Story:
Talking Village - Reinventing Problem Solving And Management Development

By Matt Shlosberg - Managing Director at Hanna Concern

March 7, 2011 at 12:22pm

Management Education

management development

MBA

Moonshots

Embed the ethos of community and citizenship

Amplify imagination

Enable communities of passion

Summary

This story shows how one company made a complete 180 degree turn in management development by letting managers into the wild and letting them do what's natural while developing them through peer-to-peer collaboration.

Essentially, managers can now crowdsource solutions to their everyday problems. Got an immediate problem to solve? Well, there're millions of managers out there. Chances are, someone had encountered a similar problem before and already knows the answer.

Context

Let's face it. Traditional approaches to management education are highly ineffective. People walk into classrooms and forget 80% of what they've learned the moment they walk out. What's worse is that they don't know how to apply the 20% they do remember!

Triggers

The following are some of the problems with today's management education:

Whether educated or not, managers face problems every day and they typically rely on themselves or the very few people around them to solve these problems.
With millions of managers out there, there's a huge untapped knowledge base containing practical solutions to real world problems. Before TalkingVillage, there was no way to access this knowledge base.
You can't develop managers and leaders in the classroom. They'll forget what they've learned quickly.
Management is a practice, not a science. You become good when you practice management, not when you learn it.
Professors, consultants, bosses, and leadership coaches have limited experience themselves and only teach what they know. By learning from them, you limit your own knowledge to what they know.
Traditional management development methodologies are way out of context. Most management educators don't have the knowledge of their student's exact type of work and teach generic concepts, rather than concepts that directly apply to their everyday work.

The truth of the matter is... managers learn the best on the job, while solving real world problems!

Key Innovations & Timeline

In late 2010, a team of entrepreneurs put together Talking Village, a web site allowing managers to develop by collaborating with their peers, consultants, and professors. In addition to featuring a ton of resources managers can refer to, this site allows participants to ask questions and solicit community feedback, essentially crowdsourcing problem resolution and management education. Because web site members come from different companies, different countries, and different backgrounds, the range of answers is wide and is not limited to mental blocks of single organizations. Thus, a manager trying to figure out how to solve a tough problem may receive dozens of innovative ideas from people working in other industries.

Here's another way to look at it: Talking Village allows you to crowd source management education and problem resolution and give your managers the knowledge they otherwise wouldn't receive. You can do so at no cost, while keeping managers on the job. Because managers stay on their jobs while they use Talking Village, they are also able to better apply their new knowledge, making this learning effort far more effective than traditional management development methodologies.

Challenges & Solutions

For privacy and confidentiality reasons, some companies hesitate putting their competitive or sensitive information on the web. To solve this problem, Talking Village allows individual large organizations to create their own, private instances of Talking Village, which they can run internally or share with their partners or customers.

Benefits & Metrics

The new approach to problem solving and management education carries a number of benefits:

A more effective, more practical approach to management development and problem solving.
A much lower cost of education and operations.
Greater knowledge retention.
No need to take people off of their work.
No need for general theory or useless hypothetical exercises - it's all about real world problems.
Fast.
A greater and more diverse source of knowledge.
Ability to solve immediate problems without leaving the desk.

Lessons

Talking Village is a very practical and free approach. Everyone is encouraged to join and contribute.

Materials

Visit Talking Village at http://www.talkingvillage.com

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March 17, 2011 at 9:58pm

Aaron Anderson

If Talking Village turns out to be a place where you can get real time solutions as you need them, that will trump traditional modes of delivering management education - which is a lot like knowledge in advance of need. How do you know you need to learn something until you are faced with a challenge you can't solve with the tools you already have? Like the MIX, content rules, and applicability is the true measure of worth. I may have to add one more element to my value equation - accessibility - as in, can I find the solution swiftly? If I'm facing the metaphorical on rushing wall of flames, how will I know what tools to drop (Weick is the original source of this research, btw) and whether or not the solution I've sourced will work? Answer, not until I try it. This is why blended programs work so well - learning and doing at the same time.

March 31, 2011 at 10:41am

Ellen Weber

Thanks Matt, I do like your illustrations here to show that management classes are disconnected to the workplace issues that people face.

For that reason, and because they are lectured theory without opportunity to apply what they learn - it does not work and students waste time or feel frustrated.

In fact McKinsey polls would also support your key premise here, Matt, in that they show how very little changes at work, because of lthe way earning occurs - and chiefly because it is rarely applied. I like your talking village design here.

It would be especially cool to see a community like the one here at MIX - build that community in such a way that it holds the tools we all crave to help workplaces along as genuinely innovative climates. .

June 12, 2011 at 6:40am

Sam Knuth (Folk-Williams)

I was just thinking about ways that managers can improve their skills in working with people. I like this idea not just for the crowd sourcing, but also for the knowledge sharing and re-use. Many management problems are similar and if we document them as we encounter them, detailing how we dealt with them... what a great resource!

February 29, 2012 at 2:52am

Captain Obvious

During the years I began to study forensic psychology, I had this class called negotiation and conflict management, that actually taught me a lot of great and useful things that I applied during my career beginnings as an intern and afterwards as a business consultant. You make a strong point by bringing into discussion the ethos of the community right here because, in order for us to understand better how things work in all human professional relation kinds, we must look back in ethology. That`s how the class I told you about began, with an introduction in ethology and a great book to read about this topic. I will always keep in mind this.