Abhijit used an unusual presentation deck of 2 sketch notes to present his very interesting thoughts and examples of living in perpetual beta, concluding that if L&D changes, it could be a catalyst for change. A message very synergistic with the Revolution ;).
In some recent work, an organization is looking to find a way to learn fast enough to cope with the increasing changes we’re seeing. Or, better yet, learn ahead of the curve. And this led to some thoughts.
As a starting point, it helps to realize that adapting to change is a form of learning. So, what are the individual equivalents we might use as an analogy? Well, in known areas we take a course. On the other hand, for self-learning, e.g. when there isn’t a source for the answer, we need to try things. That is, we need a cycle of: do – review -refine.
In the model of a learning organization, experimentation is clearly listed as a component of concrete learning processes and practices. And my thought was that it is therefore clear that any business unit or community of practice that wants to be leading the way needs to be trying things out.
I’ve argued before that learning units need to be using new technologies to get their minds around the ‘affordances’ possible to support organizational performance and development. Yet we see that far too few organizations are using social networks for learning (< 30%), for example.
If you’re systematically tracking what’s going on, determining small experiments to trial out the implications, documenting and sharing the results, you’re going to be learning out ahead of the game. This should be the case for all business units, and I think this is yet another area that L&D could and should be facilitating. And by facilitating, I mean: modeling (by doing it internally), evangelizing, supporting in process, publicizing, rewarding, and scaling.
I think the way to keep up with the rate of change is to be driving it. Or, as Alan Kay put it: “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Yes, this requires some resources, but it’s ultimately key to organizational success, and L&D can and should be the driver of the process within the organization.
As I read more about how to create organizations that are resilient and adaptable, there’s an interesting emergent characteristic. What I’m seeing is a particular pattern of structure that has arisen out of totally disparate areas, yet keeps repeating. While I haven’t had a chance to think about it at scale, like how it would manifest in a large organization, it certainly bears some strengths.
Dave Grey, in his recent book The Connected Company that I reviewed, has argued for a ‘podular’ structure, where small groups of people are connected in larger aggregations, but work largely independently. He argues that each pod is a small business within the larger business, which gives flexibility and adaptiveness. Innovation, which tends to get stifled in a hierarchical structure, can flourish in this more flexible structure.
More recently, on Harold Jarche‘s recommendation, I read Niels Pflaeging’s Organize for Complexity, a book also on how to create organizations that are high performance. While I think the argument was a bit sketchy (to be fair, it’s deliberately graphic and lean), I was sold on the outcomes, and one of them is ‘cells’ composed of a small group of diverse individuals accomplishing a business outcome. He makes clear that this is not departments in a hierarchy, but flat communication between cross-functional teams.
And, finally, Stan McChrystal has a book out called Team of Teams, that builds upon the concepts he presented as a keynote I mindmapped previously. This emerged from how the military had to learn to cope with rapid changes in tactics. Here again, the same concept of small groups working with a clear mission and freedom to pursue emerges.
This also aligns well with the results implied by Dan Pink’s Drive, where he suggests that the three critical elements for performance are to provide people with important goals, the freedom to pursue them, and support to succeed. Small teams fit well within what’s known about the best in getting the best ideas and solutions out of people, such as brainstorming.
These are nuances on top of Jon Husband’s Wirearchy, where we have some proposed structure around the connections. It’s clear that to become adaptive, we need to strengthen connections and decrease structure (interestingly, this also reflects the organizational equivalents of nature’s extremophiles). It’s about trust and purpose and collaboration and more. And, of course, to create a culture where learning is truly welcomed.
Interesting that out of responding to societal changes, organizational work, and military needs, we see a repeated pattern. As such, I think it’s worth taking notice. And there are clear L&D implications, I reckon. What say you?
#itashare
One of my arguments for the L&D revolution is the role that L&D could be playing. I believe that if L&D were truly enabling optimal execution as well as facilitating continual innovation (read: learning), then they’d be as critical to the organization as IT. And that made me think about how this role would differ.
To be sure, IT is critical. In today’s business, we track our business, do our modeling, run operations, and more with IT. There is plenty of vertical-specific software, from product design to transaction tracking, and of course more general business software such as document generation, financials, etc. So how does L&D be as ubiquitous as other software? Several ways.
First, formal learning software is really enterprise-wide. Whether it’s simulations/scenarios/serious games, spaced learning delivered via mobile, or user-generated content (note: I’m deliberately avoiding the LMS and courses ;), these things should play a role in preparing the audience to optimally execute and being accessed by a large proportion of the audience. And that’s not including our tools to develop same.
Similarly, our performance support solutions – portals housing job aids and context-sensitive support – should be broadly distributed. Yes, IT may own the portals, but in most cases they are not to be trusted to do a user- and usage-centered solution. L&D should be involved in ensuring that the solutions both articulate with and reflect the formal learning, and are organized by user need not business silo.
And of course the social network software – profiles and locators as well as communication and collaboration tools – should be under the purview of L&D. Again, IT may own them or maintain them, but the facilitation of their use, the understanding of the different roles and ensuring they’re being used efficiently, is a role for L&D.
My point here is that there is an enterprise-wide category of software, supporting learning in the big sense (including problem-solving, research, design, innovation), that should be under the oversight of L&D. And this is the way in which L&D becomes more critical to the enterprise. That it’s not just about taking people away from work and doing things to them before sending them back, but facilitating productive engagement and interaction throughout the workflow. At least at the places where they’re stepping outside of the known solutions, and that is increasingly going to be the case.
In an insightful article, Ken Majer (full disclosure, a boss of mine many years ago) has written about the need to have the right culture before executing strategy. And this strikes me as a valuable contribution to thinking about effective change in the transformation of L&D in the Revolution.
I have argued that you can get some benefits from the Revolution without having an optimized culture, but you’re not going to tap into the full potential. Revising formal learning to be truly effective by aligning to how we learn, adding in performance support in ways that augment our cognitive limitations, etc, are all going to offer useful outcomes. I think the optimal execution stuff will benefit, but the ability to truly tap into the network for the continual innovation requires making it safe and meaningful to share. If it’s not safe to Show Your Work, you can’t capitalize on the benefits.
What Ken is talking about here is ensuring you have values and culture in alignment with the vision and mission. And I’ll go further and say that in the long term, those values have to be about valuing people and the culture has to be about working and learning together effectively. I think that’s the ultimate goal when you really want to succeed: we know that people perform best when given meaningful work and are empowered to pursue it.
It’s not easy, for sure. You need to get explicit about your values and how those manifest in how you work. You’ll likely find that some of the implicit values are a barrier, and they’ll require conscious work to address. The change in approach on the part of management and executives and the organizational restructuring that can accompany this new way of working isn’t going to happen overnight, and change is hard. But it is increasingly, and will be, a business necessity.
So too for the move to a new L&D. You can start working in these ways within your organization, and grow it. And you should. It’s part of the path, the roadmap, to the revolution. I’m working on more bits of it, trying to pull it together more concretely, but it’s clear to me that one thread (and as already indicated in the diagrams that accompany the book) is indeed a path to a more enabling culture. In the long term, it will be uplifting, and it’s worth getting started on now.
In a conversation I had recently, specifically about a community focused on research, I used the term ‘community of improvement’, and was asked how that was different than a community of practice. It caused me to think through what the differences might be. (BTW, the idea was sparked by conversations with Lucian Tarnowski from BraveNew.)
First, let me say that a community of practice could be, and should be, a community of improvement. One of the principles of practice is reflection and improvement. But that’s not necessarily the case. A community of practice could just be a place where people answer each other’s questions, collaborate on tasks, and help one another with issues not specifically aligned with the community. But there should be more.
What I suggested in the conversation was that a community should also be about documenting practice, applying that practice through action or design research, and reflecting on the outcomes and the implications for practice. The community should be looking to other fields for inspiration, and attempting experiments. It’s the community equivalent of Schön’s reflective practitioner. And it’s more than just cooperation or collaboration, but actively engaging and working to improve.
Basically, this requires collaboration tools, not just communication tools. It requires: places to share thoughts; ways to find partners on the documentation, experimentation, and reflection; and support to track and share the resulting changes on community practices.
Yes, obviously a real community of practice should be doing this, but too often I see community tools without the collaboration tools. So I think it’s worth being explicit about what we would hope will accompany the outcomes. So, where do we do this, and how?
#itashare
It’s time for another game of Where’s Clark? As usual, I’ll be somewhat peripatetic this fall, but more broadly scoped than usual:
Yes, it’s quite the whirl, but with this itinerary I should be somewhere near you almost anywhere you are in the world. (Or engage me to show up at your locale!) I hope to see you at one event or another before the year is out.
There have been a couple of recent proposals about the relative role of cooperation and collaboration, and I’m trying to make sense of them. Here are a couple of different approaches, and my first take at teasing them apart.
Dion Hinchcliffe of Adjuvi tweeted a diagram about different types of working together that shows his take. He has coordination as a subsidiary to cooperation and on to collaboration. So coordination is when we know what needs to be done, but we can’t do it alone. Cooperation is when we’re doing things that need to have a contribution from each of us, and requires some integration. And collaboration is when we’re working together with a goal but not clear how we’ll get there. I think what’s core here is how well defined the task is and how much we contribute.
In the meantime, Harold Jarche, my ITA colleague, as a different take. He sees collaboration as working together to achieve a goal that’s for the organization, whereas cooperation goes beyond. Cooperation is where we participate and assist one another for our own goals. It’s contribution that’s uncoupled from any sense of requirement, and is freely given. I see here the discussion is more about our motives; why are we engaged.
With those two different takes, I see them as different ways of carving up the activities. My initial reaction is closer to Dion’s; I’ve always seen cooperation as willingness to assist when asked, or to provide pointers. To me collaboration is higher; it’s willing to not just provide assistance in clearly defined ways such as pointers to relevant work, answering questions, etc, but to actively roll up sleeves and pitch in. (Coordination is, to me I guess, a subset of cooperation.) With collaboration I’ve got a vested interest in the outcome, and am willing to help frame the question, do independent research, iterate, and persist to achieve the outcome.
I see the issue of motivation or goal as a different thing. I can cooperate in a company-directed manner, as expected, but I also can (and do) cooperate in a broader sense; when people ask for help (my principles are simple: talk ideas for free; help someone personally for dinner/drinks; if someone’s making a quid I get a cut), I will try to assist (with the Least Assistance Principle in mind). I can also collaborate on mutual goals (whether ITA projects or client work), but then I can also collaborate on things that have no immediate outcome except to improve the industry as a whole (*cough* Serious eLearning Manifesto *cough*).
So I see two independent dimensions: one on the effort invested, just responding to need or actively contributing; and the other on the motivation, whether for a structured goal or for the greater good.
Now I have no belief that either of them will necessarily agree with my take, but I’d like to reconcile these interpretations for the overall understanding (or at least my own!). That’s my first take, feedback welcome!
I had lunch recently with Paul Signorelli, who’s active in helping libraries with digital literacy, and during the conversation he talked about his vision of the future of the library. What I heard was a vision of libraries moving beyond content to be about learning, and this had several facets I found thought-provoking.
Now, as context, I’ve always been a fan of libraries and library science (and librarians). They were some of the first to deal with the issues involved in content organization, leading to information science, and their insight into tagging and finding is still influencing content architecture and engineering. But here we’re talking about the ongoing societal role of libraries.
First, to be about learning, it has to be about experience, not content. This is the crux of a message I’ve tried to present to publishers, when they were still wrestling with the transition from book to content! In this case, it’s an interesting proposition about how libraries would wrap their content to create learning experiences.
Interestingly, Paul also suggested that he was thinking broader, about how libraries could also point to people who could help. This is a really intriguing idea, about libraries becoming a local broker between expertise and needs. Not all the necessary resources are books or even print, and as libraries are now providing video and audio as well as print, and on to computer access to resources beyond the library’s collection, so too can it be about people.
This is a significant shift, but it parallels the oft-told story of marketing myopia, e.g. about how railroads aren’t about trains but instead are about transportation. What is the role of the library in the era of the internet, of self-help.
One role, of course, is to be the repository of research skills, about digital literacy (which is where this conversation had started). However, this notion of being a center of supporting learning, not just a center of content, moves those literacy skills to include learning as well! But it goes further.
This notion turns the role of a library into a solution: whether you need to get something done, learn something, or more, e.g. more than just learning but also performance support and social, becoming the local hub for helping people succeed. He aptly pointed out how this is a natural way to use the fact that libraries tend to exist on public money; to become an even richer part of supporting the community.
It’s also, of course, an interesting way to think about how the locus of supporting people shifts from L&D and library to a joint initiative. Whether there’s still a corporate library is an open question, but it may be a natural partner to start thinking about a broader perspective for L&D in the organization. I’m still pondering the ways in which libraries could facilitate learning (just as trainers should become learning facilitators, so too should librarians?).
Learning is the new business imperative. It is now an indisputable business reality: companies must become more nimble and agile. As things move faster, new processes arise, and the time to copy a new business approach drops, it becomes clear that continual innovation is the only way to not just survive, but thrive. And this doesn’t, can’t, come from the status quo.
And if the answer isn’t known, as is inherent in situations like problem-solving, trouble-shooting, new product/service creation, and more, then this, too, is a form of learning. But not the type addressed by training rooms or eLearning courses. They serve a role, but not this new one, this needed approach, We need something new.
What we need are two things: effective collaboration and meta-learning. Innovation comes, we know, from collaboration. Collaboration is the new learning, where we bring complementary strengths to bear on a problem in a process structured to be optimally aligned with how our brains work. And we need to create a culture and set of skills around continually learning, which means understanding learning to learn, aka meta-learning.
Accelerating the development of these capabilities means doing things different and new. It means sowing the seeds by instigating a learning process that develops not only some specific needed capabilities, but also the meta-learning and collaboration skills. It means understanding, valuing, and explicitly developing the ability of people to learn alone and together. It means making it safe to share, to ‘work out loud’. And finally it means scaling up from small success to organizational transformation.
This is a doable, albeit challenging move, but it is critical to organizations that will excel. Learning is no longer a ‘nice to have’, or even an imperative, it is the only sustainable differentiator. The question is: are you ready? Are you making the new learning a strategic priority?