I’m still reeling from the intellectual stimulation of the Corporate Learning Trends Conversations on Learning in Organizations that was held a few days ago.   One other big learning for me, in addition to the responsibility of learners, was the issue of corporate learning culture. There were two facets to this.

The first facet has to do with the characteristics of a culture that is conducive to collaboration and communication.   From a business point of view, it’s about execution and innovation.   Execution works in well-defined domains, but innovation requires a variety of factors that characterize a learning organization, including feeling safe to contribute, tolerance for different ideas, and more.   Increasingly, I believe, organizations that can innovate fastest will be those that thrive,   so successful organizations will be learning organizations.

One of the participants mentioned organizations where you can’t share mistakes, and that’s emblematic of organizations that hire smart, aggressive people and expect them to go out and succeed. Which leads to some smart choices, but also you see repeats of the same mistakes.   You don’t really see the effects of that culture until you put in social media, where it becomes obvious whether people are contributing, sharing, etc.

And that was the point I made: to address culture, you have to be explicit about it, it can’t just be background.   An organization should choose it’s culture, with a recognition of where it is now. You’ve got to be realistic, or you won’t be able to sell it, which may include being honest about how it has to change.   But if you don’t talk about it, make it explicit, support change, reward changet, etc, it can’t happen.   It may not be easy, but it should be done.

The second facet has to do with cross-cultural issues.   In the session, Allison Anderson of Intel and Dave Wilkins of Mzinga and I discussed the challenges of trying to cross borders and cultures.   I pointed to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions via a web tour, in making a point about how different cultures can have values that are contrary to a sharing culture.

I cited an example where a company in a country with a low gender difference (MAS) value had acquired a company from a country with a high gender difference value. The potential problem is that a male engineer from the high gender difference country might not listen to a female engineer from the low difference country, yet this would not be in the company’s best interest.

There are clearly problems in expecting someone to adopt a company culture different than their national culture, and yet there is clearly some advantage.   I idealistically suggest it’s worth the effort, if you buttress it with vision and mission, discusison about organizational success, and provide support for the transition.

Like with responsibility for learning, corporate vision & mission, and accepted ethical standards, organizational cultural values needs to be discussed explicitly: defined, modeled, scaffolded, and even evaluated and rewarded.   If it’s not explicit, it’s not fair to assume.   This is really about taking responsibility for organizational learning at a larger level, architecting it, and leveraging technology as an infrastructure that supports the architecture.   It’s meta-learning, and that’s the paradigm I think organizations need to not just survive, but thrive.

On the fantastic Corporate Learning Trends online conference Conversations on Learning in Organizations, one of the topics that came up was “How can we get learners to take resonsibility for their learning”, and it’s a critical one.

At the end of the day, we can’t create learning, we can only (at best) design environments that are conducive to learning.   Learners have to actually take action.   Now, in most instances they’re willing (though our current formal learning is often antithetical to ease of learning; e.g. “spray and pray”, “show up and throw-up” sessions), but when we go beyond the formal course (and we should), we largely abandon learners to their own devices.

That’s a mistake, as the empirical evidence is that efficacious self-learners are relatively rare.   They get by, but they’re far from optimal.   For instance, the first online courses had high dropout rates and relatively low success until they started facilitating the learning process.   Similarly, the work literacy movement is specifically to address the need for these skills.

And it’s not only about skills, but also attitude. When I was teaching at a university, I was always dismayed at the number of students who’s attitude was “just tell me what I need to do to get a good grade”, without caring about the inherent interest in the subject.   Sure, our current schooling may well extinguish the love of learning, and so may the ‘industrial’ approach to training.   However, an intrinsic interest in learning is critical to success, individually, organizationally, and societally.

However, organizationally don’t talk about learning, about learning skills, and we don’t take responsibility for developing those learning skills and making them meaningful.

So my first response was, and is, we need to be explicit about learning skills: about their existence, importance.   And we need to do more, we need to measure them, model them, develop them, and reward them.

As many have noted over the past 24 hours of the conference, the role of the organizational learning function is shifting to facilitating learning, not delivering it.   While there’s still a role for formal learning, our pedagogies and our responsibilities need to shift to learning facilitation, both formal and informal.

Learners need to be assisted in taking responsibility for their learning, and we need to take responsibility for making it so.   In the end, organizations that learn best, will be the ones that survive, and thrive!   So be responsible, and support responsibility!

This starts out slightly technical, but eventually gets to the learning!

My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games (FaceMaker & Spellicopter may be the two best known titles).   When I went back to grad school, I went for the design side, though I’ve kept the ability to understand what technology does, and do a bit more than the average bear.

So when my internet connection started getting flaky, I realized I had a problem.   Not the basic problem, but because there were several comonents in the chain, and it’s hard to isolate one without substitute parts.   And, of course, when you have two potential culprits, it’s so typical to have the manufacturer of one blame the other, and vice versa!   Now, my DSL modem and my wireless router were both quite old, at least 4 years and maybe as old as 6 or more.   And I didn’t have a spare of either router or modem. What was I to do?

(Tech details)

For those who are curious, the DSL signal comes in on the phone line, and then the modem translates it into ethernet. That could go straight into the computer, but instead I have that go to a wireless router to serve all the devices in the house (currently 4 computers, a Wii, two DS’s, and my iPhone; when no one’s visiting!).   The phenomenom I was seeing was the connection starting to hang on various accesses.   Rebooting both router and modem solved the problem (rebooting only one never seemed to work), but only for a while (8-24 hours). BTW, this behavior was described both by the ATT guy and a guy at Fry’s as classic hardware going bad.

I called ATT, and they agreed to send me a new modem (I reupped for a year).   That came and I managed to get it installed.   Took several tries, since they forgot to tell me that the modem now stores it’s own account login details, so those detalis don’t need to be stored in the router!   Ahem.   That one bit of info, and I was up and running again.

For a while.   Then the flakiness happened again.   So off I went to Fry’s for a router. For a ridiculously low price they had a refurbished one available, so I nabbed it. Same brand, only a newer version of my old one, which I was happy with.

Taking that home, I finally accessed it’s settings, but couldn’t make it talk to the modem!   The lights on both modem and router said they were connected, but no traffic would go through.   And I couldn’t access the settings via wireless, and it took a long time for the settings page (you control the router through a web page it hosts internally).

I took the router back and exchanged it.   I was willing to bet that the first one was just flaky.   With the new one, the settings page came up almost instantly, and I could access it wirelessly as well.   OK, that seemed better.And the lights indicated everything was fine. But, no traffic was still going through!?!?

I was pretty sure that, it being the weekend, I couldn’t get help ’til Monday, but I searched the Netgear site anyways, and they said they had phone help 24 hours, so I called and got through.   The guy there first said he couldn’t help me by phone for a refurbished modem, but then proceeded to tell me just what the problem was (turns out he couldn’t walk me through online, but could give me the details, which was all I needed).   Of all crazy things, the modem and the new router both want the same URL!   He had me reset the router’s IP address to something different, and viola’, I’m online!

(End tech details)

The learning here is severalfold.   First, systematicity helps.   Now, I know that, but it’s nice to have a chance to practice it.   One of things I miss most about not programming anymore, besides the ability to create new experiences, is debugging.   I loved using logic to try and figure out what’s wrong, and testing, repairing, and so on. I used to work on cars with my Dad, and the same process would be followed.   I think systematic research and testing is a meta-learning skill, and one we really don’t teach in school, yet it’s critical!

Another meta-learning skill, or really attitude, is persistence. I didn’t have an option, because no internet connection would be a critical business issue.   Fortunately I had a connection, it was just flaky (and with all this online seminar action coming up!.   And I admit there were times when I was tempted to use bad language (or did), and/or had to take time out to cool off.   But I kept thinking, testing, talking, reading, and more.

Of course, the two critical pieces of information would’ve been devastating if I didn’t have them.   And I didn’t find either in a discussion forum, I talked to people, live. I’ve learned to be very clear about the steps I’ve already taken, and that helps to short-circuit what can often be very basic stuff (e.g. “did you plug it in, and are the lights lit”). I mentioned that I’d tried the manual, and my steps, which helps build credibility with the tech person (the router person commented that he thought I could do with just the instructions).

So, I think we could and should spend more time developing reasoning skills as well as rote knowledge (duh!), and help people learn to share their thinking to help identify the problems faced.

And now, here’s hoping it was the hardware and not a different problem!

Note that this ate up a lot of my time this past week, what with store, and time on tech support, etc, so this is also an apology for my lack of blogging this past week!