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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Economic Catastrophe (& more culture)

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I’m finding it hard today to be positive after listening to a couple of well-reasoned analyses of our economic crisis.   One analyzes the current economic crisis, explaining the complex economic structures created and unregulated (admittedly a US perspective).   The other is an “Inconvenient Truth” on the larger economic picture here in the US.   If you have to watch one, however, I’ll recommend the latter as more important.   Our childrens’, and our country’s future are at stake.   So let’s see if I can spin some gold out of this mess.

I’ve already talked about investing in culture, and I want to reiterate and elaborate on that message.   I listened to a free webinar the other day via the Institute for Corporate Productivity, where they’d done a survey on companies and asked about their culture. There was good news in their results: there was a significant correlation between the assessment of cultural elements surveyed and the success of the company.   And bad: not many companies scored highly on all eight.   A couple of factors stood out; areas for improvement included: generating trust among employees, encouraging innovation, nimbleness of the organization, and empowering workers to do their best.

Actually, I take it as good news; first that culture matters, as it’s an area a learning person can have a role in, and second that there is room for improvement, so you can have an impact.   The important issue is to become aware that culture matters, and take positive steps to improve the situation.

And there are concrete steps you can take.   You need to identify what your culture should be, and currently is, and address the delta.   In this post about making an innovative ecosystem (part of a performance ecosystem; pointed to on Twitter, btw I’m @Quinnovator), there are a number of prescriptions.   Diversity is to be supported, small experiments are valuable, nimbleness rules.   In support of that you need people to feel safe to experiment, collaborate to success (innovations typically are not the output of an individual but of a group, as Keith Sawyer tells us), etc.

So, organizations that focus on positive cultures succeed better.   I reckon that’s going to be even more true in truly rough times.   What are you doing to increase your contribution to organizational success?

Words of Wisdom*

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L&D  speaking:

We got into elearning when there were scattered experiments going on around the organization.   Of course we stopped those, as we need a coordinated approach.   We want to grow in a controlled way.

Our first move was, of course, to purchase an LMS.   A good LMS is like a fine automobile, with lots of capabilities to handle all conditions.   We selected the top of the line, to last a long time.   Two years ago it was up and running.   Our vendor was very helpful, taking the necessary time to have it optimally integrated with our IT system.   Our IT group changed the infrastructure a year ago, to *open source*   (I don‘t know what they were thinking), but fortunately my vendor says that they‘d be happy to help change the installation to work with the new services architecture.

We found out that some years ago a competency modeling exercise had been done, so we were able to populate the LMS with the roles, and the associated competencies.   Now our people can look up interesting roles from back then, and see what competencies are required. Then we realized we needed content about those competencies, so we went for the greatest volume per dollar.   You‘ve got to have all the content you can to hopefully match up with those competencies.

It became clear that the off the shelf content didn‘t cover our proprietary processes, so we needed to develop our own content.   We got a full fledged authoring suite and asked our trainers to develop courses.   They’ve become very good at taking those PDFs and PowerPoints and putting them up online with quiz questions.   Of course we have pre-tests so we can show a delta and validate our work.   It‘s amazing how quick we can crank one of these out!   We‘ve got to find more content to transform, as our team is just too efficient at it.   Now we’re looking at PowerPoint plugins.   We‘re getting more flexible, too.   We used to have SMEs give workshops, and those were attended, so we’ve purchased virtual presentation software to allow our SMEs to present online.   Who needs all this rapid eLearning stuff?   And that LMS makes it easy to schedule the presentations!

We’re doing some more trendy things as well.   Right now games are hot, and we found that one of our loading dock personnel was a talented game designer. He‘d taken a popular FPS (whatever that means) and built our offices in it, where you wandered around the premises and shot zombies (who represented managers).   We got him to scatter the words of the company mission around the premises, and you pick them up and bring them to headquarters, and when you collect them all there‘s another game where you organize them into the mission statement, and then you win the game.   There‘re still zombies running around to shoot, but now we label them as the competition.

We‘re also aware of the excitement about virtual worlds, and so we’re porting the game into Second Life.   We can‘t figure out how to build zombies, so we‘re paying our employees to act like zombies ‘in world’.   It‘s a bit of incentive to work hard so you can earn a chance to play as a zombie.

While our focus is formal learning, we recognize that all needs may not be able to be met by courses.   We‘ve checked with various departments to see if they’ve got portals of information.   So, to get product information, you go to the sales site, er, or is that engineering?   No matter, what‘s important is that the information is out there, and we provide links to all the portals (there’re hundreds) for all the courses.   However, we need to be focused: the information people need should be available internally, and if there‘s a need, they can ask us to fill it. We strictly firewall off access to the outside, as we don‘t want people getting information that hasn‘t been vetted internally.

We‘re also working on mobile deployment.   We‘ve captured the CEO speaking at the latest shareholder meeting, and we‘ve made available an audio for listening in the car   His vision of the firm, like that of his forefathers, helps us understand just why the firm is as it is.   It‘s available on our portal for downloading.   For a next step, we are trying to convert it to video.   We‘ve also developed a full ethics course for delivery on mobile phones.   There‘s the content to read, and then a quiz that can be uploaded back to our LMS.   It‘s required, so we‘re getting some interest.

We recognize the importance of community.   Beyond the phone, we have email, and we‘re trialing this new ‘instant messaging’.   We continue to track new directions.   There‘s a lot of new TLAs out there, XML, DITA, SCORM, etc.   Frankly, we‘re trying to find someone who knows this stuff.

We‘re careful to know our areas of responsibility.   When someone wants to talk expertise directories, or other KM-type activities, we point them to IT. Wikis and blogs?   We‘ve no time for a drunken Hawaiian party.   Our responsibility ends at formal learning.   Informal learning is an oxymoron.

You‘ve got to ensure you‘ve got an adequate budget, and then you fiercely protect it.   Don‘t spend money unless it will make you look good; better to hoard than to squander.   New technologies need to be touched to demonstrate to management that you‘re on top of industry trends, but going overboard can ruin a career. At the end of the day, you need to find out what the executives are hearing about, and make sure you are doing something with it.   Your job is to respond.

In conclusion, we‘ve implemented a centralized system of eLearning. We‘ve got it all there if people are interested.   Now it‘s up to the managers to get their people to use it.   Little pockets of experimentation keep popping up outside our control, but we‘re pretty good about stopping those and informing them about our capabilities.   Thanks for your time.

Any resemblance to any person purely coincidental; any resemblance to any organization purely intentional.

Learning Organization Dimensions

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After my post on Improving Organizational Learning Infrastructure, Daan Assen suggested that it was too limited in reference to the broader Learning Organization picture.   That’s valuable feedback, because I really mean it to be the learning organization culture and the technology infrastructure, the latter of which isn’t included traditionally in the learning organization work.   Clearly the label has some issues, as Stacy Doolittle also opined, suggesting architecture may be a better word than infrastructure.   Still, I’m not convinced that infrastructure isn’t the most inclusive term. Anyone have an opinion?

The reason I mention this, however, is that Daan pointed me to some work by Garvin & Edmondson that provides some nice characteristics of a learning organization.   It starts with three factors, a supportive environment, concrete processes and practices, and a leadership that reinforces learning.   I think this is a nice breakdown.

These components break up further, so for instance, a supportive learning environment is composed of: psychological safety, openness to new ideas, appreciation of differences, and time for reflection.   That latter one really strikes a chord with me, as that was a major barrier back when we were trying to get traction on meta-learning (and we’re not giving up!).

Concrete processes and practices breaks up into experimentation, information collection and analysis, and education and training.   I note that it doesn’t seem to capture more about informal learning than just providing the environment, and no mention is made of tools or infrastructure.   They may well have reasons for that, but it’s important to me to consider not only the environment, policies, and leadership, but also the channels.

Still, the particular focus on the supportive learning environment is a nice characterization.   You need safety, openness, appreciation, and reflection.   And your social networking tools will make very concrete any gaps in those.   When you see folks not sharing, not tolerating, and not having time, you know you’ve got a barrier.   It’s a mirror to see your organization.   So, what do you see looking back at you?

Collective intelligence patterns

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I had the good fortune to get to meet Tom Malone way back when he was working on what makes computer games fun (cited in my book).   I stopped by PARC (then the geek’s Mecca), and got to bask in the environment that produced the GUI on top of Doug Engelbart’s mouse.

I knew Tom then went on to be a thought leader out of the Sloan School of Management, studying office work and then higher levels of activity, leading to a recent book “The Future of Work”.   I happened to meet him again at an event at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, and he was gracious enough to remember me and discuss his work (I challenged him about his ‘guilds’, since they still can’t get reasonable healthcare that businesses can get, don’t get me started).

I mention this backstory to show the trajectory of thought leadership he’s had (and yet still remain a really nice guy).   He just spoke at the celebration of Doug Engelbart’s work, and while I couldn’t attend, I was looking for blog postings and found his slide deck.

You (should) know I like models, and he’s gone beyond talking about how web 2.0 social networking can facilitate work, to actually analyze and distill some underlying principles. In his presentation on The Landscape of Collective Intelligence, he comes up with four characteristics of design patterns (or genes, as he calls them): What (strategy), Who (staffing), How (structure & process), & Why (incentives/alignment).   This is a really nice systematic breakdown into patterns tied to real examples.

For Who, he distinguishes between a hierarchical arrangement and a crowd, the latter being a more random structure.   He focuses on the latter.   For Why he breaks it out into Money, Love, & Glory.   For What, it’s Create a solution or Decide on an issue.   How is whether you’re having it independent or dependent.   The latter two work out to a nice little matrix with collection, collaboration, many-to-many, and group decision.

I really liked his statement that “failure to get motivational factors right is probably the single greatest cause of failure in collective intelligence experiments”.   That’s insightful, and useful.

The implications for informal learning are obvious, I’ll have to think more about formal learning.   Still, a great foundation for thinking about using networks in productive ways.   Definitely worth a look.

Investing in Culture

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These are uncertain times, and people are curious how to cope.   A recent webinar announcement from i4pc touted how a American Management Association survey concluded: “one of best ways to avoid becoming victim of the economy is to focus on corporate culture”.   That’s great reinforcement, as culture is one of the components of improving organizational learning infrastructure.   Of course, I recommend you take the broader steps, not just culture, but culture is key.

Marcia Conner’s presentation for the Corporate Learning Trends conference was on steps you could take even without a   budget.   Steps were to be more open, get more experts presenting, and more people contributing value.   It’s all about leveraging the existing corporate capabilities in opportunistic new ways.   Lightweight, high value. But it takes a culture where people value contributions, feel safe to share, trust one another’s opinions and values.

And one of the things social networking does is surface your learning culture.   When you provide the opportunity to share, (see the Social Learning Question Of The Day responses, great ideas about the benefits of social learning), you’ll see whether your culture is really supportive.   Of course, you’ll also have the opportunity to address it.   And social networking is one of the lowest cost investments you can make!

Shutting down capability by laying off divisions means you’ll be lagging when things pick up.   Those who invest in internal capability now will be those poised to capitalize when opportunity resurfaces. Don’t you want that to be your organization?

Organizational Learning Infrastructure

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In one of my reflection sessions (aka shower), I was thinking what it is I do.   I’ve been branding it ‘elearning strategy’, but it’s really more than that.   It’s about looking at how organizations develop competence, move to excellence, foster innovation, collaboratively problem-solve, etc.   I’ve had a tagline: “making organizations smarter”, and the inevitable (and desired) follow-up is “how do you do that?”.   However, then the easy, and uninteresting answer, is to fall into talking about elearning, performance support, mobile, portals, knowledge management, all that stuff that makes people’s eyes glaze over if they haven’t seen the light.

What I realized today was that what I’m really about is improving organizational learning infrastructure.   It’s Not About The Technology, as Jay says, though that’s a component of it.   It’s about culture, policies, processes, procedures, tools, templates, incentives, and more. It includes courses, and community, and more.   It’s about assessing the current state, identifying some long-term goals (and values), establishing metrics, prioritizing short, medium, and long term term steps, and executing against them, with regular checks.

With culture, it’s about willingness to share, trust, take considered risks, or developing that ability.   It’s about knowledge and skills how to learn alone and together, using the infrastructure.   It’s about populating the performance ecosystem with support.     It’s about identifying competencies in learning through tools and collaboration.   It’s about providing the technology infrastructure that supports finding or making answers. It’s about experimenting, looking for feedback, and iterating (perpetual beta).   It’s at the individual, team, unit, and organizational level.   It’s about being strategic first, then tactical.

There are frameworks, instruments, best practices, and more to move, but it’s definitely time to move.   I think a survival strategy right now is to invest in capability to you’re poised to move once opportunity comes around again.   So, my answer to the question “how do you make organizations smarter?” and new meme is: improving organizational learning infrastructure.   Are you improving?

What did I learn about learning in 2008?

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The Learning Circuit’s Blog Big Question for December is “What did you learn about learning in 2008?”   It’s good to reflect, and using the end of the calendar year is a traditional time.   Consequently, I trolled back through a year of blog posts.   Whew!

I saw several recurrent threads, but the strongest one is on learning to learn.   I think we’ve seen more focus on that this year, particularly with Tony Karrer & Michelle Martin’s Work Literacy effort, and a lot of the discussion at the Corporate Learning Trends conference (most recently). It’s a theme that appeared in Marcia Conner‘s presentation, in looking at what to do in tough times.   What impressed me is how much it’s been taken on in many places and in many forms, after Jay & I were pushing it several years ago (circa 2003-2004). I’m thrilled, of course.

It’s also a theme that characterizes the TogetherLearn thinking, where it’s about helping people help themselves, but not taking the self-directed and learn-together skills for granted.   Which segues nicely into my second learning, which was about social learning.   I knew about the importance (having been steeped in Vygotsky in grad school), but it hadn’t hit home quite as viscerally as this year, and I’ve become more than a convert, in fact an evangelist, about the opportunities, both formal and informal.

Interestingly, I’m also beginning to see the emergence of mobile social, and I see that mobile was another recurrent theme in what I talked about this year.   I see more opportunities, and convergences, particularly my revelation about mobile web. Twitter, for instance, is social, can be mobile, and can be a powerful learning experience.

So, my personal learning was getting more deeply into the whole elearning 2.0 area, and it’s impact back on strategy, mobile, and even games.   And the clear implications that we’ve got to focus on learning to learn skills.   There’re some new thoughts brewing, of course, and maybe that’ll play a role in my predictions for next year.   But that’s another month’s big question.

For the record…

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog for this important message:

I was talking with one of the bright and lively people at DevLearn 08 (the conference *rocked*), and we started talking about different folks’ ‘styles’. She was opining about a couple of well known consultants and their credibility. I naturally asked about her perception of mine, and she was surprised to find out I was an independent consultant, thinking I was some sort of academic.

That’s not an insult, as I have been an academic and I believe that the deep background I bring to bear is not only a benefit in the work I do but also in the way I educate my clients.   However, allow me to be very clear:

I am a consultant (and, I like to think, a very good one).   It’s how I support my mortgage, HMO, and family (in that order :).   I work with organizations that:

  • need to move beyond small and isolated stabs at elearning
  • are realizing the focus is on increasing organizational excellence
  • want to take full advantage of technology benefits to innovation and execution
  • don’t want to be swayed by a biased opinion
  • want advice about what makes sense for their context in the short, medium, and long term

I offer a reliable capability to assess a need, whether tactical or strategic, and find a sound (and typically innovative) yet pragmatic solution, whether improved design, a full plan, or ongoing assistance.   This is based upon a deep understanding of cognition and technology, a lateral thinking style, an ability to learn quickly and swiftly assess a situation, and a systematic bent that tends to explore alternatives and the associated trade-offs to yield a solution that’s not ‘off the shelf’. It’s also independent, so once you’ve got a plan, you can evaluate who’s best to implement it.   It’s about melding creativity with process to yield solutions, not just ideas.   I work through Quinnovation, and with my esteemed colleagues Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, and Jane Hart through TogetherLearn.

I hope that’s clear.   If you want to know more, I’m easy to find; drop me an email, or give me a call.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Beyond the course

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In the process of thinking through how to support informal learning, I was reminded of a diagram I created several years ago.   I started from an approach based upon philosophy that talked about acting in the world: you act in the world when you can, and when you have a breakdown you need to solve it, so you repair, and then reflect and learn so you can act more competently the next time (Ok, so it’s an idealized model). What it led me to think was that when we have a need, we first try to find the answer. If we don’t, then we have to do more extreme steps of actively trying to solve it, and then ideally we save that answer so that others don’t have to solve the same problem (see what I said about ‘ideal’?).

Without going into all the thinking (it’s elaborated more in several places, including this white paper; PDF), the point is that supporting people in performance includes not just courses, but content and job aids, and connections to people.   Note that when it moves from information need to problem-solving, the people will change because there isn’t an expert (or you’d have the answer already).

The interesting thing for me is that this provides a strong justification for using social networks in learning: wikis can be places where people can store the information about problems they’ve solved, discussion boards and profiles fill the need of finding expertise, blogs may support people in their problem-solving as well, serving as a way to share questions and get feedback.   The social network provides the rest of the support around the courses which really only serve the situation where a major skill-shift change is needed.

So, it’s probably just buttressing the obvious,   but I get a degree of comfort from taking a pre-existing model and using it to create a framework which then turns out to map to something I’m deeply involved in.   Does it make sense to you?

Extending elearning?

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A contact asked me what I saw as the link between Sharepoint and elearning, and I started to give my standard answer about portals fitting in with the whole performance ecosystem. Last I played with Sharepoint, it seemed like a portal solution; a place to deposit files.   Obvious extensions I would infer from social networking would include wrapping discussion around resources (and, of course, having a way to make the resources accessible from multiple points of view, search, and other features in support of reasonable information architecture).

However, I decided to update myself on Sharepoint features, and went to look at Microsoft’s page.   They tout collaboration, content management, and search as well as portals.   This sounds like they’re beginning to incorporate real eCommunity/social networking capabilities (they mention blogs & wikis, and expertise finders). Of course, what they have in their marketing versus what’s actually there in full capability is an open question (and I’m not bagging Microsoft here; just look at LMS vendors and them trying to match a ‘checklist’ of necessary features).   Integration with Office is, for most business, a plus.

However, I’m skeptical as it’s not as easy as just putting it all together, it has to be well done.   That may be a services issue and not a technology one, however.   The point I want to make here, however, is that augmenting formal courses with resources and eCommunity is the natural progression.

On principal, there are a number of reasons to think about this augmentation.   Some obvious ones include:

  1. When performance analysis indicates that tools are a better solution than courses
  2. When it’s a combination of tools and training, the training can/should include the use of portals, and then the resources should be available on the portals
  3. Individuals can be introduced into a community after formal learning
  4. User-generated content can be mined for new courses
  5. Courses might be made available via the portal, or at least presentations decks
  6. Media files to augment courses could be made available via the portal

It may not seem obvious to the training practitioner that this is part of supporting elearning, as it really goes beyond the event, but I’ll argue that those who don’t look to extend their responsibility to the performance at all levels of competency are limiting their organizational relevance and consequently their value to the organization.   And that’s just a missed opportunity.