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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for October 2021

Tech Thoughts

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I’m late with a post this week, owing to several factors, all relating to technology. I hadn’t quite pulled together a complete lesson, but by writing down these tech thoughts, I got there. (A further argument for the benefits of reflection.)

It started with upgrading our phones. We needed to (I tend to hand mine down, but really we both needed an upgrade this time). Of course there are hiccups, particularly since m’lady’s was so old that it couldn’t do the amazing thing mine had done. What happened with mine was that you just put the old phone and the new phone together and the new one just sucks the data off the old one and then the old one asks if you want to wipe it clean!  That’s some serious user experience. Something we should look more to in our LXD, so that we’re doing proper backwards design and we have the right combination of tools and learning to make performance relatively effortless.

Then another thing was quite interesting. An individual linked to me on the basis of a citation in a book. I didn’t know the book, so he sent me a picture of the page. He also asked if I could read Dutch. Sadly, no. However, I had recently upgraded my OS, and when I opened the picture, I noticed I could click on the text. Of. The. Picture!  I could select all the text (my OS was doing OCR on the picture live!), and then I could paste into Google Translate (another amazing feat) and it recognized it as Dutch and translated it into English. Whoa!

On the flip side, owing to the unusually heavy rain (for California), first our internet went out, and then the power. Fortunately both were working by the next morning. However, after that my backup drives kept dismounting and I couldn’t execute a backup reliably. I thought it might be the laptop, and I did a couple of increasingly difficult remedial measures. Nope. Had the drives been damaged by the power outage? Power outages aren’t quite new around here (we’re a bit up a hillside, and squirrels regularly blow the transformer), yet it hadn’t happened before.

Then I was on a Zoom call, and I started having hiccups in the microphone and camera. Even typing. What? When I switched to the laptop camera, it was all good.  All the things, drives, microphone, external monitor, are connected by a external hub. The hub had gone wonky! Instead of having to replace drives, I picked up a new hub last nite, and all’s good now. Phew!

I guess my take home tech thoughts is that we’re making true a promise I’ve mentioned when talking mobile: we really do have magic. (Asimov famously said any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.) We can do magical things like talk at distance, have demons do tasks on our behalf (picture text transcribing and translation), etc. On the other hand, when it doesn’t work, it can be hard to identify the problem!  Overall, it’s a win. Well, when it’s designed right! Which involves testing and tuning. As Dion Hinchcliffe put it: “Seamless #cx is now table stakes.” So let’s get designing, testing, and tuning, and make magical experiences.

Levels of Organizational Alignment

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Several years ago, I was pushing the notion of the Coherent Organization. While I still feel it’s relevant, perhaps the time wasn’t right or I wasn’t convincing enough. However, as I continue to consider the issue of alignment of what we do in L&D (and organizational) practices, I realize there’s more. One way, then, to think about the coherent organization is as achieving levels of organizational alignment.

Starting from the top, I think of the alignment with the organization and society. Normally, and probably most importantly for survival, organizations need to think about alignment with their market. (In appropriate ways; I’m reminded how the freight business got upended when companies thought they were in the train business and not the transportation business.) However, there  is a level above the market, and that is whether the org is serving the market in a society-appropriate way. For instance, if you’re helping your customers rip off their clients, it may be lucrative but it’s not a scrutable way to do business. I like the notion of benefit corporations  (though they may not go far enough). Don’t do well by doing ill.

Which is the next level of alignment, of employees with the organization’s mission. They’ll be more engaged if that mission is appropriate!  Further, I like the notion of ’employee experience’. I’ve heard it said that you can’t have a good customer experience if you don’t have a good employee experience. That’s plausible. I think Dan Pink’s  Drive says it well, you want your employees to have Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. Which means having a clear raison d’être, goals and the freedom to pursue them, and support to succeed.

Accompanying that is a workplace culture that’s supportive of success. I like Jerry Michalski’s focus on trust; start from there. Then have transparency, e.g. ‘show your work’ and ‘learn out loud‘. I’m also a fan of the Learning Organization Dimensions of Garvin, Edmondson, & Gino. I like how Amy Edmondson has gone on to advocate for including both safety and accountability as complementary components of success.

Of course, this carries down to the individual level. For instance, including a focus on having performers prepared up front and developed over time. This includes a shift to coaching and mentoring, as well as learning experience design grounded in the sciences of learning and engagement.  Going further, we should havie people not just knowing their purpose but getting feedback on how they‘re doing to achieve it. Recognition matters, with positive recognition of accomplishment or support to improve. Against an objective metric, of course, not comparative to others.

There’s more, but most importantly, it’s aligning all these from bottom to top. For instance, you could be creating a great culture to serve a bad purpose. Alternatively, you could have a great purpose but use industrial era methods to get there. I have to admit that, having served in orgs of various sizes, and seen the pockets of inefficiency that can emerge, I wonder how any business makes any money! Still, there’s evidence that the better you’re aligned, the better you do. (See the Toward Maturity Top Deck results or Laurie Bassi’s work on the link between people approaches and org success.

Achieving success at all  levels of organizational alignment is a path to success. No one’s saying it’s easy, but it  is doable. Further, it’s your best investment in the future. Just as with designing learning, get the core right before you add shiny objects, the same is true for organizations. There’s a transformation in practices to be done before you then apply the digital transformation. However, once you align these, as well, you’re on an upward path. Shall we?

By the way, this is aligned :) with the theme of what I’ll be  talking about in my opening keynote for the ATD Japan Summit.  

Higher-education Myths

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I’ve been in a variety of higher education roles in several ways: as a victim, er, student; as a grad student; post-doc; tenured/promoted faculty member; textbook publishing consulting;  strategic elearning consulting… Further, in general, I’m a supporter. I do have quibbles, and one is the persistence of learning myths. Trust me, I wrote a whole book on what the research says about them! In addition to having talked about org learning myths, let me explore some elements of higher-education myths.

I saw an article in the top education news source in the country, The Chronicle of Higher Education. I get their daily newsletter, just to keep my finger on the pulse. However, this article was touting issues for Gen Z students. Yet, research says that the ‘generations’ framework isn’t valid. There’s no reliable data that generations is a viable discrimination. In fact, it literally  is discrimination (in terms of using arbitrary distinctions to label people.

This is only part of the broader problem. A colleague regularly chides his alma mater for continuing to believe in learning styles. This, too, is a myth! While learners do differ, there’s no evidence we should adapt learning to learning styles, let alone can we reliably identify them. It’s appealing, but wrong. Not that it isn’t also prevalent amongst K12 teachers as well.

Which is related to another problem, business school curricula. I was surprised, and dismayed, to find that a prominent business school has personality instruments as part of it’s curricula! This includes MBTI, which is discredited both theoretically and empirically. Other such instruments, also with flaws, continue to be indicated. I’m sure there may be some financial motivation as well. (E.g. like Apple & Microsoft did offering huge discounts to schools, to get new users used to their experience.)

We should not tolerate learning myths in university. Aren’t these bastions of science? Ok, that’s another myth, that universities aren’t riven with politics, but that’s not the focus here. Still, universities should be better at rejecting myths, just as they should also be better about using the best pedagogies. Which they also aren’t doing, by and large ;).

There are more myths about universities, and issues like what their role in society  should be. That’s not what I’m talking about here, though. For all their other issues, they should  not be perpetuators of higher-education myths. (Here’s hoping they’re also not guilty of the ‘attention span of a goldfish’ myth!)

The (Post) Cognitive Perspective

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I’m deeply steeped in the cognitive sciences, owing to a Ph.D. in cognitive psych. Fortuitively, this was at the time my advisor was creating the cognitive science program (and more). So I’ve a bias. Yet I also have a fair bit of empirical evidence that taking a cognitive perspective accomplishes things that are hard to do in other ways. So let me make the case that the cognitive perspective is more than just a useful one, but arguably a necessary one.

I‘ll start by reflecting back on something I wrote before, about virtual world affordances. At the time, platforms like Second Life were touting the advantages of an immersive navigable world. Of course, the promises were all-encompassing: everything would move to virtual worlds. In retrospect, it didn‘t eventuate. Why? I argue it’s because the cognitive overhead of virtual worlds means that there has to be a sustained value proposition, and that came from when you truly need 3D immersion and social.  

Similarly, when I wrote my books on games and mobile, I focused on the cognitive impacts. The first reason was because technology was changing so fast that anything hardware-specific would be out of date before the book was published. The second is because our brains don‘t change that fast, so what works will work regardless of the technology .  

Note that our understanding of cognition has changed. We‘re now in a ‘post-cognitive‘ era, where the notion that all our formal, logical thinking is done in our heads is wrong. Research is showing that we‘re far more ‘situated‘ than we think, and distributed as well. That includes distributed across external representations and other people! It’s very contextual, and it’s not all in our heads!

So these days, when I look at things, I try to look with a cognitive (ok, post-cognitive) perspective. I look to see how things align, or not, with how our brains work. When I evaluate learning technologies, for instance, I look to see how well they do things like provide meaningful practice: active and contextualized. You can also see when particular technologies (e.g. VR/AR/AI) will be valuable, and not. Similarly, when I look at workplace change proposals, I look at how well they reflect our mechanisms for adapting to change.  

I‘ll argue that these perspectives are valuable. You can quickly see why most training doesn‘t work, cut through hype from vendors, create explanations about why myths are mythtaken, etc. You can save money, be more effective, etc when you align with how our brains work. I‘ve talked before about how there are gaps. This is the flip side, how to avoid those gaps, and do better.   In short, you‘re better able to assist your organization in being more effective (and efficient).  

That‘s why I‘m pleased that I am able to put these basics into the learning science book, and workshops. It‘s possible to get better at this sort of perspective. It‘s also possible to get it on tap as needed. However, it does take both the cognitive understanding and the experience in applying it. So, how‘s your cognitive perspective?

On a side note, I want to encourage you to consider my workshop at DevLearn on Make It Meaningful, a full day exploring how we make learning experiences deeply engaging (adding to effectiveness). This is also the topic of my online workshop through the Learning Development Accelerator. This is, to me, the most important topic to  complement  learning science. (Available as a book and workshop. ;) In both cases, I’m trying  to help us  stop making boring courses that people want to avoid, and suggest that this  can be done for most any topic. It also leads to more effective learning outcomes! Hope to see you at one! (Of course, if your organization would like your own private version, let me know!)