Quinnovating

Cultural Alignment

27 December 2016 by Clark 1 Comment

I was thinking about the ways in which organizations can support performance. That is, we can and should be aligning with how we think, work, and learn. So we can provide tools to support us in the moment, we can provide tools to help us work together, and we can develop people all slowly over time. In short, I was thinking about cognitive alignment, and I was going to write about it, but it turns out I already have! However, I also realized that there was an opportunity to extend that to cultural alignment, and I think that’s important as well.

So, one of the things we can do to optimize outcomes is to give people performance support. In particular, we can provide tools to address gaps that emerge from our cognitive architecture. We can also provide policies about things we’re supposed to do. And that’s all good. However, some of that might not be necessary under the right circumstances.

I was thinking about the specific case of acting in ways that are consonant with the values of the organization. For instance, in a well-known upscale department store chain, the staff have the leeway to spend on the order of $1K to address any emerging customer problem. I reckon the store figures that’s the future worth of a happy customer. And that’s acting in alignment with the culture of the organization.

The point I want to make is that by having an explicit culture in the organization, you might not have to provide performance support. If the desired approach is understood, it can be generated from understanding the organization’s value. If you know what’s expected, you can perform in alignment without needing external clues and cues.

There are clear benefits from a learning organization in terms of innovation and employee engagement, but what about the other side? I suggest that the right culture can also benefit the ‘optimal execution’ side. In short, there’s little reason to do aught but begin a move to a more enlightened culture. At least, that’s what seems to me to be the case. How about you?

Employee Experience

21 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

One of the recent trends has been about ‘customer experience’, focusing the organization on a consistent and coherent customer experience from first exposure through to ongoing product or service use. And this is a ‘good thing’! I’ve participated in the efforts of an organization to achieve it, and can see the real benefits. However, I want to suggest that just as important is the employee experience. This is the goal of a true performance ecosystem and an aligned culture.

Richard Branson, the successful entrepreneur behind the Virgin brand, argues that the only real way to deliver great customer service is to have really happy employees. And I think that his argument is plausible. We know that when people are engaged, there are good outcomes like greater retention. Happy employees is a necessary step to happy customers.

We also know that when we’re creating a learning culture, we get both more engaged employees, and better business outcomes. That is, when employees have purpose, are given autonomy to pursue their goals, and are supported towards success, they’re happier and more productive. Also when an organization works well together – sharing because it’s safe, tapping into diversity, being open to new ideas, and supporting reflection – innovation can flourish.

And, I’ll argue, that when the tools are ‘to hand’, employees are happier and more productive. When you can:

find necessary tools and resources
reach out with questions
provide answers
represent your thinking
share your work so others can align and contribute
collaborate
experiment and analyze

all with ease, working is optimal. That is, employees can achieve their goals effectively and efficiently.

Spending cycles to optimize this, to develop the infrastructure and the culture, is an investment in a long term benefit to organizational success. I believe the two components of the organizational culture and the technology infrastructure are the critical components to employee experience. And optimizing those has benefits that cross the organization. That strikes me as an important strategic focus; what’s your take?

(When) Is pattern-matching enough?

15 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

In the course of my research, I came across the project shown here, as represented by the accompanying video. In the video, they show (and tout) the value of their approach to developing pattern recognition around mathematics. Further, they argue that it’s superior to the typical rule presentation and practice. And I can buy that, but with many caveats that I want to explore.

So it’s clear that we learn by abstracting patterns across our experiences. We can provide models that guide, but ultimately it’s the practice that works. An extreme example is chicken-sexing (mentioned in the transcript); determining the gender of new-born chicks. Here, no one can articulate the rationale, it’s merely done by attempts and correct/incorrect feedback! And the clear implication is that by having learners do repetitive tasks of looking for patterns, they get better at it.

And, yes, they do. But the open question is what is the learning benefit of that. Let’s be clear, there are plenty of times we want that to happen. As I learned during my graduate studies, pilots are largely trained to react before their brains kick in: the speed at which things happen are faster than conscious processing. When speed and accuracy is important, nay critical, we want patterned responses. And it does work for component skills to more complex ones in well-defined domains. But…

When we need transfer, and things are complex, and we aren’t needing knee-jerk responses, this doesn’t work. I would like to train myself to recognize patterns of behavior and ways to deal with them effectively, for instance (e.g. in difficult presentation situations, or negotiations). On the other hand, in many instances I want to preclude any immediate responses and look for clues, ponder, explore, and more.

The important question is when we want rote performance and when we don’t . Rote ability to do math component skills I’m willing to accept. But I fear a major problem with math instruction in schools is about doing math, not about thinking like a mathematician (to quote Seymour Paper). And I don’t want students to be learning the quadratic equation (one of Roger Schank’s most vivid examples) instead of how math can be used a problem-solving tool. The nuances are subtle, to be sure, but again I’m tired of us treating learning like color-by-numbers instead of the rocket science it should be.

Look, it’s great to find more effective methods, but let’s also be smart about the effective use of them. In my mind, that’s part of learning engineering. And I’m by no means accusing the approach that started this discussion of getting it wrong, this is my own editorial soapbox ;). There’s much we can and should be doing, and new tools are welcome. But let’s also think about when they make sense. So, does this make sense?

Improving design processes

13 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Recently, I had a chance to catch up with a client who’d used my services to review their design processes. Per my approach, I’d generated a report with a large number of suggestions. What happened, not surprisingly, is that a subset of them actually were implemented. Still, it was gratifying to hear of the changes, and I think they’re worth exploring as an opportunity to show how small changes can yield big improvements.

One of the major areas was to work on how they use SMEs. Instead of just having a contracted expert, they’re moving to work with folks who have ‘on the ground’ expertise to couple with their domain expertise. I argue for triangulating on the real objectives with several perspectives, and this approaches that ideal.

A second thing was that there was a bit of a ‘waterfall model’, and instead I suggest having collaboration at critical points along the way. In this case, they have moved to more collaboration at an important juncture point, with more roles involved to be more innovative on the possibilities.

Also, in their particular case, they have to abide by certain constraints, such as amount of time. As a result of looking at the opportunities, they are moving to meeting their requirements by adding more practice, not more content. This is a big win for the learners, and the learning.

They are also looking at applying their refined understanding of the nuances of learning. This is embryonic, I was told, but they are moving to looking to redesigning their content to better align with what is known about learning science. At this point it may not be instituted in their processes, but it’s already affecting the mindset they bring to the task.

There are a couple of other things they’re beginning, but I reckon these are some big wins for their audience and the outcomes. With only small changes in what they are doing, they are increasing the likelihood of effective learning. And that’s the point: for any design process, there are inflection points where better outcomes can be achieved with minimal impact on the overall processes. That is, the processes may change, but they’re different, not hugely larger.

There’s much we can and should be doing to improve our learning design processes, for our learners, and the learning. We know what the opportunities are, now we just need to marshal the will to make changes. Are you ready?

Learning Strategy Issues

7 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Online Educa logo The other thing that I was involved in at Online Educa in Berlin was a session on The Flexible Worker. Three of us presented, each addressing one particular topic. One presentation was on collaborating to produce an elearning course on sleeping better, with the presenter’s firm demonstrating expertise in elearning, while the other firm had the subject matter expertise on sleep health. A second presentation was on providing tools to trainers to devolve content development locally, addressing a problem with centrally-developed content. My presentation was on the gaps between what L&D does and how our brains work, and the implications. And, per our design, issues emerged.

The format was interesting: our presentations were roughly 10 minutes each. And we were using a tool (sli.do) to collect and rank questions. Then we had the audience work at their tables (in the round) to come up with their answers to the top questions, which we then collected and the panelists riffed on the outcomes. We got through three questions as a group, and I thought the outcomes were quite interesting. In short, as a rapporteur at the closing business session, I suggested that the topic ended up being about flexible work, not flexible working.

The top question that emerged had to do with how to support effective search (after I expounded on problem with the notion that it all had to be in the head). The sourced answers included crowd-sourcing the tags for finding objects, using a controlled vocabulary, and auto-analyzing the content to determine tags. I suggest a hybrid solution, in general. The interesting thing here was the audience picking up on the need to go beyond courses and start looking at resources.

The next question was how to move from a training to a performance culture. And it was another exciting development to hear them thinking this way. The solutions offered included coaching, supporting the importance of self-learning (meta-learning, yay!), and working both top-down and bottom-up. I also suggested that measuring was a likely catalyst that could begin to draw attention to outcomes (just as I reckon competencies are the lever in higher-ed).

The third question was about ensuring quality in a localized learning environment (e.g. user-generated content). The concern was that the knowledge of learning design wouldn’t necessarily be widespread. Suggestions included making the content editable for collaborative improvements, or using rankings, and scaffolding of improvement through the community. Here too, a focus on learning itself could assist.

What’s encouraging to me is that each of these questions was really about moving to a transformative viewpoint. The audience was clearly thinking ‘beyond the course’. They were focusing on supporting performers in learning, and resources, and leveraging the community, all activities consonant with the revolution.

An interesting aside came in the closing session. Several folks were mentioning a need for change, and an audience member asked “why?” He was a consultant, and his clients already seemed to be moving forward. I suggested he was seeing the best, and that many folks were not there (mentioning the Towards Maturity data as well as the problems I identified in the beginning of the Revolution book. And it’s a problem that too many people don’t yet see the missed opportunities and don’t feel the pain (and are frankly not looking).

So, there are opportunities to start taking small steps in the direction of taking on a bigger perspective and making the role of L&D more strategic. It first takes an awareness of the problems (my old line: “L&D isn’t doing near what it could and should, and what it is doing it is doing badly, other than that things are fine” :), and then a strategy to move forward. The strategy depends on where the organization is to begin with, but there are systematic principles to guide progress. That’s what I do, after all! It’s nice to see awareness growing. So, are you ready to start taking some positive steps?

Aligning Learning

6 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Online Educa logo Last week, at Online Educa in Berlin, I gave a tutorial on deeper elearning as a pre-conference event. In it, I talked about getting more meaningful objectives, writing practice that actually develops meaningful outcomes, and content (concepts & examples) aligned to support effective practice. I also talked about emotional engagement and social learning, before talking about revising design processes to incorporate these deeper elements in an effective and not-too-different approach. In short, I was talking about aligning our designs, and our design processes, to how we think and learn.

This is something that most organizations should be thinking about. I was pleasantly surprised that the audience included folks from universities, not-for-profits, and government agencies as well as businesses. The challenges are different in some respects, but there are shared elements. Education tends to be about long term learning relationships (typically at least a half year to several years), versus the short-term relationships (e.g. an hour to several days) in organizational learning. Yet the need to respect how our brains work is a continuum. Our brains learn in particular ways that are unaffected by the curricular needs. Learning solutions for performance and for education both still need to respect our neural and cognitive architecture.

And too little of what we do reflects what we know. As a recent commenter noted, there’s a conflict between the de-facto practices and what research says. As she also noted, our tools are also focused on supporting wrong approaches. It’s not that tools prevent doing meaningful learning, it’s just that you have to get your design right first and then make the tool conform (as opposed to the alternative). And our limitations as designers flow from the same source, our brain, as our limitations as learners. Thus we need to be as aware of cognition in our designing as in our design.

I’ll be talking about the problems this engenders in a special webinar tomorrow. There’re still a few slots left. If you’re committed to trying to improve your learning design, and you have the resources to do so, this is an opportunity to get started. There isn’t a lot of pressure yet, but it’s time to be proactive before people start asking questions about the business impact of what we’re doing. What do you think?

Content aggregation

30 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

At the recent DevLearn conference, I had a chance to present in xAPI Base Camp on Content Systems. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about since working on an adaptive learning system back in 1999-2000. And I think it’s now an even bigger big opportunity. In the course of responding to an interested attendee, I aggregated this list of my (non-blog) publications on the process, and I thought it might be useful to share them here (from most recent to earliest):

Talking about lifecycle and opportunities in the Litmos blog

Perspective from visiting the Intelligent Content conference in eLearnMag

The possibilities and necessities of adapting to context in Learning Solutions magazine

New ways of looking at learning content in Learning Solutions magazine

Moving from text to experience for publishers in eLearnMag

A discussion paper including granularity and tagging in the IFETS journal

What you see is a transition in focus. From thinking about content objects at the right granularity and with the right tagging, I transition to thinking about strategy for content publishers. Ultimately, I have shifted to looking at the learning industry and opportunities to adapt learning to context (which includes location, current task, current role, and more).

While I think that adaptivity is a ways away, I also believe that the initial efforts in getting more rigorous about content strategy, engineering, and governance are a worthwhile investment now. The benefits are in less redundancy, tighter design, tracking, and greater flexibility. The long term benefits will come from analytics, adaptivity, and contextualization. I reckon that’s an opportunity that’s hard to ignore. I’ll suggest that it’s past time to be thinking about it, and time to start acting. What about you? Are you ready?

Thoughts on Learning Design Strategy

29 November 2016 by Clark 4 Comments

At the DevLearn conference, I ran a Morning Buzz on Learning Design Strategy. I’m happy to say that the participants threw in lots of ideas, and I thought they were worth capturing. I started with a set of questions to address, so I’ll go through their comments in roughly that order (though we didn’t exactly follow this structure):

What is learning design strategy?

I had in mind the approach taken by an organization to their learning design. Attendees suggested it’s your goals and approach, ensuring you are delivering effectively. It’s also your review approach, and metrics. These are all elements that indeed contribute to strategy.

What gaps are we seeing in learning design strategy?

The participants offered up a suite of places that were problems, including aligning with organizational goals and access to support measuring impact, both of which are indeed strategic issues. They also raised problems with prioritization of the demands, the need to move beyond just courses, and the lack of learning design knowledge. All are real problems.

What do we need to be able to improve?

The audience offered up a number of suggestions. For one, there was a desire for strategies (probably more tactics) for doing beyond ‘the event’. Support for selling changes in the way of doing things was mentioned as well. The shift to self-learning was mentioned, leading to concern over how to support this. Attendees also mentioned a need of awareness in designing ‘backwards‘. Finally, a culture of learning was expressly discussed.

What are possible solutions?

The participants offered a suite of suggestions. One was adopting a learn-apply-perform model, which another termed a learn-practice-demo. Both were getting at the need for active practice and an ability to actually demonstrate performance. There was also a mention of looking to social networks and peer recommendations to lower the demand and facilitate self-learning. A culture shift was suggested, supported by the methods used to teach! A final solution was to move quickly to mentoring, which implicitly suggests including mentoring in the design.

Steps to take to move forward?

I also wanted to know what how they might move forward, and what they needed. Two clear suggestions emerged. One was for examples, and I reckon both of better learning designs, and approaches to implement those learning designs in organizations. The other was for tools. Here it was clear that they weren’t talking about tools to develop learning, but tools to support them doing good design, and following processes.

At the end I left with mixed feelings. It’s good to know that the problems I see are reflected in what the practitioners reports; we see the same problems It’s also sad that these problems exist. I do believe that the Serious eLearning Manifesto is one piece of support. And I’ve written on practices (e.g. with SMEs), but it’s clear that some practical scaffolding would help. I’ve worked with a few organizations, but I’m struggling to find ways to help more. (Maybe this is the topic of my next book?) So, what ideas do you have?

(I’m offering a webinar next week that will address these issues, if you’re serious about making changes.)

Special Webinar on Learning Design Strategy

23 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Learning, properly, should have an impact. It’s about systematically changing behavior, developing new skills to meet ever-changing needs. That’s why we invest in learning: training or elearning. If elearning doesn‘t make an impact, who cares how accessible or affordable is seems? It‘s actually undermining your goals for increasing expertise, effectiveness and productivity.

Too much of what is done under this umbrella isn’t sufficient. It’s quite simply not effective. Here’re some signs that your elearning might not be working:

Your learning unit develops courses on demand
You work from PDFs and PPTs to develop your course
You have a knowledge quiz at the end
You use libraries to add graphics & interactions
Your learners avoid the courses
You track completion
You evaluate impact by learner feedback

If you’re spending money to develop elearning, and it has any of the above features, there’s a strong chance you’re burning money.

The good news is that it’s not as hard to change as you think! The design processes you are using now, the ones that reflect the above issues, are not that far removed from ones that offer real outcomes. Yes, there are changes, but they’re changes within the process, not fundamental. You can be making changes that will make a marginal impact on the development measures, but a real impact on the learning outcomes. It’s not trivial, but it is doable.

If this is of interest, I’m offering a free webinar to talk through the issues. It’s not for everyone: if you don’t have the authority or the resources to make a change, there are other posts that talk through the opportunities. This webinar is for those who really want to explore the possibilities. If that’s something you want to be thinking about, if you’d really like to consider consider how you get from here to there, I encourage you to keep reading.

Webinar: 7 Unbelievable eLearning Mistakes

Date: December 7

Time: 10 AM to 11AM Pacific

Via: Zoom Conference Service

Have you been concerned about your learning design: whether your designs are actually producing results? Ultimately, is your elearning changing behaviors, developing skills, and increasing capacity? And how do you know? There are a lot of reasons to believe that most elearning is not delivering on the promise. And yet elearning has the potential to be a powerful tool for organizational excellence. The barriers are not unsurmountable; we know the problems, and steps to change. However, as has been said: “When all is said and done, more is said than done.” I want to give you the chance to take the steps. In this complimentary webinar we‘ll explore barriers to getting measurable results from elearning.

This isn’t your usual webinar, however. Here we are specifically talking to organizations that want their elearning to actually have an impact. If you don’t have the resources and position to make a change, this really isn’t for you. If you want your organization to take it more seriously, invite your boss ;).

This is for you, if:

You’re ready to look at your elearning with a serious eye
You want to ensure that you are getting value for your investment
You need to operate in the real world, under real constraints
You’re willing to invest for a real change that has impact

This isn’t for you if:

You are happy with the status quo
You haven’t the authority or the resources to make a change

If you are ready to take a serious look at your elearning, I invite you to sign up. There’s a limit to how many can attend, so please register early. When you register I’ll send you the necessary details. Hope to see you!

The webinar was run on schedule, and signups are now closed.

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