Informal Learning

Informal learning

Push the Reset Button

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Charles Jennings made a comment on Corporate Learning Trends that got me thinking about the need for a reset of the whole training function:

Baldwin, Ford and Weissbein’s research (20 and 10 years ago, respectively) showed that the USA spends around $100 billion on training every year, but only about 10% of the expenditures result in transfer to the job. I’m sure if the research was re-run today the results would be similar, whether in the US, in Western Europe or anywhere else, for that matter.

In other words, if CLOs were in any other ‘C-Level’ jobs they wouldn’t last long. One look by the CEO/President at their P&L statement and they’d be shown the door…

The current economic situation is being called by some The Great Reset, or a time to re-evaluate our financial and economic systems. This is also an opportunity to reset our notions of learning and working. Face it, training and anything else that comes under the industrial umbrella of Human Resources are always secondary to operations. It doesn’t have to be that way, but sticking to “tried & true” methods is not going to get any breakthroughs in how we integrate learning and working, an essential part of thriving in a networked economy, in my opinion. Organizational learning and human performance need a great reset as well.

Here’s what I see for the great learning reset:

  • Think and act macro (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each knowledge worker.
  • Become a part of the business not a peripheral department – if you’re in Ford’s HR department, your business is cars & trucks, not human resources.
  • Throw away all notions of “delivery” and focus only on solving organizational challenges – training is a solution looking for a problem – just solve the problem.

Learning has to become part of the organizational and individual DNA and during a reset that may require learning specialists, but in the long run the learning function should be absorbed. That leads to the future role of the “learning specialist”. I would say it is to continuously make yourself redundant. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If you’re maintaining a steady state, such as developing courses as requested, then you’ve failed in integrating learning into the work.

Creative time

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Being self-employed, I never complain about being too busy. Of course, there are periods when I’m not busy and these give me time to write on this blog or on togetherLearn or pick up an interesting book. I have even taken up reviewing books for some publishers because I can usually find the time to do so and it’s cheap professional development for me. My friend and colleague, Michele Martin talks about the breathing room we independents have for thinking or “creativity” that many salaried workers just don’t have the time for:

But  it’s easy to focus on doing cool things in new and different ways when you have some breathing room. When you don’t, I can see where it’s just annoying to hear people tell you that you should be open to new ideas. Hello–I’m just trying to get through the day here. I have no time for your “creativity.”

I believe that this “breathing room” makes me a much better consultant to my clients. I have the time to read or research a topic in depth. I can spend time trying out a new tool or platform. This “luxury” is my business advantage. No one pays for this learning time, only my productive time, but in many cases I’ve spent a fair bit of time on a generic problem before I’m contacted by a client. At the risk of putting consultants out of business, I would even suggest that employees be given more time to think and even play so that they can become internal consultants for workplace change. As Michele says:

Creativity shouldn’t–can’t–be a luxury, though. It can’t be something that we bring to a problem only when we have the space and time for it, because more often than not, we will be in situations where we lack both.

Future of organizational learning and development

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On 21 April 2009 Corporate Learning Trends will be organizing sessions, speakers and workshops online; all for free. The main topic is the future of organizational learning and development. Follow the link to make any suggestions on topics of interest, format, times and delivery modes.

The previous sessions were well-attended and the whole togetherLearn gang is helping out with this one.

Visit Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation 2008

Come join in the conversations and learning.

Twitter: more than what I’m having for breakfast

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Twitter is a great source of information. Here are some “tweets” that caught my attention and I’ve added as “favorites”. An eclectic mix of tools, tips, information and ideas:

sleslie how did I never know about the <acronym> tag? http://snurl.com/adf6y

shantarohse When you want the whole discussion not just a monologue. TwitterScope by @designmeme shows posts with @ replies. Clever. http://bit.ly/rYEQ

skap5 RT @aptuscollab: @skap5 Future work unit is federated teams. Recession has broken valence bonds of old corporate molecule.

soluzioni #davos “… education is the engine nexus … technology is the flywheel …” – Linda Lorimer

valdiskrebs In this century, global power will increasingly be defined by connections — who is connected to whom & for what purposes. http://is.gd/iNyF

MichelleBlanc Retweeting @Cleo_Qc: @MichelleBlanc http://www.back-to-iraq.com/ Un journaliste supporté financièrement directement par ses lecteurs.

Dave_Ferguson RT @levyj413: “From 30,000 Feet to 3 Feet: Running a Federal Blog” http://twurl.nl/550nep <slideshare>

kate__k Great patching-together of twitter, delicious and RSS: become a ‘twitterteacher’, too! – http://tinyurl.com/bjtcdo – thanks @thecleversheep

thecleversheep PDF to Word is now available to everyone! http://www.pdftoword.com/

robpatrob Fast Forward guide to Twitter – all you need to know to convince a friend/boss/colleague is up now http://tinyurl.com/ayzub2

Social media without the BPR

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Last night at ThirdTuesdayNB the conversation came around to how to implement social media in large, bureaucratic organizations without creating a white elephant type of project that takes years to implement. Michele Martin just posted some social media baby steps that have worked for her, particularly:

Static website => blog

Wikis for committee work to replace/reduce e-mail

Other small steps that I think can work without major business process re-engineering (BPR):

  • Use e-mail only for contractual/legal/official communications that need to be tracked, and add an internal Jaiku or Yammer instance of Twitter for business conversations inside the firewall.
  • Use social bookmarks and tags (Delicious or open source variants) to highlight external information, once again to replace e-mail and to open everyone’s browser “favorites” to the rest of the organization.
  • Replace multi-recipient e-mails with internal blog posts and send the link via e-mail or IM. All comments get added to the blog post and if the position holder leaves, the replacement takes over the blog. Great for non-sensitive discussions like training schedules.

Sense-making with PKM

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Latest version: PKMastery

PKM

We may learn on our own but usually not by ourselves. People learn socially. In looking at how we can make sense of the growing and changing knowledge in our respective professional fields, I see two parallel processes that support each other. One is internally focused, as in “How do I learn this?” and the other is external, as in “Who can help me learn this?”.

We constantly go through a process of looking at bits of information and trying to make sense of them by adding to our existing knowledge or testing out new patterns in our sense-making efforts. The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them and PKM (personal knowledge management) can be your customized surfboard.

Here is an internal process based on repeating four activities:

Sort Categorize Make Explicit
 Retrieve
Observations & Readings Tag, List, File, Classify Write Look-up as/when needed

These can be combined with three external activities:

  1. Connect – with others via various platforms and extend my reach
  2. Exchange – ideas and observations
  3. Contribute – to conversations

Together, these processes look like this:

These internal and external activities are a way of moving from implicit to explicit knowledge by observing, reflecting and then putting tentative thoughts out to our networks.

Looking Inward

One of the important aspects of PKM is triage, or sorting. It’s the ability to separate the important from the useless. Unfortunately, what you may view as useless today could be quite important tomorrow. Developing good triage techniques takes time and practice.

Categorizing: Once we’ve found something of interest or value, we will need to categorize it. The big change with the Web is that we no longer have to put one object in one file folder, as we did with a physical object or even on your computer desktop. Today, everything is miscellaneous. Tags are labels that can be attached to digital knowledge objects and an objects can have many labels. That means that we can have as many categories as we want.

Making Explicit: There are many ways of making knowledge explicit. We can talk about it, write about, engage in debate, create a video or even develop a hypothesis. The act of making it explicit provides the discipline necessary to examine our thought processes.

Going Public: Even more powerful than making our knowledge explicit is to make it public. This can start some interesting conversations about things that matter to us. Going public makes our professional knowledge much more personal. It also encourages peer discussions and reinforces the outward looking aspect of personal knowledge management. Web tools to help us go public include micro-blogging; blogs and podcasts.

Retrieval: The importance of retrieval becomes more obvious with the passing of time. As years of sorting, categorizing and making explicit develop into a large amount of information we can begin to see its value. These are our thoughts and ideas but they are connected to the ideas that sparked them and have been reinforced or questioned by our peers. The great benefit of using digital tools and Web platforms is that we can retrieve our knowledge artifacts (or information that has special meaning to us) anytime and anywhere. That’s quite a powerful professional asset.

Looking Outward

“No man is an island entire of himself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …” – John Donne

Connecting: We need to be reading, watching and listening to find out what is happening in our professional fields. There are flows of conversation around us all the time. For those of us with access to the digital surround we have no excuses not to connect. Finding conflicting viewpoints on a subject is as easy as going to Wikipedia and reading the comments on any controversial subject. The variety and depth of our connections are indicators of how seriously we take our sense-making efforts. Who we know helps to improve what we know.

Exchanging: We exchange and note ideas and information all of the time. In the age of print we lent out or gave away books, magazines and newspapers. We exchanged opinions, sometime without knowing it. An empty restaurant on a Saturday night may have indicated that the locals did not think it was any good.

Conversations help us make meaning. The quality of our conversations is affected by the quality of the company we keep. If we seek out interesting people with different ideas we may learn more and broaden our horizons.

A stock exchange is designed to help capital flow and we need to use knowledge exchanges to allow ideas to flow. For centuries, knowledge exchanges were limited to elites but we now have access to world’s largest and most open exchange ever created.

Contributing. Clay Shirky has brought up the concept of a cognitive surplus that is a result of the leisure time that we gained about fifty years ago. As a society we were in a state of shock and did not have the tools to deal with all of this time, so television filled the void. Shirky says that television collectively takes up about 200 billion hours in the US per year. Wikipedia only needed 10 million hours to get to where it is today as the leading online encyclopedia. We are poised to be able to contribute to more Wikipedia-style efforts but many of use just don’t know how. Our institutions have not prepared us to be ongoing contributors to human knowledge, as we have been led to believe that this is the domain of “experts”.

In a connected world it is getting much easier to contribute, whether it be with words, pictures, music, or actions. Not only that, it may be our social responsibility to be contributors to our common knowledge.

How else will we be recognized as professionals in our fields unless we actively contribute to them?

TOOLS EXAMPLES
OS = open source		 INWARD
SUPPORT		 OUTWARD
SUPPORT
Aggregator Bloglines

Google Reader

 Sorting

Categorizing

 Connecting
Social
Bookmarks		 Delicious

Diigo

 Sorting

Categorizing

Making Explicit

 Connecting

Exchanging
Micro-blogging Twitter

Jaiku (OS)

Yammer

 Sorting

Making Explicit

 Connecting

Exchanging
Blogging Blogger

Typepad

WordPress (OS)

 Making Explicit Contributing
Photo-sharing Flickr

Photo Bucket

 Sorting

Categorizing

Making Explicit

 Exchanging

Contributing
Social
Networking		 Facebook

LinkedIn

Elgg (OS)

 Making Explicit Exchanging

Contributing

—

What I have found out over several years of using PKM methods and tools is that I have been creating a powerful resource. My annotated bookmarks and my blog are the first places I search when I have an article or report to write. My PKM process has given me a digital library brimming with my own sticky notes that I can easily find.

I also offer workshops on how to develop PKM processes that work in various organizational contexts.

Informal learning works for new hires

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Todd Hudson discusses how the New Seasons Market chain uses a very informal approach not just for senior employees (where it seems to be a more natural fit) but for new hires as well. Criticism is often leveled against informal learning methods in that they don’t work for basic skills training. The New Seasons Market, with nine outlets, shows otherwise:

At New Seasons, you won’t see new hires crammed into three days of New Employee Training that’s so common today. After their Day One Orientation, New Seasons newbies are pretty much set free in their departments. “New Seasons’ training is like a Waldorf School experience. There’s no codified way for people to learn most jobs. People are told to look around, figure it out and ask for help when they need it,” said Charla [HR Director].

The company starts its hiring based on attitude, “We look for candidates more interested in genuine human interactions than in an ‘items per hour’ ratio”. I recommended in soft skills are foundational competencies that hiring for attitude makes more sense because you can always train for skills later.

This is a succinct real-world case for informal learning (book) in the workplace, what Todd Hudson calls Lean Knowledge Transfer (PDF), and reminds me of Guy Wallace’s more comprehensive Lean ISD (book) [also available as a free 404-page PDF at http://www.eppic.biz ].

CSTD Presentation References

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Here are the links for my presentation today on The Future of the Training Department for the Canadian Society for Training & Development:

Main Article co-authored with Jay Cross

Slideshare presentation

Wirearchy framework

Cluetrain Manifesto

Cynefin framework

Delicious bookmarks on Personal Knowledge Management

Creative Commons search engine for shareable images

Wikimedia Commons for shareable and copyright-free images

GapingVoid cartoons

In response to questions from participants:

Twitter in plain English

ROI of Social media

Why the Government of Canada needs PKM

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David Eaves writes in Why the Government of Canada needs Bloggers:

“One theme that came up was that public servants feel they are suffering from information overload. There is simply so much going on around them and it is impossible to keep up with it all. This is especially true of those in the senior ranks.”

I saw this when I was working on the Advanced Leadership Program with the Canada School of Public Service last year. I can’t discuss any specifics of what I observed, but there is no doubt that senior public servants are inundated with information and that their time is not their own, with many days filled with meetings and other time-consuming activities.

However, blogging is not enough because managing information overload is more a question of attitude than skills. We need to understand that we’ve been in a state of information overload since the 15th Century when there were more books than one person could read in a lifetime (watch Clay Shirky’s interview on FastForward). Blogs, or their equivalent, are only one part of the knowledge management equation.

I think that public servants really need PKM (personal knowledge mastery). PKM is a way to help make sense of the information flows that face us and I’ve written about PKM many times. It is basically a process of:

  1. Sorting & Filtering (e.g. Feed Readers & following on Twitter )
  2. Annotating and Filing (e.g. social bookmarks)
  3. Tentative Sense-making (e.g. Blog posts & Twitter Posts)
  4. Engagement and conversations in these venues and others

The bottom line of web-based PKM is to develop a process of sense-making. It’s much like the discipline of maintaining a professional journal, attending lectures or reading good books and does not negate any of these activities.

So I would say that public servants, especially in senior positions, need more than blogs and that they need their own, individual PKM process, incorporating various web social media tools. If the Indonesian Minister of Defence has been able to maintain a blog for the past fours years, our public servants can do that and maybe a bit more, n’est-ce pas?

Soft skills are foundational competencies

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Aaron Chua at Wild Illusions sees financial measurements as no longer able to tell the complete story. He mentions various other areas for measurement, including “talent development” but in a different context from the tired “talent management” perspective we’ve heard for several years:

This means a total redefinition of what talent development means in organisations. The first implication is of course to throw out the idea of having a talent development unit. Instead, we need to think about ways to rebuilt how talent is truly developed via connections to the resources at the edge, connections to different organisational competencies that plugs their gaps, connections that increases cognitive diversity and brings about unexpected learnings et al. All these are rich areas for a new breed of talent development companies to think about and to create new products/services upon.

If you buy into Richard Florida’s concept of the Creative Class (which I mostly do) then it becomes obvious that for organizations to succeed they will have to nurture creativity in their workforce. Creative people are at all levels, including the janitor, and are not ‘human resources’ but individuals who have the capability of  gaining wisdom. From the Creative Class Blog is an article on The Workplace in a Wiki World, with this idea about the changing emphasis for workers:

Therefore, for an individual to succeed in a wiki-corporation or wiki-organization it will increasingly require being more than an engineer, programmer, economist, or accountant. It will also require the “soft skills” to do media relations or “wiki” relations, interacting daily with a range of customers and outside contributors, as well as collaborating with others in the company.

Here’s my speculation on workplace learning in ten years.

Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. The soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and other environmental supports. Once you have the soft skills to perform in a networked workplace, you’ll have foundational competencies.

I think many people will say of course we’ve known this all along, but in a workplace where our networks are as important as our skills, it will be more difficult to hide the fact that you’re a highly skilled jerk.