Conclusions

This conclusions are a summary of the main ideas that emerged from the debates occurred during the scientific meeting. These have been enlightened with participants’ contributions and validated by Scientific Committee members.

Preceded by the 9th International Meeting of EDO group focused on Design Thinking and where more than 35 experts have participated, the 5th international EDO Conference 2018 was celebrated in Barcelona on 9th, 10th and 11th of May under the theme “Leadership and talent management at organizations”.

445 experts on the matter coming from all Spain and Latin America have participated on site and actively on the four conferences, 12 symposiums, 9 workshops and 13 oral panels and posters analyzing and discussing the 130 contributions selected from the 183 received. Also, around 140 twitter users have participated in the Conference via Twitter (#ciedo18).

We present the most significant conclusions are related to the objectives of the Conference and associated to the exchange of experiences and good practices about promotion of social and informal learning in the workplace, analysis of the reality and learning perspectives in action in organizations, assessment of new ways and methodologies to organizational learning and the analysis of the leadership and its role in knowledge management. These are:

• We reaffirm the first conclusion of EDO Conference 2016 that pointed out that: “Today's society still considers knowledge and employee and citizen continuous training to be strategic elements for organizations. The bonds that exist are becoming more evident and necessary, if we consider that people are knowledge sources to be shared to help improve and develop people, organizations and society.”
• The current challenge in organizations is still to be able to successfully manage and benefit from people’s knowledge, promoting informal learning and enhancing networking and learning communities.
• Organizations that focus on citizen’s, and their inside and outside users and obtain their active participation are a source of creativity, innovation and generate social value. Moreover, they get organizational and learning management improvement.
• Improving social and organizational knowledge includes all its members, highlighting the potential that they can contribute to the conceptual, methodological and resolution identification of people of different ages and their interaction.
• All people that take part of the organization can be active agents in knowledge management. They can train and must train, being necessary that take an active part of the decision making that affect their own learning. With co-responsibility and with a good leadership we can discover what we have to learn and what we have to know and do not know yet.
• The use of social network in organizations enhances open innovation, suggested and fed by users. Thanks to forums, knowledge bases, good practices and other alternatives, knowledge socializing facilitate and generate new proposals.
• Social networks facilitate and enhance participation but their highest priority exist when they overcome the traditional conception as a space for relationship and exchange of information to become a conducive context to create and manage collective knowledge.
• There are several experiences and modalities to promote working processes and, indirectly, networking. This evince that this kind of structures and dynamics are possible in any context if organization and its members commit.
• Promoting networking processes not only contribute to a better use of available resources in organizations but also clearly helps to group their members, enhance professional development processes in the framework of the organizations and, thus, improving them.
• The impact of leaders to the talent management is essential, provided that they act as change actors, including a positive attitude, strategic vision, effective leadership and permanent process of assessment of results accomplished.
• The development of modern organizations focused on knowledge demands a distributed leadership that draws from identification and explanation of reality, sometimes invisible, with the obvious burden of acknowledgement, motivation and transparency.
• Promoting leadership that helps talent management in organizations requires to take into account the distinguish nature of working contexts. Solving the singularities of public administrations, education organizations and other social and corporate organizations, it is mandatory to highlight the need to review systems of selection, training and promotion of the workers and leaders, reinforcing references of the realities of participant organizations, respectful with diversity, focused on knowledge and linked to social needs.
• Leaders and workers must understand that learning and working are the same, in order to understand the sense and usefulness of communities of professional practices. In these, every person is and feels co-owner of the community of practice, facilitating that the collaborative work concludes with a legacy to the organization.
• Boosting collective knowledge creation and management demands planning and adequacy of contexts that allow conversation and debate. Somehow, it is important designing conversation and planning the structure of the communication, considering the contribution of technological ecosystems to talent management.
• Giving value to learning processes, to training generated, in any context that is produced is needed. Also, revising methodological design is important to allow generating valid spaces to develop talent.
• The development of organizations must be linked to personal and professional development, identifying important tendencies to concrete strategies and tools to evaluation and self-evaluation of the process.
• Talent management and learnability are emerging topics in different organizations and sectors and are related to organizational culture. Their development demands properly combine contextual studies with the analysis of international dimension that help us to move forward in conceptualizations, methodologies and contrasted results.
• Technology as process and tool is closely linked to the human being; we evolve and transform reality with them and it becomes a language and driver of knowledge. There is no dichotomy between technology and training but a dialectical and symbiotic relationship, which open a space of innovation for learning. In this sense, the network with its tools and services plays a part in the reality and considering it as a separate resource is a mistake.
• The algorithms of Internet and social networks filter information that we consume with criteria not always related to our intentions and needs. Ignoring this situation and consuming information and knowledge blindly is a risk that fosters acculturalization and the spread of fallacies.
• The theoretical development about innovation, change and organizational development is solid and its theoretical and epistemological basis have a wide journey. However, innovation, improvement and development practices are scarce and with modest results, and in general less formal. There is a divorce between the institutional speech and institutional practices.
• Finally, we highlight that new realities demand a collaborative institutional and professional process among social, productive and academic sectors, which are evinced in this Conference.

The Congress’s Scientific Committee
Barcelona, ​​May 2018