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Social Cognition

25 July 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

In the two preceding posts, I discussed situated and distributed cognition. In this closing post of the series, I want to talk about social cognition. They’re related, and yet each needs explicit consideration. If we don’t know how we think, work, and learn, we can’t optimally support both performance in the moment and continual innovation over time.

The traditional definition of social cognition is how we think about social interactions. But here I’m emphasizing instead the fact that our thinking isn’t just in our heads or our tools, but also across our partners. That’s partly distributed cognition, but I want to emphasize it. And this is true for formal and informal learning as well as performing.

There are two ways to think about this. For one, we benefit from formal social interactions as ways to get richer interpretations. It works the same way when we are problem-solving: working together (under constraints) increases the likelihood of the best outcome. As I like to say, the room is smarter than the smartest person in the room if you manage the process right. The implications of this are several.

First, we need to make sure we have the right constraints. When we have people working together, it helps if it’s the right people and the right environment. We know that diversity helps, as long as there is overlap in values. Similarly, it needs to be psychologically safe to contribute, the environment helps to be open, and there needs to be time for reflection.

There’re also benefits to mentoring and coaching, helping people in the moment. We want to succeed, and we like to be challenged, and we learn when we are, so having scaffolding helps. Developing coaching and mentoring skills is a good investment in the workplace.

There’re also times when we want help, or someone else does and we can help. That is, we need to support serendipitous inquiry. It helps, by the way, to assist people in learning how to ask questions or answer them in useful ways. There also needs to be the channels to accomplish these goals.

Recognize that there are times when the answer can come from the network, not our own efforts. Particularly if things are changing fast, or the situation’s unique or hard to anticipate. In fact, it frees us up to do more if we take advantage of that as often as possible! It takes nurturing the networks to become a community so that the answer’s likely to be right.

The point being, there are lots of considerations to making the ecosystem sociable as well as effectively distributed and situated. If you want to optimize the environment, it helps to have the latest understanding of the users of that environment. Hope this makes sense, and in the spirit of social, I welcome your thoughts and comments!

Why L&D Should Lead

10 July 2018 by Clark 1 Comment

So, I’ve seen a bright future for L&D. It’s possible, and desirable. But is it defensible? I want to suggest that it is. L&D should be the business unit with the best understanding of our brains (except, perhaps, in a neurology company, e.g. medical, or a cognitive company, e.g. AI). And I’ve argued that’s a key role. So, if we grasp that nettle and lead the change, we could and should be leading the way to a brighter new future for organizational success.

Look, cognitive science is somewhat complex. In fact, the human brain is arguably the most complex thing in the known universe! However, we have a good understanding of cognition for the purposes of guiding learning and performance in the workplace. Or, as I like to say, understanding how we think, work, and learn. Moreover, we really can’t (and shouldn’t) be doing our jobs unless we have that knowledge. (I have a workshop that can help. ;)

Now, it’s also becoming a cliche that the organizations that learn fastest will be the ones that thrive (not just survive, or not!). We must learn, individually and together. And knowing how to have people work and play well together, representing, reflecting, collaborating, and more should be L&D’s role. We should be the ones who know the most and best about how to do those things in consonance with how our cognitive architecture works.

And, to be clear, there are lots of practices in organizations that are contrary to the best learning. Fear, lack of time for reflection, micro-management, old-school brainstorming, the list goes on. Without knowledge, we may firmly be convinced we’re doing it right, and instead undermining the best outcomes! (One way to tell if it’s safe to share in your org: put in a social network. If no one participates…) On the flip side, there are lots of practices that science tells us work. Details around formal learning, creating spaces for informal learning, practices for short-term and long-term innovation, etc.

We have an uphill battle gaining the credibility we need, but I say start now, and start small. Instill the practices within L&D, take ownership of the necessary skills and knowledge, make it work, document it, and then use that success as a stepping stone to spread the word.

Then, if we are doing that facilitation of learning, you should be able to see that we are enabling the most important work in the organization! We can be the key to org success, going forward. L&D should lead the change. That’s the vision I see, at least. Does this sound good and make sense to you?

The ITA Jay Cross Memorial Award for 2018: Mark Britz

5 July 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

In honor of the colleague, mentor, and friend that brought us together, every year the Internet Time Alliance presents the Jay Cross Memorial Award. The award is for an individual who represents the spirit of continuing informal learning for the workplace. This year, Mark Britz is the deserving recipient.

Jay was a fierce champion of social and informal learning. He saw that most of how we learn to do what we do comes from interacting with others. As a response to his untimely passing, the remaining members of the ITA decided to honor his memory with an award. Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, & myself each year collectively decide an individual who we think best reflects Jay’s vision. And we announce the recipient on the 5th of July, Jay’s birthday.

Mark has resonated and amplified the message of ongoing learning since we first crossed paths. He has interacted with the ITA members regularly via tweets, blogs, and in person when possible. And we’ve appreciated his engagement with the ideas and his contributions to our thinking.

I got to know Mark’s thinking a bit better when he wrote a case study based upon his work at Systems Made Simple for the Revolution book (Jay wrote the foreword). And he’s continued to blog about workplace learning at The Simple Shift with short but insightful posts. Currently part of the team running events for the eLearning Guild, Mark manages to consistently touts views that illuminate thinking about the new workplace.

The situation he cites in that case study is exemplary of this type of thinking. Charged with starting a corporate ‘university’ in an organization that was composed of many experts, he knew that ‘courses’ weren’t going to be a viable approach. Instead, he championed and built a social network that pulled these experts together to share voices. The core L&D role was one of facilitating communication and collaboration, rather than presenting information.

For his continuing work promoting communication, collaboration, and continual learning, we recognize Mark’s efforts with the 2018 Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award.

Mental models are the agents of learning

22 May 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

I was talking with my friend and colleague Harold Jarche about how he’s expanding his valuable Personal Knowledge Mastery to teams and at the organizational level. Walking through his diagram, what is critical, what is being exchanged, are mental models. And I thought this an interesting insight.

I’ve talked before about mental models, and they’re important for learning. What they do is provide a causal basis for understanding what happened, and predicting what will happen. And that’s important. From such models, we can therefore evaluate different options, and choose the one that has the best outcome. They may not help in new areas, but they give us a basis for new and unique combinations of circumstances.

So, individually, we make decisions based upon models. In fact, our brains build models to explain the world. (Important for instruction to provide good ones.) And so when we experiment and reflect we may try to capture these models. Senge, in The Learning Organization talked about mental models as one of his 5 disciplines.

When we’re brought in on a team as a complementary set of knowledge and skills to solve a problem, we’re coming in with our models. In the ‘coherent organization‘ model, these have been developed through our community of practice, and are brought to bear on challenges we’re addressing. Results are shared back, particularly new insights. Similarly, our communities should be tracking others for models to appropriate and adapt.

Thus, the mental tools we use in this new age of information and innovation are conceptual causal models. We need tools to capture, represent, and share these models. And most importantly, I reckon, we need to understand the nature of these models to facilitate us taking the best advantage of them.

Our models may be exchanged, but they’re not transactional. Like a smile, we can give the away and still have them. But we can, and should, continue to acquire and develop them. Models are our value to our field and organizations.

Plagiarism and ethics

17 April 2018 by Clark 1 Comment

I recently wrote on the ethics of L&D, and I note that I didn’t address one issue. Yet, it’s very clear that it’s still a problem. In short, I’m talking about plagiarism and attribution. And it needs to be said.

In that article, I did say:

That means we practice ethically, and responsibly. We want to collectively determine what that means, and act accordingly. And we must call out bad practices or beliefs.

So let me talk about one bad practice: taking or using other people’s stuff without attribution. Most of the speakers I know can cite instances when they’ve seen their ideas (diagrams, quotes, etc) put up by others without pointing back to them. There’s a distinction between citing something many people are talking about (innovation, microlearning, what have you) with your own interpretation, and literally taking someone’s ideas and selling them as your own.

One of our colleagues recently let me know his tools had been used by folks to earn money without any reimbursement to him (or even attribution). Others have had their diagrams purloined and used in presentations. One colleague found pretty much his entire presentation used by someone else! I myself have seen my writing appear elsewhere without a link back to me, and I’m not the only one.

Many folks bother to put copyright signs on their images, but I’ve stopped because it’s too easy to edit out if you’re halfway proficient with a decent graphics package. And you can do all sorts of things to try to protect your decks, writing, etc, but ultimately it’s very hard to protect, let alone discover that it’s happening. Who knows how many copies of someone’s images have ended up in a business presentation inside a firm! People have asked, from time to time, and I have pretty much always agreed (and I’m grateful when they do ask). Others, I’m sure, are doing it anyway.

This isn’t the same as asking someone to work for free, which is also pretty rude. There are folks who will work for ‘exposure’, because they’re building a brand, but it’s somewhat unfair. The worst are those who charge for things, like attendance or membership, or organizations who make money, yet expect free presentations! “Oh, you could get some business from this.” The operative word is ‘could’. Yet they are!

Attribution isn’t ‘name dropping‘. It’s showing you are paying attention, and know the giants whose shoulders you stand on. Taking other people’s work and claiming it as your own, particularly if you profit by it, is theft. Pure and simple. It happens, but we need to call it out. Calling it out can even be valuable; I once complained and ended up with a good connection (and an apology).

Please, please, ask for permission, call out folks who you see are plagiarizing, and generally act in proper ways. I’m sure you are, but overall some awareness raising still needs to happen. Heck, I know we see amazing instances in people’s resumes and speeches of it, but it’s still not right. The people in L&D I’ve found to be generally warm and helpful (not surprisingly). A few bad apples isn’t surprising, but we can do better. All I can do is ask you to do the right thing yourself, and call out bad behavior when you do see it. Thanks!

No all-singing all-dancing solution

3 April 2018 by Clark 1 Comment

I was pinged on LinkedIn by someone who used the entrée of hearing me speak in next week’s Learning Solutions conference to begin discussing LMS capabilities. (Hint: they provide one.) And I thought I’d elaborate on my response, as the discussion prompted some reflections. In short, what are the arguments for and against having a single platform to deliver an ecosystem solution?

In Revolutionize Learning & Development, I argue for a Performance & Development ccosystem. The idea is more than courses, it’s performance support, social, informal, etc. It’s about having a performer-centric support environment that has tools and information to hand to both help you perform in the moment and develop you over time. The goal is to support working alone and together to meet both the anticipated, and unanticipated, needs of the organization.

On principle, I tend to view an ‘all singing all dancing’ solution as likely to fail on some part of that. It’s implausible that a system would have all the capabilities needed. First, there are many functionalities: access to formal learning, supporting access to known or found resources, sharing, collaborating, and more. It’s unlikely that all those can be done well in one platform. Let alone, doing them in ways that matches any one organization’s ways of working.

I’m not saying the LMS is a bad tool for what it does. (Note: I am not in the LMS benchmark business; there are other people that do that and it’s a full time job.) However, can an LMS be a full solution? Even if there is some capability in all the areas, what’s the likelihood that it’s best-of-breed in all? Ok, in some small orgs where you can’t have an IT group capable of integrating the necessary tools, you might settle for working around the limitations. That’s understandable. But it’s different than choosing to trust one system. It’s just having the people act as the glue instead of the system.

It’s always about tradeoffs, and so integrating best-of-breed capabilities around what’s already in place would make more sense to me. For instance, how *could* one system integrate enterprise-wide federated search as a stand-alone platform? It’s about integrating a suite of capabilities to create a performer-centric environment. That’s pretty much beyond a solo platform, intrinsically. Am I missing something?

Let’s talk

9 January 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

“Conversations are the stem cells of learning.” – Jay Cross

I recently read something that intrigued me. I couldn’t find it again, so I’ll paraphrase the message. As context, the author was talking about how someone with a different world view was opining about the views of the author. And his simple message was “if you want to know what I, or an X, thinks, ask me or an X. Don’t ask the anti-X.” And I think that’s important. We need to talk together to figure things out. We have to get out of our comfort zone.

It’s all too evident that we seem to be getting more divisive. And it’s too easy these days to only see stuff that you agree with. You can choose to only follow channels that are simpatico with your beliefs, and even supposedly unbiased platforms actually filter what you see to keep you happy. Yet, the real way to advance, to learn, is to see opposing sides and work to find a viable resolution.

Innovation depends on creative tension, and we need to continue to innovate. So we need to continue to engage. Indeed, my colleague Harold Jarche points to the book Collaborating with the Enemy and argues that’s a good thing. The point is that when things are really tough, we have to go beyond our boundaries. And life is getting more complex.

So I keep connections with a few people who don’t think like me, and I try to understand the things that they say. I don’t want to listen just to those who think like me, I recognize that I need to understand their viewpoints if we’re going to make progress. Of course, I can’t guarantee reciprocity, but I can recognize that’s not my problem.

And I read what academic research has to say. I prefer peer-review to opinion, although I keep an open mind as to the problems with academic research as well. I have published enough, and reviewed many submissions, so I recognize the challenges. Yet it’s better than the alternative ;).

This is, however, the way we have to be as professionals. We have to understand other viewpoints. It matters to our world, but even in the small little worlds we inhabit professionally. We need to talk. And face to face. It matters, it turns out. Which may not be a surprise. Still, getting together with colleagues, attending events, and talking, even disagreeing (civilly) are all necessary.

So please, talk. Engage. Let’s figure stuff out and make things better. Please.

Addressing Changes

25 October 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I listed some of the major changes that L&D needs to acknowledge. What we need now is to look at the top steps that need to be taken. As serious practitioners in a potentially valuable field, we need to adapt to the changing environment as much as we need to assist our charges to do so. So what’s involved?

We need to get a grasp on technology affordances. We don’t need to that the latest technology exists, whether AI, AR, or VR. Instead, we have to understand what they mean in the context of our brains. What key capabilities are brought? Can VR go beyond entertainment to help us learn better? How can AI partner with us? If we can make practical use of AR, what would we do with it?

In conjunction, we need to understand the realities about us. We need to take ownership and have a suitable background in how people really think, work, and learn. Further, we need to recognize that they’re all tied together, not separate things. So, for instance, we learn as we work, we think as we learn, etc.

For example, we need to understand situated and distributed cognition. That is, we need to grasp that we’re not formal logical thinkers, but instead very context dependent, and that our thinking is across our tools. As a consequence, we need to design solutions that recognize our individual situations, and leverage technology as an augment. So we want to design human/computer system solutions to problems, not just human or system solutions.

We also need to understand cultural elements. We work better when we are given meaningful work, freedom to pursue those goals, and get the necessary support to succeed. This is not micromanagement, but instead, is leadership and coaching. We also need an environment where it’s safe, expected even, to experiment and even to make mistakes.

We also need to understand that we work better (read: produce better results), when we work together in particular ways. Where we understand that we should allow individual thought first, but then pool those ideas. And we need to show our work and the underlying thinking. Moreover, again, it has to be safe to do so!

And, these are all tied together into a systemic approach! It can’t be piecemeal, because working together and out loud can’t be divorced from the technology used to enable these capabilities. And giving people meaningful work and not letting them work together, or vice-versa, just won’t achieve the necessary critical mass.

Finally, we also need to do this in alignment with the business. And, lets be clear, in ways that can be measured! We need to be understanding what are the critical performance needs of the organization, and demonstrate that we’re impacting them in the ways above.

This can be done, and it will be the hallmark of successful organization. We’re already seeing a wide variety of converging evidence that these changes lead to success. The question is, are you going to lead your organization forward into the future, or keep your head down and do what you’ve always done?

Acknowledging Changes

24 October 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

There are a serious number of changes that are affecting organizations. We’re seeing changes in the information flow, in technology, and in what we know about ourselves. Importantly, these are things that L&D needs to acknowledge and respond to. What are these changes?

It’s old news that things are happening faster. We’re being overwhelmed with information, and that rate is accelerating. On the other hand, our tools to manage the information flow are also advancing.

Which is the second topic. We’re getting more powerful technology. We can create systems that do tasks that used to be limited to humans. They can also partner with us, providing information based upon who we are, what we’re doing, and what else is going on.

And there are increasing demands for accountability (and transparency). Your actions should be justified. What are you doing, why, and what effect is it having? If you can’t answer these questions, you’re going to be looking for a job.

Most importantly, we’ve learned quite a bit about ourselves that is contrary to many pre-existing beliefs. Specifically ones that influence organizational approaches. Our myths about how we think, work, and learn are holding us back from achieving optimal outcomes.

For one, there’s a persistent belief that our thinking is in our heads. Yet research shows that our thinking is distributed across our tools. We use external representations to capture at least part of our thinking, and access information that we can’t keep in our heads effectively. Yet we seem to depend on courses to put it in the head instead of tools to put it in the world.

Our thinking is also distributed across others. “You’re no longer what you know, but who you know” is a new mantra. So is “the room is smarter than the smartest person in the room” (with the caveat: if you manage the process right ;). Informal and social learning is the work. Yet we still act as if we believe that people should solve problems independently.

And we also act as if how we learn is by information dump. Add a quiz, so we know they can recognize the right answer if they see it, and they’ve learned! Er, no. Science tells us that this is perhaps the worst thing we could do to facilitate learning.

In short, our practices are out of date. We’re using patch-it (or ignore-it) solutions to systemic issues. We address simple things as if they’re not all connected. It’s time to get on top of what’s known, and then act accordingly. Are you ready to join the 21st century?