So, you recently read Jane Bozarth's Social Learning for Trainers and followed it up with a read of Enterprise 2.0 by McAfee and The New Social Learning by Conner and Bingham. You're excited by the promise of social software for learning. You're already a Facebook and Twitter junkie and life couldn't be better with vendors announcing "Facebook for the enterprise". Wow! You're going to be a hot-shot social learning pro, aren't you? Errrm... think again. Life as a social learning consultant isn't a bed of roses and while the glamour of the Scobels, Hinchliffes, Ghoshes, Schrecks and others is inviting, you're likely to have a rough road ahead. Behind the glitz and glamour is a tough, painstaking albeit eventually fulfilling job, which you absolutely need to know about. So, before you get charmed into this shiny new world read my little disclaimer - it ain't easy!It's Not Really Facebook for the EnterpriseOk, ok I know you love Facebook and I know Jane says you could potentially use established tools like Facebook and Twitter for learning. Jane is right, I must say and I personally believe that the most mature social business implementations need to have porous walls. With that said, I have to also note that we're just not there yet! And frankly, there's perhaps a middle ground we need which'll just take some time. In the mean time, while you revel in the glory of Facebook, your employers need single sign on, integration with other systems, security, governance, uptime guarantees, content ownership assurances, and what not. Ah! That doesn't seem as cool anymore, does it? If you're heading the social learning route, remember that showing off the success of #lrnchat or the Learning and Skills Group is just the first step.You'll be a Consultant with No Direct Control Ever heard of organisational politics? It's the bad phrase to describe the tension between innovation, internal systems and organisational structure. Once you've gone ahead and wowed YOUR boss with that demo of #lrnchat or or that matter your own PKM approach powered by social media, you should really have a free rein. Or should you? Well if you're championing the cause of collaborative learning in the enterprise, you can't do it alone. You need to get IT to buy into supporting you. You'll need to get leadership to champion your proposal, and to do that, you'll need to champion some of their goals. As it turns out, none of them are your puppets - so getting the organisational machinery to start working in the same direction can mean several emails, presentations, meetings, arguments and consultative discussions. Forget about your role as an instructional designer - you're now only a consultant. You have no direct control. Hell, you can't even control behaviours for your 'learners'. At least in the classroom you could set a few rules for participation. Now you need to model their exisiting collaborative behaviours onto your system. You'll often feel that "Click Next to Continue" in elearning or "Let's move to the next exercise." in the classroom gave you more power. Are you happy to live with that for some time?It's Not the Kool-Aid You've been Drinking So, you're happy to rough it out - after all there's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! I guarantee you, there is one, but it's far, far away. Before you can get to the wonderful effects that you've only read about it blogs, you'll need to do heaps of hard work. As a start, you may need to create dozens of proofs of concepts for the scores of teams in your organisation. It's not just about getting the executives involved, people are at the center of social business. Be prepared to sit at your desk for hours uploading files, setting up wikis, creating discussion areas and helping people wrap their heads around emergent collaboration. Be prepared to get laughed at and to take the feedback, go back, work and come back more resilient. Even when your community starts to thrive, things won't just happen by magic. There's a lot of unglamourous work involved in community management, I'm afraid. Take a look at what Donald Taylor does for the Learning and Skills Group and what Tom, Dave and Jeanette do for the Articulate community. In fact, with all the content curation, one-on-one support, online facilitation and constant manual gardening that Dave Anderson does, I wonder when he sleeps. It's effective, it's useful and it comes from a genuine desire to help people. It may end up being glitzy and glamourous, but don't count on it.You've Got To Build Comfort with "Good Enough"As an elearning pro and even as a trainer, you would have fussed hours, days, weeks and months to get things just right. After all, that slide needs to look polished. That activity needs to be instructionally sound. That elusive goal of perfection keeps you going everyday. Social learning has it's own levels of perfection, but that perfection doesn't come from the quality of content. A badly formatted, abrupt, but contextualised answer is good enough for a social QnA environment. It's not pretty, nor is it the most awesome content - it's just effective and works. It takes great patience to keep looking at gigabytes of user generated content that may not be as good as what you could have created but is so contextualised, that it's far more effective. In social business, perfection comes from being an integral part of the way we work. Perfection is when information flows seamlessly across the internet and the intranet, and people can consume byte-sized content when they want to, where they want to. It's perfection all right, but of a different kind.If you've read this far, you probably see my point - being a social learning pro involves a lot of hard work. It's immensely fulfilling; after a while a lot more than just doing instructional design or training. Be prepared however, to take the long, hard road there. Put your heads down, think big, start small and keep iterating. And when you really start to deliver value, which could be sometime away, the accolades may come too. I guess it's just a question of being patient. That's just my two cents - what do you think?© Sumeet Moghe

Now that I am back to my regular blogging schedule, I guess we wouldn’t have it complete without sharing across a relatively short blog entry with an Inspiring Video Clip of the Week, don’t you think? I mean, it’s been a while since I have shared over there the last one, so I may as well use this opportunity to share one that I have found incredibly powerful and rather thought provoking around the topic of Taking Risks (… and see what happens). You know, for a good number of years I have been postulating that for a business to become a truly Social Enterprise one of the traits that would need to come with the job is to not only know about risks and the potential failures they provoke, what they are, and what they imply, but to eventually encourage that same sense of failure as one of the most powerful learning processes for knowledge workers and organizations alike out there; that is, to learn from the risks they take and the mistakes they make, in order not to repeat them again. And continue growing through learning accordingly. And it looks like the folks portrayed on this short video clip surely know what they were talking about: If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived… It’s been flagged as perhaps one of the most motivational videos out there and I would probably have to agree with that statement; to be honest, once you watch through it you will know exactly what we mean. It lasts for a little bit over a minute, but it’s worth it every single second of it and I can certainly vouch that after you watch through it, you would not be looking into risks, or risk taking, with the same pair of eyes. Quite the opposite. The metaphor of Risk = Life is just brilliant! If not, judge for yourselves. Here is the embedded code for you to play the clip right away: Incredibly powerful, don’t you think? While going through it though I just couldn’t help remembering a keynote session I attended while at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris a couple of weeks ago, where my good friend Richard Collin, shared plenty of amazingly inspirational stories and anecdotes on what it is like living an Enterprise 2.0. And, as part of that experience, one of the slides that I liked the most was the one I captured through live tweeting, and Twitpic, under the suggestive heading "The 10 Commandments To Take Back Home For You" that surely captures the essence, in my opinion, of what risk taking is all about in a corporate environment for all of those knowledge workers, social computing evangelists or not, who are trying to live and embrace Enterprise 2.0 and who are very much willing to walk the extra mile that most people wouldn’t want to, because the latter are just too comfortable getting the most out of the specific status quo they have inherited over the course of the years. Yet, over the course of time, and without them realising much about it, those 10 commandments tend to become their new mantra because it reflects, quite nicely, not only their new way of working, and getting the job done, but also their new way of living. And throughout all of it there is plenty of risk taking, as we can see from that list itself: "Remember it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission Come to work each day willing to be fired Circumvent any orders aimed at stopping your dream Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description Find people to help you Follow your intuition about the people you choose, and work only with the best Work underground as long as you can, - Publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism Never bet on a race unless you are running in it Be true to your goals, but be realistic about the ways to achieve them Honour your sponsors" Thus when people asked me, during the event, to describe out of all of those 10 commandments which one would be the one that would represent the closest to what I have been doing in the last 11 years, as a social computing evangelist, I probably came to terms with realising that, all along, it’s been #2: "Come to work each day willing to be fired". Perhaps a bit too drastic and a tad too dramatic, I  can imagine, but I guess that’s what optimists and outrageous, rebels at work, trust agents, intrapreneurs, heretics, free radicals, etc. etc. have felt all along: risk taking in what you strongly believe as that next, new innovative brilliant idea is just as worth while doing as risking being fired for it. If not, it’s not worth it. Not worth the effort, nor the energy nor the support from others. Because if that happens eventually, getting fired, that is, there is a great chance that you aren’t working for the right business in the first place and a good indication that it may well be a good time for you to move on altogether… However, risk taking is not only one of those traits that you could apply to knowledge workers, in their ability to push the limits as social computing evangelists, for instance, or whatever other knowledge work activity, but we can also see plenty of that with executives themselves in whatever the organisation, and, I guess, that instead of me detailing what that would be like, I am just going to point you folks to a short video clip interview that Ginni Rometty, IBM’s CEO, did recently where she talked about taking risks and what it meant for her: So, now you know, next time that you bump into someone who may well be a bit too apprehensive and perhaps a bit too self-critical inside when taking risks they may just as well loosen up a bit, because, you know, as Ginni herself puts it rather nicely, "growth and comfort do not co-exist". So it will be up to us, knowledge workers, to decide how far apart we would want to go take both growth and comfort through risk taking while wanting to achieve our goals and go that extra mile. After all, when was the last time that you were about to be fired for the stuff you love doing the most? Has it happened yet? I bet it hasn’t, so why we do keep being so risk averse within the corporate environment? Something tells me we are the ones on the losing end and big time. Somehow we should probably start reverting that trend, and soon enough!, should we want Social Enterprise to succeed in the corporate environment. Is it worth it? Probably. Should we go for it? You bet!! Even if that gets us fired!

A year back, when I decided to go with the idea of ThoughtWorks University V2, I was seriously influenced by Jay Cross's idea of a workscape. We already had a very successful graduate induction program in the form of ThoughtWorks University, and to change it meant flouting rules like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But then, I think a bit like my friend Aaron Silvers - "We should be fixing things all the time". I wanted to move from a purely academic approach towards learning to an approach that we drove through real work. I wanted to rethink the reason we ran the program and if instructional soundness really translated into workplace effectiveness. Our team took a gamble towards workscaping the program. I can say safely today that we've seen results that make me proud to be part of the program and I believe we're making a dent in the universe like never before. Last Thursday, the team of graduates at ThoughtWorks University enabled a local charity Sukrupa by launching their website complete with a donations system. This apart, they've made significant progress with a student records system and an ecommerce project for the same client. In today's blogpost, I want to reflect on our experience of the last six weeks and share with you how real work has made ThoughtWorks University a better program for the company and the world at large.You Can't Train People on Values"Profit, smarts, and growth is essential, but the meaning of work-life must extend beyond the bottom line." - Jonathan WolterAt ThoughtWorks, our values and mission are at the heart of how we work. My colleague Jonathan Wolter, has written eloquently about our mission to advocate social justice. While our mission and values are at the core of our DNA, I don't believe we can train anyone on this. We can do great presentations and elearning courses and convince ourselves that we did a great job, but frankly you believe in a mission by pursuing it. You cherish values by living them. Teaching of any kind lacks the realism to drive home a passion for missions and values. At ThoughtWorks Univeristy, we set our graduates the task of enabling Sukrupa - a local school that's on a mission to educate children from Bangalore's slums. It's amazing how a challenge with a real world impact can galvanise people. In solving this problem our grads not only pursued software excellence and helped change the world in their own little way, but they also lived ThoughtWorks' values as a means to the end. If you read about our values you'll soon realise how a small, real world problem can easily help them live each of our cultural traits.Experience is the Biggest Teacher"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you wanted" - Randy PauschOften it takes seeing what doesn't work, to realise what could actually work. We took a risk by starting the project with little upfront analysis. In the initial weeks of the project we were literally playing it by ear, taking our clients' requirements as they came. While we took this chance knowing the potential benefit for Sukrupa and for the graduates' experience, the uncertainty and the lack of coordination on the team was disconcerting. There was even an occasion when our otherwise affable client was put off by our amateurish approach. When you put a group of talented, passionate people together though, problems are only an opportunity for greater responsibility. A quick shuffle of team roles and our analysts had nominated a testing lead, a UX analyst, a project manager and backlog cop. From that point on we never looked back. The graduates have forged such a strong relationship with our client, that it'll drive most experienced account managers to shame. Technically, and process wise - our graduates struggled; but their passion kept them resilient through ups and downs of the six weeks. The role of the trainers was just to be coaches - guides on the side, who would chip in with their experience and help the project along in the right direction. At the end of the day, the trainers have learned heaps about leadership and the students have learned heaps about client management and software delivery. We didn't teach them anything - they learned through experience.Nothing Succeeds like Success"You know that you've done well, if your customer breaks out in tears during a showcase." - Patric FornasierYou can teach people all you know, but they'll never know what it's really like until they achieve real success. In the past six weeks our graduates wrote real tests and real code, configured one-click deployment for the project, elicited and delivered real user stories, worked in a true Agile environment, and managed a real client relationship. As I sat through graduation on Friday, I looked at each of our 20 new consultants -- their confidence and energy was evident. As I later wrote to these consultants they aren't rookies anymore - they know what it takes to release software. They can now stand alongside their more experienced team mates and still be confident given their success on our project with Sukrupa. I hope it's heaps easier for them to pull their weight on a project, knowing that they've seen real success.This ThoughtWorks University brought for me, my happiest moments as a ThoughtWorker. It's been an absolute privilege working alongside each of these 20 young people - and it's an experience that'll take some beating. It's also provided evidence to my hypothesis that challenges and failure can be great catalysts to learning. I've seen that smart, passionate people, given a worthy task, will learn and rise to challenge. I hope our story can inspire you to make real work an integral part of your learning programs. Do chime in with your thoughts in the comments section - I'm very keen to hear what you think. And by the way, please donate unabashedly to Sukrupa - a small donation from your side could go a really long way for this really special school.© Sumeet Moghe

Earlier on this year, while at Lotusphere 2012 and at IBM Connect in Orlando, Florida, I had the unique opportunity and great pleasure to finally attend live a keynote session from the one and only Guy Kawasaki. As you can imagine, I had very high expectations about being wowed by someone who i have admired all along and whose books I keep constantly going back to in order keep learning more and more about a good number of different topics, specially, those related to social business. Well, that keynote was probably *the* best 20 minutes spent on attending any live session I have had in the last few years. I was certainly not disappointed a single bit! And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way, apparently. No surprise. In fact, just those 20 minutes made the entire week worth while! Eventually, it’s all about "Defaulting to yes!". In that keynote session Guy talked about plenty of really good tips on how to enchant your audiences, whether in real life or virtually, about your own product(s), whatever that may well be. This presentation in Slideshare covers some of the major items he talked about, although it’s not the actual presentation he used. But still equally helpful. One of those key messages he shared along was that one of always defaulting to yes! Basically, meaning the following, as Mitra Sorrells beautifully captured on a recent blog entry under the title "9 Tips From Guy Kawasaki on How to Use Social Media to "Enchant" Customers": "Default to a "yes" attitude. "Think to yourself, I will do what this person asks; I will be happy to do it; I will probably say yes even before they ask, even before I know what they are going to ask me to do. Always be thinking, ‘how can I help the other person,’" Kawasaki said" Very powerful message, indeed, which clearly resonates with the whole mantra behind living social, i.e. helping others excel at what they are already doing without asking for anything in return. That’s, usually, how networks and communities operate in the open Social Web at the moment. But then again, and I am sure you would all agree, at some point in time, it’s bound to fail. Why? Well, mostly because, as we, human beings, tend to do with almost everything out there, we keep abusing such good will and good hearted mentality of wanting to help others by answering yes to everything to the point where people will keep taking advantage of it all, even if it starts harming people’s own productivity. It’s just as if we don’t see it and just care for getting that help without thinking much about the potential consequences we over-impose on others. And perhaps till now we couldn’t do much about it, since we all know that we always find it incredibly tough to keep saying No to people. It just doesn’t happen. We are not natural at it, as we keep thinking, considering and pondering some more the potential consequences from that "No, thanks!". You know, who wants to hurt someone else’s feelings by rejecting and saying "No!" to their offer, whatever that may well be? Probably no-one, right? Well, here’s where we can all feel incredibly grateful to Dan Pink after a recent, rather thought provoking, blog post he put together under the suggestive title "How to say No . . . especially to things you want to do", which is some really fascinating read on the power of saying No, but, most importantly, on how to do it well and feel good about it, without that sense of guilt that we are all far too familiar with. And still keeping that flavour that Guy mentioned about always defaulting to yes! How can that be, right? Well, Dan explains it very nicely as perhaps one of our biggest challenges for this century; one for which it’s going to be rather tough to find a really good answer that would be applicable to everyone: "How do we say no to things we want to do?" Yes, I know, how can we possibly answer that question and still feel good about it? Well, perhaps we need to look into two things that can help already venture a potential solution, or a good direction for it altogether anyway. Think about productivity for a minute. Think about your own productivity and effectiveness for the work you do. Think now how if you keep defaulting to yes to everything that you would want to do, while helping others, would eventually mean that you would have very little time to look after your own productivity. And in the end you may fall behind. So, in a way, you need to be the first one self-protecting your own interests before reaching out to others to help them. As Elizabeth Gilbert mentions on Dan’s blog entry, you need to start becoming your own bodyguard for the work you do, because there may well be a good chance that no-one else would be able to do it for you. And that’s where the second element of the equation kicks in, which Dan also addresses beautifully with this insightful quote: "I wouldn’t want to return to a world of limited options and pricey information any more than I’d like to return to a world of scarce, expensive calories. But I think we all need a little help dealing with our new circumstances and saying no to things that we want to do" Indeed, I think Dan pretty much nails it when talking about how you can succeed when saying "No!" to not just the things you don’t want to do, but also the things you would want to, but can’t: get some extra help from others. That is, help others understand that as much as you would want to help out, default to yes, and participate in their initiatives and projects you may not be capable of doing so, for whatever the reason, and it’s totally fine to say no and feel good about it. No-one is going to look up at you and claim you haven’t helped them accordingly. It’s going to be a constant exercise of helping set the expectations of how far you can stretch yourself out without having to invoke that self bodyguard to protect you and your own productivity. And just like good, regular and constant exercise is good for burning those unnecessary calories and fat, so will it be setting up the right expectations on your willingness to help out others achieving their goals. it’s not going to be a matter of just plainly saying no, but more along the lines of helping people understand that some times it will work, and how some other times it won’t. And that’s just fine. It’s just a matter of adjusting expectations, your commitment to help others, and, finally, put a stop on abusing people’s innate willingness to help out while killing their own productivity in the end. At the end of the day, it’s all about respecting and fully understanding the productivity of others and, in return, they will respect yours accordingly. And, believe me, that’s then when great things will come up! So, what do you think? How do you say no to the things you would want to do while keeping up with your own productivity and effectiveness in the context of that mantra of always defaulting to yes without losing your sanity? An oxymoron right there? Utopian altogether? The 21st century chimera? I would love to know and find out more about it in the comments how you get around it…

I remember using a computer for the first time in 1990 - it was when I wrote my first computer program, in BASIC. Internet access in the nineties was an absolute luxury in India. In fact I had little activity on the internet until the mid nineties. I do remember reading some years back though, that in 1993, Peter Steiner had published a cartoon about the internet in the New Yorker. The cartoon featured two dogs at a computer, with one dog saying to another, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". The cartoon seemed to symbolise the anonymity with which users could participate on the internet. The internet in those days was definitely a lot about content. People and conversations were not part of internet currency yet. In the last two decades however, the internet has changed and how! Social media has made the internet more about context than content and the fact is that today, if you're dog, you'll soon get figured out on the social web.The Only Social Media Rule You Need to Remember Last year at DevLearn 2010, my friend and industry colleague Cammy Bean said that the only social media rule or guideline people need is, "Don't be an @$#hole". While that statement is amusing, it's also quite profound. Frankly, it's not so tough being on social media. Just don't be ill mannered and don't do stupid things. Why then do some people still behave like absolute boors on the web? In the past year or so, I've gotten kicked out of at least two different social groups for simply demanding better behaviour. Now I'm not talking about non-assertive behaviour, I'm just saying good behaviour. And frankly it isn't rocket science.Real Authority and Respect Comes from Humble FacilitatonI got that response from a community lead of a fairly active wildlife forum on Facebook. To give you some context, I was responding to a fairly open question creating a second home for Asiatic Lions. I don't claim to be an expert on the subject - I just wanted to share what I thought and knew. The community lead chose to tear me to pieces on the forum and almost told me to shut up because she was sure I knew nothing! Again, I'm not an expert on behavioural science, but I know that if you want to grow your community, you want to invite opinions and encourage debate. Could she have handled her disagreement differently?Abusiveness only Portrays You in Bad LightThe message you see above is a real example of the kind of language I strongly object to. There's no doubt that the we all deserve the right to express ourselves freely. That said, language of this nature serves no one well. People who you're talking about will just read your language and reject you outright. People whose attention you wish to catch are likely to see your strong words, but understand nothing about why you're upset and why you feel in a certain way. Most importantly, a conversation that starts on this kind of a note is unlikely to be constructive. The only place it can go is south.Don't Defend Poor BehaviourIf you're a community manager, then you have a responsibility to make your community a safe place to contribute. There are no two ways about it. You need to be cognizant of bad behaviour regardless of who it comes from. In the above case, I responded to the abusive comment and asked if we could avoid profanity on the forum. The community lead came out and vociferously defended the original poster stating his experience in conservation as a license for poor behaviour. Soon after, I found myself kicked off the group and the community manager had made the group secret so I couldn't even find it if I searched for it. Wow! Isn't being respectful at least a bit easier?Don't Undermine the Feedback LoopWhen I publicly challenged the rude commentary here, I got some amount of support from a well respected member of the group. It seemed natural for the community lead to apologise for her boorish conduct, but all I saw was a justification of why she was right to behave the way she eventually did. I remember at another community, when I raised my concerns about the poor organisation of presentations at the group's monthly meetings, the community lead was so furious, she said, "If you think attending **** sessions is a waste of time, please don't bother attending any sessions". I took the cue and left the group for good. You could fault me, depending on the way you look at it, but the fact is that in each case, I provided feedback. In each case, it was the community lead's responsibility to take that feedback graciously. Instead, all I got in each situation was retribution. Frankly, I don't really care about being part of communities that don't believe in respectful conduct. That said, each of these social media participants have tarnished their own reputation because I and others will carry these stories across the web. After a while, it's a really small place to hide poor behaviour.While a lot of what I've written today comes from my own experience, I don't want this to appear as a sob story. I am really surprised at how people can say things they'd never say in person, just because they're on a social network. Social media attaches all of this misbehaviour to our public identities. Do we really want to build our identities this way? We deeply undermine our own credibility by being ill-mannered in our conduct online. It takes very little effort to be respectful. Just that little effort, and I hope the social web can be a much better place to participate. What's more, we can continue to retain the credibility we deserve. What do you think?© Sumeet Moghe

A few days back, just before I embarked on to another business trip to both London (To attend and present at the #UCExpo event) and Paris (To present at the Lotusphere Comes To You event) - more on both of those wonderful events shortly!, by the way- I put together a blog post where I tried to highlight the current status of the Social Web out there and how it seems like we are entering a new era of mediocrity, where the overall user experience keeps deteriorating itself by having to face a good number of various different issues that consistently keep diminishing and destroying our very own rights, as end-users, specially, as we keep allowing, repeatedly, plenty of abusive practices from lots of social networking sites, without doing much about it apparently. Well, while we try to figure out a way out to rebel against that ugly landscape we’ve allowed to grow further along, in today’s blog entry, and as way to resume my regular blogging activities, once again, I would like to spend a few minutes covering Enterprise 2.0 or, lately, Social Business, which seems to be the term everyone has been embracing (Incorrectly, if I may add, judging from what Social Business is originally all about it, as coined by Prof. Muhammad Yunus), since things are not going much better either in that space, as the true intentions from most organizations are starting to show up. I have been involved with social networking sites for business since early 2001 and over the course of the years I have had a chance to get exposed to a good number of trends. Both positive and negative. I have been having hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations with the various parts of the Social Business ecosystem: vendors, customers, business partners, competitors, industry analysts and other thought leaders and, over the course of the last few years, one thing is starting to become rather obvious and evident regarding the state of Social Business within the corporate world. The fact that there are two different and distinct types of businesses wanting to embrace it: Those who are there for the money, your money, that is, the easy buck And those who are there for the true social transformation of their entire business ecosystem (Both internal and external) Yes, I know that this may all well seem like I am turning myself into some kind of a curmudgeon, but if you folks have been reading this blog for a long while now you would notice that’s not the case. Quite the opposite. I’m still that optimist, outrageous, heretic, rebel at work, free radical and hippie 2.0 (Now more than ever, specially!) who is finally understanding that we may well be at the crossroads of what one would consider the point of no return for Social Business, and that’s the one where businesses would, finally, need to make a critical decision: Are you there, in Social Business, for the money, for that easy buck I mentioned above, or are you there for the real transformation of your business, and your business processes, as you know it? The reason why I am starting to question the validity of Social Business in the current corporate world has got nothing more to do than trying to distinguish those businesses that are just there wanting to earn the easy buck out of you, and therefore are living on the hype & buzz from Social Business itself (which is what’s been happening in the last three to four years and counting…) from those companies that are challenging their current business models to see how they could, at long last, start, truly, living social. But what do I mean exactly with earning the easy buck, you may be wondering, right? Well, to me, there are two different types of businesses at the moment with regards to the world of Social Business and that transformation that we all keep talking about. Those that are claiming they are truly social businesses, because they are, indeed, living it all the way. They are transforming their business models to match the current needs and business landscape of the 21st century, where the knowledge economy, the relationship economy and the meritocracy economy, amongst others (Including a sustainable customer centric approach towards doing business!), are slowly taking over previous business models and are surely on their way to transforming their overall business ecosystem. And then there are those that are saying they are truly social businesses, because of how they have embraced the social networking / computing philosophy and traits like transparency, openness (through servant leadership), publicy, agile, trustworthiness, being nimble, full employee empowerment and engagement through co-ownership and co-sharing of responsibility, etc. etc. and yet they still keep operating with the same good old mentality from the 20th century, with the same business models; the ones where command and control, micro-management, controlling the brand, as well as the message, optimisation of resources, etc. still rule big time, where customer centric interactions do not exist at all, where they claim they have lowered down the barrier for decision making and the centre of gravity, but it hardly ever happens, where they keep stating how they continue to encourage an open knowledge sharing and collaborative culture, and yet, employees still carry on competing against each other to get better overall performance reviews to advance in their own personal careers, at whatever the costs (Oh, and never mind rewarding group / team / networks / community performance, because currently it just doesn’t exist); in short, where they claim they are now becoming sustainable, engaged, networked, transparent social businesses and in reality nothing has changed. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. At all. Well, those are *not* social businesses, I am afraid, and, in my opinion, they should not be considered social businesses and that’s why from here onwards I refuse to add that tag of #socbiz for any company out there that keeps talking about how they have become true social businesses, yet, they hardly walk the talk. Becoming a social business is something you earn. It’s a merit you work really hard for over the course of the years to provoke that social transformation that will help you carry out your business in a sustainable, meaningful and purposeful manner into the 21st century. It’s a lot of hard work, effort and energy of wanting to do things different than what you have been doing in previous decades. It’s a step forward towards a radical change in both management, leadership and transparency, as well as trust and engagement, from all sides of the equation, both the businesses and the employee workforce itself. The #socbiz is a tag that should be used carefully and sparingly, instead of being abused left and right by all of this mumbo jumbo talking that we keep getting bombarded with from all over the place; only if you are truly willing to not just say you are embracing it, but to eventually walk the talk all the way should you be worth it of that #socbiz tag. And I am afraid plenty of companies keep failing at delivering on this important business transformation. That’s why, to me, it’s now the time where we need to put a stop to all of the BS we keep getting thrown back at us (And please do excuse my French!). We are on that critical stage where the initial hype, buzz and enthusiasm about Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business is running over, where knowledge workers are finally finding out, through a massive awakening!, that all of their efforts in wanting to change and smarten up by becoming true knowledge (Web) workers 2.0 are not being met by the other half of the equation, the employers themselves, those businesses who pretend to have what it takes to live social, but that they haven’t delivered, nor do they want to!, since there aren’t any hopeful signs they will be changing and adapting any time soon. We need to start getting serious about this social transformation, ALL of US, not just the employee workforce, but also the corporate world, as a whole, as my good friend, Sameer Patel put rather nicely, just recently in a superb blog post under the rather thought provoking title "Social Business Facts and Fiction" with notable quotes like this one: "The first innings of social in the enterprise is over. Those organizations that like to experiment have done so. Beyond those, a small number of executives who innately believe that collaboration is absolutely critical to execution have put their weight behind these programs. […] But there’s massive untapped opportunity out there to revise the value proposition for those numbers-driven businesses who will want to understand how all of this enhances what they’ve invested in for the last decade. Until then, this massive bucket of executives will treat "social business" as another Mickey Mouse program until they see how it matters to revenue increase, cost reduction and risk mitigation" Now, I am not sure whether I will be rather supportive of a Mickey Mouse programme, or not, as Sameer himself puts it rather nicely, in my opinion, but one thing for sure is that I think we all need to start challenging, and rebelling to a certain extent!, against those very same executives / business leaders and those other folks with the decision power to come forward, up their game, and truly state where they stand with regards to Social Business: up for the easy money, and quick profits, regardless of the damages they may continue to exert upon all of us (Remember Knowledge Management back in the day with vendors and consultants? Do we want to keep making the very same mistakes? Over and over again? Anyone?) or that social business transformation we, knowledge workers, have been anticipating all along over the course of the last few years and which we all know will help succeed those business into the 21st century Knowledge Economy, but that we keep failing in seeing it become a reality, our reality, just because we are not brave enough to challenge the current status quo of how business has been getting things done in the last few decades. Think of it, seriously, picture yourself into 2020, or 2030 even, do you still think you will have a job in your current company without realising the social business dream? Actually, let’s push the limit a little bit further. Do you think that your company will still exist by that date without having become a successful social business eventually? … That’s what I thought. We need to change that dream into reality, our reality. Our time to act is now! Not tomorrow, or the day after, or next year. Or in five years. But today!! If you would want to be known, and respected!, as a successful social business, you better start earning that tag with all of us. Because we are watching… and acting accordingly, if you aren’t. So, dear social business, where do you stand? By the money or by the social business transformation? Or, perhaps, somewhere in between? … If so, whereabouts exactly? Care to tell us so that we know where you stand in this Social Enterprise journey? I am sure we would all love to know, wouldn’t we, folks? You never know, you may be closer to it than you think.

Yesterday, I did an introductory talk on social learning at XConf - an internal ThoughtWorks conference. I got a largish audience which actually left me quite pleased and I thought the talk went quite well. I want to share my slides with you and if I get time, I'll record audio over these visuals so you can get the full message. Feel free to use these visuals the way you please. As with all content on this blog, it's under the Creative Commons license.© Sumeet Moghe

Image credit: Faithful ChantPeople have identities. Whether we like it or not, these identities exist regardless of whether someone works at your company or not. People create and share content already. Whether we like it or not, they do a lot of this outside of your company. I'm a big believer of the notion that enterprise social software needs porous walls. The fact is that in real life your organisation's walls are quite porous. Most knowledge workers are fairly active on Twitter, some of them write blogs. Some speak at conferences and some use services like Tripit to manage their life and to stay connected with other people. Their connections include but are not limited to other people in your organisation. The eventual success of our social business implementations will come when we can actually facilitate information exchange across these porous walls. Can we use our social business platforms to build a composite brand for people using their activity from across the web? The technology to do this is commonplace, but to actually execute this we need to think human. How can we make corporate identities on social business platforms intermesh with people's existing brands on the public internet? Here are some ideas I've been pondering over:Twitter Integration: Can we design people's profiles in such a way that it automatically shows their Twitter stream, if they've added the Twitter ID to the system. Yammer already does smart things like integrating selective tweets with the Yammer activity stream. How frictionless is it for people to post to the enterprise social network directly from Twitter! As a corollary how tough can it be to send selective status updates from the enterprise social network to Twitter?Facebook Integration: Can people who are my friends on Facebook automatically be my friends on a social business platform? Could we at least get a way to scan our Facebook friends list and find corresponding friends on enterprise network? Just as in Twitter, can we have a 'lifestream' that allows people to see what we're upto in our daily lives? Can the integration of workstreams and lifestreams help build a connected enterprise?Blogs: While internal blogging is cool, most people are unlikely to retire their own blogs and they'll still continue to post great, useful stuff in there. How can we integrate people's blogposts from the external world into the enterprise activity stream? This could be a big win from an enterprise knowledge standpoint. It's also a recognition for people's personal brand - a small gesture that leads to great personal satisfaction.A Rational Approach to Privacy : There's always a certain amount of risk averseness towards storing personal data on SaaS platforms. This being said, most great social business platforms are SaaS solutions, where data isn't on your private servers. I understand there are some concerns particularly in Europe, around mandating storage of personal information on the cloud. I still believe that there are a few things to be mindful of. Most people already put this kind of information on services like Facebook, where they have no ownership of data. This indicates a certain level of comfort with storing personal information on third-party systems. With most SaaS providers we're protected by an NDA. As long as you can determine a practical exit strategy, should storing personal data be really such a huge risk? Frankly, the constant status updates that people will post are far more personal than a company phone number. And if push comes to shove, can we offer a choice to individuals about storing what they consider personal data on a SaaS solution? Until we ask, we'll never know who has an objection. It's always a bad idea to base design decisions around the outliers in your organisation - it only means that your system wil suck for the vast majority.Composite Profiles: People already have profiles all across the web. Can we find ways to integrate profile data from established services like Facebook and Twitter? In fact, as a step to that, do our profiles need a 2.0 twist to them? Social business implementations still capture only old-school contact information on profiles. Can we start to capture modern, context information such as Facebook and Twitter IDs, blog urls, etc on profiles? Eventually, these could be data sources to help you establish a strong social media presence on the web. Imagine how easy it'll be to have a constantly up-to-date list of your employees on Twitter. Or for that matter, a constantly up-to-date employee group on Facebook. Collecting context information is only a first step to this.Of course some of this can require significant heavy lifting in terms of customising your platform or building custom functionality. That said, I believe there's tremendous value in doing such stuff and all of us should at least place innovation of this nature on our social business roadmaps. Do you need to partner with your social business platform providers for some of this stuff and help them build it out as experimental functionality? Should we select platforms that allow us to create mobile apps that could actually bring these worlds together, much like a FriendFeed for the enterprise? There are several ideas that we can think of - the key is to ensure that we don't separate corporate identities from public identities. People are people and the corporate identity is no mask for who they really are.This article is an adaptation of an article I wrote on our internal blogging platform at ThoughtWorks. That in itself is an example of the separation between the real world and the enterprise. I had plans to write a completely different article this week, but the thought of composite identities was too compelling not to socialise on this blog. What's your view on the topic? Feel free to drop in your thoughts into the comments section of this post.By the way, I'm speaking at the Learning Solutions conference this month. I'll be at Orlando for the entire week, and am doing the following sessions:Social Learning without the Technology - Seven Patterns to Try Out: 1430, March 23rdWhat’s New In Blended Learning: with Julie Brink, Michael Tucci and Erin Gibbens. This is a Morning Buzz session on March 24thSocial Learning and Social Media - Their Role in Learning: with Terrence Wing, Julie Rochon and Kathy Jeep. This is a Morning Buzz session on March 25thI also want to use this opportunity to connect with as many of my tweeps and industry colleagues as possible. So if you want to catch up for a few drinks or do an evening trip to Disney World, count me in. Sahana Chattopadhyay of ThoughtWorks is also going to be at this conference, so if you wanted the India story of learning technologies, we'll be happy to catch you up. See you there!© Sumeet Moghe

Science. That wonderful and fascinating world that keeps escaping most of us, mere mortals, from trying to understand, or even, just simply get a glimpse, of how it works and how it makes the world, and the universe, turn around and around. Science. The one subject back at school that I always kept struggling with time and time again. And it’s now, several decades later, and thanks to a nearly two minute long video clip that I have finally found out why I had such aversion to it back then and how I’m coming to terms with it nowadays and start enjoying it for what it is: an open wide window into wisdom and knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing with a passion! In a world where we keep worshipping, and longing to become at some point in the near future!, film stars, music giants, sports titans, TV drama queens or whatever other demeaning reality show protagonists du jour, or whatever other unscrupulous types, it’s always refreshing and quite re-energising to bump into amazingly inspiring pearls of wisdom that make, even the most complex of concepts, incredibly easy to understand and grasp. That’s just what I have experienced while watching this short video clip featuring Prof. Brian Cox where in less than two minutes he gets to explain in very simple terms how everything is connected to everything. Now, if we ever had any reservations about how well interconnected we, human beings, are not just with each other, but with the environment that surrounds us, including the rest of the universe, this would be the kind of video to show those skeptics. Prof. Cox, in just a matter of minutes, gets to explain the Pauli Exclusion Principle and, although there is some controversy as to whether he has got it right, or not (Read through this rather long blog post and the extended comments for more details), what I have found to be the most fascinating thing was not whether he got it right or not, but the passion that he thrives on when sharing stories about the topics you can see he really is truly passionate about. That passion that keeps him going on and on and on for endless hours talking, in very simple terms, about concepts that the vast majority of us would struggle with big time (Again, read the comments from the link I mentioned above to get a glimpse of what I mean …). How powerful passion can be in storytelling? How long before we can see empowering passionate stories being shared in a business environment to help us transfer knowledge, collaborate effectively, and connect with other knowledge workers? How long before the business world understands that all of these collaboration, open knowledge sharing and social networking are all about sharing stories and that the more passionate you are about them when you share them across the more inspiring they would get? How long before it clicks for the corporate world to understand that we, as human beings, live of stories, of sharing those stories, of relaying relatively simple messages to one another to connect, to build trust, to bond, to eventually be us, even on a business environment? You know, not sure what you would think, but I could venture to state that if I had science teachers, back then, in my younger years, as passionate and engaging as Prof. Brian Cox is, when telling and sharing stories, I bet that I would not have become an English teacher eventually. Oh, nothing wrong with being an English teacher really, and working for an IT firm over the last 15 years (And still having a blast!), but you know what I mean. Passion, or, better said, the lack of it, can surely help influence, in a perhaps negative manner, how we may all be moving along with our careers, with our commitments, with our own goals, with our lives, you name it. Maybe Prof. Cox has shown, in that very short video clip, and without him noticing it, the way for us, in the business world, to turn the tide on that demolishing statistic that 8 out of 10 employees in America (And I am sure that very same thing happens in a good number of different countries) are not happy with their jobs. Maybe the reason for that is that somewhere along the way we may have lost that passion for the work that we do; if that’s the case, we need to bring it back, it’s killing us at the moment. and big time! And even more worrying when thinking that two thirds of our lifetimes are spent on stuff that we are no longer happy about, nor passionate enough for. Think that one of those thirds is, finally!, getting enough sleep, now that we know it’s actually rather unproductive not having enough of it. So that leaves us to two thirds of our lifetime to enjoy, one where we do the stuff we are passionate about, i.e. our private, personal, out of work, quality time, whatever that may well be. And the other third our jobs, the kind of work we do. Isn’t it time then to bring back that passion into work again, not only for what we do, but also for the connections, and personal business relationships we keep building up and that we know are going to help us eventually get work done while we learn doing things much more effectively? Isn’t it due time that we bring back into the business world the power of passionate storytelling that we all once had? Prof. Cox, in that short video I am embedding below, so you can watch it through right away, surely has been leading the way in transforming a potentially too complex, too technical, too wordy, too boring subject like science is, into something fun, playful, educational, entertaining, enlightening, simple enough to grasp and understand and exciting to get involved with! Maybe, the business world needs to pay a bit more attention to science. At least, to those science pockets where passion is shining through for its excellence. We need it. We very much need it. And we need it NOW!

The last week at work was great. Against several odds, we launched our internal social business platform - myThoughtWorks. The uptake until now with just three working days of operation, has been tremendous. We've seen 1016 documents, 347 social bookmarks, 294 threads and 293 blogposts on the platform from about 524 contributing users. 1310 of our 1700 users are active on the platform and that is a huge win, given our vastly distributed nature. The last few weeks have also been a great learning opportunity for our team and while it's easy to surround ourselves with those statistics and feel good about them, the truth is that our journey has only begun. In today's blogpost, I want to share with you some of my musings and our team's collective learnings from the weeks gone by.Never Overlook CommunicationI was chatting with Mark Needham last night. For all his eccentricities, Mark is a very reasonable guy and someone who just gets social media and social learning. Mark however, was one of the people who was taken by surprise with our launch of the new platform. When I spoke to him, he mentioned that while he'd gotten the memos, none of them were interesting enough for him to pay any attention. It brought out a very interesting point. The meaning of your communication is in the response you get. If someone as connected as Mark knew nothing about the launch, it meant that we were perhaps not communicating effectively to get his attention. When we were launching MediaWiki in my previous firm, we'd faced a similar experience. Corporate communication means nothing if no one receives your message. The success of a social business initiative does depend on effective communication leading up to the launch. This ensures that the key movers and shakers are already warming up to the idea. Shocking high potential users doesn't do much good. If one way doesn't work, try another. In coming weeks we're planning several more roadshows, user meetups and other ways to make our communications click.Understanding User Context is Key to Success"Communication channels are highways of habit: people have their preferences and they generally stick to them." - Jono Bacon, The Art of CommunityEveryone in the enterprise usually wants to contribute to its success. If social business is key to the success of your enterprise most reasonable people will want to jump in. Provided of course, you communicate well enough. This being said, we need to be empathetic towards the slower adopters. It's often not a lack of will to contribute, but the limitation of the performance context that stops people from being gung-ho adopters. Let me give you an example. Our most recent social learning implementation rests on the Google stack. We use Google Sites as a wiki, Google Groups for discussions, Google Chat for chatrooms and Google Videos for media sharing. The heart of the implementation however is Google Groups. For consultants at client site who are often coding at client computers, the easiest way to stay in touch with the rest of the company is email. When you add to that, limited access to ThoughtWorks systems, accessing any other platform becomes a big challenge. Google Groups gets around this problem quite well by providing simple mailing lists for communities. It also helps that a vast majority of western software developers like mailing lists! The move to a social business solution is great for our enterprise if adoption keeps going up as it has in the last three days. Adoption also depends on our empathy and responsiveness for user mindsets and context. In coming days we need to find ways not just to make things like email integration and mobile access seamless for our onsite consultants, but also to ensure that we can build such relationships with our clients that it's not taboo to access the enterprise social network while onsite.Choice is not Always a Great ThingEvery time you provide an option, you're asking the user to make a decision. - Joel SpolskySocial media has transformed my learning and there's no doubt about that. I do remember though that when I first saw Twitter, I couldn't wrap my head around it. It's quite simple isn't it? Just 140 characters! For some reason I just didn't get it. The process of finding people to follow, setting up a client that works for you, choosing hashtags that matter was just too complicated for me back in the day. I've struggled similarly with Facebook when it was new. Social media is like that. It becomes powerful when you make the right choices and personalise effectively. Personalisation however, is about making several choices and not everyone is happy to have choice. This is the part of the social business puzzle we need to figure out. While we want most people to make meaningful choices, how can we create useful defaults that the average user can get away with? The shorter the setup time, the easier it is to dive in and participate.Intuitive is an Overloaded WordWe use the word 'intuitive' way too loosely in design circles. We often debate pointlessly around little things that'll make our interfaces 'intuitive'. This often reminds me of the old BSD bikeshed painting analogy that Sriram Narayanan pointed me to. The fact is that the little things that make a platform intuitive for one are the same things that make it unintuitive for another. Intuition is really a factor of context, experience and familiarity. When my mental model matches the model that an application provides, it seems intuitive. When mental models clash, it's unintuitive. The catch with social business implementations is that they are unlikely to be intuitive to users that are unfamiliar with the social paradigm. In fact, I can say that even experienced users of social media who don't use it in a business context are likely to struggle at time. So instead of fussing over how to make the experience intuitive, it's crucial that we make the experience 'learnable'. There's also no substitute to providing people support when they need it. Complaints are good - they are opportunities to connect with users, educate them and build relationships. Nikhil Nulkar, our enterprise community facilitator (a.k.a ninja) is great at doing just this.Learning is a continuous process and after going through several social learning initiatives and experiments, I'm glad to be implementing a proper social business solution for my employers. I'm learning heaps about this stuff, and as time goes on I want to share these insights with you. I'd love to hear your thoughts about today's musings so please drop a line in the comments section and tell me.I'm going to be at Learning Solutions 2011 next week, so if you're in the vicinity please come and say hello. It'll be great to catch up.© Sumeet Moghe