Yammer for internal knowledge sharing for health care and policy making

What is Yammer? 
Yammer is booming, especially in the Nederland within Europe. Many companies have started their Yammer groups for rapid internal exchange. If you don't know Yammer:  Yammer is kind of Twitter (micro-blogging) service which can be used within organisation, so it is not public like on Twitter. The messages can be slightly longer than on Twitter and it is easier to reply (looks a lot like Facebook). Someone from KLM told me for instance he was looking for someone who could explain their wiki system to him. He put out a message on Yammer and found someone who could sit with him and explain it, the very next day. Without Yammer it would have been difficult to find this person.
  Yammer on tour started with great online ramp up
Last thursday Yammer organised the Yamtour. It was very well facilitated beforehand using a -you can predict - a Yammer network. People were invited to introduce themselves, everybody got a nice reply or welcome. People were asked to come forward with topics for the unconference part, and had to think of people they would certainly like to meet. For me it worked in order to meet Emile (whom I interviewed, see the video below). There was a bit of a 'selling' atmosphere in the first presentations like focussing on the ROI van Yammer and other figures to convince people of the value of Yammer. 38% of our time we spend looking for information and Yammer can reduce that time span. I thought it was a missed chance not to link and refer more to the real question that came up through the Yammer group beforehand. But nice to see the examples of various uses of Yammer and how it has opened up knowledge in organisations and made it accessible, through the use of a social approach.

Social online learning = not facilitated? 
Most people I met had the idea that you deploy Yammer, invite people and the rest should be a spontaneous proces. I talked to a member of an IT - company where it had actually worked like this.Someone spontaneously took the initiative to start a Yammer group (a free account). He invited employees from the company and within a few months 80% of the employees was on Yammer. This person explained that it is an IT company and that employees are relatively young. I also meet many organizations where it is set up spontaneously by someone and then it remains a small group of employees who sign up, or people sign up, but very little sharing is going on. I believe in supporting and facilitating the process of adoption. I'm also convinced from a knowledge management/organisational learning prespective you can influence the direction of the conversations that you would like to see on Yammer. Many people I spoke to are worried that facilitation means you are taking the spontaneity away but you can also facilitate and stimulate without imposing conversation topics and rules.


Examples of using Yammer for closing the gap between senior management and the workfloor
I enjoyed the examples of Rijkswaterstaat, Capgemini and Mobile BI. Tim de Waard of Rijkswaterstaat said that they regularly organize Yamjam brainstorming sessions on specific topics. The board of directors was coached to participate during a hands-on laptop session. After the Yamjam, they also wanted Yammer on their Blackberries, because it had given them a good insight into the various complaints and grudges within the company and it gave them the ability to respond to employees. Tim told us he himself currently has a better understanding what the board of directors is doing, before the Yamjams he really had no idea. At Rijkswaterstaat there is a community manager. He ensures that new people join a group called 'new to Yammer' and helps them develop their personalized feeds and filters. He also welcomes new members and organizes Yamjams.  

Capgemini has used Yammer in an interesting way for organizational change. Each year the senior management gets together for a three-days retreat, this time the retreat was planned in Barcelona. They used Yammer to engage a large group of people in the conversations. During the 3 days of the retreat 8000 people have joined Yammer. Presentations were shared in real time, and feedback was collected. This gave senior management a much better understanding of:

•      who the thought leaders are
•      major concerns of employees
•      what excites people

Showing the value of internal knowledge sharing
Finally they spoke about the way to demonstrate actual value created. They recommend to collect cases, every discussion, every question on Yammer may be a case. One tip is to choose a hashtag (# benefit) for conversations that helped people. In one organisation over 1500 cases were collected in this way, that show the variety of ways in which Yammer has helped employees do their jobs. Unfortunately there was no discussion of the advantage of use Yammer above for instance open social media like Twitter.

Practical example of Yammer in healthcare: replacing the client logfile
Afterwards I interviewed Emile de Roy van Zuydewijn from Thuiszorg Emile, about their use of Yammer to replace the client logbook in healthcare. In the Dutch video he explains how they are using Yammer to communicate about clients, using the clients' names as hashtags. There are also clients and other healthcare professionals who can join them in an external network. The advantage is that you can easily communicate with various involved parties. Furthermore, when the client is part of it, it is very transparent.  Emile was the one who thought of it, set it up and introduced it. It wasn't hard to get the students to use it. It might be slightly more difficult though with older groups. He has chosen for Yammer because of the security (closed system), the ease of use and the fact that you can use it on many devices (like via apps).

What strikes me in this case is that there is a pioneer with a clear vision on what a tool can do for a group. You might call that the technology steward role.

Read Dutch?  here's a blogpost by Eric van Oevelen from Avans Hogeschool who was there too. And here's the blogpost by Paul Voors from the NS.

It's-not-information-overload-but-filter-failure

This quote is from Clay Shirky. A wonderful way of looking at the often mentioned problem of 'information overload'. If I say I'm reading and following 100 blogs people are really shocked and I quickly add that they don't have to. Clay Shirky is turning it around: the problem is not information overload, the problem is that people don't know how to filter. With the result that they don't make use of the possibility to access relevant information and develop connections. Watch Clay Shirky talking if you have time:

He explains that because of the low cost of publishing on the internet everyone can contribute. The web editors and publishers are no longer working as quality filters. This means that the filters sit on the other side, with the users, with us. So we have to filter out quality. This is empowering, but also demands quite some skills.

I've seen the firehose metaphor going round and I really like it. If you are thirsty: how are you going to drink from a firehose? So if we are floaded with information and conversations through social media how are we going to filter?

There are two basic helping frames:

• Focus on builing a relevant network (the people)


• Use handy tools to filter ( technology)
  

Beth Kanter has a good blogpost and developed a diagram (shown here).

Three tips for the first filter: People and Network

• Make deliberate choices for the number of networks and people you want to engage with. These networks may be formal as well as informal. You can not be as active in 50 networks (I've seen NGOs in Ghana try this!). But through social media you can be active in a few and still scan the other networks. The danger is that you remain in scanning mood throughout. Decide to be active, ask questions, react on forum discussion, blogs etc. Invest in face-to-face contact with your closest networks. If you are busy, don't drop your whole social media engagement but go back to your best network.
  


• If you are less busy and have more time at hand, invest in new relationships or exploring new networks too. Make sure investing in new relationship is not at the detriment of your close ties.
  


• Evaluate regularly whether your network is working for you or whether you need to shift gear. Probably if you change jobs or focus, you need to refocus, but even in the same job, this evaluation is needed. Unfollow people that are not helping you in any way. Better a small effective network than a large network that makes you lose your interest in social media.
  

Three tips for filter 2: Technology and Tools

• Use tools that allow you to scan information and make it easier to get an overview like RSS readers, email subscriptions and tools like Hootsuite. Make sure your start up pages in your browser are supporting this too. You can find more information about RSS readers here. Learn to scan quickly and bookmark things for later reading.
  


• Make use of the options in tools to filter out through making categories, for instance in your RSS reader. This allows you to focus in busy times. For instance, in twitter you can create lists of people who would like to follow. I have several lists by type of network.

• Make use of a blog to digest, reflect and process. A blog is a wonderful way to may sure you reflect on all you have read and scanned. Scanning is not enough, but you need to digest. Personally I use social bookmarking for scanning. Later when I need to dig into a topic a read everything carefully. Sharing your insights through a blog is a nice to share back and be part of the conversation.

There are probably many more handy tools. Share your tips in the comments if you have one!

Finally there is a blogpost with 6 lessons Steffan Antonas. De five lessons I consider to be very important are (read the sixth in his blogpost if you are curious):

1. Use the tools to build relationships, don't see it simply as information


2. Prioritise offline contact, make sure you don't waste valuable offline contacts by trying to read up online and keeping an eye on your iphone, computer or ipad


3. Be open and personal, people are not looking for very dry information, but are also looking for anecdotes, humour etc. (oeps did I do that in this blogpost?)


4. Stay focussed on your own interests, it is easy to get carried away and waste time


5. Having many followers are fine, but focus on your 'strong ties' your close network

Stimulating self-directed learning

We had quite some confusion this week going on about the concept of 'networked learning' during an interesting day with learning professionals. For some this is really about networking online through social media and learning a lot by connecting with other professionals online. For others this is about face-to-face networks focussing on learning together from practice, like a community of practice. I guess it doesn't matter as long as you are clear what you are refering to. Be clear about the definition you use. A definition I liked a lot was: 'discussing difficulties with others, mostly during lunch'. You can simply imagine how this person has the brightest insights by lunching with a group of (self-chosen) colleagues :). Here's a graph with some dimensions of learning networks. If you talk about a closed, face-to-face, problem-solving network you talk about a different animal than when you talk about a fluid twitter community around a certain hashtag. Which is OK, as long as you don't talk about best practices and set fixed steps to nurture these networks. In that case it is good to be more specific. Some people clearly felt that learning networks should be organic and self-organised. I disagree because I think you can do quite a lot to support and grow healthy learning networks. I like to quote Barab: "you can not design communities of practice, but you can design for communities of practice".

Informal and formal learning was also part of the confusing language and I got to realize this is not a helpful language after all. Formal learning gets labelled as 'directive', informal learning makes people think they can't do anything to stimulate it. Though I also say I focus on 'informal learning' I will try to use a clearer language in the future. Learning is not informal or informal, activities can be more or less formal (and I'm sure people using the term want to express that). An example: my personal question is currently how I could learn handy things for my Mac computer. I could learn this through a classroom course, I could learn this by asking questions on Forum on online communities. I could also learn this by going to colleagues who have a mac and are willing to share. The learning is roughly the same process, the activities are participate in differ.

What can be more or less formalized and structured is the organisation of learning activities. On the one hand, a self-structured process whereby nothing is organised. On the other hand a well prepared and structured curriculum. Both have advantages, in a self-structured process the person is fully in control and takes ownership of his/her learning process. In a curriculum people have thought deeply about the field and what should be part of the content. Often trainings are put forward in a caricature whereby the participants only receive information. In reality many trainings also try to link to the questions and experiences of the participants. In between is the interesting area where learning professionals can be creative to stimulate participant-led learning. You can nurture learning communities. Stimulate professionals to blog. Add a coach to a workteam. You can connect people through twitter hashtags. Those are organised activities that try to combine the best of both worlds.

By the way I just found an article about 'emergent learning' and'prescriptive learning'. Might be better terms than formal and informal learning? What do you think?


For people interested in the presentation I can include my prezi. Though the text is Dutch, it is pretty visual too.

Netwerkleren on Prezi

Stimulating informal learning in organisations

It is estimated that professionals learning informally for 80% or even 94%. Personally I'm convinced of this principle though semi-formal events or workshops can play a crucial role in directing learning. As Harry Vos states in his dutch blog "more formal or workshop learning supports informal learning and not the other way around". At the one hand, it is surprising how we focus on formal events, on the other hand it is tempting, also for myself, because they are so much more visible. Informal learning on the other hand seems invisible and a natural process that doesn't need a helping hand, after all people group around the coffee machine automatically. However, you can stimulate informal learning, bringing you as a facilitator in the grey area in between formal and informal learning.


So far I've focused on learning in communities of practice and networks, but there is more to it and I would like to explore the other forms more (including social media ofcourse!!). Together with Sibrenne I've facilitated a learning network for two years. After the two years nobody wanted to continue facilitating it. Interestingly, I have the feeling the informal netwerking and exchange is still going strong. Many of the people I'm still meeting and exchanging with, though not as structured and there are no meeting any longer. It is 'underground learning' and not as accessible to everyone. So facilitating a community of practice or learning network is a great example of the way you can stimulate individual learning to become collective learning- and at the same time, it catalyzes individual learning by the participants (in a dynamic network ofcourse).

But what else can you do to stimulate informal learning processes in organisations? The European PILIP project has created a website about informal learning. It has a quickscan to map informal learning processes which allows you to zoom in on factors that stimulate or hinder informal learning. You might work on those, to catalyze more rapid and effective informal learning processes. You can find a toolbox with tools like intervision, best practice storytelling, etc. I haven't used it yet, but I'm planning to go through it for an upcoming session with a development organisation.

A nice example: I experienced one that a worker was very active in formulating her learing questions, mobilizing relevant colleagues and inviting them for a lunch about the topic. A stimulating factor and positive example! What you can do is name this (literally, give it a name like peer-assist-lunch and stimulate others to copy this practice, for instance by creating a budget to cover for the lunch costs.

77% of learning = Informal

Jay Cross states that 80% of learning is informal (in his book informal learning). Well, that's a nice figure that I've seen resurface in many places and articles (I even like to quote it myself!). The 80% is backed-up by various sources. However, I wonder how you can really measure this. Personally, I buy this estimation because it links with the way I personally learn. I hardly attend formal conferences and trainings because I get so little out of it. Nevertheless, I guess other people with different learning styles may get more out of it.

Now Jay Cross has a great blogpost with convincing arguments. At a company, Sara Lee, 20 employees were asked to list work-related learning activities (the exercise took place in 2002). They compiled a list together and were then asked to estimate how much time is spent on each activity. This was the list:

- Experiences on the job 45%
- Manuals and instructions 2%
- Training programs 8%
- Networking 30%
- Mentoring & coaching 3%
- Special assignments 2%
- Workshops 10%

You could say 77% is highly informal (experiences on the job, manuals, networking) and the rest is more formal. This is a strong case for strengthening informal learning and supporting people to optimize their own informal learning processes, for instance by helping them to use social media to set up their own learning activities, for instance reflecting on experiences on the job in a blog, networking via Twitter, etc.

Learning from masters and across disciplines

Image by daskar via Flickr

It is much easier to learn from practitioners who are doing similar things and are working in similar ways as you do. But maybe are slightly ahead of you in some ways.

Weggeman in his book 'Leiding geven aan Professionals? Niet doen!' about managing professionals recounts the story of a famous violist. The story illustrates at the one hand that there may be masters who may find it hard to explicitate their knowledge in words. On the other hand, it show that it is hard to learn from someone who is not a practitioner with a similar knowledge base. Here's the story:

A journalist asked him what the secret was of his success. He thought for a while and then said: "I think it is the way I use my bow, look, this is the way I do it. And this is the way a lot of my colleagues do it." The journalist didn't understand it and couldn't turn it into any sensible information. There was a masterclass pupil of the violinist who had heard the interview and was busy for about half an hour to try and explain to the journalist what the famous violinist had meant.

The journalist did not have the same basic knowledge about playing the violin as the masterclass pupil had. As a result the journalist could not understand the explanation. the pupil was able to understand it and make sense of it.

This bites the idea that you can learn and innovate by working across disciplines. The potential to learn from other disciplines may be high- but the risk that you never understand a thing is very high too.. It may explain for instance the sometimes apparent closedness of the development sector. You hear complaints that the sector is not open to learning from other sectors. It probably needs brokers like the masterclass pupil to make sure that learning is possible at all.

The lion and the hunter

I found this image on the weblog of my friend Denise who lives in Ghana and she gave me permission to use it. The picture is taken at a mural at Fort Prinzenstein an old slave fort located near the Keta Lagoon Volta Region, Ghana. During my time in Ghana, I enjoyed the lively metaphors my colleagues were using. Unfortunately I didn't write them down. Often there were animals involved. I enjoy this one because it highlights the subjectivity in stories and that there are always different perspectives to take.

Unfortunately the web2.0 is not yet leveraged at large scale by people in developing countries. Ít will need some historians to show that African countries are not only about misery and hunger. Looking at African countries in the misery and they need help way means we don't see what's there to learn (Not that I'd say that they are the lions and we are the hunters!).

Jay Cross about informal learning

I just finished reading informal learning, the book by Jay Cross

If you want to see two more videos where Jay Cross continues his explanation, you can go to his blog. In youtube the second video has half the amount of viewers as the first one, which can be an indication that it wasn't interesting enough for half of the people, or it can be explained by the fact that people like to watch a video for 3-4 minutes, but not longer. Personally I dislike watching long videos, it takes up too long, then I'd rather have the text to scan through.

In the video and his book, he explains that 80% of learning budgets in companies are spend on training, whereas most of the learning (also 80%) takes place outside training rooms. He sees human conversations as the mail technology for learning and estimates that training will become obsolete. Though later he adds that formal training can be good for novices, comparing it to driving on a buss, where you the buss driver is determining the direction for you. Informal learning, though, works better for experienced workers. This is compared to biclyces, riding a bike you can decide where to go. It makes me curious why he hasn't chosen a car, which goes as fast as a buss at least... A bicycles is much slower than a buss.

To be honest, the book did not give me a lot of new insights, but maybe my expectations were too high. I had hoped to find more detail about levels of learning. I'm a little frustrated that we use the word learning for someone who asks for whether you want coffee with milk and learns that you like milk in your coffee. But we also use it for the results of deep personal reflections that make you decide that you want a major shift in your life. You learn what to do with your life.
It's a different level of impact.

The positive side is that the book explains informal learning in very simple, convincing ways, and gives lots of examples methods to stimulate informal learning like World Cafe, Bar camps, etc. I've come to realize informal learning may be a good term in itself. And he has very good account of the developments in the field of elearning since he was one of the first people coining the term.

I feel that Jay is using a definition of training in a somehow sterotype way. The way I know training is much more participatory and experience-based and may therefore not be diametrically opposed to informal learning. For instance, a training may even use a World Cafe method, a method that Jay labels as perfect for informal learning. Therefore it seems too black and white to me to talk about formal and informal learning and labelling training as formal learning. I will try to capture my ideas about informal/formal in a diagram in a next post. (I'm just realizing that this is the second blogpost with a cliffhanger, maybe the example of Jay about a waiter who only remembers something while unfinished and forgets everything when it's finished has influenced me after all :).

The difference between consonents and vowels

Both my children are in mixed classes at school. The youngest in group 3/4, the eldest in group 4/5. At times the youngest overhears what is being taught to the other group. So she heard that they learned about consonents and vowels (in her class, they just start reading!). So at home she wanted to know what the difference is between consonents and vowels. Try to explain!

Though I could mention them (B = consonent, O= vowel), I found it hard to explain why a consonent is a consonent and why a vowel is a vowel. For my eldest daughter, this was easy. Since she had learned it in school a year ago, it was very easy for her to explain.

This shows that at times it is easier to learn from a person who has recently gone through the same process. The experienced person may have internalized the use and may not be able to explain how he/she makes certain distinctions or decisions.