Peer to Peer Knowledge Sharing

Have you checked out a site called Skillshare? 

Skillshare is a kind of learning community where members offer to share their knowledge, sometimes for a fee, on a wide variety of topics ranging from design, to development, and even to hobbies like cooking and photography. Other Skillshare community members can register for these classes, which are all delivered live and in-person, (currently Skillshare does not offer eLearning capability).

The Skillshare site serves as a kind of marketplace or clearinghouse for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge from experts that are interested and incented to offer their skills and expertise to participating community members who are hoping to increase their knowledge on a given subject for personal or professional reasons.

Underlying the concept of a site like Skillshare is the notion that more traditional and 'formal' avenues and mechanisms for delivering this type of instruction frequently can't react quickly enough to changes in the public's demand for specific learning content, and by the time they could assemble resources, develop a curriculum, complete all the administrative tasks associated with offering new learning programs, that enough time may have passed that the demand for the learning content may have waned, or the market may have simply moved on. In a way just like these formal institutions Skillshare is the middleman, but one with much less friction and cost that can serve to separate producers of learning content from consumers of that content.

The other interesting angle of Skillshare is how it democratizes the learning process, any member of the community can register to offer a course or class; (currently topics are being vetted by the site curators before being offered), and any other member can attend. Integration with Facebook on the individual course pages adds an element of social participation and feedback to the design and delivery process. It represents a model worth examining by those of us that may work in a corporate or organizational setting and are tasked with creating, distributing, and evaluating the effectiveness of training and learning content and opportunities.

Could you imagine the adoption of the Skillshare model, with it's disaggregated and de-centralized provisioning of access to and opportunity for topic and project-specific expertise in a large or traditional organization? If an organization truly followed the Skillshare model and focused exclusively on small, in-person group based courses, and did not try to get overly heavy and dense with complex eLearning technology, then the development and rollout of the concept would be exceedingly simple. Just put up a simple website that allowed employees to volunteer to teach on subjects they have expertise and passion around, have HR or the Learning group do a bit of vetting to make sure the content is (mostly) aligned with business objectives, and open up registration to the population of potential learners. Add another area of the site for learners to suggest topics they are eager to learn more about, maybe add some simple voting, commenting, and rating functionality for courses and instructors and you'd be all set.

One of the frequent worries that HR and organizational leaders express is capturing and understanding so-called 'tacit' knowledge of the workforce, the kind of insight and understanding that isn't really written down anywhere or is easily transferred from one employee to another (or to many) by traditional and typical methods. In HR we can mean well, but we can end up creating too much infrastructure, impose too many demands, or simply not be cognizant that simple facilitation of more peer-to-peer knowledge sharing would benefit the employees and the organization in a significant manner. 

Sure, an informal employee knowledge sharing community could not or should not replace essential training related to safety, compliance, operation of equipment and such, but in today's modern organization most of what employees really need to know, and what others would likely be happy to share, seems to fall into that vast category of learning that a less-formal, more nimble, and employee driven approach would be more suitable for and possibly more effective.

What do you think - does your organization make it easy for people to share what they know? And for people to ask for help and guidance on subjects they would like to learn more about?

Have a Great Weekend!

Soft, Selfish, or Stupid

Last week in Boston the fifth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was held, and while sadly I was not in attendance, the excellent ESPN True Hoop blog provided an outstanding series of posts that offered summaries and commentary from the conference.Does he need more practice?

One of the True Hoop posts reviewed a panel discussion titled 'Birth to Stardom, Developing the Modern Athlete in 10,000 Hours?'. This panel was moderated by 'Outliers' author Malcolm Galdwell, famous for his '10,000 hours' theory, (the time one needs to put it to achieve mastery at any given skill), and included (among others), Steve's HR Technology favorite basketball analyst, the great Jeff Van Gundy.

The discussion centered around the modern athlete and the debate surrounding the age-old question of nature vs. nurture. Do sports stars have innate, natural ability that assures success, or are they developed due to the combination of training, early identification, and almost obsessive focus on performance? In other words, does the '10,000 hours' theory apply at the highest levels of athletics?

While in athletics, the inherent physical characteristics that place most of the top performers at an advantage can't realistically be debated (if you are only 5' 3", putting in the 10,000 hours still likely won't land you in the NBA), what is open to discussion is the relative importance in athletic achievement of 'nurture', and the necessity of supremely physically talented athletes to diligently practice, refine, and improve their skills over time. As we know, many of the games greatest stars were not necessarily the hardest workers (see Iverson, Allen in 'Talkin' About Practice').

And certainly the access to and the involvement of mentoring and coaching play a role in athletic development as well; even the most dedicated pracitioner will need guidance along the path, and coaches have to be prepared to adapt their approaches to better fit the talents and goals of the athletes.

In the end, there seemed to be agreement (perhaps obvioulsly), that for most athletes, a combination of 'nature', (raw, physical traits and ability), combined with 'nurture' (work habits, dedication, ability to accept coaching), were necessary conditions for athletes to achieve their greatest potential.  Sure, it could be argued whether the '10,000 hours' level is really relevant in athetics (often the length of time needed to put it 10,000 hours would result in a loss due to aging and injuries of some of the raw physical abilities needed to succeed), but the basic equation of Raw Talent + Hard Work = Success seems to hold.

But beyond the obvious conclusion, the great Jeff Van Gundy offered up this nugget of wisdom, observing that all players that arrive in the NBA have at least a baseline of physical ability, i.e. there are no slow, short, unathletic players, but the real differentiators were more intangible.  According to JVG professional athletes need to balance the physical with the attitudinal.

JVG's money line: “Soft, selfish or stupid. You can be one of these things, but you can’t be two.” 

Super point, and one that likely applies beyond sports as well. While we all have this idea in our minds when we are managing, leading, or recruiting for our organizations of what the 'perfect' or 'high potential' employee looks like, the reality is those 'perfect' employees and candidates are almost impossible to define and to find. But often we don't admit this, and we just keep grinding, keep sourcing to uncover that one person out there that isn't 'soft, selfish, or stupid', when in reality we could live with having two of the three characteristics, and manage around the one that is missing.

The greatest players certainly, win on all three variables, but the other 95% that make up our teams, (and almost all of us) will fall short of at least one of them. Maybe instead of holding on to a mostly unrealistic chase for a once-in-a-generation star, we build up a solid team of role players that can feed off each other, and perhaps make up for one another's shortcomings, (as well as yours).

The Next Indie Superstar

In the comments on last weeks' 'HR and Indie Culture' post my friend Kris Dunn and I had an exchange about what was ostensibly a simple question: How do you as a open-networking, tweeting, blogging, cutting-edge type of HR pro keep the 'indie' mindset and streak of rebelliousness once (or perhaps more accurately if), you actually bust into the C-suite, get the big time job, or (please don't brutalize me in the comments), get the 'seat at the table'.

Which on the surface is a decent, if not terribly interesting question.  The 'right' answer is pretty obvious, stay true to yourself, keep doing the things you did on the way up, don't sell out, etc.  I think when faced with that as a hypothetical question, it is pretty easy to answer it in that way.  In the real Seger (but you certainly knew that)world it is not always so simple.  How many times have we heard individualists and 'rebels' like Bob Seger and John Mellencamp providing the background music for a series of forgettable, (yet I am sure lucrative for them) truck commercials?

When the suits come in waving around the big money and trips on the private jet it has to be pretty tempting to forget about (or at least alter slightly) ideals that made sense to you when you were 22 or 25.  Let's go back to Bob Seger. You're getting pitched to have 'Like a Rock' used as the soundtrack to 50 million truck commercials. You have to be thinking, what's the harm really? And if I don't do it they'll just grab Tom Petty or Aerosmith while I get to keep it real and work the state fair circuit for another year or three.

Actually the entire conversation is predictable and kind of boring.  Some people will remain true to their Indie roots, some will forget them entirely to get by (and I am NOT judging at all), and most will fall somewhere in-between. Eventually you have to make a living, you make some concessions to fit in, and every once in a while you bust out on the weekend to see the Warped tour in your cargo shorts and golf shirt. 

The better question that KD and I kicked around was not just would he, or anyone else stay 'Indie' after they hit the big time, but would they coach, support, and encourage the next generation of indie, even if it meant that the new blood would take indie in a different direction, perhaps one that is better, more imaginative, and perhaps even more 'indie' than you had ever done yourself?

Would you be comfortable enough to see folks on your team actually surpass what you have accomplished?

In indie music the pioneering bands like the Minutemen and Mission of Burma ultimately were seen as extremely influential to scores of bands that followed, but they did not directly 'train' or necessarily mentor any of the acts that came after them.  Their influence, and I suppose most kinds of influence, is from observation, anecdote, and to some extent legend. Budding musicians went to their shows, traded bootlegged concert tapes, and tried to mine bits of inspiration from all they saw and heard. It was a passing relationship at best.

But the rest of us are not touring the country playing in a band (or in my personal dream competing on the professional barbecue circuit). We are mostly inside our organizations, leading, collaborating, and yes, influencing the people around us. So maybe some of us are doing amazing things, perhaps a few of us are bringing exciting and innovative ideas and strategies to the table, and we have mastered this whole blog, twitter, unconference game to the point where we have the other folks in the organization scratching their heads at just why the heck we suddenly got so popular. That's awesome and an achievement to be proud of.

So I will leave you with this question: What are you doing to find, support, mentor, and cultivate the next indie superstar?

And if you have someone in mind already - let us know in the comments, you can think about it while you listen to Mellencamp singing about a truck.

Cast of Characters

Cast of characters
Originally uploaded by steveboese

Are you only bringing one thing to the table?

This picture is the cast of characters from my 8 year old son's latest creation, a comic book based on the Lego 'Power Miners'. What I found amusing about the page was the specific roles he has assigned to all the characters, and the descriptions he chose for each one.

For example on the good guy side we have 'Ace the Engineer', 'Brains the Scientist', and 'Tom the Reporter'. The villains have the expected sinister sounding names like 'Boulderax', 'Sulfurix', and 'Glaciator'.

Each character fits neatly into their assigned role, you know what to expect from them as the story progresses. Granted, 8 year olds (and most TV sitcom writers) usually haven't mastered the concept of complex character development. In this story, Glaciator will be evil throughout, and there is no way he will ever change.

What does this have to do with HR Technology? Well, nothing really.

But it does raise a question that almost all of us who are lucky enough to still be employed need to ask ourselves. That is, are we as one-dimensional and predictable as the characters in my son's comic? Are we only bringing one thing to the table? Even if that one thing that we do, we do fantastically well, it is still only one thing. When it comes time for the organization to decide who will be in the next group to be shown the door, if you can be so easily defined by your 'one thing', you are bound to be at more risk than a more fully developed character.

To use another analogy, when Kirk, Spock, Bones, and a random crewman beamed down to the hostile planet, it was pretty much a given that 'Crewman XYZ' was the one not coming back.

Do whatever you have to do to not be branded as a one-dimensional character like 'Glaciator' or 'Crewman XYZ'. Learn a new skill, badger some colleagues to let you in on a new project, connect with peers in your industry and start sharing knowledge and insight.

Don't be so easily defined.