Harold Jarche

Get thee to a theatre

by

Our son, an actor who plans on majoring in drama at university, sent me this article on How Do Actors memorize their Lines? Anyone interested in how our brains and bodies function together should read this article. Michael Boyd and Oliver Sacks discuss some very interesting case studies about memory:

[Oliver Sacks] “What strikes me is the thousands and thousands of lines on the one hand, and roles on the other. These lines would have no coherence, would make no sense, would not hold together without a role, and especially a role in relation to other roles. The ability to enter a role can again outlast the hippocampi. It can outlast all sorts of mental abilities.”

The type of mental/physical coordination and development that acting enables makes me think that performance arts should have a more prominent role in our education system. We are missing opportunities for integration of drama and the opportunity for students to get a better understanding of themselves. Why is theatre an elective while English writing is compulsory? Can’t you learn English through acting?

Another form of acting is improvisation, where each actor must listen to the others and play off their actions. What a great way to teach listening and empathy! Improv is also a life skill and a good business skill as Brand Autopsy writes in Learning through Improv. Here are some lessons from improv:

  • Failure is an Option
  • Practice Passionate Followership
  • Don’t Act, React
  • Go with your Gut
  • Don’t be a Blockhead
  • Trust Others
  • Make Others Look Good


I never did much acting in school, but I am really seeing the value of it as I watch our son juggling three plays plus his school work.

T&D Learning in 2020

by

ASTD interviewed several people in our field and asked what things will look like in 10 years. In Learning in 2020, trends in Tools, Technology, Workforce, Talent Management and Future Leaders are discussed. There’s lots here, some you may agree with and some you may not. Given what has happened to the economy in the last 6 months, many of these predictions may be a bit mild.

Here’s my 2 cents worth:

An educated and informed citizenry

by

Rob Paterson thinks that Canada and its government are moving beyond the nation-state and that coalitions may become the main model for future governments.

Meanwhile, the Internet, airwaves and coffee-shops across the nation are engaging in a sort of dialogue. Unfortunately it is not always an informed dialogue and this is a sad state of affairs. How can the electorate engage in the political process when too many do not understand it? In New Brunswick public education there are no classes on civics or government. Our sons learn about politics at the dinner table; thankfully. For instance, there is a lack of understanding about the duty of the Official Opposition, as they’re not just the party that came in second place:

The duty of the Official Opposition and other opposition parties is to “challenge” government policies and suggest improvements, and present an alternative to the current Government’s policy agenda.

There have also been many comments based on the “fact” that the current PM was elected as such. Our Prime Ministers are not elected, only Members of Parliament are elected, and the government’s right to govern is based on the confidence of those members:

The Prime Minister and the Cabinet are responsible to, or must answer for, their actions to the House of Commons as a body and must enjoy the support and the confidence of a majority of the Members of that Chamber to remain in office. This is commonly referred to as the confidence convention.

If the Government is defeated in the House on a key (“confidence”) question, then the Government is expected to resign or seek the dissolution of Parliament in order for a general election to be held. It is not always clear what constitutes a question of confidence. Motions which clearly state that the House has lost confidence in the Government, motions concerning the Government’s budgetary policy, and motions which the Government clearly identifies as questions of confidence, are usually recognized as such.

There is no doubt that a democracy depends on an educated and informed citizenry. We now have easy access to information, but we need to continue with the education.

Invert the Pyramid

by

In Advice for the Training Department I recommended that those in the training function should concentrate on Communicating & Connecting. Later I suggested that the training department should wake up and smell the coffee or be rendered obsolete. All of this is premised on the fact that our organisational structures need to change in order to deal with complexity and one framework we can start with is wirearchy.

However, the training department can at best manage incremental change unless the organisation itself changes. In It’s Time to Invert the Management Pyramid, Vineet Nayer says:

It is not a stationary relic I’m talking about. I’m talking about the brand new dinosaur on the block – the classical management pyramid. Time has come to dismantle it and adapt to a new evolutionary and unstructured model that leverages the team effect to ensure that companies can lead change rather play catch up or be left behind.

The training department and the CLO can help in this effort, but inverting the pyramid is the big work that needs to be done by the entire organisation.

I believe that structural change is coming sooner than many expect, with the WorldBlu list as an example of the hunger for change. The inability of our prominent command and control organisations to deal with growing complexity highlights our structural problems. The largest military force in the world cannot defeat a loosely knit group of terrorists; the US/Cdn automotive sector has been incapable of changing its business model and our elect & forget political representatives are increasingly hamstrung by an electorate that no longer provides majorities or landslides.

It is time to invert the pyramid and integrate learning into all that we do. Are you ready?

Federman – No educator left behind

by

I’ve been following Mark Federman’s work since he published McLuhan for Managers with Derick deKerckhove. Mark recently gave a presentation for TVO (video download) on No Educator Left Behind that ties together much of his work over the past few years. These include papers like Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can’t Teach (PDF) and the notion of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity (UCaPP). Other ideas sewn into this presentation include epochal changes; break-boundaries and the shift from the 3 R’s of education to the 4 C’s :

  1. Connections
  2. Contexts
  3. Complexity
  4. Connotation

The recent Facebook study group incident in Ontario is used as an example of Mark’s thesis. His presentation also questions the entire system of content-based validation and test scores as a remnant of the 17th Century that should be discarded. There is much in this presentation that should at least be considered by educators and those setting educational policies.

Proficiency-based training

by

According to Clark Quinn in this eLearn Article:

There is one role for pre-tests, and that is in the realm of allowing students to test out of a course. Learners should be allowed to skip the content they already know if they can demonstrate competency. This is to the great benefit of the learner. But when pre-testing is used to demonstrate mastery for this purpose, it should be an option, not a requirement. So please, don’t abuse your learners. Give pre-tests only to allow the learner to test-out of specific material. And don’t give in to de facto standards that dictate every course start with a pre-test. Use assessment properly, to demonstrate mastery.

I agree that pre-testing is not of much value unless it triggers some action. This reminds me of the proficiency-based training we used for training military helicopter pilots. Learning how to fly an aircraft is an expensive endeavour and each flight costs several thousand dollars. Minimizing training time, without compromising standards, was one of our objectives.

Flight training was divided into about 35 “air lesson plans” and each one was about 1.5 hours. At the end of certain lessons, students had to have achieved mastery of specific skills, such as hovering or completing a circuit. Additional time in the aircraft could be provided, with counseling, but after a certain number of hours students were expected to achieve the performance requirement. Conversely, if a student achieved the performance requirement in fewer lessons, he or she could skip one or more lessons and move on to the next stage. In this way, a student could complete the course days or weeks earlier than scheduled and at a lower cost for the training establishment. For pilots who were already spending a lot of time away from home, this was a positive incentive.

As Clark mentions in his article, if you can demonstrate mastery then training is not necessary. For learning professionals, it is important to design tests that can validate competency. This is an overlooked area of instructional design as too much effort is spent on delivering content, in my opinion. Another rule that we had in military training, though not always followed, was to design the proficiency test before developing any training. The proficiency test had to correlate with the job performance area that was being addressed. In this way, the direct link between training and job performance was obvious. Considering my last post, this could be a good thing for the training department.

Wake up and smell the coffee

by

An interesting post made by Rob Wilkins, is a confirmatory data point of what I’m seeing in the corporate learning sector:

This morning the CLC (Corporate Leadership Council) released the results of a survey that asked CEOs which areas were to suffer the most in response to the crisis. L&D [learning & development] came out on top at 38%. So this means, globally, that a third of organisations surveyed will stop investing in development of employees. Recruiting was second and IT infrastructure was third.

As I said in Opportunities in Difficult Times, there may be a silver lining, but not for everyone in our business. When your department is number one on the CEO chop list, you should be thinking about your reason for being. Training is seen by this group of CEO’s (and I would wager many others) as superfluous to the company’s bottom line. Obviously all of those initiatives like blended learning, competency-based training and learning style inventories haven’t convinced the boss that L&D is important. Neither have all the ROI calculations that get discussed during training conferences. The CEO and the CLO must be using different calculators.

The reason that these companies will stop investing in the development of employees is that they don’t see a direct correlation to their business. People go on a course and come back no better prepared for work. A successful course is where you learned perhaps 10% of what was covered. The rest of the stuff is interesting and might be useful – some day.

At the risk of repeating myself, the following message doesn’t get through to many training departments, and now they will pay the price.

Too many people in the training department make the leap from a performance issue (lack of skills, abilities, knowledge; lack of access to appropriate data and resources; etc) directly to training as the only solution. This is the wrong approach and the most costly. Even the CEO may play into this, with statements like “We have a training problem” and no one challenges that statement. There is no such thing as a training problem.

Here are some “training problems” that are not solved through training:

  • Unclear expectations (such as policies & guidelines)
  • Inadequate resources
  • Unclear performance measures
  • Rewards and consequences are not directly linked to the desired performance

These barriers can be addressed without training. Only when there is a genuine lack of skills and knowledge, is training required [repeat as necessary]. Training should only be delivered in cases where the other barriers to performance have been addressed. A trained worker, without the right resources and with unclear expectations, will still not perform up to the desired standard.

Training departments have allowed themselves to be lulled into a comfortable spot while times have been good. Everyone feels better after a little training, so that is what was prescribed – for all that ails you. I have met too few L&D professionals who can actually analyze work performance and come up with something other than training as the solution. Well, it seems that the days of the one trick pony are over.

I, for one, do not regret the demise of the L&D function. Perhaps our profession will wake up and start helping the organisations we serve.

For a follow-up on this post, read Tom Gram on What’s a self-respecting learning function to do in an economic crisis?

Social or Community?

by

Fred Cavazza raises an interesting point on the difference between social and community platforms. “Community” platforms allow members to fully engage in conversations, while “Social” platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, are more passive. In the comments, Fred says that blogs are definitely social, as they allow authors to block and filter comments.

Graphic by Fred Cavazza: Community (left) – Social (right)

Using social media is not the same as fostering a community, is what I infer from Fred’s comments. My experience is that communities are much harder to control, can have short lifespans (e.g. most Ning communities) but can be much more dynamic. For instance, there are some interesting conversations and new forums created on LearnTrends that would not have happened on any individual blog. One recommendation for successful online communities is that the founder needs to give up control to get one going and then must stay actively involved, but with a gentle hand, to keep it going. Just like a real community.

On the Edge

by

Yesterday we presented our session at Corporate Learning Trends and everything that could go wrong, did. Plan A failed so we switched to Plan B which didn’t work so we made up Plan C that limped along for the hour. Jane was stuck in traffic, the technology did not work the way it did the day before and the three of us were multi-tasking so much that we were not as focused as we should have been. So much for life in perpetual Beta. But that’s the whole point — we went out on the edge, practising what we advocate, and failed in so doing. We learned a lot.

www.gapingvoid.com

Sometimes it’s cool to live on the edges but for the most part it’s hard work. Things keep breaking. The business model isn’t proven. The procedures aren’t fixed. The models and metaphors are not understood by everyone. Our new business venture, TogetherLearn, is an edge model, and it will have its challenges, as does my own work based in rural Canada.

When we ran our informl unlearning workshops a couple of years ago we had constant failures with our technology. Some participants did not appreciate this. We could have gone with a bomb-proof solution yesterday but decided to push the technology, and ourselves, to the limit. You only find out if it really works when you do that. Yesterday’s experience reinforced that to be a good teacher you need to be a good learner, so it’s back to the drawing board for me.

Learning Together

by

Today, at 8:00 PM GMT we’ll be introducing our new venture, TogetherLearn. Details are on the LearnTrends collaborative site.

This venture is a natural progression of my work over the past decade, after retiring as a military training development officer in 1998, with a freshly minted MEd in hand. At that time, I was reading Jay’s blog and making comments. Jay and I finally met in Moncton about the same time that I ventured out on my own as free agent (and started my own blog) and since then we’ve collaborated on several projects. Much of our work has been around informal learning and performance improvement in the workplace. Through Jay I met Clark and Jane. My work with Drupal, as an early adopter, introduced me to Bill who is now providing our platform of choice for TogetherLearn. The Drupal community is large and dynamic and as an open source advocate, I could not be happier than to support its development.

I see myself as a bridge between theory and practice, or between early adopters and the early majority,  as this picture shows. For me, technology is the application of organised and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. Some of the methods I’ve developed are in my performance  Toolbox, so that I can share and also learn from others.

Our group is much like what I picture wirearchy to be, which is the clearest view of what I would like all workplaces to become:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology