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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Beyond Talent Development

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On Tuesday, with a big presentation, the American Society for Training & Development announced a rebranding. The new name is the Association for Talent Development, going from ASTD to ATD. And while this is a necessary move, I think it wasn’t the best change they could’ve made.

ASTD needed the change, for two reasons. For one, ASTD has membership in, and runs events, around the world. There may be other orgs (e.g. CSTD for Canada), but the 800 lb gorilla is ASTD. Second, training, while still a large proportion of what ASTD does (rightly or wrongly), is increasingly being joined by other approaches such as coaching and mentoring.

The first reason resonates, but I have a problem with the second. To put it another way, I believe that the change to Association makes sense, but Talent Development doesn’t.  As I stated in Revolutionize Learning & Development, I believe that the necessary direction for organizations is to couple optimal performance with continual innovation. What’s required from Learning & Development, then, is to support all manners of performance and develop continual innovation.

What’s involved is not only to support training when it needs to be ‘in the head’, but using performance support when we can. And we need to develop and facilitate organizational innovation. The latter means not only developing individual (and group) ability to interact constructively, but to facilitate useful interactions of all sorts.

And here’s the rub. I see Talent Development as developing people through training, mentoring, and coaching, but I see the potential role for the folks in what now is termed L&D to be not only the development of people’s ability, but their ability to perform, even if it isn’t developing the person. That is, using performance support when it makes sense should be part of the unit’s responsibility, even when it doesn’t develop the person. Similarly, I see facilitating constructive interaction (curating resources, removing barriers to interaction and supporting tool use, etc), whether it develops people or not, as a vital role.

That’s the reason I chose to suggest, in the book, that the unit should be renamed Performance & Development; supporting both optimal execution and continual innovation in all relevant ways. The opportunity is to be the strategic organizational resource to ensure that all the intellectual resources of the organization are contributing.

And that is the reason I have a problem with Talent Development. To me, Talent Development is focused only on developing people instead of facilitating overall organization performance. And I think that’s falling short of the opportunity, and the need. Don’t get me wrong, I laud that ASTD made a change, and I think Talent Development is a good thing. Yet I think that our role can and should be more.  I  wish they’d thought a little broader, and covered all of the potential contributions.  So, maybe, Association of Performance & Development or APD. Regardless, it’s a dynamic organization that offers a lot. I just wonder who’s going to fill the gaps.

Learning Quotient?

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I had the good fortune to be invited to the Future of Work event that was held here in Silicon Valley two  weeks ago, and there were four breakouts, one of which was on learning and knowledge management.  You can guess which one I was on (though tempted by the leadership and culture one; there was overlap).

Within that breakout the activity was to pick four topics and further break out.  The issue was meeting workplace needs given the changing nature of work, and I suggested that perhaps the biggest need was to focus on skills that held true across domain, so called meta-cognitive skills, and learning to learn (a total surprise, right?).  That was one that people were interested in, so that’s what we discussed.

We broke down learning into some component elements.  We talked about how your beliefs about learning (your epistemological stance) mattered, as well as your intention to learn, and how effective you were at learning alone and with others.  It also matters how well you use tools and external representations, as well as your persistence.

What emerged was that learning skills shouldn’t be taken for granted.  And consequently, one of the attendees suggested that perhaps along with IQ and EQ, we should be looking at people’s LQ or learning quotient.  I just saw an advertisement that said EQ (they called it EI Emotional Intelligence, probably to avoid trademark infringement) was better than IQ because you can improve your EQ scores. However, the evidence suggests you can improve your LQ scores too.

A decade ago now, Jay Cross and I were pushing the meta-learning lab, and I still think Jay was right claiming that meta-learning might be your best investment.  So, are you aware of how you learn? Have you improved how you learn?  Can you help others learn more effectively?  I believe the answer is yes, and we not only can, but  should.

No, we’re not “doing all right”

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A number of the Change Agents Worldwide  resonated with an image of the 50 reasons not to change at work that was overlaid on an image of Doug Engelbart. The point, of course, is that all these reasons not to change provide a significant barrier to success. We decided that we‘d line up and  start a blog carnival with each of us addressing one. I decided to address number 45:

45. We‘re doing all right as it is.

First, do you have evidence for that, or are you in denial? It‘s easy to not want to change because it‘ll be hard, so it‘s easier to say that things are OK. It is particularly easy if you aren‘t really checking! L&D, for instance, has been notoriously bad about seeing whether their interventions are actually achieving any impact (around 3% reporting that they actually go to level 4 on Kirkpatrick‘s scale).

If you are checking, what are your benchmarks? Are you measuring just execution, or are you including innovation? Because, as I‘ve said before, optimal execution is only going to let you survive, to thrive you‘ll need continual innovation. If you‘re doing what your strategy says, are you looking out for disruptive forces, and creating your own? You should be checking to see if you‘re striking that balance of being able agile enough as well as productive enough.

Finally, is “all right” really good enough? Shouldn‘t we be shooting for the best, not just good enough? Do you think your competitors are sitting complacent? We really should be looking for every edge. That doesn‘t come from believing we‘re doing all right. We should be looking for continual improvement.

Yes, it‘s harder to not believe we‘re doing all right as it is, but your curiosity should be driving you forward regardless. Your organization, if it isn‘t continually learning, is declining. Are you really doing all right? If you‘re definition of ‘all right‘ is that you are continually curious and moving forward with experimentation, then I reckon so.

Revolution hits the road

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Finally!    Revolutionize Learning & Development (Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age) is now shipping,  (and has been available on Kindle for a couple of weeks), so at last you should be able to get your mitts on it if you’re so inclined.  And, if you’re at all involved in trying to make your organization successful, I will immodestly suggest you might want to be so inclined.

Just as background, it documents my claim that organizational L&D isn’t doing what it could and should be doing, and what it  is doing, it is doing badly. Then it lays out  elements that should be considered, what it would look like if it were going well, and    how you  might get there.  While the exact strategy for any one organization will be dependent on where they are and the nature of the business, there are some frameworks to help you apply those to your business.  The goal is to move to Performance & Development, coupling optimal execution with continual innovation.

If you’re curious but not yet ready to dig in, let me mention a couple of things:

  • there’s a free sample available
  • I was interviewed by GameOn Learning’s Bryan Austin about the topic (shorter and more focused)
  • I was also interviewed by Rick Zanotti of Relate (longer and more wide-ranging)

And, if you’re going to be at ASTD’s International Conference  in DC next week, I will be there and:

  • presenting about the issues  on Monday the 5th of May  at 4:30 PM in room 146B (session M313)
  • signing copies right after (5:30 PM) in the ASTD book store
  • holding an author chat on Wednesday May 7th at 9:45 AM also at the ASTD Bookstore

So, check it out, and see if it makes sense to you.  Or you can just  go ahead and get it.  I hope to see you in DC, and welcome your feedback!

Neil Jacobstein #ChurchillClub Keynote Mindmap

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Neil Jacobstein gave the keynote for the special Future of Talent event sponsored by SAP and hosted by the Churchill Club. In a wide ranging and inspiring talk, Neil covered how new technologies, models, and methods provide opportunities to transcend our problems and create a world worth living in.

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What do elearning users say?

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Towards Maturity is a UK-based but global initiative looking at organizations use of technology for learning.  While not as well known in the US, they’ve been conducting research benchmarking on what organizations are doing and trying to provide guidance as well.  I even put their model as an appendix in the forthcoming book on reforming L&D.  So I was intrigued to see the new report they have just released.

The report, a survey of 2000 folks in a variety of positions in organizations, asks what they think about elearning, in a variety of ways.  The report covers a variety of aspects of how people learn: when, where, how, and their opinion of elearning. The report is done in an appealing infographic-like style as well.

What intrigued me was the last section: are L&D teams tuned into the learner voice.  The results are indicative.  This section juxtaposes what the report heard from learners versus what L&D has reported in a previous study.  Picking out just a few:

  • 88% of staff like self-paced learning, but only 23% of L&D folks believe that learners have the necessary confidence
  • 84% are willing to share with social media, but only 18% of L&D believe their staff know how
  • 43% agree that mobile content is useful (or essential), but only 15% of L&D encourage mlearning

This is indicative of a big disconnect between L&D and the people they serve.  This is why we need the revolution!   There’s lots more interesting stuff in this report, so I strongly recommend you check it out.

Egoless design

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A number of years ago I wrote a series on design heuristics that emerged by looking at our cognitive limitations and practices from other field. One of the practices I covered briefly in one of the posts was egoless design, and a recent conversation reminded me of it.

The context for this is talking about how to improve our designs.  One of the things from Watts Humphrey’s work on software design was that if we don’t scrutinize our own work, we’ll have blindspots that we’re unaware of.  With regular peer review, he substantially improved code quality outcomes.  Egoless programming was all about getting our ego out of the way while we worked.

This applies to instructional design as well.  Too often we have to crank it out, and we don’t test it to see if it’s working.  Instead, if it’s finished, it is good.  How do we know?  It’s very clear that there are a lot of beliefs and practices about design that are wrong. Otherwise, we shouldn’t have this problem with elearning avoidance.  There’s too much bad elearning out there. What can we do?

One of the things we could, and should do, is design reviews. Just like code reviews, we should get other eyes looking at our work.  We should share our work at things like DemoFest, we should measure ourselves against quality criteria, and we should get expert reviews.  And, we should set performance metrics and measure against them!

Of course, that alone isn’t good enough. We have to redesign our processes once we’ve identified the flaws, to structure things so that it’s hard to do bad design, and doing good design flows naturally.  And then iterate.

If you don’t think your work is good enough to share, you’re not doing good enough work. And that needs to change.  Get started: get feedback and assistance in moving forward.  Just hearing talks about good design isn’t a bad start, but it’s not enough. You’ve got to look at what  you are doing, get specifically relevant feedback, and then get assistance in redesigning your design processes.  Or you won’t know your own limitations.  It’s time to get serious about your elearning; do it as if it matters. If not, why do it at all?

It’s (almost) out!

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My latest tome, Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age is out.  Well, sort of.  What I mean is that it’s now available on Amazon for pre-order.  Actually, it’s been for a while, but I wanted to wait until there was some  there there, and now there’s the ‘look inside’ stuff so you can see the cover, back cover (with endorsements!), table of contents, sample pages, and more.  Ok, so I’m excited!

RLnDCoverSmallWhat I’ve tried to do is make the case for dragging L&D into the 21st Century, and then provide an onramp.  As I’ve been saying, my short take is that L&D isn’t doing what it could and should be doing, and what it  is doing, it is doing badly.  But I don’t believe complaining alone is particularly helpful, so I’m trying to put in place what I think will help as well.  The major components are:

  • what’s wrong (you can’t change until you admit the problem :)
  • what we know about how we think, work, and learn that we aren’t accounting for
  • what it would look like if we were doing it right
  • ways forward

By itself, it’s not the whole answer, for several reasons. First, it can’t be. I can’t know all the different situations you face, so I can’t have a roadmap forward for everyone. Instead, what I supposed you could think of is that it’s a guidebook  (stretching metaphors), showing suggestions that you’ll have to sequence into your own path.  Second, we don’t know all yet. We’re still exploring many of these areas.  For example, culture change is not a recipe, it’s a process.  Third, I’m not sure any one person can know all the answers in such a big field. So, fourth, to practice what I’m preaching, there should be a community pushing this, creating the answers together.

A couple of things on that last part, the first one is a request.  The community will need to be in place by the time the book is shipping.  The question is where to host it.  I don’t intend to build a separate community for it on the book site, as there are plenty of places to do this.  Google groups, Yahoo groups, LinkedIn…the list goes on. It can’t be proprietary (e.g. you have to be a paid member to play).  Ideally it’d have collaborative tools to create resources, but I reckon that can be accommodated via links.  What do you folks think would be a good choice?

The second part of the community bit is that I’m very grateful to many people who’ve helped or contributed.  Practitioner friends and colleagues provided the five case studies I’ve the pleasure to host.  Two pioneers shared their thoughts.  The folks at ASTD have been great collaborators in both helping me with resources, and in helping me get the message out.  A number of other friends and colleagues took the time to read an early version and write endorsements.  And I’ve learned together with so many of you by attending events together, hearing you speak, reading your writings, and having you provide feedback on my thoughts via talking or writing to me after hearing me speak or commenting on my scribblings here.

The book isn’t perfect, because I have thought of a number of ways it could be improved since I provided the manuscript, but I have stuck to the mantra that at some point it’s better out than still being polished. This book came from frustration that we can be doing so much better, and we’re not. I didn’t grow up thinking “I’m going to be a revolutionary”, but I can’t not see what I see and not say  something.  We can be doing so much better than we are. And so I had to be willing to just get the word out, imperfect.  It wasn’t (isn’t) clear that I’m the best person to call this out, but someone needs to!

That said, I have worked really hard to have the right pieces in place.  I’ve collected and integrated what I think are the necessary frameworks, provided case studies and a workplace scenario, and some tools to work forward.   I have done my best to provide a short and cogent kickstart to moving forward.  

Just to let you know that I’m starting my push.  I’ll be presenting on the book at ASTD’s ICE conference, and doing some webinars. Bryan Austin of GameOn Learning interviewed me on my thoughts in this direction.  I do believe in the message, and that it at least needs to be heard.  I think it’s really the necessary message for L&D (in it, you’ll find out why I’m suggesting we need to shift to P&D!).  Forewarned!  I look forward to your feedback.

Manifesting in practice extended

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In my last post, I wrote about the first step you should take to move to Serious eLearning, which was making deeper practice.  Particularly under the constraints of not rocking the boat.  Here I want to talk about where you go from there.  There are several followup steps you should take after (hopefully) success at the beginning.  My big three are: aligning with the practice, extending the practice, and evaluating what is being done.

1. So, if you took the advice to make more meaningful and applied practice within the constraints of many existing workplaces (order-taking, content dump, ‘just do it’), you next want to be creating content aligned with helping the learner  succeed at the practice. Once you have those practice questions, you should trim all that material to just what they’ll need to be able to make those decisions.

This also means stripping away unnecessary content, jettisoning the nice-to-know, trimming down the prose (we overwrite).  By stripping away the content, you can work in more practice and still meet the (nonsensical) criteria of time in seat.  And you’ll have to fight the forces of ‘it  has to be in there’, but it’s a worthy fight, and part of the education of the organization that needs to occur.

Get some war stories from your SMEs while you’re working (or fighting) with them.  Those should be your examples, and guide your practice design. But if you can’t, you’ll just have to do the best you can. Make the introduction help learners see what they’ll be able to do afterwards.  All this fits within the standard format, so you should be able to get away with it and still be taking a stab at improving what you’re doing.

2. The second step is to extend practice. I mean this in two ways. For one, massed practice dissipates quickly, and you want practice spaced out over time. This may be a somewhat hard sell, yet it’s really required for learning to stick. Another part of the organization’s education.  You should be developing some extra content at development time for streaming out over time, but breaking up your course so that the hour of seat time is 30 or 40 mins up front, and then 20 or 30 mins of followup spread out over days and with repeated practice will make learning stick  way more than not.  And if it matters, you should (if it doesn’t, why bother?).

The second way to extend it is to work on the meaningfulness of your practice.  Ideally, practice would be  deep, simulations or at least scenarios.  The situations that will most define company success are, I will suggest, in complex contexts. To deal with those, you need practice in complex contexts: serious games or at least scenarios.  And don’t make them boring, exaggerate so that the practice is as motivating as the real world situation is.  Ultimately, you’d like learners creating solutions to real world problems like creating business deliverables, or performing in immersive environments, not answering multiple choice questions!  And extending the experience socially: whether just reflecting on the experience together, or better yet,  collaborative problem solving.

3. Finally, you should start measuring what you’re doing in important ways.  This, too, will require educating your organization.  But you shouldn’t assume your first efforts are working.  You want to start with the change in the business that needs improving (e.g. performance consulting and Kirkpatrick level 4), then figure out what performance by  individuals would lead to that business change, and then develop your learning objectives and practice to get people able to do that performance. And then measure whether they can, and whether it leads to performance changes in the workplace, and ultimately changes in the business metrics. This will require working with the business units to get  their data, but ultimately that’s how you become strategic.

Of course, you should be measuring your own work, and similarly if your interventions are as efficient as possible.  But those should only happen after you’re having an impact.  Measuring your efficiency (“our costs per seat time are at the industry average”) without knowing whether you have an impact is delusional. Are your estimates of time to accomplish accurate?  Are you using resources efficiently? Are people finding your experiences to be ‘hard fun’?  These matter  after the question of: “are we helping the organizations needs?”

So, between the previous post and this, hopefully you have some concrete ideas about how even in the most constrained circumstances you can start improving your learning design.  And the Manifesto supporting principles go into more depth on this, if you need help.  So, does this provide some guidance on how to get started?  Ready to sign on?  And, perhaps more importantly, what further questions do you have?