The aboutChange Collaborative Learning Suite (CLS) is an integral training and knowledge management tool. aboutChange's CLS integrates a whole system of training and KM activities, not a collection of parts. aboutChange's services and technologies are designed to fit with your organization's existing communications systems and training applications, integrating core competencies, critical resources, and key successes into a cohesive plan of action with measureable bottom-line results and reporting protocol via the Knowledge Scorecard. The Knowledge Scorecard is how we track progress, what works and what doesn't, eliminating redundancy, minimizing wasted effort and optimizing performance. We deliver a highly reliable set of training and knowledge activities untilizing real-time analysis and unfiltered and anonymous communications 24/7. This approach yields superior knowledge, enabling organizational members to make better decisions faster. We believe this process provides our clients a sustainable strategic advantage.

Our situational analysis (the Organizational Assessment Survey, or OAS) is a world-class multifactor instrument that analyzes your organization on 30 + different factors ranging from job enrichment to intergroup conflict. But we have a few key differences:

• Cost effective On-Demand analysis: Evaluation and training take place online, but we integrate an automated email engine that helps keep your front-line staff in the loop and on the same page, no matter where they are in the world. We have reliably delivered this kind of dynamic, cost effective, realtime analysis and feedback since 1999.
• Results are instantaneous: As soon as the first group of employees complete a survey, everyone will be able to see the results and run queries. This instant feedback-loop process enables employees to analyze and solve their own problems in real-time.
• Knowledge Assets: In addition to providing evaluation and feedback on common workplace issues; quality assurance, competency and compliance, etc., we have provided an intentional space for knowledge sharing, building a framework of knowledge assets. Whether common knowledge or implicit knowledge, factors are automatically calculated, updated and available on-demand.

In addition to presenting a quick and easy understanding of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, we provide additional evaluation tools that help organizational members identify individual and collective vision, values and goals. This helps every one understand how they fit in with the overall strategic plan of the organization. We call this Total Buy-In Factor, (TBIF). And because all employees can instantly see results and run queries, buy-in is much greater on resulting change initiatives and training programs.

The OAS and the Organizational Roles Inventory (ORI) provide statistically reliable and objective analytical feedback while blended learning, on-site via face-to-face meetings and online collaborative learning allow organizational members to connect learning with immediate practice relevance. Training to competency and compliance as well as, mining collective knowledge assets, implicit and explicit knowledge of what works involves a collaborative journey of self discovery. We call this process, Collaborative Competition. Together, these powerful evaluation and learning tools help work teams co-create and apply knowledge assets for strategic advantage. The aboutChange Knowledge Scorecard provides the metric for measuring intangible assets (KM) and ROI. Shared values, visions, and goals provide directionality and thereby connect meaning with purpose. The end result is innovation 24/7 and sustained competitive advantage.

Building Productive Workplaces

Many companies say they help build more productive workplaces. Usually this means they focus on increasing efficiency and throughput, often via BPR such as Balanced Scorecard or Six Sigma.

When we say we help build more productive workplaces, what do we really mean? For us, productive workplaces are comprised of healthy individuals (hearts, minds, and souls) working collaboratively to achieve their company’s mission, vision, and goals. We are experienced teachers and coaches advancing research-based collaborative solutions for evaluation, learning and ongoing development. We take aim at reorganization and wholeheartedly focus instead on organizational restoration.

Our open-source solutions help organizational leaders optimize employee performance and ongoing development in a competitive and dynamic business environment. CLS has been designed to assist organizational members in creating and maintaining self-organizing communities—engaged and motivated people who value knowledge sharing and collaborative competition. This represents an organization’s cultural intelligence (CQ) and is a key organizational asset for recruiting, retaining and developing talent and in building a culture of decisive, committed and healthy individuals.

The framework for aboutChange's CLS is derived from groundbreaking research in socio-technical systems (STS). STS provides your company with tools and techniques that your people use for personal development and organizational-wide performance optimization:identifying and carrying out planned business development, increase the flow of communications, decision-making, and knowledge management. Our collaborative technologies allow you to achieve several goals:

• Evaluate the current company culture (its strengths and weaknesses)
• Frame problems and identify solutions
• Inspire knowledge creation and knowledge sharing (collaborative inquery)
• Peer review of ideas -- enable collaborative learning
• Communicate real value to fellow employees to help achieve total buy-in and collaborative decision-making and immediate practice relevance

Rather than simply applying a technological solution to improving productivity, our approach combines our online toolset (a technical system) with on-site analysis and training process (a social system). The end result? A more productive workplace, not just more efficient workers.

Online Tools

The aboutChange Collaborative Learning Suite provides a suite of web-based evaluation, training, and collaboration tools.

Evaluation Tools

All of our evaluation tools give each employee the opportunity to become a research-practitioner. Query tools are not reserved for management; rather, every participant has the opportunity to see how his/her responses compare to workgroup scores and the company as a whole.

Organizational Assessment Survey

The Organizational Assessment Survey is our situational analysis tool. It is a world-class instrument that analyzes your organization on 30 different factors ranging from job enrichment to intergroup conflict. We use this survey in two main ways - first, to help identify areas for potential change, and second, to track your progress as you change over time. While the OAS has been used to evaluate organizations for over 20 years, the current version has a few unique features:

• Since our survey takes place online, your workforce can complete it anywhere with Internet access. It's easy for employees to take and retake the survey, even if they're out of the office or if they miss the initial date.
• Results are instantaneous. As soon as the first employees complete the survey, you can see the results. No more waiting weeks while the consultants scan in bubble-sheets.
• Analysis is dynamic: If an employee takes the survey late, all factors are automatically updated. If a second batch of workgroups takes the survey late, factors calculated for the company are also updated automatically.
• Research is a collaborative process: a virtual feedback-loop of information enables employees to see how their role fits with the organization's vision, values, and goals--co-creating a more productive workplace.

Organizational Roles Inventory

We use our Organizational Roles Inventory (ORI) to help evaluate the way decisions are made individually and collectively. The ORI survey helps employees understand how they filter information, identify patterns of interaction, and frame problems. It also serves to illustrate the importance of looking at critical issues from different perspectives.

Values, Vision, and Goals

This survey tool helps employees discover shared values on the workgroup and company levels. Values, vision and goals provide directionality, purpose and intention and, in turn, foster innovation and organizational evolution. When an organization has a clear vision and clear goals it is easier for it's members to understand how they fit in with the overall direction of the organization. It is an organization’s collective values, vision, and goals determine its direction in the strategic plan.

Decision Tools

Situation Room

Many companies use online message boards to help their employees harness collective knowledge to solve problems. While message boards are great for informal discussion, issues that are brought up don't always get resolved - suggestions might be made, but no mechanism exists to ensure that the person who brought up the issue can actually come up with a solution.

The aboutChange Situation Room is a tool that helps employees aggregate structured opinions on how to solve problems and share knowledge. It guides your employees through the process of framing problems (identifying the problem, explaining what's already been done, and determining the scope of the issue). It then guides others through providing structured responses and rating the importance and urgency of the issue. The end result? Problems are framed and then filtered, suggestions are offered, goals are set, obstacles are identified, and solutions are found much more quickly and effectively. Furthermore, the Situation Room allows employees to follow-up, and comment on what works for each issue. Unique e-mail integration ensures that all employees know about issues affecting them; it's easy to respond when you have something to say about an issue.

In addition, the Situation Room may also be used to address sensitive personal or intergroup relational issues. Research indicates that communications can be greatly enhanced by moving potentially volatile confrontations to a safe space, away from face-to-face contact. In this safe space, participants are more engaging and open to suggestions, and thus more willing to offer their opinions and knowledge.

E-Learning Tools

The Learning Lab

The Learning Lab is a collection of online articles and exercises that supplement the onsite intervention and training. Employees use the Learning Lab when they want more depth than is provided in the onsite training. Also, employees who miss on-site training sessions can use the Learning Lab to catch up when it's convenient for them.

On-site Process

The Collaborative Learning Suite supports a framework of blended learning assets through both on-site and online methods of delivery. Over the first 90-day period these sessions will include training on specificly identified areas for certification or general improvement. Each session will begin by reviewing key learnings from prior sessions that provided practice relivance, and also encourage open, authentic and genuine knowledge sharing extending the conversations taking place online, in the Situation Room, and in the workplace, around the water cooler, regarding critical developments. The overall goal is to train employees to frame problems and identify solutions.

Key Concepts

The aboutChange Collaborative Learning Suite is centered around several key concepts.

ME, WE, and US

Throughout the Collaborative Learning process, we continually refer to the theme that learning takes place on many levels. We focus on three broad levels: the individual, the workgroup, and the whole company (ME, WE, and US).

The ME level is an individual focus: Many organizational researchers have tended toward a two-sided approach the individual and group level. They are primarily concerned with what motivates individuals to higher levels of performance (as in need and expectancy theories) and how leadership, for instance, will affect the groups performance. The aboutChange process integrates a multidimensional approach. First, we see the individual as key to all organizational learning, and as such, the Collaborative Learning process integrates much deeper levels of understanding involving, values, vision, goals, and desired changes. For each individual, we strive to answer the question “What’s in it for me?”, thus improving total buy-in.

The WE level is workgroup-oriented. Here the emphasis is on the importance of group dynamics, patterns of interaction, and collaborative decision-making. We also focus on intergroup issues.

The US level focuses on company-wide issues. Emphasis is placed on leadership and management styles, openness, systems thinking, and action-oriented research.

As employees use our system, the ability to compare results on three broad levels provides meaning - each employee knows how his/her values, vision, and goals fit in with the company, on multiple levels.

A System of Cycles

We like to describe your company's growth process as a cycle, a sort of spiral climbing up toward a true knowledge-based organization. Each turn of the spiral is a 90-day cycle, involving four modes of knowing and learning: communication, education, collaboration, and innovation.

1. The communication mode involves the socialization of knowledge sharing that is needed to learn new knowledge. Many social scientists claim learning is a social action, and interaction is needed to be able to learn.
2. The education mode involves modeling, mentoring, and teamwork--working together to create various ideas for sharing knowledge. The Situation Room provides the context for this knowledge creation.
3. The collaborative mode involves the externalization of learning - that is, making decisions based on new knowledge. This process requires that team members first identify action opportunities and then apply the organization's mission, vision, and values in their communities of practice (the workplace, at home, and in the broader community).
4. The fourth mode, innovation, involves implementing those new decisions; that is, taking action.

Through each cycle, it's critical to operate in each of these modes at different times.

Different Ways of Knowing and Learning

Another key feature of the socio-technical approach is that it doesn't favor any one corporate organizational structure or leadership style over another. This system is designed to improve learning; communication, knowledge sharing and decision making within your organization, in alignment with your vision, values, and goals. Your organizational structure emerges out of your needs, not out of our idea of what's best for you.

We understand that there are many different ways of approaching and dealing with problems, and that for every problem, some approaches are better than others. Through our Organizational Roles Inventory, we provide you with a framework for talking about different points of view, and we help you to understand the benefits of considering these "information filters" when you're trying to solve problems.

The aboutChange Collaborative Learning Suite (CLS) helps real people in real organizations solve real problems in real time. It is designed to help maximize performance and improve business practices from the inside out. The framework for CLS is the Collaborative Learning System. As the graphic illustrates, effective organizational decision-making is an integral and multidimensional process and a sociotechnical experience dovetailing the interaction of people (a social system) with tools and techniques (a technical system). Sociotechnical systems (STS) approach the organization as a social system focusing wholly on group relations in depth on three levels from micro to macro including: individual systems, workgroup systems and company-wide systems.

There are five distinct stages. Each stage requires different strategies, tactics and skills that enable effective leaders to make better decisions--mitigate risks, liability, redundancy of effort, and ultimately develop and retain a productive workplace comprised of decisive, committed and healthy people. Research indicates that ineffective decisions often result from lack of formal structure. Highly effective organizations and their leaders create an intentional space for both formal and informal collaboration. CLS v5.0 helps to facilitate evaluation, communication, education, collaboration and innovation. Collaborative learning not only leads to competitive advantage, but the most immediate effect is better employee and customer-centered relations.

A Word About Change:
Businesses and their customers do not exist in a vacuum—the cultural tendency toward inertia results in lowering the high bar for business results-focused e-learning efforts. The marketplace is turbulent and always evolving and this dynamic is affected by both internal and external determinants. Understanding the science and art of collaborative learning is a critical executive skill for the 21st century leader.

There are five stages to the Collaborative Learning System.

1. EVALUATE (Recognition of Needs—Situation Analysis):
The Evaluation stage is almost always preceded by a “recognition of needs phase”. The workgroup, department or project manager becomes aware that there are some problems or imperfections (constraints) in the present situation (systems) that need to be resolved. There is usually a growing pattern of dissatisfaction with the existing situation. Uncovering the true nature of the dissatisfaction is the first step in properly and effectively evaluating the situation.

2. COMMUNICATE (Unfiltered Conversation):
The sharing of information and knowledge is sometime referred to as “Environmental Scanning” and this simply means open, honest and unfiltered conversation around what works and what doesn’t. It’s the kind of discourse that takes place between friends over pizza and beer: What do you know, how do you know what you know, how do you validate what you know. When it comes to resolving “critical issues” this boils down to an evaluation of options; benchmarking, best practices, and innovative approaches. This phase often also includes a review of current policies, operating procedures and above all a confirmation of values, vision and goals. Through heartily comparing, observing, reading, discussing and engaging the advice from peers and other professionals, information is harvested and assessed. As the flow of open, authentic and genuine communication increases, all sides of the situation become clearly visible. Hidden agendas and sidebar conversations are minimized as objective evaluation is valued and rewarded.

3. EDUCATE (Breakthrough Learning):
Many organizations jump right into training and/or e-learning without fully evaluating possible barriers to learning--the obstacles or constraints that keep organizational members from learning new practices and taking decisive action. This is where breakthrough learning becomes important. While many so-called learning management systems are designed to shrink the epistemic gap (knowledge gap), CLS v5.0, on the other hand is designed to expand the epistemic gap. This is new! ActionPoint helps create an intentional space for breakthrough learning--a place between what is known (benchmarking) and what is yet to be known (innovative practices). Breakthrough learning results from the willingness to plunge into the creative chaos of unexplored territory. Once we have faced our brutal reality through valid, reliable data and unbiased information--understanding the subjective way we do business around here, it becomes possible to see where e-learning will be effective.

4. COLLABORATE (Actionable Knowledge):
At the end of the day people make decisions not software and it is decisive and committed people who execute—create action opportunities. After all, information is useless until someone does something with it. This is called actionable knowledge. While measurement is essential for validating your strategic plan, (If you don't measure, you can't manage), evaluation, communication and education is essential for collaboration. Getting the right people on board (recruiting, training and retaining) is a key feature of collaborative learning.

5. INNOVATE (Implementation):
This is a natural extension of the collaboration stage and it is here the organization optimizes its competitive advantage. Reflection, peer review and debriefing help to filter new knowledge from best practices. In addition to identifying actions that are truly innovative, the organization’s leaders are able to make confident decisions even in times of uncertainty. CLS v5.0 helps organizational members track progress and measure outcomes. The whole process has a clear beginning, middle and end. It’s cyclical and dynamic—the whole cycle starts over again. ActionPoint provides a roadmap that will help management:

• clearly identify the desired results and specify the time and effort that will be required to achieve them.
• identify “hot spots” within groups, between groups and throughout the organization
• obtain immediate and useful information on performance, commitment and outcomes
• provide 24/7 real-time feedback to employees letting them know how they are doing
• make adjustments to the process when needed

Even though they seem opposed, openness and anonymity are both key values for the aboutChange CLS. Here's why:

Research shows that when participants know their responses are truly anonymous, they'll respond more freely and accurately, participation increases. In addition, adult learners who participate in self-regulating learning environs out perform those who participate in traditional learning environs. Because the CLS system run on our servers (ASP model), we're able to guarantee anonymity, dramatically improving training/development, information/knowledge-sharing quality as well as, optimizing performance.

While there are several competitors that use LMS and CMS (LCMS) in an attempt to "integrate" learning with company-wide relevance, they tend to overhang the market with their capabilties and deliverables. Our evaluation approach is unique! We begin by helping you assess individual, workgroup and company-wide strengths and weaknesses before we jump into training. This helps us identify the knowledge gap.

The aboutChange CLS system provides instant feedback to all participants in real time. That's On-demand! In essence, each employee becomes a research practitioner, with the ability to run queries and get real-time feedback. The query system is open to all. We provide something valuable to your employees, and so with each cycle, response quality improves.

Thus, guaranteed employee privacy, openness, and anonymity, produce results far more accurate than you would get with emerging LCMS processes.