Who we are

Internet Time Alliance is five can-do practitioners with more than a century of experience managing projects, designing interventions, improving service, increasing sales, and boosting profits.

Jon Husband and Paul Simbeck-Hampson are Associate members of Internet Time Alliance.

Background

Several years ago Jay realized that while he championed social learning in books and conferences, he did most of my work in solitary.

Jane Hart and Jay linked arms and were soon joined by Clark Quinn and Harold Jarche. Jane and Jay have known each other for years and think alike. Clark and Jay had founded the MetaLearning Lab seven years earlier and have met for lunch & beer and worked on things together ever since. The following year, Harold and Jay had offered online, open-source unworkshops that stretched from Tokyo to Tel Aviv. When Charles Jennings retired as CLO at Thomson Reuters, we immediately invited him to join us.

Principals.

Jay Cross champions informal learning, web 2.0, and systems thinking. His calling is to help business people improve their performance on the job and satisfaction in life. He is the author of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance. His insights and stories will expand your perspective and enliven your meetings.

Jane Hart is founder of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, where she keeps track of existing and emerging technologies. Jane has recently implemented more than a dozen social learning environments in Europe – in universities, non-profit and profit making organisations.

Harold Jarche helps organizations make sense of the Web for community building, collaboration, professional development and communication. Harold is an independent consultant with 25 years of experience in the public and private sectors.  Harold’s popular blog has provided a wealth of information for more than six years. He holds degrees from the Royal Military College of Canada and the University of New Brunswick.

Charles Jennings served as CLO of Reuters and Thomson Reuters for eight years, and knows organizational learning. He has deep experience in both the business and learning practitioner sides of planning and implementing world-class performance solutions for organizations.

Clark Quinn is recognized as a leading advocate of design that respects how people really learn, courtesy of a PhD in applied cognitive science at UCSD. A respected speaker and writer, he’s been responsible for numerous innovative designs that integrate learner, learning, and user experience into successful performance solutions. Read more at internettimealliance.com

Working Smarter in Terra Nova Circa 2015

By Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and Jon Husband

We will call our destination Terra Nova, Latin for “new world.” Within five years, the world will have changed so radically, you will not recognize it. It is a new era and it is right around the corner.

In Terra Nova, push and pull combine to create a dynamic flow of power, authority, know-how, and trust. Change is so fast and furious that work and learning blur into one activity. Workers respond to novel situations as best they see fit, governed by the organization’s values and their own gut feelings.

Terra Nova is holistic, with significant decision-making power delegated to the workers themselves. “Power to the people” could be its rallying cry.

“I love to learn [pull] but I hate being trained [push].” —Winston Churchill.

Companies don’t want learning—they want things done. Traditional learning (stuffing information into people’s heads) is often expensive and unreliable compared to building know-how into the job.

Motivation

As Dan Pink writes in Drive, the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2010), “It’s about satisfying workers’ desire for autonomy, which stimulates their ‘innate capacity for self direction.”

In Terra Nova, successful organizations embrace respect for the individual, flexibility and adaptation, openness and transparency, sharing and collaboration, honesty and authenticity, and real-time responsiveness and immediacy. Workers are motivated by achievement and autonomy. Everybody wins.

Learning in a community is unlike learning in a classroom. You take snippets of conversation, mix in something you saw on the web, and Google the concepts you’re fuzzy on. The lessons that emerge from this stew of soundbites and fragments are richer and more textured than what you’d find in most books.

Terra Nova is a New Ball Game

Developing talent and extracting results in Terra Nova starts with unlearning obsolete but embedded beliefs. Smart companies prosper. Clueless companies die. Brains make the difference. Organizations that continuously exercise and improve their collective brainpower come out on top. Until recently, most of the collaboration and development that fuels the growth of individual and group braininess was haphazard. We hope to bring this activity into the sunlight and suggest tips on benefitting from social learning, informal learning, instructional design 2.0, mobility, judgment skills, and more in the near future.

How do you think the world of learning will look in 2015? Comments are welcomed and encouraged below. Read more at www.elearnmag.org

The Learnstream of Jay Cross

50 Acts that Enhance Novelty at Work

Step up with confidence.

Join a social media group.

Ask advice from a novice.

Don’t try to avoid risks.

Reconsider negative opinions.

Become what you’d like others to see in you.

Act like a genius who values humility.Read more at jaycross.posterous.com

Working Smarter Fieldbook | June 2010

By Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Jon Husband, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn

Smart companies prosper. Clueless companies die. Brains make the difference. This Fieldbook shows managers how to increase their organization’s collective intelligence.

€19.68 Read more at www.lulu.com

Welcome to SiftLinks

SiftLinks is a service that monitors your friend stream on Twitter, pulls out the links and creates an RSS feed for you to peruse at your leisure.

About

SiftLinks was created because I was tired of missing out on all the great links that people posted on Twitter that I never got the time to properly check out. I don’t have a massive follow list but quite often, if I was away from the computer for a couple of days and only accessing Twitter via my iPhone, I’d miss out on reading some really interesting articles. I figured it would be easier if I could dash through those articles in my feed reader when I got the chance. I also figured that if I wanted this then someone else might too, so I went ahead and put it together. Read more at siftlinks.com

Harold Jarche

The Evolving Social Organization

Simplicity and the Enterprise

With growth, the simplicity ends.

Complication: the industrial disease

As companies get even bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of  growth.

Complexity and the new Enterprise

Organizations need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication.

Implementing Social Learning

We know that informal learning happens all of the time but often the best answers or experts are not connected to the person with the problem. Social learning networks can address that issue by giving each worker a much larger group of people to help get work done.

Enterprise social learning

Our social networks have a greater influence on us than we think. Read more at www.jarche.com

Conversations and collaboration

What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind? Or put another way: What percentage of your time do you spend reaching out to someone or something else for knowledge that is essential for you to get your job done? Do you know how much you don’t know?

If 90% of the knowledge needed to get work done is not supported by enterprise software or organizational learning departments, then there is a significant imbalance in most organizations today. Any time you wonder why things aren’t working in your organization, it’s because you’re in a system optimized for only one tenth of what you need to get done.

Thanks to my ITA colleague Clark Quinn for inspiring me to write this post. Read more at www.jarche.com

Reflections from the Office…

Three things that gave me inspiration today (and it’s only 9am!)

Twitter

@Struggle2Learn @simbeckhampson TY for the RT! Just signed up 2 follow u. Look 4wrd to sharing and learning.

“I just felt humbled by this tweet. Someone actually took the time to write “Just signed up 2 follow u” gave me a sense of worth that I’d not felt for a long time. I’ve had hundreds of messages and DM’s via twitter and in this one statement it made realise how grateful I am to all those who offer support, guidance and inspire me to continue my work. Thank you Livia.”

Amplify

http://bit.ly/cN3cIh (by  @lewishowes via  @oberhauser)

1. Be yourself. Be genuine. 2. Get active on social media sites ie. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Amplify 3. Provide awesome content. Provide value. 4. Be smart with your time. ie. Ping.fm for re-sharing. 5. Be consistent with topics and themes. 6. Promote others; provide good content and promote others who provide good content. 7. Connect face to face and over the phone to build strong relationships. 8. Thank others for their inspiration and support.@lewishowes

“Amplify Amplify Amplify. There I’ve said it now, three times in-fact. Anyway, I watched a video early this morning produced by Lewis Howes. His first point continued the vibration I’d felt from the earlier tweet. I’m going to keep this list in mind when continuing my pursuit of social media Nevada. Thanks Lewis.”

Disqus (via Blogger)

Re: http://bit.ly/914hWJ comment by @JayCross. “Paul, no need for thanks. We are true believers! Tchuis! jay”

“And then before the clock had even struck 9am Jay Cross, one of my favourite writers, added a short but very sweet note to a blog post I’d written recently. Can the day get any better? I’m spending some time over the coming days looking at the mashup of media I’m producing, how effective and consistent it is and whether it can be improved and scaled.”

- Paul Read more at simbeckhampson.ning.com

Internet Time Alliance Six heads are better than one

Charles Jennings: Why focus on informal and social learning

In many cases non-formal and social approaches will replace formal learning. In a few cases they won’t.

There are 8 drivers for this change:

1. There is a strong imperative for continuous learning – the world is changing so fast that we need to continually update our knowledge, skills and productivity.

We all need to develop the mindset of continuous, always-on learners.

2. Natural learning is a process. It is not a series of events.

3. Most learning occurs outside formal learning settings

4. The vast majority of learning is social, even without us focusing on it.

5. A lot of existing formal learning practices are ineffective and inefficient.

Filling heads with knowledge has little to do with real learning (which is all about behaviour change).

Most formal learning is content-heavy and interaction-poor

6. People learn better when they’re in charge of their own learning.

Guidance helps, command-and-control doesn’t.

7. There’s an inherent inertia in formal learning approaches.

Once a course, programme or curriculum has been developed there is often so much invested effort and cost that it’s unlikely to be changed or discarded as fast as it needs to be in order to keep pace with changing circumstances.

8. Cost. Informal and social learning approaches are invariably cheaper, more effective and better received than their formal counterparts.

Despite all of the above, formal learning will undoubtedly continue to be very important in a few areas such as compliance and onboarding/induction.

LMS systems are vital primarily due to the need to track and record compliance training activity.

Good onboarding programmes are worth their weight in gold.Read more at internettime.posterous.com