Hack:
What have you learnt today ?

By Ravindra Krishnappa - Chief cook & bottle washer at Vertexperts.com

November 10, 2011 at 10:10pm

Moonshots

Enable communities of passion

Redefine the work of leadership

Summary

While we collectively talk incessantly about "learning" organizations, we do not provide a podium for people to express thier TWO fundamental (and probably the most impactful) feelings
a. Curiosity
b. Pride

What is needed is a platform for people to share "What each one has LEARNT" on each day and have the rest of the team vote on the best learning ?

With the advent of Social media within enterprises, it seems a pretty straightforward to put this in place ?

Problem

There needs to be a very simple and effective solution that enables healthy participation, while ensuring that every individual in the organization receives recognition for having learnt / taught something new to others.

Individuals like to be able to express their curiosity without the stigma of "Duh ?"
Individuals like to take pride in the fact that they've LEARNT something new or helped another individua by providing a new "tidbit" of information

Curiosity & Pride are two powerful emotions that is probably not leveraged enough within an organization

Solution

For a solution to be sustaining, it needs to be SIMPLE
Simple to establish
Simple to administer
& Simple to scale

The idea is to establish a simple - IDEA for the day / What have I learnt TODAY posting into the enterprise structure, where each individual can post ONCE a day.

These ideas get VOTED on.

The TOP ideas (ie with maximum votes) carry forward in a list for the whole month.

There is a once-a-month announcement of the top 3 ideas. Reward as appropriate

These roll up for an YEARLY, top 3 with Reward as appropriate.

IDEAS include something that an individual has LEARNT, which may be useful to others ?

Practical Impact

This automatically becomes the basis for a "Learning" organization.
Increases participation.
Democratizes idea generation and impact review.

First Steps

The full steps are listed in the solution section - first steps therefore become sustainable process automatically.
The solution is simple to implement, easy to administer and understand.

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November 15, 2011 at 2:02pm

Mozhdeh Rastegar

I like the simpicity in your idea. We have something similar being done in Sales within the company I work for today. It is called "The Win of the Week" where the Company Profile, IT Environment, Project Description, Solution, Reason Business Won, and Lessons Learned are described. This goes out to the entire Sales force. Though this is a great source of ideas, much of the time, the emails get ignored or filed for later reading.
What I believe is needed in my company but also perhaps as a tweak to your hack is a way to manage the data that gets loaded. There needs to be an easy way to do a key word or category search on what is available to enable use. It would be great to not only hear about what was learned but also how someone may have applied what they learned. Thanks for your thoughts!