Performance Improvement

Human performance technology

how professionals learn for work

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Jane Hart has been asking her readers what are the most useful/valuable ways that they learn for or at work. In the sixth annual Learning in the Workplace Survey, which surveyed over 5,000 respondents from a wide variety of industries and types & sizes of organizations, the following methods were ranked in order.

  1. Daily work experiences
  2. Knowledge-sharing within your team
  3. Web search
  4. Web resources
  5. Manager feedback & guidance
  6. Professional networks  & communities
  7. Coach or mentor feedback & guidance
  8. Internal resources
  9. Blogs & news feeds
  10. E-learning courses
  11. Conferences & professional events
  12. Classroom training

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working smarter case study

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In 2010/2011 Jay Cross and I worked with a corporate university of a large US company with the objective to cultivate a fully engaged, high performing workforce through rapid, collaborative, informal, self-directed learning. The aim was for employees to learn fast enough to keep up with the demands of their jobs and grow into experts in their field.

The university transitioned from designing processes for formal learning to increasing support for informal learning by:

  1. Establishing a learning & performance innovation team.
  2. Developing low-cost methodologies (Do It Yourself).
  3. Integrating informal learning support into work.
  4. Phasing out approaches, tools & methods that were no longer providing value.

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connecting work, learning, and life

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The 70:20:10 reference model states that, in general, what we learn at work comes 70% from experience, 20% from exposure to new work, and 10% from formal education. At the 70:20:10 Institute [disclosure: I am a service partner], the basic approach is to start with the 70 (experience) because this is where learning and working are most connected. When we learn as we work, at the moment of need, then we learn in context and we remember what we have learnt.

“70:20:10 uses the performance paradigm to achieve working = learning in the context of the workplace and thus to contribute to the desired organisational results. In our practice we have seen many applications of the learning paradigm in 70:20:10, which is not the intention. The paradigm starts from the idea that skills need to be developed so it begins with the 10 and uses these to flesh out the 20 and 70.

This is a back-to-front approach. In 70:20:10, it’s not learning or the 10 that are central, but rather the principle of working = learning. Here again it is about achieving the desired performance improvement in the context of the individuals or teams who want to work better together.

70:20:10 is about performance enhancement: the performance paradigm starts with the desired organisational results and uses performance consulting to establish what interventions are needed in the 70, 20 and 10 to improve individual and organisational performance. This should not be confused with the learning paradigm approach in which learning is added to working. In the performance paradigms, working = learning is achieved using such models as performance support, microlearning and social learning. This makes it possible to learn at the speed of performance.” — 70:20:10 Institute

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the missing half of training

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The training industry is based on models that were developed for the military. The Systems Approach to Training includes the ADDIE [analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation] model, with variations used throughout industry. Robert Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction inform much of instructional design. Gagne’s early work was in military training. Other models were developed in the second half of the 20th century but they mostly remained in line with their military roots. One model for instructional design that I promote is Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping. It’s a welcome change, but is focused on individual training.

In the military there is much more training than individual, skill & knowledge-focused, course work. There is also ‘collective training’. Collective training is what military units do when they are not on operations. Collective training is run by operators, not trainers, and is informal, social, with an emphasis on simulation. Types of simulation can range from expensive highly technical combat mission flight simulators, to distributed war games, or command post exercises involving thousands of personnel.

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the uncertain future of training

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Training courses are artifacts of a time when resources were scarce and connections were few. That time has passed.

The roots of training are to get a lot of people to do the same thing competently. The Roman army trained soldiers for battle and many other duties, like building roads. Standard methods were developed. Drill and feedback over time helped to develop competence. But the modern training field exploded after 1945. Large organizations created training departments, now called ‘learning & development’ or some other variant, but still focused on one thing: looking backwards. Training looks at how people currently do work and then gets others to replicate this. These are described as competencies, made up of certain, skills, knowledge, and attitudes. The assumption was that what works today will work tomorrow. The training department assumed the status quo.

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training > performance > social

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Thank Goodness It’s Monday! This is my second TGIM post. Mondays for freelancers mean new opportunities. Weekends are often times to get work done when it’s quiet. Mondays are good days to take a day to reflect, as clients are usually busy going through their inboxes and catching up. So happy Monday to everyone.

In my last TGIM post I went through my social bookmarks on PKM. This post looks at resources related to my training-performance-social workshop.

One approach to supporting workplace learning, based on the 70:20:10 model, is for the organization to provide three types of enablers (see image at bottom):

  • Tools: that workers are dependent upon to do their work
  • Skills: competencies to work independently
  • People: social structures to work interdependently with others, inside & outside the organization

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gaining insight through social and informal learning

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Organizational performance improvement is comprised of reducing errors and increasing insights, according to Gary Klein. For the past century, management practice has focused very much on error reduction, with practices such as Six Sigma, especially in manufacturing.

“Fifty-eight of the top Fortune 200 companies bought into Six Sigma, attesting to the appeal of eliminating errors. The results of this ‘experiment’ were striking: 91 per cent of the Six Sigma companies failed to keep up with the S&P 500 because Six Sigma got in the way of innovation. It interfered with insights.” —Gary Klein

Learning and development (L&D) practices reflect this priority on error reduction. Subject matter experts are interviewed or observed, good practices are noted, and then training programs are designed to develop the skills that make up some or all of a job. Anyone with the requisite abilities, as quantified in the job description, can then be trained.

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supporting the business of learning

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The 2nd edition of the 70:20:10 Report has been published by GoodPractice. I have described 70:20:10 as a useful model and have suggested nine ways to implement the model. These form the core of the social learning workshop.

The 70:20:10 model is based on observations that in the workplace, people learn 70% of what they need to do their job from experience. About 20% is learned from exposure to new tasks or environments. Only 10% is learned from formal education and training. While these numbers are not firm, they provide a rule of thumb.

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imagining open collaboration

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At work and in school we are pretty good at creating documentation to share explicit knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that goes into training programmes. It’s the result of interviews with subject matter experts and reviews of the field of study. For the most part, it’s stuff that is easy to codify and share.

On the other hand, understanding implicit knowledge requires a lot of conversations. It means learning and working at the same time. The type of knowledge we need to make critical decisions is often emergent, in that it emerges over time through what my colleague Clark Quinn calls ‘open collaboration’.

“This is what decision-making looks like when it matters and it’s new: open collaboration … The details are not trivial, they’re critical.

And these situations are increasing. Whether life-threatening or not, and even with the power of data, we’re going to be facing increasingly challenging decisions.  We need to learn when and how to collaborate.  One person following a script (which should be automated) is increasingly less likely to be the answer. An individual equipped with models, and resources including others, is going to be the minimal necessary solution.” – Clark Quinn

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strategic transformation of workplace learning

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Is your learning and development team able to transform so it can support complex work, help people be more creative, and adapt to the changing nature of the digital workplace? Strategic transformation is more than changing what you work on.

“Strategic Transformation. This means changing the very essence of what ‘learning’ means in the company, through both a new understanding of how it happens in the workplace (i.e. not just through conventional training but as people carry out their daily jobs) and how performance problems can be solved in different ways. It also means that learning and performance improvement is no longer the sole remit of the L&D department, but something that everyone in the organisation – managers and employees alike – has responsibility for.” – Jane Hart

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