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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Enterprise Thinking, or Thinking Enterprise

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I realize, with recent releases like Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers and Marcia Conner & Tony Bingham’s The New Learning (both recommended, BTW, reviews coming soon, with standard disclaimer that I’m mentioned in both) that the message is finally getting out about new ways to facilitate not just formal learning and execution, but informal learning and innovation.   But there’s more needed. It takes new thinking at the top.   You need to think about how the enterprise is thinking.

So what do you want for your enterprise thinking?   Shows like The Office make us laugh because we identify with it. We know the officious types, the clueless, the apathetic, the malevolent, the greedy, the ones just marking time.   They’re definitely not thinking about how to make the organization more successful, they’re thinking more about what will make their life most enjoyable, and there’s little or no alignment.   That’s not what you want, I’ll suggest, but is what’s seen, in various degrees, in most places.

Instead, you (should) want folks who know what the goal is, are working towards it individually and collectively.   That are continually looking for opportunities to improve the products, processes, and themselves.   This is where organizations will derive competitive advantage.

How do you get there?   It takes coordinating several things, including the dimensions of the learning organization: leadership, culture, and practices), and the information infrastructure for working well together.   You need to have the tools, you need to understand the behaviors required, you need to know that working this way is valued, and you need to be informed as to what the goals are.

We want to be empowering people with the models that help understand the shifts that are happening and how to cope, so they’re part of the movement.   They   need to understand things like networks and complexity, so that they’re equipped to contribute at the next level.

It’s time to stop thinking patchwork (“we’ll just put in the tools”, or “we’ll move in the direction of more open leadership”), and starting thinking systemically and strategically.   Identify and acknowledge where you are now, and figure out a path to get where you need to be.   It’s not likely to be easy, but it’s clearly time to get started.

Brainstorming, Cognition, #lrnchat, and Innovative Thinking

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Two recent events converged to spark some new thinking.

First, I had the pleasure of meeting up with Dave Gray, who I’d first met in Abu Dhabi where we both were presenting at a conference. Dave’s an interesting guy; he started XPlane as a firm to deliver meaningful graphics (which was recently bought by Dachis Group, and he’s recently been lead author on the book Gamestorming.

What Gamestorming is, I found out, is a really nice way to frame some common activities that help facilitate creative thinking.   Dave’s all over creativity, and took the intersection of game rules and structured activities to facilitate innovative thinking, and came up with a model that guides thinking about social interaction to optimize useful outcomes.   The approach incorporates, on a quick survey, a lot of techniques to overcome our cognitive limitations. I really like his approach to provide an underlying rationale about why activities that follow the structure implicitly address our cognitive limitations and are highly effective at getting individuals to contribute to some emergent outcomes.

I also happened to have a conversation with a lady who has been creating some local salons, particular get-togethers that have a structured approach to interaction (I’ve attended another such).   Hers was based upon biasing the conversation to the creative side, a very intriguing approach. Not only was she thinking of leveraging this for tech topics, but she was also thinking about leveraging new technologies, e.g., a Second Life Salon.

Which got me thinking that there were some relationships between Dave’s Gamestorming approach and the salons . I wouldn’t be surprised to find salons in Dave’s book!   Moreover, however, was that there are intriguing potentials from tapping into virtual worlds to remove the geographic constraints on such social interactions.

What was also interesting to me, reflecting on an early experience with the Active Worlds virtual world, your attention eventually focused on the chat stream, because that’s where all meaningful interaction really happened.   Which is really what #lrnchat is, a chat.     One of the nice properties of a chat is that you’re not limited to turn-taking.   A problem in the real world is that the more people you add, the less time each gets to contribute in a conversation. In a simultaneous medium like #lrnchat, everyone can contribute as fast as they can, and the only limitations are on the participants ability to process the stream and contribute (which are, admittedly, finite).   Still, it’s a richer medium for contribution, as I find I can process more chats in the same time only one person would talk (of course, the 140 char limit helps too).

The important thing to me is that social media have new capabilities to enable contribution, and achieve the innovation end that Dave’s excited about in ways that maximize the outcomes based upon new technology affordances that we are just beginning to appreciate.   Can we do better than we’ve done in the past, leveraging new technologies?   I think Dave’s model can serve for virtual as well as real events, and we may be able to improve upon the activities with some technology capabilities.   To do so, however, means we really have to look at our capabilities in conjunction with new technologies.   Yeah, I think we can have some fun with that ;).

Thou Shalt Learn!

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Like that will work…not!   Seriously, there are several things that have to line up to get social media working for you (which, if you’ve been paying attention, is the new and only sustainable competitive advantage).   As I discussed a couple of days ago, your learners have to have the skills.   But there are a couple of other things you have to have in place.

First, you have to have the tools.   And, frankly, not just any tools.   There are some nuances that will likely make a difference.   Certainly usability is one. The closer the necessary usage steps are to a) familiar uses and/or b) user goals, the more likely the tools will be used. Similarly, the more they’re aligned with the user’s task flow, and tasks, the more likely they’ll be used to the benefit of the organization.   The notion is that the tools are ‘ready to hand’ as the need strikes.

You also have to have a culture where contributing is accepted: safe, even rewarded.   I previously commented on the dimensions necessary, including a supportive learning environment, leadership, and concrete processes and practices.   People won’t contribute if it’s not safe, valued, and rewarded.   As my ITA colleague Jon Husband says, wirearchy is based upon trust and credibility, as well as information and knowledge.   Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham, in their new book The New Social Learning, similarly emphasize trust.

The fact of the matter is, if you build it, they may not come.   There are lots of reasons why people may be hesitant, and really you have to actively recruit and support their participating in most cases.   They have to experience it, perceive the value, and still be supported in adopting the regular use of a social infrastructure.   It will take time, but the outcomes are powerful.   Just don’t go into it naively; either be willing to take the time to experiment and learn, or bring in the outside help to accelerate your use of social learning to accelerate learning in the big sense: problem-solving, experimentation, research, creativity, etc (all those areas that contribute to organizational innovation and success).

Social media is the key to leveraging the power of people, to learn, and you don’t want to leave it to chance.   Really, it’s learn or die.   Which are you keen on?

Learning Experience Design Strategy

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On our weekly twitter learning fest, #lrnchat, I regularly identify myself as a learning experience design strategist.   I don’t always assume people know what that means, but for that audience I figure they can infer what it means.   However, I think the idea is worth exploring, because increasingly I think that not only is that what I do, but it also is important.

First, I think it is important to stop thinking about content, and start thinking about learning experience.   It’s too easy, when focusing on content, to focus on knowledge, not skills, yet skills are what will make the difference – the ability to do.   Also, it helps focus on the conative side of learning, the motivation for and anxiety about learning when you think about the learner experience. And, as always, I take a broad interpretation of learning, so this holds true beyond formal learning; it applies to thinking about performer experience when you consider the tools they’ll have, and even the way that access to communities and other informal learning components will be made available in situ.

When you think about creating learning experiences, you are talking about design.   How do you create effective and engaging learning experiences?   You need a design process, tools, and good concepts around learning and engagement.   Really, both my book on designing engaging learning experiences, and my forthcoming one on mobile learning, are at core about design.   And there are levels of design, from individual experiences to the architecture and infrastructure that can support the rich suite of experiences that characterize an organization’s full needs.

Which takes us to the last part, strategy.   By and large, I don’t do the design anymore, since I can add more value at a higher level.   Increasingly, what I’m doing is helping organizations look at their needs, current state, teams, processes, and more, and helping them develop a strategic approach to delivering learning experiences.   I help design pedagogies, processes, templates, and short-, medium-, and long-term steps.   And it is in this way that I accomplish what my first real client told me I did for them, I helped them take their solutions to the ‘next level’.

I think learning experience design is important, so important that I want to not just execute against a project at a time, but find ways to develop capability so a lot more good learning experience is created.   That means working with groups and systems. More organizations need this than might be imagined: I’ve done this for for-profit education, education publishing, those servicing corporate learning needs, and of course organizations (governmental and corporate)   wanting their external or internal learning solutions to be effective and engaging.   The sad fact is, too much ‘learning design’ is content design, still.   I’m always looking for ways to help spread a better way of creating learning.

For example, I ran a ‘deeper ID’ workshop this week for a team, and presented the concepts, modeled the application to samples of their learning objectives, gave them a practice opportunity, and wrapped up, across each of the learning elements. It was a way to address learning design in a bigger way. An extension would be to then submit sample content to me to have me comment, developing their abilities over time, as I did with another client working on integrating scenarios.

There are lots of ways this plays out, not just workshops but developing content models, spreading new metaphors for mobile learning, creating pedagogy templates, and more, but I reckon it is important work, and I have the background to do it.   I’ve found it hard to describe in the past, and I do question whether the ‘learning’ label is somewhat limiting, given my engagement in social learning with ITA and more, but I reckon it’s the right way to think about it. So I’ll keep describing it this way, and doing this work, until someone gives me a better idea!

Don’t take learning skills for granted!

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In all the excitement about empowering learners by providing rich information and social environments, it’s too easy to think that “if you build it, they will learn”.   Yet the evidence is to the contrary. While there are numerous components, including a culture that tolerates diversity and doesn’t punish honest mistakes, one that is easy to neglect the actual learning skills of employees. My ITA colleague Charles Jennings made a nice first pass at a list of useful skills.

Individual learning skills include the ability to know where to look for what, and how to write good search queries and evaluate search results. While you would think that at least the so-called ‘digital natives’ (a myth) would have these skills down, a UK study   found to the contrary that they were “anything but expert searchers”. On the contrary, there was a gap between performance and self-estimates of skill (a general trend when 80% of people think they’re above average :), and little time spent evaluating the quality of the information.

Social learning skills similarly should not be assumed.   As I mentioned in my previous screed on social learning design, my experience showed that learners don’t necessarily know how to work together.   The full suite of how to: be trustworthy, be appropriate, ask for help, give help, discuss intelligently, collaborate usefully and more are all not necessarily in the competency set of your audience.

Back when Jay Cross and I were pushing Meta-Learning, we argued, and still believe, that one of the best investments you could make would be to focus on the learning skills of your team, ensuring they’re optimally capable of learning new things.   That’s certainly true for information/knowledge/concept workers.   Coupled with a similarly light and strategic investment in social learning infrastructure, it seems like the biggest bang you can get for your buck.

I suggest identifying the necessary skills, making them explicit in the organization, and even assessing and developing those skills.   In a time of increasing complexity, helping learners address complexity seems like an obviously valuable investment!

Designing Social Processing

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In reflecting on the presentation I gave earlier this week, I realize that I didn’t make it clear that just making it social will make activities lead to better processing.   Of course, my goal was evangelizing, but I reckon I should followup with some clarity.   There are some design principles involved.

First, the assignment itself needs to be designed to involve valuable processing activities.   If it’s merely reviewing other’s comments (after you’ve had them either “restate the concepts in your own words” or “indicate how this explains something in your past or will influence your future behavior”), asking for a “contentful contribution” (where you’ve made clear that a contentful contribution addresses the substance of their post in an elaborative or constructively critical way) is fairly straightforward. If, however, you’re looking for discussion, you will need to strive for a topic that is likely to have different points of view, either from a base of values or from different conceptions.   Areas where misconceptions are rife are useful as they can be used for constructive feedback.

If you’re asking them to collaborate to apply the knowledge to a problem (which I encourage), then you’ll want to find an application exercises the core knowledge in ways that is as closely related as possible to how they’ll need to apply it in the world.   Choose appropriately challenging applications that will bring out differences of opinion that will need active interaction to resolve.   Having teams submit intermediate representations gives the instructor a chance to provide guidance, ala Laurillard.

However, there’s more than just the assignment.   For one, do not assume learners know how to interact well on a collaborative project.   When I first assigned such to online learning teams, they questioned how to work together. I’m glad they did, as I was able to develop a set of guidelines for them that subsequently smoothed the process.   Things like each coming up with their draft response, and then sharing before negotiating a shared approach are not necessarily obvious to learners.

Finally, you need to have an environment where learners understand the expectations about taking responsibility for learning and contributing sincerely on projects, as well as tolerating differences of opinion and tolerating diversity.   Don’t assume it, engineer it by stating at the outset what’s appropriate, and always welcome inquiries on process.

Social learning does provide richer processing (next to an individual Socratic tutor, but that’s not very scalable), but it takes careful design as well.   Design your learning experiences well, and generate powerful outcomes!

Transforming Business: Social Media and Conversations

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In a conversation with my ITA colleagues (we keep a Skype channel open and conversations emerge daily), we revisited the idea that there’s a higher perspective that needs to be highlighted: social media is a business engine, both internally and externally!   Jane Hart’s been helping clients with social media marketing, and this has been an entree to talk about social media for working and learning.

The point here is that conversations are the engine of business.   (I mean conversations in the broad sense of discussions, collaborations, partnerships, productive friction, and more.)   We converse, therefore we work.   Just as, internally,   innovation, research, new products etc are the results of interaction, so to are the external aspects of business. Market research is listening to customers, branding is conversations about value propositions, negotiations with partners and suppliers, RFPs, it’s all communication. And, the Cluetrain Manifesto has let us know that with the internet and more open information, we can’t control the conversation, we have to be authentic and engage in open communication.

So if we move up a level, we recognize that both internally and externally, to succeed we need to facilitate conversations.   We need a social media infrastructure that allows stakeholders internally and externally to negotiate mutual goals and collaborate to achieve them.   The successful organization needs to fundamentally rewire itself into a wirearchy.   He who communicates best, wins.

Communication is fundamental to human nature; we’ve developed the ability to accelerate our adaptation to the environment by communication.   We’ve moved from evolution to invention.   We interact, therefore we are.   I’ve largely been focused on internal dialog, but it’s clear that from an executive perspective, you need to realize that communication is fundamental, and social media is another technology lever to move the earth. We’ve been doing it with the phone and email, but there are so many more powerful tools to augment those now. We moved from the buggy to the automobile, and we can (and should) move from email to a rich social media environment. If we want competitive advantage, at any rate.   And you do, don’t you?

Social InFormal – it’s the network!

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Yesterday, I talked about how social added to formal learning.   Today I want to extend social learning learning to informal learning.   When I talked about the value social adds to formal, it was about processing the information in richer ways, to help facilitate learning.   However, the value proposition for informal learning is different.

We can start, however, with formal learning, because I see learning as a continuum from formal to collaboration.   We start with designed activities to generate productive processing, but then we could and should want that learning to extend out into the community, where the fostered understanding can take root and grow.   It’s about having others improve on what we start with in a virtuous cycle (just as Dave Ferguson added breed to my original seed, feed, and weed).

While our individual learning might involve a portal with resources and search engines, our social learning goes beyond this.   We again see expressing ideas and adding feedback to others, but now it’s very task-focused, particularly in collaboration.   Further, we can specifically ask for help and pointers, and track others’ information that serve as virtual mentors for us.We are our network.

And it’s this latter, this collection of people who we’ve come to recognize as valuable, as well as those we may not even know about but input into the same mental space, where the deliberate and serendipitous collide to provide synergistic value.

This is a slightly different cut on it than Harold Jarche captures, focusing more on the processes of working than the organizational role, but in both cases, it’s still about the network.   It’s about what the network can add to our ability to do.

And, of course, it’s about putting in place the infrastructure that enables performers to tap into their network as easily as they can tap into organizational resources, so that the focus is on the task, not on the tools.

Social Formal – it’s the processing!

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In thinking about the benefits of adding social to formal learning for a presentation I’ll be giving, I realized that the main reason to extend social activities into formal learning is for the additional processing it provides.   While there is processing individually, social interaction provides more opportunities.

The types of learning processing that matter for learning are personalizing, elaborating, and applying.   All of this can be done individually. We can: restate what we understand, write up what the content means to us personally, write up how the concept could be reconsidered, and apply the knowledge to solve problems.   Our goals are retention over time ’til the learning is needed, and transfer to all appropriate situations.   Applying it is the most useful, but it’s a probabilistic game.   We work to increase the likelihood that the learner will succeed (even with criterion-referenced approaches, some may not make it).

Those forms of processing are useful, but feedback is better. Diana Laurillard, in her book Rethinking University Teaching had a conversational model where the learner articulated their understanding after performing and then the instructor could provide feedback. This doesn’t always scale well, however.   Are there other things we can do?

Well, how about if we require learners to put out their thoughts to each other, and then have them comment on the other’s thoughts? There are additional processing benefits here.   First, learners are listening to other, possibly wrong or different interpretations, and they have to review their understanding of the material to provide feedback.   Internalizing that monitoring of the concept is really useful to create a self-improving learner! So, just having them comment on each other is a first step.

However, having them having to negotiate a shared understanding is better. Having learners work to create a shared definition or response to an extension question means that they can’t just ‘agree to disagree’, but have to work to a compromise. That knowledge negotiation is a very powerful tool to get them to reprocess the concept and refine their understanding.   Thiagi, for example, has a whole suite of training exercises that are specifically design to get learners working together to reprocess information.

And, if we are after meaningful skill shifts (and we should be), then having them actually apply the knowledge to solve a problem or create a response to a contextualized performance should be our ultimate task.   Here, learners have to work together to determine not only their understanding, but how it applies to a particular circumstance, committing as a team to their solution. With the right amount of ambiguity in the process, learners will have to wrestle with the issues to create a response.

The outcomes from social learning extend and augment individual processing in ways that make the material more memorable.   They not only have to create a response, but they have internal cycles of feedback and refinement that are more than any realistic cycle of assignment and formal feedback can provide.   And, typically, the only cost besides social media is the ability to develop meaningful tasks.

Look, we know that information dump and check doesn’t work.   Processing does.   Processing together is more engaging and more effective, and usually quite cost effective.   What more do you want?

What is the Important Work?

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When you look at the changes going on in society, and the implications for business, you realize that there are some significant changes going on.   This isn’t news: things are moving faster, we’re having less resources available, our competition is more agile, the amount of relevant information is increasing, customers are more aware, the list goes on.   Does this mean something fundamental, however?

I want to argue that it does. Not surprisingly for regular readers, I think that the nature of work is changing.   The success factor for businesses will be, increasingly, the ability to:

  • continually innovate
  • conduct useful research
  • experiment
  • learn from mistakes
  • create new processes
  • solve problems
  • create new products/services/offerings/markets/businesses

In essence, to do the important work faster.   Call it knowledge work, call it concept work, the point is that execution will only   be the cost of entry, innovation will be the necessary differentiator.   The fact is, our brains are really good at pattern matching, and bad at rote work. Training people to do rote work is a dying enterprise. We should be reserving our brains for making decisions, dealing with ambiguity, and working together to create new understandings. That, increasingly, is the important work. And facilitating that work is job number one.

Now, I recognize that there’s a lot of work and businesses out there that are doing just fine as they are.   But that’s not the way to bet.   That’s likely to change in a relatively small window.   Some have postulated it on the order of 5 years.   No matter how cool your innovation is (c.f. the iPad), look how fast competitors come out (within months). That’s not a sufficient barrier to entry. And the work that’s not the important work?   Well, that could and should be outsourced or automated. Rote work isn’t how you add value, and create margins.

So, the important question becomes, how do we get the ability to do the important work?   And that, my friends, is why the ITA is on a crusade about wirearchy, personal knowledge management, social media, informal learning, and new L&D skills.   Because the only way to do the important work is to enable the power of your people. You need to get out of the old hierarchical ‘one thinks for many’ world, and start recognizing the importance of organization culture, of facilitating communication and collaboration, of enabling the necessary elements.

We believe that recognizing the inherent value of individual and collective capability, and honoring it with meaningful work and the best support, makes for more enjoyable and successful organizations.   We’re seeing the possibilities, tracking and developing the methods and tools, and helping organizations make the transition.   Are you ready to do the important work?