In olden times employers improved workforce capability and managed talent using a natural model of learning, working and collaboration called apprenticeship. That model took advantage of the natural and most powerful ways that adults learn—learning while doing—and was so successful that it continues on today in fields such as medicine, law, and construction.
Apprenticeship was never fully implemented in the business world because of the challenges of scale. The need to train millions of homogeneous factory workers for an industrial age eliminated such personal and targeted methods of gaining knowledge in favor of uniform classrooms and workshops. And uniformity came at the price of squelching individual capability, creativity and potential. The need for both scale and individual contribution is clearly there, but a workable solution that achieves both at once has been a long time coming. Various technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), knowledge management, performance support and eLearning have been used to address parts of the problem, achieving learning at scale but with mixed results.
There is an innovative solution that takes a company the last ten yards, all the way from understanding to application to impact. That solution is now being employed by some of the largest companies in the world. It is called eWorking.
While the classroom model created an artificial distinction between learning and doing in order to achieve scale, today the pace of change and the demands of time on knowledge workers are so great that the traditional model has become completely untenable. eWorking creates a scaleable solution for people to quickly learn and apply new methods on the fly, each in their own way, sharing insights and coaching each other, while compressing both time and space to a single point.
The innovation of eWorking is that learning takes place in the context of doing one’s job. It is no longer "first learn, then do". It is now "learn while doing." The apprentice model that worked so well for hundreds of years has finally returned to the workplace, this time on steroids and far more powerful. Not only can eWorking help achieve global alignment for a company, it can also help to rapidly adapt to change through collaboration channels that tap into the collective knowledge and experience of people throughout the organization and make best practice immediately available and iterative.
Our version of eWorking is an online platform called LeveragePoint. It was developed to help companies navigate these new waters in ways that minimize risk and maximize business results, helping a company move along the continuum from understanding to application to bottom line impact. By combining the principles of apprenticeship—learning, working, and collaboration—on a single platform, LeveragePoint makes frameworks and methods come to life, activating, embedding, and evolving business methods in a single stroke.
It does that by combining eLearning, eWorking, required data and contextual help with web 2.0 style collaboration and the tacit knowledge of the organization, all in the context of the task at hand, all on the same screen. Users can work, learn, get coached, share, and collaborate in the context of the specific work they are doing at that moment. Under the hood is powerful technology providing support for modeling (semantic web), integration (web services) and metrics gathering and analysis.
On the product side of our business, while we have chosen to focus on the corporate marketing function as our initial point of entry, with offerings in Marketing Strategy and Value Management. But our vision is larger than that. We plan to expand into the full range of corporate activity.
On the custom application side, we are already putting the power of the LeveragePoint platform to work for some of the largest companies in the world, creating dynamic and integrated solutions for their own content and methods, creating powerful and sustaining alignment of the organization with its own strategy in ways that are both measurable and transformational.
LeveragePoint addresses an important need of the time, providing an integrated solution that helps organizations capture those last ten yards, taking a company all the way from introduction of methods to evolution of those methods to measurable business impact. To see how that plays out in the challenging economic climate of 2009, watch this space in the coming months. We will hear from business leaders who have adopted our solutions, experts in marketing, strategy and technology, as well as end users throughout the world who are applying the LeveragePoint solution in their jobs, and scoring touchdowns for their companies.
Jonathon Levy
Chief Strategy Officer
