Here is a video where we provide an overview this new version, along with an example of its applicability. Going through each cycle of the framework, we describe how it can be used for developing social learning and its ability to transform practice. We are writing this up, but this video gives you a preview of what’s to come.

Let us know how you think you can use this.

Below is the text of the video…

Transcript

Urgency
We’re living in a time when things are moving fast. The rules of the game are changing. Science is changing. Technology is changing. Geo-politics is changing.

Learning fast is the only mode of survival. But here’s the crazy thing: our models of learning have not kept up.

Old learning models
For many people learning starts with something that’s known. It’s then transmitted to someone who doesn’t know it.

But for the projects we’re involved in this simple view doesn’t work. In the real world things are too dynamic. And complex.

Need for new model
Knowledge doesn’t sit still. You’ve got to be on your toes – you’ve got to improvise, solve problems, strategize, jump on opportunities. And bring others along.

Learning that matters today is social, in real time, and inventive.

More often than not, what we need to learn is not yet known. And that’s why we need a new learning model.

Importance of learning models
Most people don’t think about the learning models they use. But it matters a lot.

Reward me for being good, punish me for being bad – you’re using a behaviorist model. You think that learning is molding behaviour.

Give your students a long explanation – you’re using a cognitivist model. You want this explanation to become a cognitive structure in their head.

Help your kid work out a question for herself – you’re using a constructivist model. You think it’s best people construct their own knowledge.

These are just a few examples. And most of us use multiple models. But they are important because they guide how you think you learn, how you foster learning, and how you evaluate it.

Framework
Let’s look at our framework which we use to address complex twenty-first century learning. It’s driven by data about what’s creating value for different stakeholders – and it’s responsive to a changing and unpredictable environment.

For us learning starts with a joint activity – conversation, design, problem solving, benchmarking – you name it.

This framework focuses on the value produced by social learning. It distinguishes between different types of value and models learning as the dynamic flow among them.

For us learning starts with a join activity. A conversation, design, problem-solving, benchmarking… you name it.

Immediate value
You meet others who understand you, talk shop, think together, have fun, get to know each other, feel inspired.

You get value from just participating. We call this immediate value.

Potential value
All going well, this activity gives you confidence, new insights, good ideas, new perspectives, unexpected solutions, a new contact …

You might even produce a document – like the people on this photo did.

We say that these things represent potential value, because they may – or may not – end up being helpful to you.

For many people learning ends there. Not for us.

Applied value
Let’s imagine now that you try one of those good ideas when you get back. You change your practice. Collaborate with someone you met.

In a traditional learning model this should be unproblematic since you already have the knowledge.

But putting something into practice is very creative. It involves a lot of learning and generates new knowledge.

We call this applied value.

Realized value
As a result of all this chain of events, you would hope to see some improvement in performance. Your own or your organization’s.

This we call realized value.

Loops
Of course, it doesn’t always work. It might lead to nothing, or it might lead to a disappointment. Whether it’s a success or a failure you need to feed that back because it’s an important piece of information that will lead to further learning.

This feedback creates loops that are a key dimension of the model. Learning has to go all the way into practice and then back. And then into practice again.

It’s these learning loops that make the learning relevant, adaptive and dynamic.

Story
We’ll take a pause here to walk through these cycles with an example from a recent project where this model was used.

This is Honorable Zitto,the Chairperson of the Public Accounts Committee in Tanzania.

The role of a public accounts committee is to hold the government to account for its use of public funds.

The project I was supporting brought together the Chairs of these committees from seventeen countries across Eastern and Southern Africa to learn together in different ways.

Hon Zitto was at one of the project workshops where he had some interesting conversations with other members about good practices in procurement.

We would say that enjoying these conversations with his counterparts from other countries gave him immediate value.

At the workshop he picked up something about the role of the National Audit Office that they didn’t do in Tanzania. It was that the Audit Office needs to scrutinize the procurement process before it’s completed – and not just afterwards.

Picking up an idea like that is a good example of potential value.

Back in Tanzania he heard something that now raised a red flag. The National Electoral Commission had procured election equipment – but the company that had been awarded the tender was the same company who had prepared the tender documentation.

A chance to apply what he learned.

Armed with examples of good practice from other countries in the region, he convinced his Auditor General to carry out a pre-procurement audit.

He also shared the story with the media — another good practice from the network. This added pressure on the Auditor General’s Office to take action.

See how creative this is. It involves combining multiple insights and seizing the opportunity. This is why it makes sense to call it applied value.

Within a month, as a result of the The Auditor General’s action, the tender, which was valued at 126 million US dollars, was cancelled and re-advertised.

OK, so the story reached realized value. Some money was probably saved, but more important, a transparent process was put in place.

Was this fed back into the community?

We collected many stories like this as part of the ongoing project evaluation – and shared them with network members.

A bigger picture
This story brings another important point about social learning: it doesn’t happen in isolation. A story like this is embedded in a broader context — a context that involves many different stakeholders.

This project’s been going on for several years. It includes networks of Public Accounts Committees in Eastern and Southern Africa, their clerks, the World Bank, the German Development Agency and various local organizations.

A key factor in the learning potential of the project was the quality of the conversations among stakeholders to fit their activities in a bigger picture.

Strategic value
The quality of these strategic conversations is an integral part of social learning and one that’s often neglected. We call it strategic value.

There’s another one that’s often taken for granted. It’s the learning of the project support team and community leaders.

Enabling value
Yes, it couldn’t happen without a lot of support and leadership – logistical, coaching, facilitation, technology, agenda design…a lot of learning there.

It’s a key aspect of the learning process. We call it enabling value.

Transformative value
Learning is not limited to an improvement in performance. It can also generate new perspectives or new definitions of success.

It can even trigger broader cultural and institutional transformations.

We call this transformative value. It doesn’t always happen. But there is always the potential that it might.

And when it does, it’s often the most dramatic aspect of learning….

and – potentially – the most contentious.

Story
Another story from the same project but from a different member shows this transformative value and its potential to disturb the status quo.

If you had been in Zambia last year and happened to turn on the T.V. you might have seen government ministers being questioned about the use and mis-use of public finances.

What you might not know is that Hon Mwale, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee in Zambia had been inspired by some other countries in the network to have these hearings televised. It became a very popular series.

Here we see learning even transforming the broader political culture.

Yes, BUT they became a political hot potato. Suddenly the broadcasts were stopped and the director who had set it up was in danger of losing his job.

Yes, transformative value often upsets existing power structures.

While there is still controversy about how and whether these broadcasts should be continued, another unexpected outcome has been a sharp increase in the number of whistle-blowers contacting the Public Accounts Committee.

That’s a very interesting story – transformative in many ways and very useful to other network members when it gets fed back.

Multiple pieces and a dynamic flow between them
For us all of these pieces need to be in place and with a dynamic flow among them if learning is to make a difference in today’s world.

Uses of the framework
People are using this framework in many ways.

The value-creation cycles show you where to focus your attention.

And value-creation stories like the one we just told you explain how your project is making a difference.

If you are planning a project you can use the framework to structure conversations with various stakeholders – set aspirations and decide what conditions need to be in place.

If you are running a project, you can use the cycles to design activities and stories to create ongoing feedback loops.

If you are evaluating a project, you can use the framework to structure your data collection and analysis. You can follow indicators at each cycle and use stories to attribute outcomes to project activities.

Closing
We find many people – across sectors – struggling to integrate learning in all phases of their project – from planning to implementation to evaluation.

Unfortunately, learning remains a side-show in many projects – a bit of training, knowledge-sharing, a piece of research, an evaluation report. But today embedding social learning has to be a strategic part of any innovative project.

Our framework does just that. It acts as a shared language for negotiating aspirations, for framing the design, and for driving the learning through ongoing feedback loops and data collection.

Many of our clients are placing it at the centre of their initiative. This gives us hope. It shows we can change the discourse on learning to one that is going to address the challenges of today.

Download a PDF copy of the report

How do you show that a network’s activities have changed the performance of its members in their practice? And, how do you use that information to feed into a vision of where the network should go next?

That’s how we used a new version of our value-creation framework for a learning network whose members come from different countries in Southern Africa.

For this network one project cycle was coming to an end and a new one was beginning. Not only had we collected many value-creation stories to show the connection between network activities and changes in public finance management in their respective countries, but we also used the value cycles in the framework to look at what the project had aspired to in the beginning, what happened, and what should happen in the next phase of the project.

The report I produced for the project summarizes the new version of our framework (based on the original framework, but now substantially expanded) and demonstrates how this new framework can be used to provide a strategic tool for evaluating and shaping a big social learning project.

Highlights on using this updated framework:

• What was really powerful in this session was the combination of value creation stories and indicators at each cycle. This is what the framework is about – not just value-creation stories as is often interpreted.
• In a meeting that was potentially fraught with political tensions the framework gave a shared language for understanding what had happened and for negotiating the way ahead in a productive and transparent way. In particular the strategic and enabling value cycles helped to surface some of the most serious places of disconnect in the functioning of the project.
• We collected value-creation stories for nearly four years. During this time most network members felt that collecting these stories was a hoop to jump through to keep project funders happy. But when they were put together into a strategic document based on the framework, network leaders finally realized the power of their stories for their own network learning.
• The idea of feedback loops was extremely helpful for showing how learning comes from talking about successes and failures and that both need to be integrated into the discourse of the network.

Cautions

• It is very time and resource intensive to collect and refine good value-creation stories and the data for the different cycles. We collected hundreds of partial stories; it took persistence to follow up with people to complete them. There were only about fifty stories that went through all cycles (often at a stretch) and around twenty stories that were really good.
• Next time it should be easier because people will now have some good models of stories and see the value of collecting them. But it will take discipline to turn the telling and recording of stories (and the feedback loops) into a regular network practice.
• In the real world – certainly the one I live in – the process of collecting data is much more messy than people realize. And it’s certainly not linear. It was more of a bricolage as we went back and forth between people, stories and indicators, scraping out time, improvising, and making up tools as we went.

A lot of our work in the last few years has been focused on developing the capability of various types of social learning leaders, including community and network leaders, systems conveners, sponsors, and enablers at various levels of scale.

A strand of our current writing is to articulate the central disciplines of social learning leadership. A social learning leader is someone who is paying attention to these disciplines.

A discipline is not a recipe, a process, or a best practice. We are not sure these exist for this kind of work. Rather a discipline is a way to bring rigor to an art. It includes the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself if you’re responsible for a social learning space, the perspectives you can take, the methods and tools you can apply, the pitfalls you should avoid, and the ways you can assess the quality of your work.

The figure lists the current disciplines we have identify and are working on. The list is still somewhat in flux, but it will give you a good idea of what we are trying to do.

Our aim is to publish these disciplines as a handbook that will be useful to people who take social learning leadership in their contexts.

And here is the text on the visual, if you can’t see it:

Meaning

• Relevance: what is our learning partnership about?
• Accountability: how is accountability negotiated?
• Value creation: what difference are we making for whom?

Participation

• Voices: who needs to be involved?
• Power: how can learning trump power?
• Leadership: how to foster distributed leadership?

Modes

• Engagement: how to work together on issues of practice?
• Imagination: what images inform and orient learning?
• Alignment: how to achieve effectiveness at scale?

Time/space

• Continuity: how to enable ongoing learning loops?
• Boundaries: how to make boundaries into learning assets?
• Scale: how to maintain a multi-scale perspective?

The practice goes like this: everyone at a meeting belongs to a leadership group – and each group stewards one part of the learning process of the whole group. In this way leadership of the community meeting is distributed over the entire event.

Leadership here is seen as an act of service, that is, not leadership in terms of telling others what to do, but helping the group develop itself as a learning partnership. We’ve seen these groups lead to some transformational turn-arounds in group dynamics and the learning potential. (Notwithstanding the times they flopped – which led us to learn a great deal!)

We gave playful names to the groups in the spirit of making it a fun and inventive way of leading the process: agenda activists, community keepers, critical friends, social reporters, external messengers, value detectives.

Over the years we’ve come to see that these groups can work well in lots of different contexts including group meetings, conferences, and long-term community development. Anywhere, that is, where there is an intention for collective learning.

We’re now preparing to study the practice as it is being used on a course for owner-managers at Lancaster University Management School. Our inquiry is to find out if and how they develop the social learning capability of the cohort over this coming academic year. We’ll keep you posted.

Let us know if you use or develop the leadership groups. This chapter for download is going to be one chapter in a handbook we are producing for facilitators, conveners and coordinators of social learning. We’ll publish each chapter as we get it done and integrate feedback in the final version.

Contents

• about leadership groups more broadly
• practices we have developed around leadership groups
• descriptions of each leadership group
• facilitation tips
• sample instructions

Download

You can download the full text in PDF format here:

See also

One of the roles – social reporter – is a branch from some early work (2006) that Bev did with David Wilcox on using social media and the web for capturing the content of meetings and events. At that time we wrote a social reporting toolbox. David also writes about it on his blog here.

In whole group discussions “online folk” are projected onto a big screen at the front. We use Adobe Connect for the video-conferencing and Skype for sound. The sound quality on Adobe Connect is not nearly so good as Skype. However, as we discovered at the Academic BEtreat, Skype sound with more than four people quite often drops.

It’s tiring for onliners to be listening and participating for such long periods so we have invested in good microphones to give them better quality sound. We use music stands to prop up a computer or i-pad when they join in small group discussions with “face-to-facers”.

We don’t claim that this is the ideal set-up – it is simply what we have found, mostly through googling and our trusted friends. Next BEtreat we’ll invest in more good microphones for the small group conversations instead of using internal computer mics. Up until now we’ve been using some perfectly good speakers we’ve had for a while to bring online voices into the room, although we ended up simply using our internal Mac Book Pro speakers in the Academic BEtreat.

In addition we bought 2 x 100 feet (30 meter) internet cables and many – many – extension chords.

In our value assessment framework, published by the Open University of the Netherlands, we identify five levels of value creation of a community or network:

• Cycle 1. Immediate value: the activities and interactions between members have value in and of themselves
• Cycle 2. Potential value: the activities and interactions of cycle 1 may not be realized immediately, but rather be saved up as knowledge capital whose value is in its potential to be realized later.
• Cycle 3. Applied value: knowledge capital may or may not be put into use. Leveraging capital requires adapting and applying it to a specific situation.
• Cycle 4. Realized value: even applied new practices or tools are not enough. A change in practice does not necessarily lead to improved performance, so it is important to find out what effects the application of knowledge capital is having on the achievement of what matters to stakeholders …
• Cycle 5. Reframing value: this happens when learning causes a reconsideration of how success is defined. It includes reframing strategies, goals and values…

For a reliable picture of how the community is creating value we would have to follow the value creation across these different cycles. To do this we collect “value creation stories”. Value creation stories and indicators (qualitative or quantitative) at each cycle are complementary. The idea is to generate a value-creation matrix that combines qualitative and quantitative data into a rich picture of the value created by learning in these social contexts.

Sponsors, evaluators and leaders of communities and networks should be able to use the framework and accompanying toolkit.

Contents

• clarifications about the distinct learning value of communities and networks respectively
• a conceptual framework to understand the value from such learning in terms of five cycles of value creation
• examples of indicators for each cycles
• a template for telling stories that account for value creation
• a toolkit for collecting data

Download

You can download the full text in PDF format here:

Citation

Wenger, E., Trayner, B., and de Laat, M. (2011) Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework. Rapport 18, Ruud de Moor Centrum, Open University of the Netherlands.

See also

There are some resources on evaluating communities of practice and networks on the CPSquare wiki and on the KM4dev wiki. Nancy White looks at three different perspectives on evaluating communities on a video on her blog.

The first four cycles in this framework are an adaptation of the four-level model of Donald Kirkpatrick (1976, 1994), which has become a standard in the training and program evaluation literature (the fifth cycle is an addition we have made specifically for the work of communities). An early version of this adaptation appeared in chapter 8 of the book Cultivating communities of practice.