Last week I wrote about Rethinking, how we might want and need to revise our approaches, and showed a few examples of folks thinking out of the box and upending our cherished viewpoints.  I discovered another one  (much closer to ‘home’) and tweeted it out, only to get a pointer to another.  I think it’s worth looking at these two examples that help make the point that maybe it’s time for a rethink of some of our cherished beliefs and practices.

The first was a pointer from a conversation I had with the proprietor of an organization with a new mobile-based coaching engine.  Among the things touted was that much of our thinking about feedback appears to be wrong.  I was given a reference and found an article that indeed upends our beliefs about the benefits of feedback.

The article investigates performance reviews, and finds them lacking, citing one study that found:

“a meta-analysis of 607 studies of performance evaluations and concluded that at least 30% of the performance reviews ended up in decreased employee performance.”

30%  decrease performance?  And that’s not including the others that are just neutral.  That’s a pretty bad outcome!  Worse, the Society for Human Resource Management is cited as stating   “90% of performance appraisals are painful and don‘t work“.  In short, one of the most common performance instruments is flawed.

As a consequence of tweeting this out, a respondent pointed to another article  that he was reminded of.  This one upends the notion that we’re good at rating others’ behavior: “research has demonstrated that each of us is a disturbingly unreliable rater of other people‘s performance”.  That is, 360 degree reviews, manager reviews, etc., are fundamentally based upon review by others, and they’re demonstrably bad at it.  The responses given have reliable biases that makes the data invalid.

As a consequence, again, we cannot continue as we are:

“we must first stop, take stock, and admit to ourselves that the systems we currently use to reveal our people only obscure them”

This is just like  learning styles: there’s no reliable data that it works, and the measurement instrument used is flawed. In short, one of the primary tools for organizational improvement is fundamentally broken.  We’re using industrial age tools in an information age.

What’s a company to do?  The first article  quoted Josh Bersin when  saying “companies need to focus very heavily on ‘collaboration, professional development,  coaching  and empowering people to do great things’“.  This is the message of the Internet Time Alliance and an outflow of the Coherent Organization model and the L&D Revolution.  There are alternatives that are more respectful of how people really think, work, and learn, and consequently more effective.  Are you ready to rethink?

#itashare

(in the future)
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies? Or hot fudge?
Dr. Agon: Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

In Woody Allen’s Sleeper about someone who wakes up in the future, one of the jokes is that all the things we thought were true are turned on their head.  I was talking with my colleague Jay Cross in terms of why we’re not seeing more uptake of the opportunities for L&D to move out of the industrial age, and one of the possible explanations is satisfaction with the status quo. And I was reminded of several articles I’ve read that support the value of rethinking.

In Sweden, on principled reasons they decided that the model of prosecuting  the prostitute wasn’t fair. She was, they argued, a victim. Instead, they decided to punish the solicitation of the service, a complete turn around from the previous approach.  It has reduced sex trafficking, for one outcome. Other countries are now looking at their model and some have  already adopted it.

In Portugal, which was experiencing problems with drugs, they took the radical step of decriminalizing them, and setting them up with treatment.  While it’s not a panacea, it has not led to the massive increase in usage that was expected.  Which is a powerful first step.  It may be a small step toward undoing some of the misconceptions about addiction which may be emerging.

And in Denmark there was an experiment in doing away with road signs. The premise was that folks with regulations will trust the regulations to work. If you remove them, they have to go back to assessing the situation, and that they’ll drive safer.  It appears, indeed, to be the case.

I could go on: the food pyramid, cubicles… more and more ideas are being shown to be misguided if not out and out wrong.  And the reason I raise this is to suggest that complacency about anything, accepting the received wisdom, may not be helpful.  Patti Shank recently wrote about the burden of having an informed opinion, and I think we need to take ownership of our beliefs, and I think that’s right.

There are lots of approaches to get out of the box: appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, double loop learning, the list goes on.  Heck, there’s even the silly and overused but apt cliche about the definition of insanity. The point being that regular reflection is part of being a learning organization.   You need to be looking at what you’re doing, what others are doing, and what others are saying.  Continual improvement is part of the ongoing innovation that today’s organization needs to thrive.

Yes, we can’t query  everything, but if we have an area of responsibility, e.g. in charge of learning strategy, we owe it to know what  alternative approach  might be. And we certainly should be looking at what we’re doing and what impact it’s having.  Measuring just efficiency instead of impact?  Being an order taker and not investigating the real cause?  Not looking at the bigger picture?  Ahem.  I am positing, via the  Revolution,    that L&D isn’t doing near what it could and should, and we are via the Manifesto  that what it  is  doing, it is doing badly.  So, what’s the response?  I’ve done the research to suggest that there’s a need for a rethink, and I’m trying to foster it.  So where do we go from here?  Where do  you go from here?  Steak, anyone?

#itashare

My background is in learning technology design, leveraging a deep background (read: Ph.D.) in cognition, and long experience with technology.  I have worked as a learning game designer/developer, researcher and academic, project leader on advanced applications, program manager, and more.  More recently, I’ve been working with many different types of organizations including not-for-profits, Fortune 500, small-medium enterprises, government, education, and more with workshops, project deliverables, strategic consulting, writing, and more.

This crosses formal learning, mobile learning, serious games, performance support, content systems, social and informal learning, and more.  I reckon there’s a benefit to 30+ years of being fortunate enough to be at the cutting edge, and I work hard to maintain currency with developments in learning, technology, and organizational needs.I like to think I’m pretty good at it, and I am for hire.  I’ve worked in most of the obvious ways: fixed-fee deliverables when we can define a scope, hourly/daily rates when it’s uncertain, and on a retainer basis to keep my expertise ‘on tap’.

What I have  not  done, is work on a commission basis. That is, I don’t push someone’s solution on you for a cut of the action. I’ve cut a few such deals in the early days,  particularly for long-term clients/partners, but to no avail.  And I’m fine with that. In fact, that’s now my stance.

There are reasons for this both principled, and pragmatic. On principle, I want to remain able to say Solution X is the best, as I truly believe it to be true, and not be swayed that Solution Y would offer me some financial reward.  I believe my independence is in my clients best interests.  This holds true in  systems, vendors, individuals, whatever.  I want you to be able to trust what I say, and know that it’s coming from my expertise, not some other influence.  When you get my expert opinion, it is to your needs alone.  And, pragmatically, I’m not a salesperson, it’s not in my nature.

I also don’t design solutions and outsource development. I have trusted partners I can work with, so I don’t need solicitations to show me your skills.  I’m sure  your team is awesome too, but I don’t want to take the time to vet your abilities, and I certainly wouldn’t represent them without scrutiny. When I have needs, I’ll reach out.

So I welcome hearing from you when you want some guidance on reviewing your processes, assessing or designing your strategy, ramping up your capabilities, considering markets, looking for collateral, and more. This is as true for vendors as other organizations.  But don’t expect me to learn about your solutions  (particularly for free), and flog them to others.   Fair enough?  Am I missing something?

I’ve been on a rant about learning design for a few posts, but I ended up talking about how creating a better process is part of getting strategic.  The point was that our learning design has to embody what’s know about how we learn, e.g. a learning engineering.  And it occurs to me that getting our processes structured to align with how we work is part of a bigger picture of how our strategies have to similarly be informed.

So, as part of the L&D Revolution I argue we need to have, I’m suggesting organizations, and consequently L&D, need to be aligned with how we think, work, and learn. So our formal learning initiatives (used only when they are really needed) need to be based upon learning science. And performance support similarly needs to reflect how we process information, and, importantly, things we don’t do well and need support for.  The argument for informal and social learning similarly comes from our natural approaches, and similarly needs to provide facilitation for where things can and do go wrong.

And, recursively, L&D’s processes need to similarly reflect what we do, and don’t, do well.  So,  just as we should provide support for performers to execute, communicate, collaborate, and continue to improve (why L&D needs to become P&D), we need to make sure that we practice what we preach.  And a scientific method means we need to measure what we’re doing, not just efficiency, but effectiveness.

It’s time that L&D gets out of the amateur approach, and starts getting professional. Which means understanding the organization’s goals, rejecting requests that are nonsensical, examining what we do, using technology in sophisticated ways (*cough* content engineering *cough*), and more.  We need to know about how we think, work, and learn, and apply it to what we do. We’re about people, after all, so it’s about time we understood the science in our field, and quit thinking that our existing practices (largely from an industrial age) are inherently  relevant. We must be scrutable, and that means we must scrutinize.  Time to  get to work.

#itashare