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The Quinnovation blog

There is a lot of concern about incorporating social learning into organizations centering on the organizational and culture issues.  I gave my “Blowing up the training department” presentation last nite for Massachusetts ISPI chapter, and a number of the questions were on getting the executives to buy in to the need, and then changing the culture. My recent post on problem-solving similarly raised such questions.

As Kevin suggested, if you asked executives “Do you support problem-solving, sharing and reflection, reward diverse participation, and encourage individual initiative?”, they would answer in the affirmative.  However, if you asked below that level, you might find a different viewpoint.

This reminded me of an earlier post on attitudinal change, where the first step was to make folks aware of their own attitudes.  I think it might be similarly necessary to help make executives aware of the reality, not what they believe.  An audit might be a good tool to invoke, assessing the realities of the possibilities to contribute, the rewards, as well as the actual behaviors and beliefs of the individuals in the organization.  Eventually, you have to characterize the organization on dimensions of being a learning organization, including supportive learning environment, leadership, and processes and practice.

If you can present individuals with the reality, as the attitude change model suggests, you then have the opportunity to present alternatives, and evaluate the tradeoffs involved. For instance, changing cutlure is hard. However, the consequences of not changing may be worse!  Then, if you can get commitment to change, you have the necessary buy-in to start organizational change processes.

It seems clear to me that change can’t happen without an awareness of the real situation and it’s consequences.  Org change requires leaders to proselytize and walk the walk.  That only happens when they’re really committed, and that requires them to acknowledge the gap and the need.

I’m continually exploring the needs and solutions possible, but it’s clear we can’t avoid the tough issues and have to come up with approaches to address them.  These tactics are, I’m sure, not new, but you need the tools to move forward.  Learning culture audit anyone?

Karl Kapp and Tony O’Driscoll have launched the age of virtual worlds in organizational learning by providing a thorough overview in their new book Learning in 3D. This is a comprehensive and eloquent book, covering the emerging opportunity in virtual worlds.  Replete with conceptual models to provide structure to the discussion as well as pragmatic guidance to how to design and implement learning solutions, this book will help those trying to both get their minds around the possibilities and those who are ready to get their hands dirty.

Their enthusiasm for the opportunities is palpable, and helps bolster the reader through some initial heady material. The book is eloquently written, as you’d expect from two academics, but both also play in the real world, so it’s not too esoteric in language or concept.  It’s just that the concepts are complex, and they don’t pander with overly simplistic presentations. They get it, and want you to, too.

Their opening chapters make a solid argument for social learning.  They take us through the changes society is going through and the technology transformations of the internet to help us understand why social learning, formal and informal, is a powerful case.  They point out the problems with existing formal learning, and identify how these can be addressed in virtual worlds.

What follows is a serious statement of the essential components of a virtual world for organizational learning, a series of models that attempt to capture and categorize learning in a 3D world.  They similarly develop a series of useful ‘use cases’ (they term them “archetypes”), and place them in context.  Overall, it’s a well thought out characterization of the space.

Coupled with the conceptual overviews are pragmatic support.  There are a number of carefully detailed examples that help learners understand the business need and the outcomes as well as the design.  There are war stories from a number of pioneers in the space.  There is a systematic guide to design that should provide valuable support to readers who are eager to experiment, and the advice on vendors, adoption, and implementation is very practical and valuable.

The book is not without flaws: they set up a ‘straw man’ contrast to virtual world learning.  While all too representative of corporate elearning, the contrast of good pedagogy versus bad pedagogy undermines the unique affordances of the virtual world.    I note that their principles for virtual world learning design are not unique to virtual worlds, and are essentially no different (except socially) from those in Engaging Learning.   And their 7 sensibilities doesn’t seem quite as conceptually accurate as my own take on virtual world affordances.  But these are small concerns in the larger picture of communicating the opportunities.

This is a valuable book for those who want to understand what all the excitement is about in virtual worlds.  I’ve been watching the space for a number of years now, and as the technology has matured have moved from thinking that the overhead was too high to where I believe that it is a valuable tool in the learning arsenal and only going to be more so. This book is the guide you need to being ready to capitalize on this opportunity.  You can get a 20% discount purchasing it directly from Amazon.  Recommended.

I’ve been arguing for a while that we need to take a broader picture of learning, that the responsibility of learning units in the organization should be ensuring adequate infrastructure, skills, and culture for innovation, creativity, design, research, collaboration, etc, not just formal learning. As I look at those different components, however, I wonder if there’s an overarching, integrating viewpoint.

When people go looking for information, or colleagues, they have a problem to solve. It may be a known one with an effective solution, or it may be new. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a new service to create, a new product to design, a customer service problem, an existing bug, or what. It’s all really a situation where we need an answer and we don’t have one.

We’ll have some constraints, some information, but we’re going to have to research, hypothesize, experiment, etc. If it’s rote, we ought to have it automated, or we ought to have the solution in a performance support manner. Yes, there are times training is part of the solution. But this very much means that first, all our formal solutions (courses, job aids, etc) should be organized around problem-solving (which is another way of saying that we need the objectives to be organized around doing).

Once we go beyond that, it seems to me that there’s a plausible case to be made that all our informal learning also needs to be organized from a problem-solving perspective. What does that mean?

One of the things I know about problem-solving is that our thought processes are susceptible to certain traps that are an outcome of our cognitive architecture. Functional fixedness and set-effects are just two of the traps. Various techniques have evolved to overcome these, including problem re-representation, systematicity around brain-storming, support for thinking laterally, and more.

Should we be baking this into the infrastructure? We can’t neglect skills. Assuming that individuals are effective problem-solvers is a mistake. The benefits of instruction in problem-solving skills have been demonstrated. Are we teaching folks how to find and use data, how to design useful experiments and test solutions? Do folks know what sort of resources would be useful? Do they know how to ask for help, manage a problem-solving process, and deal with organizational issues as well as conceptual ones?

Finally, if you don’t have a culture that supports problem-solving, it’s unlikely to happen. You need an environment that tolerates experimentation (and associated failure), that support sharing and reflection, that rewards diverse participation and individual initiative, you’re not going to get the type of pro-active solutions you want.

This is still embryonic, but I’m inclined to believe that there are some benefits from pushing this approach a bit. What say you?

The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question of the Month is “predictions and plans for 2010“, specifically:

• What are your biggest challenges for this upcoming year?
• What are your major plans for the year?
• What predictions do you have for the year?

I’ve already blogged the predictions question, so I’ll just address the first two points.

As a consultant, my big challenge is always finding more people who I can help.  With my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance, we’re looking for organizations that know they want to leverage the power of social media to develop a collective intelligence infrastructure, but need assistance.  Through Quinnovation, I’m looking to improve organizational learning design, whether through developing immersive learning simulation capability, mobile delivery, performance solutions, adaptive systems, content models, or all of the above as a strategic lever.  I’ve helped lots of folks, and it’s clear there’s more need, so I’m just looking for more opportunities to really improve things, and ways to find those opportunities.

My plans are severalfold.  First, I’ve got to finish the manuscript for my mobile book.  I’m also committed to execute against the contracts I already have to continue to deliver great solutions.  And I intend to continue experimenting, speaking (hope to see you at the Guild’s Learning Solutions conference in March), writing, and of course, consulting.

I’m also intending to elaborate on some recent thoughts on learning experience design.  I think there’s a real opportunity to wrap some definition around the different components that helps systematize the integration of engagement and effective learning.  This is a generalization of Engaging Learning, going broader in areas of application, and across technologies.  I think there’s a need (just look at all the bad elearning still out there), and as we start delivering learning in more distributed ways and in wider contexts, we need a conceptual framework that helps us design in meaningful ways.

Naturally, I welcome your participation and assistance in any of the above!

eLearning Mag publishes short predictions for the year from a variety of elearning folks, and I thought I’d share and elaborate on what I put in:

I’m hoping this will be the ‘year of the breakthrough’.  Several technologies are poised to cross the chasm: social tools, mobile technologies, and virtual worlds.  Each has reached critical mass in being realistically deployable, and offers real benefits.  And each complements a desired organizational breakthrough, recognizing the broader role of learning not just in execution, but in problem-solving, innovation, and more.  I expect to see more inspired uses of technology to break out of the ‘course’ mentality and start facilitating performance more broadly, as organizational structures move learning from ‘nice to have’ to core infrastructure.

While I don’t know that these technologies will actually cross over (I’m notoriously optimistic), they’re pretty much ready to be:

• Social I’ve mentioned plenty before, and everyone and their brother is either adding social learning capabilities to their suites, or creating a social learning tool company. And there are lots of open source solutions.

• Mobile has similarly really hit the mainstream, with both reasonable and cheap (read: free) ways to develop mobile apps (cf Richard Clark & my presentation at the last DevLearn), and a wide variety of opportunities. The devices are out there!

• Virtual worlds are a little bit more still in flux (while Linden Labs’ Second Life is going corporate as well, some of the other corporate-focused players are in some upheaval), but the value proposition is clear, and there are still plenty of opportunities.  The barriers are coming down rapidly.

Each has available technologies, best principles established and emerging, and real successes.  Given that there will be books on each coming this year (including mine ;), I really do think the time is nigh.  And, each is a component of a broader approach to learning, one that I’ve been advocating for organizations.

I’m hoping that organizations will start taking a more serious approach to a broad picture of learning.  The need in organizations is for learning to not be an add-on, isolated,  but instead to be part of the infrastructure.  We are at at a stage now where learning has to go faster than taking away, defining, designing, developing, and then delivering can accommodate.  The need is for learning to break out of the ‘event’ model, and start becoming more timely, more context-sensitive, and more collaborative.  Organizations will need their people to produce new answers on a continual basis.

I’m hoping that organizations will ‘get’ the necessary transition, and take the necessary steps.  As Alan Kay said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”.  I’m hoping we can invent the future, together.  We need the breakthrough, so let’s get going!

I was talking with a colleague over lunch the other day about her company, platform, and organizational learning issues.  And something occurred to me: we’re trying to merge onto a freeway right at a blindspot.

In orgs, there’s a real tendency to bucket any discussion of learning into ‘training’, and dismiss it.  You’ve heard me go off again and again about how I think learning includes innovation, creativity, problem-solving, etc, and that’s because I’m trying to make learning the umbrella term for all the good stuff & secret sauce, not automatically shunted off into the realms of cost-center and irrelevance.  And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think training has to be irrelevant (though in practice much of it is). The problem is that those same executives who identify a problem and demand a training solution for it aren’t open to a more discerning analysis of the problem, more enlightened learning practice, or more.  Regardless, it’s easy to get ignored as soon as they hear ‘learning’.

So then you can look at another channel to come in, and the obvious alternative is knowledge management (KM).  Except that, too, has a real easy knee-jerk rejection.  The initial wave of KM had so much hype it could only under-deliver on unrealistic expectations (as has happened before with AI and expert systems, as well as every new management phase).  So, KM also is a difficult sell.

The problem, then, is where do you come in?  What is the fog-penetrating terminology that will help get the C-suite to really ‘get’ that you’re talking about stuff that’s mission-critical?  That’s a big blindspot.  Collective intelligence? I just read that ‘innovation’ as a term is dead.  ‘Social  media’ can bring up bad images as well.  And anything called 2.0 is liable to be seen as hype, whether it’s Web or Enterprise.

The sad thing is, there’s some real ‘there’ there, but it’s an uphill sell.  Any bright ideas about how to market a real-game changer to people who need it, but can’t see it?

I love talking with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues, they’re always sparking me to new thoughts.  In our chat, we were talking about learning, and I riffed off Charles’ comment about defining learning to opine that I see learning as a persistent behavior change (in the same context).  It’s very behaviorist-influenced (given that I’m a cognitive/connectionist/constructivist type), but the point is that it needs to manifest.  Otherwise, you get what we cog types call ‘inert knowledge’, you can recite it back on a test, but when it’s relevant in the world it never gets activated!

However, it got me to thinking about individual versus group behavior.  And I realize that there were some key points I take as foundational:

• that orgs will need innovation
• that innovation isn’t solitary
• thus, that improving collective innovation requires collaboration
• and that collaboration requires culture & infrastructure

I’ve argued before about how the increasing rate of change, capability, and more mean that executing against a total customer experience is only the cost of entry, and that continual innovation will be necessary. Competitors can reproduce a product or service quickly.  Technology advances provide new opportunities to improve products, processes, and services. So, you need continual innovation (which I think of as continual learning, as problem-solving, new {process|product|service} development, creativity, research, etc are all learning).

Now, Keith Sawyer has made the point that, in general, innovation isn’t individual.  In reality, individuals build upon one another’s work continually.  Sure, one person may be responsible for an innovation, but that’s not the way to bet.  Collective intelligence is the way to get the highest and continual output.

As a consequence, collaboration is needed.  The right people need to get together in the right way to address the right problem at the right time.  If you’re not collaborating, you’re suboptimal and therefore vulnerable.  Recognize the attendant issues: you have to be willing to tolerate failure, share mistakes as well as successes, and provide time for reflection!

To do that requires the double context of a supportive culture, and a facilitative infrastructure. There have to be ways to find the right collaborators, to understand the context, to share solutions, to test and evaluate, and to impact the way things are done.  And there have to be rewards for doing so.

That’s both the opportunity and the challenge on the table, and that’s why I hang w/ my posse.  We’d love to talk with you about it.

On Friday, I had the pleasure of a conversation of Kris Rockwell, CEO of Hybrid Learning for my in-process mobile learning book. I’d sought him out because of how he was developing mobile.  Using content models to separate out the content from how it gets rendered for display, he’s creating more flexibility across devices. This combines two of my passions, and is part of a performance ecosystem strategy.

Hybrid uses DITA, a standard for wrapping definition around content, to develop their content.  He presented powerful arguments to use this open source topic-based approach.  For one, being open source, you’re not locked in to a proprietary format, yet backed by IBM it’s well supported.  Second, it’s lightweight, compared to say S1000D (which I hadn’t heard of). And, of course, it’s portable across systems, meaning your solution doesn’t die even if your vendor does!

The use of a specification for such description around the content being developed is something I argue for regardless of mobile delivery or not.  When you wrap more rigor, and more semantic granularity around your development process, you’re well on your way to an organized content governance process.  For instance, if you design into a template even for the quick one-off requests that often come through the door in learning units, you are more likely to be able to reuse that content elsewhere, and, conversely, draw upon available content to shorten the development time. Done properly, the if you update the source one place, the changes should propagate throughout the relevant content!   There are lots of cost efficiencies being found in documentation with this approach, and it should percolate into elearning as well.

What Kris is also finding, however, is a real advantage in content portability  across mobile devices. Content so developed can easily be re-rendered for different devices, if they don’t already have the capability to hand.  He argues convincingly that designing for a device is a bad approach, and designing for device-independent delivery gives you the power not only to hit more platforms but also more flexibility for new platforms that emerge.  In short, your content development costs are amortized across more delivery options and ‘future-proofed’.

There was a lot more of interest in the conversation, including layered exploration (a “drill down” navigation style) and the potential for ordinary cell phones (dumbphones) to be viable delivers of instruction.  But that’s a topic for another day.  The take home for today, however, is think content models as well as mobile.

Entreprise Collaborative, a cross-cultural endeavor bridging English and French to provide a jumping off point on organizational collective intelligence (and co-led by my Internet Time Alliance colleague Harold Jarche), is launching a blog carnival.  The first topic is: the future of the training department in the Collaborative Enterprise.

I’ve written before about the changes I see coming for organizations (e.g. here), and they’re driven by the changes I am seeing in business and in society.  Things are moving faster, and this has all sorts of consequences: it means that change is occurring more frequently, information is doubling, our competition is more aggressive, and more.  Really, we’re unmasking the chaos that we’ve been able to cover with observed patterns, and explain away the excepti0ns. Well, now the patterns are changing fast enough that we can’t expect to be able to plan, prepare and execute to succeed. We have to be more nimble, more agile.  In short, we have to move away from depending on formal learning to be able to cope, and we need a new solution.

The solution is to empower individuals so that they’re pulling together.  No longer can a few do the thinking for everyone, as we see in a hierarchical organization. Instead, we need to make sure everyone understands what the overall goal is, and have them work together to achieve it.  We need to tap into the collective intelligence of the entire organization. This is a redefinition of learning as performance, incorporating problem-solving, innovation, creativity, design, research, and more.

That means a number of things: we need to be explicit about goals, transparent about processes, supportive about collaborative skills, and proactive in creating a culture that fosters and nurtures the necessary approaches.  This doesn’t come for free.  Who is responsible for ensuring this works?

In some organizations it’s the information services group, or the knowledge management group.  And they certainly should be on board; ideally you don’t want a hodgepodge of different systems to do the same thing, you want a coordinated environment that supports lessons learned in one area to be easily shareable elsewhere in the organization.  At core, however, I believe that folks who understand learning have to be part of the picture.  They may not own it, but they need to be actively facilitating across the organization.

And this, to me, defines the future of  the training department.  It can no longer be just about courses.  It’s got to include performance support, and informal learning. It’s got to be about culture, and learning together skills, and facilitating productive information interchange and productive interactions. We have technologies now to empower user-generated content, collaboration and more, but the associated skills are being assumed, which is a mistake.  The ability to use these tools will continually need updating and support.

This should not be threatening or anxiety-inducing!  Training used to be important, as skilled workers were critical.  As we’ve automated more work and started developing training for more knowledge work without adapting our methods (and, consequently, making generally dreadful learning experiences), the training role is less and less seen as worthwhile. The opportunity to reestablish a strategic role in the organization should be viewed with excitement, and taken up as the gift it is!

So, I see the future of the training department being as learning facilitators, and the path there to be to take on more and more of that role.  In the future, I reckon, learning facilitators will be partners with the technology infrastructure units in providing an innovation infrastructure, a performance ecosystem.  These facilitators will be (virtually) distributed across the enterprise just as the technology infrastructure is.  Yes, there’s likely some re-skilling involved, but it beats irrelevancy, or worse.  Here’s to redefinition!

I just downloaded a couple of new apps onto my iPhone. Okay, so one was a free trial of a game, but the other was a really interesting offering, and it led to some thoughts about organizational silos and new functionality.

The app was a new release by ATT called Mark the Spot, that lets you report the occurrence and location of a problem with your coverage.  This is a new way to interact with customers, allowing them to serve as a agent of “can you hear me now”-style coverage evaluation.  Given that they’ve just turned up as the lowest rated carrier of the major four here in the US, according to leading consumer champion Consumer Reports, it’s a step in the right direction.

Now this is an instance of considering a broader reach of engagement in our conversations tapping into collective intelligence. As I’ve been learning with my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance, tapping into collective intelligence goes beyond conversations internally to include partners and customers.   It’s also a broader interpretation of learning, in the senses that I argue we need to consider, including problem-solving, innovation, etc.  And it’s mobile.

So here’s the question I pondered: is this tech support?  Marketing?  And what occurred to me is that it just isn’t really easy to categorize.  It’s a dialog with the customer, gathering data about coverage, which could be seen as market research.  They can also extend it via a call into a issue resolution exercise (ok, so the app doesn’t really make the call for you but could and should: “click to send the data and be connected to a representative”) .  You could even bake in some trouble-shooting support as a performance support exercise.

The approach, and the potential, crosses boundaries in terms of the benefits and how it must be supported organizationally.  We’re beginning to see a new notion of mashup that combines functionalities that might normally be seen in separate organizational areas, but from a customer perspective, they’re linked. And  we’re seeing a hybrid of communication capabilities, linking the data capabilities of an app with voice, and even media files (e.g. some trouble-shooting information).

Around 1999, the CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, opined that elearning was going to be so big that email would seem like a rounding error.  I think that it’s not just about education over the internet, but it’s really about the broader picture of learning including performance support, social learning, and it’s not just the desktop internet, but it’s mobile apps, and more.  The full performance ecosystem isn’t just within the organization, but it’s external as well. It’s what your company builds for you, what your ‘providers’ build for you (device, service, etc), and, ultimately, how you integrate that into your personal learning network.

The implications are huge.  How to organizations realign to make meaningful information environments for their employees, partners, and customers?  How do we skill up society to take advantage and shape this environment for the benefit of all?  And how do we develop ourselves to manage and optimize the environment to help us achieve our goals?

I think we are seeing an inflection point that will trump email, but it’s not about education, it’s about the broad intersection between people’s goals and our technology infrastructure.  And our role in that, as designers of learning experiences and performance ecosystems.  We have a fair bit of understanding of cognition and social interaction, and increasing experience with different technology capabilities.  Now it’s time to put that all to work to start creating meaningful new opportunities. Who’s game?