Last week, I demonstrated how a business could tackle some familiar, costly business problems by investing in its learning capacity. The goal was to increase the liquidity of working knowledge, as intellectual capital.

This week, I want to illustrate how learning is part of a diverse, wider ecology, a web of interconnected and mutually interdependent expertise. Collaboration and cooperation - or, to extend the metaphor, symbiosis - sustains this ecology.

By collaborating, co-workers with complementary expertise, or groups with converging interests, can strengthen trust and build bridges when addressing specific learning gaps in the business. This includes learning about (and with) clients.

Increasingly, businesses (and their client partners) are operating as "value networks" and the interrelationships and dialogue between them is the pulse of innovation and survival.

Enriching the learning culture and capacity for change in this way, also enhances a reputation for attracting new talent and new business, in the proverbial virtuous circle.

So, how does this actually happen? One stimulant for learning can be the creative abrasion between different workgroups - or communities of practice - which opens up opportunities for partnership and ventilating issues from multiple viewpoints. Ideas can be reapplied, recombined or reworked.

The action point here is to provide ample and frequent opportunities for people to interact, which usually entails increasing their physical or "virtual" (online) proximity. As E. M. Forster succinctly put it: "Only connect".

If spontaneous or self-organising encounters do not occur naturally in the course of everyday transactions, then a re-examination of both your physical and virtual arrangements may be necessary. Design or rethink places or "spaces" that are conducive to the free and fertile exchange of ideas and expertise.

Let's look at an example. Ask any local corporate lawyer about our segregated accounts legislation. Its interpretive twists give rise to some interesting hybrids, which may transect insurance, securitisation, capital markets or mutual funds. Vigorous discussions can then ensue about how to adapt and reapply a body of learning developed by insurance specialists to, for example, a mutual funds context. Disciplinary boundaries become very blurred here and it is a classic example of "convergence". Stir in some compliance, regulatory and accounting issues and the broth thickens.

Normally, peer advice, informal intelligence and interpretation is naturally exchanged and tested in telephone conversations, practice group or client meetings, informal mentoring down the hall. Passing encounters at the water cooler or kitchen chat also have their place. This is the natural habitat and neighbourhood telegraph of the workplace.

However, if you slice and dice an organisation to death, you lose out on this rich interaction. People, not just lawyers, can often operate in disconnected, territorial fragments or (global) hierarchies, and may not even talk to each other. Cross-selling to each other - let alone clients - becomes impossible and routine but important knowledge transfer, needed just to get the job done, is choked. If you don't talk to each other to learn, how will you ever learn about, or from, your clients?

When observing if, where and how people talk to each other, remember that the technology eventually adopted should fit the people and their preferred work habits, not the other way around. Expensive technological solutions may be wholly unnecessary and may even disrupt, rather than enable, the very interaction you wish to encourage. The key lesson here is to "see where people walk first before you build a path".

For compact or proximate organisations, simple "brown bag" lunches, lunch 'n' learn sessions or "eavesdropping" on physical meetings are great low-cost/no-cost "technologies" for sharing expertise or picking up ideas. For geographically dispersed or global businesses, the options range from online conferencing, threaded discussion groups or weblogs, and know-how databases, to requests for information via plain old e-mail. Many or all of these are accessible through a corporate portal or gateway to enterprise wide resources.

Some forward thinking enterprises who want to involve their clients in the learning process, or learn from them, use secure client-facing extranets or virtual private networks to learn in partnership.

So, if you have fundamental communication problems in your organisation, such as territoriality or poor, unrewarded or undercompensated knowledge sharing practices, you will need to defuse those time bombs first, starting at the top, with your leaders. This is not about the technology. It is primarily about reordering the habitat and motivating the desired human behaviour.

This is where your marketing, human resources development and facilities management teams come in. Next week, I will discuss their role in this learning ecology and how those roles have increasingly converged in recent years.

@EDITRULE:

Chris Maiden is the Knowledge Manager at Appleby Spurling & Kempe. He is both a Chartered Manager and Chartered Librarian and writes and speaks internationally on knowledge management issues. Copies of Mr. Maiden's columns can be obtained on the Appleby Spurling & Kempe web site at www.ask.bm.

This column should not be used as a substitute for professional legal advice. Before proceeding with any matters discussed here, persons are advised to consult with a lawyer.