Informal Learning – Harold Jarche

ITA Jay Cross Award 2023

2023-07-05 by Harold Jarche

The Internet Time Alliance Award — in memory of Jay Cross — is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Informal Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work.

Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organization and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.

We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday

Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance — Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and myself — resolved to continue Jay’s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.

ITA Jay Cross Award 2022

2022-07-05 by Harold Jarche

We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday.

the power of story

2022-09-282022-04-22 by Harold Jarche

Stories are powerful ways of sharing knowledge

In 2006 while the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was fighting in Afghanistan, Professor Anne Irwin observed how soldiers decompressed and learned through storytelling.

When they are out in the field and return from a patrol, the exhausted soldiers relax together in small, tightly-knit groups – Irwin calls them “nesting circles” – and recount the events of the day or the mission.

Each soldier contributes a story, an anecdote or even a joke, adding stock and spice into what becomes a collective stew of experiences, she said. They also playfully insult each other.

The storytelling not only helps forge the individual identity of each soldier, it builds interpersonal relationships that can have a bearing on how well the unit performs on the battlefield.

“Joking is a big part of it, and teasing,” she said. “It is not abuse. If you have been teased harshly it lets you know that you are part of the group.”

—John Cotter, Canadian Press, July 03, 2006

Even though these soldiers had all been formally trained and had worked and fought together, there was still a need to make sense of their continuing experiences. Informal and social learning can be the glue that helps keep them together during tough times.

from training to learning to performance

2022-03-152022-03-15 by Harold Jarche

I have been reading in several places recently that a new concept of learning in the flow of work, or workflow learning, is the latest advance in the learning & development field. It’s not that new though.

2004 — What is workflow learning?
2010 — Co-design of workflow
2012 — Work is learning, and learning is the work

So I dusted off my copy of Electronic Performance Support Systems (1991) by Gloria Gery, which begins with an identification of problems with the training industry.

Training (and learning) was moved out of the actual job context.
The experts were removed from the novices.
Post-training support was reduced to manuals, an occasional job aid, and intermittent supervisory commentary.

Does this sound familiar in any workplace today?

ITA Jay Cross Award 2021

2021-07-052021-07-05 by Harold Jarche

The Internet Time Alliance Award, in memory of Jay Cross, is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Informal Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work.

We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday.

moving beyond training

2021-01-12 by Harold Jarche

Working smarter means that everyone in an organization learns from experience and shares with their colleagues as part of their work. Training is not enough — see the missing half of training. We cannot know in advance and prepare formal instruction for everything that people need to learn on the job today.

The 70:20:10 framework shows that learning at work is based, generally, on these ratios:

70% from Experience
20%: from Exposure
10% from formal Education

ITA Jay Cross Award 2020

2020-09-032020-07-05 by Harold Jarche

We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday.

business schools are a technology of the last century

2021-02-252018-04-30 by Harold Jarche

Our dominant models of how we organize and work as a society are fundamentally changing as we transition from an Information-Market economy to a Creative-Network economy. Charles Green succinctly explained the order in which this transition happens:

“Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest—that’s when things really get set in concrete.”

I broke this down in detail in a post on the new business ideology. This was further explained in Adapting to Perpetual Beta, my volume on leadership in the network era.

connecting work, learning, and life

2017-12-17 by Harold Jarche

The 70:20:10 reference model states that, in general, what we learn at work comes 70% from experience, 20% from exposure to new work, and 10% from formal education. At the 70:20:10 Institute [disclosure: I am a service partner], the basic approach is to start with the 70 (experience) because this is where learning and working are most connected. When we learn as we work, at the moment of need, then we learn in context and we remember what we have learnt.

“70:20:10 uses the performance paradigm to achieve working = learning in the context of the workplace and thus to contribute to the desired organisational results. In our practice we have seen many applications of the learning paradigm in 70:20:10, which is not the intention. The paradigm starts from the idea that skills need to be developed so it begins with the 10 and uses these to flesh out the 20 and 70.

This is a back-to-front approach. In 70:20:10, it’s not learning or the 10 that are central, but rather the principle of working = learning. Here again it is about achieving the desired performance improvement in the context of the individuals or teams who want to work better together.

70:20:10 is about performance enhancement: the performance paradigm starts with the desired organisational results and uses performance consulting to establish what interventions are needed in the 70, 20 and 10 to improve individual and organisational performance. This should not be confused with the learning paradigm approach in which learning is added to working. In the performance paradigms, working = learning is achieved using such models as performance support, microlearning and social learning. This makes it possible to learn at the speed of performance.” — 70:20:10 Institute

the secret of freedom

2019-08-012016-12-26 by Harold Jarche

“Le secret de la liberté est d’éclairer les hommes, comme celui de la tyrannie et de les retenir dans l’ignorance.” —Maximilien Robespierre (1758 – 1794)
Translation: “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

Is there more ‘fake news’ today than in previous decades, especially before the web? I think there is probably more only because there are more sources of information. It used to be that you bought a newspaper to get some depth of reporting, complete with advertisements, or watched television to get ‘up-to-the-minute’ news. Of course it was all edited and curated. As time goes on we find out many of the truths we were told in the past were ‘well-massaged’ by the power elites. But if we are in a post-truth moment then we need to understand the tools we have at hand to deal with falsehoods.