Search Results for: engagement

A ‘Critical Friend’?

16 May 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

I’m participating in an engagement, and they were struggling to define my role. Someone mentioned that I’m serving as a ‘critical friend’, and the others cottoned on to it. I hadn’t heard that term so I explored, and liked what I found. Thought I’d share it.

So, ‘critical friend‘ is a term that originated in the education sector. The prevailing definition is:

a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person‘s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work.

What’s key to me is that the role involves being committed to the success of the endeavor, but also being provocative. The latter is about asking the hard questions and bringing in outside input that wouldn’t likely be considered otherwise. And I believe, based upon what I’ve dug into for innovation, that this is a valuable role.

So what I’m doing is getting to know the situation, rapidly consuming lots of documents, interviewing people, and sitting in on other information gathering sessions, to get to know what’s up. Then I’m floating some ideas that I think they really need to consider. The ideas are contrary to the path they’re planning on but I’ve buttressed them with some strong arguments. They make not take on all of them, but at least they’ll have explicitly considered them.

I’ve played this role specifically in a number of different situations (in fact, in some sense you could consider most of my engagements to have at least a facet of this). I like to think that my 30+ years of work across cognition, technology, learning, design, and organizational implementation, with corporations, education institutions, government agencies, and not-for-profits, as well as my stockpiling of models, means I’ll generate some lateral and valuable thoughts in almost any situation. That’s certainly been the case to date. And I really do want to help people achieve their goals.

It’s a fun, though challenging role. You have to get up to speed quickly, and be willing to offer ideas. I pride myself on also being able to suggest ways to accomplish ideas that aren’t obviously implementable at the first go (all part of Quinnovation ;).

When you’re looking at some change, getting some critical friend support on principle is a good idea. People challenging you for your own best interest isn’t always easy, but the outcomes are pretty much always worth it. So, who’s your critical friend?

Leveraging Technology

29 March 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

I was listening to a tale recounting a time when an organization was going through a change, and had solicited help. And the story surprised me. The short story is that the initial approach being taken weren’t leveraging technology effectively. And it led me to wonder how many organizations are still doing things the old way.

So the story was of a critical organizational change. The hired guns (the typical consulting agency) came into to do their usual schtick, interviewing some people and making recommendations. The problem was, there was no way to interview an appropriately representative sample, and consequently the outcome was going to be less than optimal. The resulting plan was large. dd

In this situation, a colleague stepped in and managed to arrange to use a social platform to do a better job of sharing the intentions and soliciting feedback. You might not be surprised to hear that the subsequent process also yielded greater buy-in. The process resulted in a fine-grained analysis of the plan, with some elements continuing to be executed by the initial partner, others taken on internally, and others discarded. The ultimate cost was reduced far more than the cost to implement this extra step.

The missed opportunity, it turns out, was that the process used didn’t get scaled and implemented for further changes. Some outside factors removed the instigator responsible for the change and it had been done as a ‘stealth’ operation, so awareness wasn’t spread. The hired guns, already entrenched, went back to business as usual.

The eye-opener for me was the fact that the approach initially taken wasn’t leveraging technology. In this day and age, that strikes me as completely unjustifiable! They were better able to support transparency and communication, and as typically happens that yielded both better outcomes and better engagement. Of course, that’s the point of the revolution, getting smarter about aligning technology with how our brains think, work, and learn. It’s just that I forget how far we still need to go.

Just thinking through changes, at every stage of initiatives there’s a benefit:

collecting data and determining the issue, via surveys and discussion
developing ideas and approaches in collaboration (transparently, showing your work)
sharing visions about the resulting approach
providing support for expected problems
collaborating to address the unexpected problems
maintaining focus through the change
celebrating successes

All these can be facilitated through technology in powerful ways that can’t be done across geographies and timezones without tech.

So here’s my question to you. Is your organization leveraging technology appropriately? And this is both at the level of L&D, and then also organization wide. Is your L&D group working transparently, leveraging social media to both support effective performance and continue to develop? And then are you using that experience to spread the possibilities throughout the organization? That’s the opportunity on tap, and I would really like to see L&D leading the way. Heck, we’re supposed to be the ones who understand how people learn, and when it comes to change, that’s learning too. Let’s own this!

The change is here

1 March 2017 by Clark 2 Comments

For a number of years now (at least six), I’ve been beating the drum about the need for organizations to be prepared to address change. I’ve argued that things are happening faster, and that organizations are going to have to become more agile. Now we’re seeing the evidence that the change has arrived.

Two recent reports highlight the awareness. Gallup released a report on The State of the American Workplace recently that talks about the lack of engagement at work. Deloitte also released a report, Rewriting the rules in the digital age, that documents trends shifting the office environment. With different perspectives, they both overlap in discussing the importance of culture. It’s about creating an environment where people are empowered and enabled to contribute.

The Gallup report concludes with new behaviors for leaders and managers. The first point for leaders is to use data and focus on culture. This, to me, involves leveraging technology and creating an environment. L&D could be leading using performance data captured through the ExperienceAPI, and facilitating the culture shift in courses and developing coaching. Their prescription for managers is to move to be coaches (and again, L&D should be both developing the skills and facilitating the processes). And employees need to take ownership of their own development, which means L&D should focus on both meta-learning and ensuring resources (curation and creation) as well.

The second report is the more interesting one for me, because it’s about the trends and the ways to adapt. The top two trends are the Organization of the future (c.f. The Workplace of the Future :) and Careers and learning. The former is about redesigning organizations to become agile. The latter is about a redefinition of learning. They are a wee bit old-school, however, as while they do discuss innovation throughout, it isn’t a core focus and their definition of learning doesn’t include informal learning. It’s still a top-down model. But again, clear opportunities for L&D.

The key leverage points, to me, are learning and technology. And here I mean more self-directed and collaborative learning conducted not formally, but facilitated. Social learning really can’t be top-down! Important technologies are for communicating and collaborating, as well as tools to search and find resources.

And while the focus is on HR, including recruitment and leadership, I reckon that L&D should have a key place here, as indicated. The world’s changing, and L&D needs to adapt. It’s time to innovate L&D to support organizational innovation. Are you ready?

Another model for support

22 February 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

I was thinking about today’s post, wherein I was talking about a couple of packages that might help organizations move forward. I was reflecting back on some previous posts about engagement models, and was reminded of a more recent one. And I realized this has played out in a couple of ways. And these approaches did provide away to develop the organization’s abilities to develop better learning. So this is another model for support for developing at least the learning side of the equation.

In a couple of instances , I’ve worked with organizations on a specific project, but in a particular way. For each, my role was to lead the design. In one case, it was for a series of elearning modules. My role was to develop the initial template that the rest of the content fit. Note that this isn’t a template for tarting it up, but instead a template about what the necessary elements and details around them were to ensure that the elements (e.g. intro, concept, practice, etc) both fit together and reflected the best learning science. In a more recent instance, it was on a specific focus, but there were several modules that used a similar structure.

What happens, importantly, is that by working collaboratively, we learn together. Each of these organizations was in the business of developing content, but they were looking to raise their game. So, for instance, through leading the Workplace of the Future project but sharing the thinking behind it, by working out loud in that sense, it’s possible to develop a shared understanding. And in the latter case, though they’d read the Deeper eLearning series, they got a lot more out of working it through with me. (And, I’ll suggest, more than also reading the subsequent blog posts I wrote about the project.)

In each case, we created an overall template for the learning, and then detailed what the elements for the template were, and the critical components. When we applied it, usually with me doing it first, and then handing off. It’s really a Cognitive Apprenticeship approach.

So, it’s a slightly more involved approach, with a much more variable scope, but in conjunction with other approaches I’ve mentioned like critiquing content or design processes, it’s one way to get a jump on deeper learning science. Just trying to think of models that can support improvement, and that’s what I’m trying to push.

Support for moving forward

21 February 2017 by Clark 2 Comments

I have to admit I’ve been a bit surprised to see that movements towards improving elearning and learning strategy haven’t had more impact. On the learning design side, e.g. the Serious eLearning Manifesto and our Future of Work project, it still seems there’s a focus on content presentation. And similarly with learning strategy, so despite the Revolution, it doesn’t appear that there’s any big move in L&D to take a bigger perspective. And my question is: “why not?”

So I’ve been trying to think what might be the barriers to move forward. What could keep folks from at least taking initial steps? Maybe folks are making moves, but I haven’t seen much indication. So naturally I wondered what sort of support could be needed to move forward.

Perhaps it seems too overwhelming? In the manifesto we did say we don’t expect people taking it all on at once, but we know folks sometimes have trouble breaking it down. Similarly, there’re a lot of components to the full performance ecosystem. One possibility is that folks don’t know where to start. I wrote sometime shortly after the manifesto’s release that the best place to start was with practice. And I’ve similarly argued that perhaps the best revolution catalyst is measurement. But maybe that’s too general?

So I wondered if perhaps some specific support would assist. And so I’ve put together a package for each that’s an initial assessment to identify what’s working, what’s not, and from which to give some initial recommendations. And I’ve tried to price them so that they’re not too dear, too hard to get approval for, but provide maximum value for minimal investment. Both are based upon the structure of previous successful engagements. (The learning strategy one is a little more because it’s a wee bit more complex. ;) Both are also based upon frameworks I’ve developed for each:

elearning design is based upon deeper elearning and the leverage points in the design process

elearning strategy is based upon the performance ecosystem model and the implications for developing and delivering solutions.

In each I’m spending time beforehand reviewing materials, and then just two days on site to have some very targeted interviews and meetings. The process involves talking to representative stakeholders and then working with a core team to work through the possibilities and prioritize them. It also includes an overview of the frameworks for each as a basis for a shared understanding.

The goal is to use an intensive investigation to identify what’s the current status, and the specific leverage points for immediate improvement and longer-term shifts. The output is a recommendation document that documents what’s working and where there are opportunities for improvement and what the likely benefits and costs are.

This isn’t available directly from the Quinnovation site: I’m starting here to talk to those who’ve been tracking the arguments. Maybe that’s the wrong starting point, but I’ve got to start somewhere. I welcome feedback on what else you might expect or want or what would help.

If you’d like to check out the two packages and start moving forward, have a look here and feel free to followup through the contact link. You’ve got to have the 3 Rs: responsibility, resources, and resolve. If I can help, glad to hear it. If not, but there’s something else, let me know. But I really do want to help move this industry forward, and I’ll continue to try to find ways to make that happen. I invite you to join me!

Silo APIs?

26 January 2017 by Clark 3 Comments

I was in a conversation with my colleague Charles Jennings about organizational innovation, and one of the topics that arose was that of barriers to successful organizational function. In particular, we were talking about how the division of responsibility between organizational development (OD), leadership development, and learning & development is a problem. And I think the problem is bigger. Separating out functions into silos makes sense in a deterministic world, but that doesn’t characterize our current environment.

Now, separation of functions can be useful. Certainly in software engineering, having application program interfaces (APIs) have led to the ability to connect powerful capabilities. A program can call a function and get data returned via an API, and the software doesn’t have to care how the function’s carried out.

In the org equivalent we could have a business unit request a course, for example, and L&D responds with said course. In fact, that’s not atypical. Yet it’s problematic in human terms. The business unit may not have done the due diligence, the performance analysis, that ensures a course is the right solution.

Ok, we could change it: the business unit could indicate the performance problem and L&D could respond. However, again there’s a problem. Without understanding how things are done, L&D’s solution won’t be contextually accurate. Any intervention won’t reflect how things are done unless interactions occur.

And that’s the point. Any meaningful work – problem-solving, trouble-shooting, improvement, innovation, research, design etc – any learning, is complex. And, done right, they inherently require engagement and interaction. Moreover, we also know that the best solutions come from creative friction, people interacting. Communication and collaboration is key!

Engagement between silos works best when you mix members from each. Or, to put it another way, breaking down the silos is the only way to get the best outputs for the important work, the work that will advance the organization whether removing errors, creating new products or processes, etc.

People are complex (the human brain is arguably the most complex thing in the known universe). Solutions that tap into that complexity, instead of trying to avoid it, are bound to yield the best insights. We’ve now got a lot of insight into processes that facilitate getting the best outcomes. It’s time to engage with it, to the benefit of the organization.

2016 Reflections

28 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

This is the last Learnlet for 2016, and so it’s time for some reflections on what has been an ‘interesting’ year. I’ll admit it’s been rough, what with losing so many people known through popular media. I guess you get to an age where more and more people who’ve you’ve grown up with in one way or another begin to pass on. And of course serious changes nationally and internationally. But there are some learnings as well.

So, I did a fair bit of speaking in 2016, keynoting conferences in New York and Beijing, as well as more private events live and online. I spoke about mobile learning, deeper learning design, innovation, as well as the L&D revolution. And, of course, I attended the usual suite of industry conferences, notably the eLearning Guild events and Online Educa. I also was engaged in a number of consulting engagements, working with folks to deepen their understanding (and mine), to achieve meaningful outcomes.

One learning is the value of travel outside the US. I actually lived outside the US for 7 years (in Australia), and the perspective of seeing how others live, and looking at the rest of the world (and back at the US) from other perspectives is a valuable grounding. The view I had of China before my recent trips was quite different than the reality. I can say the same from previous experience with India. It’s too easy to be insular. Instead, it’s helpful to be curious.

And that’s an industry comment too. I continue to talk (e.g. my workshop in Berlin) and write about deeper learning design. And I continue to evangelize about it (c.f. the Serious eLearning Manifesto with my colleagues, and the recent Future of Work project). And yet, the industry seems to continue on in ignorance. The tools still reflect more of a focus on content instead of experience, for instance. Things get better, but surprisingly slowly. How long until we start treating learning design with the appropriate respect? We need to get out of our comfort zone!

There are positive signs. My engagements with Learnnovators has demonstrated that at least some folks care about quality. And I had several client engagements specifically focused on better learning design. There just need to be more efforts in this area. It’s not hard to tweak processes to generate outcomes that not only look like good elearning, but actually have a high likelihood of an impact.

I’ve done a lot of reading this year (most recently The Fifth Discipline, which puts lots of what I’ve learned about organizations into a context). It amazes me that with robust science at the organizational level as well as the learning science level, we still see so much action in organizations (and society) contrary to what’s demonstrably known. There are positive signs here too, but still too few. It’s challenging, as it involves crossing discipline and business boundaries, yet the benefits are promising.

And I think the hype about technology improvements are premature. Wearables continue, of course. And VR has reached the stage where it’s easy to experiment. Yet in each case, we’re still in the stage before standards emerge that will make a real market. AR and content strategy are still nascent, but there’s much potential. Fortunately, analytics is seeing a boon from the standardization around xAPI. We need to stick to the core learning affordances of new technology to truly grasp the potential.

Looking forward, I see much opportunity, as implied by the gaps indicated above. There’s real opportunity for improvement in the use of technology to facilitate outcomes. We can do personal and organizational learning better. We can leverage technology in ways that are closer aligned with how our brains work. As a precursor, we’ll need a broader understanding of cognition, but that’s doable. I’m happy to help ;).

And let me just add a very heartfelt thanks to those of you who I’ve interacted with, this year and in the past. Whether reading the blog, making comments, engaging on social media, attending sessions or workshops, and of course via engagements, I’m very grateful. I hope to connect with you in the future, in any of the above ways or any other. I continue to learn through and with you, and that’s a gift. Again, thank you.

Goodbye 2016, and here’s to making positive changes in the new year. May it be your best yet.

Cultural Alignment

27 December 2016 by Clark 1 Comment

I was thinking about the ways in which organizations can support performance. That is, we can and should be aligning with how we think, work, and learn. So we can provide tools to support us in the moment, we can provide tools to help us work together, and we can develop people all slowly over time. In short, I was thinking about cognitive alignment, and I was going to write about it, but it turns out I already have! However, I also realized that there was an opportunity to extend that to cultural alignment, and I think that’s important as well.

So, one of the things we can do to optimize outcomes is to give people performance support. In particular, we can provide tools to address gaps that emerge from our cognitive architecture. We can also provide policies about things we’re supposed to do. And that’s all good. However, some of that might not be necessary under the right circumstances.

I was thinking about the specific case of acting in ways that are consonant with the values of the organization. For instance, in a well-known upscale department store chain, the staff have the leeway to spend on the order of $1K to address any emerging customer problem. I reckon the store figures that’s the future worth of a happy customer. And that’s acting in alignment with the culture of the organization.

The point I want to make is that by having an explicit culture in the organization, you might not have to provide performance support. If the desired approach is understood, it can be generated from understanding the organization’s value. If you know what’s expected, you can perform in alignment without needing external clues and cues.

There are clear benefits from a learning organization in terms of innovation and employee engagement, but what about the other side? I suggest that the right culture can also benefit the ‘optimal execution’ side. In short, there’s little reason to do aught but begin a move to a more enlightened culture. At least, that’s what seems to me to be the case. How about you?

Aligning Learning

6 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Online Educa logo Last week, at Online Educa in Berlin, I gave a tutorial on deeper elearning as a pre-conference event. In it, I talked about getting more meaningful objectives, writing practice that actually develops meaningful outcomes, and content (concepts & examples) aligned to support effective practice. I also talked about emotional engagement and social learning, before talking about revising design processes to incorporate these deeper elements in an effective and not-too-different approach. In short, I was talking about aligning our designs, and our design processes, to how we think and learn.

This is something that most organizations should be thinking about. I was pleasantly surprised that the audience included folks from universities, not-for-profits, and government agencies as well as businesses. The challenges are different in some respects, but there are shared elements. Education tends to be about long term learning relationships (typically at least a half year to several years), versus the short-term relationships (e.g. an hour to several days) in organizational learning. Yet the need to respect how our brains work is a continuum. Our brains learn in particular ways that are unaffected by the curricular needs. Learning solutions for performance and for education both still need to respect our neural and cognitive architecture.

And too little of what we do reflects what we know. As a recent commenter noted, there’s a conflict between the de-facto practices and what research says. As she also noted, our tools are also focused on supporting wrong approaches. It’s not that tools prevent doing meaningful learning, it’s just that you have to get your design right first and then make the tool conform (as opposed to the alternative). And our limitations as designers flow from the same source, our brain, as our limitations as learners. Thus we need to be as aware of cognition in our designing as in our design.

I’ll be talking about the problems this engenders in a special webinar tomorrow. There’re still a few slots left. If you’re committed to trying to improve your learning design, and you have the resources to do so, this is an opportunity to get started. There isn’t a lot of pressure yet, but it’s time to be proactive before people start asking questions about the business impact of what we’re doing. What do you think?

Strategy Sessions

2 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

In a previous post, I talked about a couple of instances where I worked with folks to let them ‘pick my brain’. Those were about learning design in particular, but I’ve also worked with folks on strategy. In these strategy sessions, things work a little differently.

So, in a typical strategy session, I prepare by looking at what they’ve done beforehand: any existing strategy documents. I also look at their current context, e.g. their business, market, customers, and products/services. Finally, I look at their stated goals. I also explore their stated needs, and see if there are some they may be missing. Then we get together.

I typically will spend an hour or so going over some principles, so we have a shared framework to discuss against. Then we brainstorm possible actions. We’ve prepped for this, circulating the space for topics, so people have had time to identify their individual ideas. We get them documented, diverging before converging. This may be a relatively large group, with representative stakeholders, but not so large that it can’t be managed.

Then, typically, a smaller group will take those ideas and prioritize them. To be clear, it’s informed by the context and infrastructure, so that the steps don’t just go from easier to harder, but it’s also about choosing steps that are strategic in securing credibility, building capacity, and leveraging other initiatives. At the end, however, the team I’m working with has both a general roadmap and a specific plan.

And I think this is good. They’ve gotten some new and valuable ways to think about strategy, and custom advice, all in a very short engagement. Sometimes it’s happened under the rubric of a mobile strategy, sometime’s it’s more general, but it always open eyes. In two particular instances, I recall that the outcomes they ended up focusing on most weren’t even on their radar when they started!

consulttaleslogo This is another instance of how folks can get high benefit from a small engagement. Picking my brain can be valuable, but it’s not a fair engagement unless we make it mutually rewarding. That’s not so hard to do, however. Just so you know.

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