Informal Learning

I have been described as “a keen subversive of the last century’s management and education models”, a description I like. It’s a difficult business model though. That’s why I joined with my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance in 2009. I finally had a close professional group to discuss nascent ideas. Our latest work is on the coherent organization.

We work together on projects, public speaking, workshops, and writing. I am starting to think that our customers and our clients are diverging. The people who could really use our help are managers and individual knowledge workers. For example, we have had incredibly positive feedback from individuals attending our workshops at the Social Learning Centre. We intend to continue to grow this community.

However, organizational budgets are often controlled by people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Requests for Proposals are usually aligned to a certain solution type. For instance, asking for advice on selecting the appropriate LMS does not ask the deeper question of why you need an LMS in the first place. Requesting help to add informal learning learning to formal instruction does not look at whether the training courses are actually useful to begin with. As my colleague Charles Jennings says, knowing is not doing.

The thinking that hard-wires ‘knowing’ to ‘learning’ has set our efforts to build high-performing organisations back many years.

Learning and knowing sometimes coincide, but they are different beasts.

There is still a huge focus on ‘knowing’ in organisational learning. We build formal classroom courses and eLearning programmes that consist of pre-tests and post-tests. We then assume that if we gain a higher score after some formal learning process (almost invariably assessed through a test/examination/certification based on knowledge recall) than we did before, then learning has occurred.

Most of us know deep down that this is bunk.

Passing knowledge tests immediately following a course tells us little about real learning. It may tell us something about short-term memory recall, but real learning can only be determined by observable long-term changes in behaviour.

I often feel like a doctor in the days before diagnostics. The preferred solutions were the prettiest or the most expensive (and least effective). In this kind of system, it took a long time for doctors to start washing their hands or give up on practices like blood-letting. I was told by someone at a large multinational company that it is easier to hire a brand-name consulting firm to deliver what many in the company know they do not need, than to engage a much cheaper and more effective group like the Internet Time Alliance to try a novel approach. In many ways, it seems that the brands have successfully mounted the bandwagon. What they lack in skills and experience, they make up in marketing.

But every once in a while we meet a client who is open to innovative ideas, or at least trying a few probes in the spirit of addressing complexity. These clients have self-confidence and a sense of adventure. They are not afraid of the concept of failure. If something is guaranteed to be a success, it should not require much attention from management anyway.

We are not just an alliance amongst ourselves but we are building a wider network of individuals and organizations who know that we should create better work environments for society in the network era. We have learned that complex problems require different thinking and innovative solutions. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. We know that each organization’s situation is not only different, it is continually changing. We are not your average consultancy. But who would want one in times of great change anyway?

What does life in perpetual Beta mean for your business on the internet?

First of all, there is no real privacy online [Cluetrain Thesis #13 – There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.]

But … social media are very powerful business tools.

Understand your business first, and then understand social media.

Then set negotiable boundaries and be flexible.

It’s all about Probes [as in Probe-Sense-Respond]

How to launch a Probe, such as a community of practice:

1. What are you testing?
2. How will you know if you have made progress?
3. What is the smallest probe we can do?
4. Measure the results.
5. Do it again, and again, with slight variations as needed.
6. Measure the results and either amplify it or stop doing it.

Ensure that over 50% of your probes fail.

Is this how your organization functions? What are doing to encourage failure and learning by doing?

Here is how Jane Hart and I have been doing some probes this past year.

We started running workshops at the Social Learning Centre after a discussion about getting connected with our actual customers. For example, in most consulting projects, the client is a manager/exectutive but the end-users are distributed throughout the company. The client may be satisfied but we often do not get to interact with all of the actual users. We thought we would like to try something different from a standard consulting arrangement.

We thought it would be good to try something that could be purchased directly by individuals. Jane had done some online workshops previously and had learned what works and what doesn’t, though this is constantly changing, as we have learned. I did my first workshop on personal knowledge mastery in April and  35 people signed up. I learned that there was an additional need for a live meeting that would get people talking a bit more, so this was added. I ran two more workshops on PKM and kept adjusting the schedule and resources. It was definitely popular. Jane and I then tried out a five-week Summer Camp that finishes this week. This was something quite new and a real joint effort. We learned that it’s a lot easier to do these workshops as a team.

As these workshops progressed, we wondered if this was the best way to reach out and if we could build a larger community. There are currently +1,700 members registered at the SLC, so we had an idea that some of them were looking for what we can offer in the way of workshops. In slightly over two weeks (September 2012), we are launching a full year of workshops, with six themes, a Summer camp, and a private Salon for discussions amongst community members. Themes are: PKM; social media for professional development; from training to performance support; online communities; social learning in business; and enterprise community management.

We don’t know how this will go, as it is another probe. It’s based on what we have learned so far, but we don’t kid ourselves that this will be a huge success. The feedback to date has been quite positive, so we are confident that most participants will gain something. We are doing it for one year, and during that time we will assess, monitior and evaluate our progress. Where it will lead, we do not know.

My hope is that the Social Learning Centre will become a dynamic community that we can support and guide with a gentle hand. Dealing with people who are directly paying you is a validating experience. Repeat customers mean you are doing something right. As people can vote with their feet, we will have to stay connected to the needs of community members. This year has been a wonderful learning experience for me and I am sure that next year will be as well.

By the way, if you are looking for an example of a failed probe, one workshop I proposed three years ago, has never been conducted.

I was talking to a financial advisor at a bank the other day and I asked her what kind of professional development she did. The bank has a central online learning portal where employees can take “courses”, particularly compliance training. The financial advisor told me she just went to the end of each course and did the test. She found it rather useless. I talked about some of the communities that we have supported for sharing professional development, like our workshops, and she said it would great to have access to something like this, but it would be blocked by the IT department.

I have heard similar stories from many professionals in different industries and government agencies over the years. Developing all of this compliance training must account for a significant amount of revenue for the e-learning industry (anyone have figures on this?). It cannot be very satisfying though. It’s probably demoralizing to think that most of these courses are actually detested by the end-users. But then humans have excellent coping mechanisms for cognitive dissonance.

One reason I support the 70-20-10 framework is that it can change management’s focus.  It’s a way to see the forest and not just count trees. First, let me say that 70-20-10 is a rule of thumb, not a recipe.

A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination. ~ Wikipedia

This rule of thumb is supported by evidence though. Studies show that informal learning accounts for between 70 and 95% of workplace learning  [USBLS: 70%; Raybould: 95%; EDC: 70%; CapitalWorks: 75%; OISE: 70%; eLG: 70%; Allen Tough: 80%]. I have previously referred to Gary Wise and his extrapolation of Josh Bersin’s data from 2009. According to Gary, as much as 95% of workplace learning is informal.

Many organizations only offer sanctioned courses as professional development. This is completely inadequate in a complex work environment. It is like the central planning policies of the Soviet Union. It is arrogant to think that we can know in advance what people need to learn on the job today. For example, roles like online community manager did not exist a few years ago.

In complex environments, the people who know best are those doing the work, which is why we need loose hierarchies and strong networks. The job of learning professionals, in my opinion, is to help build strong learning networks. We need to let workers learn and instead support the work being done.  Frameworks like 70-20-10 can start the conversation by asking what are we doing about the other 90%. It’s a big number; bigger than that 10% for formal instruction. Consider 9:1 a rule of thumb.

Take a look at these 8 demand-side knowledge management principles by Nick Milton.

1. People don’t pay attention to knowledge until they actually need it.
2. People value knowledge that they request more highly than knowledge that is unsolicited.
3. People won’t use knowledge, unless they trust its provenance.
4. Knowledge has to be reviewed in the user’s own context before it can be received.
5. One of the biggest barriers to accepting new knowledge is old knowledge.
6. Knowledge has to be adapted before it can be adopted.
7. Knowledge will be more effective the more personal it is.
8. They won’t really know it until they do it.

They highlight the difference between Push and Pull learning. Training is Push. Informal learning is mostly Pull. Look at what Push can mean in the context of demand-side KM:

1. How often are training courses aligned with the moment of need?
2. Do participants request and value compliance training?
3. How credible are trainers with those in the business units they support?
4. How much time and affordance is there to put training courses into individual context?
5. How is old knowledge respected and then challenged in a non-confrontational manner?
6. What kinds of tools are available to adapt new knowledge?
7. How personal are courses and classes?
8. What opportunities do people have after a course to practice and get feedback?

There are many do-it-yourself applications available today that let people take control of their learning. Traditional courses can be designed or taken from a wide variety of sources, such as Udemy. Professional communities on platforms like LinkedIn abound. Knowledge workers are shifting their professional development from Push to Pull. They are also more in control of who Pushes to them, through social networks and other sources of online information. Networked sense-making frameworks like PKM can give more control over one’s learning.

For learning & development departments, a Pull workplace changes the traditional expert-led dynamic of content creation. The shift to more Pull and less directed Push learning also challenges the role of the instructional designer. The ID, who spends a long time getting a course “just right” with  learning objectives aligned to Bloom’s taxonomy, engaging graphics, and absolutely correct wording; may be becoming an anachronism. By the time the instructionally-sound course has been developed, the work requirements may have changed (again).

It’s not that informal learning support is better than anything instructional design can deliver, it’s really a question of time. Getting roughly integrated knowledge assets and professional advice from a network is better than waiting six months for a polished course to be developed. It’s also a matter of  increasingly complex work requirements and dealing more with exception-handling, rather than routine procedures. Exceptions cannot be taught through training; but learning about them on the job, and in networks, can and should be supported.

In the network era, the days of an instructional design team working in splendid isolation to produce award-winning courses may be numbered. The pace of change and the level of complexity are outpacing the ability to Push the knowledge artifacts needed for an agile workforce. Connections are more important than content in the networked enterprise. As workers take control of their learning by Pulling it in, the training department had better adapt.