Informal Learning

Informal learning

LMS is no longer the centre of the universe

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OK, so here’s the deal – if learning is work and work is learning, why is organizational learning controlled by a learning management systems (LMS) that isn’t connected to the work being done in the enterprise? Learning is no longer what you do before you go to work, never having to learn anything else in order to do your job. In the 21st century networked economy, learning and working are becoming one.

As Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers, we need to keep learning in order to get our jobs done – “What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

In a networked economy, social learning is how we get things done. Training, based on solid documentation of processes and procedures, works well at lower levels of complexity and we can develop best practices. As complexity increases, we need more tacit knowledge, which cannot be documented. Conversation is a prime medium for the sharing of tacit knowledge and is the foundation for collaborative work. We need to communicate in order to collaborate. This is why organizations need to manage what matters – collaboration.

The LMS framework is being challenged for its supremacy over organizational learning much as heliocentricity showed European civilization that we were not the centre of the galaxy. Jane Hart says that, “what is needed is an organisational system that SUPPORTS and ENABLES this informal approach to learning.” That system is one where the LMS is nothing more than a node in the network, which means that the LMS has to play nice with others (which most do not). The centre of the universe has shifted for training & development professionals and they can ignore this shift, as the Catholic church did, or they can become part of the Learning Reformation.

Instructional or Formal; whatever

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I used this chart, developed a few years ago, to explain in a simplified way the differences between Learning Interventions and Instructional Interventions.

It shows that training & education (in the workplace) should concentrate on addressing a clear lack of knowledge and skills by using appropriate instructional interventions, well-established over the years.

Non-instructional learning interventions are those that provide tools and resources in order to do something we don’t know (or have forgotten) how to do. This is typically the area of performance support but also communities of practice, personal knowledge management, personal learning environments, etc. Informal learning would be another name for non-instructional. Instructional Systems Development (ISD) does not address non-instructional (informal) learning requirements and even the literature on performance support lacks clear design guidelines. Informal learning (or whatever you want to call it) is a major opportunity for improving work performance.

Informal learning needs will continue to grow as more work requires access to contextual knowledge, as Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers:

“What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

We cannot train individuals for that 90% but we can support access to knowledge and expertise across the enterprise. This is an opportunity.  There is much experience available in the fields of knowledge management, organizational design, human-computer interaction and information design that is valid and can be put to good use.

However, practitioners don’t always talk to each other or use the same frameworks and terminology. This is where I see Jay Cross’ concept of workscapes (PDF) going – a way to integrate these fields and use what we already know.

Working smarter is the key to sustainability and perpetual improvement. Knowledge work and learning to work smarter are becoming indistinguishable. The accelerating rate of change in business forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete.

The infrastructure for working smarter is called a workscape. It’s not a separate function so much as another way of looking at how we organize work. Workscaping helps people grow so that their organizations may prosper. Workscapes are pervasive. They are certainly not lodged in a training department. In fact, they make the training department obsolete.

Working smarter also means working together but first we have to get out of our disciplinary silos.

Formalized informal learning: a blend we don’t need

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Telling people that we can “formalize informal learning” is a not so subtle way of saying, “it’s OK, you don’t have to make any fundamental changes to the way you’ve been been doing training & development for the past half century”.

I asked the question in February’s eCollab Blog Carnival, with tongue very close to my cheek, because I knew it would stimulate discussion on the role of informal learning in workplace performance. I never thought anyone would seriously adopt it, but on viewing Jay Cross’s slides yesterday, it seems many have.

Here is an excerpt from an interview I did with Jay on the subject:

When asked if we should try to formalize informal learning, Jay responded by saying that it’s the wrong question. It would be like asking if we should “informalize” formal training. A key understanding that Jay wants to get across to everyone in the workplace learning arena is that it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather how much informal and how much formal learning should we support and who is determining what’s to be done. All learning is a bit of both. His promotion of informal learning is not to replace formal training but to open up the possibilities of supporting the other 80% of learning that has been ignored for far too long.

Two core themes in supporting informal learning are control and trust. Managers and supervisors need to give up some control and organizations must learn to trust their people, says Jay. Embracing, encouraging and supporting informal learning is part of a greater workplace cultural change.

Aye, there’s the rub – our organizations actually need to change.

We need to change from this:

To this:

This kind of change is not just adding another “blend” to the training bar-mix. It is a fundamental change required to move from a command & control pyramid to a network. It means a very different training department, if it’s even called that any more, as well as a new framework for informal, social learning in the enterprise. The required role for supporting workers is connecting, communicating & collaborating.

Jim McGee summed up the difference in yesterday’s conversation on a world without KM, the “best argument for Social Networks over Knowledge Management is shift in perspective from static content to dynamic interaction“.

It’s the same for training. Informal learning is dynamic and social (on the fly, just-in-time, self-directed, group-directed, serendipitous) while formal training is static (designed, directed, evaluated). What about a world without ISD (instructional systems design)? The best argument favouring informal learning over formal training is a shift in perspective from static content to dynamic interaction. It also means a loss of control for training departments everywhere. Tough.

Don’t try to formalize informal learning. Just help people do their jobs.

Here’s some final advice from @mneff during yesterday’s KM conversation: “Focus on connection & collaboration. The management of assets is mostly obsolete by the time it is stored.”

Emergent Social Media

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Four major types of social media (SM), according to Patti Anklam are:

  • Media SM – news, commentary & opinions
  • Customer SM – listening to customers, responding to market needs
  • Enterprise SM – provide the conditions for enabling knowledge & action to emerge
  • Personal SM – learning, creating, co-creating, sharing, weaving

Patti also asks, what’s the fifth SM? — “the networked, community, purposeful use of social media to bind networks, causes, and events.” Ideas include: Cause; Crowd & Community SM. My suggestion would be Emergent SM, because it is not separate but a result of activities in the other four.

Learning is described as an essential part of Personal SM but really it is part of all four. In networks, learning cannot be pulled out as a separate activity. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing/area/silo. As I have said before, when you learn with and from your customers, learning and marketing are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning.

Here’s my perspective:

Personal SM facilitates cooperation in networks. It is self-directed.

Enterprise SM enables collaboration inside the organization and focuses on shared objectives.

Media & Customer SM are specialized areas for certain organizational objectives and are market focused.

Emergent SM develops as continuous learning, co-creating & sharing become the norm, at the individual, organizational and market level. As Esko Kilpi states:

Complex organizations are neither products of random experimentation, nor can they be perfectly designed beforehand  and managed efficiently top down. The Internet could not have been designed top down, nor can any living organism be planned from outside.

What is going on in these cases is called emergence. Interaction itself has the capacity to create emergent structure, coherence, consistency and change.

Emergent SM is the combination of self-directed learners and learning organizations who connect as a network that learns: Networking = Learning

Sense-making glossary

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PARC offers a glossary of quite useful sense-making terms. Sense-making is what the second part of the Seek-Sense-Share PKM model is about.

Sense-making – The process by which individuals (or organizations) create an understanding so that they can act in a principled and informed manner …

Source-linked sensemaking – In conventional media, a document about a topic may cite a list of references. In source-linked sense-making, the report is an active document with active links for retrieving the sources used …

Examples of sensemaking operations are abstracting, annotating, assumption linking, classifying, clustering, comparing elements or schemas, concept splitting, making a cross product, detailing, document mining, emitting, extracting, format stripping, foraging,  fusing,  goal shifting, instantiating schemas, linking, matching,  negotiating meaning, perceiving order, re-encoding, refining, retrieving, segmenting, shifting representations, source linking, summarizing, stemming, structuring, transforming, and zoning.

Resumable sensemaking is the sensemaking analog of life-long learning, that is, it embodies the idea that (at least potentially) the process of making sense is never done.

Many of the definitions are framed around report writing but these can easily be expanded into the broader areas of personal knowledge management or personal learning environments.

Agility and Autonomy

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for social learning to be successfully implemented in an organisation it is not just about adding in the new tools or platforms but also about acquiring a new mindset and new skillset for both learning professionals and individuals.

Jane Hart  shows in this Table; Social Learning = New Toolset + New Mindset + New Skillset

New Mindset: Agility

A key part of the New Mindset is agility. This is one of the limitations of instructional design as it too often practiced. For instance, at one time, software engineers assumed they could design a program and then build it based on the initial  specifications. Today, that is not often the case and much software development has adopted more agile methods. Assuming you know everything at the start of a complex development project is rather arrogant. This article on the future of software development had me asking if instructional design is also arrogant:

The problem was that the Waterfall Model was arrogant. The arrogance came from the fact that we believed that we could always engineer the perfect system on the first try. The second problem with it was that in nature, dynamic systems are not engineered, they evolve. It is the evolutionary idea that led to the development of agile methods.

Instead of factory-style production teams, agile programming uses far fewer, but better, programmers. The principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing often and testing often are all applicable to developing good instructional programs.

A culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Agile organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

New Skillset: Autonomy

I have observed over the years that a significant portion of the workforce has not been able to develop the skills to learn for themselves. What many lack are tools, methods and practices to learn and to take action. Autonomous learners face many barriers on the job, particularly the pervasive attitude that you must look busy or you’re not working.

We are trained early in life to look to authority for direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer or an expert with the right answer begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

The message from many workplaces continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do.

However, when we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we need to engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. The way to begin is to become autonomous.

Developing practical methods, like PKM, is a start on the path to autonomy. A major premise of PKM is that it is Personal and there are many ways to practice it.  We need to think about and talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change.  An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Many of our human resource practices should be questioned and dropped.

Social Learning

Social learning is how things get done in networks. For example, Sue Schnorr recently asked if Networking = Learning?. It seems that way to me. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning within and without the enterprise and social learning is the lubricant for an agile organization. Agility is a necessity because we are dealing with increasing complexity.

Esko Kilpi puts it very succinctly. Let me paraphrase his words:

In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity you need to first cultivate diversity [autonomy of each learner] .

You also need rich and deep connections, but these are not enough if you don’t also have meaningful conversations [social learning].

Learning is the work …

All models are flawed but some are useful

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Silvia Andreoli has added to my last post on PKM and created this graphic to show the individual as well as the social aspects of personal knowledge management. I like its simplicity and the way it shows the flows. My only minor issue is that I would replace “knowledge” with “personalized information”. Knowledge is an emergent property of the entire system, in my opinion.

Silvia’s graphic has some similarities with one of my earlier representations, which included four internal processes and three external ones:

I found over time that even this representation was too complicated to get the idea across quickly and people did not remember it, so I developed the more simplistic Seek-Sense-Share graphic. For people steeped in knowledge management or learning models, a more complicated representation is likely better, but as an introduction, I will keep to the simpler representations. Silvia’s graphic makes an excellent addition to these models.

I seek, I sense, we share

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I’m working on a few presentations and have been updating some graphics, one of which I used in my last post. Anne Marie McEwan told me she really liked the image and instead of waiting until I give the presentations next month, I’ve put up a segment of the slides on Slideshare [no longer available] with all the related graphics on PKM from the perspective of seeking, sensing and sharing. (CC-Attribution-Non-Commercial). Please let me know if you find them useful and feel free to suggest changes. It’s life in perpetual Beta around here.

Critical thinking in the organization

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Even the mainstream training field is realizing that reduced layers of bureaucracy mean decision-making gets pushed down the organization chart. This is the message of the AMA in the promotional video – Critical Thinking: Not just a C-suite skill.  However, wirearchy takes this one important step further by advocating a two-way flow of power and authority. In both cases, the need for critical thinking is evident. Here is Edward Glaser’s definition:

“Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives, to reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience, and to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life.”

A personal knowledge mastery process can help to develop critical thinking skills, where sense-making includes observing, studying, challenging (especially one’s assumptions), and evaluating. Developing these skills takes practice, appropriate feedback and an environment that supports critical thinking.

seek sesne share critical thinking

Several web tools can be used to develop critical thinking skills; the foundation of PKM:

critical thinking tools

Flattening the organization is one way to open communications and delegate responsibility but asking employees to engage in real critical thinking, and accepting the resulting actions, will not work unless there is a two-way flow of power and authority. Critical thinking is not just thinking more deeply but also asking difficult and discomfiting questions. Without power and authority, these become meaningless.

So yes, critical thinking is not just for the C-suite, but unleashing it requires a new framework for getting work done. Wirearchy as the organizational framework, coupled with active personal knowledge management processes, is a step in that direction.

Elgg: it’s a community effort

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This weekend I noticed a tweet from Alec Couros about some issues with the Ning social networking platform. That post is over a year old but from the comments as late as last fall, there seem to be ongoing issues on how Ning treats its customers, users and their data.

This brought me to reflect, once again, how important an open source framework is as we move more of our computing to the cloud. While Ning may be free, it is not open source, and the company can make changes at will, just like Facebook, Google or Twitter may do.

I advise my clients that they should consider how important their data is to them before using software as a service (SaaS). Can the data be easily exported? With social bookmarks, it is easy to export and import OPML files from one platform to another. It is also simple to export from WordPress.com SaaS to your own open source hosted version, which is why I strongly advise clients to use WordPress for blogging. With Ning, Facebook and many others, there is no such export function.

So what is the alternative to Ning? This social networking platform is simple to set-up and use and has been embraced by millions, including LearnTrends (+3,000) and WorkLiteracy (+900), two sites I manage. For large enterprise projects I have used Drupal as a community management platform and it works well, though it requires solid technical support.

Another platform that I have used since its early days is Elgg, an open source social networking platform that attracted me because of its unique underlying model. We started using Elgg for an online medical community of practice in 2004 after going through dozens of platforms. The key differentiator of Elgg is that the individual is the centre of all the action. A course is just a node that an individual connects to. You don’t “enter” a course, you just connect to it, as you would to a colleague or friend. This is real user control. We liked Elgg so much that we paid to develop a calendar function and then gave the code to the community.

In 2005 I described Elgg as a Content/Community/Collaboration Management System that allows you to develop, invent and construct knowledge. That sure beats any LMS, in my opinion. Elgg is used for commercial applications like Emerald Publishing as well as the foundation for the Eduspaces community.

The Elgg platform has matured in the past six years and has a strong community and a solid product (v. 1.7). My colleague Jane Hart provides Elgg services for education & business. Soon, Elgg.com will launch with services for those who want a hosted community platform. One major advantage of Elgg will be the ability to take your data and have it hosted elsewhere. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a wise business decision. The Elgg community blog has more information.

Supporting communities like Elgg and Drupal means that we can have more control over our use of web technologies. As business and education move to the web and the cloud, open-source platforms will help to ensure that some corporate board doesn’t decide our future for us.