Learning

Learning

The networked enterprise and learning support

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Would you rather go to a doctor who is in the band-aid business or the healing business? Prescribing training for all organizational learning is like handing out band-aids without a diagnosis. Training is often a solution in search of a problem.

This becomes evident when ~80% of learning on the job is informal and less than 10% of the knowledge needed for work is in our heads. But how much organizational effort is put into training, above all else? If it’s more than 20% of the learning support budget then it’s probably being misspent. For instance, Peter Senge’s comprehensive research showed that the average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old. What is the reason for this? Organizational learning. Basically, individual learning in organizations is irrelevant. Work is almost never done by one person alone. Almost all value is created by teams and networks of people.

Enterprise training and its ADDIE framework are designed to develop individual skills, where the objective is always, “the learner will be able to …” not, “the organization will be able to …”. The basic premise is that any trained human cog will be able to fit into the organizational machine. But knowledge-intensive and creative enterprises don’t work that way. Every node in the networked enterprise is unique but the network itself is even more important. Social learning is how we get things done in networks. This is how nature and complex adaptive systems work – social learning is the best strategy.

We need to understand, encourage and support social learning in the enterprise.

Recently, Jane Hart & Jay Cross created this graphic that shows the five stages of workplace learning.

One limitation of this representation is that the first four stages look bigger than the fifth stage and could be perceived as being more important. Here’s a different perspective on the same theme.

My recent post on the value of the LMS stems from the perspective that the networked enterprise is a new organizational form that needs different support mechanisms.  Siloed support functions are becoming redundant, as are siloed technologies. Unless a platform like an LMS is actually used to get work done, it will become redundant as well. When learning is the work then it has to be integrated with working. That means stand-alone L&D departments (and the stand-alone LMS) are peripheral to 90% of the learning that is happening. The new focus of the training department in the networked enterprise must be on communicating, connecting and collaborating, and that means integrating with the work being done, not using parallel processes and technologies.

Identifying a collaboration platform

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This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post that the LMS is no longer the centre of the universe and Jane Hart’s post today on A Transition Path to the Future. According to Jane, Step One in this transition is:

There are, of course, a number of steps on the transition path to a post-LMS future, and one of the first inevitably involves taking a good hard look at how your LMS is performing.  It may be that you want to retain it in some cut-down form, or it may be that it is providing no real value at all, and it is a barrier to “learning” .  I’m not suggesting that in every case, you should junk your LMS completely – in fact that would probably involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater! – but you certainly need to take an honest look at whether it is delivering what you need in the workplace today.

Step Two, or a concurrent step, would be to look at how to enhance collaboration.

First of all, collaborative work tools must be simple to be effective. The real complexity should come out of the emergent work, not the software. A collaboration platform that is over-engineered would be counterproductive. The key aspect of a collaboration platform is that should make work more transparent and rewards sharing. Does your LMS do this? Does it simplify work and make it more transparent for everyone in the network? Does it enhance serendipitous learning?

The options then become:

  • Open the LMS so it can be used in the daily workflow
  • Connect the LMS to a collaborative work platform
  • Migrate learning to a collaboration platform and minimize use of the LMS

Given the nature of many LMS, the last option is the most likely. Once again, it’s about getting work done. If learning is embedded in the work tools, then there is little need to go to a separate place (LMS) to “do some learning”. Here are some examples:

  • Use blogs to replace group e-mails so that information can be updated on a given subject/topic. This makes the work transparent and encourages learning.
  • Use wikis for all documentation. This reinforces the notion of work in perpetual Beta and encourages business improvement.
  • Adopt presence tools (IM, micro-blogging) so you know who is doing what in the organization. Tools like Twitter/Yammer/Laconica also become excellent places to jot down notes in public, which encourages serendipitous learning.

The key challenge is merging work and learning, especially in the minds of workers. I’ve noted before that the main objective of the modern training department should be to enable knowledge to flow in the organization. The primary function of learning professionals within such a collaborative work model is to connect and communicate, based on three core processes:

  1. Facilitate collaborative work and learning amongst workers, especially as peers.
  2. Sense patterns and help develop emergent work and learning practices.
  3. Work with management to fund and develop better tools and processes for workers.

If your LMS is not helping you with these processes then it’s time to find a better platform.  I recently described one such platform – Elgg: it’s a community effort:

Another platform that I have used since its early days is Elgg, an open source social networking platform that attracted me because of its unique underlying model. We started using Elgg for an online medical community of practice in 2004 after going through dozens of platforms. The key differentiator of Elgg is that the individual [worker] is the centre of all the action. A course is just a node that an individual connects to [does not disrupt work flow]. You don’t “enter” a course, you just connect to it, as you would to a colleague or friend. This is real user control. We liked Elgg so much that we paid to develop a calendar function and then gave the code to the community.

In 2005 I described Elgg as a Content/Community/Collaboration Management System that allows you to develop, invent and construct knowledge [knowledge management & social learning]. That sure beats any LMS, in my opinion. Elgg is used for commercial applications like Emerald Publishing as well as the foundation for the Eduspaces community.

The Elgg platform has matured in the past six years and has a strong community and a solid product (v. 1.7). My colleague Jane Hart provides Elgg services for education & business. Soon, Elgg.com will launch with services for those who want a hosted community platform. One major advantage of Elgg will be the ability to take your data and have it hosted elsewhere. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a wise business decision. The Elgg community blog has more information.

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* Here is Jane Hart’s follow-up post on Elgg as a collaboration platform.

LMS is no longer the centre of the universe

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OK, so here’s the deal – if learning is work and work is learning, why is organizational learning controlled by a learning management systems (LMS) that isn’t connected to the work being done in the enterprise? Learning is no longer what you do before you go to work, never having to learn anything else in order to do your job. In the 21st century networked economy, learning and working are becoming one.

As Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers, we need to keep learning in order to get our jobs done – “What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

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

In a networked economy, social learning is how we get things done. Training, based on solid documentation of processes and procedures, works well at lower levels of complexity and we can develop best practices. As complexity increases, we need more tacit knowledge, which cannot be documented. Conversation is a prime medium for the sharing of tacit knowledge and is the foundation for collaborative work. We need to communicate in order to collaborate. This is why organizations need to manage what matters – collaboration.

The LMS framework is being challenged for its supremacy over organizational learning much as heliocentricity showed European civilization that we were not the centre of the galaxy. Jane Hart says that, “what is needed is an organisational system that SUPPORTS and ENABLES this informal approach to learning.” That system is one where the LMS is nothing more than a node in the network, which means that the LMS has to play nice with others (which most do not). The centre of the universe has shifted for training & development professionals and they can ignore this shift, as the Catholic church did, or they can become part of the Learning Reformation.

Complexity links

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I use Delicious to keep track of web resources and recently passed on, via Twitter, my social bookmarks tagged with complexity. Here are some of those bookmarks.

James Surowiecki’s three conditions on the use of the Wisdom of Crowds [something often overlooked], via Dave Snowden:

  1. independence of opinion between the individuals
  2. relevant diversity among the individuals
  3. decentralization of the decision-making process

A short explanation of the Cynefin framework (and video by Shawn Callahan), by Ton Zijlstra:

Over the years I’ve seen the number of issues companies and professionals are dealing with shift more and more to the complex realm. Because our internet and mobile communications connected world as a whole has shifted towards this complex domain more by increasing the connections between us and as a result the speed of change, the dynamics around us and the amount of information. A quantitative shift with massive qualitative impact. Complexity is where predictability is absent, and only in hindsight cause and effect are clear. It’s the messy bits, as Shawn says, where human interaction, culture, innovation, trust are at play. And it’s those same messy bits where increasingly organizations are able to distinguish themselves from others, or not.

On transforming to the enterprise of the future, by Art Murray at KM World:

Move from a posture of sense-and-respond to one of “co-creating.”

Stephan Haeckel’s Adaptive Enterprise brought us from make-and-sell to sense-and-respond. In today’s environment, even sense-and-respond may not be enough. Enabled by massive social networks with memberships numbering in the hundreds of millions, the cycle of listening to customers and filling their wants and needs is both rapid and continuous. You need to get into your customer’s mind, and let your customer into yours. The same goes for your suppliers, even your competitors.

Action: Trash the stupid customer surveys, along with the sales presentations. Have an ongoing conversation instead. Ask thought-provoking, open-ended questions and listen intently (the right way to do knowledge capture). Focus on needs and desired results, and find the most efficient and effective way to achieve them.

Added bonus: Do the same internally, from staff meetings to budget planning to performance reviews. Get knowledge flowing in all directions.

Rob Paterson, “ … we refuse to see the complex and work as if complexity was complicated or simple.”

It’s a simple message, really. But if you don’t get it, you’re headed for chaos.

Simple = easily knowable.

Complicated = not simple, but still knowable.

Complex = not fully knowable, but reasonably predictable.

Chaotic = neither knowable nor predictable.

Simple Rules, by Michael Dubakov [check out the simulations]:

Many complex systems are based on simple rules. A set of several simple rules leads to complex, intelligent behavior. While a set of complex rules often leads to a dumb and primitive behavior. There are many examples.

The Cynefin framework and (the complexity of ) classroom instruction, by Andrew Cerniglia:

Classroom instruction is complex but do we treat it as such? Is “sensing” a priority of teacher education? How would an instructor who waits for “patterns to emerge” be viewed by their supervisor? As laid back? Aloof? And does outcome-based education (unintentionally) result in educators treating complex situations as complicated, or worse yet, simple in nature?

TLt2010 Presentation on Net Work Learning

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I am presenting at Tlt2010 in Saskatoon this morning. Here’s the overview:

The network era is blurring the lines between working, learning and playing. As we become more connected, our governing models, our business structures, and our ways to support learning are all getting more complex. Social learning is how knowledge is generated in networks – and networks are where many of us will be working. Net work means learning to work anew.

These are the finalized slides, revised this morning. [Re-posted with explanatory notes on 14 May 2010]

Net work learning with notes

I’ve really enjoyed the presentations by my co-presenters, Scott Leslie and David Wiley and of course their insights and comments had me making last-minute changes this morning.

Note: I’m told the video of this presentation will be available in about a week or so. I’ll pass it on via twitter and add the link here.

Instructional or Formal; whatever

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I used this chart, developed a few years ago, to explain in a simplified way the differences between Learning Interventions and Instructional Interventions.

It shows that training & education (in the workplace) should concentrate on addressing a clear lack of knowledge and skills by using appropriate instructional interventions, well-established over the years.

Non-instructional learning interventions are those that provide tools and resources in order to do something we don’t know (or have forgotten) how to do. This is typically the area of performance support but also communities of practice, personal knowledge management, personal learning environments, etc. Informal learning would be another name for non-instructional. Instructional Systems Development (ISD) does not address non-instructional (informal) learning requirements and even the literature on performance support lacks clear design guidelines. Informal learning (or whatever you want to call it) is a major opportunity for improving work performance.

Informal learning needs will continue to grow as more work requires access to contextual knowledge, as Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers:

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

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

We cannot train individuals for that 90% but we can support access to knowledge and expertise across the enterprise. This is an opportunity.  There is much experience available in the fields of knowledge management, organizational design, human-computer interaction and information design that is valid and can be put to good use.

However, practitioners don’t always talk to each other or use the same frameworks and terminology. This is where I see Jay Cross’ concept of workscapes (PDF) going – a way to integrate these fields and use what we already know.

Working smarter is the key to sustainability and perpetual improvement. Knowledge work and learning to work smarter are becoming indistinguishable. The accelerating rate of change in business forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete.

The infrastructure for working smarter is called a workscape. It’s not a separate function so much as another way of looking at how we organize work. Workscaping helps people grow so that their organizations may prosper. Workscapes are pervasive. They are certainly not lodged in a training department. In fact, they make the training department obsolete.

Working smarter also means working together but first we have to get out of our disciplinary silos.

Formalized informal learning: a blend we don’t need

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Telling people that we can “formalize informal learning” is a not so subtle way of saying, “it’s OK, you don’t have to make any fundamental changes to the way you’ve been been doing training & development for the past half century”.

I asked the question in February’s eCollab Blog Carnival, with tongue very close to my cheek, because I knew it would stimulate discussion on the role of informal learning in workplace performance. I never thought anyone would seriously adopt it, but on viewing Jay Cross’s slides yesterday, it seems many have.

Here is an excerpt from an interview I did with Jay on the subject:

When asked if we should try to formalize informal learning, Jay responded by saying that it’s the wrong question. It would be like asking if we should “informalize” formal training. A key understanding that Jay wants to get across to everyone in the workplace learning arena is that it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather how much informal and how much formal learning should we support and who is determining what’s to be done. All learning is a bit of both. His promotion of informal learning is not to replace formal training but to open up the possibilities of supporting the other 80% of learning that has been ignored for far too long.

Two core themes in supporting informal learning are control and trust. Managers and supervisors need to give up some control and organizations must learn to trust their people, says Jay. Embracing, encouraging and supporting informal learning is part of a greater workplace cultural change.

Aye, there’s the rub – our organizations actually need to change.

We need to change from this:

To this:

This kind of change is not just adding another “blend” to the training bar-mix. It is a fundamental change required to move from a command & control pyramid to a network. It means a very different training department, if it’s even called that any more, as well as a new framework for informal, social learning in the enterprise. The required role for supporting workers is connecting, communicating & collaborating.

Jim McGee summed up the difference in yesterday’s conversation on a world without KM, the “best argument for Social Networks over Knowledge Management is shift in perspective from static content to dynamic interaction“.

It’s the same for training. Informal learning is dynamic and social (on the fly, just-in-time, self-directed, group-directed, serendipitous) while formal training is static (designed, directed, evaluated). What about a world without ISD (instructional systems design)? The best argument favouring informal learning over formal training is a shift in perspective from static content to dynamic interaction. It also means a loss of control for training departments everywhere. Tough.

Don’t try to formalize informal learning. Just help people do their jobs.

Here’s some final advice from @mneff during yesterday’s KM conversation: “Focus on connection & collaboration. The management of assets is mostly obsolete by the time it is stored.”

Emergent Social Media

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Four major types of social media (SM), according to Patti Anklam are:

  • Media SM – news, commentary & opinions
  • Customer SM – listening to customers, responding to market needs
  • Enterprise SM – provide the conditions for enabling knowledge & action to emerge
  • Personal SM – learning, creating, co-creating, sharing, weaving

Patti also asks, what’s the fifth SM? — “the networked, community, purposeful use of social media to bind networks, causes, and events.” Ideas include: Cause; Crowd & Community SM. My suggestion would be Emergent SM, because it is not separate but a result of activities in the other four.

Learning is described as an essential part of Personal SM but really it is part of all four. In networks, learning cannot be pulled out as a separate activity. We have to stop thinking of learning as a separate thing/area/silo. As I have said before, when you learn with and from your customers, learning and marketing are the same. Perhaps getting rid of the L word is a start. It’s all learning.

Here’s my perspective:

Personal SM facilitates cooperation in networks. It is self-directed.

Enterprise SM enables collaboration inside the organization and focuses on shared objectives.

Media & Customer SM are specialized areas for certain organizational objectives and are market focused.

Emergent SM develops as continuous learning, co-creating & sharing become the norm, at the individual, organizational and market level. As Esko Kilpi states:

Complex organizations are neither products of random experimentation, nor can they be perfectly designed beforehand  and managed efficiently top down. The Internet could not have been designed top down, nor can any living organism be planned from outside.

What is going on in these cases is called emergence. Interaction itself has the capacity to create emergent structure, coherence, consistency and change.

Emergent SM is the combination of self-directed learners and learning organizations who connect as a network that learns: Networking = Learning

Sense-making glossary

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PARC offers a glossary of quite useful sense-making terms. Sense-making is what the second part of the Seek-Sense-Share PKM model is about.

Sense-making – The process by which individuals (or organizations) create an understanding so that they can act in a principled and informed manner …

Source-linked sensemaking – In conventional media, a document about a topic may cite a list of references. In source-linked sense-making, the report is an active document with active links for retrieving the sources used …

Examples of sensemaking operations are abstracting, annotating, assumption linking, classifying, clustering, comparing elements or schemas, concept splitting, making a cross product, detailing, document mining, emitting, extracting, format stripping, foraging,  fusing,  goal shifting, instantiating schemas, linking, matching,  negotiating meaning, perceiving order, re-encoding, refining, retrieving, segmenting, shifting representations, source linking, summarizing, stemming, structuring, transforming, and zoning.

Resumable sensemaking is the sensemaking analog of life-long learning, that is, it embodies the idea that (at least potentially) the process of making sense is never done.

Many of the definitions are framed around report writing but these can easily be expanded into the broader areas of personal knowledge management or personal learning environments.

Agility and Autonomy

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for social learning to be successfully implemented in an organisation it is not just about adding in the new tools or platforms but also about acquiring a new mindset and new skillset for both learning professionals and individuals.

Jane Hart  shows in this Table; Social Learning = New Toolset + New Mindset + New Skillset

New Mindset: Agility

A key part of the New Mindset is agility. This is one of the limitations of instructional design as it too often practiced. For instance, at one time, software engineers assumed they could design a program and then build it based on the initial  specifications. Today, that is not often the case and much software development has adopted more agile methods. Assuming you know everything at the start of a complex development project is rather arrogant. This article on the future of software development had me asking if instructional design is also arrogant:

The problem was that the Waterfall Model was arrogant. The arrogance came from the fact that we believed that we could always engineer the perfect system on the first try. The second problem with it was that in nature, dynamic systems are not engineered, they evolve. It is the evolutionary idea that led to the development of agile methods.

Instead of factory-style production teams, agile programming uses far fewer, but better, programmers. The principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing often and testing often are all applicable to developing good instructional programs.

A culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Agile organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new.

New Skillset: Autonomy

I have observed over the years that a significant portion of the workforce has not been able to develop the skills to learn for themselves. What many lack are tools, methods and practices to learn and to take action. Autonomous learners face many barriers on the job, particularly the pervasive attitude that you must look busy or you’re not working.

We are trained early in life to look to authority for 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.

The message from many workplaces continues to be that good employees wait for their supervisor to tell them what to do.

However, when we move away from a “design it first, then build it” mindset, we need to engage everyone in critical and systems thinking. Workers in agile workplaces must be passionate, adaptive, innovative, and collaborative. The way to begin is to become autonomous.

Developing practical methods, like PKM, is a start on the path to autonomy. A major premise of PKM is that it is Personal and there are many ways to practice it.  We need to think about and talk about work differently. For example, dropping the notion of being paid for time is one way to start this change.  An hourly wage implies that people are interchangeable, but no two minds are the same. Many of our human resource practices should be questioned and dropped.

Social Learning

Social learning is how things get done in networks. For example, Sue Schnorr recently asked if Networking = Learning?. It seems that way to me. Learner autonomy is a foundation for effective social learning within and without the enterprise and social learning is the lubricant for an agile organization. Agility is a necessity because we are dealing with increasing complexity.

Esko Kilpi puts it very succinctly. Let me paraphrase his words:

In order to develop the necessary emergent practices to deal with complexity you need to first cultivate diversity [autonomy of each learner] .

You also need rich and deep connections, but these are not enough if you don’t also have meaningful conversations [social learning].

Learning is the work …