I’ve been attending the CLO Fall Symposium this week, and it’s been a great experience. I wrote it up as a blog post over at eLearn Mag. There is supposed to be more linkage between Learnlets and their mag real soon. Stay tuned!
Driving formal & informal from the same place
There’s been such a division between formal and informal; the fight for resources, mindspace, and the ability for people to get their mind around making informal concrete. However, I’ve been preparing a presentation from another way of looking at it, and I want to suggest that, at core, both are being driven from the same point: how humans learn.
I was looking at the history of society, and it’s getting more and more complex. Organizationally, we started from a village, to a city, and started getting hierarchical. Businesses are now retreating from that point of view, and trying to get flatter, and more networked.
Organizational learning, however, seems to have done almost the opposite. From networks of apprenticeship through most of history, through the dialectical approach of the Greeks that started imposing a hierarchy, to classrooms which really treat each person as an independent node, the same, and autonomous with no connections.
Certainly, we’re trying to improve our pedagogy (to more of an andragogy), by looking at how people really learn. In natural settings, we learn by being engaged in meaningful tasks, where there’re resources to assist us, and others to help us learn. We’re developed in communities of practice, with our learning distributed across time and across resources.
That’s what we’re trying to support through informal approaches to learning. We’re going beyond just making people ready for what we can anticipate, and supporting them in working together to go beyond what’s known, and be able to problem-solve, to innovate, to create new products, services, and solutions. We provide resources, and communication channels, and meaning representation tools.
And that’s what we should be shooting for in our formal learning, too. Not an artificial event, but presented with meaningful activity, that learners get as important, with resources to support, and ideally, collaboration to help disambiguate and co-create understanding. The task may be artificial, the resources structured for success, but there’s much less gap between what they do for learning and what they do in practice.
In both cases, the learning is facilitated. Don’t assume self-learning skills, but support both task-oriented behaviors, and the development of self-monitoring, self learning.
The goal is to remove the artificial divide between formal and informal, and recognize the continuum of developing skills from foundational abilities into new areas, developing learners from novices to experts in both domains, and in learning..
This is the perspective that drives the vision of moving the learning organization role from ‘training’ to learning facilitator. Across all organizational knowledge activities, you may still design and develop, but you nurture as much, or more. So, nurture your understanding, and your learners. The outcome should be better learning for all.
Learning Experience Creation Systems
Where do the problems lie in getting good learning experiences? We need them, as it’s becoming increasingly important to get the important skills really nailed, not just ‘addressed’. It’s not about dumping knowledge on someone, or the other myriad ways learning can be badly designed. It’s about making learning experiences that really deliver. So, where does the process of creating a learning experience go wrong?
There’s been a intriguing debate over at Aaron (@mrch0mp3rs) Silver’s blog about where the responsibility lies between clients and vendors for knowledge to ensure a productive relationship. One of the issues raised (who, me?) is understanding design, but it’s clearly more than that, and the debate has raged.
Then, a post in ITFORUM asked about how to redo instructor training for a group where the instructors are SMEs, not trainers, and identified barriers around curriculum, time, etc. What crystallized for me is that it’s not a particular flaw or issue, but it’s a system that can have multiple flaws or multiple points of breakdown.
The point is, we have to quit looking at it as design, development, etc; and view it not just as a process, but as a system. A system with lots of inputs, processes, and places to go wrong. I tried to capture a stereotypical system in this picture, with lots of caveats: clients or vendors may be internal or external, there may be more than one talent, etc, it really is a simplified stereotype, with all the negative connotations that entails.
Note that there are many places for the system to break even in this simplified representation. How do you get alignment between all the elements? I think you need a meta-level, learning experience creation system design. That is, you need to look at the system with a view towards optimizing it as a system, not as a process.
I realize that’s one of the things I do (working with organizations to improve their templates, processes, content models, learning systems, etc), trying to tie these together into a working coherent whole. And while I’m talking formal learning here, by and large, I believe it holds true for performance support and informal learning environments as well, the whole performance ecosystem. And that’s the way you’ve got to look at it, systemically, to see what needs to be augmented to be producing not content, not dry and dull learning, not well-produced but ineffective experiences, but the real deal: efficient, effective, and engaging learning experiences. Learning, done right, isn’t a ‘spray and pray’ situation, but a carefully designed intervention that facilitates learning. And to get that design, you need to address the overall system that creates that experience.
The client has to ‘get’ that they need good learning outcomes, the vendor has to know what that means. The designer/SME relationship has to ensure that the real outcomes emerge. The designer has to understand what will achieve these outcomes. The ‘talent’ (read graphic design, audio, video, etc) needs to align with the learning outcomes, and appropriate practices, the developer(s) need to use the right tools, and so on. There are lots of ways it can go wrong, in lack of understanding, in mis-communication, in the wrong tools, etc. Only by looking at it all holistically can you look at the flows, the inputs, the processes, and optimize forward while backtracking from flaws.
So, look at your system. Diagnose it, remedy it, tune it, and turn it into a real learning experience creation system. Face it, if you’re not creating a real solution, you’re really wasting your time (and money!).
The Performance Environment
I’ve represented the performance ecosystem in several ways in the past, and that process continues to occur. In the process of writing up a proposal to do some social learning strategizing for an organization, I started thinking about it from the performer perspective.
Now, personal learning environments (PLE) is not a completely new concept, and quite a number of folks contributed their PLEs here. However, I wasn’t creating mine so much as a conceptual framework, yet it shares characteristics with many.
I realized there were some relevant dimensions, so I added those in, including whether they tend to be more reflective or active, and whether they’re formal or informal. Note that I played a little fast and loose in the positioning to hopefully not make the connections too obscured, so it’s not quantitatively accurate so much as conceptually indicative. Also, I’m trying to catch categories of tools, not specifics. Still, I (apparently :) thought it was interesting enough to try to get feedback on.
So, what do you think? Am I missing a channel? A connection? Feedback solicited.
Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 3
A: “Ok, you‘ve got me thinking about this social learning guff. But it sounds expensive as well as difficult. Suppose I need a whole social media system, some big installation. Not sure I can sell it up the chain.â€
B: “One thing at a time. First, it doesn‘t have to be expensive. You likely already have some of the social media infrastructure, and other ways can be darn near free, but of course the rest of it does take time and effort.â€
A: “Well, the cost is good news. But I‘ve got to have payoff numbers. Intangibles are a hard sell.â€
B: “I hear you. That‘s why it‘s worth it to take some time and do the back of the envelope numbers. It‘s not like you can pull someone else‘s numbers off the shelf and apply them, though there are examples that can provide guidance, like the customer numbers.â€
A: “Customers? I thought this was internal”
B: “Oh, internal‘s a big opportunity, but so are conversations with customers, supply chain partners, any stakeholders that can be the source of valuable interactions. Companies have found value crowd-sourcing new products and processes, having customer communities self-help, and even facilitating communities related to their products and services. And, of course, there have been some spectacular mistakes by ignoring social media! Have you heard about the cluetrain”
A: “As in ‘get a clue‘? What is all this, crowdsourcing, cluetrain”
B: “Sorry. Crowdsourcing is getting a lot of people to contribute ideas. It‘s the ‘room is smarter than the smartest person in the room‘ (if you manage the process right), carried to the next level. The Cluetrain manifesto was a marvelously foresightful and insightful recognition that with the power of the network, you no longer can control the information about your company, so you have to start having a dialog with customers.â€
A: “So, we need social internal and external, eh”
B: “Yep, that‘s the idea. And you figure out how much value you can get from your customers by having them provide you feedback, how much by making it easier to help themselves. That‘s on top of the benefits of reducing time to get answers and increasing the quality of internal ideas.â€
A: “Sounds hard to quantify.â€
B: “Well, it‘s not necessarily easy, but it is doable. It just takes some time, but during that time you‘ll really be exploring the opportunities to make your company more effective. There are big wins on the table, and it‘s kind of a shame if you ignore them or walk away.â€
A: “Does this mean I can take the cost of the training department away”
B: “No, but changing it. It‘s not replacing training, though having the social media infrastructure more effective. Face it, most training is a waste of money not because it‘s not necessary, but because it‘s done so badly.â€
A: “I‘ll say.â€
B: “So why do you keep doing it”
A: “Because it‘s supposed to be important!â€
B: “And it is, but if it‘s important, isn‘t it worth doing well”
A: “I suppose.â€
B: “Here‘s the picture: you hire people, but they can‘t know everything they need to, you have proprietary processes, unique products, etc. So you have some formal learning to get them up to speed, right”
A: “Yes, that‘s why we have it.â€
B: “But once they‘re had formal training, they‘re not really productive until they‘ve had a chance to put those skills into play, and refine them. They become practitioners through practice. And then with enough time and guidance, they become your experts.â€
A: “It‘s when they get beyond that novice stage that they‘re useful.â€
B: “But that‘s when you ignore their needs, and there‘s so much more you can do. Practitioners don‘t need courses, but that‘s about all we do for them, when we should be giving them tools and resources. Experts should collaborating, but the most we do with them typically is have them offer courses. It‘s broken.â€
A: “And social media will hep with those latter two, supporting practitioners and experts.â€
B: “Exactly! And it can assist in making the formal learning better too. But it requires expanding the responsibility of the training department to be a learning group, not removing the training department.â€
A: “Isn‘t this IT? Or maybe operations or engineering”
B: “Nope, they‘re stakeholders, but you don‘t want IT trying to facilitate conversations!â€
A: “Darn right. But trainers aren‘t going to be able to do it either.â€
B: “Yep, it‘s a shift, but they or at least the instructional designers should have the grounding in learning to make the shift. It‘s a new world, and some shifts have to occur.â€
A: “I‘ll say, it‘s changes for managers too.â€
B: “Yep, new skills for all in learning, new roles, new ways of working. To cope with the new world in which we have to work in: faster, more agile. Eh”
A: “Got it. Guess I‘d better get me some guff!†Grins.
Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 2
A: “Remember our discussion yesterday? I‘m still leery of this social learning guff. Sure, I want my folks to collaborate. But they talk now; they‘ve got phones and email. They can get courses if they need them. Why do I need more”
B: “You‘re right that they‘re collaborating now. But are they doing it efficiently? Is what they‘re sharing accurate? Do they go to the right people? There‘re two problems: they probably don‘t have the best tools, and the probably don‘t have the best skills. The evidence is that folks aren‘t doing it well. If it‘s so critical, as you suggested yesterday, don‘t you want it optimal”
A: “Sure, but what‘s all this social media stuff got to do with it”
B: “A couple of things. First, if someone finds an answer here, do you want someone else to have to find it again over there”
A: “Well, no.â€
B: “Right. And, if someone‘s not going to the right person, or not doing good searches, don‘t you want to help them improve”
A: “Well, yeah. Obviously. Or kick their sorry backsides out!â€
B: “Retention‘s easier than recruitment, and investing in your people‘s been shown to pay off.â€
A: “You‘re right. Ok, so you still haven‘t answered my question.â€
B: “By putting in social media, we‘re providing the architecture where someone‘s answer can be shared, systematically. Rather than leave the informal, social learning to chance, we‘re facilitating it both systemically, and personally.â€
A: “Architecture, you make it sound like buildings.â€
B: “Well, it is, it‘s infrastructure that supports appropriate activity. You wouldn‘t use offices as a warehouse, and you wouldn‘t put a coffeemaker in a bathroom. The point is to use the right tool for the job.â€
A: “Great metaphor, not!â€
B: “Ok, but you get the point.â€
A: “So if I build it, they will learn”
B: “Of course not. If you don‘t have a culture where it‘s safe to contribute, they won‘t. If it‘s not safe to admit mistakes, you can‘t learn from them. If you haven‘t established the culture, identified the skills, organized the change, or staffed appropriately, it‘s not going to happen.â€
A: “Who‘s got time for that?!”
B: “Your competitors”
Guff: a conversation in 3 parts. Part 1
A: Looking up from reading. “Guff!â€
B: Curious. “What‘s guff”
A: “All this social learning stuff.â€
B: “Really, you think so”
A: “Yeah, I mean, learning‘s learning, and who needs to make a ‘social‘ out of it? We‘ve got courses, if they want to be social in the classroom, fine, but all this hype about social learning is just a way for consultants to try to sell old soda in new bottles.â€
B: “So you think learning is about courses”
A: “Sure. What else”
B: “Well, let me defer that answer, and ask you another question.â€
A: “Oh, so you‘re one of those, eh? Answer a question with a question? Ha. Go ahead, shoot.â€
B: “If learning‘s not important, what is”
A: “That‘s easy, nimbleness. We‘ve got to adapt, innovate, create, we need to be faster than the rest. Heck, they can clone a product in months, or less. You‘ve got to be agile!â€
B: “So just executing isn‘t enough”
A: “Heck no! You‘ve got to have the ‘total customer experience‘ locked down, and that means optimal execution is just the cost of entry. Thriving is going to require continually introducing improvements: new products, new services.â€
B: “OK, let‘s get back to your question, what else learning might be.â€
A: “About time.â€
B: “So, think about that innovating, problem-solving, creativity, etc. That‘s not learning”
A: “No.â€
B: “Do they know the answer when they start”
A: “No, or they‘d just do it.â€
B: “Right. The answer is unknown, they have to find it. When they find it, have they learned something”
A: “Alright, I see your game. Yes, they‘re learning, but it‘s not like courses, it‘s not education!â€
B: “Right, courses are formal learning. That‘s the point I want to make, using the term ‘learning‘ to just talk about courses isn‘t fair to what‘s really going on. There are informal forms of learning that are just the aspects you need to get on top of.â€
A: “Oh, okay, if you want to play semantic games.â€
B: “It‘s important, because this ‘social learning‘ you call guff is the key to addressing the things you‘re worrying about! Formal learning serves a role, but there‘s so much more that an organization should be concerned about.â€
A: “So here comes the pitch.â€
B: “And it‘s straightforward: do you want to leave that innovation and creativity to chance, or do your best to make sure it‘s working well? Because the evidence is that in most organizations it‘s nowhere near what it could be, and there are systematic steps to improve it.â€
A: “C‘mon. Can you tell me someone who‘s doing it well”
B: “Sure. Just a few small firms you might‘ve heard of. Intel‘s used a wiki to help people share knowledge. Sun‘s capturing top performance on video and sharing it. SAP‘s getting customers to self-help and contribute to new product ideas.â€
A: “Sure, the tech companies, but how about anyone else”
B: “Caterpillar‘s got communities of practice generating ROI, Best Buy‘s getting a lot of advantage through internal idea generation, the list goes on, and those are only the ones we‘ve found.â€
A: “Ok. I suppose it makes sense, but still, that label…â€
B: “I hear you.â€
Creating Stellar Learning
Getting the details right about instructional design is quite hard, or at least it appears that way, judging from how many bad examples there are. Yet the failures are more from a lack of knowledge rather than inherent complexity. While there are some depths to the underlying principles that aren’t sufficiently known, they can be learned. However, a second level of embedding systematic creativity into the process is another component that’s also missed, however this time it’s from a broken process more than a lack of knowledge.
What we want are learning solutions that really shine: where the learning experience is engaging, efficient, and effective. Whether you’re creating products for commercial sale, or solutions for internal or external partners, you want to take your learning experience design to the next level. So, how does an organization improve their learning design process to create stellar learning?
Let’s go through this, step by step. First, you’ve got to know what you should be doing. I’ve gone on before about what’s broken in learning design, and what needs to be done. That can be learned, developed, practiced, and refined. Ideally, you’d have a team with a shared understanding of what really good learning is composed of and looks like. But it’s not just the deep learning.
There’s more: the team needs to develop both the understanding of the learning principles, and a creative approach that encourages striking a balance between pragmatic constraints and a compelling experience. Note that creating a compelling experience isn’t about wildly expensive productive values, but instead about ensuring meaningfulness, both of the content, and the context (read: examples and practice). The learners have to be engaged cognitively and emotionally, challenged to work through and apply the material, to really develop the skills. If not, why bother? Again, it’s not about expensive media; it can be done in text, for crying out loud! (Not that I’m advocating that, but just to emphasize it’s about design, not media.)
I find that it’s not that designer’s aren’t creative, however, but that there’s just no tolerance in the system for taking that creative step. Yes, it can be hard to break out of old approaches, but there has to be an appreciation for the value of creating engaging experiences. I will admit that initially the process may take a bit longer, but with practice the design doesn’t take longer, yet the results are far better. It does, however, take a shared understanding of what an engaging experience is just as it takes the understanding of the nuances of creating meaningful learning.
And that level of understanding about both deep learning and creative experience design can be developed as a shared understanding among your team in very pragmatic ways (applying those principles to the design of that learning, too). It’s just not conscionable anymore to be doing just mediocre design. It won’t lead to learning and is a waste of money, as well as a waste of learner’s time.
That covers the design, and even a bit of the process, but what’s needed is a look at your design tools and processes. And I’m not talking about whether you use Flash or not, what I’m talking about is your templates. They can, and should, be structured to support the design I’m talking about. Too often, the constraints in existence stifle the very depth and creativity needed, saddling them with unnecessary components and not requiring the appropriate ones. Factors that can be improved include templates for design, tools for creation, and even underlying content models! They all have to strike the balance between supportive structure and lack of confinement.
Look, I’ve worked numerous times on projects where I’ve helped teams understand the principles, refine their processes, and yielded far better outcomes than you usually get. It’s doable! Yes, it takes some time and work, but the outcome is far better. On the flip side, I’ve reliably gone through and eviscerated mediocre design, systematically. The point is not to make others look bad, but instead to point out where and how to improve product. Those flaws from the teams that developed it can be remedied. Teams can learn good design. My goal, after all, is better learning!
A caveat: to the untrained eye, the nuances are subtle. That’s why it’s easy to slide by mediocre design that looks good to the undiscerning stakeholder. Stellar design doesn’t seem that much better, until you ascertain the learner’s subjective experience, and look at the outcomes as well. In fact, I recall one situation where there was a complaint from a manager about why the outcome didn’t look that different. I walked that manager through the design, and the complaints changed to accolades.
You should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but you can justify it as well (and when you do walk folks through the nuances, they’ll learn that you really do know what you’re talking about). There’s just no excuse for any more bad learning, so please, please, let’s start creating good learning experiences.
Standards and success
Apparently, Google has recently opined that the future of mobile is web standards. While this is wonderfully vindicating, I think there’s something more important going on here, as it plays out for a broader spectrum than just mobile.
I’ve been reflecting on the benefits that standards have provided. What worked for networks was the standardization on TCP/IP as a protocol for packet transmission. What worked for email was standardization on the SMTP protocol. HTTP standardization has been good for the web, where it’s been implemented properly! What’s been a barrier are inconsistent implementations of web standards, like Microsoft’s non-standard versions of HTML for browsers and Java.
The source of the standard may be by committee, or by the originator. Microsoft’s done well for itself with the Office suite of applications, and by opening up the XML version, they’re benefiting while not doing harm. They own the space, and everyone has to at least read and write their format to have any credibility. While IMS & IEEE held meetings to get learning content standards nailed down, ADL just put their foot down with SCORM (and US Defense is a big foot), and it pretty much got everyone’s attention. But it’s having standards that matters. The fact that Blu-ray finally won the battle has really opened up the market for high definition video!
On the other hand, keeping proprietary standards has hindered development. At the recent VW talks hosted by SRI, one of the topics was the inability to transfer a character between platforms. That’s good for the providers, but bad for the development of the field. Eventually, one format will emerge, but it may take committees, or it may be that someone like Linden Labs will own the space sufficiently that everyone will lock into a format they provide. Until then, any investment has trouble being leveraged in a longer term picture, as the companies you go with may not survive! There’s an old saying about how wonderful standards are because there are so many of them. The problem is when they’re around the same thing! I was regaling a colleague with the time I smoked (er, caused to burn up, not lighting up!) an interface card by trying to connect two computers to exchange data. One manufacturer had, contrary to the standard, decided to put 12 volts on a particular pin!
And, unfortunately, in the mobile space, the major providers here in the US want to lock you into their walled garden, as opposed to, say, Europe, where all the phones have pretty much the same abilities to access data. This has been a barrier to development of services. The web is increasingly powerful, with HTML5, and so while some things won’t work, web-based applications are defaulting to the lingua franca for not just content exchange but interactive activities. The US is embarrassingly behind, despite the leading platforms (iPhone, Pre, etc).
In one sense this is sad that we can’t do better, but at least it’s good to have the web as a fallback now. We can make progress when it doesn’t matter what device, or OS, you’re using, as long as you can connect. The real news is that there is a lingua franca for mobile that you can use, so really there aren’t any reasons to hold off any longer. Ellen Wagner sees a tipping point, and I’m pleased to agree. There may be barriers for enterprise adoption, but as I frequently say: it’s not the technology, the barriers are between our ears (and maybe our pocketbooks :).
Update: forgot my own punchline. Standards need to be, or at least become, open and extensible for real progress to be made. When others can leverage, the greatest innovations can occur.
Standards are hard work, but the benefits for progress are huge. This holds true in your organization, as well. Are you paying attention to standards you should be using, and what you should standardize yourself?
Minimizing Transformative Disruption
A tweet by @JoshuaKerievsky pointed me to the Satir Change Model, in the context of introducing agile programming. The model purports to capture the disruptive effects of a new idea until it’s internalized, and I find it resonates quite well. My simplified version looks at it from the point of view of organizational change upon introduction of a new initiative, such as the organizational learning transformations I’m espousing and supporting.
In this simplified version, you can see that an intervention originally creates a decrement in performance, until the intervention takes hold, and then there are some hiccups incurred until the system stabilizes at a new and (hopefully) improved performance outcome. While we want the improvement, the decrement is something we’d like to minimize. However, how do we do that?
In researching it a little bit, I came upon a book that discussed using a stepwise approach to minimize it (also in software process improvements), and had a version of the diagram that demonstrated smaller decrements.
By having smaller introductions that break up the intervention, you decrease the negative effects. The point is to take small steps that make improvements instead of a monolithic change.
That’s what I’m trying to achieve is breaking up the organizational transformation implied by the performance ecosystem, and customizing it for an organization by prioritizing steps into next week, next month, next year, etc. Of course, the diagram is only indicative, not prescriptive, but I trust you recognize what I mean.
The overall approach is to achieve the improvement, but in a staged way customized for a particular organization and context, not a one-size-fits-all approach that really won’t fit anyone.
The goal is to maximize improvements while minimizing disruption, and doing so in ways that capitalize on previous efforts and existing infrastructure. To do this really requires understanding how the different components relate: how content models support mobile, how performance support articulates with formal learning and social media, and more. And, of course, understanding the nuances of the underpinning elements and how they are optimized.
Organizations can’t continue in the status quo of only formal learning, but I reckon many folks aren’t sure where and how to start. That’s the point of using a framework that points out how the elements interact, and coupling that with an specific organizational assessment. From there, you can prioritize steps, come up with action plans, be prepared to choose vendors, not have the vendor sell you on what they do best, and more. You’ve got to have a plan, or where you end up may not be the best place for your organization.
I’m reminded of the Cheshire Cat and Alice:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. ”
–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
So, do have a plan of where you want to get to, as well as an intent to start moving?