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.

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.

If facing change, expanding our horizon, and dealing with complexity are all social learning challenges, we live in demanding times. In the context of rapid globalization and increasing interdependence, we face a threatened environment, economic precariousness and imbalances, the need for better education, ideological conflicts – to name a few of our challenges.

These challenges are neither simply personal nor abstractly global. They require accelerated learning at various levels of scale at once, from individuals, to communities, to organizations, to regions, to nations, to worldwide learning systems.

Learning capability – or the ability to learn – is a paradoxical aspiration because learning by itself does not guarantee learning capability. Sometimes being successful at learning is precisely what prevents you from learning the next thing. When applied to social systems, learning capability depends on the learning capability of individuals, but in the context of the structure of the system in which they live. Networking, convening new social learning spaces, brokering across boundaries, acting as learning citizens and social artists – these are the kinds of interventions that have the potential to increase social learning capability at a systemic level.

Taking such a systemic view is especially critical at a time when global challenges are placing unprecedented demands on our ability to learn together. Developing social learning capability across sectors may be urgent, but it is still an elusive aspiration. We need a social discipline of learning.

Making sense of social learning capability is the great challenge of learning theory in the 21st century. Learning how to enhance it, accelerate it, and evaluate it is the challenge of the practitioner. Both undertakings are interrelated – and contributing to both is our personal and professional aspiration.

We are not entirely sure how they do it, or even if there is a recipe for how it is done. But we know that what they do is important. Their work in key to the development of social learning capability at all levels, from small conversations and communities to large-scale social systems.

It is definitely an art form – expressed in many different ways – that can change the way we experience the world and ourselves.  One thing that social artists have in common is that they use their passion and commitment to guide the process and act as exemplary learning citizens. As with artists, they live what they do. Their identity is the wellspring of their ability to create social learning spaces. And as with artists, their contribution often goes unnoticed. We need a language for talking about their art and their contribution. The world will be a better place when their subtle form of leadership is recognized as the key for developing the array of social learning capabilities we urgently need today.

As we participate in different social learning spaces our actions affect those spaces. They also affect the people we interact with. And those people belong to other social spaces. So our own learning behavior can affect the learning capability of a whole landscape of learning spaces.

The notion of learning citizenship brings an ethical dimension to learning. How we decide to act as learning citizens affects the world around. It enhances or decreases the learning capability of the social systems we are part of. Because learning citizenship is anchored in the experience of who we are in the world and uses our identity as source of leadership, we could call it an “ethics of identity”.

Organizations need to start recognizing, fostering, and supporting learning citizenship as a way to increase their learning capability and fostering and spreading innovation. Workers can act as learning citizens when they make decisions that affect the learning capability of their surroundings. Say you are a bridge engineer in a company, and the bridge engineers in your organization are spread all over the world and don’t talk to each other very much. As a worker, you’d say, “I have all this work to do; I don’t have time for anything else.” As a learning citizen, you’d say, “This organization is not maximizing its learning capability. We need to put some energy into making sure we engineers form a community and learn from each other.” We would call doing that an act of “learning citizenship.” That brings a new dimension to the definition of work. But right now it is something that is not recognized in most organizations. There is not even a language to talk about it. We would say, your most valuable employee is your best learning citizen.

That’s what we mean by social learning spaces:

…social containers that enable genuine interactions among participants, who can bring to the learning table both their experience of practice and their experience of themselves in that practice.

Not all attempts to bring people together to learn create social learning spaces! They involve a social discipline of learning, a spirit of learning citizenship, and often the skills of a social artist.

Opening new social learning spaces, when they work well, is a key intervention for increasing the learning capability of a social system.

Participation in this project crystallized some initial thoughts on social learning capability, which are captured here. The topic is now becoming a major thrust of our work.

Contents

Download

You can download a PDF version of the paper in English here:

A portuguese translation is also available:

Citation

Wenger, E. (2009) Social learning capability: four essays on innovation and learning in social systems. Social Innovation, Sociedade e Trabalho. Booklets 12 – separate supplement, MTSS/GEP & EQUAL Portugal, Lisbon.

Technology has always been relevant to communities to help members connect across time and space and share relevant resources. Web 2.0 technologies are often associated with new, more “horizontal” ways to connect and share information, networked thinking, and new forms of representation—all uses of technology that are very much aligned with the peer-to-peer learning typical of communities of practice. There are many different tools and for each tool, many different realizations; and there is also a great variety in the ways people and communities use these tools. Yet practically, it is useful to review briefly the potential that these new technologies hold for the learning of communities of practice.

However, the use of these technologies brings up all sorts of delicate community issues. Who has the right to read, edit, or administer a wiki? Who is an author on a blog? How do members keep track of where relevant events are happening and relevant things are stored? Will a collective resource become incomprehensible without some level of coordination? How do members manage the mix of private and public spaces? The new tools emphasize user control and self-organization, but their effective use by communities often entails more coordinating work and development of shared practices than one would expect. Finally, the number of offerings of new and different types of technologies grows so quickly that at least some community members need to act as “technology stewards” staying updated on behalf of the community to spot the best tools to support the community activities without overwhelming the members.

Avatar-based web worlds (e.g., Second Life). Some communities have meeting areas on avatar-based sites. It allows them to have more of a sense of shared space even when they cannot be together in physical space. For instance, the ability to see who is there, even as an avatar, can help members get a more concrete sense of community togetherness than in a teleconference call. The full potential of these types of sites has yet to be fully explored.

Some communities open accounts on media-sharing sites, such as Flickr for sharing photos, so that members can share photos, videos, and maps. This provides a simple way to document community events or to collect resources relevant to members. In other communities members use their own individual accounts and a common tag to share memories or resources. Sharing through a common tag means that individuals can share their photos, videos etc. across multiple communities.