One of the important things about informal learning is that the learnings can and should be shared. More importantly, they should form the backbone of new practices and processes. As Garvin, Edmondson, & Gino documented about learning organizations, there should be experimentation, evaluation, and these should be come concrete. Since I’ve been writing about informal learning, I intended this month to talk about how that informal goes to formal. However, a few days before I started writing this, I came across an article that talks eloquently about a collection of practices. Connie Malamed, one of our reliable research-to-practice translators, has written on making tacit knowledge explicit. The issue is that things experts do, they don’t even have access to, so we need to go further. Go read that, and then I’ll riff a bit more on translating informal to formal.
While Connie’s talking about unearthing tacit knowledge, and that’s critical, I’m talking about anything generated in the organization. It can be explicit knowledge as well as tacit, but if it’s not made visible across the organization, it’s inherently tacit. From user interface research, we know that when people solve a bad interface design by using post-it notes, they no longer are aware it was a problem. Similarly, if people bake some useful steps into their practices, they’re not necessarily aware it’s new.
Techniques like learning out loud, showing your work, storytelling, tracking lessons learned, etc, are all about making ‘hidden’ knowledge visible. There’s an extra step of filtering through this information, and determining what – if anything – should be incorporated into official corporate approaches. We might be able to use AI to codify it, but we can’t trust it to make contextual decisions about what to keep and not.
Thus, there’s a curation role here. Some of what emerges will be applicable. Some may need tuning to be relevant (“yes, and…let’s just adjust this so it meets this requirement, too”). Some may need correction (“while that seems more effective, it’s also illegal, but here’s a way to adjust it so it’s legal and still better than the old”). Some may just be left as is, allowing it to spread naturally.
Some of this can just be making content searchable, and having a knowledge platform makes this feasible. Some if it, however, may be worth baking into formal approaches like learning experiences and performance support. Learning is a process, not an event, at the individual and organizational level. It’s an ongoing practice, not an event. The transfer from informal to formal is a part. That mindset is part of fostering the continual innovation that informal learning brings.
HPT Treasures - for Evidence Based Performance Improvement 