Organizational learning in the digital era

In the first edition of #AskTheHub, we talked with the CEO of Howspace, IIlkka Mäkitalo, about the importance of organizational learning and how collaboration tools are innovating towards the future. We learn about his journey with organizational learning and how it has shaped the development of Howspace.

David: Hi everyone and welcome to the first edition of AskTheHub, my name is David and I’m the CEO of Amplifyre. In this series, we take questions from the community on Business, Technology, and Product Development topics and talk with experts in the field from the Amplifyre hub. In this first video, we'll talk with Ilka the CEO of HowSpace about Organizational Learning.

David: Hello ILkka, how are you doing?

ILkka: Hi David, I’m doing good, nice to be here with you.

David: Thanks! for taking the time for this interview. To start things off, I would like to know, what is the HowSpace company about?

ILkka: Yes so, as you can see, we started with How and there's one nice story about how we created the name, this brand is two and a half years old and, we were impressed by the famous Ted Talk video of Simon Sinek where he told about this Golden Circle “Start With Why” that why you should know, to start with meaning and purpose, so why question and then moved to How and what so the Howspace is the space between why and what. The space, where purposeful things are implemented with good methods.

We started our original company in 1999. The topic of today, Learning, is really close to my heart. I could say that I’m a learning addict, willing to learn something every day and my background is in educational sciences. I started my career a long time ago as a primary school teacher and then personally I have like two sides in my head so, I think in a technological way and then I’m a consultant and trainer and I try to combine those two strong approaches together with a great user experience in our platform to understanding the context of our clients and then bringing the best out of technology for their benefits.

David: It's great that people are on this journey of making learning better and understanding, how learning works and how we can learn better as individuals, but also as organizations and, I can tell you that since school I always thought, why don't we learn in schools actually, more and better, how we can learn well? We learn the topics all the time and everybody has different ways of learning but we don't spend much time actually learning, so how should we learn? Yeah, so I think that's an interesting way to go. How would you define organizational learning, what is the difference between organizational learning and individual learning?

ILkka: Yeah I think all together learning has been changing a lot during the last few years, and I think it was like a separate process so you participated in a course then you went back to work and now it's much more integrated so the work and learning on an individual level and organizational or community level of learning.

David: How do you see the future of collaboration tools like Howspace? I know that you're using artificial intelligence already right now, and are there other advances like other use cases, for example, other applications that you are thinking about, so where is the journey going right now.

ILkka: Where we are strong today already, is the possibility to get a huge amount of participants involved in processes like strategic development, co-creation or sense-making value renewals, and so on. So we can bring people into Howspace. It can be happening in real-time, it can be asynchronous as well and with the support of AI, we can make sense with the support of the methods that we have implemented. For example, in a couple of weeks, we will release a new feature called reflect which means that you can have a discussion ongoing on the page and so far you had to click to see the AI analysis but now you can see the analysis that is emerging and changing on the fly on the page, so while you are discussing you can have a summary that's updating and you can have the real-time word cloud and all that and you can use filtering so for example if you have a global meeting ongoing, you can have a vertical out of US-based participants and UK participants and management and employees so you can say those are talking about that time and then I can feel to the whole discussion oh I would like to join the UK management team, ah this is their point of view and so it's really chasing the way we can have a dialogue along the time.

David: Yeah really interested to see and I'm looking forward to seeing how well this will develop in the future, thank you very much for your time for this interview

ILkka: Thanks David

David: And if any one of our viewers here has some additional questions to Howspace or about organizational learning we are happy to answer them please leave them down in the comments. See you next time!

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