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.

ID - Instructional Design or Interactivity Design in an interconnected world?

Instructional design is not only seen as a core competency for learning and development/training specialists, but it’s a huge industry, too. Most learning vendors tout their ‘expertise in instructional design’ as a key reason as to why we should engage them to produce learning content. If we do so, then almost invariably their approach is around developing content in an ‘instructionally-sound way’ to produce a set of ‘learning interventions’.

I have a real problem with this approach and the thinking behind it.

It simply isn’t appropriate for the needs of the 21^st century knowledge industry, and is arguable even more inappropriate for those whose work is carried out with their hands rather than with their minds.

Let’s Forget About Events

Undoubtedly instructional design is crucial if the mindset is learning events – modules, courses, programmes and curricula. However, if the mindset has stretched beyond event-based learning to where most learning occurs for workers, which is in the workplace at the point-of-need, where process-based learning serves best – and where learning through doing and learning as part of the work process happens, then ID takes on a whole new dimension.

From Content to Activity

The vast majority of structured learning is content-rich and interaction-poor. That’s understandable in the context of a 20^th century mindset and how learning professionals have been taught to develop ‘learning’ events. But it simply isn’t appropriate for today’s world.

For years we’ve been led to believe that ‘learning’ meant acquiring knowledge. If knowledge acquisition is the end-game, then the logical conclusion was to provide information that could be turned, whatever the magic employed, into knowledge in the recipient’s head. Believe me, the old idea that data becomes information which in turn becomes knowledge and finally transmogrifies into wisdom has been debunked years ago. We use our knowledge and experience to interpret data and information. Wisdom comes to a few only after years of experience.

These days we’re a little better informed about what constitutes learning. It’s not that there have been fundamental discoveries in the field. There have been a few, but we’ve also spent more time observing learning in action. And ‘action’ is the key word. It’s become clear that learning is about action and behaviours, not about how much information you hold in your head. If we train our dog, or our goldfish, we can observe learning by the fact that the animal can do something it couldn’t do before the training started. If their behaviour isn’t modified then we can only conclude that they haven’t learned. We have no idea of knowing, of course, but it may be that the dog ‘knows’ what it should do (‘’sit, now!’) but, for reasons known only to itself, can’t (or won’t) execute the action.

Ebbinghaus and All That

Knowing something doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve learned it. Challenging?

Let’s test this hypothesis. I attend a course on how to use my company’s new CRM system. The instructor (or virtual instructor delegated into an eLearning course) steps me through the various processes and delivers the learning content in an engaging way. I even have an opportunity to try things out on a ‘training system’. At the end of the course, I take an assessment. I pass with flying colours.

The training has been successful and I’ve learned. Right?

Not necessarily. What I’ve done is managed to retain information in short-term memory. Even if I’m successful in transferring this to long-term memory - and it’s likely that most won’t transfer. Dr Ebbinghaus’ experiment revealed we suffer an exponential ‘forgetting curve’ and that about 50% of context-free information is lost in the first hour after acquisition if there is no opportunity to reinforce it with practice.

I’ve only learned (or learned successfully – I don’t know what unsuccessful learning is – can someone please help me out with that?) when I can use the CRM system without constantly asking for help or referring to some documentation. And it’s almost impossible to achieve this without having the experience of using the system/tool. And I have no hope of learning without plenty of practice. Experience and practice are two of the main ways we change our behaviours and learn.

The Value of Real ID

If experience and practice, rather than knowledge acquisition and content, are the drivers of the learning process, what do Instructional Designers need to do to be effective?

The need to become Interactivity Designers. That’s what they need to do.

My colleague, Clark Quinn (www.quinnovation.com) knows a thing or two about designing learning experiences, having been a leading expert in the field in both academia and the business world for some years. Clark talks about learning experience design. He provides good explanations of his thoughts and approach here and here.

I find both Clark’s learning experience designer and also the term interactivity designer helpful because they move us beyond instruction to where the real meat of learning is, to actions and interactions, experiences and conversations.

Unlocking the Power of Experience

Each of us holds hundreds of experiences inside our heads that can be used to improve our own performance and the performance of those around us in both formal and informal learning environments. We just need to figure out how to tap into those experiences – that’s where the skills in interactivity design come in.

Good ID will result in the design of experiences that can build capability and learning far more quickly and effectively than by filling heads with information and ‘knowledge’ and then hoping that will lead to behavioural change.

We need designers who understand that learning comes from experience, practice, conversations and reflection, and are prepared to move away from massaging content into what they see as good instructional design. Designers need to get off the content bus and start thinking about, using, designing and exploiting learning environments full of experiences and interactivity.

As they do this they’ll realise that most of the experiences and interactivity they can draw on will occur outside formal learning environments.

Less is more: A different approach to L&D in a world awash with information

 

This post appeared on the TrainingZone.co.uk site last month.  I’ve re-posted it here for people who don’t choose to register on the TZ website.

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Charles Jennings argues that the adage 'access to knowledge is power' is more fitting in today's information-swamped world.

"In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008. Information overload is more serious than ever."

Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com writing in the Harvard Business Review, May 2009

Andreas Weigend knows a thing to two about data and the social data revolution, about its impact on business and its role in information overload. In his job at Amazon he had to be smart about using information if he was to help his employer make best use of the vast volume of the stuff that was arriving in its data centres every few seconds.

Social data

Social data is information produced by anyone. Some originators may be acknowledged experts. Others may simply be passionate about a topic. Either way, the data they produce can provide significant value to others. Amazon has thrived on the back of contributions and recommendations by readers and purchasers. Early on the company found that users often trusted recommendations by other users more than they trusted promotional or 'expert' views. Weigend said "by enabling users to actively contribute such explicit data, Amazon.com succeeded in leveraging knowledge dormant in its large customer base to help customers with their purchasing decisions".

"Being able to find just the right information or source of knowledge at the just right time in the just right context is far more useful than recalling something we’ve learned some time ago and hoping it is still relevant and 'right'."

Other organisations have used this collaborative knowledge sharing extremely effectively. Wikipedia created a transparent knowledge creation environment by allowing open discussion and online collaboration. Many other organisations have rebuilt their customer service models to encourage user communities to share knowledge about problems, issues and workarounds as they have found the 'wisdom of the crowds' better serves customers than a small, over-burdened customer help line.

But Weigend's world was not just about managing information, one of the base metals of knowledge. It was also about managing and connecting people, the caretakers of the gold. In fact it was primarily about connecting people - connecting people and helping them make their own connections between their data so it can be exchanged, made sense of in new contexts and some of it used to develop knowledge, skill and action, often in ways the originator had never thought of.

Implication for L&D: Less is more

So what are the implications of this tsunami of information on the way we go about training and development?

Firstly, every L&D professional needs to cast aside any belief that the more information and knowledge we have in our heads the better equipped we are to do our jobs or live our lives. It simply isn't true in today's world. The old adage 'knowledge is power' no longer sits comfortably in a world where information is swamping us and new knowledge is being generated and becoming obsolescent at rates never known before.

Access is power

Today, access to knowledge is power. And if this also means access to the person or people with the knowledge or the raw information, even better. Being able to find just the right information or source of knowledge at the just right time in the just right context is far more useful than recalling something we've learned some time ago and hoping it is still relevant and 'right'. With the increasing speeds of change and the ongoing knowledge explosion, what we learned three months ago is more likely to be out of date or simply wrong today than was the case even two or three years ago. We're living in exponential times.

Living with dynamic knowledge

As we continue to move from industrial to knowledge-based economies the half-life of much of the information that we use on a daily basis will continue to get shorter. The currency of most of the knowledge we use will have smaller and smaller windows of usefulness.

The implication of this trend for the current content-rich model of training and development that's used so widely today is really profound. In short, not only is less more, but in many cases nothing is better than any at all! That's a difficult pill for many L&D people to swallow.

"The message this sends for L&D is that our jobs as enablers of performance clearly need to change from being knowledge dispensers to becoming learning guides."

But think about it in practice. Is it better to get people to commit information to memory, knowing that it will be short-lived (and possibly out of date when they come to use it), or help them become skilled in the approaches and techniques to find the current, correct information quickly when they need it? Think for a few seconds and it is obvious that the second strategy is the better one. Teach people to fish rather than providing them with fish. What use is there in someone trying to remember their tax coding, when it may change two or three times in a year? Surely it's better simply knowing where to find the current (correct) coding when you need it. Having the metadata and the search skills is far more useful than memorising the detailed information in this and many other situations in the day-to-day pursuit of our work and life.

The message this sends for L&D is that our jobs as enablers of performance clearly need to change from being knowledge dispensers to becoming learning guides. Helping our colleagues navigate their way through information and mis-information. Through what is currently 'correct' and what may have been correct some time ago but isn't any more.

A new focus for training: Forget the ephemera and get down to core skills

L&D needs to move from providing detailed task-based information to helping people develop a core set of useful generic skills that will provide them with the tools to find, analyse and make decisions to act at the point in time they need to act.;

This is a very different world than one focused on producing modules, courses and curricula full of ephemeral information – detailed content that has a relatively short half-life and is unlikely to be remembered in any detail beyond a post-course assessment, even if to that point.

We need to remember Herman Ebbinghaus' findings from 1885 - 125 years ago - that on average we will forget about 50% of what we've 'learned' within 60 minutes if the information has no context and we don't have the opportunity to reinforce it through practice.

The core skills we need

So, what are the core skills we need to help people develop so they can operate in this ocean of information?

To be honest, I don't have a definitive list. But I think I know some of the capabilities L&D should focus on. If we help people develop these, at least they'll be on a solid footing to extract positive and practical use from the volumes of information they come across each day:

Search and 'find' skills	To find the right information when it's needed
Critical thinking skills	To extract meaning and significance
Creative thinking skills	To generate new ideas about, and ways of, using the information
Analytical skills	To visualise, articulate and solve complex problems and concepts, and make decisions that make sense based on the available information
Networking skills	To identify and build relationships with others who are potential sources of knowledge and expertise, within and outside the organisation
People skills	To build trust and productive relationships that are mutually beneficial for information sharing
Logic	To apply reason and argument to extract meaning and significance
A solid understanding of research methodology	To validate data and the underlying assumptions on which information and knowledge is based

Of course there will be other core context-focused skills that people need to learn. They will tend to be complex skills that need lots of guided practice to master.

However, that doesn't change the fact that, going forward, L&D will need to focus less on content and more on developing core capabilities and skills.

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Five Barriers to Effective Learning in Organisations

Very few of us would argue with the proposition that a lot of organisational learning and development activity is sub-optimal to the extent that it provides little value to participants and their organisations.

Even in organisations where L&D priorities are closely aligned with business priorities there’s plenty of head-room for improvement.

So, the question arises as to what barriers need to be overcome if L&D departments are to optimise their operations, increase the value they add to workforce performance and productivity, and remain relevant?

The Barriers

There are five common barriers that L&D managers should think about when starting out to transform their learning operations to deliver greater value. I’ve listed them below and I’ll make some suggestions how to tackle them. Sometimes solutions are straightforward. At other times it requires a total re-think of strategy and practice to break the barriers and implement effective solutions. Some are intertwined with others. Some stand alone. All are important and need to be addressed.

The Five Barriers:

Barrier 1: Efficiency
Barrier 2: Inertia
Barrier 3: Convenience
Barrier 4: Training Mindset
Barrier 5: Manager Engagement

Barrier 1: Efficiency

No machine can work at 100% efficiency without breaking the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Otherwise perpetual motion engines would be a reality and we’d never again have to pay to run our cars, pay to heat or cool our houses, or bother about the planet’s dwindling energy resources.

Likewise, no HR or L&D process or intervention is likely to be 100% efficient.

However, even if 100% efficiency is a pipe-dream L&D managers need to consider strategies and actions that can be adopted to increase efficiency from what is generally accepted to be a very low level (some figures indicate that the value returned by Training and L&D over the past 30 years averages somewhere around 10-30%). In fact the business impact of most training and development is not even measured in many cases, so a definite figure is difficult to determine.

Efficiency can be improved in almost every case by changing focus from ‘learning’ to ‘performance’. Focusing on outputs rather than inputs. This sounds simple enough, but requires many L&D professionals to adopt a new mindset and new approaches to the way they do their jobs.

I’ll deal with the change from ‘learning thinking’ later on, but one straightforward change to improve efficiency is jettisoning the almost ubiquitous Training Needs Analysis process and replacing it with some form of business-focused performance analysis.

TNA has been a major limiting factor for L&D efficiency for many years – with its implicit assumption that ‘training’ is both the problem and the solution. It almost goes without saying that in the vast majority of cases TNAs result in the development and delivery of some form of formal learning or training. That may be fine if the performance problem is one that can be solved or part-solved by improving knowledge or skills. Yet the majority of sub-optimal performance is not due to lack of knowledge or skill at all (the two problems that training of any type can address) but to other factors in the work environment. Gilbert (1978), Harless (1970), Rummler and Brache (1996) and Stolovitch and Keeps (1999) have all demonstrated this.

Most sub-optimal performance in organisations is due to factors such as:

• lack of clear expectations (emphasis on the word “clear”);
• insufficient and untimely or even counterproductive feedback;
• lack of easily perceived and understood required information;
• inadequate tools, resources, procedures and support;
• inappropriate and even counterproductive incentives;
• task interferences and administrative obstacles that prevent achieving desired results.

To this list, we can also add poor selection of individuals to do the job, poor communication between supervisors and workers, and low perceived value by the performers for the desired process or outcome. And probably a whole tranche of other factors.

If there’s a gap between expected and actual performance, don’t jump to a TNA. Step back and analyse the root cause of the gap first. Also examine whether performance expectations are realistic. Identify the cost of doing nothing. Is it worthwhile? What is the up-side if the performance gap can be closed? These questions are all about performance, not about training or learning.

Barrier 2: Inertia

L&D departments generally adapt to change slowly. However, L&D is not buffered from the rest of the world where change is increasing in speed and complexity and other professional groups need to find ways to respond faster, more flexibly, and more innovatively than they have in the past. If L&D as a function is to survive and thrive then it needs to get on the front-foot and embrace change in the way it approaches performance challenges. This may need transforming L&D structure and organisation, re-skilling L&D professionals, re-engaging with stakeholders and so on. But change is essential if L&D departments are to increase the value they add to their organisation.

I see two problems to address. One is in the focus on process over product. Like many HR departments, most L&D professionals pride themselves in having well-documented processes. Process is King and performance outputs, unfortunately, are often only Jack, Ten or Nine. The old HR light bulb joke equally applies to many L&D departments.

Question: how many HR people does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Just one, but everyone needs to be involved in the 2-week effort of defining the process to achieve the outcome.

The second cause of inertia is L&D’s general risk aversion. L&D people are generally not risk-takers. They change the way they do things slowly. Go to the racetrack or casino and you’re far more likely to find sales people and technical people there than HR and L&D people. If the HR and L&D people are there it’s probably just as bystanders or maybe they’re having a very small wager. They won’t be putting their shirt on ‘Adios Boy’ in the fifth race. Maybe that’s a good thing –no risk, no chance of failure – but also no reward. We do need to learn to be more accommodating of taking calculated risks, of trying new approaches, of learning from people outside our immediate teams, and of experimentation and innovation.

Peter Senge, who popularised the concept of a Learning Organisation, once asked the rhetorical question: “How has the world of the child changed in the last 150 years?'. To which he provided the answer: 'It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed….they're' immersed in all kinds of stuff that was unheard of 150years ago, and yet if you look at schools today versus 100 years ago, they are more similar than dissimilar”.

Equally, if we ponder on how the world of work has changed in the past 150 years and then look at the approach we take to organisational learning we find, in many cases, an even greater yawning gap.

The opportunities to overcome inertia are there. L&D leaders and L&D professionals just need to step up and take them, move fast, reorganise for business-aligned outputs, be innovative and take risks.

Barrier 3: Convenience

Anyone who has heard me speak about the need for change in the way L&D goes about its role in improving performance and productivity will have heard me use the term ‘conspiracy of convenience’.

David Wilson, managing director of the excellent UK corporate learning analyst company, elearnity first explained this conspiracy to me. It rang bells, and still rings them.

It works as follows. Many of you will recognise parts or all of the conspiracy of convenience:

a. A senior or not-so-senior manager contacts an L&D manager and says “I have a problem. My team isn’t performing. We’re not hitting our targets. I think some training will help. Can you please train them?”

b. The L&D manager, knowing that designing, developing and delivering training courses is the key part of their job, agrees to the task. They get underway.

c. A Training Needs Analysis may be the first step, but analysis as to whether the lack of performance is really due to lack of knowledge or skill (where training may help) or some other factor (where training can’t) is not considered. Neither are approaches other than content production and delivery. Training is the activity. Modules, courses, programmes are the one-trick pony.

d. The training is designed, developed and delivered with great care and attention.

e. Feedback is gathered from participants (‘did you enjoy the course’? ‘do you feel the module/course/programme met your needs?). Maybe some form of pre-test/post-test was used (measuring short-term memory only, incidentally), but there is no measurement of the impact on performance and productivity. No-one measures longer term behaviour change. No-one tries to link improved skills to improved productivity or profitability (too hard to isolate the variables!). No-one holds the L&D manager accountable for results (phew!)

f. The training has no impact whatsoever. (The business manager will be back at L&D’s door a few months later with another request “That training was good, but can you re-train them?”)

g. Net result - everyone’s happy …. The L&D manager because his team has designed, developed and delivered a ‘great learning experience’. The business manager because she has ‘invested in her people’ by organising training for them… but nothing happens.

h. How convenient ….

There is a significant challenge for L&D to evolve from this type of fulfilment service to trusted advisor. A fulfilment service develops and delivers goods. In the case of traditional L&D fulfilment these goods are almost exclusively in the form of modules, courses, programmes and curricula. L&D needs to morph into a strategic change agent and valuable consultant working with leaders and managers to solve pressing and emerging business problems where employee and supply chain performance is involved.

Barrier 4: Training Mindset

The fourth barrier is the prevalence of ‘training’ mindsets. Training is an input. Performance is an output. Focusing on inputs has some, but limited, value. Focus on outputs provides much more value.

Too many of us see our L&D role as piano teacher rather than conductor. Certainly a good piano teacher instils enthusiasm and a desire in her student to practice and improve, but a good conductor is focused on the performance above everything else. Good conductors bring out the best. Great performance is not just about great skill. Skill certainly plays a part, but there are other important factors that only a focus on performance and outcomes can mine. What behaviours best enhance performance? How about teamwork? What other resources need to be at hand for great performance? What are the expectations of the audience/managers/organisation?

There are a few simple techniques that can be employed by L&D professionals to rise above the ‘training’ mindset and think ‘performance’ and ‘results’. Think like a business person, not like an L&D specialist.

Ensure you never fall into the conspiracy of convenience trap. If you’re presented with a request for training, step back, engage the requestor and use your consulting skills to get to the root cause of the performance problem. Understand the expectations. What does the requestor expect training to achieve? Is this expectation reasonable? Is it actually a problem that training can help solve? Are there better/cheaper/faster ways of solving it than formal training? What is the cost of doing nothing?

There are a number of structured approaches for performance consulting that focus on outputs rather than training/leaning inputs. Every L&D practitioner should have at least one in the kitbag.

Barrier 5: Manager Engagement

HR has been struggling to implement the HR business partner model for years. In some organisations it works, in many it doesn’t.

One of the main challenges is to get HR professionals thinking like their stakeholders – thinking ‘business’ rather than ‘HR’. Another challenge is to get business stakeholders to understand their role in HR activities.

Neither HR nor L&D can do their jobs effectively themselves. They need their stakeholders to be totally aligned and engaged in their activities. This is often a huge challenge. Many senior business leaders simply want to pass the baton to L&D and expect L&D to do their ‘magic’ and return fully-formed, competent and capable team members to them. Unfortunately life doesn’t work that way.

Research shows that line managers are the single most important factor in raising employee performance. Managers who are focused on the development of their reports can raise performance at least as much, and generally more, than any training course or L&D intervention can. Mary Broad’s work on the transfer of training is a good starting point, but there is other research that shows the vital role that managers play.

The Corporate Executive Board’s L&D Roundtable found that employees of managers who were very effective at developing their teams outperform their peers by 25-27%. When the LDR looked at some of the detail they found:

• That the retention rate of employees of managers who were effective at developing their employees was 39.7% greater than for managers who were ineffective at developing their employees.
• That the commitment of employees of managers who were effective at developing their employees was 29.4% greater than for managers who were ineffective at developing their employees.
• That employees of managers who were effective at development had higher job satisfaction and were better at responding to change.

All this points to the fact that engaging and enrolling managers in focusing on, and being involved in, L&D activities is critical in achieving game-changing performance improvement.

Without effective manager engagement, we might as well not bother. L&D efforts alone are destined to be sub-optimal.

Getting to the Core of Learning Content in the Internet Age

There is an argument that we all need to learn less if we want to know more.

The ‘learning’ referred to here is what we know as formal structured learning activities - classes, courses, programmes, and eLearning.

The argument goes like this.

Although formal learning only constitutes about 10-20% of the actual learning that occurs in organisations, it’s the visible part of the iceberg and the part where most of the budget and L&D resource is focused.

When we look at the structured learning taking place in organisations we find that the vast majority is content-rich and interaction-poor. The further up the hierarchy we go – from K12 to college through University and into training and learning in our working lives – we notice the majority of the structured learning we’re offered contains lots of content for us to ‘know’ but very little opportunity for us build capability to ‘do’. Yet action and ‘doing’ are at the heart of the value that people bring to themselves, to their work and to their organisations. Knowledge may provide scaffolding, but we’ve learned over the past 30 years or so that most of the knowledge we need to ‘do’ doesn’t have to be stored in our heads. There’s research that proves this point, but we only have to think about a common scenario to realise it ourselves.

Consider this. Your organisation has just rolled out a new online Finance system that requires you to use a new set of processes and forms when you complete your monthly expense claims. The new expense process that you need to follow has a number of steps, some of which are counter-intuitive (I’m sure we’ve all been faced with systems like this). Prior to system roll-out you’re required to attend a 2-hour instructor-led briefing/course along with all your colleagues. The instructor leads you through all six new processes that you’ll need to follow and describes the steps you’ll need to take in each. The expenses process had 12 steps. Some of the other five processes in the new system (raising and signing-off purchase orders, receiving goods etc.) have more steps, some have less. The course is content-rich. You are shown screen-shots of the new system and the instructor steps through each process (without giving participants the opportunity to practice on the system itself as go-live day is still in the future and the system isn’t yet stable). At the end of the course the instructor hands out a bound folder with all the screen-shots and descriptions of the processes.

When the time comes for you to complete your first expense claim (6-7 weeks after the training) do you:

a. Recall the processes you had been taught and easily step through them?

b. Find the folder and step through the processes from the screen-shots and descriptions?

c. Ask a colleague if they have used the system, if they have, get their help?

d. Call the helpline?

The chance is that you do either c. or d.

Why?

There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, very few people would be able to recall task detail weeks after being instructed. Even if you were tested and proved that you had ‘learned’ the processes at the end of the training. Post-training tests demonstrate short-term memory recall, not behaviour-changing learning. Hermann Ebbinghaus illustrated this and the exponential nature of forgetting in his famous 1885 experiment. In short, we forget around 40% of non-contextual information within the first 20 minutes of learning it if we don’t practice and reinforce the learning almost immediately. If you didn’t have the opportunity to practice the new Finance system processes, they were mostly gone from memory the next day. If you did, then didn’t have the opportunity to use the system again for a number of weeks, you’ve lost it from short-term memory again.

The second reason people ask others or call the helpline is because the vast majority of people simply don’t turn to detailed manuals when facing a problem and can’t remember the solution. They are more likely to turn to other people for help. Even if you pulled the folder off the shelf it’s likely that the amount of detail and the number of processes would have made it difficult to follow, and you will have lost the context with which they were described in the course anyway.

Part of the problem is that with learning we tend to concentrate too much on content and ‘knowing’ and too little on action and ‘doing’.

Traditional Model – Content-centric learning

The standard approach has been to expect people to learn all the content in a structured learning event – whether it’s an ILT or eLearning module, course or programme. Then ratify this learning through some type of assessment. The assumption is that if you pass the assessment, you’ve ‘learned the topic’. This is a naïve view of the learning process. Learning is about behaviour change, not short-term knowledge acquisition.

Most people who sit down to design learning experiences (even trained ‘instructional designers’) think first about the content. ‘How much content can I transmit to the recipients in the time I’ve allowed?’ or ‘Which content do I need to produce to meet the learning objectives?’ The knee-jerk reaction is to start with the content because somehow we seem to think that learning revolves around content. Content is information which we believe somehow transmogrifies into knowledge that will be useful to ‘do’ at some time in the future.

What’s Worth Knowing?

If we break what we need to know about using a process or procedure, for example, into its component parts we can start to get an understanding of what we need to learn and commit to long-term memory and what we don’t.

Firstly, there are some things that we simply have to commit to memory. These are the core concepts. In the diagram above the examples of core concepts are things such as ‘what does my job involve?’ and ‘what relationship does my role have with other departments?’ This is what I’d call the DNA of the role. Other core concepts that need to be committed to memory may involve some basic formulae, tools, marketplace practices and ‘the way we do things around here’. This is the content that any good new hire or induction training programme should include. These core concepts only change rarely. Structured learning/training works well to help with this memorisation.

Then there are things that we need to be familiar with, but don’t need to commit to memory in any detail. These are contextual elements that may vary depending on the context in which we need to use them. The Finance system processes are good examples of this. They are probably too complex to be learned correctly, and they are likely to change over time or depending on the role of the person using them. There’s no point committing the detail to memory, but it’s helpful to be familiar with the general structure and steps.

Finally there is the detailed task-specific content. The 12 steps in the process map and the field-level forms in the case of the Finance process. This is ‘stuff’ that you simply shouldn’t waste time learning, or trying to learn in a formal way. In many situations, task-specific content changes constantly. What was correct and up-to-date last week may not be correct and up-to-date today. It is simply a waste of time to include this content in structured learning/training courses and programmes. You may learn it by repeatedly doing it, and then you have the problem of ‘unlearning’ it when the process changes.

So, what’s the answer?

Find/Access Model – Content-right learning & Content-light learning

The answer is that in today’s rapidly changing world we need to learn just enough to be prepared to meet that rapid change. This means, in the words of John Seely Brown, we need to rethink what we need to learn, and how we learn. If most of what we learn is going to be rapidly made obsolete by change, then we need to change our learning models.

This brings us back to the initial premise – if we want to know more, then maybe we should learn less.

The Find/Access model addresses this challenge. This model takes a lot of the content out of 'learning' and moves it into the ‘familiarise’ and ‘find’ categories.

The Find/Access model focuses learning only on core concepts. Basic conceptual tools such as critical thinking skills, analytics skills, logic, search skills, data validation skills, research methodologies skills and so on fall into the core concepts bucket. This is the ‘stuff’ we need to learn.

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Armed with the skills developed in the core concepts bucket, dynamic and detailed content can be obtained when it’s needed from ‘the cloud’ or from other sources – m colleagues, helpdesks, experts and so on.

There’s no need to incorporate the vast majority of the dynamic content we need in structured learning courses and events. In fact, doing so simply distracts and consumes time – which may be a benefit to the providers of learning courses and events, but is of little use in the process of improving performance.

However, we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. To take this step we first need to ensure we have both the core find skills – the ‘MindFind’ skills (as my co-authors David James Clarke IV, Cameron Crowe and I describe in our forthcoming book MindFind) – and the tools to connect us to the information sources we need at the time we need them. Fortunately, Web application developments over the past 3-4 years are making this second task much easier for us.

Third Order Find Skills

As professionals involved in learning and performance improvement, we need to focus on helping others develop capabilities and skills in the core concepts bucket – the critical thinking skills, the analytical skills, logic, the search skills, and to develop some understanding of research methodologies.

(I’m sure there are other skills and capabilities that should be in this bucket and welcome any comments and suggestions you might have)

Fortunately, the development of third order approaches to the organisation, categorisation and labelling of information allows us to find what we need much more easily now than in the past. This is critical, and the designers of every structured course should reinforce the development of third order find skills and the use of third order find approaches. David Weinberger explains these third order approaches very clearly in his excellent book ‘Everything is Miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder’. Weinberger describes how tagging and metadata (third order classification) allow us to find information from our own contextual standpoint, rather than having to fit into some classifier’s context. Those of us who spent weeks and months shuffling academic library index cards in the past will understand how liberating the use of metadata has been.

As we develop these third order find skills the misplaced need for vast amounts of content in structured learning will fall away. We’ll need less structured learning overall. We’ll place more focus on learning by doing (through experience and practice), through interacting with others (network-building and conversations) and through reflecting on our actions. As a result, although we’ll be learning more overall, our structured learning will decrease. We’ll know more and the knowledge we need will be more relevant for action.

Technorati Tags: learning,learning content,find skills

TRUST – if L&D is to have any impact, it's vital

Trust is very important in our lives. As children we put our trust in our parents. As we grew we learned to make decisions regarding when we should trust and when we should be more circumspect. When we start a new job or project we spend time figuring out who we can turn to for advice, who we can trust, and whose advice we need to double-check.

With the rise of the networked society and the increasing use of social networking tools, trust is probably on our minds every day. Who doesn’t hesitate before clicking on that shortened URL from a friend on Facebook or someone we follow on Twitter and wonder whether it’s genuine or whether the account has been hijacked and the link is about to initiate some malware infection from an unknown server in some unknown location that just may not be caught by our spam/malware protection software?

So, trust is probably at the forefront of our thinking most days.

Trust and Getting Things Done in Organisations

Trust relationships are powerful allies in getting things done in organisations. I think we're all aware of that.

If we’re working in L&D strong trust relationships with senior leaders and middle managers are vital. Without a high level of trust anyL&D manager will find it almost impossible to embed a culture of learning in their organisation.

Trust and ‘A Seat at the Table’

Like HR, many training and learning departments have been trying for years to gain a seat at the top table in their organisation. To a large extent these attempts have failed and it’s worth asking why this is the case.

Although the age-old management credo that ‘our people are our greatest asset’ has now moved beyond lip-service in many organisations (despite the fact that the value of this ‘greatest asset’ still isn’t explicitly shown on a balance sheet), the leadership of the part of the organisation that’s directly responsible for working, advising and helping extract maximum performance from this asset is still not welcome as an equal member of the senior management team. Sure, CLOs and senior L&D managers may regularly be invited to present new initiatives or ‘state of play’ reports to senior management meetings, but that’s different from being inside the tent or having a ‘seat at the table’ and contributing to ongoing strategy development.

This situation raises a couple of questions for me - and they're both tied to trust and trust relationships.

The first question is: “Do most senior managers actually believe that L&D managers play an important role in keeping the organisation running and on-track’’?

Associated with this is a second question: “Do most managers think that L&D can add value”?

I think both of these questions come back to competence trust and to relevance. They beg the question as to whether business managers have confidence that their L&D department can make a difference, impact organisational performance and the balance sheet. In other words, is L&D relevant in business terms? If it isn’t, then why include passengers on the senior leadership team.

So, what can CLOs and L&D managers do to address this?

Different Types of Trust

Firstly it’s worth understanding about the some of the different types of trust and then developing a plan to build trust with your senior business colleagues.

Trust is qualified in a number of ways. For some there are two types - competence trust and benevolent trust. The difference is this. The first is the ‘I believe you know what you’re talking about, so I’ll trust your opinion’ type of trust. In other words,’ I believe that you’re competent so I’ll trust you’. The second is the ‘I believe that you won’t tell me anything that will harm me, so I’ll trust your opinion’ type of trust.

Another view of how we come to trust someone or not is defined as being based on our assessment of their benevolence, integrity and ability.

Now, no matter how we define it, it’s important that L&D managers address trust in its many forms in building solid relationships with senior business managers. And trust is a two-way thing. I’ll trust you if you trust me...

Moving L&D up the Agenda

If you want to move L&D up the agenda and have the opportunity to be involved in strategic decision-making, you need to demonstrate that the L&D managers and their teams are trustworthy.

You do this by building trust relationships. By demonstrating that you understand the problems business managers are facing, and then by working with them to deliver solutions to resolve those problems demonstrably, quickly, efficiently. By doing this you will start to build competence trust and benevolent trust relationships. You’ll also go a long way towards engendering your managers’ trust in your ability and competence to deliver business solutions, and a feeling that you are a trusted partner, someone who can be relied on.

If you work on this basis – get close to your business managers, analyse their problems with them, advise them of the options open to them from your professional L&D standpoint, take their input, and then develop effective solutions, and demonstrate the efficacy and impact in the most straightforward way possible – in business terms – you will find that a trust relationship will develop.

That’s the way to get a seat at the top table. It’s not magic. You’ll just find yourself being invited to provide advice and suggestions at early stages in the strategy-setting process. You’ll find people calling you up because the CEO or CFO has recommended you as someone who can help managers with their problems.

You may even find HR colleagues asking how you have managed to become a trusted consultant and advisor to the CEO and CFO and other senior leaders.

The Power of X – Experiential Learning in Today’s World

It’s generally accepted that most of the learning that occurs within our organisations takes place outside formal training and learning events.

The majority of our learning comes from the new and different experiences we have in our daily work. Our learning also comes from practice and from conversations and from taking the opportunity to reflect on our experiences and on those of others.

Smart organisations look to exploit the fact that most learning comes through these four channels (experience, practice, conversation and reflection) by ensuring that managers create the right environments and provide learning opportunities for their team members on an ongoing basis in the workplace. Good managers do this in a number of ways. It may be by opening up new challenges, exposing their employees to new experiences and stretch assignments from which their employees can learn, by rotating members through various roles within their team, or through various other approaches such as job shadowing, informal coaching and mentoring, establishing professional and role-related networks for knowledge and experience sharing and so on.

Some telling research

A little while ago the Learning and Development Roundtable, one of the HR research and support practices within the Corporate Executive Board based in Washington DC, researched the 15 most important actions a manager can take to improve the performance of their team members and their teams overall.

Of the three actions that have most impact, two involve experiential learning. The other is brought about if managers simply tell their employees what they expect of them and how they will be measured against those expectations.

The table below shows the top three actions this research uncovered.

	Manager Action	Average Performance Improvement
1.	Explain performance standards: clearly explain to employees what is expected of them and how they will be measured against those expectations	19.8%
2.	Ensure Projects Provide Learning: Ensure each currently assigned project or assignment is a learning experience for employees. Discuss and reflect on objectives, progress and output	19.8%
3.	Provide Experiences that Develop: Help employees obtain the experience at work that will help them develop over time	19.1%

Learning & Development Roundtable, 2005

Interestingly, two manager actions that came out near the bottom of the Learning & Development Roundtable’s impact list were:

• Teach a new skill or procedure – which elicits an average performance improvement of 7.7%
  
• Ensure necessary skills/knowledge – which elicits an average performance improvement of 6.7%

By providing experience that help their team members develop, and then working with them to ensure they learn from those experiences, managers are using two of the most powerful development levers available. It’s not rocket science. It is simply just good leadership and management practice to focus on experiential learning.

What can L&D professionals do?

What then can learning and development professionals do as part of their role to leverage experiential learning?

The answer to that question, first and foremost, must be for them to stem the flow of content-heavy courses and re-focus on what they can do to replace content with experiences or, at least, replace a large amount of the content with more opportunities for experience.

The vast majority of courses and other formal learning is content-heavy and interaction-poor. If we count the number of interactions in a formal classroom session (including both teacher-learner and learner-learner interactions), or in a piece of eLearning, then we are likely to find a number in the tens rather than the hundreds. Research has shown that this is the case. The average number of interactions, per group, is often as low as 20. That’s per group, not per individual learner!

On the other hand if we consider the level of interaction in, for example, the computer game HALO (the world’s best-selling entertainment property which sold over $200 million on its first day of release) you will find more than one million interactions. That’s correct, one million interactions! Now, computer ‘shooter’ games may not be your idea of a useful way to spend your time or learn, but L&D professionals need to think about the ways they can transform the learning content they develop into real learning experiences with the emphasis on ‘experiences’ and not on transmitting content.

It is even better if L&D professionals can step outside the model of courses, curricula and formal learning and start to think about what they can do to facilitate and encourage individual contributors and management in their organisation to develop opportunities for learning through experiences. Provide some new challenges, ensure support is in place, build tools to facilitate network-building and the opportunity to discuss with others and to reflect. Think experience, practice and sharing rather than content, content, content.

The Importance of X

This experience component is vital. Experiential learning is a very powerful tool, especially when it is coupled with the smart use of technology. There are some excellent experiential learning models and tools available for training and development professionals to apply as part of their role in supporting managers to build employee and organisational capability.

But to use experiential learning approaches effectively, learning leaders need to step away from exclusive focus on knowledge and skills. Knowledge and skills are ingredients in the output that is excellent performance, but their importance is overrated. Building knowledge in heads and skills in heads and hands is no guarantee for improved performance. Building employee capability is more complex than that.

The main difference between experiential learning and more traditional classroom-based and eLearning approaches is that experiential learning is focused exclusively on action rather than on information. The underlying principle of experiential learning is that we learn through ‘doing’ and that our contribution in our job role is based on our ability to do rather than to know.

The 21^st Century experiential learning view is that the place to store vast amounts of information and knowledge is in libraries, not in heads, and that now and in the future these libraries will be increasingly virtual, easy to access, and usually available at the click of a mouse or the touch of a screen.

Knowledge versus experience

Focusing on knowledge and ‘knowledge transfer’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) as the way to build employee capability will almost inevitably lead to less-than-effective performance. Workforce readiness depends on more than filling heads with knowledge. It depends on developing agile thinking and the ability to ‘find’ and ‘do’ rather than the ability to know. And the development of these capabilities requires experience, practice, conversations and reflection.

Experiential learning and technology

Outside of opportunities for workplace learning experiences, there are some state-of-the-art experiential virtual world learning solutions emerging that offer an “apprenticeship” for employees seeking real-world experience without the risk of severe implications or errors. As learners gain practical skills in an authentic and safe learning environment, organisations can focus on helping them develop their core competencies and avoid the distractions of having to spend so much time focusing on complex experiential learning development and delivery.

One such solution that we rolled out in Reuters, where I was the chief learning officer, was the Toolwire live labs environment which we used for our technical employees and software developers, many of whom were both young (without extensive experience) and geographically distributed (some being located in the USA and Europe, others – an increasing number – being in a number of countries in Asia.

The Toolwire live labs and interactive virtual worlds system offers access to suites of (real) servers and routers for technical training. Along with scenario-based assignments, this hardware can be configured and tested by learners remotely through their laptops or PCs. If errors are made, the hardware can be automatically reconfigured to initial state for further attempts. This experiential learning environment replicates the type of environment found in many classrooms and on training servers but, by using the Internet cloud and some smart reconfiguration technology, overcomes some of the problems inherent in standard classroom experiential learning environments.

Other experiential learning environments are also emerging. I was recently given a tour of a Language Lab in Second Life where there is a lot of language learning activity. The British Council is very active in teaching English in Second Life to children aged between 13 and 17. They have a dedicated safe area for teenagers, called British Council Isle.

Apart from first generation virtual technologies such as Second Life, other environments such as those developed by Forterra Systems are starting to be implemented in organisations outside the military (where they have traditionally been in use for some time) for experiential learning use.

A call to action

In summary, learning and development, training and performance professionals ignore the power of experiential learning at their peril. Without constant focus on identifying new ways to utilise and exploit experiences, practice, conversations and reflection any learning solutions produced will be very much poorer.

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