Jay Cross is currently focusing on the ROI of organisational learning initiatives and debunking some of the myths and metrics. His notes from the CLO Symposium include this:
Jayne Johnson, director of Leader Development for GE at Crotonville, delivered the final keynote presentation. Someone asked how she measured the on-going effectiveness of Crotonville; she doesn’t. As for cost-justification in advance, no, GE believes in “launch and learn.” Experiment a lot, and keep what works.
The notion of launch and learn reminds me of the cynefin approach to complex environments:
The cynefin framework looks at five domains (the 5th is Disorder) and it shows how our reliance on backward-looking tools, such as best practices, is not a suitable strategy for complex environments:
Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.
Probe-Sense-Respond (P-S-R) is similar to GE’s Launch-Learn approach. When no one can understand the vagaries of your situation in a changing, complex environment then the only thing to do is try out new things based on your best judgement then watch, learn and keep trying new things out. Effective organisational practices will emerge by doing things.
This is the big challenge for Web 2.0 for learning professionals as well. There are no best practices or even good practices. There are things that work for some people, some of the time. As learning professionals, our job is to understand our organisation or client’s situation and look outside to see what others are doing. We have to try things out and see how they work. If we wait for the best practices, we will be too late. This is life in continual Beta (change) and the natural world provides some good examples.
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