Search Results for: engag

Measuring Culture Change

1 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Someone recently asked how you would go about measuring culture change, and I thought it’s an interesting question. I’ll think ‘out loud’ about what might be the possibilities. A learning culture is optimal for organizational innovation and agility, and it’s likely that not all elements are already in place. So it’s plausible that you’d want to change, and if you do, you’d like to know how it’s going.

I think there are two major categories of measures: direct and indirect. Direct measures are ones that are impacting the outcomes you’re looking for, and indirect ones are steps along the way. Say, for instance, one desirable outcome of a learning culture would be, well, learning! In this case, I mean the broad sense of learning: problems solved, new designs generated, research answering questions. And indirect would be activity likely to yield that outcome. It could be engagement, or social interaction, or… If we think of it in a Kirkpatrickian sense, we want to generate the indirect activity, and then measure the actual business impact.

What direct measures might there be? I can see time to solve customer problems or problems solved per time. And/or I might look at the rate of research questions answered. Or the rate of new product generation. Of course, if you were expecting other outcomes from your culture initiative, you’d naturally want aligned methods. You could just be concerned with employee engagement, but I’m somewhat inclined (and willing to be wrong) to think about what the outcome of increased engagement would be. It could also be retention or recruitment, if those are your goals.

These latter – engagement, recruitment, retention – are also possible indirect measures. They indicate that things are better. Another indirect but more targeted measure might be the amount of collaboration happening (e.g. the use of collaboration tools) or even activity in social networks. Those have been touted as the benefits of building community in social media, and those are worthwhile as well.

As a process, I think about what I might do before, during, and after any culture change initiative. I’d probably want a baseline to begin with, and then regular (if not continual) assessments as we go. I’d take small steps, perhaps in one unit to begin, and monitor the impact, tuning as I go along. Culture change is a journey, not an event, after all ;).

So ok, that’s off the top of my head, what say you?

Pick my brain?

26 October 2016 by Clark 1 Comment

It’s a continual bane of a consultant’s existence that there are people who want to ‘pick your brain’. It’s really asking for free consulting, and as such, it’s insulting. If you google the phrase, you’ll see how many people have indicated their problems with this! However, there are quite legitimate ways to pick my brain and I thought I’d mention a couple. In both cases, I think were great engagements on both sides, high value for a reasonable investment.

Both in this case were for folks who develop content. In one case a not-for-profit, the other in the higher-ed space. One had heard me speak about learning design, and one had heard about a workshop I’d given, but both contacted me. It is clear they realized that there’s value to them for having a scrutable learning design.

Content Review

So for the first one, they wanted some feedback on their design, and we arranged that I’d investigate a representative sample and provide feedback. I went through systematically, taking notes, and compiled my observations into a report I sent them. This didn’t take any investment in travel, but of course this feedback only points out what’s wrong, and doesn’t really provide mechanisms to improve.

I think they were surprised at the outcome, as the feedback was fairly robust. They had a good design, largely, under the constraints, but there were some systematic design problems. There were also some places where they’d managed to have some errors that had passed editorial (and this was only a small sample of a replicated model across a broad curriculum). To be fair, some of my complaints came from situations that were appropriate given some aspect of their context that I hadn’t known, but there were still a set of specific improvements I could recommend:

“We found his comments insightful, and we look forward to implementing his expert suggestions to further improve of our product…“

Learning Design Workshop

In this case, they’d heard about a workshop that I’d run on behalf of a client, and were interested in getting a similar experience. They had been designing content and had a great ability to track the results of their design and tweak, but really wanted a grounding in the underlying learning science. I did review some sample content, but I also traveled to their site for a day and presented learning science details and workshopped the implications to their design process.

I went through details such as:

the importance and format for objectives,
SME limitations and tips how to work with them,
what makes effective practice,
the role and characteristics of concepts,
the details behind examples,
introduction and the role of emotions in the learning experience,
and more.

We went through examples of their content, and workshopped how they could adjust their design processes in pragmatic ways to instill the important details into their approach. We also talked about ways to followup to not lose the momentum, but it was clear that this first visit was viewed favorable:

“…a walking encyclopedia of learning science… was able to respond to our inquiries with one well-researched perspective after another”.

So, there are ways to pick my brain that provide high value with mutual benefit on each side. Sure, you can read my blog or books, but sometimes you may want assistance in contextualizing it to your situation. I encourage you to think of making an investment in quality. These are about learning design, but I have some examples in strategy that I intend to share soon. And more. Stay tuned for more ‘adventures in consulting’ tales that talk about ways in which a variety of needs are met. Maybe one will resonate with you. Of course, they’ll be mixed in with the regular reflections you’ve come to expect.

Kaihan Krippendorff Keynote Mindmap

14 September 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

At a private event, I had a chance to hear Kaihan Krippendorff talk about thinking differently about innovation. He used an 8P’s model as a framework to illustrate how to think differently.

He started by pointing out that the myth of entrepreneurial innovation is overblown, and that innovation comes from moving outside ‘business as usual’.

In an engaging way, he used several examples for each of the Ps to show how companies succeeded by rethinking around this element (speaking too fast to capture them!).

Editorializing

23 August 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

I recently wrote about serious comics, and realized there’s a form I hadn’t addressed yet has some valuable insights. The value in looking at other approaches is that it provides lateral insight (I’m currently reading Stephen Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From) that we may be able to transfer. And the source this time is editorial cartoons.

Editorial cartoons use imagery and text to convey a comment on a current topic. The best ones portray a poignant insight into an issue of the day, via a twist that emphasizes the point to be made. They’re usually combined with a distinct visual style from each artist. They reflect some of the same thoughts that accompany internet memes (the captioned photos) but require more visual talent ;).

The common approach appears to be (and I welcome insight from others) the ability to use another context to exaggerate some viewpoint. It’s a bit metaphorical, but I think the trick is to abstract the structure from the situation to be illuminated, and to map it to another situation that highlights the relationships. So you could take some recent pop star spat and map it to a political one, or highlight an economic policy as a personal one.

As context, I happened to stumble upon an exhibition of Conrad‘s work in my college art gallery, and as he was the local cartoonist for my home newspaper (The LA Times), I recognized his work. I had the chance to explore in more detail his award-winning efforts. Agree or disagree, he made powerful comments and I admired his ability.

Now, editorial cartooning is very context-sensitive, in that what is being talked about is very much ‘of the day’. What’s being commented on may not be relevant at a later time, particularly if they conjoin a popular culture event with an issue as they often do. But the insight, looking for the twist and the way to make the point, is a valuable skill that has a role in learning design too.

In learning design, we want to make the content meaningful. There’s intrinsic interest in pretty much everything, but it may be hard to find (see: working with SMEs), and also hard to convey. Yet I believe comics are one way to do this. You can, for instance, humorously exaggerate the consequences of not having the knowledge. I’ve done that with content where we introduced each section of a course with a comic (very much like an editorial cartoon) highlighting the topic and necessity.

The point being that we can not only benefit from understanding other media, but we can appropriate their approaches as well. Our learning designs needs to be eclectic to be engaging and effective. Or, to put it another way, there are lots of ways to get the design implemented, once you have the design right.

Meaningful and meta

17 August 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Over the weekend, one of my colleagues posted a rant about MOOCs and critical thinking. And, largely, I think he was right. There’re several things we need, and MOOCs as they typically are constituted, aren’t going to deliver. As I talked about yesterday, I think we need a more refined pedagogy.

So the things we need, to me, are two things:

meaningful learning, whereby we have individuals learning skills that are applicable in their lives, and
meta-learning, or learning to learn, so that people can continue to develop their skills in the face of increasing change.

And I don’t think the typical ‘text on screen with a quiz’ that he was ranting about is going to do it. Even with hand-shot videos. (Though I disagree when he doesn’t like the word ‘engage’, as I obviously believe that we need engagement, but of both heart and mind, not just tarted up quizzes.) He wanted critical thinking skills, and I agree.

Hence the activity framework. Yes, it depends on your design skills, but when done right, focusing on having learners create products that resemble the outputs that they’ll need to generate in their lives (and this is strongly influenced by the story-centered curriculum/goal-based scenario work of Roger Schank) is fundamentally invoking the skills they need. And having them show the thinking behind it developing their ‘work out loud’ (“show your work”) skills that ideally will carry over.

Ideally, of course, they’re engaging with other learners, commenting on their thinking (so they internalize critiquing as part of their own self-improvement skill set) and even collaborating (as they’ll have to). And of course there are instructors involved to evaluate those critical skills.

As an aside, that’s why I have problems with AI. It’s not yet advanced enough yet, as far as I know, to practically be able to evaluate the underlying thinking and determine the best intervention. It may be great when we are there, but for now in this environment, people are better.

The other component is, of course, gradually handing off control of the learning design responsibility to the learners. They should start choosing what product, what reflection, what content, and ultimately what activity. This is part of developing their ability to take control of their learning as they go forward. And this means that we’ll have to be scrutable in our learning design, so they can look back, see how we’re choosing to design learning, so they can internalize that meta-level as well.

And we can largely use MOOC technologies (though we need to have sufficient mentors around, which has been a challenge with the ‘Massive’ part). The point though, is that we need curriculum design that focuses on meaningful skills, and then a pedagogical design that develops them and the associated learning skills. That’s what I think we should be trying to achieve. What am I missing?

Learning Through the Wild

10 August 2016 by Clark 1 Comment

So last week I was in the wilderness for some more time, this time with family. And there were several learnings as an outcome that are worth sharing.

As context, Yosemite National Park is one of the world’s truly beautiful places, with the valley as an accessible way to see the glacier-carved rock. Beyond the valley, however, there is backcountry (mountains, rivers, lakes) that is only accessible by backpack, and I’ve done plenty of that. And then there’s one other option: the High Sierra Camps. There you can stay in tent cabins, eating prepared meals, but you can only get to them by horse or by hiking. (You can also get just meals, and carry in your tents and bags and all, which is what we did.) What this does is get you to a subset (a spectacular subset) of the high country, a chance to experience real wilderness without having to be able to carry a backpack.

Also as context, I am a fervent believer in the value of wildness. As I expressed before, there’s the creativity aspect that comes from spending time in the wilderness. You can reflect on your regular world when you’re no longer tied to it. As you hike or ride along the trails, your mind can wander and process in the background. There are also mental health benefits to be found in escaping from the everyday clatter. (This is very necessary for me! :) And, importantly, the processes in nature provide a counter-balance to the artificial processes we put in place to breed plants and animals. The variation generated in the wild is a complement to our own approaches, just as computers are a complement to our brains. Consequently, I believe we need to preserve some of our natural spaces.

So, one of the learning outcomes is being able to experience the wilderness without having to be physically capable of carrying everything you need on your back. I reckon that if you can experience the wildness, you can appreciate it, and then can become a supporter. Thus, just the existence of these alternate paths (between cars and backpacking) means to me a higher likelihood of preserving the environment.

Similarly, there are rangers who visit these camps, and provide after-dinner campfire talks. They talk at dinner, talking about what they will be covering, but also advocating for the value of the programs and the wilderness. Similarly, the staff at the camps also do a good job of advocating for the wilderness (as they would), and there are guidebooks available for perusal to learn more, as well as information around the dining rooms (and great food!).

One of the larger learning lessons is that, once you’re in context, the interest is naturally sparked, and then you’re ripe for a message. Your curiosity gets stoked about why coyotes howl, once you hear them. Or you wonder about the geology, or the lifecycle of plants, or…you get the idea. Creating artificial contexts is one of the tricks of learning (please, don’t keep it abstract, it doesn’t work), but layering it on in context is increasingly doable and more valuable.

Meaningful engagement in context is a valuable prerequisite for learning. The reason we can go to conferences and get value (contrary to the old “you can’t learn from a lecture”) is because we’re engaged in activity and conferences serve as reflection opportunities. Sometimes you need to get away from the context to reflect, if the contextual pressures are too much, and sometimes the context naturally sparks reflection. Making time for reflection is a component of a learning organization, and getting support in context or having time away from context both are parts. So my recommendation is to support wilderness, and get out in it!

The probability of wasting money

3 August 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Designing learning is a probability game. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, you can lead a learner to learning, but you can’t make them think. What I mean is that the likelihood that the learning actually sticks is a result of a myriad of design decisions, and many elements contribute to that likelihood. It will vary by learner, despite your endeavors, but you increase the probability that the desired outcome is achieved by following what’s know about how people learn.

This is the point of learning engineering, applying learning science to the design of learning experiences. You need to align elements like:

determining learning objectives that will impact the desired outcome
designing sufficient contextualized practice
appropriately presenting a conceptual model that guides performance
providing a sufficient and elaborated suite of examples to illustrate the concept in context
developing emotional engagement

and so on.

And to the extent that you’re not fully delivering on the nuances of these elements, you’re decreasing the likelihood of having any meaningful impact. It’s pretty simple:

If you don’t have the right objectives (e.g. if you just take an order for a course), what’s the likelihood that your learning will achieve anything?

If you don’t have sufficient practice, what’s the likelihood that the learning will still be there when needed?

If you have abstract practice, what’s the likelihood that your learners will transfer that practice to appropriate situations?

If you don’t guide performance with a model, what’s the likelihood that learners will be able to adapt their performance to different situations?

If you don’t provide examples, what’s the likelihood that learners will understand the full range of situations and appropriate adaptations for each?

And if you don’t emotionally engage them, what’s the likelihood that any of this will be appropriately processed?

Now, let’s tie that back to the dollars it costs you to develop this learning. There’s the SME time, and the designer time, and development time, and the time of the learners away from their revenue-generating activity. At the end of the day, it’s a fair chunk of change. And if you’re slipping in the details of any of this (and I’m just skating the surface, there’re nuances around all of these), you’re diminishing the value of your investment, potentially all the way to zero. In short, you could be throwing your money away!

This isn’t to make you throw up your hands and say “we can’t do all that”. Most design processes have the potential to do the necessary job, but you have to comprehend the nuances, and ensure that the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed on development. Just because you have an authoring tool doesn’t mean what comes out is actually achieving anything.

However, it’s possible to tune up the design process to acknowledge the necessary details. When you provide support at just the right places, and put in place the subtle tweaks on things like working with SMEs, you can develop and deliver learning that has a high likelihood of having the desired impact, and therefore have a process that’s justifiable for the investment.

And that’s really the goal, isn’t it? Being able to allocate resources to impact the business in meaningful ways is what we’re supposed to be doing. Too frequently we see the gaps continue (hence the call for Serious eLearning), and we can only do it if we’re acting like the professionals we need to be. It’s time for a tuneup in organizational learning. It’s not too onerous, and it’s needed. So, are you ready?

Serious Comics

27 July 2016 by Clark 1 Comment

I attended ComicCon again this year, and addition to the wild costumes, crowded exhibit hall, and over-priced food, there are a series of sessions. They cover television, movies, and print in a wide variety of markets. And I like the sessions that aren’t associated with popular media (as waiting in lines is something I’m fairly averse too). One I saw this year (not all of, for several reasons) was particularly thought-provoking.

As background, when I was approached by the Australian Children’s Welfare Agency, many years ago, to do a game to help kids who grow up in ‘non-parental’ situations, they’d already spent their money on a video, and a comic book, and a poster. As far as I know, it was the first serious game you could play on the web (and I’m happy to have that disconfirmed, but as I’ve thought about it and tried to find out to the contrary, I haven’t found to the contrary). And back then we didn’t even have the label ‘serious game’!

And I’ve been a fan of serious games since before then (my first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games). In fact, one of the reasons I went to grad school was because I saw the connection between adventure games and learning, but it wasn’t clear they were commercially viable (at that time).

But I didn’t think about the comic book much. I got a copy as part of the overall launch when the game was released along with the other materials, so I’m sure I read it (it may even be lurking somewhere in a cubbyhole somewhere, though could also have been the victim of a move or a tidiness binge). And I’ve argued before about how graphic novel and such formats aren’t used enough in learning.

So this session was on serious comics, and it of course resurrected those thoughts. One panelist opened about how they were using comics to spark reading, and I was reminded how apparently the original Pokemon games (not Go, though that was obsessing my kids on the trip) required and consequently sparked lots of reading. The second speaker introduced how he was using comics to spread STD/HIV awareness. These are actually both serious issues.

Of course, I was also reminded of an interactive comic book I once read on my iPad that had games interspersed that advanced the storyline (I couldn’t finish because I couldn’t complete one of the games: I’ve little time to spend developing the necessary ‘twitch’ skills). However, more serious games, requiring applying the knowledge available through the comic, could provide an embedded practice environment. It’s sort of a blend between a pure comic and a pure game, for important outcomes. And this is very doable in ebook formats, even if the ‘game’ is just a mini-scenario or several, but with HTML 5 embedded you could do more.

I once wrote that in the future there would be lots of little interactive ‘learnlets’ that would teach you anything you needed to know (including how to make learnlets ;) and games or even interactive comics are what I meant and what could be pretty close to ideal. It’s been doable for a while, but now it’s doable pretty much with commercially available tools (e.g. not requiring custom programming). We can make learning ‘hard fun’, and we should. So, what are you waiting for?

The Inaugural Jay Cross Memorial Award winner is…

5 July 2016 by Clark 2 Comments

Reposted from the Internet Time Alliance website:

The Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Real Learning and is reflective of Jay‘s lifetime of work. Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organisation and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Jay Cross Memorial Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.

We are announcing this inaugural award on 5 July, Jay‘s birthday. Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance (Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn) resolved to continue Jay‘s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.

The Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award for 2016 is presented to Helen Blunden. Helen has been an independent practitioner at Activate Learning since 2014. Her vision is to help people stay current in a constantly changing world of work and do this by working and sharing their work and learning in a generous, open, and authentic manner. Helen started her career within the Royal Australian Navy across two branches (Training Development and Public Relations) as well as working within Service and external to Service (with Air Force and Army and Defence civilians), then with the Reserves. Helen later worked as a Learning and Development Consultant for Omni Asia Pacific, and subsequently with National Australia Bank as a Social Learning Consultant. Helen is an active blogger and is engaged professionally on various social media platforms.

Here is Helen in her own words: “In my observations, it‘s not only learning teams in organisations or institutions that need to change and recreate the traditional ways of training into learning experiences. It‘s wider than that. I have smaller businesses, some of whom are vendors who offer training products and services to the public or to organisations who are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get â€˜into the 21st century‘ as their clients ask for more blended programs â€“ shorter programs â€“ but still achieve the same outcomes. Dare I say it, the tools that Jane Hart offers as tools for professional development are not for learning people alone â€“ they‘re for everyone. This is where I‘m grappling to understand the enormity of the change and how, for the first time, you‘re not only helping a client design and develop the learning experience â€“ but you need to teach them how to use the tools so it becomes part of their social behaviour to build their own business, brand and reputation.â€

Helen will be formally presented with the award in her home city of Melbourne by Simon Hann, CEO of DeakinPrime, the corporate education arm of Deakin University.

It is with great pleasure that the partners of the Internet Time Alliance present the first Jay Cross Memorial Award to Helen Blunden.

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