Scaling Collaboration with Learning Platforms

Now that the Cohort 1 of the Campus has embarked on its learning journey, I felt it’s time to revisit what motivates us: prototyping a structure and culture for the holistic and experiential education of transformative leaders, who are passionate about increasing their effectiveness with orders of magnitude.

Prototyping a culture is “simple” because it takes “only” to intently listen and respond to the life-giving forces present in the social field and amplify them.

Prototyping an educational structure adds the challenges of scalability, social and economic sustainability, and equity. For inspiration about them, I returned to the writings of a wise acquaintance of mine, John Hagel, the author of my favorite business books and co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.

Re-reading John’s brilliant essay, The power of platforms, published by Deloitte University Press, evoked in me the following generative question that I’m offering for reflection and unpacking by the learners and friends of Campus Co-Evolve:

What practices could we introduce or strengthen in Campus Co-Evolve,
inspired by John Hagel’s thoughts below, 
which could help the Campus become a prototype for a platform business,
in the center of a learning innovation ecosystem
to serve the developmental needs of all people and organizations?
Dynamic and demanding environments favor those who are able to learn best and fastest. Business leaders who understand this will likely increasingly seek out platforms that not only make work lighter for their participants, but also grow their knowledge, accelerate performance improvement, and hone their capabilities in the process.
 
Very few examples of learning platforms exist in business yet, but we can find very large-scale learning
 platforms in arenas as diverse as online war games (for example, World of Warcraft) and online platforms to help musicians develop and refine their remixing skills (for example, ccMixter).
 
Enough examples exist to see that these platforms have a distinctive configuration known as “creation spaces.” Their primary unit of organization is a small team or work group that takes on particular performance challenges. The participants in these groups work closely together over time to come up with creative new ways to address evolving performance challenges. The emphasis on small teams or work groups is essential because the focus is on a powerful form of learning that involves accessing tacit knowledge. This in turn requires the formation of deep, trust-based relationships. These relationships evolve quickly in small teams or workgroups but are very challenging to scale. The second key element of these platforms is that they provide participants with ways to connect with each other beyond the individual team or workgroup to ask questions, share experiences, and get advice. In other words, they scale the potential for learning far beyond the individual group.
 
Learning platforms facilitate learning by bringing participants together to share insights over time. They tend to foster deep, trust-based relationships, as participants have the opportunity to realise more potential by working together. Business leaders who understand this will likely increasingly seek out platforms that not only make work lighter for their participants, but also grow their knowledge, accelerate performance improvement, and hone their capabilities in the process.
 
As with social and mobilisation platforms, learning platforms critically depend on the ability to build long-term relationships rather than simply focusing on short-term transactions or tasks. Unlike the other platforms, though, learning platforms do not view participants as “static resources.” On the contrary, they start with the presumption that all participants have the opportunity to draw out more and more of their potential by working together in the right environment.
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