One of the things that emerged at the recent A(S)TD conference was that a particular gap might exist. While there are resources about learning design, performance support design, social networking, and more, there’s less guidance about facilitating innovation.  Which led me to think a wee bit about what might be involved.  Here’s a first take.

So, first, what are the elements of innovation?  Well, whether you  listen to Stephen Berlin Johnson on the story of innovation, or Keith Sawyer on ways to foster innovation, you’ll see that innovation isn’t individual.  In previous work, I looked at models of innovation, and found that either you mutated an existing design, or meld two designs together.  Regardless, it comes from working and playing well together.

The research suggests that you  need to make sure you are addressing the right problem, diverge on possible solutions via diverse teams under good process, create interim representations, test, refine, repeat.  The point being that the right folks need to work together over time.

The barriers are several.  For one, you need to get the cultural elements right: welcoming diversity, openness to new ideas, safe to contribute, and time for reflection.  Without being able to get the complementary inputs, and getting everyone to contribute, the likelihood of the best outcome is diminished.

You also shouldn’t take for granted that everyone knows how to work and play well together.  Someone may not be able to ask for help in effective ways, or perhaps more likely, others may offer input in ways that minimize the likelihood that they’ll be considered.  People may not use the right tools for the job, either not being aware of the full range (I see this all the time), or just have different ways of working. And folks may not know how to conduct brainstorming and problem-solving processes effectively  (I see this as well).

So, the facilitation role has many opportunities to increase the quality of the outcome.  Helping establish culture, first of all, is really important.  A second role would be to understand and promote the match of tools to need. This requires, by the way, staying on top of the available tools.  Being concrete about learning and problem-solving processes, and  educating them and looking for situations that need facilitation, is another role  Both starting up front and educating folks before these skills are needed are good, and then monitoring for opportunities to tune those skills are valuable.  Finally, developing process facilitation skills,  serving in that role or developing the skills, or both, are critical.

Innovation isn’t an event, it’s a process, and it’s something that I want P&D (Learning & Development 2.0 :) to be supporting. The organization needs it, and who better?

#itashare

A number of years ago I wrote a series on design heuristics that emerged by looking at our cognitive limitations and practices from other field. One of the practices I covered briefly in one of the posts was egoless design, and a recent conversation reminded me of it.

The context for this is talking about how to improve our designs.  One of the things from Watts Humphrey’s work on software design was that if we don’t scrutinize our own work, we’ll have blindspots that we’re unaware of.  With regular peer review, he substantially improved code quality outcomes.  Egoless programming was all about getting our ego out of the way while we worked.

This applies to instructional design as well.  Too often we have to crank it out, and we don’t test it to see if it’s working.  Instead, if it’s finished, it is good.  How do we know?  It’s very clear that there are a lot of beliefs and practices about design that are wrong. Otherwise, we shouldn’t have this problem with elearning avoidance.  There’s too much bad elearning out there. What can we do?

One of the things we could, and should do, is design reviews. Just like code reviews, we should get other eyes looking at our work.  We should share our work at things like DemoFest, we should measure ourselves against quality criteria, and we should get expert reviews.  And, we should set performance metrics and measure against them!

Of course, that alone isn’t good enough. We have to redesign our processes once we’ve identified the flaws, to structure things so that it’s hard to do bad design, and doing good design flows naturally.  And then iterate.

If you don’t think your work is good enough to share, you’re not doing good enough work. And that needs to change.  Get started: get feedback and assistance in moving forward.  Just hearing talks about good design isn’t a bad start, but it’s not enough. You’ve got to look at what  you are doing, get specifically relevant feedback, and then get assistance in redesigning your design processes.  Or you won’t know your own limitations.  It’s time to get serious about your elearning; do it as if it matters. If not, why do it at all?

The main complaint I think I have about the things L&D does isn’t so much that it’s still mired in the industrial age of plan, prepare, and execute, but that it’s just not aligned with how we think, learn, and perform, certainly not for information age organizations.  There are very interesting rethinks in all these areas, and our practices are not aligned.

So, for example, the evidence is that our thinking is not the formal logical thinking that underpins our assumptions of support.  Recent work paints a very different picture of how we think.  We abstract meaning but don’t handle concrete details well, have trouble doing complex thinking and focusing attention, and our thinking is very much influenced by context and the tools we use.

This suggests that we should be looking much more at contextual performance support and providing models, saving formal learning for cases when we really need a significant shift in our understanding and how that plays out in practice.

Similarly, we learn better when we’re emotionally engaged, when we’re equipped with explanatory and predictive models, and when we practice in rich contexts.    We learn better when our misunderstandings are understood, when our practice adjusts for how we are performing, and feedback is individual and richly tied to conceptual models.  We also learn better  together, and when our learning to learn skills are also well honed.

Consequently, our learning similarly needs support in attention, rich models, emotional engagement, and deeply contextualized practice with specific feedback.  Our learning isn’t a result of a knowledge dump and a test, and yet that’s most of what see.

And not only do we learn better together, we work better together.  The creative side of our work is enhanced significantly when we are paired with diverse others in a culture of support, and we can make experiments.  And it helps if we understand how our work contributes, and we’re empowered to pursue our goals.

This isn’t a hierarchical management model, it’s about leadership, and culture, and infrastructure.  We need bottom-up contributions and support, not top-down imposition of policies and rigid definitions.

Overall, the way organizations need to work requires aligning all the elements to work with us the way our minds operate.  If we want to optimize outcomes, we need to align both performance  and  innovation.  Shall we?