Learning by association

The Intercontinental Hotel in Berlin was once again host of the Online educa conference on e-learning. This year 335 speakers interacted with 1700 delegates from 66 counties in one of larger events of this kind. I arrived on Thursday midday - my initial impressions were of chaos, too many rooms, too many speakers, too much conversation. Yet as the day rolled on, I began to see patterns of interaction that defined how this community functions: networks and nodes that have distributed information, fostered ideas, bred collaboration and defined influence in this community for the last ten years.

What can communities teach us about our own business?

Given the demands of our professional and family lives, it’s sometimes difficult to understand how we have time to participate in communities at all. In the face of the principals of modern management based on contractual relationships and financial initiatives, it’s difficult to understand why their members are willing to devote so much energy, time and passion in helping their communities grow. And yet, sociologists from Alexis de Tocqueville and Mancur Olson to Bruno Latour have documented the vitality of such social networks.  Why do many employees characterize the work as a place of the apathy and antipathy and yet see their professional communities as places of passion, motivation and creativity?

With at best a primitive formal structure, what actually holds communities together? As we’ve discussed earlier in the blog, the hubs and nodes that characterize physical networks are also readily identifiable in social networks that underlie most voluntary associations. The role of the hub or aggregator is primordial here: they feed the network with sufficient incentives to focus the community’s energy on a common vision and common goals. Robert Salisbury has argued that money is rarely either available or sufficient to obtain community adhesion, leaders must broker vision and prestige to obtain membership buy-in. Karen Stephenson’s analysis goes further in analysis of social networks; she suggests that the nature of the brokerage relationship varies in social, work, expert, and learning networks.

Without job titles and job descriptions, how can we describe how individuals interact in communities? One useful key is to understand how individuals analyse, aggregate, transform the information they receive in their networks. David Snowdon’s work on role archetypes can be helpful here: we perform specific roles in networks based upon the work

at hand. Elisabeth

Richard suggests that the roles we play are often based upon our place in community:  as a front-line worker, information synthesist, cluster manager, integrator or experts. The role we play in communities, free of the constraints of more formalized job functions, may be a good indicator as any of what we are capable of doing in formal organizations.

The types of information we process may also be a clue to how we learn to deal with our business challenges. Fundamental to communities is a fairly clear vision of meaning; we act and react to the information provided by the network in search of meaning. Certain individuals prefer to written to oral communication, even in collective situations like meetings and conferences. Others are keener to reading between the lines, more sensitive to images and non-verbal communication. Finally others react more to feelings of trust, influence and value, which seem to be transmitted only partially in formal communication.

It is also interesting to reflect briefly on what professional communities are not. Farida Hasanali’s quest to understand the business value of the APQC community is a case in point (see her blog at http://apqckm.blogspot.com/ ). Professional communities do not prove to be great sources of revenue for their sponsors. They are not efficient organizations: a great deal of time and effort is spent on seemingly non-productive activities. They do not directly influence the behavior of their members; it can even be argued that the members often shape the vision of the network over time.  This influence is perhaps the major value proposition of such networks, providing organizational sponsors to get inside their “clients” heads.

What can communities teach us about our business? To begin with, the persistence of professional associations sheds light on the importance of non-financial incentives in explaining our motivations to work. Next, hubs or aggregators play a fundamental role in coordinating and motivating social networks around work, innovation, and learning. In studying how individuals interact in these informal networks, we can get a better sense of their place, potential, and limits of action in more formal organizations. Finally, the patterns of interaction inherent in professional organizations may reveal value levers for making your own business “better”. For managers intent on optimizing processes around “quicker, faster, better”, the very presence of communities like that I saw in Berlin plead in favour of the search for meaning.

What do you think? Do you have a comment or suggestion that can add value to our efforts? Share it with us here.