Learning

Learning

Promoting learning

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The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow noted some 60 years ago that rising incomes should largely be attributed not to capital accumulation, but to technological progress – to learning how to do things better. While some of the productivity increase reflects the impact of dramatic discoveries, much of it has been due to small, incremental changes. And, if that is the case, it makes sense to focus attention on how societies learn, and what can be done to promote learning – including learning how to learn. – Joseph E. Stiglitz

We may talk about the importance of learning, but for the most part we do not practice it. Let’s start with schools. Schools tend to focus on weaknesses instead of strengths. They also focus too much on content dissemination. Our institutions have failed to foster the love of learning, and do not motivate students to learn for themselves – in many cases it’s the opposite. One problem is the continuing focus on subject-based curriculum. It separates education from reality. We do not live our lives in subject areas, and no workplace is subject-based, but almost all of our curricula are stuffed into category silos.

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Organizational Learning in the Network Era

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W. Edwards Deming, American management visionary, understood that systemic factors account for most organizational problems, and changing these has more potential for improvement than changing any individual’s performance. Therefore the role of executives should be to manage the system, not individuals. But the real barrier to systemic change is hierarchical management, as it constrains the sharing of power, a necessary enabler of organizational learning. People have to trust each other to share knowledge, and power relationships can block these exchanges. Just listen to any boardroom meeting and see how power can kill a conversation. If learning is what organizations need to do well in order to survive and thrive, then structural barriers to learning must be removed.

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Learning is Connecting

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“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error.” – John Chambers 1999

Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, was right, but not the way most people understood it at the time. As everything gets connected, we have to re-think our ideas about education and training. While education over the internet may not be as pervasive as email today, learning over the internet is massive. Learning is happening on every social media platform. It’s just not being controlled by educators and trainers. For example, there are how-to videos on YouTube, learning-oriented chats on Twitter, study groups on Facebook, and professional communities on LinkedIn. Google Plus may soon become the biggest social learning platform, as it integrates with collaborative documents, and real-time video Hangouts that can automatically be recorded and made available via YouTube.

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AITD National Conference 2014

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Sydney Harbour
Sydney Harbour

I will be  speaking tomorrow  at the AITD national conference in Sydney, NSW. Here is the interview I had with the staff prior to leaving Canada.

AITD: Without giving too much away can you tell us about your Work is learning and learning is the work keynote address?

Work is learning and learning is the work, because the nature of work is changing. For example, automation is replacing most routine work. That leaves customized work, which requires initiative, creativity and passion. Valued work, and the environments in which it takes place, is becoming more complex. Professionals today are doing work that cannot be easily standardized.

In complexity, we can determine the relationship between cause and effect only in retrospect. Think about that. It puts into question most of our management frameworks that require detailed analysis before we take action. It also shows that identifying and copying best practices is pretty well useless.

In complex work environments, the optimal way to do work is to constantly probe the environment and test emergent practices. This requires an engaged and empowered workforce. Emergent practices are dependent on the cooperation of all workers (and management) as well as the free flow of knowledge. It also requires learning as part of everyone’s workflow.

These changes mean that the role of training and development must change, or become obsolete.

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Re-wiring for the Complex Workplace

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Note: The following article appears in Inside Learning Technologies & Skills – May 2014. This is the “No Flash Required” version.

Complexity is the new normal

We are so interconnected today that many cannot imagine otherwise. Almost every person is connected to worldwide communication networks. News travels at the speed of a Tweet. Meanwhile, inside the enterprise, reaction times and feedback loops have to get faster to deal with markets that can create multi-billion dollar valuations seemingly overnight. But are they getting faster?

Expectations for digital competencies for workers keep increasing, without much of a clue from management what these really are. Today’s workplace demands emergent practices just to keep up, but there is little time or thought provided to develop these. In most cases our current models for managing people and supporting their knowledge-sharing are ineffective.

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Most socially-shared

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“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” – Groucho Marx

I usually ignore “best of” lists that tell us the “Top XX” people in a field. Too often there is no methodology given, and it’s either a popularity contest or just a marketing scheme. I was surprised when I got a note that someone saw my name on a list that actually used data. In this case it was the Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness:

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Ten Years, Ten Thoughts

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In compiling my ebook, Seeking perpetual beta: a guidebook for the network era, I tried to cover all the posts that resonated with readers, clients, and colleagues over a decade. Here are some highlights, representing one thought per year.

    1. Taking control of our learning is a challenge for individuals used to working inside hierarchies that demand conformity and compliance.
    2. The mainstream application of knowledge management and learning management over the past few decades was mostly wrong; we over-managed information, knowledge, and learning because it was easy to do.
    3. The basic structure of the job presumes common skills and the mechanistic view that workers can be replaced without disruption.

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Knowledge sharing paradox revisited

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The knowledge sharing paradox is that enterprise social tools can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it because knowledge is a very personal thing. Knowledge workers care about what they need to get work done, but do they care about the organizational knowledge base?

So my conclusion this time around was that the centralized stuff we spent so much time and money maintaining was simply not very useful to most practitioners. The practitioners I talked to about PPI [personal productivity improvement] said they would love to participate in PPI coaching, provided it was focused on the content on their own desktops and hard drives, and not the stuff in the central repositories. —Dave Pollard (2005)

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