Curation over Creation

by Clark Quinn

I’ve been discussing a number of components when successfully executing informal learning, including brainstorming, showing your work, and experimentation. Here I want to take up another, curation. Too often, L&D feels it can’t release control, and it has to be responsible for all resources generated. This is wrong for several reasons, so let’s talk about curation over creation.

I once had an engagement looking at a large manufacturing organization to see how they were using social learning. (As an aside, they had lots going on, independently, with little to no awareness of the other initiatives!) One of the areas had been responsible for training on the increasingly complex software they used to design their solutions. Ultimately, they couldn’t keep up, and devolved the responsibility to the users of the software. The users needed to keep up, and the L&D group moved to facilitating the group keeping their knowledge base up to date, rather than being responsible. It was a pragmatic, and effective, shift.

The reason to mention this is to point out that many times, the folks doing the work know best about doing it! There’s another story from interface design that talks about looking at how folks actually work. One important lesson is looking for the post-its on the monitor. These are signs that there are problems, but you won’t get it from talking to the folks because they’ve already created a work-around that’s likely invisible to them. The take-home is that they know the system well-enough to know what’s wrong with it, but they’ve used their knowledge to solve it. (Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be fixed.)

Many times, however, folks create resources to solve problems that aren’t about interfaces, but about categorizing the world and creating category-appropriate solutions. They can create decision trees, look-up tables, checklists, and more. Essentially, they’re creating what we’ve known about job aids. We shouldn’t, then, go create a better solution, what we should do is facilitate them: honing the design, sharing the solution, and designing learning around these tools.

There are several reasons to do this. On principled grounds, as mentioned, these folks are closer to the job, and therefore their insights are likely better grounded in the realities of the job. On pragmatic grounds, it’s more efficient! That is, tuning a solution is easier than generating one. We can apply design principles, but we don’t have to become the domain experts. We can also learn better about the design. We can also facilitate sharing.

This goes further, to supporting folks discussing and sharing solutions. We should show our work, but also facilitate folks sharing theirs. Facilitating practices is part of the learning organization dimensions. Just as we facilitate experimentation and translate the lessons into learnings, we should help others also learn to make sense and share (part of Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery).

When we curate, we’re more effective and more efficient. We can find and share good solutions, improve weaker ones, and generally lift the game of folks finding and sharing the best ways to work. That’s another way to facilitate informal learning, and that should be part of our job. As we move to an era where there’s lots of information, helping people make sense of it optimally becomes more useful than putting out information. With information overload, we’ll need to move to curation over creation. That’s the future, and we should be prepared.