Why the Real Power of eLearning is Social

This post was prompted by a webinar I gave on behalf of Citrix/GoToWebinar on 6^th July 2011 and originally posted as a guest post on the Learning Pool blog. I’ve made a few changes to it here.

Looking Back

eLearning has been with us in one form or another for at least the past 50 years, maybe longer.

Probably the first player on the enterprise eLearning block was the University of Illinois’ PLATO learning management system, built in 1960 to deliver training through user terminals (which, even then, had touch-screens).

Some would argue that quite a few of today’s LMS offerings haven’t advanced a great deal from PLATO. They serve up content and track activity.

 

Plato IV LMS circa 1972

Personal Journey

My own exposure to eLearning began back in 1964 when learning speed reading via an electronic system at my secondary school. The speed reading machine was about the size of a large refrigerator and probably weighed roughly the same (maybe they even shared components). However despite the obvious limitations, technology was making its way into learning through a number of routes even back then.

My first involvement in working with learning technologies that we’d recognise today was when tutoring at the University of Sydney in the early 1970s. In the School of Biological Sciences lectures were pre-recorded and delivered across the campus on TV screens and the labs were supported with tape-driven experiential learning activities. Content was still analogue, but delivered in ‘e’ format.

My exposure to eLearning in the early 1980s really got me ‘hooked’ on the potential of technology in learning. At the time I was running online collaborative learning courses. The ‘hooking’ was reinforced later in the 1980s when I was reviewing Interactive Video training programmes for the UK National Interactive Video Centre). I saw some great ‘interactive’ and engaging learning activities in those big 12” disks – the content was used to support experiential learning. At the same time I had the pleasure of sitting on the national steering committee of the TTNS service in the UK – an innovative collaboration between British Telecom and (I hardly bear mention in the current UK ‘hacking scandal’ climate) Rupert Murdoch’s News International. TTNS supported technology-based learning for schools and Further/Higher education in the UK. Every schoolchild in the UK had an email box on the Telecom Gold service – a very innovative step at the time.

Why Look Back?

The point of looking back is that it helps understand the fact that various forms of technology-based learning have been around for a long time, and that some of the pedagogies that were used in early days were equal, or superior, to the predominantly ‘course vending machine’ approaches that emerged in the late 1990s on the back of generic course catalogues and with content-led eLearning generally. Some of these 1990s models, to a greater or lesser extent, are still with us.

I think it’s a good time now to both look back and look forward and to re-think our approach to eLearning generally.

Significant Hurdles

Allison Rossett recently made it clear that there are still significant eLearning hurdles to jump in an article titled “Engaging with the new eLearning” published by Adobe. Allison pointed out that an observation she made almost 10 years ago still hasn’t been addressed. This is what she wrote in 2002:

“The good news is plentiful. eLearning enables us to deliver both learning and information at will, dynamically and immediately. It allows us to tap the knowledge of experts and non-experts and catapult those messages beyond classroom walls and into the workplace. And …it lets us know, through the magic of technology, who is learning, referring, and contributing—and who isn’t.

…Then there’s the bad news. Many simply fail to embrace eLearning. Like the sophomore taking a course called “Introduction to Western Civilization” via distance learning falling behind on assignments or the customer service representative who looks at two of the six eLearning modules and completes only one, or the supervisor, who had the best intentions, but is too busy with work to be anybody’s e-coach”.

Allison goes on to point out that “Every industry study reveals marked increases in training and development delivered via eLearning, often with disappointing numbers characterising participation and persistence….participants in eLearning programs are less likely to follow through than in an instructor-led program”.

This should give us cause to pause and think - and re-think - about our approach to eLearning . Not so much about eLearning as an approach in general - there’s plenty of evidence that it can be an effective way to assist and speed development - but we need to think about HOW we are employing and deploying eLearning. There’s clearly room for improvement there.

This also raises another fundamental question for me.

The question is this:

Where do current ideas about eLearning fit into the ‘new world’ of work and in the new world of building workforce capability in the 21^st century?

A great deal has changed since the term eLearning first entered the vocabulary in 1999 and since web-based courses and modules started appearing in volume in the early 2000s. We need to rethink eLearning in light of these changes and other changes that are only now starting to impact the world of work.

The Changes Needed

A major driver for us to re-think eLearning approaches is the move away from the 20^th Century ‘push’ models of learning - with modules, courses, content and curricula being pushed at employees.

We’re seeing a move towards a 21^st Century ‘pull’ model - where workers ‘pull’ the learning and performance resources they need when they need to improve their work performance. They may need a course, but are more likely just to need some ‘here-and-now’ support to solve a problem or overcome an obstacle and then move on.

I see a requirement for two principal changes in thinking to address the challenge this change presents to Learning professionals. The changes are these:

1. A move away from content-centric mind-sets.

2. A move away from ‘course’ mind-sets.

Step 1: Leaving Content-Centricity Behind

I’m sure most of us are aware that the major challenge for learning is no longer about ‘content’ or ‘knowledge’ (if it ever were).

We can find content whenever we need it. Our lives are inundated with content. We may not have great filters for content – that’s the real challenge - but there is no doubt they will arrive in the next few years.

The need now is for other skills such as critical thinking and analysis skills, creative thinking and design skills, networking and collaboration skills, and, across all of these, effective ‘find’ skills.

The development of these new skills has nothing to do with content or ‘knowledge transfer’. It requires new mind-sets and capabilities that I’ve come to call ‘MindFind’ – mind-sets and capabilities that support us in finding the right content when we need it, at the point of need.

Obviously the need for content won’t go away completely, but we know that content is of greatest use when we can access it in the context of a specific challenge, not when we’re provided it in a class or an eLearning course and try to remember it until we take the end-of-course test - context is (almost) all.

We need an understanding of core concepts, certainly, but Learning professionals shouldn’t be wasting their time serving up all the details about ‘task’ in closed eLearning packages. They serves little purpose and the vast majority is forgotten immediately after the course or working through the eLearning modules.

The challenge for Learning professionals is all about helping workers make sense of what is expected of them, how they can gain the right experiences, how they can get opportunities to practice, how they can find the right people to help, and how they can have time to reflect on what they’ve done and what they’ve learned so they do it better next time. This is not achieved by creating and delivering learning ‘content’. It’s achieved by utilising the right context.

Content to Context

So we need to replace content with context – learning through doing, rather than learning through knowing.

We also need to move our focus from ‘know-what’ learning to ‘know-how’ learning. From content-rich to experience-rich. And from ‘know-what’ learning to ‘know-who’ learning as well – we are who we know, and our expertise is the sum of our own resources and others we can draw on when needed.

The latter is why social learning is such an important element in learning and needs more focus. It is not just ‘social’ for the sake of being social. Workers will want to co-create. Lots of the learning content of the future will be generated by people who are doing the work rather than by specialist training instructors and learning specialists. Learning professionals need to think about how they can facilitate and support this, rather than creating the next greatest content-heavy eLearning package. Instead they need to think about helping workers make connections and building communities where they can mine their own learning.

New Channels

Workers will also expect their learning to be more personalised and available in a self-service mode so they can get what they want when they want it and where they happen to be. That means Learning professionals need to consider new channels for learning.

Last month I was working at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia with my Internet Time Alliance colleague Clark Quinn, and had the opportunity to ask the Dean of IT about the penetration of smartphones, notebooks and tablets among the 60,000 student population at the university. He estimated 90% had smartphones and at least 50% currently had tablets or notebooks. I am sure that penetration is even higher in many other parts of the world, and not just in the ‘developed’ world, either. A big part of the future of learning, as with our daily lives, is surely going to be mobile. We need to make sure that any content that really needs be made available to help with learning is accessible on multiple platforms.

More to the point, Learning professionals need to be thinking about creating learning EXPERIENCES rather than learning content.

As such, we need to move away from content-rich, experience-poor learning towards a focus on helping workers have rich learning experiences from which they can develop.

Step 2: De-Focusing from Courses

Many Learning professionals default to a course mind-set when faced with designing a solution to any performance problem. It’s an understandable response. That’s what most have done throughout their careers – design and deliver courses. Also, courses are relatively straightforward projects to undertake. Standard instructional design methodologies can be applied. They consist of a one-off event or a series of events that can be relatively easily scheduled and delivered. We know how long they’ll take, what resources they’ll use and we can manage the process quite easily.

However, we also know that most learning doesn’t occur in courses or events. It occurs in the workplace, in bits-and-pieces. It occurs through watching an expert, or through a conversation we have with colleagues or a manager, or when we make a mistake and have the opportunity to reflect on how we’d do it next time, or in one of many other ways. Designing for learning in this environment is altogether different – and often a more ‘messy’ and complex matter. But outcomes are likely to be better. People are more likely to retain the learning they achieve through experience. And this type of ‘informal’ or workplace learning has been shown to be generally better received, more effective and less costly than its formal counterpart.

So de-focusing on courses and re-focusing on supporting learning in the workplace through social learning approaches and performance support will be critical in the future. There is no doubt about that.

In fact, there is a good basis of fact to argue that the real power of eLearning is social and contextual.

Those Learning professionals that understand and respond to this fact will be able to demonstrate greater impact. Those that stick to the content-rich, experience-poor models of the 20^th Century will surely be overtaken by events.

Social & Workplace Learning through the 70:20:10 Lens

 

There have been millions of words written and spoken about ‘informal’ and social learning over the past few years.

 

 

In fact, if a Martian had just arrived on Earth and strayed into a meeting of Learning and Development professionals or into a learning conference, or even picked up a professional journal, he would logically assume that these were the only ways humans learned.

The Martian’s assumption would be roughly correct. Humans learn principally through the process of carrying out actions, making mistakes, getting help from others, having discussions about which approach to take, stepping back and reflecting on why ‘it isn’t working’ and using a myriad of other strategies in the heat of the workflow or activity.

The shift in focus to workplace and social learning by HR and Learning professionals over the past few years is an significant one. And it’s not just a passing phase or fad. It is reflecting a fundamental change that is happening all around us – the move from a ‘push’ world to a ‘pull’ world, and the move from structure and known processes to a world that is much more fluid and where speed to performance and quality of results are paramount.

Social and Workplace Learning

The increased focus on social and workplace learning is causing considerable disruption in the L&D world both to the traditional roles for those who are designers and delivers of courses and programmes and also to the whole ecosystem of training and learning suppliers that inhabit the L&D world providing programmes, courses and content and the supporting infrastructure to deliver (mainly) learning and development events.

In a way, what we’re witnessing is a significant shift in thinking about the best ways people can keep abreast their jobs and improve performance in a world where change is not only becoming the norm, but is accelerating on an almost daily basis. Other factors such as the changes brought about with new generations entering the workforce and technology changes creating participatory learning opportunities (as pointed out recently by Claire Schooley of Forrester Research) play their part.

A number of approaches are emerging to meet this changing thinking.

Our awareness that more learning occurs outside courses and curricula than inside has added fuel to the fire of social learning – which was lit by the plethora of emerging social media tools and technologies speeded on their way by events typified in the O’Reilly Media conference in 2004.

Also, there has been a re-awakening of the understanding that context is vital for learning and, aligned with this, that performance in a formal training environment is not necessarily a good indicator of performance in a different environment, such as the workplace. To an extent context is replacing content as the key factor in organisational learning. These realisations are leading to greater focus on workplace learning – learning in the context of work. Learning and work are merging.

The Importance of Experience

Bubbling along under the ‘social’ explosion has been an increasing awareness that experiences are critical to learning and performance.

The majority of learning is obtained through the experiences to which we are exposed. Many of our experiences are social, some are not.

Whichever way we gain our experience, we now know that they are vital building-blocks for our development. Learning how to ‘do’ something is far more important than learning ‘about’ something in terms of improving performance. We didn’t learn to ride a bicycle by learning Newton’s first law of motion, nor did we learn how to best utilise our professional skills through reading or being told about them. We learned through doing them or, at least, attempting to do them. The theory and explanations are often useful, but the real learning occurs through experience and practice.

The 70:20:10 Framework

 

Surprisingly, I need to place the following caveat almost every time I speak about the 70:20:10 model:

‘Proof’ 70:20:10 is a reference model or framework. It’s not a recipe. It’s based on empirical research and surveys and also on a wide sample of experiences that suggest adult learning principally occurs in the context of work and in collaboration with others (as the great educational psychologist Jerome Bruner once said ‘our world is others’). 70:20:10 is being used by many organisations to re-focus their efforts and resources to where most real learning actually happens –  through experiences, practice, conversations and reflection in the context of the workplace, not in classrooms. They have found the 70:20:10 framework a useful strategic tool to help them transform the way their organisations allocate resources and approach employee development – whether it’s leadership, management or individual contributor development. Anyone trying to 'prove' that the percentages fall in exact ratios, or anyone searching for peer-reviewed papers demonstrating the same is not only wasting their time, but clearly doesn't 'get it'.

 

Some Background on 70:20:10
The fact that most development occurs outside formal learning has been known for many years, but the idea of specific ratios of the formal to informal split has only been in focus for the past 40 years or so.

In 1971 Allen Tough, emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, identified the fact that ‘about 70% of all learning projects are planned by the learner himself’ in his research published in ‘The Adult’s Learning Projects (the book is downloadable free).  In a recent conversation, Prof Tough told me “both my books,‘The Adult’s Learning Projects’ and ‘Intentional Change’ look at the entire range of adult learning and change (not just work) but we found that 70:20:10 pattern.”

In 1996, 15 years after Allen Tough’s work, Morgan McCall and his colleagues Bob Eichinger and Michael Lombardo at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina found from their observations that:

“Lessons learned by successful and effective managers are roughly:
70% from tough jobs
20% from people (mostly the boss)
10% from courses and reading”

Eichinger & Lombardo published some details in their book The CAREER ARCHITECT Development Planner (now in its 5th edition).

More recently (2010) a survey by Peter Casebow and Owen Ferguson at GoodPractice in Edinburgh, Scotland, found a similar split in their Survey of 206 leaders and managers.

Casebow and Ferguson found that informal chats with colleagues were the most frequent development activity used by managers (and one of the two activities seen as being most effective – the other one being on-the-job instruction from a manager or colleague). 82% of those surveyed said that they would consult a colleague at least once a month, and 83% rated this as as very or fairly effective as a means of helping them perform in their role when faced with an unfamiliar challenge.  The other top most-frequently used manager development activities included search, trial-and-error and other professional resources.

Clearly, conversations (through informal chats with colleagues) and learning from the experience of others (through workplace instruction from their manager or a colleague - receiving the benefit of their experience and providing the opportunity for guided practice) are important in development of the surveyed group.

My colleague Jay Cross has listed other research into formal and informal learning (‘Where did the 80% come from?’) and explains why definitive figures have little meaning in the larger context. Jay identified a rough 80:20 split between informal and formal learning which he discussed at length in his Informal Learning book.

The 70:20:10 Framework in Practice

For me, at its heart 70:20:10 is all about re-thinking and re-aligning learning and development focus and effort. It involves stepping outside the classes/courses/curriculum mind-set and letting outputs drive the cart – thinking about performance improvement and helping people do their jobs better rather than spending the majority of time and effort on inputs – learning content, instructional design etc.  Of course the inputs are important at times, but we need to keep our perspective. Content and design are not the most important inputs to the learning and capability development process.

It doesn’t matter if the job is simple or complex, whether it’s repetitive or highly varied, or if it’s driven by defined processes or requires extensive innovative and creative thinking. The principles are the same – the most effective and generally fastest way to improve and gain mastery will be through workplace and social learning.

In practical terms what does this look like?

Well, it may mean using any of these ‘70’ approaches:

• Identifying opportunities to apply new learning and skills in real situations
• Allocating new work within an existing role
• Increasing range of responsibilities or span of control
• Identifying opportunities to reflect and learn from projects
• Allocating assignments focused on new initiatives
• Providing the chance to work as a member of a small team
• Providing increased decision making authority
• Providing stretch assignments
• enhancing leadership activities, e.g.; lead a team, committee membership, executive directorships
• Setting up co-ordinated swaps and secondments
• Arranging assignments to provide cross-divisional or cross-regional experience
• Providing opportunities to carry out day-to-day research
• Providing opportunities to develop a specific expertise niche
• Allocating assignments to provide new product experience

Or any of these ‘20’ approaches:

• Encourage the use of colleague feedback to try a new approach to an old problem
• Establish a culture of coaching from manager/colleagues/others
• Encourage seeking advice, asking opinions, sounding out ideas
• Engage in formal and informal mentoring
• Embed informal feedback and work debriefs
• Encourage learning through team work
• Target building strong internal and external networks
• Build a culture of learning through teams/networks
• Support professional and industry association membership and external networking
• Encourage facilitated group discussion as a standard practice
• Use Action Learning

The above are just a few options available for development in the ‘70’ and ‘20’ zones.

Whose Responsibility?

When Learning professionals look at these lists they often remark that many of these activities are not in their bailiwick.

Of course this is correct. The responsibility for creating an environment where real learning occurs and opening up workplace learning opportunities is primarily in the hands of senior leadership and line managers. However, HR and Learning professionals have an important role to play.

A 70:20:10 approach does mean Learning professionals need to put a new lens on their responsibilities.

L&D has an absolute responsibility as enablers – to ensure leaders and managers understand their people development responsibilities AND have the capability and tools to deliver. This means there’s a role for Learning professionals in both the analysis of performance problems and in the design of the solutions where the outcome is intended to be improved performance through better understanding (knowledge) and skills.

70:20:10 and the Changing Role of L&D

All of this raises the question ‘does adopting the 70:20:10 framework change the role of the Learning function?’.

There is only one answer to this question. Yes - it changes the role fundamentally. And the change not only impacts L&D professionals but HR professionals as well.

The table below indicates a few changes that need to occur when adopting 70:20:10 (or any model or framework focused on workplace and social learning):

These changes require new roles, new skills and new mind-sets. Learning professionals who have spent their time designing, developing and delivering formal, structured courses, programmes and curricula will need to adapt and develop their own capabilities.

My experience has been that many find the challenges of working within the new framework both challenging and rewarding. The 70:20:10 model certainly places Learning professionals much closer to their key stakeholders and to the white heat of their organisation’s Raison d'être. It has the potential to move L&D from a support function to the position of being a strategic business tool.

Tangible Actions to Deliver Results Through The 70:20:10 Framework

There are a number of actions that can be taken to deliver results through moving to greater focus on the ‘informal’ parts within 70:20:10.  The table below splits them into three categories:

1. Actions to support the informal workplace learning process
2. Actions to help workers improve their learning skills
3. Actions that support the creation of a supportive organisational culture

Who is Using 70:20:10?

Over the past 18 months I have been engaged in work with researchers at DeakinPrime, the Corporate Education arm of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Together, we have identified more than 60 organisations that have implemented the 70:20:10 model as part of their overall learning and development strategy. They include:

Nike, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Mars, Maersk, Nokia, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, L’Oréal, Adecco, Banner Health, Bank of America, National Australia Bank, Boston Scientific, American Express, Wrigley, Diageo, BAE Systems, ANZ Bank, Irish Life, HP, Freehills, Caterpillar, Barwon Water, CGU, Coles, Sony Ericsson, Standard Chartered, British Telecom, Westfield, Wal-Mart, Parsons Brinkerhoff, Coca-Cola and many others.

If you want an overview of the 70:20:10 framework with some examples, I have uploaded a SlideShare presentation HERE.

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I would like to acknowledge my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance and others who have contributed to some of the material in this post. 

There is a 60-page white paper titled "Effective Learning with 70-20-10: the new frontier for the extended enterprise" that I have written with Jérôme Wargnier of CrossKnowledge, a leading learning organisation headquartered in Paris. It was published in June 2011. The paper explores practical issues around the implementation of the 70-20-10 model. You can download it HERE

CLO Maths–Part I

Last month I took part in the iVentiv Executive Knowledge Exchange event in New York.

The two days of roundtable discussion were focused on ‘learning futures’. There were plenty of good conversations, some case studies, and lots of idea sharing and thoughts around innovation and the future of learning in organisations.

The event was attended by Chief Learning Officers and executives responsible for senior leader and employee development and corporate learning strategies in organisations such as Hertz, GE, Yahoo!, Dow Jones, Hitachi Data Systems, New York Life, CIGNA and the US Navy War College, among others. A great group of people with a huge amount of experience in the field.

Overall it was a very productive and worthwhile two days.

Industrial Crowdsourcing A quick diversion. Amongst the conversations, sharing and discussions at the event there was also an excellent session on crowdsourcing facilitated by Prof Evgeny Káganer from the IESE Business School in Barcelona. Crowdsourcing certainly has a future in corporate life, including corporate education and access to talent. Evgeny talked about the interlinking and use of social media (for communicating externally), enterprise 2.0 (for collaborating internally) and crowdsourcing (for collaborating externally). He also touched on how organisations are using microsourcing to deliver projects and ‘get stuff done’, and how the merging of crowdsourcing and microsourcing is giving rise to industrial crowdsourcing. He provided a number of examples of companies using industrial crowdsourcing today for design, software and system development, R&D and innovation. ‘Cloud workers’ already represent $1 billion in earnings. Supporting and developing cloud workers and industrial crowdsourcing is certainly something that CLOs need to get their heads around.

Dealing with Change
One observation at the iVentiv event in particular left a lasting impression on me. This was a formula that Brad Benson described in a session he led titled Learning, Leadership and Change. Brad is Chief of Staff at Intel, so has lived in the white heat of change in a large organisation. He spends his time thinking about ways of applying executive development approaches to the development of corporate strategy.

The formula Brad described was this:

 L > C

Where L= the Rate of Learning and C= the Rate of Change

Brad explained this in terms of the changing leadership and thought-leadership at Intel over the years – from the days of Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore through Andy Grove and Craig Barrett to Paul Otellini. He posited that organisations need to ensure that the rate of learning is always greater than the rate of change the organisation is grappling with – both internal change and the external change that is impacting the organisation.

Basic CLO Maths – the L and C dimensions
Brad’s formula got me thinking about the fact that it might help CLOs if they had a grasp of some of the basic maths of learning and performance.

I dragged some of my basic maths back from the depths of long-term memory and extrapolated Brad’s formula a little to describe the implications of the relative rates of change between Learning and Organisations themselves.  It seemed sensible to me to express the relationship as relating to business outcomes:

The Rate of Change is the sum of the deltas of Internal and External Change that impact the organisation (changing internal strategies and structures, changing market dynamics, changing economics, changing talent pool etc.)

From this I figured we can derive a modification of Brad’s formula:

If the rate of change in learning is greater than the rate of organisational change (the sum of internal and external change) then the outcome will contribute to business success.

If, however, the rate of change in learning is less than or equal the rate of organisational change, then the outcome will contribute to business failure. The CLO can pack his/her bags and look for other pastures.

That seemed pretty clear to me. We know that relevance and speed are two of the fundamental elements of effective learning in organisations. So being aware of rates of change and being able to respond seems to be a pretty fundamental skill of any CLO.

Organisations change
In most verticals and regions the rate of organisational change is increasing. In many cases the increase has very been rapid over the past few years, and the velocity is still increasing. In others it may not have been so fast, but no organisation is protected from change. External economic factors and the whims of financial markets see to that.

As the old adage says ‘sometimes you have to run to stand still’.

The approaches deployed in our learning and employee development strategies 10 years ago are mostly no longer valid or useful for our new organisational contexts – there are too many new variables involved and our contexts have changed inexorably. We need to continually evolve our approaches, adopt new ones, look outside our own organisation for different strategies that work, and then build those that our judgement tells us will fit into our own context.

CLO Maths – the E and K dimensions
There’s some further maths that I think CLOs might find useful.

The formula below explains the importance of experiences in learning.

This formula states that the Sum of Experiences plus the Change in Fixed Knowledge should be greater than the Rate of Change of the Work Context.

 

It describes the relationship between fixed knowledge – the type we learn through reading and classes - and the learning we acquire through experiences and good conversations. Ideally, learning through experiences is incorporated into formal learning programmes, but I’ve rarely seen it. In my experience the vast majority of formal learning is content-rich and experience-poor. It’s easier that way.

There are three variables here. CLOs can have some influence over the first two only – the number of experiences and the level of fixed knowledge. The Work Context is out of the CLO’s hands, although it is one of the main drivers. It’s a very challenging problem.

The value of fixed knowledge is degrading exponentially as the rate of change and externalities increase.

Also, the number of experiences to which employees can be exposed is arithmetic.

We can help manage this problem to some extent by recruiting people who bring experience with them. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the need for experiences that are tied to the context of work that happens in our own organisations – each organisation will overlay its own specific context.

Network Theory
CLOs might also find network theory helpful to understand what they can do to reduce the impact of the arithmetic nature of experiences.

Metcalf’s Law is a good start. Bob Metcalf, who created Ethernet and founded 3Com, defined a law that states:

There have been some recent challenges to Metcalfe’s Law’s application to social networks, but I side with Metcalfe's Defence.

If we think of Metcalfe’s Law in terms of social networks we can deduce this:

“the value of a network equals the square of the number of networked employees”

 

 

So it seems we can use social networking in organisations to break the arithmetic limitations of learning through experience.

That led to thinking a little more about the power of social networks in relation to experiences. I came up with this thought:

The sum of experiences is equal to all the individual experiences an employee has PLUS the number of meaningful social network connections.

If this equation holds, there is significant value-add if a CLO’s team can assist employees to build connections through social networks within and outside the organisation (we know this is the case from observation, anyway). Apart from other benefits social networks will bring, meaningful connections extend the pool of individual experiences and break the linear relationship.

If CLOs can make this maths work then their organisation will move forward.

The Value of Experiences
I think it’s worth reiterating that the experience element in the formulae above is critical. Without rich and on-going experiences – challenging projects, new responsibilities, exposure to other organisations’ way of doing things and other parts of our own organisations’ way of doing things we simply won’t have the level and extent of experiences that we need to succeed and develop.

My own experiences in a working life spent exploring learning and performance has led me to believe that exposure to new experiences is one of the important, if not the most important, aspects of learning and capability-building. Jay Cross, my colleague in the Internet Time Alliance, turned the experience-conversation lights on for me a few years ago when he said ‘experience and conversations are the engine room of learning, and conversation is the first learning technology’.

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I’m working on some more CLO maths and will post Part II here at some point.
If better mathematicians than me would like to correct or expand any of the above, I’d welcome your thoughts.

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.