strategy Archives : Page 2 of 64 : Learnlets

How (Not) To Write Marketing Posts

29 May 2019 by Clark 2 Comments

You’ve seen my takedowns of various posts by now, and the flurry of fluff continues. It seems like there’s some baseline social media marketing course that everyone takes. And the very first thing is a series of steps that yields annoyance and embarrassment (or should). For the sake of all of us who suffer from this, we need to stop! We need better posts for our industry. Even if they’re for promotion (I get it), we need more sensible marketing posts.

So, the steps seem to be:

Write a post (more below)
Do a search with a keyword from the post to find related posts
Write to every blog author you find and offer them to link to your post

And, as one of the people who blogs (e.g. here), please stop! I have a canned response that includes the line:

I deliberately ignore what comes unsolicited, and instead am triggered by what comes through my network: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, etc.

Now, one of the problems is that many posts I see seem to follow a similar algorithm:

Search for articles on a hot buzzword
Pull together some points from the articles you find
Mash it up as a post

The articles appear to be written by someone who doesn’t really know the industry. How do you explain the fact that they seem to be idiosyncratic collections of buzzwords and elements? Maybe newbie social media marketing hires are writing them? I don’t know. What I do know is that they’re worthy of evisceration.

If you don’t know what you’re talking about, please don’t write. Get someone who does! There are a number of folks you could find to write for you who can do a decent job. I write for a couple of organizations that are willing to invest in quality. And there are some folks in the industry who work and write for their orgs that know what they’re talking about. And, of course, the blog posts and articles from people with a good reputation are places to look. But just because someone’s written something doesn’t mean it’s good.

The same rules for debunking apply here: is this someone with a known reputation? Or is there some independent validation of what they say? Otherwise, you either dismiss it, or track it back and analyze it in reference to what’s known. And that, of course, means knowing it yourself.

I’ll continue to eviscerate the marketing posts that come my way, and try to point the way to better thoughts in the area. I invite you to do the same! And I’m open to ideas about how to cut down on the number of wrong (if not actively misleading, and certainly self-serving) posts. Your thoughts?

Facilitate is the new train

9 May 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

Ok, so I’m being provocative with the title, since I’m not advocating the overthrow of training. The main idea is that a new area for L&D is facilitation. However, this concept also updates training. It’s part of what I was arguing when I suggested that the new term for L&D should be P&D, Performance & Development. So let’s start with that. We need to facilitate in several directions!

The driver behind the suggested nomenclature change is that the focus of L&D needs a shift. The revolutionary point of view is that organizations need both optimal execution and continual innovation (read: learning). In this increasingly chaotic time, the former is only the cost of entry, but it can’t be ignored. The latter is also becoming more and more critical!

A performance focus is the key to execution. You want to ensure people are doing what’s known about what’s need to be done. That’s the role of instruction and performance support. Performance consulting is the way to work backwards from the problem and determine the best interventions to do that optimization.

However, learning science is pushing us to recognize that we can do better. Information dump and knowledge test isn’t going to lead to any change in behavior. If you want people to be able to do, you have to have them do in practice. Which means the focus is on the practice and the feedback. That latter is facilitation. The clichéd switch from sage on the stage to guide on the side does capture it. So even here we see the need for facilitation.

It’s in the latter, however, where facilitation really comes to the fore. When we talk about development, we’re going beyond developing the individual. We are addressing the organization’s learning. And, as I’ve said, innovation is learning, just a different sort. What’s needed is informal learning.

And informal learning, while natural, isn’t always optimal. Habits, misconceptions, culture, and more can intrude. This is why facilitation may be even more key to success for organizations.

And, again, L&D should be the most knowledge about learning, because learning underpins both performance and development. Thus, if L&D is going to adapt, learning how to facilitate learning will be core. Facilitate really will be the new ‘train’.

Competencies for L&D Processes?

1 May 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

We have competencies for people. Whether it’s ATD, LPI, IBSTPI, IPL, ISPI, or any other acronym, they’ve got definitions for what people should be able to do. And it made me wonder, should there be competencies for processes as well? That is, should your survey validation process, or your design process, also meet some minimum standards? How about design thinking? There are things you do get certified in, including such piffle as MBTI and NLP. So does it make sense to have processes meet minimum standards?

One of the things I do is help orgs fine-tune their design processes. When I talk about deeper elearning, or we take a stand for serious elearning, there are nuances that make a difference. In these cases, I’m looking for the small things that will have the biggest impact. It’s not about trying to get folks to totally revamp their processes (which is a path to failure). Yet, could we go further?

I was wondering whether we should certify processes. Certainly, that happens in other industries. There are safety processes in maintenance, and cleanliness in food operations, and so on. Could and should we have them for learning? For performance consulting, instructional design, performance support design, etc?

Could we state what a process should have as a minimum requirement? Certain elements, at least, at certain way points? You could take Michael Allen’s SAM and use it as a model, for instance. Or Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping. Maybe Julie Dirksen’s Design For How People Learn could be created as such. The point being that we could stipulate some way points in design that would be the minimum to be counted as sufficient for learning to occur. Based upon learning science, of course. You know, deliberate and spaced practice, etc.

Then the question is, should we? Also, could we agree? Or, of course, people could market alternative process certifications. It appears this is what Quality Matters does, for instance, at least K12 and higher ed. It appears IACET does this for continuing education certification. Would an organization certification matter? For customers, if you do customer training? For your courses, if you provide them as a product or service? Would anyone care that you meet a quality standard?

And it could go further. Performance support design, extended learning experience design (c.f. coaching), etc. Is this something that’s better at the person level than the process level?

Should there be certification for compliance with a competency about the quality of the learning design process? Obviously in some areas. The question is, does it matter for regular L&D? On one hand, it might help mitigate against the info dump/knowledge test courses that are the bane of our industry. On the other hand, it might be hard to find a workable definition that could suit the breadth of ways in which people meet learning needs.

All I know is that we have standards about a lot of things. Learning data interchange. Individual competencies. Processes in education. Can and should there be for L&D processes? I don’t know. Seriously. I’m just pondering. I welcome your thoughts.

Learning Tools and Uni Change

11 April 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

As part of a push for Learning Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University recently released their learning design tools. I’ve been aware of CMU’s Open Learning Initiative for a suite of reasons, and their tools for separate reasons. And I think both are good. I don’t completely align with their approach, but that’s ok, and I regularly cite their lead as a person who’s provided sage advice about doing good learning design. Further, their push, based upon Herb Simon’s thoughts about improving uni education, is a good one. So what’s going on, and why?

First, let’s be fair, most uni learning design isn’t very good. It’s a lot of content dump, and a test. And, yes, I’m stereotyping. But it’s not all that different from what we see too often in corporate elearning. Not enough practice, and too much content. And we know the reasons for this.

For one, experts largely don’t have access to what they do, consciously, owing to the nature of our cognitive architecture. We compile information away, and research from the Cognitive Technology Group at the University of Southern California has estimated that 70% of what experts do isn’t available. They literally can’t tell you what they do! But they can tell you what they know. University professors are not only likely to reflect this relationship, they frequently may not actually be practitioners, so they don’t really do! We’ve compounded the likely focus on ‘know’, not do.

And, of course, most faculty aren’t particularly rewarded for teaching. Even lower tiers on the Carnegie scale of research institutions dream and hire on the potential for research. There may be lip service to quality of teaching but if you can publish and get grants, you’re highly unlikely to be let go without some sort of drastic misstep.

And the solution isn’t, I suggest, trying to get faculty to be expert pedagogues. I suggest that the teaching quality of an institution is perceived, except perhaps the top tier institutions, as a mark of the quality of the institution. And yet the efforts to make teaching important, supported, valued, etc, tends to still be idiosyncratic. Yes, many institutions are creating central bodies to support faculty in improving their classes, but those folks are relatively powerless to substantially change the pedagogy unless they happen to have an eager faculty member.

CMU’s tools align, largely, with doing the right thing, and this is important. The more tools that make it easy to do the right thing, rich pedagogies, the better. It makes much more sense, for instance, to have a default be to have separate feedback for each wrong answer than the alternative. Not that we always see that…but that’s an education problem. We need faculty and support staff to ‘get’ what good learning design is.

Ultimately, this is a good push forward. Combined with greater emphasis on teaching quality, even a movement towards competencies, and rigor in assessment, there’s a hope to get meaningful outcomes from our higher education investment. What I’ve said about K12 also holds true for higher ed, it’s both a curriculum and a pedagogy problem. But we can and should be pushing both forward. Here’s to steps in the right direction!

Better Benchmarking

20 March 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

I was on a phone conversation and was asked whether I compared my clients against others in the business to help them figure out where they’re at. E.g. do I offer my partners the chance to benchmark. And after a bit of thought, I said that no, I didn’t, and explained why. Moreover, they found my answer intriguing, so I thought I’d share it with you.

So, as I’ve said before, I don’t like best practices. In fact, as I’ve written before, I think we shouldn’t benchmark ourselves against others. That’s a bad practice. Why? Because then we’re comparing ourselves against a relative measure. And I think we should be comparing ourselves to a principled metric about where we could and should be.

In fact, in the Revolution book, I created such a benchmark. Using my performance ecosystem model, I took the six fundamental elements and elaborated them. The first core element I documented is a learning culture. That’s accompanied by the approach to formal learning, looking at your instructional design and delivery. Then you move to performance focus, how you’re supporting performance in the world. We move on to social, how you’re facilitating informal learning and innovation. The next step is how you measure what you’re doing. Finally, there’s your infrastructure, how you’re creating the ecosystem environment. For each here I have a principle and an approach.

What I’ve done in the benchmarking instrument is take each of these and extend them. So, for each element broke it into two components, as there are nuances. And, for each, I proposed four levels of maturity:

Unaware: here you’re not thinking ecosystem
Initiating: now you’re beginning to establish an ecosystem approach
Mature: you’ve reached a working approach
Leading: at this level you’re setting the pace, thinking ahead

Thus, rather than benchmarking yourself against others, you have a principled approach with which to measure yourself. This instrument is fully elaborated in the Revolutionize L&D book, and goes into detail on each of the twelve rows.

And that was my response to the query. As a person, on principle you’re not supposed to compare yourself to others, but to your own progress. How to set your benchmarks? Against formal criteria. The same is true for organizations. I’ve tried to make a scrutable framework, the Revolution Field Guide, so to speak. So, please, look to best principles, not practices, and evaluate yourself similarly.

Chasing Technology Good and Bad

19 March 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

I’ve been complaining, as part of the myths tour, that everyone wants the magic bullet. But, as I was commenting to someone, there are huge tech opportunities we’re missing. How can I have it both ways? Well, I’m talking about two different techs (or, rather, many). The fact is, we’re chasing the wrong technologies.

The problem with the technologies we’re chasing is that we’re chasing them from the wrong beginning. I see people chasing microlearning, adaptive learning, video, sims, and more as the answer. And of course that’s wrong. There can’t be one all-singing all-dancing solution, because the nature of learning is remarkably diverse. Sometimes we need reminders, sometimes deep practice, some times individualization makes sense, and other times it’s not ideal.

The part that’s really wrong here is that they’re doing this on top of bad design! And, as I believe I’ve mentioned, gilded bad design is still bad design. Moreover, if people actually spent the time and money first on investing just in improving their learning design, they’d get a far better return on investment than chasing the latest shiny object. AND, later investments in most anything would be better poised to actually be worthwhile.

That would seem to suggest that there’s not a sensible tech to chase. After, of course, authoring tools and creating elearning. And that’s not true. Investment in, say, sims makes sense if you’re using it to implement good design (e.g. deep practice). As part of a good learning design strategy. But there’s something deeper I’m talking about. And I’ve talked about it before.

What I’m talking about are content systems. They may seem far down the pike, but let me (again) make the case about why they make sense now, and for the future. The thing is, being systematic about content has both short-term and long-term benefits. And you can use the short-term ones to justify the long-term ones (or vice-versa).

In the short term, thinking about content from a systems perspective offers you rigor. While that may seem off-putting, it’s actually a benefit. If you design your content model around good learning design, you are moving towards the first step, above, about good design. And, if you write good descriptions within those elements, you really provide a foundation that makes it difficult to do bad design.

My point is that we’re ignoring meaningful moves to chase chimera. There are real value steps to make, including formalizing design processes and tools about good design. And there are ways to throw your money away on the latest fad. It’s your choice, but I hope I’ve made a case for one interpretation. So, what’s yours?

Curriculum or pedagogy?

12 March 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

In a conversation today, I mentioned that previously I’ve thought that perhaps the best next ‘man in the moon’ project would be to put an entire K12 curriculum up online. And, I’ve also thought that the only way to really fix things is to train trainers of teachers to learn to facilitate learning around meaningful activity. And, of course, both are needed. What am I thinking?

So, there are huge gaps in the ways in which folks have access to learning. For example, I worked on a project that was trying to develop some K12 curricula online, to provide support for learners in HS that might not have sufficiently capable learners. The project had started with advanced learners, but recognized that wasn’t the only gap. And this is in California! So I have argued for a massive project, but using advanced curricula and pedagogy.

And, at the other end, as I spoke at a conference looking to talk about improving education in India. There, they have a much bigger need for good teachers than they can reach with their education schools. I was arguing for a viral teacher prep. The idea being not just to train teachers, but train the trainers of those teachers. Then the training could go viral, as just teaching teachers wouldn’t go fast enough.

And both are right, and not enough. In the conversation, I resurrected both points and am now reflecting how they interact. The simple fact is that we need a better curriculum and a better pedagogy. As Roger Schank rightly points out, things like the quadratic equation are nuts to keep in a K12 curricula. The fact is that our curricula came from before the Industrial Age and is barely adequate there. Yet we’re in an Information Age. And our pedagogy is aligned to tests, not to learning nor doing. We should be equipping kids with actionable knowledge to make meaningful decisions in their lives, not with arbitrary and abstract knowledge that isn’t likely to transfer.

And, of course, even if we did have such a curriculum online, we’d need teachers who could facilitate learning in this way. And that’s a barrier not just in India. The point being that most of the world is suffering with bad curricula and pedagogy. How do we make this change.

And I don’t have an answer. I think we should put both online, and support on the ground. We need that content, available through mobile to reach beyond the developed world, and we need the facilitators. They can be online, as I think about it, but they need to understand the context on the ground if they’re not there. They are context-specific necessities. And this is a massive problem.

Principle says: start small and scale. There are institutions doing at least parts of this, but scaling is a barrier. And again, I have no immediate solution other than a national (or international) initiative. We don’t want just one without the other. I don’t want teachers facilitating the old failed curricula, and I don’t want current pedagogies working on the new curricula. (And I shudder at the thought of a pre-college test in the old style trying to assess this new model!) I welcome your thoughts!

Thoughts on strategy from Training 19

6 March 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

So last week I was the strategy track coach for the Training 19 conference. An experiment! That meant that I picked the sessions from a list of those who put their session proposals up for ‘strategy’, and could choose to open and/or close the track. I chose both. And there were thoughts on strategy from the sessions and the attendees that are worth sharing.

I chose the sessions mainly on two criteria: coverage of the topics, and sessions that sounded like they’d give real value. I was lucky, the latter happened! While I didn’t get the complete coverage I wanted, I did get a good spread of topics. So I think the track worked. As to the coaching, there wasn’t much of that, but I’ve sent in suggestions for whoever does it next year.

I knew two of the presenters, and some were new. My goal, again, was real coverage. And they lived up to it. Friend and colleague Michael Allen practiced what he preached while talking about good learning design, as he does. He was followed by Karen Polhemus &amp Stephanie Gosteli who told a compelling tale of how they were managing a huge initiative by combining training with change management. Next was JD Dillon, another friend, talked about his experiences building learning ecosystems that deemphasized courses based upon data and his inferences. Alwyn Klein made an enthusiastic and compelling case for doing performance consulting before you start. Haley Harris & Beth Wisch went deep about data in talking about how they met the needs for content by curating. Joe Totherow talked games as a powerful learning tool. Finally, Alex Kinnebrew pushed for finding stakeholder voices as a complement to data in making strategy.

I bookended these talks. I opened by making the case for doing optimal execution right, meaning doing proper learning design and performance support. Then I talked about driving for continual innovation with social and informal. I closed by laying out the performance ecosystem diagram (ok, so I replaced ‘elearning’ in the diagram with ‘training’, and that’s probably something I keep), and placed the coming talks on it, so that attendees would know where the talks fit. I mostly got it right ;). However, the feedback suggested that for those who complained, it’s because I took too long to get to the overview. Useful feedback.

I finished with a 3 hour strategy session where I walked people through each element of the ecosystem (as I cut it), giving them examples, providing self-assessment, and items to add to their strategy for that element. I closed by suggesting that it was up to them to sequence, based upon their particular context. Apparently, people really liked this opportunity. One challenge was the short amount of time; this is usually run as a full day workshop.

It’s clear that folks are moving to thinking ‘outside of the box’, and I’m thrilled. There were good audiences for the talks in a conference focused on doing training! It’s definitely time for thoughts on strategy. Perhaps, as has happened before, I was ahead of the time for the revolution. Here’s to a growing trend!

Fish & Chips Economics

13 February 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

A colleague, after hearing my take on economics, suggested I should tell this story. It’s a bit light-hearted, but it does make a point. And I’ve expanded it here for the purposes of reading versus listening. You can use other services or products, but I’ve used fish and chips because it’s quite viscerally obvious.

Good fish and chips are a delight. When done well, they’re crispy, light, and not soggy. Texturally, the crunch of the batter complements the flakiness of the fish as the crunchier exterior of the chips (fries, for us Yanks) complements the softness of the potato inside. Flavorwise it’s similarly a win, the battered fish a culinary combination of a lightly savory batter against the simple perfection of the fish, and the chips provide a smooth complement. Even colorwise, the light gold of the chips set against the richer gold of the fish makes an appealing platter. It’s a favorite from England to the Antipodes.

And we know how to do it. We know that having the proper temperature, and a balanced batter, and the right sized fries, are key to the perfection. There is variation, the thickness of the fries or the components of the batter, but we know the parameters. We can do this reliably and repeatably.

So why, of all things, do we still have shops that sell greasy, sodden fish and chips? You know they’re out there. Certainly consumers should avoid such places and only patronize purveyors who are able to replicate a recipe that’s widely known. Yet, it is unfortunately all too easy to wander from town to town, from suburb to suburb, and find a surprising variation. This just doesn’t make sense!

And that’s an important “doesn’t make sense”. Because, economics tells us that competition will drive a continuing increase in the quality of products and services. Consumers will seek out the optimal product, and those who can’t compete will fall away. Yet these variations have existed for decades! “Ladies & gentlemen, we have a conundrum!”

The result? The fundamental foundation of our economy is broken. (And, of course, I’m using a wee bit of exaggeration for humor.) However, I’m also making a point: we need to be careful about the base statements we hear.

The fact of the matter is that consumers aren’t optimizing, they’re ‘satisficing’. That is, consumers will choose ‘satisfactory’ solutions rather than optimal. It’s a tradeoff: go a mile or two further for good fish and chips, or just go around the corner for the less desirable version. Hey, we’re tired at the end of a long day, or the kids are on a rampage, or… This, in the organizational sense, was the basis of Herb Simon’s Nobel Prize in Economics, before he went on to be a leader of the cognitive science revolution.

The underlying point, besides making an affectionate dig at our economic model, is that the details matter. A joke is that economics predictions have no real basis in science, but then important assumptions are made regardless. This isn’t a political rant, in any case, it’s more a point about the fundamentals of society, and how we evaluate them. As requested.

What’s the CEO want to see

6 February 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

This issue came up recently, and it’s worth a think. What would a CEO hope to see from L&D? And I think this is in two major areas. The first is for optimum execution, and the other is for continual innovation. It’s easier to talk about the former, so we’ll start there. However, if (or, rather, when ;) L&D starts executing on the other half, we should be looking for tangible outcomes there too.

Optimal Execution

To start with, we need specific responses for the things an organization knows they need to do (until that can be automated? Orgs must do what matters, and address any gaps. Should our glorious leader care about us doing what we’re supposed to? No. Instead, this individual is concerned with gaps that have emerged and that they’re fixed. Of course, we have to admit problems we’re having as well.

The CEO shouldn’t have to care how efficient we are. That’s a given! Sure, when requested, we must be able to demonstrate that our costs were covered by the benefits of the change. But the fact that we’re no more expensive than anyone else per seat per hour is just assumed! If we’re asked, we should be able to show that, and it can be in a written report. However, mentioning efficiency in the C-suite is a ticket out.

What a CEO (should) care about are any performance gaps that have arisen in previous meetings and the changes that L&D has achieved. You know, “we’ve been able to decrease those troubling call handling times back down to x.5 minutes” or “we identified the problem and were able to reduce the errors in manufacturing back to our y/100 baseline” These may even include “saving us $z”.

To do this, of course, means you’re actually addressing key business impact drivers. You need to be talking to the business units, using their measures and performance consulting to find and fix the problems. It’s not “ok, we’ll get you a course on this”, it’s “sure, we can do that course, and tell me what the outcome should be, how will we know it worked?”

Yes, particularly at the beginning when you’re establishing credibility, you may be asked for ROI. How much did it cost to fix this. You do want the fix to cost less than the problem. But that won’t be the main criteria. The CEO should be focusing on strategy, and fixing problems that prevent being able to execute on those directions.

Continual Innovation

That strategy, of course, comes from new ideas. And, to be fair, so too due the fixes to problems. That’s the learning that occurs outside the course! Research, innovation, design, trouble-shooting, all these start with a question and ultimately an answer will be learned. It comes from experimentation and reflection, as well as looking at what others’ have done (inside and out).

What are the. measures here? Well, if we take the result that innovation comes from collective constructive friction instead of the individual brainstorm, then meaningful social media activity would be one indicator. Increasing either the quantity of quality discussions would be one. Just ‘activity’ in the social systems has been one initial measure. But we can go further.

We should expect the impact of these activities to impact particular outcomes. If it’s in sales, we should see more proposals generated, higher success rates, lower closing times, lower closing costs, and other such metrics. In operations, we might see fewer errors, more experiments, more new product ideas generated. And so on. E.g. “we increased the percentage of…” The point is that if people are sharing lessons learned, we should see faster learning and higher success rates and/or greater innovations.

Of course, we have to count these. Whatever method, whether xAPI or proprietary, we should be tracking activity and correlating with business metrics. With a little thought, we can be looking for and leveraging interesting relationships between what people do in learning (and performing) and what the outcomes are.

We could also be reporting out on the outputs of sessions that L&D facilitates. At least, initially, and then the overall increase in innovation metrics would be appropriate. The key role of L&D in innovation is developing capabilities around best principles, and that includes facilitating and developing facilitative skills.

Impact

The take-home is that the CEO shouldn’t want to hear our internal metrics on effectiveness and efficiency. Don’t expect that person to know about learning theory, best approaches, nor L&D benchmarks. They want, and need, organizational impact. Even the number of or percentage of employees who’ve taken L&D services isn’t enough. What has that done? Report impact on the organization. Let the CEO know how much you’ve helped the key metrics, which are directly tied to the bottom line. Yes, you have to start working with business partners. Yes, it requires breaking some molds. But ultimately, L&D will live, or die, by whether they’re accountable to, and contributing to, organizational success in demonstrable ways.