This is the second in a series of posts about how business can profit from informal learning. We’re recapping the book before getting into the current scene.

What makes informal learning effective
Informal learning is effective because it’s personal. The individual calls the shots. The learner is responsible. It’s real. We learn in context, with others, as we live and work. Recognizing this fact is the first step to crafting an effective learning strategy.

People with experience like to learn but hate to be taught. People who already know the lay of the land don’t want a curriculum. That’s someone else’s opinion of what they need to know. They prefer to cherry-pick what they need in the most convenient way available. They expect the freedom to connect the dots for themselves. Intrinsic motivation trumps following orders.

This is business
If a learning project–make that any project–does not make business sense, don’t do it. If the return on investment is not so obvious that you can sketch it out on the back of a napkin, do something with a higher return.

The appropriate measure of learning is how good a job one is doing. Training metrics should be business metrics.

Getting down to cases
The book describes how organizations have taken advantage of informal learning.

• Communities of practice rely on practitioners to discover, document, and bring their members up to speed organically.
• Workers become better learners when they understand how learning works, set expectations, know themselves, reflect, take notes, and cement what they learn by revisiting it.
• Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Encourage meaningful conversation by recognizing its value, making room for it, supporting a culture of sharing, demanding candor and understanding, and relying on storytelling to communicate.
• Organizations have relied on graphics to develop corporate strategy and bring it to life. After all, humans are sight mammals.
• eLearning failed coming out of the starting blocks because learning involves a lot more than exposure to content, and you can’t take people out of the equation. A smart organization blends context, reinforcement, interaction, and more into the learning mix.
• A few have invested in building learning ecologies, shared spaces where people learn. They pay attention to social networks to optimize organizational performance.
• Replacing stodgy, over-planned meetings and conferences with spontaneous “unconferences” makes events more relevant and at the same time cut costs.

Previous post on this topic

15 minutes with Gary Hamel. Gary and I are on precisely the same page.

“Management” was invented in the beginning of the 20th Century and was arguably that century’s greatest invention.

Now the nature of change has changed, and 20th Century management isn’t working very well. Its goal was getting people to behave like robots; that’s the opposite of what we need today.

The future starts on the fringe. Take the web. It’s the global operating system for innovation. The web has all the innovations our organizations lack. How can we bake the principles of the web into the organization?

For the first time, “you cannot build a company that’s fit for the future without building a company that’s fit for human beings.”

The new model, exemplified by software company HCL, puts employees first and customers second.

Human beings have the essential qualities our organizations lack.

Management of learning is in the same soup, still more concerned with controlling people than with encouraging them to bloom.

I am moving the My Documents folders from all of my computers to one Dropbox.

Dropbox is the equivalent of a hard drive in the cloud. I’ve been using the free version (2 GB) for months without any hassles.

Dropbox lets me work on files offline; it syncs when I’m back on the net. It provides a shareable folder to make files available to others. You can share folders selectively (Internet Time Alliance has a shared DropBox repository.) Dropbox backs everything up, including 30 days of un-do history. Upload and download are drag-and-drop. Transmission is encrypted. Dropbox works with my iPad, essentially giving me a My Documents folder there, too. Dropbox can be reached by iPhones and Android devices, too. And I can search all my files from one place.

I just upgraded to 50 GB of storage for $99/year.

Here’s something I’ve never seen before on a Pro account of anything:

This is like having a private, omniscient wiki.

Sign up here

Wow. If these guys’ stats are accurate, they’ve downloaded more copies of my book on Informal Learning for free than Pfeiffer has sold!

I have asked my editor for Wiley’s take on this. If someone is giving my books away, I’d rather it be me.

Next week, I’ll be keynoting the first Swiss eLearning Conference in Zurich. April 13, Swiss Exhibition Hall 6.

The theme of the event is Conversations Make Markets. We’re celebrating the tenth anniversary of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Attending the first day in person will cost you CHF 695 (about $65); you can attend the first day virtually for CHF 69.

My Internet Time Alliance colleagues Jane Hart and Charles Jennings will be joining the conversation on stage remotely.

eLearning Guild’s DevLearn ’09 kicked off today.

At yesterday’s Web 2.0 Expo open sessions, Tim O’Reilly told the large audience assembled on the third floor of Moscone West to ask their questions live on Twitter.

The New York Times recently ran an article on making lifestyle changes. It’s hard. Most people who have heart attacks go right back to unhealthy routines within two years. Even Oprah, who undoubtedly has more self-discipline than most of us, fell off her diet regimen and once again tips the scales at 200 lbs. What’s a body to do? The Times offered four suggestions:

1. Make big changes, not small.
2. Act what you want to become
3. Reframe the situation
4. Don’t go it alone

These strike me as universal principles that work for almost any sort of major change.