Yet another silly post I stumbled upon.  And last week at a conf someone said they liked my take-downs. If you disagree, let me know, but otherwise here’s yet another bunch of marketing hype.  Hopefully no one uses this for any real decisions!

This one talks about ‘generation Z’, and implications for L&D. Ok, so we’re off on the wrong foot from the get-go.  These are listed as 1995-2014. (Er, um, as Jessica Kriegel pointed out last week, isn’t the whole point of the millennial label that they’re ‘2000’? )  However, there’s no evidence to point to reliable generational differences. What differences there are can be attributed to age, and it’s still a form of age discrimination, how about treating people by how they individually behave?

So there’s a list of differentiators, sourced from elsewhere. You go to the elsewhere, and it’s preferences, and anecdotal. Neither one are good bases for making broad claims. There are several cites in the list, as well. From marketing sites. So the author clearly doesn’t understand good data.  What are they talking about? Here’s a subset:

• Digital multitaskers: well, we know that’s inefficient, but haven’t we seen that taken up by device, not age group? It’s certainly true for millennials as well, and seems to be true for everyone who’s gotten on to mobile devices.
• Secretly social: (wth?) they share, but with control. As do most astute folks beyond high school.
• Diverse: er, yes, so’s the whole US. And, more and more, the world. How is this definitional? And do you think they really don’t still have biases?
• Quick Information Processors/Communicators:  dealing with chunks, quickly but not necessarily accurately. Isn’t that, er, just kind of human?

The recommendations list is similarly silly:

• Update job descriptions: make sure they’re up-to-date.  Really?  This isn’t just good practice?
• Expunge bias: ditto
• Go where the talent is: use appropriate social media. C’mon, already; any other statements of the obvious?
• Benefits: emphasize the WIIFM. Can you imagine?

The overarching theme here is ‘do good things’.  Why isn’t this appropriate for  every job search?  And the same thing continues when recommendations for your courses:

• Digital and Visual Content: Use media? Really?  Who’d have thought of it?
• Reassess your Library and Curricula: you don’t need diversity, but you do need soft skills. Here I think there is bad advice, instead of the generally ‘best principles argued for the wrong reasons’.  Just because you hear more messages of tolerance (yay!), doesn’t mean you know how to be inclusive, and are aware of unconscious bias. (That’s why it’s  unconscious!)

And the same overall pattern of good advice pretending to be specific to a generation holds true for the final list.   (I’m paraphrasing the advice here):

• Embrace diversity
• Provide social connection tools
• Give them the ability to contribute
• Include them
• Don’t try to ‘own’ their time

Tell me if you think any of these should be not true for other folks than these new folks?  I think this approach is a bad idea, overall. You’re providing decent advice (er,  mostly), but doing so through a myth-perpetuating framing. That’s still myth-perpetuating!

Ok, so this was from a company that’s trying to flog their services. It still seems like it’s written by a person more focused on marketing than matter. And I think we need to unpack these, and push back. Generation Z is just as discriminatory as millennials,  gender, and other differences that are attempts to avoid dealing with people as individuals.  If we don’t kick up our heels, we won’t get better efforts. And we should.

Many years ago, I met a guy who worked for Apple. They were allowed to have their own job titles, and his was “Intellectrician”. I thought that was a very nice turn of phrase. And, as I just ordered new business cards, I put  Intellectricity as the tagline instead of “Learning & Performance Strategy” or other permutations with Technology and such in the title.  Why?

The goal, of course, is to have a phrase that folks will read it and go “what’s that about?”, as some of my colleagues helped me remember. If you can spark a conversation, you have a chance to do a little evangelism/education. (And maybe some business interest?)  Also, I think it actually captures what I believe and like to do pretty well.

You’ve likely heard or read me harp many times on how companies aren’t well aligned with how we think, work, and learn. The cognitive violations are many, from how we design our learning, to design our workplaces, policies, tool use, and culture. If we redesigned what we’re doing, creating strategies to get better practices in place, we’d be unleashing the organizational intellect!  Hence, ‘intellectricity’.

And this is pretty much what I’m on about, in several ways:

• knowing what formal learning  really  looks like, and designing our design processes accordingly
• recognizing what facilitates informal learning in the short term (the ‘solve this’ type of problem-solving’)
• facilitating long-term informal learning by practices and tools suites
• fostering a culture where innovation thrives

This is a partial list that goes fractal really quickly with practices and principles around each area. The point is that these elements are key to organizational ‘thrival’.  Overall, they’re about optimizing the intellectual activity of the organization, learning quickly to be agile.

We’ll see if this tactic works to generate conversations and then new thinking. As Jay Cross used to say “conversations are the stem cells of learning”.  Practicing what we preach.  So here’s to Intellectricity: more conversations and more learning.

This may seem like an odd pairing, so bear with me.  I believe that we want to find ways to support organizations moving in the direction of innovation and learning cultures. Of course, I’ve been on a pretty continuous campaign for this, but I’m wondering what other levers we have. And, oddly, I think competencies may be one. Let me make the case for competencies and innovation.

So I’ve gotten involved in standards and competency work. Don’t ask me why, as I have no better answer than a) they asked, and b) the big ‘sucker’ tattoo on my forehead.  Of course, as I’ve said before, the folks that do this stuff (besides me, obviously) are really contributing to the benefit of our org. Maybe I felt I had to walk the talk?

In the course of the one that was just launched, we identified a number of competencies across the suite of L&D activities. This included (in addition the more traditional activities) looking at how to foster innovation. This means understanding culture and the change processes to get there, as well as knowing how to run meetings that get the best outputs. It’s about being prepared for both types of innovation, fast (solve ‘this’ problem) and slow (the steady percolation of ideas).

Thus, the necessary skills are identified as a component of a full suite of L&D capabilities. And the hope, of course, is that people will begin to recognize that there are parts of L&D they’re not addressing, and move to take on this opportunity. I hope that it’s becoming obvious that the ability to facilitate innovation is an organizational imperative, and that there’s a strong argument for L&D to be key. This is on principle, and pragmatically, it’s a no-brainer for L&D to find a way to become central to org success, not peripheral.

However, leaving that to chance would be, well, just silly. What can we do?  Well, two things, I think: one is to help raise awareness, the other is to provide support. A suite of skills aligned to this area is a ‘good thing’ if it known and used. Working on the know has been an ongoing thing (*cough*), but how can we support it?

Again, two things, I think. One are examples where people have put in place programs where they’ve oriented themselves in this direction and documented benefits. The other is to provide scaffolding; support materials that help folks implement these competencies. And I believe that’s coming.

“Systematic creativity is  not an oxymoron” (I may need to make a quip post about that). And this is an example. Think of brainstorming, for example. It can be useful, or  not. When done right, the outcomes are much better. And similarly in lots of ways, the nuances matter. If we define, through competencies, what suites of knowledge matter, we bring awareness to the possible outcomes. And the opportunity to improve them.

It may be an indirect path, to be sure, but it’s a steady, and real one. In fact, to say “we want to innovate, but how” and have a suite of specific sets of knowledge on tap to point people to, is pretty much next to the fastest path.  Showing people the benefits and the path to obtain them is key. It’s even self-referential: let’s innovate on making innovation systematically embedded in organizations! ;)  So, keep on experimenting!

In my post last week on engagement, I presented the alignment model from my  Engaging Learning  book on designing learning experiences. And as I thought about the post, I pondered several related things about labels, models, and drives. I thought I’d wrestle with them ‘out loud’ here, and troll (in the old sense) to see what you think.

Some folks have branded a model and lived on that for their career. And, in a number of cases, that’s not bad: they’re useful models and their applicability hasn’t diminished. And while, for instance, I think that alignment model is as useful as most models I’ve seen, I didn’t see any reason to tie my legacy to it, because the principles I like to comprehend and then apply to create solutions aren’t limited to just engagement. Though I wonder if people would find it easier to put the model in practice if it had a label.  The Quinn Engagement model or somesuch?

I’ve also created models around mobile, and about performance ecosystems, and more. I can’t say that they’re all original (e.g. the 4Cs of mobile), though I think they have utility. And some have labels (again, the 4Cs, Least Assistance Principle…) Then the misconceptions book is very useful, but the coverage there isn’t really mine, either. It’s just a useful compendium. I expect to keep creating models. But it’d led to another thought…

I’ve seen people driven to build companies. They just keep doing it, even if they’ve built one and sold it, they’re always on it; they’re serial entrepreneurs. I, for instance, have no desire to do that. There are elements to that that aren’t me.    Other folks are driven to do research: they have a knack for designing experiments that tease out the questions that drive them to find answers. And I’ve been good at that, but it’s not what makes my heart beat faster. I do  like action research, which is about doing with theory, and reflecting back. (I also like helping others become able to do this.)

What I’m about is understanding and applying cognitive science (in the broad sense) to help people do important things in ways that are enabled by new technologies.  Models that explain disparate domains are a hobby. I like finding ways to apply them to solve new problems in ways that are insightful but also pragmatic.   If I create models along the way (and I do), that’s a bonus. Maybe I should try to create a model about applying models or somesuch. But really, I like what I do.

The question I had though, is whether anyone’s categorized ‘drives’.  Some folks are clearly driven by money, some by physical challenges. Is there a characterization?  Not that there needs to be, but the above chain of thought led me to be curious. Is there a typology of drives? And, of course, I’m skeptical if there is one (or more), owing to the problems with, for instance, personality types and learning styles :D. Still, welcome any pointers.

Of late, there has been a number of articles talking about thinking and mental models (e.g. this one). One of the outcomes is that we have a lot of stories about how the world works.  Some of them are accurate. Others, not. And pondering this when I should’ve been sleeping, I realized that there was a likelihood that our misinterpretations could cause problems. It made me think that maybe transparency isn’t enough. What does that mean?

We build models, period. We create explanations about how the world works. And they may not be right.  If we aren’t given good ones up front, it’s likely. It’s also the case that they seem to come from previous models we’ve seen. (And diagrams. ;)

Now, it’s easy to misattribute an outcome to the wrong model if we don’t have better explanations. And this comes into play when we’re trying to figure out what has happened, or why something happened. This includes decisions made by others that may affect us, or even just lead to outcomes such as product designs, policies, or more.

Where I’m going is this: if we don’t see the thinking that explains how we got there, not just the process followed, we can infer wrongly about  why it happened. And this is important in the ‘show your work’ sense.

I’m a fan of transparency. I like it when politics and other decisions are scrutable; we can see who’s making the decision, what influences they’ve had, what steps they took to get there. That’s not enough, however. Particularly when you disagree or have a problem. Take LinkedIn, for example; when I connect to someone using the app on the qPad, I can then send them a message, but when I do it through the web interface on my computer, it wants to use one of those precious ‘InMail’s.  It’s inconsistent (read: frustrating). Is there a rationale?

So I’m going to suggest that just transparency is necessary, but not sufficient. You can’t just show your work, you need to show your thinking. You need to see the rationale!  Two reasons: you can learn more when you see the associated cogitation, and you can provide better feedback as well.  In short, we want to see  why they believe this is the right solution. Otherwise, we could question their decision because we misattribute the reasoning.

Transparency is great, but if you can’t see the thinking behind it, you can make wrong inferences.  It’s better if you can see the thinking  and the result. Is this transparent enough on both?

So, I’m wrestling with how to characterize useful changes in an organization. I’ve been compiling a list of different tactics (e.g. implement coaching, show-your-work, support curation, etc), and want to map them to the changes you’ll get in the organization. I’ve wanted to tie them to another set of various outcomes: improved participation, innovation, etc. But, while I have the strategies, I’m looking at what breakdowns of outcomes are some minimal useful set. I’ll lay out my  very preliminary set of thoughts around the values we’re trying to develop/influence, and I welcome input, pointers, what have you.

My goal, I should be clear, is to try to take specific changes we want in an organization, and have them linked to specific tactics.  And, of course, a new school approach.  That is, tactics that move organizations into directions that create learning organizations.

I start with the three elements Dan Pink talks about in his book  Drive.  In it, he lists three core motivators of employees: Purpose, Autonomy, and Mastery (this is my order, not his).  Purpose is  why what you’re doing matters.  What does this do for the org, and that what the org is doing also matters. Then, autonomy is when you’re given the freedom to pursue your purposes.  Now, you may not be completely capable of that, so there’s support for mastery, to develop the capabilities to succeed. I think these are all great, but are they sufficient in and of themselves? Are these the right things to want to impact?

I’m also a fan of Amy Edmondson’s quadrant model of psychological safety and accountability. Without either, you’re loafing. With just safety, you’re happy. With just accountability, you’re fearful. But if you’ve accountability  and  safety, you get results.  This draws upon the richer work of Garvin, Gino, and Edmondson on the components of innovation.  That model adds time for reflection, diversity, and openness to new ideas. Is this a better way to think about it?

There’re also personal values (which might be organizational, too).  Barack Obama, in his keynote to ATD 2018, had two very simple ones: be kind, and be useful.  I’ve extended that out one notch, to include three: responsibility (do the right thing, and  do something [useful]), integrity (honesty, do what you promise), and compassion (respect, helping, etc [kind]).  Is that a full set? Or is responsibility derivable from integrity? I’ve a collection of a suite of value proposals (five, with entries ranging from 5 – 8 core values).  Can you derive some of the others from the three I have? E.g. does courage come from integrity and responsibility? Does fairness come from compassion and integrity?  I don’t know.

And so, I’m not sure what the  right core set is.  Trust has to be in there somehow, but is that derivative from integrity?  And do I frame it from the change we want in the org, or the change in the people?  I’m inclined to the former.  And are they unitary, or can the tactics impact more than one? (Preliminary: more than one.)

Obviously, I’m at an early stage in formulating this.  I can beaver away on it on my own, but I’m happy to hear pointers, thoughts, etc.  Yes, I’m trying to diagram it too, but nothing coherent has  yet emerged.  So, once again, this is me ‘thinking out loud’.  Care to do similarly and share?