Performance Improvement

Human performance technology

Skills for learning professionals

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In a Learning 2.0 world, where learning and performance solutions take on a wider variety of forms and where churn happens at a much more rapid pace, what new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?

That’s the LCB big question, and my article on Skills 2.0, written one year ago, addressed this very question. So when this question was posed I had to make sure that I hadn’t changed my perspective in the interim. My basic premise was that working and learning in networks is an important aspect of professionalism:

Today, active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in a field. Being a learning professional in a Web 2.0 world is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.

I said that the main skill needed by learning professionals is attitude, especially being open to continuous learning and opening up your learning to public view in order to collaborate with other professionals. I’ve called this life in Beta.

In the past year, I’ve found that an open attitude is becoming more important. The people who blog or connect on Twitter can get things done quicker, find answers, get advice and can be more effective for their organizations. While working for a client this past week I used my online networks to quickly get advice that was important for the project. But you can’t do this without a network and it takes time to build trust. People usually have to know something about you before they help you out. Without some persistent point of presence (blog, Twitter, podcast), you’re invisible online unless you’re already famous.

Putting yourself out there as a learner first means that you may need to check your attitude before going online. People who pontificate or don’t help others may not be able to build a trusted network. This is even more evident on Twitter with its asymmetry, where people you follow don’t have to follow you back. Having no followers may be a sign that you don’t have much to give back to your network. That could make it more difficult to get information and advice when you need it. Twitter has amplified many aspects of blogging. You can follow more people, send out more (short) messages and get really quick feedback. This amplification will likely continue with future social networking technologies.

Last year, I concluded:

If we limit our conversations to only those in the same office, we’re missing out. People with larger and more diverse networks have an advantage as learning professionals and in dealing with change. This constant flow of sense-making through conversations in our workplace networks makes the idea of learning as a fixed event in a specific place look obsolete.

This year, I would add that it’s not just an advantage to belong to diverse professional networks but that the situation has tipped so that it is now a significant disadvantage to not actively participate in social learning networks.

Barriers to Collaboration

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In Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate, Stewart Mader and Scott Abel ask 523 workers about their information sharing habits. In reading through the responses and sample comments, it becomes obvious that there are two technologies that limit workplace collaboration – e-mail & meetings. Both can do certain tasks well but these “technologies” have become overused and abused.

Most of us who work with social media already know that e-mail can be replaced by more appropriate tools such as wikis, instant messaging, blogs or micro-blogs for a number of tasks. Also, we free-agents know only too well how much time we’ve saved by being outside an organization and not having to attend useless meetings [I would say that by avoiding meetings & commuting, I gain 2-3 hours of productivity per day].

Some highlights from Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate (PDF):

The comments indicate that people consider email a significant time management issue, and the important information often gets lost in the volume of email.

… people … recognize that trying to conduct group collaboration and revision by email is not optimal.

75% of respondents … know that a wiki can be used for documents that require group input …

Only 6% regularly request changes to a meeting agenda.

A simple strategy to give workers some time back would be to require that all meetings have agendas (on a wiki) with accompanying minutes. Then take one task that is currently done by e-mail (request for input) and replace it with a wiki, blog or other more suitable medium. These are just two small steps that could save a lot of time and frustration.

Integrating Learning and Work

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Tom Gram discusses the integration of learning and work (my professional passion) and gives a list of ten strategies for integration, of which three are discussed in detail in Part 1 (I’m already looking forward to Part 2):

1. Understand the job
2. Link Learning to business process
3. Build a performance support system

Of Tom’s 10 suggestions, not one is related to creating a course. That shows how relevant training is to the integration of working & learning and something to consider at the dawn of the learning age.

Look at “understand the job” and see how much of a challenge that could be in today’s workplace. What do you do when everyone’s job is unique? The learning professional must be in constant contact with the realities of the everyone’s work. Interventions and support will likely be incremental, addressing changing circumstances, but using multipurpose platforms for information and knowledge-sharing. Understanding work needs good two-way communications.

As jobs become more unique (I think the notion of the job may disappear over time), training either becomes a very expensive option or must be focused on specific skills that are used by several people. The result in the latter case is increasingly smaller units of training, which merges training into performance support, making training in the traditional sense less relevant.

In a complex or changing workplace (yours perhaps?), with shifting roles and responsibilities, Tom’s other seven strategies make even more sense:

4. Build a community of practice
5. Use social media to facilitate informal learning
6. Implement a continuous improvement framework
7. Use action learning
8. Organizational learning tools
9. Design Jobs for natural learning
10. Bring the job to the learning

I would say that these ten strategies would be excellent preparation for the networked workplace.

Workers, Management and Work Support

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Learning professionals are facing similar issues that others (HR, KM, IT & Marketing) do, but in many ways it’s a case of the blind men and the elephant. We are constrained by the blinders of our profession’s models. That’s one reason I like to take my models from a variety of fields, not just training or HPT. I previously wrote that we should integrate our work support departments and Tom Gram shows how this can be done by designing an organizational effectiveness function or creating internal management consultants, though these approaches can create their own bureaucracies as well, as Tom recognizes.

As effective as these approaches may be for now, I don’t think they’re adequate for the future. Everyone is struggling to keep up with change but most are using outdated tools and models. As Lou Sagar commented on Umair Haque’s post, ” … the emergence of new business models are ahead of the organizational framework to embrace and manage the impact.” That pretty well sums up the problem in my mind. We are all blind men unable to understand the new realities of work. Look at a business model as new as e-Bay’s, which many companies have yet to understand, and then add in the fact that it is already outdated and may even be declining.

The real conversation has yet to surface in the mainstream about the organizational change needed to address complexity and networks. There are models surfacing but as yet to be embraced, such as Haque’s work, wirearchy or valence theory. Creating a Chief Performance Officer out of the previous HR/Training/OD/KM functions may seem like progress but not if the realities of networked wealth creation don’t need a Chief “X” Officer any more.

Models such as chaordic organizations (PDF) show that command & control is not always necessary to be effective, especially within networks:

Given the right circumstances, from no more than dreams, determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently do extraordinary things.

Here’s the model that I’ve constructed on how training should adapt to a world where working and learning are synonymous, but even this shows a difference between management and workers, and perhaps that distinction is no longer pertinent.

In complex environments and networks, if workers need to be managed, they should not be hired in the first place, but then neither should managers.

Push the Reset Button

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Charles Jennings made a comment on Corporate Learning Trends that got me thinking about the need for a reset of the whole training function:

Baldwin, Ford and Weissbein’s research (20 and 10 years ago, respectively) showed that the USA spends around $100 billion on training every year, but only about 10% of the expenditures result in transfer to the job. I’m sure if the research was re-run today the results would be similar, whether in the US, in Western Europe or anywhere else, for that matter.

In other words, if CLOs were in any other ‘C-Level’ jobs they wouldn’t last long. One look by the CEO/President at their P&L statement and they’d be shown the door…

The current economic situation is being called by some The Great Reset, or a time to re-evaluate our financial and economic systems. This is also an opportunity to reset our notions of learning and working. Face it, training and anything else that comes under the industrial umbrella of Human Resources are always secondary to operations. It doesn’t have to be that way, but sticking to “tried & true” methods is not going to get any breakthroughs in how we integrate learning and working, an essential part of thriving in a networked economy, in my opinion. Organizational learning and human performance need a great reset as well.

Here’s what I see for the great learning reset:

  • Think and act macro (what to do) and leave the micro (how to do it) to each knowledge worker.
  • Become a part of the business not a peripheral department – if you’re in Ford’s HR department, your business is cars & trucks, not human resources.
  • Throw away all notions of “delivery” and focus only on solving organizational challenges – training is a solution looking for a problem – just solve the problem.

Learning has to become part of the organizational and individual DNA and during a reset that may require learning specialists, but in the long run the learning function should be absorbed. That leads to the future role of the “learning specialist”. I would say it is to continuously make yourself redundant. Teach people how to fish and move on to the next challenge. If you’re maintaining a steady state, such as developing courses as requested, then you’ve failed in integrating learning into the work.

Perpetual Beta

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It hadn’t really occurred to me before that pilots are an almost inextricable aspect of Enterprise 2.0. Of course the ‘iterate and refine’ concept can be implemented in other ways, but I think it’s fair to say that organizations absolutely need to get good at running pilots, if they’re not already there. It is a key facet of the path that leads to improved organizational performance.

So says Ross Dawson in pilots as a key instrument for improving organizational performance in a complex world. If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practice. There are no good or best practices that will work for  your context in a changing complex environment, so probing (AKA: piloting or Beta releases) is necessary to see what works. However, changing from a highly designed approach to an agile method is difficult. I previously recommended that instructional design adopt agile methods but even in the programming world, letting go of old ways is difficult as Sara Ford at Microsoft explains in how I learned to program manage an agile team after six years of waterfall.

There is no silver bullet solution to running the human performance side of an organization in the complexity of a highly networked economy with ubiquitous access to information and people. New tools keep being developed that can change the way we work and learn. Today it’s Twitter and tomorrow it will be something else. Approaching enterprise performance from the perspective of perpetual Beta is a way to maintain your sanity in all of this change. The values and culture can remain stable while the tools and practices keep evolving to take advantage of the situation.

Pilots are key to improving organizational performance but the culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta is my attitude toward learning – I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilize. I’ve also realized that organizations with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those that believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilizes and we don’t need to learn or do anything new. I think that point is called death.

The Community Manager

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In re-building the training function, we’ve recommended a move from content delivery to Connecting & Communicating. One role that will likely gain importance is that of Community Manager. As the electric media become embedded in our lives, we will all be constantly connected to many communities. Some of these will overlap.

The role of community manager in an organization will be to manage  organizational communities of practice, communities of interest and have an understanding of some of the other communities that touch each of us. In his Valence Theory of Organizations, Mark Federman identified “several specific forms of valence relationships that are enacted by two or more people when they come together to do almost anything; these are economic, social-psychological, identity, knowledge, and ecological.”

Effective collaboration brings all of these aspects into consideration. The communities we belong to address some or all of these valances. Workplace-related communities often address only the knowledge and economic aspects but as human beings we need more.

Because digital media are so easily reproduced and appropriated there are few walls between our online communities. Even our offline communities are getting digitally captured, by someone. Look at how difficult it is to maintain a clear line between LinkedIn and Facebook contacts. Even though many of us use the former for business and the latter for more personal communications, few are able to maintain two distinct groups of contacts. These lines will continue to blur (e.g. Twitter) and our online identities will be a composite of activities in several communities / teams / groups / networks.

The effective community manager will be less of a manager and more a well-connected node in many networks of importance to the organization. David Wilkins takes this a step further and says that the entire business should be run as a community:

It’s not about customer communities or workplace communties.  It’s about recognizing and fostering connections, and enabling information flow and information capture from multiple constituents.

If you can incorporate the best of eLearning; Human Performance Technology; Organizational Development; Knowledge Management; Communications and a touch of Marketing, then you may have the makings of a Community Manager. It seems like a pretty exciting place to be for the near future.

The Practice of Training in the 21st Century

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The Practice of Training in the 21st Century is an online presentation I will be doing for CSTD on 4 March 2009 at 1:00 PM EST. There is a fee for the event which supports CSTD’s work in fostering the profession of training, workplace learning and human resources development in Canada [my services are pro bono].

The presentation is an update of the ideas from the Training Department in the 21st Century. There is also a version on SlideShare. The March presentation will give more detail than what is on my related blog posts and enable some feedback, as well as open up the concept to a broader audience. As I re-do the presentation, any suggestions or criticism would be appreciated.

The future of certification

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At some point in the life of a discipline there is a drive toward certification. Want to be a real estate agent? It’s a quality thing, so we’re told. I was once a Certified Performance Technologist, and as I said to Dave Ferguson, I don’t see much value in re-certification when it consists of checking off boxes of how many conferences you have attended. Tom Gram, now Certifiable (Certified Training & Development Professional with CSTD), wonders:

Most learning and performance professionals will notice areas where the competencies could be modified to incorporate crossover disciplines and meet emerging trends.  For example, I think technology in learning and performance is at this point a core skill, as are informal learning approaches and sister competencies such as knowledge management and performance consulting.

I gained much from my CPT certification process as it was based on what I had done and I had to show competence. My professional responsibilities derive from the CPT standards of behaviour. However, certification can create a closed society that keeps competent people out and reinforces the status quo and the money flow. Such was the case the Ontario College of Teachers when a judge determined there is more than one way to show competence in a field. Certification can also become self-serving, as a primary revenue generator for the association.

In my case I didn’t renew my CPT designation because not a single one of my clients recognized it. I still follow the code of ethics and stay current in my field, but the piece of paper has no business value. So what is the future of certification when disciplines overlap and meld and certification bodies move with glacial speed in keeping up with the times? Certification, like professional associations, will have to change and become more reflective of the networked workplace.

On-job support is critical

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I don’t usually get information about training and performance improvement in the Wall Street Journal but this article clearly spells out the benefits of linking training directly to the workplace. In Lessons Learned, Harry Martin describes two cases and provides several links for further reading. Basically, formal training is more effective if followed up with specific objectives for change in the workplace. I think most of us know this, but many organisations don’t practice it. What I found most interesting was the effectiveness of engaging peer support in the workplace, as shown in this figure:

This reinforces the influence of peers, which parents of teenagers already know, and shows the potential for informal structures that encourage peer interaction at work. If you’re looking for better ROI for your training initiatives, the best place to put your effort may be AFTER the training.