Open Source Leadership comes to Learning Technologies 2016

What is it? Leadership development 2.0: Open Source Leadership

Open Source Leadership Development – or development using 'emergent collaboration' - is an adaptation of the principle underlying the Open Source Software movement. The principle is collaborative development.

Open source software isn‘t created privately and published to an audience. It is created by its own audience. It emerges. The users take over the system.

Linux is perhaps the best- known open source software developed collaboratively by its users.

How does Open Source Leadership work, then?

The users co-create the system AND the learning content.

“Because it’s so radically different, we are showcasing at the event the first such system in the world, so visitors to LT 2016 can see how it works,” said founder Phil Dourado.

“It’s the Blue Peter principle – here’s one we made earlier; the world’s first ever ‘emergent collaboration’ leadership development system, designed for and run within a global FTSE 100 organization and refined and developed by my team over the past eight years till I now feel it’s ready to come to market.”

Users in this new way of developing leaders help to design and build an online leadership system that sits in their company intranet as their own ‘community of practice’. They then help to populate it; sharing examples of putting leadership behaviours into action to achieve real-world business ends - discussing and sharing uncommon solutions to common problems, tapping into and sharing the group‘s collected expertise.

Not e-learning as we know it From a ‘transmission’ model of learning to ‘wisdom of crowds’

“This approach is a radical departure from the ‘transmission’ model of learning and development that 99% of large companies use – seminars, courses and e-learning programmes that are taught, often using an LMS (Learning Management System), based on the old teacher-student model,” said Dourado.

“Our users share real-world leadership tips and techniques they have tried and proved themselves – not some academic stuff that they then have to translate into action to make it relevant to their sector and their particular situation. Although we do disguise some of that external learning and slip it in and hope they don't notice; and we translate it for them so it's useful.”

“Our system uses the peer to peer communication tools that are common everywhere, but that LMS and eLearning providers have not so far successfully managed to build into how we learn at work. It’s less about the technology or platform – which is largely generic; we use Open Source software in the system we currently run – and all about the methodology and how you help the community to lead itself. That’s what we’ve learned over the past eight years.”

Just a few minutes per session; regular sessions of ‘more-ish’ learning

This process of ‘the best teaching the rest’ is seeded by micro-lessons – low time-consumption distilled ‘bites’ of learning dropped into the community regularly by the community's facilitator – a leadership guide known as The Coach - who helps steer the conversations. (Note 1)

Community members spend a few minutes at a time developing their leadership in the system, regularly taking learning out and sharing it with the teams they lead to put what they learn into practice.

“It’s a ‘leadership doing’ system, not a talking shop,” says Dourado.

“Busy executives simply don’t have time to stop working to learn how to lead periodically, in retreats or courses or workshops. They know that 90% of what they learn won’t be remembered, and won’t be practical enough or relevant enough to put into practice when they get back to the office.

“So, we entice them to ‘develop while doing’ for just a few minutes, regularly. (Note 2)

“The system is built afresh for each client, with input from the future members,” said the system’s creator, Phil Dourado.

“The start point isn’t ‘Build it and they will come.’ It’s ‘Let them help build it and they will come.’

“This is a much more cost-effective approach than building a more formal learning platform and pushing people through it, or sending people on leadership programs that they forget almost as soon as they walk back in the office door, or buying in a packaged ‘one size fits all ‘ learning platform like Harvard ManageMentor.”

Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton describes traditional e-learning this way: "On the one hand, you have formal, structured learning delivered on-line, typically presentation slides with a little window in the corner of the screen where somebody talks. For the more formal e-learning, the computer can sometimes be a problem because you lose the interactivity."

"The Information Age is enhancing innovation, especially innovation that comes from new combinations of disparate fields. This is the more informal side of e-learning. In some ways, it‘s a structured versus an unstructured problem."

The Leadership Hub, as Dourado calls his system, takes a relatively unstructured approach, relying on emergence and participation to create patterns and structure.

Dourado says “I’m a bit demanding on myself and my team, which is why we developed it for eight years as a real-world experiment before bringing it to market at LT 2016. But, after eight years of running and developing this system in a FTSE 100 company (Note 3), I can confidently say ‘Eureka! It works!’ We’ve proved it. Come and see for yourself.”

The Leadership Hub is on Stand K9 at Learning Technologies 2016, 3-4 February, Olympia, London. Dourado will be explaining how it works, with real world examples, in his seminar on the first morning of the event: 11-11.30am, Seminar Theatre 7: How to build and run a global, online, leadership development community, using emergence, knowledge-sharing, human nature and a toaster oven, Phil Dourado, Founder, The Leadership Hub

ENDS

Notes

Note (1) :* The community shapes its own environment and part-shapes its learning* The community select the tools they use, and the micro-lessons they decide are useful and applicable. By omission, they also de-select and therefore shape their own collaborative environment as the tools they do not use are eventually removed. The micro-lessons they do find useful are fleshed out with real examples via the community’s learning conversations and these real world examples are then turned into practical ‘how we do this’ leadership tools. Which are then shared with the rest of the organization.

Note (2) : *An ‘attention-based learning model’* “It’s no longer the Information Economy,” says Dourado. “Economics is about the scarce resource, and information isn’t it. We’re all drowning in information. It’s the ‘attention economy’. That’s the scarce resource. Any learning and development large organizations offer has to fit in and around the actual job of leading and HELP the user with that role, taking their attention for just minutes at a time and giving them a useful output to use then and there.”

Dourado's system uses an ‘attention-based learning model’ whose acronym is ARIA: “Grab their ATTENTION and push aside other concerns, just for a few minutes so they can focus,” explains Dourado. “Then get them to REFLECT and gain INSIGHT through conversation. The final stage is key: reach a conclusion about the best ACTION to take, go back to their team and do it! Our development system actually changes how people behave.”

ARIA was first described by ‘neurociences of leadership’ experts David Rock & Jeffrey Schwartz as the new way to develop leaders who are overwhelmed with information and ‘input’, in a paper in strategy+business in 2007.

Note (3): The IHG Leaders Lounge, is the pioneering leadership development community that Dourado and his team designed and built for InterContinental Hotels Group, to prove that Dourado’s Open Source Leadership approach – first described by him in a White Paper in 2007 - works. The IHG Leaders Lounge has won a number of awards on both sides of the Atlantic, including the CIPD/People Management annual award for best use of HR Technology in the UK, and an ASTD ‘BEST’ award for Excellence in Practice in the US.