Over at the TogetherLearn blog, I’ve posted an article about another way to think about the benefits of social learning. I’ve been concerned that the talk about chaos and emergent practice may seem too ephemeral to hard-nosed business decision makers, so I tried to make the goal concrete, or at least visual.
Then, of course, the important thing is the path to get there. Check it out!
I’ve been reading a few books about schools, since my lad’s made the transition from elementary to middle school and it’s been a bit of a battle. When he’s being set assignments like coloring in a poster on math facts, I’m a wee bit concerned. John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down was a wakeup call (he won NY teacher of the year for a couple of years, and insightfully (and incitefully) criticizes our current school system. So, when I noticed that Daniel Willingham (who’ve I talked about before) had a book out, I checked it out.
His Why Don’t Students Like School sounded like another tirade against schools, but it’s more positive than that. The subtitle tells you more: “A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for your classroom”. It follows a format of:
Fortunately, I could just skim the second part, which is the meat of the book, courtesy of my own PhD in cognitive science, and it was review. But what really struck home was how he (as reviewers repeatedly point out) uses “clear and compelling language” to help the audience really understand what’s important. He’s got great examples, and makes a large chunk of cognitive research comprehensible. Which is not to say it’s a light read, but it’s accessible and clear.
More importantly, the third part of each chapter, his conclusions, are very concrete and actionable. If teachers followed these guidelines, they’d have happier learners and better learning outcomes. What more do you want? (Ok, well, curriculum reform, but this is aimed at teachers.)
He covers a lot of ground. In nine chapters (this isn’t a long book, just deep and relevant), he covers motivation, learning styles, cognitive skills, and more. He answers the core questions and the ancillary questions that emerge. And, no, I don’t agree with him on quite all of it (e.g. on making content meaningful, he’s concerned that too familiar or interesting tasks may overwhelm the intrinsic lesson), but I suspect we’d find if we sat down that we’re agreeing furiously.
I have to say that if all my children’s teachers read this book, their schooling would be a lot better. If all our children’s teachers read this book, schools would be a lot better. So, if you’re a teacher, read this book. If you work with teachers, know teachers, or influence teachers, get them to read this book. And if you design learning experiences, even if you don’t actually teach, you should read this book.
Cognitive science research oriented towards making better learning, in a digestable form. It doesn’t get much better than this. I have no higher praise for a book than “I wish I’d written it”, and I do. Highly recommended.
Last night I went to hear Ross Dawson speak on the Future of the Enterprise. His points resonated with a lot of what I and my TogetherLearn colleagues have been saying about the changes we’re seeing. I really do think that some changes are in the air.
Ross reiterated the notion that the current context is a state of increasing change. Things are moving faster, and the chaotic reality underpinning our existence is being brought into highlight more and more. He talked about how commoditization is a driving economic factor, the fact that others can reproduce what you create quickly, so there’s incredible pressure to have to build more on top. I afterward asked him and he supported my contention that optimal execution is only the price of entry, and that continual innovation and delivering a seamless customer experience will be the differentiator.
He asked a series of five questions at the end, and one was how we got people to participate. Verna Allee suggested leadership would be even more critical. Another attendee thought that companies would have to offer compelling experiences for employees as well. I do think that helping individuals comprehend the vision, letting them figure out how to achieve the necessary goal, and creating an empowering environment are critical.
Another question had to do with how organizations would be structured going forward. Ross made a clever reference to how the word ‘corporation’ comes from corpus, or body, and that organizations now were much more a distributed enterprise: networks of employees, suppliers, clients, partners, contractors, etc. “The organization is just a persistent network.”
A point made was that all that matters are relationships and knowledge, particularly when manufacturing can be ‘on demand’, and that mass participation creates value. If the organization is a network, and all these participants generate the value, organizations have to support networking for knowledge work, getting contributions from empowered learners. To cope in this age of increasing disruptive influences, it’s critical.
It’s time for organizations to get serious about providing infrastructure that supports workers networking, communicating, collaborating, problem-solving, innovating, learning. Coupled with a supportive culture and clear vision, it’s the wave of the future. Ross thought that in five years time, the new organizational imperatives would be clear. That doesn’t give you a lot of time to get moving, and you really ought to begin last week if you want to be a leader, not a late adopter.
Get moving, or get help!
During the course of my TrainingMagNetwork presentation on “Blow up the training department, why incrementalism won’t cut it anymore”, I asked the audience whether their ‘group’ (learning function) took separate responsibility for each of the following learning support tasks/roles:
I had them respond with either a ✓ or a red ✘, depending on whether their group was covering it or not. I don’t have the quantitative results, but the overall trend was not surprising, but indicative.
As we went down the list, the proportion of green dropped off, and the proportion of red took over, systematically. Well, right ’til the end. Whether due to some good strategy, or a loose interpretation of content management, we got more green again at the bottom of the list (and that’s a good thing).
And that’s my point. To me, all those elements are part of supporting organizational performance from a learning standpoint. As I’ve argued before, I think innovation, problem-solving, design, and more are part of learning. And I think that best is supported by a learning function, not IT, or KM, let alone marketing or sales. However, it does not come from a training function or mindset. They should all be green!
Which is why I want to blow up the training department. Not only because they’re following broken pedagogies, as I’ve argued before, but because unless they’re part of a larger learning function, they’re not meeting the real need.
Now, I admit I’m being deliberately ‘stirring’ things up by talking about blowing things up, but as I did in the presentation, I ask: do I mean like a bomb or a balloon? And I mean blow up the old formal training pedagogy like a bomb, and blow up the responsibility of the training department like a balloon, to cover the entire performance ecosystem.
So, my answer to my titular question is ‘both’. :)
In trying to get attention for work, a colleague is concerned with the ‘learning’ label being a potential detriment. It’s probably true, and that’s a sad state of affairs. While I joke that we who work in the learning/training/performance/etc field are those who’ve retained their love of learning despite schooling, I do believe that there’s some baggage associated with the term.
If you put on a ‘serious business’ perspective, learning can seem like warm and fuzzy coddling. “What we really need is to hire the talent we need and let them know what to do and have them do it, right? They’ll do it, and like it, or they’re out!” Which, of course, is ridiculous, but who doesn’t believe that view is out there?
What’s really the case is that each organization will have it’s own way of doing things, and that individuals will need to be brought up to speed, then provided resources to support performing, and expected to contribute. And, as I am coming to believe, as things get more complex, we’ll need more from people in terms of adaptation.
Or, as Kevin Wheeler put it:
Today success is in the hands of creative people who have energy and excitement over reaching a business objective. These people are hard to find and hard to keep as their energy and entrepreneurial spirit are not always suited to a controlled environment. They need space, time, and freedom to experiment. They thrive in a networked world where they can exchange ideas, swap experiments, and engage in conversation.
That, to me, is learning. To look at it another way, I lump innovation, problem-solving, creativity, design, and more all as activities of learning. Herb Simon said “to design is human”, and I believe that design is about learning. But maybe it’s about thinking? Doing?
So, to me, it’s a shame that a ‘learning’ label would be a barrier to being perceived as relevant to business, but that seems to be the case. My question is, do we rebrand, or do we reengineer learning’s status in the organization. I don’t have an answer, do you?
Why is the world getting more complex? Certainly, we’re getting more information, and technology is increasing the rate at which we can sense, and respond (reducing product cycle times, for instance, as someone can replicate what you’ve developed very quickly). There’s a lot more pressure, as a consequence. But is it something fundamental?
I was pondering Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework (wonderful 4 minute video explaining it), particularly the chaotic domain and it’s prescription (roughly “do something, and hope to move it to one of the other quadrants”). It’s kind of a deep concept, but basically there are: simple topics where there’s one right answer (which we ought to automate, in my opinion); complicated issues, where we need expertise; complex issues, which we can only explain in retrospect but can adapt in, and the chaotic space.
It’s the latter that concerns me, it seems to be a case of “abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. Ok, seriously, it’s a place where the approach has to be much more experimental. I reckon it’s a place that most managers and even executives want to ignore. And yet, I believe that the world is going more and more in that direction. In fact, I’m beginning to believe we’re at a inflection point where we suddenly need to realize that ‘management’ just won’t cut it. Sure, for legacy industries, for a while. But why? Why is this fundamentally different?
I think that things moved slow moved enough that while they really were chaotic, the general patterns were good enough most of the time. But things have increasingly gotten faster, accelerating, to the point where those seemingly random shifts are happening so fast that they undermine staid process.
It’s not the information overload, and I began thinking that it is, instead, how quickly ideas can take hold. It’s not things that are the dominant factor here, it’s people. People’s reactions to marketing campaigns, messages, etc are largely unpredictable, and the likelihood and consequences of something going ‘awry’ are increased. The so-called ‘viral’ message is increasingly a disruptive factor. And why is that?
I started thinking about how long it took for ideas to spread. In the past, they could spread in a community by word of mouth over hours or days, depending on the ‘salience’ of the idea. However, a community was sort of 150 people, if you take a Dunbar’s number approach. Propagating outside of that was a critical juncture, and used to be quite hard. Someone had to travel between communities, believe, and be a good transmitter. Print as a major shift, and so too was the printing press. Suddenly it became easier to transmit a powerful meme powerfully. And it’s gotten easier with the telegraph, and the phone, and email, and…
If new ideas that are powerful can take hold quickly with minimal friction, their disruptive influence is magnified. Rightly or wrongly, a fun or powerful idea can catch fire and be a game-changer. If there’s the possibility for almost instantaneous spread, we’re truly past the point of no return in terms of chaos.
Which brings me to Twitter. Even the latest web page had to be emailed and there wasn’t a quick way to get the message around in a broadcast style except if the mainstream media picked it up, or you had an established network. Spreading beyond your network was difficult.
Enter Twitter. For the first time, a viral meme can spread almost instantaneously, reaching critical mass in the amount of time required for a few retweets. It’s a network of one to many, and 140 chars is about perfect for ‘meme’ length. It’s just a twitch to pass a message on. I’m not saying Twitter itself is the force of change, I’m saying it’s emblematic of the change.
If someone’s thought captures a new thought, or plays with an existing idea in an intriguing new way, it can spread almost instantaneously. Much more so than before. That’s a power that can be used for good or bad. Companies should be mindful that a misstep can reach many really quickly (time to get on the ClueTrain!). And breaking news can spread before the media reach the masses (cf flight 1549 landing in the Hudson).
I doubt this idea is new, and you’re free to point out where I’m wrong or who said it before, but it struck me that this is indicative of the changes we, our communities, our organizations, and our society face. Which leads me to think it’s time to take this phenomena seriously. So I’ll venture a meme, an oldie but a goodie, “World Peace, NOW!”. Here’s hoping…
We’re about ready to kick up a fair bit of dust! TogetherLearn (Jane, Harold, Jay & I, in various combinations) are serendipitously going to be sending out the social learning and strategy message in a number of ways.
First, on the 21st of April starting at 9AM PT but revolving around the globe for the subsequent 24 hours, Corporate Learning Trends will be hosting a day long circle-the-globe Conversation about Learning in Organizations. Jay is the organizer, and he’s arranged a host of the biggest names in organizational learning to take part. Still needed are hosts and topics in regions around the world for blocks of time. This is free, but we do expect participation. So seize the day, pitch in, and make it happen (or don’t complain when there’s nothing happening in your preferred time slot).
On the 22nd, Harold, Jay, & I are going to be part of the ASTD Pulse of the Profession series of webcasts, talking about Blowing Up the Training Department: Make Learning a Management Priority. Registration is $39.95, but it supports ASTD (we don’t get a dime), and we’ve got a good session planned, with the esteemed Kevin Wheeler serving as our ringmaster/lion tamer. It’s specifically intended for managers, directors, & executives charged with part or all of organizational learning. We intend to talk about the problems that organizations are facing, some of the barriers, and some new ways to think about it.
Then I will be presenting on April 30 (10 AM PT) for Training Magazine Network’s Provocative Ideas webinars, speaking about Why Incrementalism Won’t Cut It Anymore. This presentation is free, but you have to register. I’ll be looking at the bigger picture, not just social/informal, but also content strategy, mobile, and more, and particularly focused on systemic changes and the need to shift, not creep.
I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting, but that’s enough for now. Hope to see you here and there!
So I’ve been playing with rethinking my Performance Ecosystem conceptualization and visualization. The original had very discrete components, and an almost linear path, and that doesn’t quite convey the reality of how things are tied together. I believe it’s useful to help people see the components, but it doesn’t capture the goal of an integrated system.
I’ve been wrestling with my diagramming application (OmniGraffle) to rethink it. My notion is that systems, e.g. content/knowledge management/learning management systems underpin the learnscape, and that on top exist formal learning, performance support like job aids organized into portals, and social media. Mobile is a layer that floats on top, making contextually accessible the capabilities assembled below. It’s not perfect, but it’s an evolving concept (perpetual beta, right/).
So here’s my current conception. It took me a long time to create the circle with different components! First I had to discover that there were tools to create freeform shapes, and then work to get them to articulate, but I like the kind of ‘rough’ feel of it (appropriate for it’s stage).
It also captures the conceptual relationships as spatial relationships (my principle for diagram creation). At least for me. So here’s the question: does it make sense for you? Does it help you perceive what I’m talking about, or is it too a) coarse, b) confusing, or c) some other problem? I welcome your feedback!
The Learning Circuits’ Blog Big Question of the Month is whether and how get ‘unstuck’, when you’ve got a lot to offer and it’s well beyond what they expect you to do in your job.
This actually resonates with two separate things, some thoughts around ‘being revolutionary’, and a previous post based upon a similar complaint that triggered this month’s question (must be a lot of understandable angst out there). The previous post was about trying to meet unreasonable expectations, and the individual wasn’t getting the support they needed to do the job the way it should be done. Similarly the big question was triggered by someone knowing what should be done but feeling trapped.
The thread that emerges, for me, is that training departments can’t keep operating in the same old way, despite the fact that formal instruction doesn’t have to die (just improve). Incrementalism isn’t going to be enough, as optimal execution is going to be just to stay in the game, and the competitive advantage will be the ability to innovate new value to offer. It’s just too easy to copy a successful product or service, and the barriers to entry aren’t high enough to prevent competition. You never know when a viral or chaotic event will give someone a marketing advantage, so you’ve got to keep moving.
Trying to keep to the status quo, or slowly expand your responsibility is going to fail, as things are moving too quickly. You have to seize the responsibility now to take on the full suite of performance elements: job aids, portals, social learning, content and knowledge management, and more, and start moving. It still has to be staged, but it’s a perspective shift that will move you more strategically and systemically towards empowering your organization.
And back to the tactics, what do you do when your clients (internal or external) aren’t pushing you for more and better? Show them the way. While I’ve learned that conceptual prototypes don’t always work (some folks can’t get beyond the lack of polish, even when you’re just showing the proof of concept), try and mock up what is on offer, and talk them through it. Help them see why it’s better. Do a back of the envelope calculation about how it’s better. Bring in all the factors: outcomes, performance, engagement, learner experience, whatever it takes.
Then, if they don’t want it, do your best within the constraints to do it anyway (write better objectives, practice, etc. even if they won’t appreciate it), and live with what you can do. And, truly, if you’re capable of more (not more work, better/smarter work), and it’s on offer but continually not accepted, it probably is time to move on. Don’t give in, keep up the fight for better learning, your learners need it!
After having been on the board of a not-for-profit (NFP) for several years, essentially because they’re in education and weren’t using technology, we’re finally seeing some progress. An update call today with their internal IT strategy team had me finally feeling like we’d turned the corner.
It’s taken several steps, as just advocating wasn’t enough. While I had to educate some of the board, they were supportive enough, but it wasn’t enough to penetrate the leadership of the NFP. An outside initiative that would’ve made significant progress didn’t occur, but raised enough awareness that things got easier. Along the way, several initiatives were started, but lost focus and died.
The final step was the Board finally choosing to have, as one of it’s standing committees, an IT Committee. For obvious sins, I chair the Board’s IT committee, and raised the NFP’s awareness that the Board was serious. Finally, the Board’s IT committee asked the NFP to create an IT Strategy, and that catalyzed effective action. It took some work to get them to identify what an IT strategy should be (despite resources like TechSoup, though their original good document disappeared), but led to them hiring a key person, and things have really turned around.
A team of young folks along with the existing IT staff, savvy and scattered around the NFP have been selected to lead the initiative. They’re thinking strategically now, and today on the phone talked about the success one portal is having, about their three phase plan to redevelop the website and IT infrastructure, and their thinking about how to leverage technology more effectively.
I really felt that they’re finally pulling a) together and b) in the right direction. I can’t take credit for it happening, but I reckon I played a role in catalyzing the work and in coaching the direction, and it’s wonderful to see the outcomes. It’s been frustrating at times as it seems to have taken so long, but my learning is that these things take time when you don’t have direct control.
The nice thing is that the culture of the NFP is positive and supportive of learning, it’s just that they’ve been so successful with the old model that it’s hard to see a need to change. But change happens, and fortunately it’s happening here, now.
There’ll be some missteps, undoubtedly, and some waste of effort, but I do believe they’re on the right path. Now, to get the Board to start using IT more effectively…