Chief Learning Officer - August 2008 - (Page 31)

ternal Revenue Service, said her organization promotes this kind of collaborative culture by having certain departments work side-by-side to avoid operating in silos. “Everyone works together,” she said. “We have erased the lines, and there’s a clear partnership but there’s a respect for the roles and responsibilities. So in an environment like that, it’s rich, it’s fertile — it’s an excellent opportunity for learning.” Maintaining an open, candid culture also allows for more ﬂuid and continuous communication, which is critical for successful sharing. “You obviously want some boundaries, but at the same time, you want to try to nurture something that’s more organic, [something] that becomes more a part of the culture and not just something we do from 9 to 10 a.m. the second Thursday of each month,” Jones said. This kind of environment also encourages employees to spend time fully exploring a particular topic or idea, absorbing and pondering it and returning with follow-up questions, rather than trying to ﬁt too much into too short a period of time. “I think that a tendency sometimes when we do something like this is [to not] allow enough time to get full context,” Jones said. “We don’t allow enough time to digest it and come back. So how do you close the loop?” Having a culture that encourages taking time out of the day to reﬂect and offers opportunities for follow-up discussion can improve the quality and depth of the knowledge shared. Forum and Environment While an open corporate culture is the ﬁrst step toward successful knowledge sharing, learning professionals need to provide the appropriate forums and environments for effective discussion to take place. One of the ﬁrst places discussion occurs is in the classroom. That’s why Ball said she works to promote a classroom experience that allows for lots of feedback and multidimensional learning. “We are [committed to] having interactive classes, classes that are designed for the students to work together in groups and not only dig into the regulations and case studies [to] ﬁnd out what the realistic answer would be, but also [to glean information] from each other,” she said. “Every single class is an opportunity for students to come into an environment where they are learning from the teacher, the teacher is learning from them and then they are learning from each other.” In addition, TAI sponsors brown-bag lunches and a series of discussion groups called “Lessons Learned” that bring together a group or team of employees to share their experiences about a particular acquisition experience. Both types of sessions are voluntary. “It’s not just a matter of sitting next to each other for a period of time,” Jones said. “Allow people to have a little bit of social interaction to grease the cogs. Create some things around [the discussion groups] that might draw people to them, like a lunch type of thing, a brown-bag type of thing, or do it around coffee. And the less structured it is, the more freeﬂowing it is. As long as you have some reasonable Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • August 2008 • www.clomedia.com 31 http://www.clomedia.com

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Chief Learning Officer - August 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Trends Best Practices Effectiveness High-Octane Leadership Development Leadership and Personality CLO Profile Discussion Groups: Harvesting Value from Real-World Experiences Kimpton 2.0: Discussion on the Web Learning Olympics: Development Through Competition Bypassing the Obstacles to Change Listen Up: A How-To-Guide for Podcasting University of Toyota: A Success Story in Podcast Implementation What Stinks About Webinars? Webinars for Learning Professionals Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - August 2008

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