What has an Alice Springs baker got to do with the state of learning in your business?

I always liked the story about the Alice Springs baker, told on the ABC, who, asked whether he was scared that if he invested in training his staff that they might leave, replied, yes, but what if I don’t and they stay?

With the social era of the web now well under way, collective workplace knowledge, its effective use and purposeful creation and transmission is going to create a lasting and decisive differentiator between many of today’s corporate competitors.

He with the best and most effective learning network, designed to purpose, will prove a very hard animal to beat.

Effective knowledge management may not be new to certain organisations in the professional services, but its value will come to the fore in all businesses that need to compete at speed. Few will find themselves doing this against competitors who are themselves not already equipped with similarly sophisticated weapons.

The arrival of Australia’s national broadband network will play a defining role in the shape of future organisations and fast knowledge transmission; it won’t all be about downloading movies or transmitting high-resolution medical imagery.

The power of social knowledge creation lies in creating organisations whose collective cognitive processes are unique and inimitable because of their inseparability from the capacities of the minds on which they are built.

As the barriers come down on the rapid transmission and development of human capital, we may at last be moving into the great age of human resource management.

Management academics have long realised that, "Knowledge creation occurs in the context of a community, one that is fluid and evolving rather than rightly bound or static. The canonical formal organization with its bureaucratic rigidities is a poor vehicle for learning.” (Powell, Koput, and Smith-Doerr, 1996)

Rather than in companies, Powell et al suggested that innovation’s sources are more likely to be found in “the interstices between firms, universities, research laboratories, suppliers and customers".

Their research pre-dated social media by a decade or so, but essentially they were suggesting that networks learn faster than inflexible, hierarchies. We’ve probably all worked in at least one of these; I know I have.

A company’s propensity for learning will be based on many diverging dimensions, giving each a different capacity and potential.

Clearly, on this list will feature the will and capacities of leadership and management, and their fear or fearlessness when confronted with the fact that they may not have all the answers that the tacit knowledge of their people could bring, were their insights solicited.

Among others may be prior preparation, connected to such things as the quality of the organisation’s employees themselves and that of its management information systems, organisational culture, and the presence of learning incentives.

Those with a greater absorptive capacity are better positioned to learn from their people.

Think of such implications for networking real-time learning in your organisation when the well-being and wealth-creating potential of the network takes on new properties with every new arrival and every departure.

But here’s the challenge for many organisations.

If it is hard enough for individuals to change their own behaviours in the face of clear, if ill-determined threats down the path (say, giving up smoking or changing diet), so far it has proven much harder for organisations to change.

Each has its collective “mental model” of which it may be largely unaware, and which in many cases may simply reinforce rigidity.

In an organisation, this may manifest as an entrenched culture that is unconducive to learning, and therefore to change. Likewise, not all employees are committed to the health of the enterprise in which they work.

Yet mental models are crucial cornerstones for building knowledge and understanding the cognitive processes that support development and learning.

They have been described as the lenses through which we see the world, and they incorporate our biases, values, experiences and beliefs about how the world works.

Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline (a must-read for anyone interested in organisational learning and systems thinking) defined mental models as ‘‘deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior’’.

As such, mental models guide, shape, and provide the basis on which individuals interpret and make sense of organisational life, and therefore they are an important element guiding corporate destiny.

So, what if recognising truth in this, you set out to transform your organisation’s mental model to create a more agile organisation, better adapted to learning and to change?

Google, until recently the fastest-growing organisation in history, is clearly now slouch in this. In creating its regime of “20 per cent time”, in which it gives employees 20 per cent of their employable hours to work on their own projects, Google created an order in which innovation has become the enduring core of its business. This has spawned the most disruptive advertising innovation in history in the combination of its search, Adwords and Analytics offerings. It has given birth to its Gmail email service, to the Android mobile platform and the development of YouTube into a parallel force which will ultimately compete against network television itself as internet connectivity becomes the norm in every television set.

So, what if social media, or, more accurately, social technologies, became something other than a distraction in your workplace, and something viewed as a tool of development, and as a key constituent of growth, learning and a platform for future profitability? What if you encouraged your people to share what they know, and put in programs to shape it and to build their engagement and capacities for productive social knowledge creation?

Is it possible you could find you learn something new about the value of engaging and nurturing staff that even the Alice Springs baker did not know?

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