WLP357 Team Narratives, Harnessing Technology and Social Learning
In today’s episode, Pilar interviews Jaap Linssen, who has been helping people in organisations collaborate and communicate through harnessing the power of technology since 2011. Through Jaap’s examples, they talk about asking questions to drive engagement, developing team narratives to strengthen teamwork, the adoption of genAI in organisations and social learning. And building a business exporting farm cheese. Of course.
Jaap co-founded OrangeTrail in 2011. Their mission continues to be to teach organisations and their people the skills to be more connected, collaborative, and productive, facilitated by the best technology.
Pilar met Jaap a couple of years ago at the Social Now conference organised by previous guest of this show, Ana Neves. The conference is running this year on 16 & 17 May, in Lisbon. (You can hear her talk about the conference and how to retain knowledge in an organisation in episode 297.)
One of Jaap’s early experiences as an innovation consultant led to the work he now does with OrangeTrail. He was consulting for the Dutch National Postal company, spending time with each business unit, and working with them to collect innovative ideas from employees. This was during a time when the Dutch postal service had recently been privatised and was facing stiff competition and a 10% year-over-year decline in mail volume due to the rise of the internet. The urgency for change was high, but as former government employees, the staff wasn't accustomed to moving quickly.
One afternoon, after pitching a lackluster batch of ideas to the innovation board, the sales director lost his temper. He criticised the expensive "charade" of hiring consultants and collecting mediocre ideas while the company was racing toward a metaphorical brick wall.
Shaken by his outburst, Jaap and his colleagues reflected on the problem. Mail carriers were getting PDAs (this was pre-iPhone) and they had been trying to find uses for the camera. They decided to have the sales director record a video asking every mail carrier to take and upload photos of competitors they saw while on their routes.
Within hours, hundreds of photos poured in. In a matter of days, there were thousands. The mood in the company shifted dramatically as everyone realized the gravity of the competitive threat and the need for change.
This was Jaap’s "aha" moment about the power of social technology. Telling people they need to change doesn't work, but asking a simple question and providing the means to respond can transform mindsets across an entire company almost overnight. Now OrangeTrail helps leadership and communication departments change their communication style to be more inclusive, ask more questions, and involve employees in the company's ongoing stories.
09.40 MINS
Where OrangeTrail is most active is in the collaboration space. Many organisations now have adopted Microsoft Teams, but people have not really learned how to work remotely effectively; instead, they have simply learned how to conduct online meetings, resulting in more meetings, emails, and chats, ultimately creating a bigger mess. OrangeTrail's goal is to bring more structure, focused time, and balance to work using technology and the principle of "working out loud" or "working in a narrative."
“Working Out Loud” involves sharing or showing what you're doing while working, so that others can see and help you. This is done through threaded conversations or narratives, such as creating a post in a Microsoft Teams channel when working on a project plan. All decisions, revisions, and comments related to the project are made as comments on the original post, creating a clear narrative of the project's progress.
Everything in a company is a narrative, from hiring to onboarding, customer projects, and complaints. By working out loud and sharing in real-time, teams can develop a strong collective awareness of what's going on without the need for numerous meetings or emails.
Adopting this way of collaborating is challenging as people are accustomed to sending individual messages and often struggle to think of their work as a collected story or narrative. Instead, it’s important to capture contextual information alongside documents, as this context is often richer than the document itself. (We’ll link to more resources on “Working Out Loud” at the bottom of this post.)
Jaap Linssen
16.20 MINS
Being out of the loop herself about what’s going on in organisations around the adoption of genAI, and in particular Co-Pilot, Pilar turned to Jaap for insight. J
Jaap notes that while AI will undoubtedly change the way we work, many people who were initially excited about the technology have stopped using it within a few weeks of its introduction. He compares the shift to AI to the transition to working out loud or asynchronously: both require a significant change in how people think about their work.
”What I see in the companies we work with is that it's introduced for several months, and two weeks after using it, people don't use it anymore. It’s like moving from the traditional way of working to working out loud or working a narrative or asynchronous.”
Copilot’s use is limited. It only searches within the user's own email and documents, resulting in partial answers. Plus, AI can "hallucinate" or make up information in meeting transcripts, so it’s important to review and edit the generated minutes before sharing them.
It’s also the case that most people are not putting in the effort to properly brief or prompt AI to get the desired results. The key to working with genAI is to prompt it effectively to get useful responses, as AI can provide incomplete or inaccurate answers if not prompted well. Organisations need to start thinking in terms of use cases and determine how AI can simplify or speed up processes in each team or workflow.
Jaap himself has been experimenting with Copilot to analyse job applications. While it provided some helpful insights, it didn't significantly reduce the workload. However, with better prompting and further advancements in AI, it could potentially save a lot of time in the future.
You could say that the adoption of AI to the adoption of online collaboration tools: both require a deep understanding of what needs to be done and where the technology fits in. Pilar has realised that the version of genAI we’d like to be using right now is still several years away.
28.22 MINS
The conceptual way of working hasn't changed much over the centuries, with people still using virtual paper in virtual folders and sending messages back and forth like pigeons. While the speed and volume of work have increased, the way of working hasn't become smarter. OrangeTrail aims to encourage people to rethink their work processes and find better ways of doing things.
On a larger scale, OrangeTrail helps companies develop a roadmap for collaboration, setting ambitions for where they want to be in two years and outlining the steps needed to reach those goals. Recognising that change is ongoing, especially with the introduction of new technologies like Copilot, they also help organisations create a "change infrastructure" or "change engine."
This change engine consists of various elements that drive change, such as an intranet or social network for communication, champion networks, bots for answering questions, and training. By building a permanent change engine, organizations can more easily adapt to new technologies and changes as they arise.
A change engine is not just a tech component but also involves behaviours and processes. It requires understanding what works within an organisation, what resources are available, and what areas need investment. This may include leveraging social networks, engaging innovators and champions, and delivering training through various means, such as train-the-trainer programs, online learning paths, and social learning communities.
Pilar wants to know whether NOW is the time for social learning communities and communities of practice to have their moment. Jaap suggests that communities often fail because they are not part of people's daily workflow and lack the same level of passion found in hobby-related communities. Additionally, the timing of shared information is often misaligned with when members actually need it, making the community feel less relevant. To overcome these issues, communities need to be more demand-driven by encouraging members to ask questions and share information when it is needed. It’s also worth focusing the community's energy on delivering valuable outputs to the organisation on a regular basis, such as best practices or process reviews.
32.40 MINS
Pilar wanted to know about Jaap’s previous business: Dutch Farm Cheese!
Before starting OrangeTrail, Jaap founded a Dutch farm cheese business to gain firsthand experience in product development and entrepreneurship, as he felt he needed a track record to advise clients on innovation. Having grown up spending time on a farm that made artisanal cheese, Jaap set up an online international delicacy shop, starting with Dutch farm cheese. Despite positive feedback from culinary reviewers and initial success in shipping samples worldwide, Jaap found himself spending more time answering emails and queries about cheese than actually selling it. Ultimately, the workload became too much compared to the income generated, leading him to discontinue the business.
35.00 MINS
When Pilar first met Jaap, he recommended she watch the video New experiments in self-teaching by Sugata Mitra.
Sugata Mitra is an IT professional from India and the video shows various experiments in self-directed learning, where he placed computers in empty ATM slots in the slums of India and observed how children interacted with them.
One experiment involved placing a computer with scientific research text about genes and genomes in the slums of Sri Lanka. Mitra instructed the children to use the computer and told them he would return in six weeks to see what they had learned. He also asked a school teacher to play the "granny role" by walking by occasionally and expressing enthusiasm for the children's learning opportunity. After six weeks, the children had managed to understand the complex scientific content, despite initially claiming they hadn't learned anything.
Another experiment compared the learning outcomes of two groups of students in Italy: one taught by the best teacher using traditional methods to learn trigonometry, and another group given iPads and asked to figure out how the device knows its location. The self-directed group, with only a "granny" for encouragement, achieved similar knowledge levels to the traditionally taught group but with higher retention and enjoyment.
Inspired by this approach, Jaap and his colleagues implemented "social learning" in their own work, creating communities of engaged learners who develop their own curriculum by answering a series of questions and creating a "book" as part of the learning process.
While schools are slowly adopting more independent learning methods, they still have a long way to go to fully embrace the potential of self-directed learning demonstrated in Mitra's experiments.
”Here's a cleaned-up version of the quote that maintains the guest's voice and style:
"When we started the company, the thing that I really wanted to contribute was making people feel more valued and more connected to the journey that the company is on. Research shows that around 80% of people are, to some extent, disengaged with their work or their company because the place is just too big to feel truly connected, to really understand how their work relates to what the client gets.
I believe that new forms of communication and collaboration can be really beneficial in addressing this issue. However, I do worry that, like with a lot of things, AI might ultimately lead to people being less human, because AI can do the job. I'd like to have a world where things are a little bit different, where we create work that's almost like a place you go to have a good time or to feel that you matter, instead of worrying that you're going to be seen as a cost, too expensive, or redundant.
That's the idea behind what we try to do with the company – to really make people feel that they matter."
Find out more about OrangeTrail on their website.
Connect with Jaap on LinkedIn.
And don’t forget to watch the video New experiments in self-teaching by Sugata Mitra
Plus, if you’re interested in using genAI for creative projects, you might want to check out Spiralling Creativity, Pilar’s new blog.
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