Learning

Learning

ICALT 2012

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I leave for Rome today and will be presenting a keynote at IEEE’s ICALT 2012 (International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies). Here is what I will talking about.

Integrating Learning into the Workflow

The challenge for 21st century businesses is not saving 20th century jobs that will be automated and outsourced anyway, but focusing on creating more opportunities for creative work. For institutions, employers, educators and workers, that means giving up control and co-creating a new social contract for the creative, networked economy. For all businesses this means integrating learning into the workflow. There are practical models and frameworks that all businesses can use to connect work and learning. Harold Jarche will challenge some traditional ideas about workplace learning.

Our current models for managing people, training and knowledge-sharing are insufficient for a workplace that demands emergent practices just to keep up. Formal training has only ever addressed 20% of workplace learning and this was acceptable when the work environment was relatively stable. Knowledge workers today need to connect with others to co-solve problems. Sharing tacit knowledge through conversations is an essential component of knowledge work. The effective use of social media enable adaptation, and the development of emergent practices, through conversations.

As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done. Workers have many more connections, to information and people, than ever before. But the ability to deal with complexity lies in our minds, not our artificial organizational structures. In order to free our minds for complex work, we need to simplify our company learning structures.

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I am really looking forward to making some connections with people I know online (some for many years) but our physical paths have never crossed. Many roads lead to Rome this week, it seems.

Hans de Zwart
Sebastian Fiedler
Robin Good
Allessio Jacona

What's working in social business

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What’s working in social business in 2012? This is the question that CMSWire asked me to write about. In my opinion, technology sales, marketing campaigns and the speakers circuits are doing well. Implementation and organizational change are lagging far behind.

Like the knowledge management and e-learning hype phases of the 90’s and ’00’s respectively, social business is being led by software vendors. Some are even the same vendors that MIT’s Peter Senge said co-opted the field of knowledge management. I watched as e-learning moved from hope for ubiquitous learning, to the overproduction of self-paced online courses, also known as “shovelware.”

My focus on social business stems from a background in training, knowledge management, performance improvement and social learning. I have learned that the hard work comes after the software has been installed and the initial training sessions are over. Then comes the question, what do we do now?

Transparency

People may say that it’s not about the technology, but that is where a large share of the budget goes in any major change initiative. The bigger change to manage however, is getting people to work transparently. One of the major benefits of using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge. But if information is not shared, it will never be found, and knowledge will remain hidden. Transparency is a necessity for social business.

While social media enable transparency, they also lay bare a company’s culture. A dysfunctional company culture does not improve with transparency, it just gets exposed. In the transparent social business, there is no place left to hide. This change alone can be enough to cause massive organizational upheaval. Transparency can be scary for anyone who owes their position to the old system.

Social business is not just about using social media but changing routines and procedures. With greater transparency, information now flows horizontally as well as vertically. New patterns and dynamics emerge from interconnected people and interlinked information flows, and these will bypass established structures and services. Work gets more democratic as it becomes visible to all.

With the democratization of information, user-generated content increases. Today, search engines give each worker more information and knowledge than any CEO had even 10 years ago. Pervasive connectivity changes organizational power structures, though the full effects of this take time to become visible. From a transparent environment new leaders and experts may emerge, as it takes different leadership and an understanding of networks to support a social business.

Narration

Agile social businesses need people who can work in concert on solving problems, not waiting for direction from above. Management must ask: how can we help you work in this transparent environment? In social networks we often learn from each other; modelling behaviours, telling stories and sharing what we know.

While not highly efficient, this is very effective for learning. There is a need to model the new behaviours of being transparent and narrating one’s work. Social business also requires power-sharing; for how long will workers collaborate and share if they cannot take action with their new knowledge and connectivity? Changing to more social behaviours takes time, but most of all, it takes trust.

Once social technologies have been installed, modelling new work behaviours becomes the main organizational challenge.

The organization can support this by fostering and supporting communities of practice. These are potential bridges between work teams and the open social networks on the Internet. Narration of work, or learning out loud, is a prime enabler of knowledge-sharing. One indicator that a social business is working is when people at all levels are narrating their work in a transparent environment.

If the daily routine supports social learning, and time is made available for reflection and sharing stories, then an organization is on the right track. One determinant of effective professional communities is whether they actually change practices. Only then will we know if the social business initiative has been successful.

Enterprises adopting social business need to find and support people who can model knowledge-sharing behaviours, not just talk about them. Managers should identify people who already narrate their work, create user-generated content and share transparently. Companies should get advice from people who share power and do most of their work in networks already. Just think, if there is nobody to model social business behaviours in the organization, how will people learn? From their friends on Facebook?

In a social business, work is learning and learning is the work. Social learning needs to be integrated into the daily workflow. Workers need more than technology; they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative support. Management’s primary responsibility in a social business is supporting organizational learning.

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Originally posted on CMS Wire

Learning and Marketing

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I had a great conversation with the Marketing Tech Blog folks on Blog Talk Radio yesterday.

Listen to internet radio with Marketing Technology on Blog Talk Radio

Douglas Karr and Marty Thompson of DK New Media were gracious hosts. One of the main reasons I accepted their invitation is that I think marketing and learning professionals have a lot to learn from each other. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing from work. When you learn with and from your customers, marketing and learning are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning. Learning-oriented marketing, both internal and external, is both getting the message across and understanding the needs of others.

I’ve been watching marketing & training moving closer, just as work & learning get integrated in the networked workplace. I think many training departments in the future may become part of marketing. A great example of this is at  Intuit, where training is part of the marketing department and involves the customer directly. At Intuit, customers are paid to develop content, and as one person wrote in a chat comment, “The e-Learning has kept my CPA husband loyal to Intuit versus Peachtree, etc.”

Perhaps marketing and learning can work together and figure out how best to deal with complex issues and problems without a “how-to” guide. Think of the future of learning as a business, not just a supporting department. It also keeps the learning function customer-focused and not merely process-dependent.

Work is learning and learning is the work

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We have come to a point where organizations can no longer leave learning to their HR or training departments. Being able to understand emerging situations, see patterns, and co-solve problems are essential business skills. Learning is the work.

I had mentioned that 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 my workshops, and she said it would be great to have access to something like this, but it most likely would be blocked. It is a major business mistake when learning is not connected to working.

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Informal rule of thumb

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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.

Pulling informal learning

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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.

Engage, out loud

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Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid … or Smart, by Chad Wellmon is a very good look at our relationships with knowledge, how we codify it, and how we connect to it.

Only at this macro-level of analysis can we make sense of the fact that Google’s search algorithms do not operate in absolute mechanical purity, free of outside interference. Only if we understand the Web and our search and filter technologies as elements in a digital ecology can we make sense of the emergent properties of the complex interactions of humans and technology: gaming the Google system through search optimization strategies, the decision by Google employees (not algorithms) to ban certain webpages and privilege others (ever notice the relatively recent dominance of Wikipedia pages in Google searches?). The Web is not just a technology but an ecology of human-technology interaction. It is a dynamic culture with its own norms and practices.

A key idea here is that our actions are much more important than any technology. One group that has developed new norms for knowledge-sharing is the software development community. Dave Weinberger talks about public learning, what I call learning out loud (LOL), in this video where he describes how developers are “learning in a way that simultaneously makes the environment smarter”.

Dave’s video is his contribution to the Adidas blog carnival on a new way of working and learning.

John Stepper describes working out loud as the most practical way to start online collaboration.

Confused about what to write? Simply post about what you’re working on every day. Who you’re meeting with. The research you’re doing. Articles you find relevant. Lessons you learned. Mistakes you made.

The form factor of short posts that are easy-to-skim make this kind of narration practical – for both the author and the audience.

This reinforces my three key principles for net work: narration, transparency, shared power. By changing our norms and practices, we can use the Internet in ways that are best for people, workplaces and society. But first, we have to be engaged.

The learning organization: an often-described, but seldom-observed phenomenon

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What should a true learning organization look like?

W. Edwards Deming understood that systemic factors account for more organizational problems, and therefore more potential for change, than any individual’s performance. The role of managers should be to manage the system, not the individual functions. The real barrier to systemic change, such as becoming a learning organization, is command & control management. This is why the third principle for net work, shared power, is a major stumbling block to becoming a learning organization. Narration of work and transparency are easy, compared to sharing power. But learning is what organizations need to do well in order to survive and thrive.

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It's time to focus on your LQ

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Learning is everywhere in the connected workplace. Networked professionals need more than advice (training); they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative, support.  However, many of us have relegated our own learning to the specialists over the years – teachers, instructors, professors. We’re not used to handling all of this learning on our own. But if we want to thrive in complexity and if we want our work teams to be effective, we have to integrate our learning into the workflow.

On 11 June 2012 we will start the next online personal knowledge management workshop.  PKM is the foundation of connected work. It’s up to each of us to develop, and continuously revise, our sense-making frameworks as we work inside and outside the increasingly permeable walls of our organizations. Unlimited information, distributed work, self-publishing, and ridiculously easy group-forming all point in one direction – the organization will no longer address all your learning needs in the network era.

Additional skills are needed to help groups and teams learn as they work. Narration is a base skill for the networked workplace. Other skills include network weaving, curation, and network analysis.  We also have workshops on how to use social media for professional development, as well as setting up and sustaining an online community. These workshops are not just for ‘learning professionals’ but for any role; from sales to marketing to production, and especially for management. More workshops are in development and we are always interested in getting suggestions. Custom workshops and skills coaching can also be arranged.

To improve our own and our organization’s learning quotient, we need to look at ways to be more self-directed,  social, and agile learners. Life in perpetual Beta requires a high LQ.

Leadership is an emergent property of a balanced network

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This is my second recent quote from Mark Fidelman, who writes in Forbes. He has a good perspective on the integration of work and learning, and how technology is only a very small part of social business.

Investment in social business platforms and mobile solutions are great – we’re finally on the right path. But ignoring the workplace infrastructure to accommodate them will be a missed opportunity. We have to move away from the Mad Men era office, to digital workplaces that take advantage of the entire social, mobile and content being produced by an organization’s greatest asset.

Its employees.

Fidelman discusses the new role of management in the future workplace.

The new role of management is to facilitate the finding of solutions; not to dictate them. The new role of management is to facilitate “connections”, to match people with the right skills and abilities to projects where those skills are most needed. The new role of management is to remove hurdles to engagement by building approvals mechanisms into workflows. Management won’t do this alone. They will leverage new technologies that automatically introduce employees to employees, partners and suppliers in order to build relationships that help you and the organization become more effective.

Culture is an emergent property of people working together. For example, trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a balanced network [“in-balance” may be a better term for this changing state] and not some special property available to only the select few.

Network Culture

Building on my previous post – that in complex environments, loose hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle – here is my view of how a transparent, diverse & open workplace should function.

Networked contributors (full-time, part-time, contractors) need to work together in a networked environment that facilitates cooperation and collaboration. This is why the narration of work  and PKM will become critical skills, as work teams ebb and flow according to need, but the network must remain connected and resilient. A key function of leaders (think servant leadership) will be to listen to and analyze what is happening. From this bird’s-eye view, those in a leadership role can help set the work context according to the changing environment and then work on building consensus.

I’ve noted before that the power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust.