Learning

Learning

Relevance in the Network

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In Become a meta L&D Manager (requires free registration), my colleagues Jay Cross & Clark Quinn advise that it’s time to take a broader look at learning in the organization:

“Your charter as head of L&D [learning & development] is to optimise learning throughout the organisation, not just in the pockets that once belonged to HR. This takes a broader perspective than what you deal with day-to-day. You’ve got to rise above the noise to see the underlying patterns and then optimise them.”

In the comments, Martine Parry adds to this topical article, saying that the ” … training role will become responsible for large deployments and for legal and governance issues – only.” This is the root of the change that we are facing in organizations today: relevance in the network. There are many silos of support functions in any large organization, each with their own culture and perspectives on business performance – HR; L&D; IT; KM; Marketing; Communications; et al. And of course there are also the individual business units as well as the key driver of revenue in many companies – Sales. If roles have to merge, who will win out, a business unit or a support function? It’s quite possible that the traditional training function will become marginalized.

History shows that significant changes in how we communicate result in significant changes in how we work. Many silos of support functions will not work in a network-centric organization as there’s too much redundancy, duplication of effort and slowness to react. It’s becoming obvious that only highly networked organizations are going to be successful. As another colleague, Jon Husband, puts it:

“The performance management schemes, grade levels in the organizations and compensation practices have yet to recognize how work gets done in networked environments and increasingly, in a networked world.”

Does it really matter that training or L&D will be marginalized? In the long run, I think not. We are seeing the merging of roles and functions as networks bypass command & control. That means that each departmental silo will lose some of its traditional power. What will emerge will have to be more effective for the networked organization. As a learning or workplace performance professional your choice is clear:

  1. Fight to ensure that your department wins the short-term internal political game of leading organizational learning; or
  2. Park your ego (and that of your tribe) to work with everyone in the organization to make it more effective in the long-term.

It’s obvious which choice I would recommend but #2 will be fraught with problems, such as being ostracized by your departmental colleagues and maybe even working yourself out of a job. However, if your organization doesn’t succeed in the long run, neither will your job.

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Photo by ZoomZoom

Being participative

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Matthew Hodgson asks at The AppGap what participation and engagement really mean and he refers to the IAP2  core values of public participation. These values, based on “the belief that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process” are important for a participative democracy but I think that something is still missing. The values seem to imply that people are involved during the decision-making process only, as in let’s get some public input and set up some round tables, forums and discussion areas; much as the government is doing on copyright in Canada.

Like voting every four years, even the most participatory models offered by our institutions fail to grasp the nature of our networked world. Today, much of the public is always-on and you can find someone talking about the issues. Participation doesn’t stop any more. One shot deals, even those that are open and inclusive, do not recognize this sea change in communications.

Euan Semple discusses how different life and work in a global network are going to be:

I am currently reading Manuel Castells’ fantastic book The Power of Communication. In it he talks of the global network society’s tendency to truncate time and how the industrial society, with its ideas of progress, deferred gratification, Protestant work ethic etc. made becoming more important than being. In his view in the networked society “being cancels becoming”.

As a fellow freelancer, Euan is being rather than becoming. There is no corporate ladder to climb or professional designation to achieve. If everyone felt this way, many of our institutions (schools, universities, certification bodies) would collapse. Perhaps that is why many will in the near future.

The challenge for organizations and institutions in a global networked society will be to incorporate “being” into their management models. Participation becomes a constant and dynamic flow through the organization and outside it. How can you be participative in everything, not just to make the initial decision? How does that change the role of management? What is management in a network? There are probably some answers from those who are already being, accepting life in Beta, as well as those who never embraced the industrial model of becoming. We have to look to the edges of modern society to see the possibilities.

Living on the EdgePhoto: Living on the Edge by Giant Ginkgo

The marginalized training function

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Tony Karrer clarifies his comments about traditional training becoming “marginalized”, which is worth a full read but I’d like to pick up on this comment:

If you look at what makes a good situation for formal learning:

  • Large Audience
  • Similar Level / Needs
  • Known/Stable Content
  • Few Out of Bounds cases

How many organizations have these conditions and are they increasing or decreasing? Are there many “large audiences” of “similar needs and levels of experience” in your organization? How about content that is known and stable? Even compliance training changes as new regulations try to counter every unique case.

I have little doubt that most knowledge work is becoming more complex if for no other reason than the fact that we have squeezed out most redundancy in our systems and have automated any tasks we can. The only good-quality, high-paying work that is left requires contextual knowledge, problem-solving and creativity for those “out of bounds cases”. Training, other than in basic processes, does not address these skills.

cynefin and training

Knowledge workers need to learn from the emergent processes they  continuously create to deal with a complex environment. That means making things up (creativity) based on best guesses and collaboration and making parts of these processes tangible enough to pass on for their ever-shortening half-lives.

I would agree that training is getting marginalized but someone (or some department) in the organization will be taking responsibility for getting work done. For instance, at  Intuit, training is part of marketing and involves the customer directly. Your own organizational experience in the next few years may differ, but dealing with complexity will definitely be part of it.

Defining the Big Shift

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John Hagel has developed a number of “from-to” contrasts to illustrate the Big Shift. It’s great to get confirmation from someone like John Hagel that what I’ve been saying here for the past five years appears to be on track. Hagel cites several shifts in his post.

Knowledge stocks to flows – my take on learning stocks and flows (2005):

If learning is conversation, then online conversations are the essential component of online learning. Online communication can be divided into two parts (Lee Lefever):

 

Flows = Timely & Engaging (e.g. radio, speeches, e-mail, blogs)
Stocks = Archived, Organized for Reference (e.g. web site, database, book, voice mail)

 

One reason that blogs are so engaging is because they allow flow. On the other hand, stock on the Net is everywhere. In the case of digital learning content, fewer people are willing to pay for plain old stock, such as self-paced online courses. Learning content is now a commodity and over time the price of commodities tends to zero.

Some more comments on Flow.

Explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge (or knowledge that is in the early stages of emergence). This is the core of my always-in-development PKM process and also behind the idea that online content is not as important as the context in which it is used.

From push programs to pull platforms, which is how I felt in don’t push my learning (2006).

From stable environments to dynamic environments or what I called life in perpetual Beta (2006).

Take the time to read all of Hagel’s post and follow the link to the Big Shift as well.

Objectives of learning

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Charles Jennings notes in Who needs learning objectives? (free subscription required) that they’re mostly useful for instructional designers and not of much value on the job or for those taking the training.

If you are going to assess the impact of a course on individual participants’ performance in the workplace you need to forget about learning objectives for doing the job. Remember, learning objectives may be useful to help you create a logical design, but that’s all they’re useful for. When you get to measuring transfer of learning to the workplace you need to engage with the people who are in a position to observe behaviour and performance and those who are in a position to measure outputs. This usually means the manager and the team member who is responsible for maintaining performance metrics for the business or team – the balanced scorecard metrics or similar.

Connecting the training department (or training developers and instructional designers) to the work to be done is the real issue here. It may be easier to go off in isolation and develop some training when given learning objectives developed by a couple of subject matter experts, but good training can’t be developed in isolation. All human work is contextual, and models like valence theory show how we are all influenced by several factors:

valences.jpg

Getting involved in the way work is done and understanding issues is what’s necessary to be of service as a learning/training professional.

I still remember the case of a nurse clinician in charge of the performance and training for all nursing staff in a hospital. I asked to do an on-site performance analysis over several days and of course had to be accompanied. After two years on the job, it was her first time on the wards. Getting out of the office is a low-tech method that can reap major performance benefits. From a distant office view, only a few of the valences in the figure above would be noticeable.

Learning objectives are a way of reducing human performance into manageable Taylorist bits, stripped of their humanity. We have more tools to communicate and connect with people than ever before, so there are fewer excuses to reman distant from the work that needs to be done. As I’ve recommended before, the training department needs to get into the business of connecting & communicating:

invert pyramid

4 R’s – some favourites

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I usually ignore requests to follow a blog meme, but Virginia Yonkers has tagged me for a reflective post and this is my 1,500th blog post here so I thought it would be appropriate to at least partially  respond. Here are the requirements:

4 R’s Meme: Favourite Posts, asks those tagged to select 4 of their favourite posts from their own blog, one from each of the categories: Rants, Resources, Reflections and Revelations.
The posts are then listed with a brief summary on each describing:
why it was important,
why it had lasting value or impact,
how you would update it for today.
The intrepid bloggers are to tag all of their selected posts with the label postsofthepast and then select five (or so) other bloggers to tap with this meme.

Rant: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee started my journey of looking at ways to change the training function:

Training departments have allowed themselves to be lulled into a comfortable spot while times have been good. Everyone feels better after a little training, so that is what was prescribed – for all that ails you. I have met too few L&D professionals who can actually analyze work performance and come up with something other than training as the solution. Well, it seems that the days of the one trick pony are over.

I, for one, do not regret the demise of the L&D function. Perhaps our profession will wake up and start helping the organisations we serve.

This concept is being constantly updated in my presentations, with the last published version a collaborative effort on the future of the training department I did with Jay Cross.

Resources: Several years ago a created the Toolbox section of my website, which I update and add to from time to time. It’s probably time to review it, so thanks for the reminder.

Reflections: The question of schooling was a personal one as we saw how it failed to meet the needs of our children, and I wrote about schooling, deschooling or unschooling and followed this with many more questions than answers. Schooling is of course linked to our training systems and my reflections and rants merged in the question of a learning reformation.

Revelations: One ah-ha moment was that soft skills are foundational competencies, something I pretty much knew but had not articulated.

Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. The soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and other environmental supports. Once you have the soft skills to perform in a networked workplace, you’ll have foundational competencies.

Sorry, but the meme stops here, unless anyone else wants to take it up …

Future of Learning as a Business #4

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For Session 4 of today’s LearnTrends event Dave Wilkins, Learn.com, led off on the subject of social learning and the challenge of the concept as opposed to the technologies. Concepts such as wirearchy, the long tail or wisdom of crowds need to be understood and put into our work context before we can really become social learners at work. This means that you might wish to stay away from Web 2.0 terminology when selling it to clients or inside the organization. He also mentioned that there exist several ways of measuring ROI for social media, you just have to look for it. Dave discussed what Learn.com is doing so that anyone can build a course, share a document, publish, spin their own web space and collaborate with whom they want.

Amit Garg, Upside Learning, discussed his innovation and new projects team current focus on simulations & games, social learning and integrated accountability – areas that are on the near horizon for our industry.

Holly St John Peck, Peck Training Group, and  Monika Ebert, DifferentLens, discussed an informal learning solution with formal application using this model they developed (click for an interactive version):

Picture 2

There was some interesting discussion on whether this above approach keeps learning separate from daily working and performance.

Future of Learning as a Business #3

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Session 3 (C Level perspective) of the LearnTrends event started with Ann Herrman-Nehdi from the Instructional Systems Association talking about a change in the mindset of learning services with the “app” & “plug-n-play” construct of the Web. The notions of on-demand and small pieces are here to stay, as are social networks and the communication and cooperation that happens around them. Real personalization of learning is an opportunity for vendors.

Jeff Sugerman of Inscape Publishing discussed their product design concept, which is aimed at HR consultancies, so it has to be customized by each client. Open & customizable are important and they have even given up control over digital media management (e.g. DRM). He noted that the market’s desire for innovation and cool design is coupled with a reluctance to pay for it, and asks his company, “What would Picasso do?”

Pete Weaver at DDI led by saying how important it is to understand the client’s business intent. He said what is hard from a selling position is that many learning products and services are becoming commoditized. This is difficult when your value proposition is culture change and means that you have to discuss outcomes, not inputs (like the latest web technologies), with your clients.

Ben Snyder at Systemation talked about how stressed many of their clients are, due to staff reductions and the poor economy. This means that a consultative sales approach doesn’t work well. Clients also think that content, as well as time, should be free. Clients ARE willing to pay for experience. Another big trend is the move to gaming for learning [agree, but we have a way to go yet]. Finally, good customer service is important, so treat your clients well or they will go elsewhere.

Future of Learning as a Business #2

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Session 2 of the LearnTrends event looked at internal training organization. Gary Wise of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital discussed the PD&R continuum of Prepare – Deploy – Reinforce. The last part is essential in integrating learning into the work context, using performance support tools, coaching, mentoring and contacting experts. Harvesting feedback, like checking to see if job aids are effective, is also important but may be harder to implement. Most interestingly, Gary showed the training organization with a visual metaphor of a fortress surrounded by a moat. Gary recommends getting out of the fortress and thinking more like a sales person and getting out with “clients”. He is also a proponent of performance consulting skills for anyone in a training role.

Rob Robertson at Citi discussed the important role of training departments making connections with internal and external networks. I think learning as a network is essential in business today.

Allessandria Polizzi at Intuit said that clients who get training actually become better customers. Intuit went from low and “training” and then moved to higher quality training in more modes but at no costs. Interestingly, much of this training was not ADDIE developed stuff, but everything from user-generated content ( blogs, podcasts, videos) as well as connections on social networks. Customers were even paid to develop content. An important note: At Intuit, the Training department is a sub-set of the Marketing department. In the comments, Jennifer noted, “The e-Learning has kept my CPA husband loyal to intuit versus Peachtree, etc.”

Another observation during the discussion was that demand for formal training is dropping in organizations as collaborative and informal networks meet more and more individual performance needs.

Future of Learning as a Business #1

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Finally made it into the Elluminate session for today’s LearnTrends event thanks to D’Arcy Norman’s help with the Mac OS. I made it to the end of Panel 1 on industry perspectives. Tony Karrer asked if there are some new models for selling learning-related products & services online. LiveMocha was given as an example of giving online (language) learning away for free. Accelerated courses are available at a cost but there is a lot of free stuff. The Internet has created the expectation of getting content for free. However, Lisa Fagan said there can be a backlash if you give away for free as a bait & switch sales generation tactic.

Unfortunately I only made the last 10 minutes of the session but I’ll update this with links as they become available.