Why Platforms need to be Engines of Learning
I’ve been spending the last week in Calvanico, a small rural town near Salerno, one of the most beautiful provinces in Southern Italy.
I’ve been there because L’Incartata is the residence of a truly promising project, the RuralHub, a project that I’ve been following from the inception: with the mission of incubating rural innovations and researching human connections between food, resilience and agriculture, the project is an international landmark in exploring the potential of rural areas.
Similar to many other initiatives in the world, RuralHub is itself a Platform: indeed we originally co-designed RuralHub vision in 2013 thanks to a Platform Design Session — that I documented here — and it’s incredible to see how the original vision of the project unfolded through successes, uncertainties, challenges and changes, still staying substantially attached to the originally co-developed vision.
But for as much difference and peculiarities you can find in RuralHub’s story, it faces the same key challenge that every other platform faces at today: big or small, global or local, all platforms need to encourage, support and facilitate learning to eventually thrive.
In the case of RuralHub — definitively a representative model for many other incubation networks— and in many other cases, nurturing a learning process that serves the ecosystem is also the best way to respond to growth challenges. Such a learning context would indeed ensure that the peers that are part of the larger pool of contributors (typically a larger group than founders and employees), can constantly improve their performances thanks to the platform and ultimately challenge themselves towards new and ambitious objectives that, at the same time, stretch the platform edges towards higher value and new opportunities.
Positive Platforms?
Behind tasting some extraordinary organic food and enjoying the unattainable conviviality of the place, I was at the RuralHub because of the Design Positive Platforms Workshop with my long time co-conspirator, Alex Giordano. On July the 30th we held a full day Masterclass dedicated to Platform Design Toolkit and focused on its use in the generation of Platforms whose designers that are concerned about generating positive impacts.
The topic of Positive Platforms is of course on our radar since a while. We’ve been keeping an eye on every relevant analysis and, in a few months old post, Marina Gorbis and Devin Fidler from Silicon Valley based Institute For The Future, identified eight principles of Positive Platforms design. All the points raised in the post are key and interesting, ranging from open access and transparency to democratic governance and more, and we took all of them into account in developing a new version of the Platform Schema that we will soon publish. By the way, among these principles, you will find one that we think is obviously key, that of “Upskilling”:
“The best platforms already show those who work on them pathways for learning […] and connect people to resources for advancement”
Favouring a learning process is, in fact, a common trait of many successful platform ventures and — like John Hagel’s explained so well in The Evolving Power of Learning Platforms — a key factor of platform differentiation.
The 3 Phases of Platform powered Learning
What is the main reason to join a Platform? In general, entities join ecosystems — and therefore platforms — to be able to give more efficient answers to a growing performance pressure coming from society and the market. As explained very well many times by Hagel, the current shift in business models (due to rapid tecno-social changes) puts pressure onto existing companies and citizens, generating instabilities and uncertainty.
I will continue using Airbnb as a reference example (as we did on framework launch), because I definitely think it’s one of the most well designed platforms around, and it sports an excellent learning path that participants can experience.
Phase 1 — Onboarding the Platform
The first phase of interaction with a Platform is, with no doubt, onboarding. Despite every platform is different, there are recurring onboarding issues such as understanding how the platform works, assessing your own gaps for participation and solving them, start transacting. When you enter the platform as a guest in Airbnb you experience the key onboarding challenge of making the first booking. Airbnb’s neighborhood guides, coupled with an impressively crafted soft coaching that the platform provides to newbies (embedded in the platform UX) usually helps Airbnb travelers off the ground. Later on, the platform holds for you the possibility to both: grow as a traveler (learning how to book faster and better) or evolve into a host. People also can signup directly as a host: onboarding as a host means basically make the first guest booking happen. The far-famed free professional photographer service that the company provides to eligible hosts helps them get started in style and is definitely to be considered part of an “onboarding service” targeted to hosts.
Phase 2 — Getting Better on the Platform
If you know Airbnb well enough, you’ll know that the company has an impressive set of support initiatives to ensure its hosts grow, get better and provide better experiences over time. City level meetups and even a worldwide festival called Airbnb Open aim at connecting hosts and encouraging learning and peer to peer knowledge and experience sharing.
Helping participants getting better and — therefore — help the best among them emerge from the crowd is a key feature of platform businesses. According to Tim O’Reilly analysis of platforms:
“when you open the market to an unlimited number of suppliers, you must invest in reputation systems, search algorithms, and other mechanisms that help bring the best to the top.”
In this frame, Airbnb Super Host badge, a badge that only the best performing hosts achieve, is definitely a way for participants to stand out of the crowd and leverage on their capabilities, performance and reputation.
Getting better, for platform participants generally means to “grow their knowledge, accelerate performance improvement, and hone their capabilities” according to Hagel. It’s a phase which is definitely focused on two major outcomes: learn how to make the best of the platform (beat the competition and accumulate trust and reputation), and develop new capabilities that can give you access to new opportunities inside or outside the platform.
Phase 3 — Catching New Opportunities
But what happens when participants get better and develop new capabilities? The third phase is mostly about making the most of the acquired capabilities, learn how to generate more value out of them and, eventually, align more with specific (and personal) interests and drivers.
The most successful platforms provide participants with paths for the exploitation of the new potential they develop inside the platforms itself. Airbnb again gives us a clear example of this: the just introduced City Hosts feature.
City Hosts is a way for hosts to develop “immersive experiences”: thanks to this feature hosts can use several of the skills they acquired thanks to the platform (such as providing customer excellence, care, curation, timeliness, precision…) and combine them with their own passions and competences, creating compelling experiences in the context of food, craft, entertainment, exploration…moving from the hospitality layer towards unforgettable travel experiences, evidently climbing the value chain ladder and catching new opportunities of professionalization.
The Experience Learning Canvas
The more the platform helps participants reach new opportunities the more the learning engine attracts new participants thanks to the power of success stories. Learning is indeed a fundamental engine of growth: not only success stories drive more interest and participation from the ecosystem, but the learning process creates skilled participants that increasingly hold a bigger stake in the common platform and care more about its evolution and governance. When Platforms generate an evolutionary path ranging from initial participation and ending in participating in governance the learning process becomes the most powerful evolutionary engine for the Platform and the organization(s) behind it.
To help Platform Designer focus more clearly on this aspect and in relation with our exploration of the Positive Platform topic we therefore started to develop a new canvas called the Experience Learning Canvas (Ed. October 12th: all canvases, in the new format are now available at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/toolkit). The Canvas was also tested and awesomely received in our Workshop-Masterclass in Calvanico a few days ago (despite is still in EXPERIMENTAL phase).
The objective of the Experience Learning Canvas is to help platform designers creating compelling learning experiences on their platforms and to design the process by which the user can move from challenge to challenge thanks to empowering and enabling services and other expedients. As an example, see below the application of the Experience Learning Canvas to the Airbnb case. You can easily see how beautifully crafted this process is in the case of the P2P travel giant: users can enter the platform as guests or hosts and can eventually go through an end-to-end journey starting from first onboarding challenges — mostly related to saving money (as a traveler) or making extra money (as an host) — towards reaching completely new opportunities of creative expression and stable income as City Hosts or Superhosts (arrows show the evolution path).
The Experience Learning Canvas is also a powerful tool to compare different Platform approaches and also understand differences. As an example if you look at Uber’s Experience Learning Canvas below a few differences will catch the eye. The clearest difference lies in the fact that Uber — differently from Airbnb — doesn’t offer any possibility to reach significant new opportunities and, in general, offers less “evolutionary” paths with more compartmentalized roles: this definitely makes Uber a less interesting and appreciated Platform, when compared to Airbnb, for obvious reasons.
Productive peers that are just offered standardized paths of exploitation instead of evolutionary paths will less likely protect and advocate for the platform, essentially making it less resilient and more fragile.
The services you’ll envision to support the learning process will end up populating the Enabling and Empowering Services column in the Platform Design Canvas: despite the Experience Learning Canvas is still in Experimental draft we encourage you to use it in combination with the rest of the methodology (see www.platformdesigntoolkit.com and http://bit.ly/PDT20DRAFT for the presentation post).
Within time, learning emerges as the key feature of platforms: we will help platform designers of the world make sense of the challenges that are present in their ecosystem and create powerful learning paths for participants emancipation and improvement. As Esko Kilpi said in a recent post “Creative, connected learning is at the core of the post-industrial business” and that’s the kind of business we want to help you build.
A special thanks goes to Eugenio Battaglia and Chiara Agamennone for the excellent teamwork in designing the new Canvas and in co-hosting the Workshop.
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For those who speak Italian, join our masterclass in Bologna in early October. Click here to get your ticket: http://www.avanscoperta.it/it/training/platform-design-con-simone-cicero/
Attributions:
- Tour by Lil Squid from the Noun Project
- Rating opportunities document by www.mindgraphy.com from the Noun Project
- Learning by Mikael Wiman, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
