Did Corona's Big Yellow Taxi take your learning culture away?

In her legendary 1970 classic song Big Yellow Taxi Joni Mitchell asks:

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Hey now, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot

Heading into the second year of the pandemic and in the midst of a lull between waves of infection and death, can we pause and survey what we have lost from a social learning perspective?

As the results of large scale studies of the Post-Covid workplace like the Microsoft 2021 Work Trends Index emerge a few key trends are clear.

• People are digitally fatigued - passive screen time is becoming a source of exhaustion
• Networks are getting smaller - hindering innovation and sharing
• Younger and newer employees are struggling to connect and be heard.
• Cameras are off and Zoom Zombies abound

What does this mean for corporate learning?

In the early days of the pandemic many companies shut down all social learning and pointed everyone to LMS's and generic self driven learning content.

Because of the massive scale of the potential user base and the economics of scale the quality of the content is often quite compelling with good production values and real global experts. But it is a solitary experience and there is no uniqueness to the content. By their very nature content creators want to scale the same product as widely as possible.

My question today is.... is that it? Is content all we actually get from learning? Is the access to new concepts and information alone sufficient to deliver ROI on corporate learning?

Yes self driven learning is generally a lot cheaper per notional hour, but have corporate learning professionals become cynics in the way Oscar Wilde so famously described it?

“someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”

Like in the Joni Mitchell song - we often only realise the value of something when it vanishes - in this case - social and collaborative learning. And the big Yellow Taxi of Covid19 has taken away this aspect of corporate life away - at least in part.

So what have we lost as we moved to learning (mostly) alone?

Well since the commoditised learning content, we seem to have kept in all of this, starts with a "C" - why not create a list of "C's"?

These are subtler value contributors that were sometimes imperceptibly a part of a good social learning session.

Please note the emphasis on good - I'm not referring to the sad "death by PowerPoint" / "Droning sage on the stage" type of session! - I hope those never make a comeback!

No, I'm referring to compelling, interactive & fun learning sessions with colleagues in a room for a day or two.

In those moments we often had the other 8 "C's" that just happened & which I believe we need to rescue from the back of the big yellow Covid taxi!

1. Contacts - Building a personal brand in the company & becoming visible as talent
2. Collaboration - Creating together - making something - from a concept to a prototype
3. Coaching - Learning from each other, watching someone who is really skilled handle something and learning by observing.
4. Curation - Creating our own strategic know-how as a team or as a company - something that we have figured out and can give us a competitive edge
5. Calibration - Finding my space in the company & being able to benchmark my skills against peers and experts.
6. Creativity - Developing new insights and ideas together, living for a moment in that magical space that opens up between people when they engage deeply and share ideas.
7. Connection - building a cross company network - how interesting that we now realise that those chats (over stale croissants and weak coffee) were sometimes the best part of a learning session. MS Teams and Zoom is very poor at enabling this aspect. Next generation virtual conferencing platforms like Remo get closer to this experience.
8. Community - Feeling like you belong. To me this is the most important "C" - especially now, since so few markers of belonging (the office, the corporate swag, the watercooler chats) are now missing.

Not focusing on belonging in a hybrid world is a huge mistake!

Combining even one or two of these social learning value adding "C's" can create energy, differentiation and engagement well beyond the value of the one we seemed to salvage from the flames - Content.

We have all come to terms with the fact that virtual and hybrid is here to stay and we should be restless and principled in trying to get back these powerful positive impacts that social learning can provide.

We need to be restless because we need to constantly seek out new technologies that allow for real human connection (Spoiler alert it will not be Facebook's VR Workrooms or other cartoon-to-cartoon VR experiences). It is more likely to be Business simulations like those from the good people at ExperiencePoint , Celemi 10,000 Feet or StrategyTools or custom learning experiences built on the likes of Miro by wizards like Isman Tanuri of Elisan Partners. We also need better platforms like Remo or Butter and others, while we wait for better facial expressions and more human interactions in VR.

We also need to be principled - because the basic quality standard of social learning still remains in the virtual world. I summarised that commitment to quality human learning experiences in a previous Article as KnowHouse's People Power Manifesto.

Stop the taxi! We need now more than ever to learn together !