Howard Rheingold gave a fast-paced and inspiring talk on social network skills. With great examples and deep insight, he brought home powerful lessons on the power of people. His takeaways provided valuable lessons for individuals, schools, organizations, and society.

Jason and Joe led a lively session inspiring us to innovate through small hacks. Their very pragmatic process is approachable and practical. A great closing to DevLearn.

Last week, I talked about what L&D could (and should) look like.  In thinking about how to move folks forwards, I’m working on looking at various ways to characterize the different elements, and what various levels of profession should be.  One of my first stabs is trying to get at the necessary core principles, and the associated approach to be taken.  Here’s the thinking:

We start with the culture of the organization.  What the culture should be doing is empowering individuals, providing them with  support for learning. And that is not to provide all the answers, but to support people discovering the answer.  The goal is to not only address optimal execution, but increasingly to address continual innovation, which comes from cooperation and collaboration.  The goal is to augment their existing capabilities with appropriate skills and tools to focus on accomplishing the work to hand.  And not reintroducing things that already exist or can be found elsewhere.

That means that formal learning really should be focused on proprietary activities. Don’t design training on commercial tools, that exists. Save the effort to do a real course for those things that are fixed for long enough and specific to your organization.  And make it meaningful: contexts that the user  gets, skills that the user recognizes are needed, and that will make a real impact on the business.  Done properly, with sufficient practice, it will take time and money: formal learning  should be expensive, so use those precious resources where and when it really should be applied.

Performance support is more likely to add value in the moment, helping augment our limited memory and working memory capacity. When people need to be focused on the task, designing or curating resources to be used in the moment is a more cost-effective option, though again to be used appropriately.  If things are changing too fast, or the situation’s unique, there are better options.  And when you are developing or sourcing support, realize that less is more.  Look to be minimalist, and your performers (and the bottom line) will thank you.

If things are changing too fast, or the situation’s  new and unique (which will be happening more often), the network is likely to be your best resource and likely should be your  first.  The role here is to make sure that the network is available and vibrant. Facilitation of dialog, and skills, will make this solution the most powerful one in a company that intends to thrive.

The infrastructure, beyond the usual integration of tools, needs to take another level down, and start treating content as an asset that drives outcomes.  The steps that matter are to get detailed about the content structures, the model, underneath, and the associated governance. At the end, it requires a focus on semantics, what labels we have and how we define and describe content to move forward into personalization  and contextualization.

Finally, we need to measure what we’re doing, and we have to stop doing it on efficiencies. How much it costs us per seat hour doesn’t matter if that time in the seat isn’t achieving anything. We need to be measuring real business effects: are we increasing sales, decreasing costs or errors, solving problems faster, decreasing time to market, increasing customer satisfaction, the list goes on.  Then, and only then, should we be worrying about efficiencies. Yes, we should be smart about our investments, but all the efficiency in the world about doing something inane is just kind of silly.

So, does this make sense?  Any tuning or clarification needed? Feedback welcome.

 

A few weeks ago, I posted that we should think social first.  I want to amend my statement (I reserve the right to improve my recommendations :)  to say “world first”, and clarify what I mean.  Earlier, I posted about working backward and forward, and err on the side of putting information in the world first, and only put things in the head as a last resort (because formal learning is expensive).

What I’d suggested is that you should go to networks first, if the answer is out there.  If not, you would try to use performance support (which, though not necessarily cheap, may be less expensive than formal learning in terms of time off task, etc).  Formal learning is the recourse of last resort.  However, I missed one element, which came up in a conversation.

The conversation had to do with not developing resources at all, except core ones.  When someone wanted help with something, the option was to first try to point them to a video or book, or person.  The goal is not to reinvent the wheel, reproduce resources, etc.  Use the world first, and only pick up a secondary approach if the world doesn’t have it. In some sense that’s the social network, but it might be that the L&D department, in the course of  their continual self-learning (hint hint, nudge nudge), would’ve curated a relevant resource, so it could come either from a pointer to a resource, or a question of others.

Then, the core content for an organization would be meta-learning: how to find resources, how to solve problems, etc.  Something we were pushing about a decade ago. Ok, so you might also develop the values and mission of the organization as well.  And of course proprietary processes, formulas, etc.

The focus, however, is and should be the Least Assistance Principle: what’s the least we can do for someone to get them safely back into their flow.  The reality is we can’t meet all the needs in an era of increasing complexity, and we need to be more efficient  and  effective: giving good support but in the right modality.  So, point to it if you can, develop the minimal support to move forward, and only put stuff into people’s heads when it absolutely has to be there.  Fair enough?