Learning

Learning

EEA Learning Day

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I will travelling and speaking for most of this week but will share what I have learned when I get back. This will be my first time addressing the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen and I look forward to meeting many new people. Here is what I will be talking about:

Keynote: Working Smarter in the Learning Organisation

As complexity increases in the networked economy, we need to integrate learning into the workflow. Communities of practice bridge the gap between getting work done and serendipitously connecting to looser social networks. Learning and development in the networked workplace must move from content delivery to community enablement. Harold Jarche will present a new framework for working smarter which includes the narration of work, transparency and knowledge-sharing to increase innovation.

I will also be running a workshop for managers:

Workshop: Coaching in the Learning Organisation

Harold Jarche will discuss some new approaches to support informal and social learning in the workplace. If problems and environments are becoming more complex, and are changing so quickly that our level of information will always be inadequate, there are some new qualities that learning coaches will need: 

1.       Openness to learning, not only from our peers, but from our employees and their contacts.

2.       Flexibility in our learning approaches; helping people understand how they learn best.

3.       The ability to be a generalist, moving in and out of learning situations as required.

4.       The skill to develop large-scale social networks in order to access help in solving  employee problems.

5.       An understanding of how networks operate in the exchange and development of knowledge.

What is learning’s role?

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My colleague, Clark Quinn, in Building a Performance Ecosystem states that the benefits of maximum information for people to get work done, combined with minimum barriers to achieve their work goals, are good for the entire organization. “When they [workers] can get the resources they need and the right people to assist when necessary, the performance benefits are obvious.” Alignment is necessary.

Some of that alignment is missing between departmental silos though. While Clark says that “learning leaders” should step up to the challenge, there is also a strong need to get aligned with IT, marketing, and operations, to name a few. As Clark concludes:

“By aligning the use of technology with business needs in this way, learning leaders are demonstrating the strategic contribution to the organization that the executive suite wants to see. Failing to grasp the opportunity at this inflection point in business operations has a grim prospect. Folks know they can learn on their own and together. If learning leaders don’t get in and facilitate the full learning spectrum, it will happen without them. Then, just what is learning’s role?”

What is learning’s role? First of all, in the network era, a coherent organization is one in which learning is no longer a specialty. Much as writing was no longer a specialty when the majority of workers became literate, learning today is more than putting an X in a checkbox. Work is learning and learning is the work. I may have said this many times before but it is the essential change in how we must view knowledge-intensive and creative work in a networked environment.

Learning is not something done to us, it is what we do together. Learning delivery in a constantly changing work environment is an outdated notion. For example, training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. It is glaringly obvious in this time of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity that we can get pretty well any information we need whenever we want it. To make sense of this, we need network era literacies, and with these new literacies we no longer need the equivalent of learning scribes. Pulling informal learning, instead of having formal instruction pushed to workers, has to become the workplace norm. By norm, I do not mean something bolted on to a course or some function of an LMS. I mean integrated into the daily work flow.

Learning together is part of collaborating to get things done while also cooperating in order to participate in knowledge networks. “Strictly business” is less frequently the case in our lives, as our work/life boundaries get fuzzier. Meanwhile the work/learning boundaries also get fuzzier. We no longer limit our learning to classrooms, training centres, workstations, or our official company mobile devices. In this environment, we cannot leave the direction of our learning to a “learning professional”. If today’s learning professionals want to remain relevant in the coherent organization, then they need to participate in collaborative and cooperative work/learning flows. This will be a sea change for the training & development profession, but I am certain it will happen with our without their participation.

CoherentOrgExpanded

L’innovation pédagogique

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Voici ma présentation hier soir à Moncton pour l’ouverture du colloque de l’ACDEAULF.

Résumé : Les médias sociaux, la dissémination du travail et l’information illimitée modifient nos relations en milieu de travail. Nous sommes désormais capables d’entrer en communication avec n’importe qui et n’importe où, et de trouver pratiquement toute l’information que nous recherchons. Les hyperliens réduisent à néant les hiérarchies, rendant superflues de nombreuses pratiques de l’éducation industriel.

Pourtant, nous nous accrochons aux méthodes traditionnelles d’évaluation du travail. Les compétences professionnelles étaient fondées sur des tâches stables et mesurables. Les cours sont le vestige d’une époque où l’information était peu abondante et les relations limitées. L’avenir du travail réside dans l’intégration de l’apprentissage et des méthodes de travail. L’avenir, c’est apprendre à travailler plus intelligemment.

It takes time to be social

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According to research by the Dachis Group, only 10 – 20% of employees in large organizations are actively engaged with their enterprise social collaboration platforms, as reported in this MIT Sloan article:

It may be that for many employees, even in these early adopter firms working to integrate internal social business applications, using these applications do not offer enough value or reason to shift behavior. Employees may be unaware of the potential of their social platform; or perhaps they have not been properly trained and educated. Or of course, it is also possible that while they are aware and have been trained, the value still isn’t there or isn’t high enough.

I think that one of the underlying reason is that these platforms, like KM and elearning platforms before them, are not integrated with the workflow. For example, email, frustrating as it may be, is part of most business workflows. If a collaboration platform requires that you go out of your normal workflow, then it will not be used by anyone except the curious and the early adopters. The problem is too often a case of putting the technology before the people using it.

However, once social technologies have been installed, modelling new work behaviours becomes the next organizational challenge. This part is often overlooked in the hubris of a successful technology implementation project, when really it is just the beginning. Too many companies do not do the time-consuming work of modelling, coaching, mentoring and facilitating social learning (and I do not mean in the classroom). Low adoption rates are not a worker issue, they are a management issue.

Looking back on a project we did last year with a large organization, I note that we spent several months coaching the learning & performance innovation team on working socially. Initially, we had daily conference calls. We cajoled people to narrate their work, and required at least one micro-post per day. We did a lot of explaining and modelled narrating our work. Later we had weekly conference calls, or “virtual coffee” to discuss issues. These were essential, as even a few months into the new work/learning routine there was some confusion, so things were not obvious to everyone. It takes time and a lot of practice to change behaviours. After several months, we were no longer needed; but I doubt that progress would have been made if we had not provided the initial scaffolding.

Just being aware of the potential of a social platform is not enough. Everyone needs their own “aha” moment, and until that happens, adoption is not certain. It will not happen at all if the work being done on a daily basis and the social collaboration platform are not integrated; and if they are, it will still take time.

Taking Charge of your own Development

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I was interviewed by Rob Paterson (podcast at link) this week and we talked about work, jobs and taking charge of your own professional development. Rob summarized our half-hour together with these points. It is a real pleasure to have someone else encapsulate what you think.

  • The Change in Work – It’s not just factory workers but even Doctors that are going to be automated or outsourced. So how will you make a living? Only truly creative work will pay.
  • So what is Creative Work? – It is not just design etc but will include making valuable things and even growing food – and new sites such as Etsy enable you to find a market
  • The Industrial World Deskilled work – It all became assembly – Anything like this can be automated and will be
  • The jobs cannot come back
  • Training works well when you want to learn how to drive a car – you can train to be a carpenter but making the shift to be creative or to stand for themseleves – you cannot train for that

What is the new?

  • So what helps you be this new person?
  • Apprenticing – complex things cannot be learned except by shared experience
  • The crafts communities have never lost this – learn the rules and then learn how to break them – look at studios – very little teaching – mainly doing
  • Then you have to get connected to your community
  • All sorts of studios will emerge that will help you where clusters of people who know aggregate
  • The Knowledge Artisans have to take charge of themselves

What about advice for you?

  • Learn REAL skills – not just how to make it in an organization
  • Learn how to have a network – in the job world we don’t have them – many of us don’t know anything about this if we have had a job – so start now
  • This must be diverse and be about your interests
  • Put yourself OUT THERE
  • You are as good as your network
  • Think of yourself as a Freelancer for Life – and so always nuture your network  no matter what – avoid getting lulled into a sense of false security

His [my] advice to his [our] kids

  • Find the sweet spot (Dave Pollard) Find out your passion, what you are good at and what people will pay you for
  • You have to have all three

Rob just wrote a book, the first in a series, called You Don’t Need a Job. If you could spend an evening with Rob, I am sure he would share much of what he has written here. But for less than the price of buying him a glass of red wine [his preference I would guess] you can purchase this e-book for only $2.99. Rob provides an interesting way to look at the changing nature of work, and how people are reacting to the fact that the economy and society have fundamentally shifted.

We can see the world now dividing into three camps. There is a camp in Phase I [childhood]. They want simple answers. They want the good old days where women know their place and God rules the natural world. All who are not with them are against them. There is a camp in phase II [teenager]. They want to belong. Status is granted to them by belonging to the system. They want structures that can be predicted. The natural world is only a resource. They want control. And finally there is phase III [adulthood]. Here people need to express themselves. They need to be part of what is going on. They feel connected to all people and to all things.

There is lots of good advice in this first manual for the network era. You may not need a job, but we all need to work together in creating better structures for exchanging value. This book can help. Rob’s next book, You don’t need a Banker, will be out soon. Rob is also an ex investment banker, and has seen the inside of the beast, so I am sure we will learn much from him on this subject.

"I am what I create, share and others build on”

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The Entrepreneurial Learner:

Takeaways. (1) in a world of constantly changing contexts, best practices don’t travel very well. (2) As contexts change, we need to move past stories (which explain a specific event) to narratives (which create a framework for moving us to action, perhaps in a new direction). (3) there are important shifts occurring: knowing what has moved to knowing what and where; making things moves to making things and contexts (e.g., remix); (4) in sense-making, we move from playing to reframing; in media, we move from storytelling to transmedia (e.g., how a story jumps from one medium to another — this has huge implications for corporate branding). (5) Identity Shift is the biggest shift of all. We’re moving from a sense of “I am what I wear/own/control” to “I am what I create, share and others build on.” How do I put something into play so others build on it? When you figure this out, you understand agency and impact. —John Seely Brown

fractal
A “built-upon” image by Joachim Stroh

We are moving to the edge, not just in our work but for a greater part of our interconnected lives.

Traditional training structures are changing

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Citrix GoToTraining has just released a paper I was commissioned to write, called What’s working and what’s not in online training. Here is the introduction, and you can read the rest at the link at the bottom. I will be following up on some of the themes I discuss in this paper in the coming weeks.

The new challenge for learning professionals

The novelist William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” What training and development professionals can expect in the next year is already here, but not yet visible to everyone. The near future will look like the near past, with more complex social and technological connections inside and outside organizations. The rapid pace of change is unlikely to abate in the near future.

One thing is obvious, however: Learning is becoming more collaborative. In just the past year, we have seen several advancements, introductions and evolutions in the world of learning, including:

Silicon Valley and Ivy League schools are opening up their courses for free online. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), as they’re called, are initiatives hoping to disrupt higher education.

Learning management systems have become talent management or social collaboration systems as they try to increase their relevance beyond training. Last year I worked with a client that had reduced its corporate university staff by over half and outsourced all course development. Recently, McGill University management professor Karl Moore, in Forbes magazine, asked, “Is the traditional corporate university dead?”

From this, it’s clear — traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing.

Probably the biggest change we are seeing in online training is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. What follows is a list of near-term trends that should be taken into consideration by learning professionals during the next year and beyond … read the rest of the paper — What’s working and what’s not in online learning (PDF)

"They don’t want to train people on the job anymore"

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In a recent Atlantic article, Zvika Kriefer talks to Elli Sharef, who runs HireArt, a recruiting agency, focused on the tech sector.

I also asked Sharef if she had any insights on the broader employment picture, since she spends most of her day trying to match employers with employees. The most striking trend she sees is that having a strong, well-rounded resume is no longer good enough. Employers are increasingly looking for specific skills sets that match their needs.

“They don’t want to train people on the job anymore,” she says, marking a shift away from the apprenticeship model that defined many sectors in the economy before the recession. “There are just too many people looking for work for companies to waste time on someone who can’t start, ready to go, on the first day. Candidates are left to fend for themselves.”

What could this mean?

For individuals, it’s getting obvious they have to start taking their professional development into their own hands. Also, as more work becomes contractual or part-time, workers have to take up the slack where company training used to offer some professional development. It also means that those buying any professional development are going to be more discerning and price-sensitive. The tide is shifting to supporting individuals through communities, separate from companies, as organizational lifespans continue to decrease. The popularity of the PKM Workshop also indicates that people want to take control of their professional development and only need a safe place to start. Participants this year have commented that the workshops have changed how they think:

“This program has made me think differently about my professional practice.”

“I’ve had more ‘conversations’ and been exposed to many points of view that I would not have encountered any other way.”

The Seek-Sense-Share framework of PKM has proven to be useful for many participants:

“Reducing my seeking and spending more time sensing (converting things into high quality content) is my most important goal for the next few months.”

“I need to increase the proportional amount of time I spend in “Sense.” I read a lot, I share quite a bit…yet when it comes to making sense of patterns and other “stuff” in the whole, I don’t always make time to do it.”

“I very much appreciate the simpleness of the Seek Sense Share model and the fact that together they lead to Serendipity (enhanced Serendipity to be sure). S/S/S = S.”

Staying in touch with participants has given additional feedback that the workshop participants’ practices are changing:

“Without any coherent strategy I often was not persistent in my undertakings. This course gave me an excellent opportunity to evaluate my position and to work out an appropriate approach.

My take-aways:
1. Take risks & engage,
2. Focus on who, not what,
3. Less is more,
4. Ritualize and organize to make time to reflect,
5. Trust the process.
6. Have fun.”

But what about training (L&D) departments?

If organizations are engaging job-ready workers, then training has to move away from course delivery and focus on performance and collaboration. But it is difficult to move a traditional training organization directly to a social learning focus. It is easier to start with performance consulting and then expand to social and collaborative learning, as I wrote in from training to performance to social. Nancy Slawski picked up on this on How to Live Social in the L&D Trenches:

“Kermit the Frog’s rendition of ‘It’s not Easy Being Green’ could be the theme song for L&D folk who are trying to push against the grain of workplace cultures that are heavily siloed , that define learning in terms of content heavy learning events and who see social learning and social media as one in the same.

On top of these internal challenges, learning professionals also have external pressures of learning and industry. We are reminded daily that unless L&D can morph ourselves into social, informal, collaborative gurus who have their fingers on the pulse of talent and performance , our days are numbered. (is that a DoDo bird I see?)”

The workshops provide only one possible way to start the shift in workplace learning support from Push to Pull, with an emphasis on Flow over Stock. There are many other options. But we think it’s very important to understand how work is changing, as every day there are indicators of the shift. When work is learning and learning is the work, none of us can just sit back and see what gets pushed to us. As knowledge workers, it’s essential to note that anything that can be reduced to a flowchart will be automated. In such a world, it’s best not to leave everything to centralized planning and control, whether as an individual or in supporting workplace learning.

Do not underestimate the power of audio

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I once wrote a paper on educational radio programming on the CBC during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The achievements of early radio have similarities with web-based social learning. Two of the more popular programmes on early CBC radio were the Citizens’ Forum and the Farm Radio Forum.

“Farm Radio Forum, 1941-65, was a national rural listening-discussion group project sponsored by the Canadian Association for Adult Education, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and CBC. Up to 27 000 persons met in neighbourhood groups Monday nights, November through March, using half-hour radio broadcasts, printed background material and pretested questions as aids to discussion of social and economic problems.

Farm Forum innovations included a regional report-back system, whereby group conclusions were collected centrally and broadcast regularly across Canada, occasionally being sent to appropriate governments. In addition, discussion – leading to self-help – resulted in diverse community “action projects” such as co-operatives, new forums and folk schools. Farm and community leaders claimed that the give-and-take of these discussions provided useful training for later public life. In 1952, UNESCO commissioned research into Farm Forum techniques. Its report was published in 1954, and consequently India, Ghana and France began using Canadian Farm Forum models in their programs.”

Radio is a one-way medium but innovations such as programme guides by mail one week in advance, local discussion groups and national feedback on individual responses, kept people actively involved. Imagine a group of farmers gathering at a neighbour’s house, bringing food for a communal supper, and then discussing issues of great social relevance,  like the possibility of medicare. This was real public radio, not just commercial-free airwaves. Today, the CBC produces programmes such as Cross-Country Checkup and the Radio Noon Phone-Ins for similar purposes.

Donald Clark has looked at the medium as well, in Radio Education: huge and hugely underestimated and provides a view of the further potential of this medium in the Internet era.

Radio and new media
Podcasting is the true heir to radio. To timeshift an audio experience and put it in the hands of the learner, gives them is convenience and control. Internet radio has given many access to distant radio stations and led to growth in stations with a very specific focus. Far from being a dead or dying medium it is finding new purposes and new channels.

Conclusion
Radio is scalable, in the broadcasting sense. It’s low cost and reach have seen widespread use, not only in the developing world but in developed countries like the UK, where radio has long been respected as a source of high quality educational content. Video is very far from killing the radio star.

Sometimes it’s good to go back and revisit what we have collectively learned. We should not underestimate the power of audio, whether it be as podcasts or live radio.

our crude knowledge capture tools

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Earlier this week I commented that while of course, you cannot capture knowledge in the literal sense, people in organizations need to share their knowledge-making experiences. The aim of knowledge-sharing in an organization is to help make tacit knowledge more explicit, not some type of fictional Vulcan mind meld. I have quoted Dave Jonassen on knowledge transfer several times here, “Every amateur epistemologist knows that knowledge cannot be managed. Education has always assumed that knowledge can be transferred and that we can carefully control the process through education. That is a grand illusion.” I also noted in networked sharing that it is very important to understand that organizations and cultures that do not share what they know, are doomed.

It is important to keep in mind that what we loosely call knowledge, when using terms like knowledge-sharing or knowledge capture,  is just our approximation of it so we can share it with others. As Dave Snowden says, we are not very good at articulating our knowledge.

We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

When we use our knowledge to describe some data, such as what we remember from an experience or our summary of a book, we convey our knowledge by creating information, and as Dave notes, writing it down is not very effective.

But that does not mean that we shouldn’t even try. The cumulative pieces of information, or knowledge artifacts, that we create and share can help us have better conversations and gain some shared understanding. Our individual sense-making can be shared and from it can emerge better organizational knowledge. It’s not a linear process, as in from data we get information, which when aggregated becomes knowledge, and over time becomes wisdom (DIKW).

I think of wisdom as something that can only be partially shared over time. Hence the reason why masters can only have a limited number of apprentices. But when writing, and later books, came along, we had a new technology that could more widely distribute information created by the wise, and the not so wise. Neither the wisdom nor the knowledge actually get transferred, but the information can be helpful to those who wish to learn.

Mass communication has not been without its detractors, perhaps Socrates being the first.  He is reported to have said that the advent of written language, and books, would result in men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, who will be a burden to their fellows (Plato’s Phaedrus). How times change.

The lesson I take from this is that we cannot become complacent with knowledge. It must be shared amongst people who know that they are only seeing a fragment of others’ knowledge. Because it is so difficult to represent our knowledge to others, we have to make every effort to keep sharing it. For example, narrating one’s work does not get knowledge transferred, but it provides a better medium to gain more understanding. Knowledge shared in flows over time enables us to create better mental pictures than a single piece of knowledge stock.

One way of capturing knowledge is to create knowledge collections, as described by Steve Denning, in Can knowledge be collected?

Why has the promise of knowledge collections not been realized? Evidence-based medicine suggests that the answer may lie in distinguishing between precision knowledge, intuitive knowledge, and behavior-change knowledge.

[snip] In assessing the potential value of knowledge collections in economics, management or development, it’s important to recognize that most of the relevant knowledge is not precision knowledge. It’s not like “when you have a strep throat, take an antibiotic.” It’s more like the treatment of cancer or hypertension. It needs trained professionals to solve problems through intuitive experimentation and pattern recognition, and then behavioral change knowledge to provide support and involvement in continued monitoring and experimentation.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, capturing knowledge (as crudely as we do) is only the first step. We also need to enable sharing, take action, and empower people. But I cannot see how we can do this if we don’t try to capture some of what we know in order to get a level of common understanding. Exactly what I have been trying to do on this blog, over many years.