I had lunch with John Darling of Q2Learning today.   They’ve got an interesting positioning, going beyond just learning events to a learning experience with a stated goal of achieving proficiency.   I’d known him from before through the eLearning Forum, but we’d never really sat down and talked.   We’d gotten connected via TogetherLearn, and naturally our conversation ranged around formalizing informal learning.

We were talking about a conversation he had with a CFO, where the CFO estimated about 3% of their budget was going to training, and admitted that they needed 20-25% improvement in their ability.   Obviously, there are issues of whether traditional training could have that big an impact, but clearly there’s a mismatch.

Now, I believe that learning is more than skilling up to some minimal baseline.   I believe it encompasses the information access to support performance, mentoring from the top end of novice through practitioner, and communication and collaboration that supports problem-solving and innovation.   And the associated skills.   Not only do novel inquiries and problems get dealt with, but new products, services, customer experiences, and more are the outcome of the full performance ecosystem.

There are two obvious questions here: where would an organization get 20-25% performance improvement?   Not just from training, I’ll wager.   You need to create a more coherent learnscape, where people are continually moving to the center of their communities of practice, where more people are effective learners, self-learners, and together-learners, where the cultural values and learning skills are as explicit as the organizational goals and individual roles.   I’d suggest that you’ll get more from wrapping structure around informal than investing purely in formal!   (Which is not to say that formal isn’t needed, though if it’s no better than most of the training that’s out there, it may as well not be done…)

The other question is: where’s the money?   I want to suggest that when it gets into problem-solving, innovation, etc, it goes beyond a training budget to operations and R&D.   R&D will undoubtedly have some infrastructure costs, but I’ll suggest that the innovation and problem-solving skills that are supported across the organization will have a substantial impact on R&D outcomes as well as more operational metrics.   Similarly, operations has some ancillary costs, but support costs should be minimized by   both empowering staff to augment their resources and sharing their learnings. For that matter, marketing gets into the picture when you consider bringing customers into the learning equation (they will self-help if they can with a reasonable amount of effort!).

My point is that we’re thinking about organizational learning wrong, and consequently we’re thinking wrong about outcomes and budgets wrong as well.   Training departments are often encouraged to be strategic. What I want to suggest is strategic, at the organizational level, is thinking of learning as a continuum from formal to exploration, and recognizing that it is an increasing contribution to organizational success.

In short, we don’t deserve a budget if we’re not contributing to real outcomes, and the outcomes that matter are going to shift from mere ability to excellence, from following the procedure to solving problems, from product life-cycles to customized solutions.

So get strategic, and start thinking about systemic support for ‘learning’.   You’ll get the budget you deserve, so deserve a meaningful budget!

I’ve been reading a few books about schools, since my lad’s made the transition from elementary to middle school and it’s been a bit of a battle.   When he’s being set assignments like coloring in a poster on math facts, I’m a wee bit concerned.   John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down was a wakeup call (he won NY teacher of the year for a couple of years, and insightfully (and incitefully) criticizes our current school system.   So, when I noticed that Daniel Willingham (who’ve I talked about before) had a book out, I checked it out.

His Why Don’t Students Like School sounded like another tirade against schools, but it’s more positive than that. The subtitle tells you more: “A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for your classroom”.   It follows a format of:

• question related to successful learning through teaching
• the cogntive science research that underpins this question
• specific recommendations for improving teaching

Fortunately, I could just skim the second part, which is the meat of the book, courtesy of my own PhD in cognitive science, and it was review.   But what really struck home was how he (as reviewers repeatedly point out) uses “clear and compelling language” to help the audience really understand what’s important.   He’s got great examples, and makes a large chunk of cognitive research comprehensible.   Which is not to say it’s a light read, but it’s accessible and clear.

More importantly, the third part of each chapter, his conclusions, are very concrete and actionable. If teachers followed these guidelines, they’d have happier learners and better learning outcomes.   What more do you want?   (Ok, well, curriculum reform, but this is aimed at teachers.)

He covers a lot of ground.   In nine chapters (this isn’t a long book, just deep and relevant), he covers motivation, learning styles, cognitive skills, and more. He answers the core questions and the ancillary questions that emerge. And, no, I don’t agree with him on quite all of it (e.g. on making content meaningful, he’s concerned that too familiar or interesting tasks may overwhelm the intrinsic lesson), but I suspect we’d find if we sat down that we’re agreeing furiously.

I have to say that if all my children’s teachers read this book, their schooling would be a lot better.   If all our children’s teachers read this book, schools would be a lot better.   So, if you’re a teacher, read this book.   If you work with teachers, know teachers, or influence teachers, get them to read this book.   And if you   design learning experiences, even if you don’t actually teach, you should read this book.

Cognitive science research oriented towards making better learning, in a digestable form.   It doesn’t get much better than this.   I have no higher praise for a book than “I wish I’d written it”, and I do.   Highly recommended.

Last night I went to hear Ross Dawson speak on the Future of the Enterprise.   His points resonated with a lot of what I and my TogetherLearn colleagues have been saying about the changes we’re seeing.   I really do think that some changes are in the air.

Ross reiterated the notion that the current context is a state of increasing change.   Things are moving faster, and the chaotic reality underpinning our existence is being brought into highlight more and more.   He talked about how commoditization is a driving economic factor, the fact that others can reproduce what you create quickly, so there’s incredible pressure to have to build more on top.   I afterward asked him and he supported my contention that optimal execution is only the price of entry, and that continual innovation and delivering a seamless customer experience will be the differentiator.

He asked a series of five questions at the end, and one was how we got people to participate.   Verna Allee suggested leadership would be even more critical. Another attendee thought that companies would have to offer compelling experiences for employees as well.   I do think that helping individuals comprehend the vision, letting them figure out how to achieve the necessary goal, and creating an empowering environment are critical.

Another question had to do with how organizations would be structured going forward.   Ross made a clever reference to how the word ‘corporation’ comes from corpus, or body, and that organizations now were much more a distributed enterprise: networks of employees, suppliers, clients, partners, contractors, etc.   “The organization is just a persistent network.”

A point made was that all that matters are relationships and knowledge, particularly when manufacturing can be ‘on demand’, and that mass participation creates value. If the organization is a network, and all these participants generate the value, organizations have to support networking for knowledge work, getting contributions from empowered learners.   To cope in this age of increasing disruptive influences, it’s critical.

It’s time for organizations to get serious about providing infrastructure that supports workers networking, communicating, collaborating, problem-solving, innovating, learning.   Coupled with a supportive culture and clear vision, it’s the wave of the future.   Ross thought that in five years time, the new organizational imperatives would be clear.   That doesn’t give you a lot of time to get moving, and you really ought to begin last week if you want to be a leader, not a late adopter.

Get moving, or get help!

During the course of my TrainingMagNetwork presentation on “Blow up the training department, why incrementalism won’t cut it anymore”, I asked the audience whether their ‘group’ (learning function) took separate responsibility for each of the following learning support tasks/roles:

• Training/Courses?
• eLearning/Webinars?
• Job Aids?
• Portals?
• Social Media?
• Mobile?
• Content/Knowledge Management?

I had them respond with either a ✓ or a red ✘, depending on whether their group was covering it or not.   I don’t have the quantitative results, but the overall trend was not surprising, but indicative.

As we went down the list, the proportion of green dropped off, and the proportion of red took over, systematically.   Well, right ’til the end.   Whether due to some good strategy, or a loose interpretation of content management, we got more green again at the bottom of the list (and that’s a good thing).

And that’s my point.   To me, all those elements are part of supporting organizational performance from a learning standpoint. As I’ve argued before, I think innovation, problem-solving, design, and more are part of learning.   And I think that best is supported by a learning function, not IT, or KM, let alone marketing or sales.   However, it does not come from a training function or mindset.   They should all be green!

Which is why I want to blow up the training department.   Not only because they’re following broken pedagogies, as I’ve argued before, but because unless they’re part of a larger learning function, they’re not meeting the real need.

Now, I admit I’m being deliberately ‘stirring’ things up by talking about blowing things up, but as I did in the presentation, I ask: do I mean like a bomb or a balloon?   And I mean blow up the old formal training pedagogy like a bomb, and blow up the responsibility of the training department like a balloon, to cover the entire performance ecosystem.

So, my answer to my titular question is ‘both’.   :)

In trying to get attention for work, a colleague is concerned with the ‘learning’ label being a potential detriment.   It’s probably true, and that’s a sad state of affairs.   While I joke that we who work in the learning/training/performance/etc field are those who’ve retained their love of learning despite schooling, I do believe that there’s some baggage associated with the term.

If you put on a ‘serious business’ perspective, learning can seem like warm and fuzzy coddling.   “What we really need is to hire the talent we need and let them know what to do and have them do it, right? They’ll do it, and like it, or they’re out!”   Which, of course, is ridiculous, but who doesn’t believe that view is out there?

What’s really the case is that each organization will have it’s own way of doing things, and that individuals will need to be brought up to speed, then provided resources to support performing, and expected to contribute. And, as I am coming to believe, as things get more complex, we’ll need more from people in terms of adaptation.

Or, as Kevin Wheeler put it:

Today success is in the hands of creative people who have energy and excitement over reaching a business objective. These people are hard to find and hard to keep as their energy and entrepreneurial spirit are not always suited to a controlled environment.   They need space, time, and freedom to experiment. They thrive in a networked world where they can exchange ideas, swap experiments, and engage in conversation.

That, to me, is learning.   To look at it another way, I lump innovation, problem-solving, creativity, design, and more all as activities of learning.   Herb Simon said “to design is human”, and I believe that design is about learning.   But maybe it’s about thinking?   Doing?

So, to me, it’s a shame that a ‘learning’ label would be a barrier to being perceived as relevant to business, but that seems to be the case.   My question is, do we rebrand, or do we reengineer learning’s status in the organization.   I don’t have an answer, do you?