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Innovation Thoughts

27 April 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

So I presented on innovation to the local ATD chapter a few weeks ago, and they did an interesting and nice thing: they got the attendees to document their takeaways. And I promised to write a blog post about it, and I’ve finally received the list of thoughts, so here are my reflections. As an aside, I’ve written separate articles on L&D innovation recently for both CLO magazine and the Litmos blog so you can check those out, too.

I started talking about why innovation was needed, and then what it was. They recalled that I pointed out that by definition an innovation is not only a new idea, but one that is implemented and leads to better results. I made the point that when you’re innovating, designing, researching, trouble-shooting, etc, you don’t know the answer when you start, so they’re learning situations, though informal, not formal. And they heard me note that agility and adaptation are premised on informal learning of this sort, and that the opportunity is for L&D to take up the mantle to meed the increasing need.

There was interest but some lack of clarity around meta-learning. I emphasize that learning to learn may be your best investment, but given that you’re devolving responsibility you shouldn’t assume that individuals are automatically possessed of optimal learning skills. The focus then becomes developing learning to learn skills, which of needs is done across some other topic. And, of course, it requires the right culture.

There were some terms they heard that they weren’t necessarily clear on, so per the request, here are the terms (from them) and my definition:

Innovation by Design: here I mean deliberately creating an environment where innovation can flourish. You can’t plan for innovation, it’s ephemeral, but you can certainly create a felicitous environment.
Adjacent Possible: this is a term Steven Johnson used in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, and my take is that it means that lateral inspiration (e.g. ideas from nearby: related fields or technologies) is where innovation happens, but it takes exposure to those ideas.
Positive Deviance: the idea (which I heard of from Jane Bozarth) is that the best way to find good ideas is to find people who are excelling and figure out what they’re doing differently.
Hierarchy and Equality: I’m not quite sure what they were referring to hear (I think more along the lines of Husband’s Wirearchy versus hierarchy) but the point is to reduce the levels and start tapping into the contributions possible from all.
Assigned roles and vulnerability: I’m even less certain what’s being referred to here (I can’t be responsible for everything people take away ;), but I could interpret this to mean that it’s hard to be safe to contribute if you’re in a hierarchy and are commenting on someone above you. Which again is an issue of safety (which is why I advocate that leaders ‘work out loud’, and it’s a core element of Edmondson’s Teaming; see below).

I used the Learning Organization Dimensions diagram (Garvin, Edmondson & Gino) to illustrate the components of successful innovation environment, and these were reflected in their comments. A number mentioned psychological safety in particular as well as the other elements of the learning environment. They also picked up on the importance of leadership.

Some other notes that they picked up on included:

best principles instead of best practices
change is facilitated when the affected individual choose to change
brainstorming needs individual work before collective work
that trust is required to devolve responsibility
the importance of coping with ambiguity

One that was provided that I know I didn’t say because I don’t believe it, but is interesting as a comment:

“Belonging trumps diversity, and security trumps grit”

This is an interesting belief, and I think that’s likely the case if it’s not safe to experiment and make mistakes.

They recalled some of the books I mentioned, so here’s the list:

The Invisible Computer by Don Norman
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
My Revolutionize Learning and Development (of course ;)
XLR8 by John Kotter (with the ‘dual operating system‘ hypothesis)
Teaming to Innovate by Amy Edmondson (I reviewed it)
Working Out Loud by John Stepper
Scaling Up Excellence by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao (blogged)
Organize for Complexity by Niels Pflaeging (though they heard this as a concept, not a title)

It was a great evening, and really rewarding to see that many of the messages stuck. So, what are your thought around innovation?

Human Learning is Not About to Change Forever

26 April 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

In my inbox was an announcement about a new white paper with the intriguing title Human Learning is About to Change Forever. So naturally I gave up my personal details to download a copy. There are nine claims in the paper, from the obvious to the ridiculous. So I thought I’d have some fun.

First, let’s get clear. Our learning runs on our brain, our wetware. And that’s not changing in any fundamental way in the near future. As a famous article once had it: phenotypic plasticity triumphs over genotypic plasticity (in short, our human advantage has gained via our ability to adapt individually and learn from each other, not through species evolution). The latter takes a long time!

And as a starting premise, the “about to” bit implies these things are around the corner, so that’s going to be a bit of my critique. But nowhere near all of it. So here’s a digest of the nine claims and my comments:

Enhanced reality tools will transform the learning environment. Well, these tools will certainly augment the learning environment (pun intended :). There’s evidence that VR leads to better learning outcomes, and I have high hopes for AR, too. Though is that a really fundamental transition? We’ve had VR and virtual worlds for over a decade at least. And is VR a evolutionary or revolutionary change from simulations? Then they go on to talk about performance support. Is that transforming learning? I’m on record saying contextualized learning (e.g. AR) is the real opportunity to do something interesting, and I’ll buy it, but we’re a long way away. I’m all for AR and VR, but saying that it puts learning in the hands of the students is a design issue, not a technology issue.
People will learn collaboratively, no matter where they are. Um, yes, and…? They’re already doing this, and we’ve been social learners for as long as we’ve existed. The possibilities in virtual worlds to collaboratively create in 3D I still think is potentially cool, but even as the technology limitations come down, the cognitive limitations remain. I’m big on social learning, but mediating it through technology strikes me as just a natural step, not transformation.
AI will banish intellectual tedium. Everything is awesome. Now we’re getting a wee bit hypish. The fact that software can parse text and create questions is pretty impressive. And questions about semantic knowledge aren’t going to transform education. Whether the questions are developed by hand, or by machine, they aren’t likely on their own to lead to new abilities to do. And AI is not yet to the level (nor will it be soon) where it can take content and create compelling activities that will drive learners to apply knowledge and make it meaningful.
We will maximize our mental potential with wearables and neural implants. Ok, now we’re getting confused and a wee bit silly. Wearables are cool, and in cases where they can sense things about you and the world means they can start doing some very interesting AR. But transformative? This still seems like a push. And neural implants? I don’t like surgery, and messing with my nervous system when you still don’t really understand it? No thanks. There’s a lot more to it than managing to adjust firing to control limbs. The issue is again about the semantics: if we’re not getting meaning, it’s not really fundamental. And given that our conscious representations are scattered across our cortex in rich patterns, this just isn’t happening soon (nor do I want that much connection; I don’t trust them not to ‘muck about’).
Learning will be radically personalized. Don’t you just love the use of superlatives? This is in the realm of plausible, but as I mentioned before, it’s not worth it until we’re doing it on top of good design. Again, putting together wearables (read: context sensing) and personalization will lead to the ability to do transformative AR, but we’ll need a new design approach, more advanced sensors, and a lot more backend architecture and semantic work than we’re yet ready to apply.
Grades and brand-name schools won‘t matter for employment. Sure, that MIT degree is worthless! Ok, so there’s some movement this way. That will actually be a nice state of affairs. It’d be good if we started focusing on competencies, and build new brand names around real enablement. I’m not optimistic about the prospects, however. Look at how hard it is to change K12 education (the gap between what’s known and what’s practiced hasn’t significantly diminished in the past decades). Market forces may change it, but the brand names will adapt too, once it becomes an economic necessity.
Supplements will improve our mental performance. Drink this and you’ll fly! Yeah, or crash. There are ways I want to play with my brain chemistry, and ways I don’t. As an adult! I really don’t want us playing with children, risking potential long-term damage, until we have a solid basis. We’ve had chemicals support performance for a while (see military use), but we’re still in the infancy, and here I’m not sure our experiments with neurochemicals can surpass what evolution has given us, at least not without some pretty solid understanding. This seems like long-term research, not near-term plausibility.
Gene editing will give us better brains. It’s alive! Yes, Frankenstein’s monster comes to mind here. I do believe it’s possible that we’ll be able to outdo evolution eventually, but I reckon there’s still not everything known about the human genome or the human brain. This similarly strikes me as a valuable long term research area, but in the short term there are so many interesting gene interactions we don’t yet understand, I’d hate to risk the possible side-effects.
We won‘t have to learn: we‘ll upload and download knowledge. Yeah, it’ll be great! See my comments above on neural implants: this isn’t yet ready for primetime. More importantly, this is supremely dangerous. Do I trust what you say you’re making available for download? Certainly not the case now with many things, including advertisements. Think about downloading to your computer: not just spam ads, but viruses and malware. No thank you! Not that I think it’s close, but I’m not convinced we can ‘upgrade our operating system’ anyway. Given the way that our knowledge is distributed, the notion of changing it with anything less than practice seems implausible.

Overall, this is reads like more a sci-fi fan’s dreams than a realistic assessment of what we should be preparing for. No, human learning isn’t going to change forever. The ways we learn, e.g. the tools we learn with are changing, and we’re rediscovering how we really learn.

There are better guides available to what’s coming in the near term that we should prepare for. Again, we need to focus on good learning design, and leveraging technology in ways that align with how our brains work, not trying to meld the two. So, there’re my opinions, I welcome yours.

Other writings

1 February 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

It occurs to me to mention some of the other places you can find my writings besides here (and how they differ ;). My blog posts are pretty regular (my aim is 2/week), but tend to have ideas that are embryonic or a bit ‘evangelical’. First, I’ve written four books; you can check them out and get sample chapters at their respective sites:

Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games

Designing mLearning: Tapping Into the Mobile Revolution for Organizational Performance

The Mobile Academy: mLearning For Higher Education

Revolutionize Learning & Development: Performance and Information Strategy for the Information Age

They’re designed to be the definitive word on the topic, at least at the moment.

I’ve also written or co-written a number of chapters in a variety of books. The books include The Really Useful eLearning Instruction Manual, Creating a Learning Culture, Michael Allen’s eLearning Annual 2009, and a bunch of academic handbooks (Mobile Learning, Experiential Learning, Wiley Learning Technology ;). These tend to be longer than an article, with a pretty thorough coverage of whatever topic is on tap.

Then there are articles in a variety of magazines. These tend to be aggregated thoughts that are longer than a blog post, but not as through as a chapter. In particular, they are things I think need to be heard (or read). So, my writing has shown up in:

eLearnMag

Learning Solutions

CLO

The topics vary. (For the eLearnMag ones, you’ll have to search for my name owing to their interface, and they tend to be more like editorials.)

And then there are blog posts for others that are a bit longer than my usual blog post, and close to an article in focus:

The Deeper eLearning series for Learnnovators

A monthly article for Litmos.

These, too, are more like articles in that they’re focused, and deeper than my usual blog post. For the latter I cover a lot of different topics, so you’re likely to find something relevant there in many different areas.

I’m proud of it all, but for a quick update on a topic, you might be best seeing if there’s a Litmos post on it first. That’s likely to be relatively short and focused if there is one. And, of course, if it’s a topic you’re interested in advancing in and I can help, do let me know.

Mobile Lesson

5 January 2017 by Clark Leave a Comment

I’m preparing my keynote for a mobile conference, and it’s caused an interesting reflection. My mlearning books came out in 2011, and subsequently I’ve written on the revolution. And I’ve been speaking on both of late, but in some ways the persistent interest in mobile intrigues me.

While my services are pushing the better design of and the bigger picture of elearning, mobile isn’t going away. My trip to China to keynote this past year was on mlearning (and one the year before), and now again I’m talking on the topic. What does this mean?

As I wrote before, China is much bigger into mobile than we are. It’s likely because we had more ubiquity of internet access and computers, but they’re also a highly mobile populace. And it makes sense that they’re showing a continuing interest. In fact, they specifically asked for a presentation that was advanced, not my usual introduction.

I’m also going to be presenting on more advanced thinking to the audience coming up, because the entire focus of the event is mlearning and I infer that they’re already up on the basics. The focus in my books was to get people thinking differently about mobile (because it’s not about courses on a phone), but certainly that was understood in China. I think it’s also understood by most of the developers. I’m less certain about the elearning field (corporate and education), at least not yet.

In many ways, mobile was a catalyst for the revolution. I think of mlearning as much more than courses, and my models focused on performance support and social more than formal learning. That is really one of the two-fold focuses on the revolution (the “L&D isn’t doing near what it could and should”; to complement the “and what it is doing, it is doing badly” :). In that way, these devices can be a wedge in the door for a broader focus.

Yet mobile is just a platform for enabling the type of experiences, the types of cognitive support, as any other platform from conversation to artificial intelligence. It is an important one, however, with the unique properties of doing things whenever & wherever you are and doing things because of when and where you are.

So I get that mlearning is of interest because of the ubiquity, but the thinking that goes into mobile really goes beyond mobile. It’s about aligning with us, supporting our needs to communicate and collaborate. That’s still a need, a useful message, and an opportunity. Are you mobilizing?

Learning Strategy Issues

7 December 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

Online Educa logo The other thing that I was involved in at Online Educa in Berlin was a session on The Flexible Worker. Three of us presented, each addressing one particular topic. One presentation was on collaborating to produce an elearning course on sleeping better, with the presenter’s firm demonstrating expertise in elearning, while the other firm had the subject matter expertise on sleep health. A second presentation was on providing tools to trainers to devolve content development locally, addressing a problem with centrally-developed content. My presentation was on the gaps between what L&D does and how our brains work, and the implications. And, per our design, issues emerged.

The format was interesting: our presentations were roughly 10 minutes each. And we were using a tool (sli.do) to collect and rank questions. Then we had the audience work at their tables (in the round) to come up with their answers to the top questions, which we then collected and the panelists riffed on the outcomes. We got through three questions as a group, and I thought the outcomes were quite interesting. In short, as a rapporteur at the closing business session, I suggested that the topic ended up being about flexible work, not flexible working.

The top question that emerged had to do with how to support effective search (after I expounded on problem with the notion that it all had to be in the head). The sourced answers included crowd-sourcing the tags for finding objects, using a controlled vocabulary, and auto-analyzing the content to determine tags. I suggest a hybrid solution, in general. The interesting thing here was the audience picking up on the need to go beyond courses and start looking at resources.

The next question was how to move from a training to a performance culture. And it was another exciting development to hear them thinking this way. The solutions offered included coaching, supporting the importance of self-learning (meta-learning, yay!), and working both top-down and bottom-up. I also suggested that measuring was a likely catalyst that could begin to draw attention to outcomes (just as I reckon competencies are the lever in higher-ed).

The third question was about ensuring quality in a localized learning environment (e.g. user-generated content). The concern was that the knowledge of learning design wouldn’t necessarily be widespread. Suggestions included making the content editable for collaborative improvements, or using rankings, and scaffolding of improvement through the community. Here too, a focus on learning itself could assist.

What’s encouraging to me is that each of these questions was really about moving to a transformative viewpoint. The audience was clearly thinking ‘beyond the course’. They were focusing on supporting performers in learning, and resources, and leveraging the community, all activities consonant with the revolution.

An interesting aside came in the closing session. Several folks were mentioning a need for change, and an audience member asked “why?” He was a consultant, and his clients already seemed to be moving forward. I suggested he was seeing the best, and that many folks were not there (mentioning the Towards Maturity data as well as the problems I identified in the beginning of the Revolution book. And it’s a problem that too many people don’t yet see the missed opportunities and don’t feel the pain (and are frankly not looking).

So, there are opportunities to start taking small steps in the direction of taking on a bigger perspective and making the role of L&D more strategic. It first takes an awareness of the problems (my old line: “L&D isn’t doing near what it could and should, and what it is doing it is doing badly, other than that things are fine” :), and then a strategy to move forward. The strategy depends on where the organization is to begin with, but there are systematic principles to guide progress. That’s what I do, after all! It’s nice to see awareness growing. So, are you ready to start taking some positive steps?

Content aggregation

30 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

At the recent DevLearn conference, I had a chance to present in xAPI Base Camp on Content Systems. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about since working on an adaptive learning system back in 1999-2000. And I think it’s now an even bigger big opportunity. In the course of responding to an interested attendee, I aggregated this list of my (non-blog) publications on the process, and I thought it might be useful to share them here (from most recent to earliest):

Talking about lifecycle and opportunities in the Litmos blog

Perspective from visiting the Intelligent Content conference in eLearnMag

The possibilities and necessities of adapting to context in Learning Solutions magazine

New ways of looking at learning content in Learning Solutions magazine

Moving from text to experience for publishers in eLearnMag

A discussion paper including granularity and tagging in the IFETS journal

What you see is a transition in focus. From thinking about content objects at the right granularity and with the right tagging, I transition to thinking about strategy for content publishers. Ultimately, I have shifted to looking at the learning industry and opportunities to adapt learning to context (which includes location, current task, current role, and more).

While I think that adaptivity is a ways away, I also believe that the initial efforts in getting more rigorous about content strategy, engineering, and governance are a worthwhile investment now. The benefits are in less redundancy, tighter design, tracking, and greater flexibility. The long term benefits will come from analytics, adaptivity, and contextualization. I reckon that’s an opportunity that’s hard to ignore. I’ll suggest that it’s past time to be thinking about it, and time to start acting. What about you? Are you ready?

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.

Deeper Design: Working out Loud and the Future of Work

20 September 2016 by Clark 2 Comments

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a project. After I wrote the Deeper eLearning series of 6 posts with Learnnovators, we wondered what to do next. We decided to do a course together, free-to-air, and write about the process as well (a bit of Working Out Loud), with the intention was to try to do deep design on a pragmatic basis. And, just as a hint, the topic is the Future of Work, the choice of which is
part of the story. It’s a tribute to our late friend and colleague, Jay Cross, with the assistance of my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance.

learnnovators course design example

Well, that goal was accomplished. First, there are four articles talking about the design, that Learning Solutions magazine was kind enough to host:

The first post talks about our initial plans, and how we settled on a topic.

The second post talks about our initial design decisions, scoping the overall course.

The third post talks about our detailed design decisions.

And the fourth post talks about our development process.

We intend a fifth post talking about what we learn after the release!

and now there’s also a press release that provides a link to the course. There’s an opportunity at the end of the course to leave some thoughts and comments, if you go through it (it’s designed for 20-30 minutes).

And, of course, if you do go through and want to talk about it, you can comment on the posts or here. I welcome your thoughts!

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.

Ambiguity Denial Syndrome?

23 June 2016 by Clark 2 Comments

I was talking with a colleague at an event one of the past weeks, and I noted down the concept of ambiguity denial syndrome. And I’m retrospectively making up what we were talking about, but it’s an interesting idea to me.

So one of the ways I start out a talk (including later today for a government agency) is to talk about chaos. I use a fractal, and talk about the properties a fractal has. You know, that it’s a mathematical formulation that paints an image from which patterns emerge, yet at any point you really don’t know where it’s going to go next.

I use this to explain how our old beliefs in an ability to plan, prepare, and execute were somewhat misguided. What we did was explain away the few times it didn’t work. But as things move faster, the fact that things are not quite as certain as we’d believe means we have to become more agile, because we can less tolerate the mistakes.

The point I’m making, that the world increasingly requires an ability to deal with ambiguity and unique situations. And our learning designs, and organization designs, and our cultures, need to recognize this. And yet, in so many ways, they don’t.

At the individual level, we’re not equipping folks with the right tools. We should be providing them with models to use to interpret and adapt to situations (explain and predict). Our learning designs should have them dealing with a wide variety and degrees of certainty in situations. And we should be testing and refining them, recognizing that learners aren’t as predictable as concrete or steel. Instead we see one-shot development of information dumps and knowledge tests, which aren’t going to help organizations.

At the interpersonal level, we should be facilitating people to engage productively, facilitating the development of viable processes for working and learning together. We know that the room is smarter than the smartest person in the room (if we manage the process right), and that we’ll get the best results when we empower people and support their success. We need them working out loud, communicating and collaborating, to get the best. Instead, we still see top-down hierarchies and solo work.

In short, we see people denying the increasing complexity that the world is showing us. Implicitly or explicitly, it’s clear that many folks believe that they can, and must, control things, instead of looking to adapt on the fly. We have new organizational models for this, and yet we’re not even seeing the exploration yet. I acknowledge that change is hard, and navigating it successfully is a challenge. But we have lots of guidance here too.

Too many processes I see reflect industrial age thinking, and we’re in an information age. We have greater capacity amongst our people, and greater challenges to address, with less tolerance for mistakes. We need to address, even embrace ambiguity, if we are to thrive. Because we can, and we should. It’s the only sensible way to move forward in this increasingly complex world. So, are you ready?

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