When Learning is the Work: Approaches for supporting learning in the workplace

Two weeks ago I ran a webinar under this title for Citrix.

At the start I posed the question “when you think about one great learning experience you’ve had, can you remember where it occurred? Was it in a classroom or workshop, or did it occur while you were completing the task?”

I’ve asked this question, or variations of it, many times over the past few years. The response from this group was quite similar to earlier ones except it was neater – the split was exactly 80:20 – 80% said that the learning experience had been while they were completing the task and 20% said it was in a classroom or workshop.

Sometimes the response to this question has been more skewed towards the workplace (or in daily life – I ask people to include learning experiences that have occurred during childhood in their thinking). Rarely do more than 20% say their great learning experiences or AhAh! moments, occurred in a formal learning setting. Also rarely is the response of a group more skewed towards formal learning environments. 20% seems to be the maximum from any group – certainly in my experience.

Although these samples are not random and the methodology may be suspect, the nature of people’s learning experiences is clear. Most of our significant learning occurs informally. Not only informally and in the workplace, but increasingly in the extended workplace as it increasingly becomes boundaryless.

Learning in the Extended Workplace – it’s social and it’s mobile

The extended workplace is certainly the ‘growth’ area for learning. As we become more connected in our daily lives we are also becoming more connected in our work. There has been huge interest in all things social and particularly in social learning over the past 2-3 years. My colleague, Jane Hart, maintains the most comprehensive social learning site at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. It’s well worth a number of visits. Her ‘Social Learning Handbook’ is also a tremendous resource, as is Marcia Conner’s ‘New Social Learning’ book. They’re both practical and have lots of helpful advice for people thinking about the ‘how’ of piloting or rolling social learning into their suite of services.

Mobile technology, too, is becoming a huge driver for worker education. The growth in mobile technology is phenomenal. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reported in 2010 that more than 70% of the world’s population had a mobile phone (with 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2010 – 3.8 billion in the developing world). Added to that statistic Sybase published a report in September 2010 suggesting that children (our next generation employees) are more likely to own a mobile telephone than a book (85% of children own phones compared with 73% who own books at home).

Clark Quinn, another Internet Time Alliance colleague, has recently published an excellent practical book titled ‘Designing mLearning’.  There is a free sample download available on the site, but it’s well worth getting hold of the entire book. Again, it contains plenty of practical advice on the right questions to ask and how to get your hands dirty and start out on building mobile learning solutions to support performance in the workplace.

Leaving the Golden Age of Training

With all these changes there is no doubt that we’re leaving the simple ‘golden’ age of training where formal, structured development through a series of well-designed and planned training events sufficed as the only tool in the box.

We’re moving from this early-20th Century approach and entering a much more complex world where learning professionals need to ‘think business’ and focus on the most efficient, effective and sustainable ways they can help their CEOs and Presidents rapidly build and maintain workforce performance improvement. This inevitably involves bringing learning into the workplace rather than bringing the workforce to learning venues. Work and learning are converging, there’s no doubt about it. If training and learning departments don’t understand this and respond by altering their practices and developing their services they will become increasingly irrelevant.

Learning Maturity

Another issue I discussed in the Citrix webinar was learning maturity.

‘Maturity’ can mean a lot of things and there are some good learning maturity models but one simple way I look at assessing learning maturity in organisations is to determine the stage of development from a primary focus on ‘know what’ – the essential starting point for new hires or people moving to new roles – to a more sustained focus on ‘know who’ and ‘know how’.

The latter two are where the cultural and sustained value of learning lies yet many Training and Learning departments have their prime focus hard-wired to the former. Many learning interventions are still formal, information-rich, interaction-poor and are essentially about trying to fill heads with facts that can be retained until they submit to the post-course assessment or certification exam.

We know that filing heads with information and knowledge at task-level before the opportunity to practice the task or the need to use the information is quite pointless, but ‘content’ is still the driver for most learning.

Learning maturity can also be demonstrated by an increasing de-focus on content and the provision of more opportunities to practice and to be exposed to experiential learning in context.

Of course the ‘know who’ part is critical, too. We learn and work with and through others and we need to identify those ‘others’ who are best placed to help and work with us - both inside and outside our organisations.

The 70:20:10 Model (remember it’s just a model)

During the Citrix webinar I also looked at the 70:20:10 model as a mechanism for organisations to realign their learning focus and move up the maturity ladder.

Most people have heard of the model – and it is only a reference model and not a recipe. It is based on survey and empirical data going back to the early 1970 (at least) that indicates working adults learn about 70% of what they need to know to do their job well in the workplace from experience and practice. They learn about 20% from others, through knowing who to ask, from informal coaching and mentoring and from effective networking and storytelling. They also learn about 10% of what they need from formal learning/training.

When we talked about implementing learning strategies and practice using the 70:20:10 model in the Citrix webinar the challenges that were identified by participants were typical of those faced by many organisations.

I’ve listed a sample below, along with my responses.  I’d welcome any further thoughts and suggestions:

Question: “Where does group learning fit? Approaches such as Action Learning and facilitated workshops for skills development?”

Response: This is an interesting question and one that points up the fact that we don’t live in an either/or world.  Well-designed and run facilitated workshops are a good example of why models such as 70:20:10 are simply reference models and not intended to be used as tight recipes. In a well-run facilitated workshop there will be plenty of opportunity for peer learning, networking, peer mentoring and other ‘20’ activities as well as structured activities. There should also be plenty of opportunity for practice. Organisations such as Cranfield Management School work with client organisations to structure ‘formal’ 70:20:10 models of learning – where formal executive programmes are structured to provide roughly 70% of experiential learning and practice in the workplace; roughly 20% learning through others – action learning, peer-mentoring, workplace coaching etc; and roughly 10% formal classroom-based learning at the Management School.

Question: “How are these new approaches applicable to safety environments where it’s critical that the correct information is understood rather than through the interpretations of colleagues?”

Response: Also a good question, and one often raised in ‘special pleading’ for the need to continue with formal, classroom-based learning for compliance and safety training. The point here is, if the objective is simply to provide ‘correct information’ I think most would agree that in the past the best, fastest and most thorough way was to send the information in written form – either on paper or electronically. Alternatively, I’ve seen very good eLearning modules work well in replacing formal classroom training. With written information there are fewer opportunities for misconceptions and misunderstandings, and less reliance of memory. Bringing people into a classroom and presenting information has always been probably the most inefficient and ineffective way we could possibly devise for compliance and safety training.
If you want to see how one large corporation has demonstrated the positive impact of using ‘crowdsourcing’ and social learning techniques to help people develop skills in critical environments, have a look at this video of the British Telecom Dare2Share system or this Accenture paper on the approach.  Dare2Share is an ‘internal Youtube’ where experts are encouraged to share their expertise –and they do.  L&D plays a role in that there is a button beside every piece of content that can be clicked if it’s felt the content is either inaccurate or inappropriate. Peter Butler (former CLO at BT and now CLO at Lloyds Banking Group) tells me that the ‘inaccurate’ button has been pressed just a handful of times (certainly less than 10) and corrections, where required, made at almost Wikipedia-speed.

The point here is ‘don’t fool yourself that simply providing the ‘correct’ information is the best way to change behaviour. Timely information and lessons learned from colleagues are both valuable.

More to the point, learning professionals need to get to grips with the fact that colleagues often provide the best quality information to act. They bring practical experience of ‘knowledge in use’ and context to the party. There’s plenty of evidence that crowdsourcing from practitioners in the field will provide high quality information and insights and that, like Wikipedia, ‘incorrect’ information is quickly identified, filtered and corrected.

Other questions that were asked in the Citrix webinar:

1. “How can flexible learning tasks be presented around scheduled and assessed experiential learning in environments where emergencies and interruptions occur 24x7?”

2. “How do we integrate learning into very busy workplaces which do not lend themselves to reflection on experiences in the workplace?”

3. “With informal learning we have a danger of learning bad habits. How do we tackle that?”

4. “How can we record ‘informal’ learning in the workplace for CPD purposes?”

5. “How do we change the mind-set of leaders when formal learning is endorsed, supported and embedded in the organisation?”

6. “Is the implication that we need more emphasis on developing the coaching skills of line managers and co-workers?

7. “Would you class mentoring as ‘informal’?”

Maybe readers of this blog might like to address some of these questions and share their experiences.

The Power of Conversations

“we tell ourselves stories in order to live”
Haruki Murakami

Jerome Bruner (1915- ) is one of the greatest educational psychologists the world has ever produced. He has spent his long lifetime studying learning and the human mind. Still active and in post as a Research Professor at New York University in his 95th year, Bruner has long realised the value of conversations and story-telling as vital learning tools. His research has led him to point out that ‘our world is others’ and that we need to always take this into account in our approach to learning and development.

Of course Bruner is absolutely correct. We rarely, if ever, work and learn alone. We reach our goals and contribute to our organisations’ objectives in a social context. In the maelstrom of our digital communications age the need to think ‘socially’ is more important than ever.

So if we ask what Bruner, conversations and story-telling have to do with performance and productivity, the answer we get is ‘a very great deal, indeed’.

I have pointed out previously (Training Industry Quarterly – Summer 2009 and elsewhere) that there are four basic ways in which we learn to do our jobs:

a. Through the experiences to which we are exposed

b. Through the opportunities we have to practice

c. Through our conversations with our colleagues and managers

d. Through having the opportunity for reflection on what has worked and what would work better next time

Each of these is an important factor in the learning process. As such it’s a good practice for every training and development professional to hold their learning solutions up against these four learning elements and ask the question ‘is our solution design providing opportunities in all four?’ If it’s not, then the solution should be reviewed and redesigned, or binned. Often, the solution needs little design at all but just manipulation of the environment to enable natural communication and learning to take place .

Incorporating Conversation into learning and performance design

In performance solution design, the role of conversations is often forgotten as a powerful tool for improvement. Everything from informal water-cooler conversations and informal mentoring by colleagues and managers to structured exchanges through formal coaching and expert knowledge sharing sessions exploit this power. Trainers and learning professionals should continually be thinking about ways they can do this.

The effective use of conversations is part of one of the most important challenges learning and development teams face in producing effective solutions to business problems. The challenge is to move the focus from designing learning solutions around knowledge acquisition towards those whose aim is to help development of ‘real’ learning and understanding. These are two very different things.

To achieve the latter, any solution needs to fully engage workers in the process of development and provide opportunities for them to ‘think about the different outcomes that could have resulted from a set of circumstances’ (Bruner’s words) if they are to demonstrate usability of knowledge.

Conversations are a great way to facilitate this process.

This was first published in the Winter 2011 edition of Training Industry Quarterly in my regular Performance & Productivity column.

Lost in Translation:

Why Learning Professionals Need to Learn to Speak their Stakeholders’ Language

The language we use is important. There’s no doubt about that. Human cultural development owes a great deal to our ability to communicate complex thoughts and be clearly understood by others so they can take actions.

The problem is, like opinions, there are just so many languages to choose from at any one time. Not just national and cultural languages, but the language of professionals as well.

The independent state of Papua New Guinea, North of Australia, is a good case-in-point. Over 850 distinct indigenous languages are spoken in the country (12% of the world’s total) among a population of just under 7 million people – an average of around 8,000 speakers per language – with some groups down in the 10s. Imagine trying to work across the country with that challenge and the potential for confusion.

Professional Languages

But national and ethnic/cultural languages are only the start. If you drop in on a conference or a meeting of virtually any professional group (try pharmaceutical reps, a team of engineers, or a gaggle of Finance people in your own organisation) you’re likely to think that a foreign language is being spoken. That is, unless you’re inculcated into ‘the practices of the profession’ as Bruner calls it. In some ways they are speaking a different language. If we want to understand what they’re talking about we need to spend some time with them and learn it.

Organisational Languages

Exactly the same holds for organisational language. In organisations it sometimes feels as if tens if not hundreds of different languages are being spoken – often for good, practical reasons.

The Finance Department will have its own language, the Sales department will have a different one, and the IT Department often lives out on a limb surrounded by the shield of its own language. Learning and performance professionals will have their own language too – with lots of acronyms, and terms that carry specific meaning – ID, TNA, LMS, HPT and so on, often overlaid with our own organisational acronym set.

This is where lots of problems present themselves for Learning professionals when they attempt to engage with their stakeholders. Many find themselves in situations when the language they are speaking is simply not understood by people in other organisational functions and they, in turn, find difficulty understanding the language of others.

However, if Learning professionals are to work closely with their colleagues and managers in the line of business, whatever that line may be, they need to learn the target language of the stakeholder – and learn it fast.

Some Tactics

I have no particular skills to impart on national and cultural languages. I’m certainly no linguist. So when I find myself in a country where English is not spoken I revert to a couple of basic tactics.

First I look and listen for words that might have some similarity to English. I guess this is a type of pattern-matching approach. I see if there are words that I might understand, check whether the meanings are what I think they may be and store them away for later use.

The second approach involves identifying commonly used words and either asking what they mean or trying to work out their meaning through the context of their use.

Neither of these tactics is as good as learning to speak the language properly but at least I've found they help me get by.

An Anecdote

In the early and mid-1980s I spent a number of years working on collaborative ‘eLearning’ projects (although we didn’t know them by that name back then) using computer conferencing technology. I was working with academics, teachers, students and workers in the UK, France and Germany and spent long hours in (physical) meeting rooms where multiple languages were being spoken. In France a lot of the discussion took place in French (naturally). My colleague, a Frenchwoman who had lived and worked in England for so long that her French accent was impossible to detect, used to say “Charles, how come you can almost pass as fluent when we’re in meetings and talking about collaborative learning, computer conferencing, telecoms, X25 networks and so on, but you’re absolutely hopeless speaking French when we’re engaging someone in general conversation?”. My answer to her was that so long as the context was pretty narrow and you understood what people might be speaking about then meaningful communication isn’t too difficult. It’s quite easy to build a limited vocabulary that is useful in specific situations, and if you have an inkling of what is being said, and what is likely to be said, then you can get by.

I think Learning professionals can take something from this anecdote in the way they need to approach conversations and communications with others in their organisations.

In simple terms, it’s about effectively communicating in the language of your stakeholder whether you’re speaking to them, writing proposals, giving presentations or delivering reports for their eyes.

If you use your own sometimes arcane professional language it’s likely that much of what you’re saying will simply be lost in translation.

THE DOs an DON’Ts OF WORKING WITH STAKEHOLDERS

Below is an basic set of 'DOs and DON'Ts' for Learning professionals when engaging and communicating with stakeholders and others outside the L&D cabal – it’s a simple job-aid or performance support tool.

DOs

1. DO speak the language of your stakeholder/client/customer.

Do this in all your communications with them. If you don't know their language, you need to learn it - or some of it, such as the key terms they use, before you present anything to them or engage in dialogue. Failure to do this will render you marginalised at best and irrelevant at worst.

You need to understand the drivers that your stakeholders consider important. For example, getting an understanding of some of the subtleties of financial terms. You don’t need to become a financial whizz, but almost every manager with financial responsibility will expect you to know some of the basics - the difference between a balance sheet and a profit and loss account, for instance, or what net present value (npv) is and how your organisation might calculate it - almost every project you’re called in on for learning support will have had its npv calculated, and your proposals had better not increase the costs so that npv takes a downward spiral.

You also need to have some understanding of your organisation’s, and your stakeholder’s, strategic intent – mid-term and longer-term strategy. If you don’t, do a bit of detective work and read some strategy documents on your intranet. Absorb some of the terminology that’s used.

If you’re going to speak to a manger in Sales, do your homework on the current sales figures, know the names of your organisation’s major clients and any prospects that may be on the horizon. If it’s a manager in Development you’re going to meet, ask around beforehand and see if you can identify the major challenges and deadlines that might be keeping her awake at night.

2. DO explain things simply and clearly without using jargon. Make any solution you're proposing as simple to understand as possible.

Remember, your target is not a learning or performance professional. Develop simple visual representations (but not complex flowcharts) to help make your solution clear. Think three-page proposals rather than 30-pagers. I once presented a 35-page, text-based, solid business plan (at least, I thought it was solid) for an L&D transformation to the HRD of a large corporation. He didn't even bother reading it. Instead asked me to come back with a PowerPoint deck containing 'no more than 6 slides with no more than 4 bullet-points on each'. When I distilled my document into the form requested he was happy to make a multi-million dollar L&D transformation/investment decision. I felt it was ‘thin’ and had to get over my ‘PowerPoint-for-everything’ prejudice, but he just wanted a few actionable options on which to make a business decision.

3. DO use terms that focus on business impact and the business results that your learning or performance solution will deliver above all else.

‘Employee Satisfaction’ is less meaningful to a line manager than ‘improved performance’ or ‘greater productivity’. Of course most managers want their teams to have development experiences that are satisfying but the vast majority will value the latter over the former on the basis that a highly performing employee, team or organisation will be more likely to also have higher levels of satisfaction than those that are struggling.

4. DO talk the language of business and organisational value rather than the language of return on investment.

Understand and agree how your stakeholder wants to measure success up-front. You won’t set the metrics, they will. This should be one of the first things you talk to them about and agree on. What will they view as ‘success’?

Find out what a successful outcome looks like to them. Sometimes it may be difficult or even impossible to put a monetary value on the outcomes they are looking for. Your stakeholder may feel that success is wider than can be measured in an ROI calculation. What’s the ROI of email or of air? We wouldn’t even bother to try to determine these. Equally, not every L&D solution can be distilled to numbers on a spreadsheet or it may be equally difficult to draw clear causal links to L&D’s input and actions and the final outputs. Get over it. Agree a set of value-based outcomes and aim for them.

Above all else, get an understanding of what your stakeholder considers success BEFORE you agree anything. Their expectations may be very different to yours and you may have to realign your own, or their expectations may be wildly optimistic and you need to do some 'reining-in'.

5. DO talk ‘results’ and ‘outcomes’ not inputs.

Your stakeholders generally won't be interested in the minutiae of L&D/HR processes or whether the instructional design is ‘sound’ or innovative, even if you think that it’s fascinating. Most will simply want to have a high level of confidence that whatever L&D delivers is going to meet or exceed their expectations. Forget about trying to explain the Kirkpatrick measurement model or sound instructional design principals.

Stick to providing a clear set of expected results – setting expectations on what difference they’re likely to see in their people’s performance or attitudes or behaviours.

DON'Ts

1. DON'T use the language of the Training/ Learning and Development/Talent cabals.

'Learning', ‘eLearning’, 'pedagogy', 'instructional design' ‘needs analysis’ etc. are all useful terms to use in specific circumstances for those in the People Development professions among our own, but they tend to send a cold shiver up the spines of most non-L&D/HR people. Using these terms will leave them cold at best, and wondering whether you understand them at worst.

Remember, always speak their language, not yours. They are your customers. You need to bend and sway with them if you're going to get them onside.

2. DON’T Complexify.

I didn’t know the word existed until recently either. Here’s a little piece of complexification theory:

If you dress up your learning solutions to make them appear more complex than they are, or if you plan to design sophisticated and complex solutions to address your stakeholder’s problems, they’ll probably mean as much to them as the formula above. Try to keep it as simple as possible. Less moving parts, less chance of breaking.

Remember, your job is to work with your stakeholders to help them solve their business problems and to help the people in their teams be better able to do their jobs. If you approach the challenge correctly they’ll all be on-side with you.

It shouldn’t be rocket science.

Who Needs Training, Again?

At some point in time I am sure we’ve all found ourselves with an answer staring us in the face, but we just haven’t managed to see it yet.

Spending money, time and effort providing face-to-face training or eLearning courses for workers in an attempt to equip them to use new processes and systems as they’re rolled out across our organisations is one of these cases.

Most of us know there are better solutions, but few Training and L&D people utilise them.

The Systems and Processes Training Dilemma
Many of us have faced the challenge of ensuring that employees can navigate and use new processes and systems as they're deployed across our organisations. All of us in corporate or organisational L&D roles are tasked with ensuring new hires come to terms with their ERP and CRM environments and with other specific processes and products quickly and efficiently.

Almost without exception this challenge is met with some form of training solution. Equally, there’s usually a call for more training when systems and processes change or when the initial training hasn’t ‘stuck’ first time around.

However there are far more effective and efficient approaches than training that address this challenge of improving ‘speed-to-competence’. It’s just that they seem to be out of the range of vision of many L&D practitioners.

The Power of Performance Support - Integrating Learning into Work
One of the most powerful alternatives to the ‘train-and-train-again’ approach is some form of Performance Support. Performance support has been part of the toolkit for building human performance and productivity for centuries. In fact the master-apprentice model is based on the concept of performance support and it’s been around almost since the dawn of mankind. A worker with a higher level of mastery ensures on-the-job support is always at hand as the apprentice develops their own mastery.

Over the years a wide range of job aids, whether delivered with the help of technology or not, have been used as simple forms of performance support. However the implementation of performance support tools and solutions as a more effective alternative to training is still on the periphery rather than at the core of how workforce development is done.

ePSS
Most of us know quite a lot about ePSS - Electronic Performance Support Systems. They are job aids’ younger brothers.

ePSS has been around in reasonably developed form for at least the past 20 years. Gloria Gery’s excellent 1991 book ‘Electronic Performance Support Systems: How and why to remake the workplace through the strategic application of technology’ which emerged from earlier ideas at AT&T was an important waypoint for the concept and practice and should be on every L&D professional’s bookshelf.

Although ePSS as a mindset has grown up considerably since Gery wrote her book, it hasn’t been adopted by the L&D community.

Gloria Gery – a prophet ahead of her time
Think about the following extracts – taken from a 1994 interview by Training & Development Journal with Gery:

“At the heart of an EPSS attitude is a belief that most organizations today face a performance crisis that training alone cannot solve….

….conventional training events are inefficient learning tools compared to an EPSS that makes learning just a point-and-click away.

….an EPSS provides task structuring and puts learning tools and data at a performer's fingertips--something conventional training can't do.”

Gery goes on to say:

“When you strip away the collusion about what is working and what isn't, you have to face the fact that training methodologies are based on a set of fallacious assumptions from public education in the 19th century”.

“Until the 1960s the only model for transfer of knowledge was the Socratic dialogue and the apprenticeship. And that only changed because the number of people needing training grew too large for one-on-one methods. That's what gave us group training."

“Group training may have worked in simpler times but now work complexity and instability of knowledge lessen its effect."

“Training events remove novices from real life and from the experts who really know the work. People are trained and outfitted with manuals and job aids, but they still don't have the competence of experts. Back on the job, most can't perform at the experts' level on tasks they were trained to do. And for tasks not covered in training at all, they are left to their own devices.”

All the above still makes great sense. Remember, Gery was making these statements almost 17 years ago.

What have we learnt in the intervening time? Have approaches employed by the majority of Training and L&D professionals when faced with the roll-out of a new system or process altered, adapted and improved?

Not much, I would suggest.

Most organisations are still spending large amounts of time and money developing and deploying structured training programmes to accompany new system and process initiatives. Yet we know the impact of training usually isn’t great. Workers still tend to turn to their colleagues (or floor walkers or help desks if they exist) for support the first time they need to work in the new environment because they haven't actually learned much from the training.

Training for these purposes just doesn't work.

Yet every ERP and CRM deployment plan I've ever seen has had a ‘training budget’ line in it. Programme and project managers seem to feel that if for no other reason than there is money allocated, structured training is an essential part of any roll-out.

Thinking about alternative and better ways of ensuring workers can use new platforms and processes is often considered just too hard.

The Range of Performance Support Approaches
Over the past 20 years the Web has provided a platform for the development of some sophisticated integrated performance support tools and environments. Some of these are being used by more enlightened organisations that are focusing on ‘working smarter’ and can see the benefits of integrating workforce development with work.

As a result there are some excellent performance support tools and approaches available for today’s learning professional. Some are very simple (a paper-based quick reference guide often works for simple systems) and others more complex, ‘smarter’ and more closely integrated into workflow. Either way, they are available and generally far cheaper than the cost of training.

Business Process Guidance
Recently a new label has appeared for advanced performance support - ‘Business Process Guidance’.

Business Process Guidance can be seen as ‘performance support on steroids’ and is specifically focused on ensuring policies and procedures are followed by providing context-sensitive on-screen assistance at any time within a rich support environment. These systems take context-sensitivity to a highly granular level (often down to a specific field in an input screen) and provide what Wayne Hodgins described to me almost 10 years ago as:

“Getting just the right content to…
Just the right person at…
Just the right time on…
Just the right device in…
Just the right context and…
Just the right way…….”

A few organisations offer solutions in this area. Panviva and LearningGuide are two companies at the top of the pile, both with excellent ePSS/BPG suites of tools.

Work=Learning. The Challenge for L&D Practitioners
The core principle of ePSS and associated solutions is that learning and work should be integrated and that workers need easy and ready access to the right information to help them with their jobs at the time they have a problem to solve, not some time beforehand and out of context.

In other words ‘just-in-time’ not 'just-in-case’.

The challenge for L&D practitioners who focus on training solutions alone is that training principles are based on preparing workers for the possibility of challenges they may face sometime in the future in a context that hasn’t occurred yet.

In other words, a great deal of training design is based on high-level assumptions at best, and on guesswork at worst.

Integrating Learning with the Work
In the next few years I believe we will see ePSS/BPG replace most of the systems, process and product training that is carried out today. The rising interest in workplace learning, integrating learning with work and ‘working smarter’ will help drive this change.

I have no doubt that the sooner performance support practices find a firm place in training and development portfolios the sooner we will stop wasting time, effort and money on using a sub-optimal train-and-train-again models.

Sleepwalkers – the emerging landscape of organisational learning

Arthur Koestler’s masterpiece ‘The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe’ is a book that I have re-read every 10 years or so, and have regularly given to young people – usually for 18th or 21st birthdays – in the probably mistaken belief that it will help them understand their world a little better.

Together with Joseph Conrad, Koestler is one of those rare people who can write with absolute clarity and great elegance in a language that he learned later in life (in Koestler’s case, English was his fourth language). ‘Sleepwalkers’ presents an account of man’s slow but sure realisation that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe but instead is a bit-player in bit galaxy out near the edge of a larger scheme of things.

Koestler explains that rather than sleepwalking into the future, over the years close and sometimes painful research and observation has led us to a better understanding of the reality of our place in the cosmos. He likens this journey to sleepwalkers slowly waking and comprehending their surroundings.

The world for many training and learning and development professionals is analogous to that of the ancient astronomers and philosophers. They understand clearly that the things are unfolding. They can see that sometimes the prior logic of their world doesn’t add up. They also understand that there are implications for the way they view their universe, but many feel they don’t have enough clarity and direction to know what to do and how to respond to the changing situation.

In the words of a more recent philosopher of popular culture, many training and development professionals realise that:

‘something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones’
Ballad of a Thin Man

Some Basic Truths

Despite the sentiment above, there are some emerging truths that can help learning and development professionals better understand the world of workforce development and provide them with some help in focusing their efforts and responding appropriately.

Continuous Learning
The first truth is that in an ever-changing world, continuous learning is the only sustainable advantage. My colleague in the Internet Time Alliance, Jay Cross, has been making this point for at least the past 10 years.

The world we live in is certainly ever-changing. Most knowledge workers, people who earn their living with their heads rather than with their hands, especially confront this fact every day of their working lives.

If learning and development professionals are to really add value to their organisations they need to adopt ways of working that respond effectively to increased levels of change and to supporting always-on working and learning patterns. They need to understand that learning is a continuous process and not simply a string of events, and that working and learning are merging. The implications of these facts is that the ‘course, curriculum’ mindset must be replaced by one focused on providing a supporting architecture for learning to be leveraged at any, and every, point in workers’ lives.

Action Speaks Louder than Anything
A second basic truth impacting learning and development professionals is that today’s productivity is measured not by what workers know, but by what they can do. Productivity is measured by actions and outputs, not the knowledge in people’s heads. If we have the ‘know what’ but not the ‘know how’ we will almost inevitably fall short in terms of performance.

It today’s world the ‘know who’ is also vital.

We need to store knowledge in our outboard brains – not only in databases, intranets and on the Internet, but also in the experience and insights of our co-workers, colleagues and people networks. Knowing who to ask when confronting a challenge is absolutely vital in our interconnected world.

Despite this, many traditional learning and training approaches are still focused on knowledge and content - the ‘know what’ - to the exclusion of the ‘know how’ and the know who’.

Knowledge acquisition may have its own particular personal value, however if it doesn’t result in behaviour change it is not really ‘learning’.

There have been many attempts to define learning and multiple points-of-view whether they be based in genetics, psychology, neuroscience, even educational philosophy and practice. However, no matter how one defines the process, learning can only be measured in a repeatable way in terms of behaviour change, sustained behaviour change at that.

“Learning is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories”
(Eric Kandal, Columbia University, Nobel Laureate for work on learning & memory)

Experience Trumps All
A third basic truth is that most of the learning that occurs for working adults happens outside formal learning environments.

And most of this is through the experiences we have as part of our work and through practice, conversations and reflection.

Like Koestler's Sleepwalkers, this unfolding realisation is presenting us with new perspectives on the role learning and development can, and should, play in building capability.

Although formal learning environments can provide experiences when designed well, most are still focused on information and content transmission. Learning and development departments will serve their organisation far better if they focus on using formal learning to do what it is best at – helping workers grasp core details of new jobs or roles, or key concepts in those jobs and roles (whether they be management or task-specific) – rather than trying to fill heads with detailed information and task-based ‘knowledge’ that often only persists in short-term memory as long as an end-of-course assessment before the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve takes over.

The lesson here is for learning and development people to approach their jobs more as gardeners or architects than as dispensers of information and ‘knowledge builders’. They should be creating the best possible environments for workers to develop as part of their work. they should also be looking to construct frameworks that shorten the process.

As my colleague, Harold Jarche says “learning is the work”. Never truer words spoken. Harold also points out that collaboration is also the work in our connected world.

This being the case, learning and development professionals need to focus on helping workers best engage the workplace and their colleagues for learning.

The Implications for Learning and Development

Paraphrasing Andrew McAfee’s comments about Web 2.0 and the changing ways of work:

If you’re a learning and development person who essentially views their job as one of controlling and managing learning activities and learning events you should be rather frightened by these trends. They are going to make your life more difficult and there’s no future respite for you on the horizon. In fact, things are going to get worse.

If you’re a learning and development person who views their job as someone who’s responsible for outputs and results and for supporting organisational development, innovation and improvement, then you’re going to find these trends playing to your strong suit. All the evidence points to this becoming an important role in organisations. Learning and development is well-positioned to play a part in this.

One key characteristics needed by learning and development professionals if they are to thrive and ride the wave of change that is happening was neatly summed up by John Seely Brown in his keynote at the DevLearn conference in San Francisco just yesterday:

“It requires a resilient mindset and ability to change, adapt, re-conceptualise and engage in deep listening with humility, and to get out of your comfort zone”
John Seely Brown

Seely Brown was speaking about workers generally, but these behaviours apply especially to learning professionals.

21st Century L&D Skills

I was recently involved in a discussion about 21st Century learning skills in one of the LinkedIn Groups. It got me thinking about a piece I’d written for TrainingZone a few months ago titled “What does your ideal L&D team look like in 2010?”. I’ve posted that article here, with some changes and updates.

If we're to believe the experts rather than the man-in the-street, the 21stCentury started on 1st January 2001 rather than on 1st January 2000. Subsequently, we’re now in the second half of the last year of the first decade of the millennium. That being the case, it’s probably worthwhile reflecting on the changes that have impacted our training/learning departments over the past 10 years. It’s also worthwhile thinking forward to the world we're likely to be facing over the next 10 and considering what an ideal learning and development team might look like if it is to effectively navigate the future.

So, what’s changed?

In the years BW (before the web) it was enough for training and learning professionals to have an understanding of instructional design and development processes (usually embedded in some ADDIE-like methodology), to be adequate writers and developers of content, and to be good performers in front of a group. This was due to the fact that the role was almost entirely focused on designing, developing and delivering training or learning events in face-to-face workshops and classes. Even if you didn’t understand the theoretical base of adult learning, so long as you could apply the ‘recipe’ you were likely to get by reasonably well.

You may have joined the training/learning profession because you were a subject expert and wanted to (or were recruited to) share your expertise. You may have fallen into L&D from an HR generalist role. Or you may have entered the learning world through a professional qualification from the CIPD, ASTD or some other national or regional awarding body, or through a College or University diploma or degree.

Once in the profession you lived and died by your participant feedback sheets. So long as the people attending your classes liked you and the catering, you were probably OK. Your Chief Learning Officer (although of course they were not known by that name then) reviewed the feedback on your classes and workshops, thought that you were doing a good job, and all was right with the world.

Then two things happened.

Change 1: The web - changing things for ever

Firstly, in 1990 Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau changed our world forever with their invention of the World Wide Web. In the wake of that innovation the concept of information and knowledge being held by the few and dispensed in structured learning events to the many collapsed. Information became ubiquitous, access became much, much easier, and the concept that ‘knowledge is power’ gave way to one of ‘access is power’.

At the same time the rate of change in many organisations increased. People moved through roles more quickly or moved off to other organisations in shorter periods, organisational strategies started to evolve in almost real-time (the idea of a 5-year or 10-year strategy/plan died about the same time the Berlin wall fell), and the ‘truth’ in terms of information and knowledge became a moving target.

All these changes threw further challenges at the model of one-off ‘knowledge transfer’ and heralded the emergence of an understanding of the need for a culture of continuous learning.

Change 2: Informal and workplace learning – a challenge for L&D

The second thing that happened was that most people came to realise that the majority of learning doesn’t occur in workshops and classrooms. Classrooms may be good places to support change initiatives and some high-level concept development and, in some cases, help the development of skills, but if learning professionals focus solely, or even primarily, on formal learning we know now that they’re missing a very big trick. There’s lots of evidence to support the fact that informal and workplace learning should be learning professionals’ prime focus. ‘Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance’ by Jay Cross my colleague in the Internet Time Alliance is a great starting point if you need one to back this up.

Added to this we’re finding that organisational structures are changing. Formal training and learning may have been adequate for the structured hierarchies of the 20^th century (although this is arguable). It certainly isn’t for the 21^st century ‘wirearchy’. Jon Husband, an expert business analyst and long-standing HR/L&D professional, explains Wirearchy as: "a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology."

Husband sees the Wirearchy model continuing to emerge and have impact, with “generations coming into the workplace with interactive games, ICQ, Napster, chat rooms, MySpace, Facebook, and ubiquitous mobility under their skin.. They're equipped with smarter software, and they take interconnectedness for granted - it's second nature to them” (it’s easy to see the challenge, with some of these tools and technologies already having been superseded by newer generations of smarter ‘gadgets’). Husband’s views on this are well documented in ‘The Future of Workplace Dynamics’ published by the World Future Society. This change is yet another challenge for L&D departments.

Social learning: The next game-changing tool for L&D

It is almost 20 years since Berners-Lee and Cailliau thrust the Web into an unsuspecting world and about 10 years since the birth of ‘e-learning’ and the widespread acknowledgement that informal learning is vital.

More recently, the social learning revolution has built on these to offer a new world of learning and development. Harold Jarche discusses some of the issues concerning the value that social learning brings in the ‘The value of social media for learning’ piece on his blog.

Jarche also challenges one of the basic tenets of L&D departments – that they should focus on developing the skills of individuals in their organisation. Jarche says: “Individual learning in organisations is irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organisational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organisation.”

A quick look at an enlightened approach to the use of social media in organisations (from my former employer, Thomson Reuters) should be enough to tell us the sensible way to encourage the best use of social networks as part of both work and learning.

Jarche and Cross argue, and I certainly agree, that training is inadequate in developing the emergent practices necessary to operate in complex networked environments. The future training/L&D department needs to understand this and respond. Social learning approaches offer one important route to adapt in this new environment. Performance support and business process guidance offer other successful strategies. All of these require new L&D operating models.

L&D Capabilities for 2010 and beyond

So, how does all this impact what the L&D department of 2010 and beyond looks like?

What are the implications for the skills and capabilities that an effective L&D team needs to possess in order to face this new digitally-enhanced and just-in-time learning future?

Capability 1 - 'fachidiot' to polymath

Initially, there is a clear need for the learning professional to move from being a content expert to being an expert facilitator of learning – from ‘fachidiot’ (narrow specialist) to polymath. My colleague Clark Quinn puts this very well in his blog posting ‘Future of the Training Department’. Clark says: “And this, to me, defines the future of the training department. It can no longer be just about courses. It’s got to include performance support, and informal learning. It’s got to be about culture, and learning together skills, and facilitating productive information interchange and productive interactions. We have technologies now to empower user-generated content, collaboration and more, but the associated skills are being assumed, which is a mistake. The ability to use these tools will continually need updating and support.”

This requires a change in mindset. If this change is to be achieved then the CLO and senior learning managers, as well as every learning professional working with them, need to adopt an open, communicative and experimental mindset. Innovation should be at the forefront of their minds. Always asking “how can we make it easier for our stakeholders to do their jobs better?” “What can we do to help them improve performance and productivity as fast and as simply and easily as possible”.

Capability 2 - technology-savvy

Technology will certainly play a major role in the L&D toolkit going forward. So every learning professional needs to understand the learning technology landscape and be able to assess new technical developments for applicability and usefulness. This means learning professionals need to become efficient researchers and learners. Keeping up-to-date with leading-edge thinking and practice is a core capability for everyone. L&D people should be allocating some of their time each day to scan publications, read blogs (even if they’re writing one themselves) and build their professional network to enhance their own capabilities. Tools such as Twitter are excellent for this. This article titled ‘Twitter as a PLN’ sums it up: “I have found more resources and got more useful advice for professional development in 3 months on Twitter than in the previous five years without it.”

There are other ways. Jane Hart maintains a tremendous resource of tools and technologies at her world-class Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies site. Resources such as this on the Internet help learning professionals become and stay technology-savvy much more easily.

Capability 3 - performance consultancy

All learning professionals need consulting and coaching acumen (as well as learning acumen). This needs to be focused on performance problems and outcomes rather than on ‘learning’ input. We all need the ability to engage with senior (and not-so-senior) line managers to identify the root cause of performance problems, and not simply focus on learning.

There are a number of performance consulting methodologies, but I have found the 7-step approach developed by UK business psychologist Nigel Harrison to be robust and straightforward. Hal Richman’s methodology is another that offers great value and stresses the importance of evaluating any learning activity in terms of business impact.

Capability 4 - business-savvy

Every learning professional needs to be able to ‘speak business’ to business people or managers in the organisation. An understanding of organisational goals is the ‘so what’ in learning. Every learning professional in the corporate world, at least, should be able to read and draw conclusions from a balance sheet and P&L account or income statement, and understand the business drivers that business leaders and line managers are focused on. Even those working in government and not-for-profit agencies should regularly check their understanding and the alignment of their work with current organisational strategy, if not the financial drivers of the organisation.

Capability 5 - adult learning-savvy

Understanding how adults learn should be meat-and-drink for every learning professional. How can we possibly provide a service without having at least a basic knowledge of adult learning, an understanding of how adults learn in the workplace, and ‘what works’ in organisational learning? The answer is, we can’t. Every learning professional also needs to understand and appreciate the four principle ways adults learn – [a] through the experiences they have; [b] through practice; [c] through conversations with colleagues and experts; and, [d] through reflecting on a, b, and c.

It also helps if the learning team as a whole has some deep expertise in the psychology of learning and some of the main current learning theories, if only to be able to take a reasoned view of any specific approaches being suggested or proposed.

Other important capabilities/attributes

Along with the capabilities above, other attributes such as ‘empathy, ‘listening’, ‘tolerance for ambiguity’, ‘basic communication ability’ have been identified as essential for effective L&D activity.

New roles

New roles will emerge in the L&D department. Roles such as Community Manager and Learning Facilitation Guru will appear, along with whole teams of L&D professionals focused on learning innovation. Every L&D practitioner needs to have the ability and, even more importantly, the desire to innovate. Innovation in designing new approaches and solutions to solve performance problems is the oxygen for L&D. It’s not important whether the innovation involves technology in all cases or not – although technology offers some huge opportunities for solving business problems and we’re just plain stupid if we ignore them – but an L&D department that fails to demonstrate an innovative mindset is one that’s quickly becoming irrelevant as a strategic business tool. Such L&D departments deserve to have their funding redirected elsewhere.

The final nail - attitude trumps skills

With the right attitude you and your L&D department will be able to be proactive and have a significant impact on organisational performance. Without the right attitude, no matter what skills your team has in the kitbag, it’s likely to fall short.

EVER TRIED TO HIT A MOVING TARGET AT TWENTY PACES WITH A COLT 45?

In the movies, the marshal steps out from behind the big rock, draws his Colt .45 and enforces the law by dispatching a few outlaws as they dive for cover 20 or 30 yards away.

In real life it was not as simple as that.

About 40 years ago I read a tremendous book by Earl Forrest about a feud that took place in Navajo County, Arizona in the 1880s.

The feud was between two families. The cattle-herding Grahams and the sheep-grazing Tewksburys. The feuding carried on for more than a decade and only ended when most of the protagonists had been killed.

Enter the splendidly named Commodore Perry Owens (that’s a photo of him, above). Commodore was his first name, not his job role - his mother named him after Commodore Perry, who defeated the British naval forces in 1813. Owens was sheriff of Navajo County at the time of the Graham-Tewksbury feud and took it on himself to sort out some of the key players and restore law and order in Navajo County. He did this in style, killing a number of the feuding parties in the famous Pleasant Valley gunfight (including a 14 year-old who picked up his dying brother’s Colt .45 and aimed it at Owens) and pursuing others incessantly.

What’s the point of this story?

The point is that Owens knew the limitations of a Colt .45 when a moving target was involved. He was in the habit of approaching potentially difficult situations with a Winchester rifle and two 12-bore shotguns along with his Colt .45. And he used each as needed. The best tool for any particular job was brought into action as appropriate and as quickly as possible. His arsenal was comprehensive and innovative for his day.

What L&D can learn from Commodore Owens?

The challenges facing everyone involved in the world of learning and performance improvement are not unlike those that faced Commodore Owens in the 1880s. We’re dealing with multiple competing pressures, variable terrain, sometimes difficult stakeholders, and an unprecedented amount of rapid change. A single-shot solution can never be the answer, rapid fire from multiple weapons is absolutely necessary.

All L&D practitioners need to adapt their approaches to fit specific needs, use the best tools for the specific job, and always be on the lookout for efficient and effective ways to deliver results. Most of all, L&D needs to focus on the ends rather than the means. On the impact and result, not on the process.

Like Owens, L&D needs to think and act strategically,and often needs to take difficult steps in order to achieve its ends. L&D professionals don’t need to gun down teenagers (!), but will certainly need to leave behind processes and approaches that were developed for an earlier age – the steady-state industrial type of organisations that are breaking down or transmogrifying before our eyes.

Sometimes L&D departments may also need to leave colleagues behind if they can’t, or won’t, join them on their journey to adapt and adopt the changes that are clear and necessary if they are to remain relevant and provide strategic value to their organisations.

Adding Real Strategic Value

Like Owens, L&D needs to continually demonstrate its value through the best possible actions and solutions it can muster.

It has to respond rapidly, be quick on the draw, and L&D professionals and suppliers need to be more than one-trick ponies. They must focus on whether (and how) they can partner with their business colleagues to help them solve their business challenges with innovative business-led solutions.

If L&D departments and their ecosystem of suppliers and consultants can swim out of the whirlpool of increasing demands having proved their strategic value to senior leaders, they will flourish. If they can’t, they’ll simply prove the premise that L&D is irrelevant in the brave new world of constant change. If this happens, CLOs should expect their budgets to be slashed, their scope to be limited, and for their departments to whither into oblivion.

If L&D vendors can’t adapt to the changing demands that are clearly starting to occur, then they should expect diminishing requests for engagement, smaller contracts and financial difficulties.

Everyone needs to change. And change now.

How Do We Know When L&D is Providing Strategic Value?

The question of the potential and actual value that L&D can contribute to organisations has been discussed and analysed at length over the years. Some good investigative research into strategic value has been published, such as the The C Level Perceptions of the Strategic Value of Learning report by Tony O’Driscoll, Brenda Sugre and Mary Kay Vona for IBM and the ASTD some 5 years ago and The Value of Learning:From Return on Investment to Return on Expectation by the UK Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (CIPD) published in November 2007.

Although the work for both these reports was carried out some years ago, there’s no evidence or reason to believe the situation they found has changed. They both point to some important challenges and failings in the standard L&D approaches that have been used for the past 30-40 years at least.

Aligning L&D Priorities and Outputs

The IBM/ASTD Strategic Value of Learning study found clear blue water between senior leaders’ expressed requirement for L&D to help them prepare for future challenges and Learning leaders’ (CLOs or Learning Directors/Managers) focus on moving up the value chain from learning to performance and talent to address current challenges. There was a chasm between the current focus (tactical) mindset of L&D and the future focus (strategic) mindset required by senior business leaders.

The CLO focus in this case – i.e. catch the balls as they’re thrown over the fence and run with them - is understandable but it’s certainly neither an optimal nor sustainable strategy. Most CLOs and senior L&D managers have a lot on their plate meeting existing stakeholder demand for training. If they don’t have solid analysis processes in place to qualify, prioritise or reject any ‘training problem’ that a manager might bring to them they are likely to be drowning pretty quickly.

If CLOs focus on learning – which in the majority of cases means the production of content-driven formal classes and eLearning – then the move to performance and talent-centric focus alone is likely to consume all of their time and resources, with no time to think about the future.

CLOs and their L&D teams need to move beyond a focus on learning to focus on solving business problems in close partnership with their stakeholders. There’s no other option. If L&D leaders and practitioners can’t do this it’s almost a certainty that their function will become irrelevant very quickly.

Proving Value

The IBM/ASTD Strategic Value of Learning study also found that there was a discrepancy between senior executives’ absence of need for direct evidence of L&D’s contribution to organisational outcomes and CLOs’ increasing focus on providing proof that their teams’ efforts provide value.

This is a chasm between the faith of senior leaders that L&D will do a good job and CLOs’ need to provide proof that they are doing a good job by carrying out more and more complex and sophisticated ROI calculations and developing more and more spreadsheet models and pie charts to deliver the message.

The message here is that CLOs and their L&D teams need to get over trying to ‘prove’ their value, and focus instead on keeping their customers satisfied. The value of L&D will be determined by its stakeholders and customers, not by L&D itself. In any transaction or service the seller may set the price, but it’s always the customer who determined the value. L&D services are no exception to this rule.

The CIPD Value of Learning study mirrored the earlier IBM/ASTD work. It found that managers are more interested in Return on Expectation (ROE) than Return on Investment (ROI) figures from the L&D department. ROE is based on whether the initial expectation of the stakeholder/customer has been met, rather than on some convoluted spreadsheet analysis ‘proving’ causal chains and returns.

Facing the Future

All this leads me to wonder whether the best strategy for CLOs, L&D practitioners and providers into the ‘learning marketplace’ who are finding it difficult in moving from the world of ‘push’ L&D to the world of ‘pull’ L&D is for them to seek out some well-known pharmaceutical products for assistance. These might help them break out of their current mindsets and set them on the best path to face the future.

Clearly it needs something dramatic. Other approaches seems to have failed. Many learning leaders and providers still think that evolution from old to new is the answer.

Evidence suggests it isn’t. There is a revolution occurring in the workplace, and revolution in the way organisations are finding they need to organise and operate to be successful in the interconnected ‘pull’ marketplace we are all living and working in.

The Pharmaceutical Option

The Benzodiazepine drugs Rohypnol (also known as the ‘forget-me pill’ well known to date-rapists) and Versad, which is used to induce amnesia following medical procedures, come to mind.

I’ve had the pleasure of having been administered Versad couple of times. It’s marvellous. The effect is that you lose short-term memory of your life for a few hours or so. It’s like you fell into a black hole until the drug effects wear off. You can’t remember what you did and how you acted (or what was done to you). You come out with no recollection of previous actions and activities during the time you were under its influence. It also sets you up to ‘clear out’ past approaches and start anew.

Which is why I’m wondering whether it will do the trick and enable the revolutionary change that is absolutely necessary if L&D departments are to remain, or become, relevant as strategic drivers for their organisations.

Something radical is certainly needed.

The Moving Target Problem

Which brings me back to Commodore Perry Owens. Owens understood the need for radical action even if it involved shooting a young boy and facing down what was previously seen as insurmountable odds. He wasn’t tied to past practices or tools. Owens would have been an advocate of learning being part of the work rather than learning being treated as something in its own right, being separate from work. He would have sought out the best tools and practices to attack the specific problem he was facing at the time. He wasn’t bound by convention. Have a look at his photograph – chest-length (red) hair and a hat that was more Mexican immigrant than cowboy. Owens also understood that sometimes you have to break conventions to get the job done. He also understood that the focus should be on action rather than process, and that doing the right thing for the community is the most important outcome for all.

It’s the same for all of us involved in helping individuals and organisations build and maintain performance, productivity, innovation and quality.

We need to leave old approaches behind and adopt emerging and emergent ones if we’re to deliver real value. And we'd better do it sooner rather than later if we're going to keep ahead in a fast-changing game.

Real learning – let’s not confuse it with completing templated exercises

I read a piece written by Kate Graham of e2train on Thursday and it started me thinking about the ‘real learning versus managed learning’ debate.

I found I disagreed with Kate’s view on a number of points, and stand on the other side of the fence from her argument for a number of reasons.

I don’t want anyone to get me wrong. I like Kate a lot. We’ve known each other for a number of years. I just think that she has got it wrong in this piece as to what real learning is and the role that LMS and ‘social learning’ have to play in the mix of building workforce capability and effectiveness in organisations.

State of Confusion

Firstly, let’s clear something up. We shouldn’t confuse what L&D/Training departments spend a lot of their time on with real learning.

Learning professionals spend a significant amount of their time (maybe even the majority) designing and delivering content and then evaluating completions and short-term memory outputs from structured mandatory and compliance training modules and courses.

Although this activity is a necessary and sometimes important one (even if only to keep the CEO and Chairman out of the courts and prison) it has little to do with real learning.

Compliance training is primarily about recording activity and gathering data that can be provided to regulatory or professional bodies or kept for a rainy day.

I bet Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, hopes and prays that his L&D teams have well-documented evidence that everyone involved with the Deepwater Horizon drill rig had been through their mandatory and compliance training. It won’t mean that they were all competent or learned anything, but it sure-as-hell will help him and BP when the regulatory authorities come knocking.

The Importance of Compliance Training

There is no doubt that organisations need an LMS or LMS-type functionality to track training activity linked to compliance and mandatory requirements. Organisations need to ensure that their employees complete certain activities in order to meet national and international regulations. Sarbanes-Oxley, AML, Fraud, Health & Safety all fall into this category along with a lot of other industry-specific demands for compliance or ‘proof’ of activity.

Regulators haven’t come up with a better way of measuring compliance than by measuring activity. Some would argue that by passing a test or gaining certification the candidate has provided proof that they will behave in a compliant way. In fact what they have proved is that they can pass a compliance test. A good short-term memory (or even a not-so-good one) will usually do the trick.

Kate, on her e2train blog, cites David Wilkins’ ‘A Defense of the LMS’ piece in pointing out that compliance training is a ‘big deal’ for organisations and here I absolutely agree. LMS technology has provided a big step forward here. Database technology in its other guises has helped organisations collect and manipulate data across the entire HR arena over the past 25 years far-and-away beyond what was done beforehand with pen-and-paper, and then spreadsheets. LMS has certainly done the trick for gathering compliance data.

Beyond Compliance

However I think there’s a question to be asked whether LMS should be the primary tool to provide more than the environment to execute compliance and mandatory requirements efficiently and effectively and to serve up content within the constructs of modules, courses, programmes and curricula.

Harold Jarche, in a short but insightful piece, recently wrote:

“..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?”

Maybe LMS vendors would be better off sticking to their knitting and letting the maelstrom that is the profusion of targeted ‘2.0’ (for want of a better term) tools that are emerging virtually every day to provided support for process-based learning.

This is already happening. Most people working in the knowledge economy want to create their own personal learning environments with tools that suit the way they work, gather information, and learn. They prefer not to be shoe-horned into large enterprise applications no matter what the benefits of ‘integration, consistency and scale’ their IT colleagues have been sold by software vendors.

The challenges IT departments are facing with requests for access to public Internet personal social tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and hundreds of others is just a foretaste of what is to come in this arena.

Employees will continue to demand access to the tools that best work for them in their personal learning environment. The battle won’t be won by IT lock-down but by acceptable use policies and enabling mindsets.

Equally the challenges of providing tools and functionality for process-based learning won’t be won by adding features to already behemoth event-driven LMS tools. It will be won by loose-coupling of a multitude of independent applications, and superficial integration at the interface level.

Can We Really ‘Manage’ Learning?

Most of us have been persuaded that the majority of real learning occurs in the workplace through experience and practice and over the water cooler through conversations and reflection. It may be an interesting intellectual pursuit to argue whether the % of learning that occurs outside classrooms and other formal module, course, programme, curriculum structures is 70%, 80%, 90% or some other figure and whether the evidence supports one assumption over another, but arguments like that add little value to the fact that there is an increasing body of empirical evidence that says we learn as we work.

Returning to Kate’s argument, it seems to me to be a defence of the status quo. That learning is almost an end in itself and separate from work. That’s the space that learning management systems have traditionally played in. The interesting thing is that this status quo is likely to be usurped in the very near future, if it’s not already been so. We can certainly see the cracks.

The Demise of the Course Vending Machine

Kate points out that today’s learning management systems (whether they’re branded as LMS or as some other infrastructural component) are very different from the course vending machines that appeared in the 1990s. To an extent I can see a lot prettier LMS tools, but most still have at their heart the management of learning events, rather than the management of learning.

I doubt whether learning can actually be managed by anyone other than the person who is developing their own skills, capability and changes in their behaviour. Learning and development professionals, managers, colleagues, friends and families can certainly help facilitate learning. They can also assist in creating an environment to help learning occur. But the management of the very personal process of learning is down to each of us in our own context. Machines and technology don’t manage learning any more than the car or public transport that you use to get to work manages your journey.

Like Topsy

Like Topsy in Uncle Toms Cabin, today’s LMS systems have “just growed'”. They have developed from stand-alone classroom training scheduling and administration systems (Oracle’s OTA was a classic of that genre) to incorporate the launch and tracking of eLearning courses and shorter nuggets of content, the Boolean logic of pre-and post-requisites, and so on and so on.

David Wilkins ‘Argument #2’ lists a mind-boggling array of features of a modern LMS – many of them focused on ‘managing’ processes, skills, forms, competencies, careers, goals certification, files, workflows, appraisals, events, assets, users, groups, pages and so on. Impressive, but primarily built around a top-down view of organisational learning. Not really management, more control.

Now the LMS world is in the race to vacuum up more ‘social’ functionality and dump it into, or add it onto, their database structures.

The Right Place?

I would question whether the LMS is the best starting point for building infrastructure to support either workplace and experiential learning or ‘learning through others’ whether at the real or virtual water cooler, or as part of the on-going process of learning and development. LMS seems to be a tool designed and adapted for a world of reasonably neat formal event-based learning, not a messy world of informal process-based learning. The equally idiosyncratic 2.0 tools seem to be a better bet to support individual learning in the new world. Maybe LMS should stick to the role it was originally conceived for and just get better at that.

Again, I’m sure some LMS vendors have sold their products to clients on the basis that they provide a solution in a box. I doubt that one solution suits many organisations, though. Most organisations see themselves as having unique needs and operating in unique ways. When you get under the skin, many of these ‘unique’ characteristics are not unique but really quite common in specific industries or sectors. However, the nature of organisations, as with people, is that they will vary both within and between, so single point-solutions are unlikely to work for all.

What Organisations Want To Do

One point that Kate makes is that today’s LMS offerings are based on what organisations actually want to do.

Maybe some organisations do want the mind-boggling array of functionality in today’s LMS, but most don’t. It’s the sum of the parts. If you buy a new DVD player you don’t necessarily want it to contain every function ever developed in DVD players since the beginning of time. Some LMS functionality is undoubtedly essential, but all certainly isn’t.

Many of the features that have been incorporated into LMS architecture over the past 10 years have been driven a Gollum-type obsession with ‘the shiny’ – an attempt to do a ‘Microsoft’ and become all things to all people – bringing in elements of performance management, talent management and other HR process controls.

I’m surprised there’s not a ‘water cooler conversation scheduler’ in David’s list. Maybe in the next version…

The Value of Learning

Kate ended her piece by saying:

“..perhaps it would be good if our thought leaders (who we need and admire) could lend a hand here. Maybe give us all some new ideas as to how we can really prove the worth of our learning to the organisation. Right now, that might come in useful.”

My suggestion to help Kate out here would be to recommend that every learning professional and every professional in the learning LMS business comes to appreciate that learning is a continuous personal process that isn’t measured by any form of pre- and post-assessment, no matter how sophisticated. This personal process can’t be ‘managed’ any more than you, waiting at the bus stop, can ‘manage’ the arrival of the number 32 bus.

Learning is an accumulation of experiences supported by practice in context and by interaction with others – who may be your peers, your supervisor, or your friends. Even your friendly learning professional.

Learning can only be said to have occurred when behaviour has demonstrably changed. Eric Kandel, who won his Nobel Prize for his work on learning and memory, said it for me:

“Learning is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories”

I’d love to know whether there’s an LMS out there that can manage that process.