Learning

Learning

Noticing: the first step to a learning organization

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Five years ago I suggested that those who teach will not test:

  • Anyone who teaches is not allowed to test.
  • Those who design the tests are answerable to those who learn and those who teach.
  • Those who teach are only responsible to those who learn and are subjected to tests.

Keith Lyons points out some more fundamental questions about the efficacy of providing feedback:

“Royce [Sadler] observed that “feedback is about telling … that is the problem”. He discussed this dilemma and noted its roots in the transmission model of education. He proposed an alternative model in which teachers were the bridge in students’ journeys from what they know to incorporating information they did not know to develop their knowledge.”

Directed feedback and assessment keep learners in a dependent situation whereas the real aim should be to get learners to notice their own progress.

“Royce argued that ‘traditional’ assessment practices require the assessor to judge a problem, repair the response and give advice. Yet these are a student’s responsibility.  He argued forcefully that Noticing is a key to student flourishing.”

My observations are that trades or craft schools often get students to notice their own progress but this is lacking in general education and corporate training. There is still a culture of dependence, stemming from early school years and copied by so many training and educational bodies:

“The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.  Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.  It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.  The expert makes all the important choices; only I can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I enforce.”

Shifting from external to internal assessment reinforces what we already know about social learning from Albert Bandura:

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

Self-ownership of our learning, taking responsibility for our mistakes, all in a collaborative work environment that helps us learn socially — these are the hallmarks of a real learning organization.

Learning is social, Design is not

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Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@jonhusband – “Noticed in office … article titled “Learning Is Social, Training Is Irrelevant” .. from Training Magazine, November 1997 … yes, 1997 ;-)”

Jack and Marilyn Whalen, the IRL researchers contracted by Xerox to advise it on the ICS project, suggested that training need not take a full year; that it could, in fact, be dramatically shortened. How? By moving the service reps out of their isolated cubicles and bringing them together in shared work spaces, where a group of six or seven ICS staffers would be in constant contact with one another. In this communal environment, the workers would teach each other how to do their respective jobs; sales reps would share what they knew about selling, service reps what they knew about service and so on. And one other thing . . . the ICS workers would take customer calls from day one, putting into practice what they learned as soon as they learned it.

The response to this proposal from the corporate training unit back in Leesburg was a long, anguished wail that could be heard all the way to Texas. But Cheryl Thomas, the manager tapped to head up the ICS project, decided to seek a second opinion – actually, 30 second opinions. She asked the employees who’d been selected to be the ICS guinea pigs what they thought of the idea. To the question of whether or not workers could teach each other, the answer she heard was, “Why not? It’s what we do already.”

NYT: The Auteur vs. the Committee – via @petervan

AT Apple, one is the magic number.

One person is the Decider for final design choices. Not focus groups. Not data crunchers. Not committee consensus-builders. The decisions reflect the sensibility of just one person: Steven P. Jobs, the C.E.O.

By contrast, Google has followed the conventional approach, with lots of people playing a role. That group prefers to rely on experimental data, not designers, to guide its decisions.

The contest is not even close. The company that has a single arbiter of taste has been producing superior products, showing that you don’t need multiple teams and dozens or hundreds or thousands of voices.

What do you do if you don’t know what to do? by @nickknoco

Creation in the wrong place is called re-inventing the wheel. Re-use in the wrong place is called flogging a dead horse.

Valeria Maltoni: People don’t Converse: they Comment. Big Difference – via @raesmaa

Conversation with the right intent, or influence, is about turning together, connecting. Conversation is the opportunity. You don’t get that from commenting alone.

@justsitthere – “Face chaos without hesitation.”

@marksylvester – ‘”I can explain it to you, I can’t understand it for you” via an extremely smart woman we met on Friday.’

Experience-Performance-Reflection

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The above diagram, by Nick Milton, shows some important aspects of what influences performance [hint: blue]. First, knowledge is the result of information (e.g. learning content) AND experience. Knowledge is directly influenced by one’s own experience. Therefore there is no such thing as “knowledge transfer“. Second, performance is taking action on knowledge. This is what is evident to others in the workplace. They observe what we do. It’s not what we know that is important to others, but what we do with it. In the workplace, what we do with knowledge is usually in a social context. This influences the third key point, that reflection of one’s performance is an important part of the learning process and this is often in a social context as well. Learning from what others do is the foundation of Albert Bandura’s social learning theory:

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

Nick Milton’s diagram shows the inherent weakness of the pervasive workplace technology called learning management systems. LMS are disconnected from 1) Experience, 2) Performance & 3) Reflection. Their focus is on formal learning (a mere 10% of workplace learning) usually in the form of information transmission. As Jane Hart explains, the LMS is not part of the experience-performance-reflection workflow:

Although the LMS has in recent years become the de facto place to store learning content in the form of courses, it is not the first port of call for a worker when they need to solve a problem – since an LMS is generally a separate, password-protected system, which is not easily searchable and the content within in it is not available in a usable format.

Smart Work starts with an understanding of what is important for the 21st century workplace. It’s not content delivery. We are awash in content. Smart workers need ways to enhance their experience-performance-reflection processes, not have more information dumped into the pipeline.

 

Leadership, Connectivity, Execution, Organization

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Powerful metaphors guide our collective thoughts. It took a long time to understand heliocentrism and then modern science even blasts that model apart somewhat. In spite of all our scientific knowledge, many people still believe in the geocentric model.

Metaphors that provide the common mental frameworks for our organizations are also powerful tools. For example, the company as a well-oiled machine conjures up a certain image. Today, more people are viewing the organization as a biological system, bringing new metaphors that can change the way we think, and act. The Socialcast blog has an infographic that shows what ants can teach the enterprise about teamwork starting with four challenges of distributed teams:

  1. Too much Focus on Technology and Process.
  2. Focus is on Doing, not Goals.
  3. Weak team Cohesion.
  4. Trouble adopting Technology.

One answer is the concept of bioteams, with four key zones that should be supported by the organization.

“We are all leaders. We must keep one another informed in real time. We trust living systems to self-organize”; writes Jay Cross on bioteams. A self-organizing, living system versus a well-oiled machine: pick the company you would rather work for.

My experience with distributed teams confirms these four essential components. I would also add an essential ingredient that strengthens the bonds between these four components and that is trust. However, even with new frameworks and models, the hard work is in changing practice, as those persevering geocentrists show.

Training departments will shrink

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The Epic social learning debate for Summer 2011 states:

“This house believes that as social learning grows, so the requirement for traditional training departments shrinks.”

Let’s examine why they grew in the first place. Training on a massive scale was a requirement for preparing citizen soldiers for war and initial methods were tested during the second world war (1939-45). A systems approach did not become standardized until after the war, led by applied research done by Robert Gagné, as noted by Donald Clark:

One of the interesting system development projects discussed in Gagne’s book is building a revised course of instruction for armor crewman training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The project was code named SHOCKACTION and undertaken during the late 1950s. The course trained tank crewmen to act as a tank commander, driver, gunner, or loader of the Army’s main battle tank. The course was considered important and worthy of considerable investment of research and development funds. It was noted by officers that the present course was not training armor crewmen to a level of proficiency.

The famous ADDIE model did not get adopted until 1975, just as the baby boomers were entering university and the business world. There was a need to train lots of people in North America and later elsewhere as economies grew. Training departments rose to the challenge.

For thousands of years people have developed work skills through apprenticeship. This worked for small numbers and developed into the highly structured guild system in Europe. Industrialization marked the fall of the guild system. The nation state and the industrial economy adopted a new competency development framework, from which we have modern training departments, professional associations, job competency models, etc. But the industrial economy no longer drives the developed world. Even the information economy  is giving way to the creative economy.

 

In Social learning, complexity & the enterprise, I go over many of the factors that are forcing us to change how we think about learning and work, which is what training departments are supposed to focus on. The most significant change is in how we relate to, and deal with, information and knowledge. We no longer have to go to the library to get a book and we have access to a growing network of expertise from people (like bloggers) who are willing to share their knowledge for free. Instructional content is no longer a scarcity. Neither are “instructors”. Expertise is becoming ubiquitous though the likes of Wikipedia and social networks.

The draining of the hierarchical pyramid will change not only training, but also intellectual property and the social contract with workers. In a shifting networked world, every artificial  structure will be affected, so why should the training department be impervious to these effects? Even money will change, as this article about  The Bitcoin Epoch being akin to the Printing Press Revolution shows.

We are in a management revolution, testing out new models such as the social enterprise, democracy in the workplace, chaordic organizations and networked free-agents. Will the rise of social learning be the “cause” of the shrinking training department? Probably not. But it will be one of the effects.

Becoming personal knowledge managers

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Nick Milton highlights an overview of knowledge management (KM) from Susan Camarena, CKO at the Federal Transit Authority, which includes:

How do we implement KM?

We already are doing it!

Everyone has their own KM program! Like:

  • Saving numbers of the “right” person to call on an old, wrinkled and well used piece of paper.
  • Reusing a memo that was approved as your template for the next memo to ensure it gets through.”
  • Getting a movie recommendation – you trust their opinion and ensure you don’t waste your time!

However, an ad-hoc approach is not efficient

You don’t learn from what I (and others) know!!!

This is the root of personal knowledge management (PKM). With digital information overload, an ad hoc method is definitely not efficient but neither is a standardized method for everyone in the organization. I’ve described my own framework as well as those of others. Setting filters is a good first step, as Five Forms of Filtering by Tim Kastelle explains.

Some of us are naive in our filtering, just going with what we think is best. Others rely on experts but that is more and more inadequate in our increasingly complex world of expertise. We need to develop networks of expertise and regularly check them for diversity and signal vs noise. Relying on a single set of algorithms can be dangerous so we need to establish heuristics that foster more critical thinking. The way we become better knowledge managers ourselves is through practice because information is not enough, we need to learn from experience. PKM is a process to capture  some of those experiences and learn through more structured sense-making and sharing.

The only knowledge that can be managed is our own.

Social, not mediated

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Earlier this year I wrote that social media for marketing is just the tip of the iceberg. The real power of social media is for getting things done. They facilitate learning and working; which are now joined at hip in the creative, complex workplace that’s 24/7 in multiple time zones and always-on.

I think phase one of social media is almost over. It started with the early adopters who were enthused and helpful. It is finishing with the carpet-baggers; all those social media gurus and brands who want to sell you stuff and see this as an easy marketplace. Just as the snake-oil salesmen followed the travelling circuses and chautauquas in the developing American West, so did every vendor and spammer jump on the social media bandwagon. And some of the bigger kids did too.

Now some organizations are realizing how interconnected, networked people can get things done by working smarter. They are seeing the iceberg under the water line and realizing that social is bigger than media. As Umair Haque describes it, we need to move from social media to social strategy:

Yet, most “social media” strategies have one or more of three goals: to “push product,” “build buzz,” or “engage consumers.” None of these lives up to the Internet’s promise of meaning. They’re just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I’ve been calling thicker value.

Organizations don’t need “social media” strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it’s the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.

My observations of Google Plus reinforce why we need to shift away from the tip of the iceberg (media) and focus on its base (social). The current business model for social network platforms is antithetical to what we really need to use them for. We are the product being sold. How can that be a sustainable social contract?

Google Plus wants to sell my data, hence the requirement to use my real name. It’s not about me; it’s about the advertisers. I think the people who are critical of Google Plus (and it could have been any other company) are signs of an initial sea change. Growing resentment of being used and subjected to constantly changing terms of service could result in a desire for common and open social platforms. Governments and NGO’s could step up and get these going but the marketplace may demand it.  If Status.net offered an ad-free & no-selling-of-data platform for $25 per year (same as Flickr Pro), would there be enough people for a viable business model? Would it be possible to give free accounts to those who cannot afford it?

I believe that as social networking becomes more important in our work and leisure activities, we will be willing to pay for it, in return for controlling our data. I hope that time is soon.

The adaptive organisation

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Continuing from the post: Adapting …

The adaptive organisation is the second-last chapter of Adapt: Why success always starts with failure, followed by Adapting and you. In the final chapters, Tim Harford examines how groups and individuals can strive to adapt, and here are some highlights.

“So let’s first acknowledge a crucial difference: individuals, unlike populations, can succeed without adapting.” This statement explains a lot about what happens in organizations ;)

Case study of Timpson:

The first thing Timpson does when it buys another business is to rip out the electronic point-of-sale machines (there are always EPOS machines) and replace them with old-fashioned cash registers. ‘EPOS lets people at head office run the business’, explains John Timpson. ‘I don’t want them to run the business.’ EPOS machines empower head offices but they make it harder to be flexible and give customers what they need.

… how senior executives must feel when their cutting-edge, market-leading business finds itself being disrupted by a foolish-looking new technology:

A sufficiently disruptive innovation bypasses almost everybody who matters at a company: the Rolodex full of key customers becomes useless; the old skills are no longer called for; decades of industry experience count for nothing. In short, everyone who counts in a company will lose status if the disruptive innovation catches on inside that company — and whether consciously or unconsciously, they will often make sure that it doesn’t.

These, then, are the three obstacles to heeding that old advice, ‘learn from your mistakes’:

  1. denial, because we cannot separate our error from sense of self-worth;
  2. self-destructive behaviour, because … we compound our losses by trying to compensate for them;
  3. rose-tinted processes … whereby we remember past mistakes as though they were triumphs, or mash together our failures with our successes.

How to overcome these obstacles:

“Honest advice from others is better.”

Perhaps there is one reason why researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receive feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.

“So it’s worth remembering once again why it is worth experimenting, even though many experiments will, indeed, end in failure. It’s because the process of correcting the mistakes can be more liberating than the mistakes themselves are crushing, even though at the time we so often feel that the reverse is true.”

The book covers and cites several key points from The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Future of Management, which may make it a bit tedious for those who’ve read many management books, but overall I would recommend it as a fresh perspective on some key organizational and structural issues.

 

Tribes and networks coexist

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So the social networking utopia is not coming, writes Mashable’s Chris Taylor on CNN. He cites one Dunbar number (now all the rage) and concludes:

Turns out we’re hardwired to get along best in tight groups of no more than 150, and have been since we were living on the African savannah. Armies take advantage of this hardwiring, as do the smartest corporations, not to mention wedding planners.

Dunbar’s research looked at relationships among primates and didn’t take into account loose ties or electronically mediated & enhanced communications. It is not a fair comparison. But Taylor’s words on Tribalism triggered an old connection for me:

A study released this month shows that digital tribalism is alive and well in the social network era. The tribes I’m talking about aren’t nations, corporations or sports teams, though clearly these brands all matter as much as they ever did.

I’m talking literally about tribes — as in the kind of village-sized small groups most of us lived among for nearly all of human history, right up until the 20th century. Small groups that we now seem to be organizing ourselves into again — virtually.

A few years ago I came across a framework of our four primary historical modes of organizing – Tribal; Institutional; Markets; Networks. The TIMN framework shows how we have evolved as a society. It has not been a clean progression from one mode to the next but rather the new form built-upon and changed the previous mode.

A key point of this framework is that Tribes exist within Institutions, Markets AND Networks. We never lose our affinity for community groups or family, but each mode brings new factors that influence our previous modes. So yes, tribalism is alive and well in online social networks. It’s just not the same tribalism of several hundred years ago.

We are in a transition from a market to network-dominated society, and according to David Ronfeldt, each transition has its hazards. While tribal societies may result in nepotism, networked societies can lead to deception, as Mashable itself has reported. It’s interesting that tribes of hackers are a potential counter to network deception.

Ronfeldt states that the initial tribal form informs the other modes and can have a profound influence as they evolve.

Balanced combination is apparently imperative: Each form (and its realm) builds on its predecessor(s). In the progression from T through T+I+M+N, the rise of a new form depends on the successes (and failures) achieved through the earlier forms. For a society to progress optimally through the addition of new forms, no single form should be allowed to dominate any other, and none should be suppressed or eliminated. A society’s potential to function well at a given stage, and to evolve to a higher level of complexity, depends on its ability to integrate these inherently contradictory forms into a well-functioning whole. A society can constrain its prospects for evolutionary growth by elevating a single form to primacy — as appears to be a tendency at times in market-mad America.

So tribes are not dead, and neither are institutions and markets, in a networked society. We need to understand all four modes as we make the current transition. Saying that tribes render social networks useless after 150 connections is a bit trite. The real work is in figuring out how best to create organizations, and societies, that balance combinations of all four modes, emphasize their bright sides and remain in perpetual Beta [what Ronfeldt calls incomplete adaptation].

The TIMN framework is very useful for having deeper conversations and increasing our understanding of what we’re going through as a society. It should be required reading for organizational leaders and politicians as well.

Resetting learning and work

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A large portion of the workforce face significant barriers to being autonomous learners on the job. From early on we are told to look to authority and direction in learning and work. The idea that there is a right answer, or an expert with the right answer, begins in our schools. John Taylor Gatto describes this in the seven-lesson schoolteacher.

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.

Good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do. In much of the industrial/service/information workplace you’re not paid to think, but to do the bidding of someone else. I know this is changing in many places, but a job is still a JOB.

Today, more of our learning is on the job so that formal training is an increasingly smaller percentage of what we need to get things done. Our informal learning needs will continue to grow, as Robert Kelley showed over a 20-year CMU study of knowledge workers. He asked:

“What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

Workers need to take control of their learning, just at a time when the great majority (especially baby boomers) have been educated by the system that Gatto describes above and have endured countless hours of training measured by hours in a classroom. The crows have been culled from many flocks of turkeys.

Here’s a quote from Peter Drucker’s 2005 article Managing Oneself, in HBR (Slideshare Synopsis of Managing Oneself):

The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naïve. But managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer. Further, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure. Every existing society, even the most individualistic one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put.

Tom Peters called this change in mindset, Brand You and predicted over a decade ago that “90+ percent of White Collar Jobs will be totally reinvented/reconceived in the next decade”. Has yours? I don’t think we’re there yet.

For years, I put forth practical methods, like Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Skills 2.0 as one part of the equation. The other part is changing organizational structures.

Dan Pink says we’re moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Like artists, we need to see and learn for ourselves. The great challenge for knowledge workers is to become knowledge managers – managers of their own knowledge. It’s accepting life in perpetual Beta.

However, we don’t have to do this alone. We can become independent while embracing our interdependence. We just need to get over our dependence on others who “provide a job” or “give us an education”. It’s not theirs to give. It’s ours to co-create.

I’ve learned a lot working for myself these past eight years. I’ve had to figure many things out on my own. Freelancing started the day after I was laid-off. PKM was my way of dealing with the fact of no professional development budget. But I learned with the help of others, most recently my colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance.  

Taking control of our learning and our work isn’t really a revolution. It’s more like a reset to the proper default position for the conceptual age.