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Don followed up Roger (and graciously adapted his presentation to fit into a considerably shortened time slot).  He made a clear and engaging argument about how things are changing and how a new mindset was needed.

Last week, I wrote about a process to follow in moving forward on the L&D  Revolution. The first step is  Assess,  and I’ve been thinking about what that means.   So here, let me lay out some preliminary thoughts.

The first level are the broad categories.  As I’m talking about aligning with how we think, work, and learn, those are the three top areas where I feel we fail to recognize what’s known about cognition, individually and together. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m looking at how we use technology to facilitate productivity in ways specifically focused on helping people learn. But let me be clear, here I’m talking about the big picture of learning – problem-solving, design, research, innovation, etc – as they call fall under the category of things we don’t know the answer to when we begin.

I started with how we think. Too often we don’t put information in the world when we can, yet we know that all our thinking isn’t in our head.  So we can ask :

• Are you using performance consulting?
• Are you taking responsibility for resource development?
• Are you ensuring  the information architecture for resources  is  user-focused?

The next area is working, and here the revelation is that the best outcomes come from people working together.  Creative friction, when done in consonance with how we work together best, is where the best solutions and the best new ideas will come from. So you can look at:

• Are people communicating?
• Are people collaborating?
• Do you  have in place a learning culture?

Finally,  with learning, as the area most familiar to L&D, we need to look at whether we’re applying what’s known about making learning work.  We should start with Serious eLearning, but we can go farther.  Things to look at include:

• Are  you practicing  deeper learning design?
• Are you  designing  engagement into learning?
• Are you developing  meta-learning?

In addition to each of these areas, there are cross-category issues.  Things to look at for each include:

• Do you have infrastructure?
• What are you measuring?

All of these areas have nuances underneath, but at the top level these strike me as the core categories of questions.  This is working down to  a finer grain than I  looked at in the book (c.f. Figure 8.1), though that was a good start at evaluating where one is.

I’m convinced that the first step for change is to understand where you are (before the next step, Learn, about where you could be).  I’ve yet to see many organizations that are in full swing here, and I have persistently made the case that the status quo isn’t sufficient.  So, are you ready to take the first step to assess where you are?

 

I’m realizing that a major theme of my work and the revolution is that what we do in organizations, and what we do as L&D practitioners, is not aligned with how we think, work, and learn.  And to that extent, we’re doomed to failure. We can, and need to, do better.

Let’s start with thinking. The major mismatch here is that our thinking is done rationally and in our head. Results in cognitive science show, instead, that much of our thinking is irrational and is distributed across the world. We use external representations and tools, and unless we’re experts, we make decisions and use our brains to justify them rather than actually do the hard work.

What does this mean for organizations and L&D?  It means we should be looking to augment how we think, with tools and processes like performance support, helping us find information with powerful search.  We want to have open book learning, since we’ll use the book in the real world, and we want to avoid putting it ‘in the head’ as much as possible. Particularly rote information. We should expect errors, and provide support with checklists, not naively expect that people can perform like robots.

This carries over to how we work.  The old view is that we work alone, performing our task, and being managed from above with one person thinking for a number of folks.  What we now know, however, is that this view isn’t optimal. The output is better when we get multiple complementary minds working together.  Adaptation and innovation work best when we work together.

So we don’t need isolation to do our work, we need cooperation  and collaboration.  We need ways to work together. We need to give people meaningful tasks and give them space to execute, with appropriate support. We need to create environments where it’s safe to share, to show your work, to work out loud.

And our models of learning are broken. The trend to  an   event comprised of information dump and knowledge test we know doesn’t work. Rote procedures are no longer sufficient for the increasing ambiguity and unique situations our learners are seeing. And the notion that  “practice ’til they get it right” will lead to any meaningful change in ability is fundamentally flawed.

To learn, we need models to guide our behavior and help us adapt.   We need to identify and address misconceptions. We need learners to engage concretely and be scaffolded in reflection.     And we need  much practice.  Our learning experiences need to look much more like scenarios and serious games, not like text and next.

We’re in an information age, and industrial models just won’t cut it.  I’m finding that we’re hampered by a fundamental lack of awareness of our brains, and this is manifesting in too many unfortunate and ineffective practices.  We need to get better. We know better paths, and we need to trod them.  Let’s start acting like professionals and develop the expertise we need to do the job we must do.

#itashare