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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Flip the office?

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In talking with my ITA colleagues yesterday, we were discussing the necessity of  going into the office, or not.  And it seemed that there were times it made sense, and times it didn’t.

What doesn’t make sense is trying to do work in an office.  If you need to think, having random conversations and interruptions happen gets in the way.  Yes,  you need colleagues and resources ‘to hand’, but that’s available digitally and distally.

Being together makes sense, it seemed to us, when you either are meeting for the first time (e.g. with clients), or want creative friction.  You can interact virtually for planned work, but it helps to interact F2F when getting to know one another, and when you’re looking for serendipitous interactions.  Jay Cross, in his landmark  Informal Learning book, talked about how offices were being designed to have the mail room and coffee in the same place, to facilitate those interactions.  If conversations are the engine of business, having the opportunity for their occurrence is useful.

This seems the opposite of most visions of work: work away from the office, interact in the office, instead of the reverse.  So, is this the flipped office?

 

Starting trouble

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This seems to be my year of making trouble, and one of the ways is talking about what L&D is and isn’t doing. As a consequence of the forthcoming book (no cover comps yet nor ability to preorder), I’ve had to put my thoughts together, and I’m giving the preliminary version next Thurs, February 6, at 11AM PT, 2PM ET as a webinar for ASTD.

The gist is that there are a number of changes L&D is not accommodating: changes in how business should be run, changes in understanding how we think and perform, and even our understanding of learning has advanced (at least beyond the point that most of our corporate approaches seem to recognize).  Most L&D really seems stuck in the industrial age, and yet we’re in the information age.

And this just doesn’t make sense!  We should be the most eager adopters of technology, staying on top of new developments and looking for their potential to support our organizations.  We should be leading the charge in being learning organizations: following the business precepts of experimenting regularly, failing fast, and reflecting on the outcomes.  Yet that doesn’t reflect what the we’re seeing.

To move forward, we need to do more. To address business needs, we need to consider performance support and social networks. In fact, I argue that these should be our first line of defense, and courses should only be used when a significant skill shift is required.  We should be leveraging technology more effectively, looking at semantics and content architectures as well as mobile and contextual opportunities.  And we need to be getting strategic about how we’re helping the organization and evaluating not just efficiency but our effectiveness and impact.

This is just the start of a rolling series of activities trying to inject a sense of urgency into L&D (change management step 1).  While this will be covered in print, in sessions starting with last week’s TK14, and continuing through Learning Solutions and ICE, here’s a chance to get a headstart.  Look for a followup somewhere around April.  Hope you’ll join us!

Amy Jo Martin #ASTDTK14 Keynote Mindmap

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Amy Jo Martin spoke at ASTD’s TechKnowledge conference, telling us engagingly about humanizing social media to monetize it. In addition to useful ways to think about the power of social media, for better or worse, she portrayed some interesting ways to think about generating or saving revenue.

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Intelligent Content

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I’ve been on the content rant before, talking about the need to structure content into models, and the benefits of tagging.  Now, there’s something you can do about it.

You have to understand that folks who do content as if their business depended on it, e.g. web marketers, have a level of sophistication that elearning (and  all elearning: performance support, social, etc) would do well to adopt. The power of leveraging content by description, not by link, is the basis for adaptive, custom, personalized experiences.  But it takes a lot of knowledge and work, and a strategy.

You’ve seen it in Netflix and Amazon recommendations, and sites that support powerful searches.  We can and should be doing this for learning and performance, whether pull  or  push.  But where do you learn?

One of the people I follow is Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler.  And he’s put together the  Intelligent Content Conference that will give you the opportunities you need to get on top of this. This isn’t necessarily for the independent instructional designer, but if you do elearning as a business, whether a publisher or custom content house, or if you’re looking for the next level of technical sophistication, this is something you really should have on your radar.

Full disclosure: I will be on a press pass to attend, but they didn’t reach out to me. I reached out to  them  because I wanted a way to attend. Because I know this is important enough to find a way to hear more.  I don’t have a set company I work for, so if I want to know this stuff to be able to help people take advantage of it, I have to earn my keep (in this case, by writing an article afterward).  I only feel it fair, however, that if I think it’s important enough to finagle a way to attend, I should at least let you know about it.

(And, fair warning, if you do lob something at me, expect to join the many who have received a firm refusal, on principle. I’m not in the PR business.  As I state in my boilerplate response: “I deliberately ignore what comes unsolicited, and instead am triggered by what comes through my network: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, etc.”.  Save us both time and don’t bother.)

Social ROI?

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Ok, so I’ve been thinking about this, but not sure what the current state of play is.  Someone was stating that talking about ROI of the social network was important but hard to do now,    and essentially wondered if there was new thinking in this area.  So let me ask the question.

So I’m calling out L&D because they’re only measuring efficiency when they should be measuring impact.  You look at measures used to evaluate the industry, and they’re things like cost/time/seat.  Which is potentially a useful measure, but  only after you’ve decided that having a bum in the seat is having a positive impact on the organization.  If you’re not doing something measurable – decreasing time to close sales or increasing the number of problems resolved accurately on the first call – it doesn’t matter how  efficient you are!

With social media, I believe it’s the same thing.  If we put in social media and facilitate discussion in engineering, we’d expect a different impact than in manufacturing.  In engineering we might get less time to design a requested feature, and in manufacturing we might increase usable yield.  It really doesn’t matter if you’re seeing more use of the system, more messages or connections or what have you, if you’re not seeing an impact.  Of course, if you can correlate them, all the better.

Sure, we also might affect indirect metrics – retention, workplace satisfaction, or customer satisfaction – with tangible value, but our real focus should be on direct metrics.  If creating a more effective culture for sharing, and sharing is supposed to lead to better outcomes, it sure would be nice to demonstrate those benefits.  I guess my experience with instructional design – if you design it according to the formula, it is good – leads me to some skepticism that we can just trust the outcome.

So, is this obvious, or are we still wrestling with this?  Other opinions?

2014 Directions

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In addition to time for reflection on the past, it’s also time to look forward.  A number of things are already in the queue, and it’s also time to see what I expect and hope for.

The events already queued up include:

ASTD’s TechKnowledge 2014, January 22-24 in Las Vegas, where I’ll be talking on aligning L&D with organizational needs (hint hint).

NexLearn’s Immersive Learning University conference, January 27-30 in Charleston, SC, where I’ll be talking about the design of immersive learning experiences.

Training 2014, in San Diego February 2 – 5, where I’ll be running a workshop on advanced instructional design, and talking on learning myths.

The eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions will be in Orlando March 17-21, where I’ll be running a 1 day elearning strategy workshop, as well as offering a session on informal elearning.

That’s all that is queued up so far, but stay tuned. And, of course, if you need someone to speak…

You can tell by the topics I’m speaking on as to what I think are going to be, or should be, the hot issues this year.  And I’ll definitely be causing some trouble.  Several areas I think are important and I hope that there’ll be some traction:

Obviously, I think it’s past time to be thinking mobile, and I should have a chapter on the topic in the forthcoming ASTD Handbook Ed.2.  Which also is seen in my recent chapter on the topic in the Really Useful eLearning Instruction Manual.  I think this is only going to get more important, going forward, as our tools catch up.  It’s not like the devices aren’t already out there!

A second area I’m surprised we still have to worry about it good elearning design. I’m beginning to see more evidence that people are finally realizing that knowledge dump/test is a waste of time and money. I’m also part of a forthcoming effort to address it, which will also manifest in the aforementioned second edition of the ASTD Handbook.

I’m quite convinced that L&D has a bigger purpose than we’re seeing, which is naturally the topic of my next book. I think that the writing is on the wall, and what is needed is some solid grounding in important concepts and a path forward.  The core point is that we should be looking from a perspective of not just supporting organizational performance via optimal execution, with (good) formal learning and performance support, but also facilitation of continual innovation and development.  I think that L&D can, and  must address this, strategically.

So, of course, I think that we still have quite a ways to go in terms of capitalizing on social, the work I’ve been advocating with my ITA colleagues.  They’ve been a boon to my thinking in this space, and they’re driving forward (Charles with the 70:20:10 Forum, Jane with her next edition of the Social Learning Handbook, Harold with Change Agents Worldwide, and Jay continues with the Internet Time Group).  Yet there is still a long ways to go, and lots of opportunity for improvement.

An area that I’m excited about is the instrumentation of what we do to start generating data we can investigate, and analytics to examine what we find.  This is having a bit of a bubble (speaking of cutting through hype with affordances, my take is that “big data” isn’t the answer, big insights are), but the core idea is real.  We need to be measuring what we’re doing against real business needs, and we now have the capability to do it.

And an area I hope we’ll make some inroads on are the opportunities provided by a sort-of ‘content engineering‘ and leveraging that for customized and contextual experiences.  This is valuable for mobile, but does beyond to a much richer opportunity that we have the capability to take advantage of, if we can only muster the will.  I expect this will lag a bit, but doing my best to help raise awareness.

There’s much more, so here’s to making things better in the coming year! I hope to have a chance to talk and work with you about positive changes.  Here’s hoping your new year is a great one!

Revolutionize Learning & Development

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It has become clear that one of the things that is needed is a shakeup of Learning & Development (L&D). My simple version is that L&D isn’t doing all it could and should be doing, and what it is doing it is not doing well. The flaws are myriad

What we see are courses as the only tool in the toolbox. The LMS, rapid elearning tools, virtual classrooms, and of course the omnipresent F2F training sessions are the rule. Organizations are not doing root cause analysis or aligning with business metrics, but instead are serving as ‘order takers’. Organizations are not looking to using performance support even though it’s likely a better value than courses, let alone looking to the network as a systematic component of the solution. Worse, the courses that are being offered are largely knowledge dump/test.

And you’ve heard me go off on this before. So what more can I do? How about write a book laying out the case in more detail? Let’s say I:

  • document the problems with evidence
  • point to the things about learning and organizations that we are not paying attention to
  • show what it could be like if we were doing what we should be (with case studies), and
  • lay out a road map forward

Would that be helpful?

Well, as I’ve hinted, that’s what’s been my project for the past months. It’s gone into production, with a target date of May 2014. The title, slightly unwieldy but capturing the necessary thoughts, has been finalized:

Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Innovation Strategy for the Information Age

I aim to spark the revolution, and I hope you’ll join me!

Augmenting Human Intellect: Vale Doug Engelbart

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Somehow, I forgot to farewell one of the finest minds to cross our paths.  (I was sure I had, but searching this morning found no evidence. Mea culpa.)  Last night, I had the privilege of attending a Festschrift for Doug Engelbart, who passed last July, with speakers reciting the trajectory and impact of his career.  And I was inspired anew by the depth of his vision.

Doug is widely known as the inventor of the mouse, but that was just an implementation detail in his broader view. His mission manifested further in the ‘mother of all demos‘, where he showed collaborative work, video conferencing, and more, working with a mouse, keyboard, and graphic display. In 1968. And yet this too was just the tangible output of a much larger project.

At a critical juncture early in his career, he took a step back and thought about what he could really contribute.  He realized that the problems the world was facing were growing exponentially, and that our only hope was to learn at a similarly exponential rate, and decided that helping humans accomplish this goal was a suitable life’s work.  His solution was so all-encompassing that most people only get their minds around a small bit of it.

One component was a knowledge work environment where you could connect with colleagues and collaborate together, with full access to articulated knowledge sources. And yes, this foresaw the internet, but his vision was much richer.  Doug didn’t see one editor for email, another for documents, etc, he wanted one work environment.  He was also willing for it to be complex, and thought using inadequate tools as riding tricycles when we should be riding road bicycles to get places.  His notion was much closer to EMACS than the tools we currently use.  The mouse, networks, and more were all just developments to enable his vision.

His vision didn’t stop there: he proposed co-evolution of people and technology, and wanted people developing systems to be using the tools they were building to do their work, so the technology was being built by people using the tools, bootstrapping the environment. He early on saw the necessity of bringing in diverse viewpoints and empowering people with a vision to achieve to get the best outcomes. And continual learning was a key component. To that end, he viewed not just an ongoing reflection on work processes looking for opportunities to improve, but a reflection on the reflection process; sharing between groups doing the work reflection, to collaboratively improve.  He saw not just the internet, but the way we’re now seeing how best to work together.

And, let’s be clear, this isn’t all, because I have no confidence I have even a fraction of it.  I certainly thought his work environment had too high a threshold to get going, and wondered why he didn’t have a more accessible onramp.  It became clear last night that he wasn’t interested in reducing the power of the tools, and was happy for people to have to be trained to use the system, and that once they saw the power, they’d buy in.

To me, one of the most interesting things was that while everyone celebrated his genius, and no argument, it occurred to me to also celebrate that time he took to step aside and figure out what was worth doing and putting his mind to it.  If we all took time to step back and think about what we could be doing to really make a dent, might we come up with some contributions?

I was fortunate to meet him in person during his last years, and he was not only brilliant and thoughtful, but gentle and kind as well.  A real role model.  Rest in peace, Doug.

Design for Doing

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It occurs to me that we are too busy designing for learning, and that’s not what it’s about.  It’s not about learning, as I often say. What is it about?  It’s about doing. It’s about performance. So what does that mean?

My backwards design process suggested looking at the desired performance, and then working backwards. This comes from a good analysis of the performance gap and determining the root cause of the difference between the existing performance and the desired one.  The solution then is determining what can be in the world, and what has to be in the head.

Another way to be thinking about it is looking at how people really perform in the world.  We need to be looking at when and how people need support, and figure out how we can bring support.  People would rather  not have to discover the answer if possible, and rather find it. Ideally, we are supporting finding the answer, but there are times when we haven’t anticipated the need, or it’s too unique to be worth investing.

The point here is that these ways of thinking about the problem come from thinking about meeting organizational needs, not about delivering learning services. They come from focusing on the doing, not the learning.  And that’s a perspective organizations need.

We do, however, need to be thinking about a broader picture. It’s not just doing the work, but it’s also about doing innovation, and continual capability development.   So it’s not just putting in place elements that support optimal execution, but it’s also about putting in place the elements that support cooperation and collaboration.

The overall focus  has to be supporting the needs of the organization. We need to be thinking about supporting the  do, not just the learn.  Are you designing for doing?