Informal Learning and Senior Executives

Informal Learning and Senior Executive development? Why not?
Yesterday, I was one of the 20 some participants at the CSTD (www.cstd.ca) workshop on Informal Learning ---ooops sorry... the UN-Workshop facilitated by Harold Jarche (www.jarche.com). Interesting day it was!

We looked at Informal Learning as a concept, Harold demonstrated a few e-tools such as Wikis, Blogs, Flicker, YouTube, etc... to give us a feel of what is out there... and FREE!

Now, back to my Formal work environment, I am thinking how I can use these tools for providing an informal e-environment to our executives. From my research, readings, focus groups, etc... executives are telling us that they wish to have more face-to-face conversations, get out of their silos and isolation and participate in action learning sets, workshops (or UN-workshops), create their network and build relationships... Network? That's a familiar face! Apart from what I think should happen, that is the human touch - meeting face-to-face, tell stories, shake hands and make new friends, I do believe the e-tools could certainly support or better said, supplement this network of acquaintances, friends, business partners.

Back to my Formal work, I am thinking, how can I get that 80%+ of informal learning to become even more alive and reach even more people and make even more friends and build an even wider network?

Back home, I now have to make time to read Jay Cross' book (www.internettime.com) on Informal Learning and get a better grasp of the subject. We all know that Informal Learning - I'm am sure someone will find an acronym for this one as well (IL, INLE, ... whatever) - Informal learning has been there since the beginning of times and why is it that we are trying to formalize learning if the cost 80% compared to 20% for Informal Learning and the utilisation is 20% compared to 80% for Informal Learning?

One point that Harold brought up is how to get your executives to adopt the e-tools. A quick answer, worth experimenting with, is to play with people's pride. Find the expert in a subject, say Leadership for example, and get this expert to understand that his messages, thoughts, ideas are needed and wanted by quite a few executives in your business. Set up a blog for your expert, help him/her write the first post on it and market this blog to all executives. Then, get the stats or show the expert how to view comments on his/her post and the wheel will start turning!

This is my very first post -maybe it will be a story with no ending, I hope!

Guy Levert
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada