Performance Improvement

Human performance technology

Invert the Pyramid

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In Advice for the Training Department I recommended that those in the training function should concentrate on Communicating & Connecting. Later I suggested that the training department should wake up and smell the coffee or be rendered obsolete. All of this is premised on the fact that our organisational structures need to change in order to deal with complexity and one framework we can start with is wirearchy.

However, the training department can at best manage incremental change unless the organisation itself changes. In It’s Time to Invert the Management Pyramid, Vineet Nayer says:

It is not a stationary relic I’m talking about. I’m talking about the brand new dinosaur on the block – the classical management pyramid. Time has come to dismantle it and adapt to a new evolutionary and unstructured model that leverages the team effect to ensure that companies can lead change rather play catch up or be left behind.

The training department and the CLO can help in this effort, but inverting the pyramid is the big work that needs to be done by the entire organisation.

I believe that structural change is coming sooner than many expect, with the WorldBlu list as an example of the hunger for change. The inability of our prominent command and control organisations to deal with growing complexity highlights our structural problems. The largest military force in the world cannot defeat a loosely knit group of terrorists; the US/Cdn automotive sector has been incapable of changing its business model and our elect & forget political representatives are increasingly hamstrung by an electorate that no longer provides majorities or landslides.

It is time to invert the pyramid and integrate learning into all that we do. Are you ready?

Proficiency-based training

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According to Clark Quinn in this eLearn Article:

There is one role for pre-tests, and that is in the realm of allowing students to test out of a course. Learners should be allowed to skip the content they already know if they can demonstrate competency. This is to the great benefit of the learner. But when pre-testing is used to demonstrate mastery for this purpose, it should be an option, not a requirement. So please, don’t abuse your learners. Give pre-tests only to allow the learner to test-out of specific material. And don’t give in to de facto standards that dictate every course start with a pre-test. Use assessment properly, to demonstrate mastery.

I agree that pre-testing is not of much value unless it triggers some action. This reminds me of the proficiency-based training we used for training military helicopter pilots. Learning how to fly an aircraft is an expensive endeavour and each flight costs several thousand dollars. Minimizing training time, without compromising standards, was one of our objectives.

Flight training was divided into about 35 “air lesson plans” and each one was about 1.5 hours. At the end of certain lessons, students had to have achieved mastery of specific skills, such as hovering or completing a circuit. Additional time in the aircraft could be provided, with counseling, but after a certain number of hours students were expected to achieve the performance requirement. Conversely, if a student achieved the performance requirement in fewer lessons, he or she could skip one or more lessons and move on to the next stage. In this way, a student could complete the course days or weeks earlier than scheduled and at a lower cost for the training establishment. For pilots who were already spending a lot of time away from home, this was a positive incentive.

As Clark mentions in his article, if you can demonstrate mastery then training is not necessary. For learning professionals, it is important to design tests that can validate competency. This is an overlooked area of instructional design as too much effort is spent on delivering content, in my opinion. Another rule that we had in military training, though not always followed, was to design the proficiency test before developing any training. The proficiency test had to correlate with the job performance area that was being addressed. In this way, the direct link between training and job performance was obvious. Considering my last post, this could be a good thing for the training department.

Wake up and smell the coffee

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An interesting post made by Rob Wilkins, is a confirmatory data point of what I’m seeing in the corporate learning sector:

This morning the CLC (Corporate Leadership Council) released the results of a survey that asked CEOs which areas were to suffer the most in response to the crisis. L&D [learning & development] came out on top at 38%. So this means, globally, that a third of organisations surveyed will stop investing in development of employees. Recruiting was second and IT infrastructure was third.

As I said in Opportunities in Difficult Times, there may be a silver lining, but not for everyone in our business. When your department is number one on the CEO chop list, you should be thinking about your reason for being. Training is seen by this group of CEO’s (and I would wager many others) as superfluous to the company’s bottom line. Obviously all of those initiatives like blended learning, competency-based training and learning style inventories haven’t convinced the boss that L&D is important. Neither have all the ROI calculations that get discussed during training conferences. The CEO and the CLO must be using different calculators.

The reason that these companies will stop investing in the development of employees is that they don’t see a direct correlation to their business. People go on a course and come back no better prepared for work. A successful course is where you learned perhaps 10% of what was covered. The rest of the stuff is interesting and might be useful – some day.

At the risk of repeating myself, the following message doesn’t get through to many training departments, and now they will pay the price.

Too many people in the training department make the leap from a performance issue (lack of skills, abilities, knowledge; lack of access to appropriate data and resources; etc) directly to training as the only solution. This is the wrong approach and the most costly. Even the CEO may play into this, with statements like “We have a training problem” and no one challenges that statement. There is no such thing as a training problem.

Here are some “training problems” that are not solved through training:

  • Unclear expectations (such as policies & guidelines)
  • Inadequate resources
  • Unclear performance measures
  • Rewards and consequences are not directly linked to the desired performance

These barriers can be addressed without training. Only when there is a genuine lack of skills and knowledge, is training required [repeat as necessary]. Training should only be delivered in cases where the other barriers to performance have been addressed. A trained worker, without the right resources and with unclear expectations, will still not perform up to the desired standard.

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.

For a follow-up on this post, read Tom Gram on What’s a self-respecting learning function to do in an economic crisis?

Performance Design Blog

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The Centre for Learning Technologies was a hybrid organisation that was university-based, externally-focused and did both research and business consulting. In my three years at the CLT I was involved in about 40 projects and worked with a great team, especially in my first year with Tom Gram, the Director.

Tom moved on in 1999 and we’ve kept in touch, but much of his professional life has been behind the firewall. Well, he’s out on the WWW now and Gram Consulting has a blog. The focus is on “performance design”, and that is an area where there are fewer bloggers than in e-learning or Web 2.0.

So this blog is also for people who are in one way or another involved in the design of work processes and human systems that are at the heart of improving business performance in the modern workplace.  That will include Organization Development Specialists, Human Performance Consultants, Business Mangers, Quality and productivity specialists and performance oriented learning specialists.  Here’s my Word Map on topics that you will likely see in future posts on performance design.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Tom.

The Training Department in the 21st Century

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I’m speaking in Toronto next month at the SkillSoft Canadian Perspectives conference and have been developing my presentation, which is based on this post and a previous one, on the changing role of training. The presentation is scheduled for one hour but I have taken the highlights and condensed it to less than 5 minutes, which is the time limit for Jing, which I’m trying for the first time. It’s also my first time using Apple’s keynote application.

This is an Adobe Flash file (*.swf), including audio, and should open in a new window:

21c_training

Updated presentation: Training & the Networked Workplace

References:

Dave Snowden

Cynefin

Wirearchy

Related: Complexity, Connection & Learning by Dave Pollard

Beyond training

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Update: This post is featured on The Working/Learning Carnival along with several other interesting articles.

Marketing and training have certain similarities – gaining attention; getting your message across; and changing behaviour. When Seth Godin says that mass marketing is dead, I ask if mass training is far behind:

Marketing had an arc, one that started with personal, local interactions between real people and rapidly morphed into very corporate anonymous actions aimed at the unwilling masses.

Mass marketing really came into its own after the Second World War, and most prominently in the US:

With the foundations in place [high rate of savings, few consumer goods, end of war, interstate highway system], the “mass” aspects of marketing came into existence in the form of mass demand, massive stores, and mass communications.

Compare the rise of mass marketing to mass training. The wars (1914-1945) brought about the systems approach to training, the basis of instuctional system design (ISD), still used by the military and emulated by much corporate training. Both of these mass, one to many, systems appeared at about the same time. They were used to achieve economies of scale and depended upon good one-way communications systems. Both marketing and training at the mass level depend on a limited number of “channels” available to the individual. That has changed.

Why does Godin think that this is the end of mass marketing? Social media:

Social media’s growth in the last three years, though, gives marketers an inkling that there may be something else going on. Sure, they can run spam ads on Facebook, but they don’t work. Social media, it turns out, isn’t about aggregating audiences so you can yell at them about the junk you want to sell. Social media, in fact, is a basic human need, revealed digitally online. We want to be connected, to make a difference, to matter, to be missed. We want to belong, and yes, we want to be led.

Since many (most) people can easily connect with people and information, and are starting to find ways to make a difference in their learning, why would they want to follow a pre-set training program designed in a one-size-fits-all fashion? It actually goes against human nature. Each one of us wants to be unique.

Good trainers know how to personalize and contextualize their sessions, but social media can reinforce this continuously, not constrained by time or space. Successful organisations will move from a training focus, and even beyond a performance improvement focus, to a connecting and facilitating one, with tools such as social media to do this. In an always-on, totally connected work environment, how else could you help people to work and learn? You could design a new course, but that may no longer be a viable option in the near future.

Learnscape Sandbox

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Need a sandbox to test out Web 2.0 tools and techniques and see what they mean for your organisation? You may want to check out our Plug-in Learning 2.0 to go:

Advice on implementation comes from learning professionals, not software geeks. Jane knows social networking tools as well as anyone in the industry; Harold has his finger on the pulse of bottom-up learning and open source approaches; Clark is a passionate advocate of cognitive design, applying what we know about how people think to the design of systems. Jay is the thought leader in informal learning and the convergence of work and learning online.

This service is for organisations who want to be early adopters of social media for work and learning but haven’t figured out a way to do it internally. Our international team has a lot of experience and we work well together. Drop one of us a note and we’ll have a chat. We believe that there is a need for this kind of service and we’ve put together a package that we think makes sense. Comments are always appreciated.

Greedy Instructional Design

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Last year I wrote that Instructional Design Needs More Agility, saying that it’s time that the training industry develop its own agile approach or risk becoming redundant. Continuing on the theme of faster and more flexible development, Daniel Lemire thinks that programming could use the greedy algorithm as a basis to manage projects. I mentioned on Twitter that I thought that a “greedy approach” was similar to agile programming and Daniel replied:

@hjarche greedy here means: don’t think globally, make the best choice locally, and the end result will be ok. So, yes, it is agile.

My experience in larger projects is that we spend too much time in planning and then freeze that process once we start development, even if the plan is no longer relevant. In smaller projects planning can be almost non-existent, with a quick decision on what model/approach to use and then it’s off to meet whatever was stated in the contract. Building in agility or the greedy algorithm at the onset seems to give more options to the development team, who now have the responsibilty of confirming that they are on course as they continue to refine the product.

Changing the training and development role in the 21st C.

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I received several comments on my last post on Learning and Performance in Balance. This post came about as I examined the role of training and development (T&D) in the workplace. My contention is that many organisational learning initiatives don’t achieve what they set out to do. They don’t enable learning at the individual level unless the person is already motivated and few are connected to performance objectives at the organisational level.

Instead, I think that a better approach would be for the organisation to focus on measurable performance and give workers the time and support to direct their own learning. The T&D function then provides support, but not direction, and also provides a feedback loop to develop better performance support from the organisation. This goes with Klaus Wittkuhn’s statement that:

It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities.

The diagram that I developed is an attempt to show that workers know best about learning, given the time and support needed, while management understands the necessary performance indicators for the organisation to succeed.

There was some concern that such an approach would allow workers to prepare for their next job and rob the current organisation. This is a possibility but as the work environment becomes more complex it is better to have employees with diverse interests and skills who can adapt to changing circumstances, instead of only being able to deal with the current state. Management must support learning, but it is too far removed from the individual worker to be able to direct it. The real experts today are those workers closest to the problem, as I responded to Virginia Yonkers:

I think that a better approach in complex organisational environments, where there are few good practices, only emergent practices, we should look at the Cynefin Model. In a complex environment, “… in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice”. My view on this is that it is better if the Probing happens from the bottom-up and then management’s role is to support these individual probe’s of sense-making. The “experts” are now those who are closest to the problem or challenge – the knowledge workers.

I’m not advocating for a Utopian state of affairs in the workplace as regards learning. We need to allocate resources better and one way is to focus on what people do best. Management deals best with what is measurable. Individuals handle all the variables that affect their lives and know what is best for them. They’ll do what they feel is best for themselves anyway. As Karyn Romeis comments, “There is just too much just-in-case, sheepdip stuff still around. There is ample evidence that, for many managers in the corporate world, training provision is a box-ticking exercise.”

Finally, Dave Ferguson reminded me that even in workplaces that require defined processes and  standardization, the workers have the ability to improve things, but need support to have these implemented. This can be the role of the T&D group in the 21st Century – to communicate what the workers have learned in such a way that management can understand it. This is a reversal of the top-down role of the industrial era.

Learning and Performance in Balance

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If you scratch the surface of training and development in any organisation you realize that management doesn’t really care about learning; they want measurable performance. This is understandable and paying lip service to the learning organisation, et al, is a waste of time. At the organisational level, performance should be the only measure. However, there is much that cannot be measured and new work processes and skills are emerging in our digital economy. Management is usually the last to know about these, so they won’t likely be planning learning activities to support emergent processes.

In a complex work environment, where innovation is more important than following established procedures, responsibility for learning should be delegated to the lowest level  – the individual worker. These workers should be encouraged to collaborate in their learning activities, with little or no direction from above. Bottom-up emergent processes are better in a changing environment because those at the coal-face best understand the issues, even if they may not be able to articulate them.

I would suggest that in a knowledge-intensive work environment, where workers already have some degree of autonomy, it would be best to give them complete control over their learning. Just drop the organisational learning function and concentrate on performance. Management must then keep open communications with workers and can develop tools that will support emergent processes as they develop. Management will always be one step behind in this process, but that’s better than being completely out of touch.

It is a better balance to let workers direct their learning and collaborate as they see fit (within limits of privacy, security, etc). The modern organisation should get out of the learning business and into the business of supporting its workers.

My thanks to recent posts on this subject by Tony Karrer, Michele Martin and Clark Quinn.