The official opening event to kickoff ATD’s International Conference, was our 44th President, Barack Obama. Prompted by questions from Tony Bingham, he eloquently addressed education, values, and more. Thoughtful, witty, and ultimately wise, an inspiring session.
As a basic premise of my book on designing engaging learning, I maintain that learning can, and should, be ‘hard fun’. When you look at learning and engagement, you find this perfect alignment of elements. And, it occurred to me, that’s also true for good project work. And here I don’t just mean coursework assignments (though that too fits), but organizational innovation should also be hard fun!
As I’ve stated before in various places, when you’re designing new solutions, problem-solving, trouble-shooting, doing research, etc, you don’t know the answer when you begin. Therefore you’re learning when you do so! It’s not formal learning, it’s informal, but it’s still learning. So what works in learning should make sense for innovation too.
And in learning, the alignment I found between elements of effective education and engaging learning make sense. Both require (amongst others):
And those also define a meaningful project for solving in the workplace.
That is, first you need to have a clear goal. The size and scope of the task should be within the reach, but not the grasp, of the team. The project has to have a clear benefit to the organization. And the team should be appropriately constituted with skills and committed to the project. The methods required for the innovation will be experimentation and feedback. Of course, you also need diversity on the team, safety to experiment, accountability for the results. (Which is helpful for formal learning too!)
We can, and should, be setting up our projects to meet these criteria. We get better outcomes, research tells us. That not only includes the product of the work, but team engagement as well. This is also a possible start to creating a culture of experimentation and continual learning. Which also has long-term upsides.
This came to me because I was asked in an interview what were the most fun projects I’d done. I realized that working with folks together to address problems, like when I led a team to develop an adaptive learning system, fit the bill. And that’s work I love, whether having a group together to collectively work out better design processes or performance and development strategy. Folks who’ve worked with me similarly have found it valuable. So who’s up for some ‘hard fun’?
Nancy Giordano was the closing keynote for the Guild’s always excellent Learning Solutions conference. In a rapid (!) talk, she gave a different cut through the changes we are facing and strategies for coping. Thought-provoking!
Platon, a portrait photographer extraordinaire, gave a poignant presentation about leadership. Starting with some presidential anecdotes, he weaved in celebrities on the way to world leaders. He ended with a powerful message about doing right and wrong and how leaders can tap into empathy to do the best for the people they represent.
Kai told stories about his experiences in music and used them to draw lessons for us. He inspired us to connect to our purpose and experiment, and demonstrated what he meant through playing.
Ok, so this may be small news, but it’s still news (and I, at least, am excited!). I’ve previously mentioned my forthcoming book: Millennials, Goldfish, and other Training Misconceptions: Debunking Learning Myths and Superstitions. It’s not out yet, though you can preorder. What I’m excited about is that I’ve now put up the site for the book.
OK, whoop de doo. I get it, yet another site. Still, it’s exciting for me for several reasons:
And, I kind of like the URL I was able to grab: debunkinglearningmyths.com.
So, I don’t expect you to get as excited as me, but I did feel I should at least let you know.
So, I’d been unhappy with how hard it was to update my site. It had some problems, but I was afraid to change it because of the repercussions. Well, it turns out that’s not a problem! So what you see is my first stab at a new site. A little background…
My ISP, a good friend, colleague, and mentor, was making some changes to how my sites are implemented. While my other sites (Quinnovation and the book sites) are all done in a WYSIWIG tool called RapidWeaver, Learnlets is a WordPress site. While I could do a blog in Rapidweaver, I’m afraid I’d lose my decade+ of posts! So, I’ve kept it in WordPress. And that’s handy for updating the site when I’m on the road (e.g. for mindmaps).
However, my ISP, in addition to being a tech guru, is also a security guru. He does tech for a living, and is kind enough to host me as well. To prevent some of the attacks that were happening to WordPress sites (hey, write a script that hammers WordPress vulnerabilities and point it to all their sites you can find), he instituted some security measures. One was that I couldn’t get into the PHP code for my sidebar! It made sense, because if anyone could get access to my admin code, they could not only change the look and feel (easy to fix), they could alter the code and put in malicious stuff. Not good. But…
I’d cobbled it together with cut-and-pasted code, but now I couldn’t edit it without downloading the raw source (once I could find the file in the WordPress hierarchies), editing it, and uploading. I couldn’t even access the sidebar editor! I had a second login for upgrading the site, but it wouldn’t allow access to things I wanted to customize. And I have a bad habit of tinkering! As things happen, I might want to add an image, or…what have you.
So, with this upgrade, I mentioned my problems with the site, and he installed some new themes I could play with. And, I found, it was pretty much click and type to create a new sidebar. Suddenly, it’s easy to change the site, without coding! It’s not perfect, but it’s better for mobile (a friend had complained about that).
As evidence, somehow it seized up in the midst of creating the first draft. I was going to have to re-create the new site! First, it would’ve been easy. I’d created most of the graphics and put them in a location. And, it remembered my previous choices, and restored them so I didn’t have to!
I asked my lad, who has a good digital aesthetic, to give me feedback on two of the options my colleague installed, and he liked this one, with a suggestion on the background (not a stock photo). I’m using the background image from the Designing mLearning book cover, but that can be changed. He didn’t like the idea of the bag of bulbs from the Quinnovation site, as he thought it was ‘stock’. I think it’s aligned with the notion of Quinnovations (or I wouldn’t have used it), and so too with Learnlets, but in honor of his opinion I’m sticking with this for now. And I appreciate that he shared his thinking!
Now that I have a draft up, what’s working and what’s not? I still need to figure out a way to let folks sign up for Learnlets as an email feed (beyond RSS, but through Feedblitz, the service I use), but other than that it’s pretty much the same. And easier to tweak! (E.g., I have subsequently gone to the Feedblitz site, used their tool to create the widget HTML code, and it’s now on the sidebar as well.)
So, the question is, what should I tweak? I’ll definitely listen on usability issues, and I’ll consider aesthetic ones ;). Regardless, thought I’d share the rationale and the process, because that’s what ‘working out loud’ is, and I think it’s part of the moves we need to see. And in return, getting feedback. So, what doesn’t work for you?
Patty McCord, famous for the Netflix Culture Deck, spoke on culture. She talked about sharing the stage with sports coaching legends, and how they were personal but focused. Her stories of the early days of Netflix and how they made tough but fair decisions were peppered with important lessons.
A colleague pointed me to a intense critique of master’s programs in Instructional Design, and it raised several issues for me. So, I thought it’d be worth discussing. The issue is that the program didn’t provide any practice in designing courses from go to whoa, it was all about theory. In the comments, many people talk about how the programs they went did include projects, but this raises issues around the role of programs as well as what practice means.
Is a master’s supposed to be about skill-building? Is it job training? In the original academic model, I’d argue that an advanced degree would be to augment your experience with some theory. E.g. if you were an accountant, or an engineer, or even a designer, with experience under your belt, you’d go for a master’s to serve as reflection in developing the concepts you perform under. You might (and should) apply them, but that’s not the focus.
David Merrill has made the case that there should be bachelor’s programs in ID, and I think this makes sense. And maybe that’s where you’d actually get the hands-on experience designing courses. Of course, the reality is that many master’s (and even bachelor’s degrees) have become vocational training. Which raises the second issue.
Then the question becomes: how much practice? Indeed, if I need to develop a practical skill, I need to perform the skills. And too much of education and training, just doesn’t do it. The author talked about deliberate practice: where you focus on one element with a coach there to critique your performance. It could be faked problems, or a real apprenticeship, but it’s a tight coupling between designed action and guided reflection (what instruction needs to be).
Look at performance where it matters: flight, warfare, medicine. You’re gradually scaffolded from simple practice to complex. Heck, if I want to learn fire-fighting, rather than a classroom and then one go at a burning building, I’d rather have a simple building, then gradually ramp up the complexity (victims, second stories, inflammables, …). All with some instructor yelling at me when I screwed up! Yes, there’d be content, with animations about how fire spreads, and some facts about smoke inhalation and the like, but the focus would be on performing.
And this holds true for job skills whether it’s vocational training or university (which is increasingly being expected to prepare people for jobs). Accounting? Analyze statements for biz problems, make recommendations for reallocation, etc. Quite a bit, that drives you to the content.
My take-home: if you have real practice, you need reflection. If you don’t, you need real practice first. Focused practice. Intense practice. Scaling-up practice! We need to get our ratios right. If you’re needing skills, then make sure you’ve got good practice up front.
In thinking about the Coherent Organization, the original proposal from my colleague Harold Jarche was that were two key attitudes: collaboration and cooperation. And I find myself talking about collaboration and communication. It’s time to try to reconcile those, and propose why I think collaboration is a new business watchword.
So, Harold argues that there are two key ways of working, collaborating and cooperating. To him, collaboration is when you’re committed to a goal to achieve, whether involuntarily or voluntarily. Cooperation, for him, is when you have the willingness to continue to contribute on an ongoing basis: putting out your own work, commenting on others, and answering questions. And he suggests that cooperation is the more important, as it’s more voluntary. And I agree that it’s likely that needs will drive collaboration, and cooperation comes from within (and in a safe environment). I think he’s talking about personal commitment, and rightly so.
So why do I talk about communication and collaboration? Because the vehicle for cooperation is communication, and so we not only need the impetus to contribute, but the skills. He’s talking about creating an effective network, and I’m talking about getting the job done. He’s nurturing a culture, and I’m about developing practices. Which are both needed and mutually reinforcing, and so I think we’re agreeing furiously.
And as I write this, my own thinking is changing. I do believe collaboration is what’s going to get things done for organizations in the short term, but I think there are two notions of collaboration. One is the traditional form of a team working on a project. However, there’s another approach that takes the longer term view. Here, it’s about people keeping a casual eye on what’s going on and serendipitous sparks fan flames. That does require cooperation, of course.
I’ve recently been reading Stephen Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, and Keith Sawyer’s Group Genius (both recommended), and it’s clear that true innovation is about getting people to work together over time. Real innovation percolates, suffers mistakes, and can’t be forced or planned. While I think progress can be made by teams working on specific needs, the change in my thinking is realizing that the longer term process of real innovation requires continual contribution in networks. What Sawyer terms ‘collaboration webs’. And this will require cooperation.
As an aside, there are still big opportunities for collaboration tools. On a recent #lrnchat, a colleague shared how she was collaborating on presentations using Google Slides. And I’ve done much important work with others using Google Docs and Sheets. And tools exist for diagramming, and white boarding, and more. Still, the tools feel embryonic. I want voice and text live as well as comments. I want to have flexible representations mixed in, so I can be working on numbers and diagrams and text in one doc (a brief eulogy here for the fabulous program Trapeze that had a revolutionary document model decades ago).
While collaboration may get the immediate focus and the ink inches (I guess pixels these days :) – because of new tools, and the immediate business benefits – I think the longer term need will be to create an environment where the culture, the practices, and the tools are aligned for successful learning. I think there’re reasons to focus on both, but the important thing is to recognize the differences and get both right. Amy Edmondson, in her book on organizational agility Teaming, suggested using the term ‘learning’ instead of innovation, as it focused on longer term and made it safer. So perhaps I’ll talk about organizational learning for the long term, and use collaboration for the short term work. What do you think?