In this post, we will explore how enterprise can close the gap between the increasing rate of technological change and its complexity with employees’ ability to discover it, understand it and act upon it for the benefit of their company. Whilst we agree that culture change and the right human capital strategy are key to addressing this recent challenge, we believe that choosing the right enterprise learning technology is equally determinant in implementing lasting and needed change in an organisation’s adaptability and agility.
Continuous, Collective and Contextual
In times of accelerating change, Cronycle allows enterprise to keep up with fast-changing business environments whilst continuously developing their employees and fostering team collaboration.
Our content engine allows individuals to filter relevant content and discover external learning networks on over 50,000 topics (equally employees can aggregate their trusted RSS feeds and twitter handles in Cronycle). Additionally rich annotation capabilities within Cronycle content boards allow for collective sensemaking. Finally, sharing knowledge in context with focused group is the number one way employees learn. Insights gained can then be shared within targeted audience both within and outside the enterprise.
Unstructured content key to enterprise learning and developing insights
In a 2016 report by Towards Maturity (an organisation whose mission is to help learning professionals create world class learning organisations) found out that “72% of CEOs believed that the next three years would prove more critical for their industry than the last 50.” At the forefront of this belief was the challenge for their employees to make sense of an ever fast-changing and complex world whilst continuing to deliver on their day-to-day business needs. As our I recently wrote with the explosion of unstructured content on the web, “filtering becomes a necessity to gain the relevant insights”.
Equally challenging, was the limited availability of this filtering skill set within organisations. Whilst O’Reilly found out that over 40% of learning came from unstructured content, only expert/capable employees had the skill set required to leverage it.
According to an Harvard Business Review article, up to a third of value-added collaboration comes from 3-5% of employees. As the article points out, this leads to collaboration overload with these expert/capable people being over solicited with time intensive and low-value collaboration, instead of spending time on (a) more rewarding coaching/mentoring interaction with their colleagues and (b) continuing to keep their knowledge edge in their field of expertise or broaden their knowledge base.
Cronycle: a one-stop solution for continuous learning
At Cronycle, we want to make it easy for employees to become more effective information managers whilst relieving expert/capable employees of low-level sharing interactions. We believe that building daily habits is key for employees to continuously learn and gradually make this part of their day-to-day work as opposed to a separate activity (as in macro-learning). Adoption of continuous learning within an organisation requires a tool which serves employees at each step of their daily learning routine.
The Stephen Hawkins lecture delivered by Sir Jony Ive in 2018 is a must watch for anyone interested in collaboration, the creative process, the benefits of communities in enterprise learning, the shortfall of curiosity or resolve alone in solving complex problems. The most insightful quotes are available in The Independent review article of the lecture.
Cronycle aims to empower employees and their team along their curation for learning process:
- Knowledge discovery/filtering: employees can aggregate content from the top thought leaders in their field of interest creating dynamic feeds with one of our 50,000+ topics. In this phase, learning is open to outside learning networks dynamically curated and updated with Cronycle’s topics.
- Sensemaking and connecting knowledge: in Cronycle, employees can create boards on any chosen subject where they invite trusted colleagues to contribute independently gathered content (articles, PDFs, videos, twitter conversations). It is an ideal environment for communities of practices to support learning, for focused team to solve problems or for experts with different expertise to cooperate.
- Publishing or sharing: the collaborative learning made possible in Board can then be published in open networks to seek outside feedback or within the enterprise to make available and searchable contextual/enriched knowledge for the benefit of all employees.
By allowing all employees to more easily practice Harold Jarche’s Seek>Sense>Share PKM framework, Cronycle feeds employees’ curiosity, supports collaborative learning and ultimately helps foster adaptability and creativity with the enterprise. Learning in the flow of work is no longer the privilege of the few, but rather available for the many.
Applications examples
I have listed below a number of simple applications which employees and teams can implement in their daily routine with Cronycle:
- Monitor what’s happening in your sector by creating a continuous feed on a topic of interest: example feed of AI in HR
- Follow top newsletters in your area of interest by creating a dedicated newsletter feed within your Cronycle
- Discover and reach out to worldwide thought leaders outside your enterprise such as influencers in the world of ‘social learning’
- Create a learning pathway on a skill set for new colleagues to access: sample learning pathway made for Cronycle employees on curation.
- Search for a particular term in across all the Board you have access to within your Cronycle: here is all the articles across board in which the keyword ‘collaboration’ appears.
- Coming soon: search your organisation’s Cronycle for a specific question you have and get resources shared by colleagues to answer it.
- Create a curated list of reference linked to an important internal article. For example, here is a feed of hyperlinks included in this article.
- Create a list of sample feeds to follow as an L&D professional to make your organisation a world class learning organisation
Supplementary information
Learn more about Cronycle’s ability to discover, filter, make sense of and share information.
Feature image from rawpixel.com
