Marcy Driscoll kicked off the Association for Educational Communications and Technology’s annual conference with a thoughtful keynote on leadership. She used her experience as a Dean to explore possibilities and suggestions for what this could and should mean.

Last week, the Debunker Club (led by Will Thalheimer) held a twitter debate on 70:20:10 (the tweet stream can be downloaded if you’re curious).  In ‘attendance’ were two of the major proponents of 70:20:10, Charles Jennings and Jos Arets.  I joined Will as a moderator, but he did the heavy lifting of organizing the event and queueing up questions.  And there were some insights from the conversations and my own reflections.

To start, 70:20:10 is a framework, it’s not a specific ratio but a guide to thinking about the whole picture of developing organizational solutions to performance problems. In the book by Jos & Charles, along with their colleague Vivian Heijnen,  on the topic, there’s a whole methodology that encompasses 5 roles and 28 steps. The approach goes from a problem to a solution that incorporates tools, formal learning, coaching, and more.

The numbers come from a study on leaders, who felt that 10% of what they learned to do their jobs came from formal learning, 20% came from working with others and coaching, and 70% they learned from trying and reflecting on the outcomes. The framework’s role is to help people recognize this, and not leave the 70 and 20 to chance. The goal is to help people along the learning curve, not just leave them to chance after the ‘event’.

First, my impression was that a lot of people  like that the 70:20:10 framework provides a push beyond the event model of ‘the course’. Also, a number struggle with the numbers as a brand, because they feel that the numbers are misleading. And some folks clearly believe that good instructional design  should include the social and the activity, so the framework is a distraction. A colleague felt that there were also some who feel that formal learning is a waste of time, but I don’t think that many truly ignore the 10, they just want it in the proper perspective (and I could be wrong).

Now, there are times when the ratio changes. In roles where the consequences of failure are drastic (read: aerospace, medical, military), you tend to have a lot  more formal.  It can go quite a ways up the learning curve. Ideally, we’d do this for every situation, but in real life we have to strike a balance.  If we can do the job right in the 10, and then similarly ensure good practices around the 20 and the 70, we’ll get people up the curve.

Another issue, for me, is that 70:20:10 not only provides a push towards thinking of the whole picture, but like Kirkpatrick (and perhaps better) it serves as a design tool. You should start from what the situation looks like at the end and figure out what can be in the world and what has to be in the head, and then go backwards. You then design your tools, and then your training, and 70:20:10 suggests including coaching, etc.  But starting with the 70 is one of the messages.

So, I like the realization of 70:20:10 (except typing all those redundant zeros and colons, I often refer to it as 721 ;): the focus on designing the full solution, including tools and coaching and more.  I don’t see 70:20:10 being the full solution, as the element of continual innovation and a learning culture are separate, but it’s a good solution for the performance part of the picture, and the specific  parts of the development.

Tied to my last post about insufficient approaches, I was thinking again about the Coherent Organization  . Coherency is powerful, but it could be a limiting metaphor.   So I want to explore it a bit further.

First, coherency is powerful.   Lasers, for example, are just light, the same as comes from your lightbulbs. Except that the wavelengths are aligned and focused. When they‘re at the same frequency, in the same direction, suddenly you can cut steel!

However, an easy interpretation is that you get this right, and it‘s then sufficient. But that‘s no longer sufficient in organizations. As things change, you need coherency and agility. How do you get both?

I‘m suggesting that coherency has to be on many dimensions.   So you have coherency with the organization‘s purpose, but people are coherent with each other, and with the customers, and with best principles.   And that latter is important, as best practices won‘t transfer unless they‘re abstracted and recontextualized.

So what I‘m arguing for is a more radical coherency, a coherency that‘s in synchrony in an ecosystem perspective. Where people are communicating and collaborating in ways that apply best principles in an way that integrates them into an aligned whole that‘s greater than the sum of the parts.

This is a learning organization, but one that‘s integrating many disparate elements. That, I think, is a desirable and achievable goal, but it’s more than one program. It’s a campaign that needs an initial focus, and a plan to successfully integrate it into practice first, and then to scale it to both shift practice and culture. It’s non-trivial, but I think it’s more than worthwhile: it’s necessary. What do you think?

As things get more complex, organizations are looking to get more agile. And they‘re looking at a wide variety of approaches in different areas. It can be agile, digital transformation, design thinking, and more. And, by and large, these are all good things. And all of them are quite simply insufficient. Why do I suggest this insufficiency? Because the solution is complex.

Organizations are complex organisms. If you try to address them with simple solutions, you will perturb them, but the results will not be as expected. Whether you believe the 70% failure rate of org change initiatives, the fact is that many or most organizational change initiatives don‘t achieve the desired outcomes. As we explore this more, we understand that it requires a ‘ground war, not an air war‘ as Sutton & Rao put it in Scaling Up Excellence. And I‘ll posit that there‘s more.

This isn‘t unknown; regardless of label, the folks who are responsible for such initiatives typically argue that that it‘s a process. Yet orgs still look for the simple packaged program that will turn things around. And while it‘s understandable, it‘s decreasingly likely to work. It takes a system approach.

And what I haven‘t seen, and I‘m willing to hear of one, is a comprehensive program that addresses the full suite of skills and culture together that constitute a coherent organization. And that‘s a non-trivial compendium of elements. There are the cultural elements, and skills, and tools, and more. PKM, WoL (SyW), 70:20:10, teaming, collaborating and communicating, etc, are all elements, but they need to be tied together.

My point, I guess, is that there needs to be an entry point, but also a plan to develop the full suite of skills and move the culture. And, like most meta-learning, it needs to be done around something. So you need a concrete focus to start, some problem you‘re working on that you‘ll do in the new way, and practice the processes and develop the competencies and culture as you go. For the org, it should be a necessary new extension to the organization‘s competencies. For L&D, it should be first applied for some L&D project.

In both cases it needs a plan and support for acquisition. And include a realistic time frame for starting, and then spreading. It‘s not simple, but it‘s necessary. Anything else, I fear, is truly insufficient.