Ok here is my hypothesis

Every business has a desire to ensure that their team are well trained and effective. This is often facilitated through a Learning and development team. However social learning has a much larger impact on what individuals learn.

In principle if we can facilitate all social learning we have then provided our business with an ideal learning culture which should ensure that every new starter gets up to speed fast with a gentle guiding hand from the L+D team.

This should not be too hard to do but requires some thought

Initially we need to create a pool of people who do things the right way for the right reasons

in previous roles i have looked to accomplish this by creating pools of subject matter 'champions' who we then train on the correct way to do things. Their role is not to formally train but to coach and mentor individuals on a regular basis. The problem with this approach comes from the fact that people stop listening to them once they are through their induction period.

I think in future changing the selection approach for these individuals will be important. In the past i have always looked to the rising stars who are already doing the job very well to act as mentors and coach’s. But if you look around your work place you'll notice the people who are often listened too, those who teach the 'bad habits' are not the ones doing the best job. In future i will look to select these from the a group i will call 'most influential' irrespective of the quality of the job they are doing.

I am now looking at different scales to measure influence and once i find it i will have come up with a way to select my next group of champions and see if that has a better impact on operational success