Nathalie Nahai opened the second day of the FocuOn Learning conference. In a rapid fire presentation, she covered 7 principles that engage individuals into behaviors. With clear examples from familiar online experiences, she portrayed how these things work. Admirably, she finished with a call to ethical behavior.
After yesterday’s rant about problems in local schools, I was presented with a recent New York Times article. In it, they talked about how the tech industry was getting involved in schools. And while the initiatives seem largely well-intentioned, they’re off target. There’s a lack of awareness of what meaningful learning is, and what meaningful outcomes could and should be. And so it’s time to shed a little clarity.
Tech in schools is nothing new, from the early days of Apple and Microsoft vying to provide school computers and getting a leg up on learners’ future tech choices. Now, however, the big providers have even more relative leverage. School funds continue to be cut, and the size of the tech companies has grown relative to society. So there’s a lot of potential leverage.
One of the claims in the article is that the tech companies are able to do what they want, and this is a concern. They can dangle dollars and technology as bait and get approval to do some interesting and challenging things.
However, some of the approaches have issues beyond the political:
One approach is to teach computer science to every student. The question is: is this worth it? Understanding what computers do well (and easily), and perhaps more importantly what they don’t, is necessary, no argument. The argument for computer programming is that it teaches you to break down problems and design solutions. But is computer science necessary? Could it be done with, say, design thinking? Again, all for helping learners acquire good problem-solving skills. But I’m not convinced that this is necessarily a good idea (as beneficial as it is to the tech industry ;).
Another initiative is using algorithms, rules like the ones that Facebook uses to choose what ads to show you, to sequence math. A program, ALEKS, already did this, but this one mixes in gamification. And I think it’s patching a bad solution. For one, it appears to be using the existing curriculum, which is broken (too much rote abilities, too little transferable skills). And gamification? Can’t we, please, try to make math intrinsically interesting by making it useful? Abstract problems don’t help. Drilling key skills is good, but there are nuances in the details.
A second approach has students choosing the problems they work on, and teachers being facilitators. Of course, I’m a fan of this; I’ve advocated for gradually handing off control of learning to learners, to facilitate their development of self-learning. And in a recently-misrepresented announcement, Finland is moving to topics with interleaved skills rapped around them (e.g. not one curricula, but you might intersect math and chemistry in studying ecosystems. However, this takes teachers with skills across both domains, and the ability to facilitate discussion around projects. That’s a big ask, and has been a barrier to many worthwhile initiatives. Compounding this is that the end of a unit is assessed by a 10-point multiple choice question. I worry about the design of those assessments.
I’m all for school reform. As Mark Warschauer put it, the only things wrong with American education is the curriculum, the pedagogy, and the way we use technology. I think the pedagogy being funded in the latter description is a good approach, but there are details that need to be worked out to make it a scalable success. And while problem-solving is a good curricular goal, we need to be thoughtful about how we build it in. Further, motivation is an important component about learning, but intrinsic or extrinsic?
We really could stand to have a deeper debate about learning and how technology can facilitate it. The question is: how do we make that happen?
It’s Working Out Loud (WOL) Week, and that’s always a valuable time for reflection. It so happens that the past few weeks I’ve been working with an organization, and they were ripe for WOL. The problem was what, specifically, should they do to make this work? They had barriers. My (off the cuff) recommendations were around creating some habits of work.
For context, they’re a very distributed organization, and have been for decades. They’ve a number of locations spread around over a space of hundreds of miles. As a consequence, they’re well-practiced at a variety of distance communication modalities. They have well-equipped video conferencing rooms, social media tool, and of course email. And yet, their communication is very formal. They’re busy of course, so while they recognize the benefits of sharing better, it’s hard for them to implement.
There would be rewards, of course. They have distributed teams supporting the same sorts of actions. Various job roles do similar work with a variety of stakeholders, and would benefit by sharing best practices, creating communities of practice around those job roles. However, for a variety of reasons, including ineffective use of the available tools, time pressures, and general lack of awareness and practice, the practices not in play.
As part of my ‘critical friend‘ role, I made some suggestions, including working out loud. They asked for specific steps they might take. So what’d I recommend? Several things:
This was off the cuff, and I might have suggested more, but this is a reconstituted list that I think captures some major necessary areas. It’s about practices that build the culture. These will need support, but they are the core ideas that can drive a move to a more open, sharing workplace. One that leads to continual improvement and innovation.
This is a rant, but it’s coupled with lessons.
I’ve been away, and one side effect was a lack of internet bandwidth at the residence. In the first day I’d used up a fifth of the allocation for the whole time (> 5 days)! So, I determined to do all I could to cut my internet usage while away from the office. The consequences of that have been heinous, and on the principle of “it’s ok to lose, but don’t lose the lesson”, I want to share what I learned. I don’t think it was evil, but it well could’ve been, and in other instances it might be.
So, to start, I’m an Apple fan. It started when I followed the developments at Xerox with SmallTalk and the Alto as an outgrowth of Alan Kay‘s Dynabook work. Then the Apple Lisa was announced, and I knew this was the path I was interested in. I did my graduate study in a lab that was focused on usability, and my advisor was consulting to Apple, so when the Mac came out I finally justified a computer to write my PhD thesis on. And over the years, while they’ve made mistakes (canceling HyperCard), I’ve enjoyed their focus on making me more productive. So when I say that they’ve driven me to almost homicidal fury, I want you to understand how extreme that is!
I’d turned on iCloud, Apple’s cloud-based storage. Innocently, I’d ticked the ‘desktop/documents’ syncing (don’t). Now, with every other such system that I know of, it’s stored locally *and* duplicated on the cloud. That is, it’s a backup. That was my mental model. And that model was reinforced: I’d been able to access my files even when offline. So, worried about the bandwidth of syncing to the cloud, I turned it off.
When I did, there was a warning that said something to the effect of: “you’ll lose your desktop/documents”. And, I admit, I didn’t interpret that literally (see: model, above). I figured it would disconnect their syncing. Or I’d lose the cloud version. Because, who would actually steal the files from your hard drive, right?
Well, Apple DID! Gone. With an option to have them transferred, but….
I turned it back on, but didn’t want to not have internet, so I turned it off again but ticked the box that said to copy the files to my hard drive. COPY BACK MY OWN @##$%^& FILES! (See fury, above.) Of course, it started, and then said “finishing”. For 5 days! And I could see that my files weren’t coming back in any meaningful rate. But there was work to do!
The support guy I reached had some suggestion that really didn’t work. I did try to drag my entire documents folder from the iCloud drive to my hard drive, but it said it was making the estimate of how long, and hung on that for a day and a half. Not helpful.
In meantime, I started copying over the files I needed to do work. And continuing to generate the new ones that reflected what I was working on. Which meant that the folders in the cloud, and the ones on my hard drive that I had copied over, weren’t in sync any longer. And I have a lot of folders in my documents folder. Writing, diagrams, client files, lots of important information!
I admit I made some decisions in my panic that weren’t optimal. However, after returning I called Apple again, and they admitted that I’d have to manually copy stuff back. This has taken hours of my time, and hours yet to go!
So, there are several learnings from this. First, this is bad design. It’s frankly evil to take someone’s hard drive files after making it easy to establish the initial relationship. Now, I don’t think Apple’s intention was to hurt me this way, they just made a bad decision (I hope; an argument could be made that this was of the “lock them in and then jack them up” variety, but that’s contrary to most of their policies so I discount it). Others, however, do make these decisions (e.g. providers of internet and cable from whom you can only get a 1 or 2 year price which will then ramp up and unless you remember to check/change, you’ll end up paying them more than you should until you get around to noticing and doing something about it). Caveat emptor.
Second, models are important and can be used for or against you. We do create models about how things work and use evidence to convince ourselves of their validity (with a bit of confirmation bias). The learning lesson is to provide good models. The warning is to check your models when there’s a financial stake that could take advantage of them for someone else’s gain!
And the importance of models for working and performing is clear. Helping people get good models is an important boost to successful performance! They’re not necessarily easy to find (experts don’t have access to 70% of what they do), but there are ways to develop them, and you’ll be improving your outcomes if you do.
Finally, until Apple changes their policy, if you’re a Mac and iCloud user I strongly recommend you avoid the iCloud option to include Desktop and Documents in the cloud unless you can guarantee that you won’t have a bandwidth blockage. I like the idea of backing my documents to the cloud, but not when I can’t turn it off without losing files. It’s a bad policy that has unexpected consequences to user expectations, and frankly violates my rights to my data.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog topics.
I recently came across a document (PDF) about disruptive innovation based upon Clayton Christensen’s models, which I’d heard about but hadn’t really penetrated. This one was presented around higher education innovation (a topic I’ve some familiarity with ;), so it provided a good basis for me to explore the story. It had some interesting features that are worth portraying, and then some implications for my thoughts on innovation, so I thought I’d share.
The model’s premise is that disruption requires two major things: a technology enabler and a business model innovation. That is, there has to be a way to deliver this new advance, and it has to be coupled with a way to capitalize on the benefits. It can’t just be a new technology in an existing business model, as that’s merely the traditional competitive innovation. Similarly, a new business model around existing technology is still within competitive advancement.
A related requirement is to have a new entity ready to capitalize. This quote captured me: “In those few instances in which the leader in one generation became the leader in the next disruptive one, the company did so by setting up a completely autonomous business unit…” You can’t do disruption from inside the game. Even if you’re a player, you have to liberate resources to start anew.
Which is quite different than most innovation. Typical innovation is ‘within the box’. This comes from having an environment where people can experiment, share, be exposed to new ideas, and allowing it to incubate (ferment/percolate) over time. And this is a good thing. Disruptive innovation makes new industries, new companies, etc. And that’s also good (except, perhaps, for the disrupted). The point being that both innovations are valuable, but different.
It’s not clear to me what happens when an internal innovation comes up with an idea that’s really disruptive. Clearly, if the idea clears the hurdles of complacency and inertia, you’d probably want to spin it off. But most innovations just need a fair airing and trialing to get traction (though depending on scope, a bit of change management might be useful).
I encourage innovation, and creating the environment where it can happen. It’s valuable even in established businesses, and a fair bit is known about how to create an environment where it can flourish. So, what can we innovate about innovation?
I’m participating in an engagement, and they were struggling to define my role. Someone mentioned that I’m serving as a ‘critical friend’, and the others cottoned on to it. I hadn’t heard that term so I explored, and liked what I found. Thought I’d share it.
So, ‘critical friend‘ is a term that originated in the education sector. The prevailing definition is:
a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person‘s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work.
What’s key to me is that the role involves being committed to the success of the endeavor, but also being provocative. The latter is about asking the hard questions and bringing in outside input that wouldn’t likely be considered otherwise. And I believe, based upon what I’ve dug into for innovation, that this is a valuable role.
So what I’m doing is getting to know the situation, rapidly consuming lots of documents, interviewing people, and sitting in on other information gathering sessions, to get to know what’s up. Then I’m floating some ideas that I think they really need to consider. The ideas are contrary to the path they’re planning on but I’ve buttressed them with some strong arguments. They make not take on all of them, but at least they’ll have explicitly considered them.
I’ve played this role specifically in a number of different situations (in fact, in some sense you could consider most of my engagements to have at least a facet of this). I like to think that my 30+ years of work across cognition, technology, learning, design, and organizational implementation, with corporations, education institutions, government agencies, and not-for-profits, as well as my stockpiling of models, means I’ll generate some lateral and valuable thoughts in almost any situation. That’s certainly been the case to date. And I really do want to help people achieve their goals.
It’s a fun, though challenging role. You have to get up to speed quickly, and be willing to offer ideas. I pride myself on also being able to suggest ways to accomplish ideas that aren’t obviously implementable at the first go (all part of Quinnovation ;).
When you’re looking at some change, getting some critical friend support on principle is a good idea. People challenging you for your own best interest isn’t always easy, but the outcomes are pretty much always worth it. So, who’s your critical friend?
A colleague recently asked (in general, not me specifically) whether there’s a role for LMS functions. Her query was about the value of having a place to see (recommended) courses, to track your development, etc. And that led me to ponder, and here’s my thinking:
My question is where to draw the line. Should you do social learning in the LMS version of that, or have a separate system? If using the LMS for social around courses (a good thing), how do you handle the handoff to the social tool used for teams and communities? It would seem to make sense to use the regular tool in the courses as well, to make it part of the habit.
Similarly, should you host non-course resources in the LMS or out in a portal (which is employee-focused, not siloed)? Maybe the courses also make more sense in the portal, tracked with xAPI? I think I’d like to track self-learning, via accessing videos and documents the same as I would formal learning with courses: I want to be able to correlate them with business to test the outputs of experiments in changes.
Again, how should I be handling signups for things? I handle signups for all sorts of things via tools like Eventbrite. Is asking to signup for a training, with a waiting list, different than other events such as a team party?
Now, for representing your learning, is that an LMS role, or an LRS dashboard, or…? From a broader perspective, is it talent management or performance management or…?
I’m not saying an LMS doesn’t make sense, but it seems like it’s a minor tool at best, not the central organizing function. I get that it’s not a learning management system, but a course management system, but is that the right metaphor? Do we want a learning tracking system instead, and is that what an LMS if or could be for?
When we start making a continuum between formal and informal learning, what’s the right suite of tools? I want to find courses and other things through a federated search of *all* resources. And I want to track many things besides course completions, because those courses should have real world-related assignments, so they’re tracked as work, not learning. Or both. And I want to track things that we’re developing through coaching, or continuing development through coaching and stretch assignments. Is that an LMS, or…?
I have no agenda to put the LMS out of business, as long as it makes sense in modern workplace learning. However, we want to use the right tool for the right job, and create an ecosystem that supports us doing the right thing. I don’t have an obvious answer, I’m just trying on a rethink (yes, thinking out loud ;), and wondering what your thoughts are. So, what is the right way to think about this? Do you see a uniquely valuable aggregation of services that makes sense? (And I may have to dig in deeper and think about the essential components and map them out, then we can determine what the right suites of functions are to fulfill those needs.)
So I presented on innovation to the local ATD chapter a few weeks ago, and they did an interesting and nice thing: they got the attendees to document their takeaways. And I promised to write a blog post about it, and I’ve finally received the list of thoughts, so here are my reflections. As an aside, I’ve written separate articles on L&D innovation recently for both CLO magazine and the Litmos blog so you can check those out, too.
I started talking about why innovation was needed, and then what it was. They recalled that I pointed out that by definition an innovation is not only a new idea, but one that is implemented and leads to better results. I made the point that when you’re innovating, designing, researching, trouble-shooting, etc, you don’t know the answer when you start, so they’re learning situations, though informal, not formal. And they heard me note that agility and adaptation are premised on informal learning of this sort, and that the opportunity is for L&D to take up the mantle to meed the increasing need.
There was interest but some lack of clarity around meta-learning. I emphasize that learning to learn may be your best investment, but given that you’re devolving responsibility you shouldn’t assume that individuals are automatically possessed of optimal learning skills. The focus then becomes developing learning to learn skills, which of needs is done across some other topic. And, of course, it requires the right culture.
There were some terms they heard that they weren’t necessarily clear on, so per the request, here are the terms (from them) and my definition:
I used the Learning Organization Dimensions diagram (Garvin, Edmondson & Gino) to illustrate the components of successful innovation environment, and these were reflected in their comments. A number mentioned psychological safety in particular as well as the other elements of the learning environment. They also picked up on the importance of leadership.
Some other notes that they picked up on included:
One that was provided that I know I didn’t say because I don’t believe it, but is interesting as a comment:
“Belonging trumps diversity, and security trumps grit”
This is an interesting belief, and I think that’s likely the case if it’s not safe to experiment and make mistakes.
They recalled some of the books I mentioned, so here’s the list:
It was a great evening, and really rewarding to see that many of the messages stuck. So, what are your thought around innovation?
A recent twitter spat led me to some reflections, and I thought I’d share. In short, an individual I do not know attacked one of my colleague Harold’s diagrams, and said that they stood against “everything classical and rigorous”. My somewhat flip comment was that “the classical and rigorous is also outdated and increasingly irrelevant. Time for some new thinking”. Which then led to me being accused of spreading BS. And I don’t take kindly to someone questioning my integrity. (I’m an ex-academic after all! ;) I thought I should point out why I said what I said.
Theories change. We used to believe that the sun circled the earth, and that the world was flat. More relevantly, we used to have management theories that optimized using people as machines. And typical business thinking is still visible in ways that are hierarchical and mechanical. We continue to see practices like yearly reviews, micromanagement, incentives for limited performance metrics, and curtailed communication. They worked in an industrial age, but we’re in a new environment, and we’re finding that we need new methods.
And, let me add, these old practices are not aligned with what we know about how our brains work. We’ve found that the best outcomes come from people working in environments where it’s safe to share. Also, we get better results when we’re collaborating, not working independently. And better outcomes occur when we’re given purpose and autonomy to pursue, not micromanagement. In short, many of the classical approaches, ones that are rigorously defined and practiced, aren’t optimal.
And it’s not just me saying this. Respected voices are pointing in new directions based upon empirical research. In XLR8, Kotter’s talking about leveraging more fluid networks for innovation to complement the hierarchy. In Teaming, Edmondson is pointing to more collective ways to work. And in Scaling Up Excellence, Sutton & Rao point to more viral approaches to change rather than the old monolithic methods. The list goes on.
Rigor is good. Classical, in the sense of tested and proven methods, is good. But times change, and our understanding expands. Just yesterday I listened to Charles Reigeluth (a respected learning design theorist) talk about how theories change. He described how most approaches have an initial period where they’re being explored and results may not be optimal, but you continue to refine them and ultimately the results can supersede previous approaches. Not all approaches will yield this, but it appears to me that we’re getting convergent evidence on theoretical and empirical grounds that the newer approaches to business, as embodied in stuff like Harold’s diagrams and other representations (e.g. the Revolution book), are more effective.
I don’t knowingly push stuff I don’t believe is right. And I try to take a rigorous approach to make sure I’m avoiding confirmation bias and other errors. It’s got to align with sound theory, and pass scrutiny in the methodology. I try to be the one cutting through the BS! I stand behind my claim that new ways of working are an improvement over the old ways. Am I missing something?
In yesterday’s post, I talked about how new tools need to be coupled with practices to facilitate exploration. And I wanted to explore more (heh) about what’s required. The metaphor is old style exploration, and the requirements to succeed. Without any value judgment on the motivations that drove this exploitation, er, exploration ;). I’m breaking it up into tools, communication, and support.
So, one of the first requirements was to have the necessary tools to explore. In the old days that could include means to navigate (chronograph, compass), ways to represent learnings/discoveries (map, journal), and resources (food, shelter, transport). It was necessary to get to the edge of the map, move forward, document the outcomes, and successfully return. This hasn’t changed in concept.
So today, the tools are different, but the requirements are similar. You need to figure out what you don’t know (the edge of the map), figure out how to conduct an experiment (move forward), measure the results (document outcomes), and then use that to move on. (Fortunately, the ‘return’ part isn’t a problem so much!) The digital business platform is one, but also social media are necessary.
What happened after these expeditions was equally important. The learnings were brought back, published, and presented and shared. Presented at meetings, debates proceeded about what was learned: was this a new animal or merely a variation? Does this mean we need to change our explanations of animals, plants, geography, or culture? The writings exchanged in letters, magazines, and books explored these in more depth.
These days, we similarly need to communicate our understandings. We debate via posts and comments, and microblogs. More thought out ideas become presentations at conferences, or perhaps white papers and articles. Ultimately, we may write books to share our thinking. Of course, some of it is within the organization, whether it’s the continual dialog around a collaborative venture, or ‘show your work’ (aka work out loud).
Such expeditions in the old days were logistically complex, and required considerable resources. Whether funded by governments, vested interests, or philanthropy, there was an awareness of risk and rewards. The rewards of knowledge as well as potential financial gain were sufficient to drive expeditions that ultimately spanned and opened the globe.
Similarly, there are risks and rewards in continual exploration on the part of organizations, but fortunately the risks are far less. There is still a requirement for resourcing, and this includes official support and a budget for experiments that might fail. It has to be safe to take these risks, however.
These elements need to be aligned, which is non-trivial. It requires crossing silos, in most cases, to get the elements in place including IT, HR, and operations. That’s where strategy, culture, and infrastructure can come together to create an agile, adaptive organization that can thrive in uncertainty. And isn’t that where you need to be?