Yesterday IBM presented a compelling case for social business excellence at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris. Social networks are so patently good for business that managers are routing around IT to put them in place. The social business captures value through capturing tacit information, fostering collaboration & discovery, filtering information flow & finding patterns, and transforming exception processing & making processes resilient.

David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know convinced me that networks have radically changed the notion of what constitutes knowledge. Lots of our previous concepts about knowledge were due to the limitations of paper, not that there’s some absolute truth out there. On the net, facts don’t stay on the page. There are no isolated ideas; there never were; there are only webs of ideas. We can improve those webs through open access, good filters, metadata, linking everything, and opening up institutions.

David describes leadership as an emergent property of an organizational network. Leadership resides more with the group being led than the purported leader. Strong leadership is simply a means for a group to accomplish its objectives.

Yesterday on Dan Pink’s Office Hours, Gary Hamel described the irrelevance of 100 year old models of management and the growing impatience of disgruntled workers, customers, and shareholders. Hamel has said that the future model of management looks a lot like web 2.0.

So networks underpin leadership, business performance, knowledge, and management.

It’s undeniable that the internet is an unprecedented game changer. People and ideas and knowledge and happenings are connected as never before, and there’s no end in sight. The omnipresent network makes us look at processes instead of events: everything has a precedent and an antecedent. Murphy’s Second Law kicks in: You can never do just one thing. Institutions that block connections, be they schools or close-lipped corporations, are increasingly out of step with the times.

But I have a question about this: Why isn’t anyone talking about learning networks?

Neither McAfee nor IBM nor Weinberger nor Hamel talks about networks for learning. This parallels the situation with informal learning and eLearning. Even after people accepted that informal learning is the primary way people learn to do their jobs, few corporate training organizations lifted a finger to do anything about it. eLearning — the boring, one-way, content slapped on pages for self study variety — was a total flop because learning involves more than exposure to information. Two major opportunities to boost performance were squandered. I don’t intend to stand idly by as business thought leaders repeat the same mistake with learning networks.

Networks were made for learning. And in a ever-changing world, learning is a survival skill.

ENGINEERING THE INDIVIDUAL’S LEARNING NETWORK
Learning originally meant finding the right path. Paths are connectors; people are nodes. The world is constructed of networks. We’re back where we started.

In networks, connections are the only thing that matters. We network with people; we use networks to gather information and to learn things; we have neural networks in our heads.

Learning is optimizing our connections to the networks that matter to us.

This satisfies both the community concept of learning (social networking) and the knowledge aspect (gaining access to information and fitting it into the patterns in one’s head).

To learn is to adapt to fit with one’s ecosystems. We can look at learning as making and maintaining good connections in a network. Cultivators of learning environments can borrow from network engineers, focusing on such things as:

• Improving signal-to-noise ratio

• Installing fat pipes for backbone connections

• Pruning worthless, unproductive branches

• Promoting standards for interoperability

• Balancing the load

• Seeking continuous improvement

This echoes a white paper, Informal Learning – the other 80%, I wrote nine years ago.

We need to think of learning as optimizing our networks. Learning consists of making good connections.

Taking advantage of the double meaning of the word network, “to learn” is to optimize the quality of one’s networks.

Learning is optimizing our connections to the networks that matter to us.

A sustainable social business provides the means and motivation for workers to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networks, blogs, and wikis. Organizations must provide the scaffolding that focuses on discovery, practice, sharing, and reinforcement. Organizations that lack a clear understanding of their learning architectures are doomed to descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat. Facebook-itus.

Next week I’ll release a white paper on the Internet Time Alliance site on how to develop an enterprise learning network.

Today, the expectations of learners are much different than they were only a few years ago. Much of what is currently rolled up monolithic, one-size-fits-all courses must give way to small but relevant content updated and delivered continuously to learners based on their individual profiles or needs. In other words, learning needs to go Agile.

What’s in it for us?

Agile Development is an approach where vendors deliver very fast, iterative product development through close collaboration with its user base (i.e. training organizations).

Dawn describes the basic Agile Development process and promises to come back with implications in a subsequent post.

Dawn references Josh Bersin’s insightful post last fall which goes beyond the training function to examine the benefits of agile in HR.

The Agile Model comes to Management, Learning, and Human Resources

Over the last five years the business of software development has been totally transformed by the concepts of agile development.  So is the business of Management and Human Resources.

Josh lists the benefits of embracing agile:

• Traditional annual performance appraisals use an older “waterfall” method – continuous feedback and recognition is an “agile” approach.
• Traditional formal training and certification is a “waterfall” model –  rapid e-learning and informal learning is an “agile” approach.
• Top down cascading goals are a “waterfall” approach – rapidly updated “objectives and key results” (sometimes called OKR – widely used at Google) is an “agile” model.
• Traditional annual rewards and bonuses are a “waterfall” model – continuous recognition and social recognition systems are an “agile” model.
• The annual employee engagement survey is a “waterfall” model – continuous online idea factories and open blogs are an “agile” model for employee engagement.
• The annual development planning process is a “waterfall” model – an ongoing coaching relationship is an “agile” model for leadership.
• The traditional recruiting process is a “waterfall” model – this is being replaced by a continuous process of social recruiting and referral-based recruiting which can be rolled out in a few hours.

Social Business is becoming the new normal
2012 is the year of Social Business. My Internet Time Alliance colleague Jane Hart aptly describes the coming environment:

Predictions for an upcoming new year are inevitably based on the “flow” from the current year, so if you have taken a look at my Top 100 articles of 2011 (or even my complete 2011 Reading List), you will not be surprised to hear that many predict that 2012 will be the “Year of Social Business“.

Up to now, for many organisations, Social Business has been about social media marketing and engaging customers, but as IBM explains …

“A Social Business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally.”

And as Amin points out in Thriving as an HR professional in a social business era,

“With a 10-year delay, the social media revolution is finally entering the workplace and its influence is going to be comparable to the consumer social media revolution.”

As many others explain, social business will change the way we do everything, as organisations move from being traditional hierarchical businesses to networked organisations.”Social” will not just be something that is bolted-on to traditional processes but will underpin a fundamental new approach to working – and learning. 

Paul Adams summed this up nicely in Stop talking about “social”.

“Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behavior almost every second that we’re awake … The leading businesses are recognizing that the web is moving away from being centered around content, to being centered around people.That is the biggest social thunderstorm, and all of us are going to have to understand it to succeed. So stop talking about social as a distinct entity. Assume it in everything you do.“

Leveraging Learning in Social Business
Installing social network software and encouraging people to exploit their connections is not enough. The fabric of a social business, its workscape, must incorporate structures and guidance to help people learn. After all, learning underpins continuous improvement and that’s what this is all about.

A sustainable workscape must provide the means and motivation for corporate citizens to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networking tools, blogs, and wikis. Self-organization helps but L&D professionals need to supplement social systems with scaffolding that focuses on learning. Without that, many organizations will descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat.

I take Chief Learning Officers’ abysmal track record with informal learning to-date as a warning shot. In today’s fast-paced world, people who do not learn continuously, on the job, rapidly fall behind. Yet CLOs continue to focus on formal classes, as if they’re running schools instead of creating business value. Formal classes and workshops are necessary, but they constitute a tiny slice of the overall learning pie.

Several years ago, L&D professionals began to accept the fact that learning by experience and informally, with others, has many times the impact of traditional training.

What did CLOs do with the insight that informal learning matters? Next to nothing. They left informal learning to chance. Even now, with the cost-effectiveness and responsiveness of informal learning pushing it to the top of CLO’s priority lists, most are taking baby steps if any steps at all. This is extremely disappointing. We who understand how people learn need to be at the vanguard of establishing social networks, expertise location, online communities, information streams, agile instructional design, help desks, federated content management, continuing reinforcement, peer development, and so on.

CLOs who do not make it easier for social business people to learn are toast.
Making the transition from command-and-control training operations to vibrant social learning workscapes is where I think Internet Time Alliance is going to make a major contribution. I envision us providing hand-holding, models, and advice to help Chief Learning Officers and HR executives make the journey from pushing curriculum and instructor-led events to nurturing systems for co-creating knowledge and competence with workers. Time will tell.

It would be irresponsible for Chief Learning Officers and HR executives to leave learning to happenstance.

Working Smarter
Agile Development is but a piece of the practice of making social business work. The entire environment is morphing into something new and different. As I wrote in my reflections on the Stoos Gathering,

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.
Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning.

When an enterprise commits to becoming an organic, value-creating network of diverse individuals, the training department has to join the fray.

New Seasons exemplifies taking a non-training alternative to workplace learning.

That New Seasons is a people-oriented business echoes in their approach to learning.

• New hires receive a brief orientation and are then let loose to learn by walking around and asking questions.
• The HR director explains “New employees are given time to look around and get to know the products, ask questions, go online, read literature and shadow experienced employees. From a training perspective, we’ve created an environment where an employee’s learning style is accommodated because they learn their own way, at their own pace and in an order that makes sense to them.”
• New Seasons executives host a Disorientation to go over values and what it takes to be successful a month after people come on board. It makes so much sense to conduct this after new hires understand what makes the organization tick.
• People keep up to speed by attending short two-way sessions with a dozen or fewer colleagues on the job floor.

New Seasons trusts its employees to do their best — and the employees return the favor by doing it.

Todd Hudson describes the New Seasons experience on his Maverick Institute blog. I fully agree with his takeaways:

1. How you deliver training should reinforce your values and business model. Is customer service key to your success? Face-to-face methods like mentoring might be best. Yes, everyone’s jumping on the e-learning bandwagon today, but before you do, ask yourself ‘How does sitting at a computer taking in information align with the value our employees deliver?’ There are plenty of situations where e-learning is the right choice. Just make sure it’s your situation.
2. Training should align with the environment. Learning by walking around at a grocery store is great. But at a copper mine? Not on your life! Too dangerous; more structure would be needed. Walking around ‘virtually’ in a simulation would be a great alternative. Whenever possible, let the work environment organically teach employees as much as it can and at their pace.
3. Training and learning should be a part of the natural rhythm of your company’s work day. Don’t let training stick out like a sore thumb and disturb your business. If you have night shifts, train at night. If your company’s work pace is irregular, then training should fit into these periods of inactivity. Here’s a simple rule: If people are complaining about training, you’re doing it wrong.

Todd’s white paper on Lean Knowledge Transfer is worth a read. I’m going to bring this to the attention of the Stoos Network; we’re on the lookout for examples of enlightened next practices. If you share my interest in mashing up agile development and corporate learning, you may want to check out Unmanagement.net.

On the flight over, I watched the film Inside Job, a documentary about the shenanigans that led to the financial meltdown fueled by the subprime mortgage bubble. The movie’s incendiary. There are lots of bad apples out there: self-serving financial engineers, ratings agencies, regulators, bankers, and more. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

As a graduate of the “West Point of Capitalism,” I’d been reluctant to condemn the system but Inside Job pushed me over the edge. Business is broken. Right before watching the movie, I read a series of Harvard Business Review articles by Roger Martin about the wrong-headedness of maximizing shareholder value. This slippery slope leads to short-term thinking, cooking the books, and screwing everyone up and down the chain except grossly overpaid CEOs. Chasing shareholder value is like trying to make your car go faster by rigging the speedometer.

Dissatisfied workers, pissed-off customers, and lousy returns on investment are the outcomes of a broken system. The current business environment is a breeding ground for Murphy’s Law. Nobody’s happy and rebellion is in the air.

Stoos is a tiny village atop a mountain about an hour south of Zurich. It’s a beautiful spot for getting away from it all. Four people — a Swiss professor, a Dutch entrepreneur and author, an American agile development coach living in Switzerland, and an American management author — realized that lots of us were talking about the same malaise with management independently. They invited us to convene on the mountain to find common ground — and a better framework for doing business.

After the two-day session in Stoos, I took the train south to Lugano, a perennially sunny town that couples Swiss efficiency and Italian verve  (Mangiare!) on the shore of an Alpine lake. Fragments of the mountain top conversations rolled around in my head. My thoughts are still coming together.

Foremost is that the business world must shift its focus from things to people. Living things trump machines. Moreover, people are inherently social. We cannot thrive — or even survive — in isolation. Connections are vital to creating value. And how is that value created? By adapting to change — and that requires learning. Bottom-line: businesses are networks of learning individuals.

Financial success not the ultimate target. Chasing money for its own sake is wrong-headed and demoralizing. Drucker had it right: the purpose of business is to create and satisfy customers. People in sustainable organizations focus on doing this better and better, forever delivering more value to their customers. Do this right and the money will follow.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Newcomens_Dampfmaschine_aus_Meyers_1890.png

For several hundred years, the machine has been the metaphor for the organization. Management’s role was to make the machine work efficiently. People were cogs; managers controlled human resources as if they were interchangeable parts. Bosses did the thinking; workers were told to get the job done. It was as if workers lacked intelligence, emotion, and initiative. Shut up and do your job.

Machines work well when you need to do the same thing over and over. They’re not so hot when doing different things is required. Denser interconnections have transformed the world into one vast complex system. The past is no longer a guide to the future. Small things have enormous consequences. Logic breaks down. Shit happens. Everything’s different.

Organism, a living system. Source:http://tolweb.org/tree/learn/concepts/whatisphylogeny.html

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.

Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning.

On the flight back to San Francisco, I watched Werner Herzog’s fabulous filmabout the 32,000 year old Chauvet Caves in Southern France. Herzog says the Caves are the place “where the modern human soul was awakened.” A reviewnoted that the paintings “are exceptional not only for their age or their historical importance, but for their beauty and grace, the strange window they offer into the development of man’s ways of looking at the world through art.” The Stoos Gathering resonates the same chord. It’s all about the creativity of people.

Those of us who took part in the Stoos Gathering are sorting through what we came up with. The punchline is “learning networks of (diverse) people creating value,” but I imagine that will be refined. You can track where we’re at and join the conversation on our website and LinkedIn group.

Next I’m going to explore the implications for professional learning and working smarter.

http://www.internettime.com/2012/01/the-stoos-gathering-working-smarter/

Business is changing, and the learning function must change along with it.

Rigid, industrial-age corporations are not keeping up with the pace of change. Customer Spring, Shareholder Spring, and Worker Spring may break out any day. Everyone’s mad as hell. They won’t take it any more.

How bad is it? The lifespan of corporations is at an all-time low. The majority of workers are frustrated, unhappy, and disengaged. Shareholders are receiving a lower return on investment than ever before. Customers are fed up with mediocre service. Return on assets has declined every year for the last forty. The only class of people making money are CEOs, and there’s general agreement that their rewards are obscene and inappropriate. We can’t go on like this.

Now what?
Many people have suggested what business needs to do differently.

Social business, Enterprise 2.0, Radical Management, the Connected Company, Living Networks, Management 3.0, and Working Smarter suggest such techniques as putting the customer in charge, harvesting collective intelligence, self-organizing teams, speedy cycle times, collaboration, transparency, openness, agility, trusting one another, responding to feedback, bottom-up organization, peer learning, web 2.0 culture, and optimizing networks. Until now, most of the people working to bring this about were acting independently.

The Stoos Gathering

Last weekend a group of twenty-one people joined forces on a mountain top in Switzerland to collaborate on coming up with ways out of this mess. Our website tells the story.

Our evolving view is that successful future organizations will become learning networksof individuals creating value. They will become stewards of the living. This is a major break from the past — and an opportunity for L&D professionals to become essential contributors to their organizations.

Learning is no longer optional
Continuous improvement and delighting customers require a culture of pervasive learning. We’re not talking classes and workshops here. Creating a new order of business requires learning ecologies — what we’ve been calling Workscapes — that make it simple and enjoyable for people to learn what they need to get the job done. Companies that fail to learn will wither and die.

As all business becomes social business, L&D professionals face a momentous choice. They can remain Chief Training Officers and instructors who get novices up to speed, deliver events required by compliance, and run in-house schools. These folks will be increasingly out of step with the times.

Or they can become business leaders who shape learning cultures, social networks, collaborative practices, information flows, federated content management, just-in-time performance support, customer feedback mechanisms, and structures for continuous improvement.

http://www.internettime.com/2012/01/no-more-business-as-usual/

1. We’re witnessing a dizzying rate of change. Business people are being overwhelmed by the pace of progress and the explosion of knowledge.

2. There are denser and denser interconnections afoot. Everything is getting hooked up to everything else. This increases complexity and makes business unpredictable

3. Intangibles are becoming the prime source of value. Social capital and know-how have replaced plant and equipment as economic value creators.

Companies that fail to take these things into account are headed for the scrap heap. Don’t believe me? Ask somebody in the newspaper business — The New York Times and USA Today are doing better than their peers — they lost only 80 percent of their value in the past decade. Or look at the music business — remember record stores?

Change rips people out of their comfort zones, and the inertia that often follows is huge. Maintaining control was the bedrock of 20th century thinking — avoiding surprises, keeping things in line, being efficient, reducing exceptions, doing the same thing over and over, planning your work and working your plan — but these are yesterday’s practices. When we put new practices in place, we need to be explicit about what obsolete practices they are replacing so employees can unlearn them.

Today’s prime directive is sharing control among all stakeholders — discern the underlying pattern and take action. Act responsibly. Do what’s right. Follow your heart. I found an artifact from the 20th century on the walkway outside my cottage recently: a time card. It had a single entry: eight hours for the first day of the week. Probably some 21st century guy recognized it for the 20th century relic it was and refused to go along, hence it was discarded.

Time cards were once a mainstay of industrial life. You clocked in; you clocked out. When work was physical, time was a reliable measure of production. The fastest manual laborer was maybe 20 percent faster than the average. It’s different with concept work. The top concept worker creates new business models, wins patents, brings in major clients and cuts the deals that make the enterprise. A manager who monitors who is at her desk early and which cars are last to leave the parking lot must unlearn clock-watching and look at time through a new lens.

A quarter century ago, Stan Davis wrote in Future Perfect that the fundamentals of the universe, and therefore business, are time, space and matter. The derivatives of time, space and matter are the universal variables that impact all business: speed, connectivity and intangibles.

Leaders talk about speed but they don’t take advantage of it. Take revenue. It’s expressed as revenue per quarter. Shouldn’t they flip the fraction upside down and talk about decreasing the time it takes to bring the revenue in? Time-to-completion is the appropriate metric. Value network analysis quantifies the value created through better linkages. Relationships like supply chain are the tip of the iceberg.

Businesses must also focus on increasing the value of relationships with customers and partners. Improving network effectiveness improves business. And as for intangibles, it’s high time to replace 20th century scorecards and surveys that assess capabilities, competencies and intangibles. The narrow focus on what’s easy to count stifles business creativity. What we can’t see has become more important than what we can.

Choosing the right feedback to listen to and responding to it is the key to optimizing speed, connections and intangibles. Honest, rigorous feedback can identify dead wood that has outlived its usefulness. When a practice is not producing results, it’s time to unlearn it.

Once upon a time, feedback from the boss was sufficient: “That’s what I’m paid to do.”

Twenty-first century leaders must shoulder responsibility for delighting customers and making the organization better. In a business world characterized by speed, connections and intangibles, that means paying attention to the right signals. Is that on your corporate learning agenda?

http://clomedia.com/articles/view/learning-in-the-21st-century-means-adapting-to-change

Business organizations are lagging reality. The 21st century is radically different from what came before and yet most businesses act as if nothing has changed.

Half of the adult population of the United States uses social media, up from 5% a scant six years. 750 million people converse on Facebook. A couple of hundred of us were blogging a dozen years ago; today 160 million people blog. Yet most corporations are  reluctant to “take the risk” on social media.

Consumers are sharing photographs and videos of their grandkids in real time. Most corporations are buried in email.

Managers and professionals do daily battle with rigid systems that don’t flex with the times, strain under mountains of trivia, and rely on obsolete practices that serve neither the customer or the company.

Our research suggests that business in general may be facing a “Customer Spring.” Like the Arab Spring, customers who are weary of being dominated by unresponsive corporate regimes will rise in protest and topple the old order.

Perhaps it won’t get to that point. Companies that cling to vestigial ways doing business as usual and don’t open themselves to serve their constituents may simply die of old age. Average corporate life expectancy is about half that of a human being and is already at an all-time low. It won’t take long.

Business is at a crossroads. It’s do or die.

The Network Era

When the economy went to hell in a hand basket a couple of years back, my gut told me this was not a downturn. Rather, the network era had taken the wind out of the sails of the industrial age. The economy was not going to “bounce back.” We were entering a new era. This was a total game changer. A new normal.

At the turn of the last century, we entered an age of unparalleled volatility, uncertainty, and accelerating speed where ideas had become more valuable than physical things. Financial markets sensed this and shifted investments from what’s on the balance sheet to bets on what would be on future income statements. Intangibles — know-how, know-who, ideas, and the tacit lessons of experience — have limitless potential; plant and equipment can be millstones that hold you back.

Relationships are the glue that holds networks together. Enlightened businesses would shuck off the factory mentality that treats workers as interchangeable parts in a machine. Rigid command and control systems would give way to a spirit of “we’re all in this together.” Barriers that wall off customers from suppliers would come tumbling down. Collaboration would crowd out giving orders. We’d end up enjoying one another’s company.

A new CEO with a grand vision of social networks, openness, innovation, experimentation, and continuous improvement is not enough to turn a large organization around because she’s anchored to a legacy culture.

Managers and professionals who have grown up taking and giving orders simply don’t know how to adapt. The CEO and her team flip the switch but the lights don’t go on below because they’re wired differently down there.

What’s required is a wholesale shift to a new way of doing things. The knowing/doing gap surrounding the advent of the network era is humongous.

The core problem was that while the landscape of business has radically changed, managers are conducting business with the obsolete tools. A manager could execute from the 20th century playbook flawlessly but still fall behind because the nature of the game had changed.

Internet Time Alliance resolved to identify the beliefs and practices that can make organizations successful in the 21st century workplace. We start by focusing on front-line managers and professionals, those closest to the customer.

Stay tuned….

http://www.unmanagement.net/2011/10/22/why-now/

• Take stock, take charge
• Delight customers
• Collaborate, team-work
• De-stress, make people happy
• Inspire performance
• Take the pulse
• Sprint
• Decide wisely
• Coach
• Nurture serendipity
• Net-work
• Conduct, don’t control

Q| How did you first get interested in e-learning?

In 1998, I’d been in the training business and adult education for more than 20 years, and when the Web came along. I was blown away; I fell in love. Learning and the Web were made for one another, and I wouldn’t let go of it. I was a man obsessed.

The Web didn’t figure into the plans of the company I was with, so I left and began working on my own, talking with visionaries and writing about it. The CEO of the company that practically invented computer-based training, CBT Systems, shared the same vision. The company paid me to develop a marketing approach, write white papers, and legitimize eLearning. In this role, I became the head of the eLearning Forum.

Q| How about informal learning?

I remember exactly when I was introduced to informal learning–November 2000. I heard a presentation from the late Peter Henschel, who ran the Institute for Research on Learning. The institute had sent anthropologists to companies to look at how people learn to do their work. They found that most of learning was on the job: you learn from just trying things out or from asking the person sitting next to you. Essentially, you learn more in the coffee room than you do in the classroom. In that case, they found that 80 percent of the learning was on the job, not in training.

At the time, I thought, “Somebody’s got to get this story out,” because essentially all this learning is going on, but it’s under the radar. There are ways to make it better, but nobody is doing anything because it’s invisible and nobody’s responsible. I’ve been preaching that message ever since.

Q| How best can L+D professionals harness it for an organization’s benefit?

Chief learning officers who continue to let informal learning happen by accident are leaving money on the table. There’s plenty they can do to make it better. For example, they can make expertise more accessible through profiles and social networks. They can replace lots of classroom training (frequently forgotten before it has a chance to be applied) with on-demand learning. They can replace wordy courses with intuitive graphics. They can replace cumbersome workshops with coaching sessions.

If people are going to learn on their own, you’ve got to give them time to talk. Conversation is the most important learning technology the world has ever seen. Conversations are the stem-cells of knowledge. Some organizations still box people up in cubicles and tell them not to spend too much time talking. Well, they are shooting themselves in the foot because that’s the way people learn.

In the big Silicon Valley companies I visit, conference rooms are in such short supply that you’ve got to sign up days in advance to reserve one. They’d probably be better off with all conference rooms and no offices. When people are together, they learn.

Q| With all the talk about informal learning, in your opinion, where do formal learning programs fit in?

Informal learning and formal learning aren’t two different things. They are points on a continuum of all learning, and the degree of formality can be more or less.

When people need to understand an entirely new framework or master a new field of study, the more formal approaches work best. You’re not going to learn algebra or electrical engineering by hanging out at the water cooler. Later on, when you’re up to speed and know the lay of the land, you just need to know what you need to know, to fill in the gaps. That’s where more informal methods are preferable.

Q| How did you initially get involved with creating University of Phoenix’s first business curriculum?

The founders of the University of Phoenix were a group of academics led by a renegade professor in San Jose. They started out to providing degree programs in public safety to police officers in California. Many police officers had two-year degrees, had taken a lot of certification courses, and only needed a few more courses to qualify for a four-year degree.

It was tough for a working adult to attend college in those days. Night classes were rare. College bookstores closed at 5:00 pm. Giving credit for experiential learning was rare. The Phoenix approach was radically different.

Where should they turn to expand on the success with police officers? Perhaps business. I had a background in market research, so they hired me to talk with the big tech companies in Silicon Valley and major banks in San Francisco. I reported back that a business degree program for working adults would sell like hotcakes. The tech companies and banks felt they were squandering much of their tuition reimbursement funds. Our programs would focus on pragmatic business topics; we would bring the university to the company and hold classes on site.

The professors said, “That’s very interesting. You’re a business guy (I was a new Harvard MBA at that time), why don’t you develop the program?” Why not? I was young and confident.

I enlisted the help of working professionals in various business areas– so if we were covering finance, I worked with finance professionals. If we’re covering accounting, I worked with accountants. We built the curriculum using adult learning principles. There were a lot of small group exercises, and it was very hands on. Less theory and more practical throughout.

The group eventually moved to Phoenix; I wanted to stay in San Francisco. I probably left a hundred million dollars on the table by not becoming the director of marketing for this program that became The University of Phoenix, the largest university in the world. They have done quite well without me.

Q| What is one thing you’d like to see changed about the approach to workplace learning?

Work and learning are converging. Both have to be more participatory, less top down; we need to recognize learners as full participants.

We have copied too much from schooling. Schools assume students don’t know much. That’s a totally arrogant attitude in the workplace. This is one reason people resent trainers. Somebody comes in with, “Well, I’m going to show you how to do this,” as if you’re stupid or something. Well, no. It ought to be “Let’s figure out how you can learn this in the most effective way possible.” We need more facilitators and fewer instructors.

People who regard themselves as just trainers are cutting themselves off from the future. More and more learning is migrating to social networks. Training folks who are not really taking advantage of networks are abdicating their responsibility for facilitating organizational learning.

When people ask me what I do, I don’t bring up training and learning. I say I’m in the business of helping people work smarter. I haven’t met anybody who says, “Oh no, we don’t want to do that.” Of course, learning is an integral part of working smarter.

Q| Any new books or projects you’d like to tell us about?

I’m really, really excited about a new project called 21C Leadership.

I believe that the 21st century is an entirely new ballgame. People who are waiting for the economy to bounce back will be waiting forever. The global economy is going through a sea change. The Network Era is replacing the Industrial Age. The management processes we used in the Industrial Age are in large measure obsolete. There’s this tremendous level of frustration because people are trying to deal with all these new challenges, but they are trying to deal with them with old mindsets, and that doesn’t work.

21C Leadership is discovering the next practices. The new ways of doing things we’re finding are more participatory, democratic, collaborative, and open.

Coming up with those practices is the easy part of the equation. Changing the behavior of hands-on managers and professionals is the tough part. We’re creating books, apps, performance support tools, and more.

I intend to replace vestigial management practices. We’re going to need places to test this out. If anyone’s interested, I encourage them to get in touch.

Q| What do you like to do for relaxation or for fun?

I really enjoy taking pictures. I’m not a great photographer, but I can sort of sense when it’s the right moment to push the button. I understand a little bit about composition, but I don’t have $2,000 cameras and professional equipment. Still, I find great joy in capturing images. Going back over those images refreshes experience and knowledge; I get to enjoy things more than once. This drives me to see more of the world than I would have if I weren’t always looking for the next shot.

ASTD - http://goo.gl/S2N9r

Work Is Changing

• Work is no longer just doing just what is in your job description.
• In 1986, 75% of the knowledge that a worker needed was stored in their heads.
• By 2006, that number was estimated to be 9%. The needed information is no longer in the worker’s mind but it is “out there” in the minds of others.
• The need for personal, informal networks – to be able to find information — has never been greater.

Conceptual Age

• We are moving from the information age (knowledge workers) to the conceptual age (conceptual workers).
• Historically, most managers didn’t make time for employees to learn, grow, and develop. Now work and learning are converging into a new type of work known as conceptual work.
• Innovation has to be baked into corporate of culture.
• Conceptual work involves gaining experience, learning, developing new thoughts and new ideas, and even developing new lines of business.
  • In this new era of work, the potential value that a worker can create is 200 times greater than average, because they no longer have physical limits.

…and why most corporations spend most of their money where the least learning takes place.

Informal learning

• Informal learning does not mean haphazard learning. It opens up possibilities and resources –  the sky’s the limit
  • Research in many countries has found that 80% of the learning required for workers to do their jobs was acquired by watching someone else do the work and other informal means.
  • Learning is not formal or informal: it’s always a mix of both.
  • Novices – those new at a job – often learn more effectively and quickly in a formal learning environment. Experienced workers prefer to acquire needed information through informal channels. You need to provide a framework for informal learning, but experienced workers don’t want to go to “courses.”
  • In informal learning situations, when someone is struggling, others step in to help in “real time.”
  • Spending/learning paradox: The majority of the training budget in most organizations is spent on formal learning – the place where it actually has the least impact on performance.
  • Training departments know how to produce formal learning because it is like school.
  • Management has to have faith that there is productive work going on and that informal learning is enabling workers to get the information that they need to do their jobs.
  • If you have high expectations of people, they will live up to them; have low expectations, and they will live down to them.

Education vs. Engagement

• Learning is more than just education.
• Learning should include real, meaningful tasks, not knowledge recitation, but application.
• Learning needs to be about the problems that a worker really cares about.
• Learning:  Natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive, fun.
• Learning engages the heart and mind.
• Meaningful conversation is the strongest learning tool!

Classroom vs. Workscape

• The traditional classroom environment is apart from work – it is where training is delivered via “push” mode. It is packaged inside of a program and is delivered piecemeal. It includes events, is generally static and the end result is that the learner comes away knowing things.
• In a workscape, learning is embedded in the work, learning emerges in pull mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. It emerges as a result of working smarter.
• In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive and FUN. It involves conversation as the main ingredient.

Social Networks

• Happy people learn more effectively and do more work.
• Study by Nicholas A Christakis & James H. Fowler
  • Social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends.
  • Happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people.
  • What are you doing and how happy are you?
  • What makes people happy?  In this order: sex, conversation music, walking, eating, cooking, shopping, children, reading, commuting, work is on the bottom.
  • Work should be increasingly about conversations. Conceptual work – conversations that are paid for.
  • Examples of the power of social networks relating to weight and smoking – if you have friends who are obese or smoke (or they have friends who are obese or smoke), you are more likely to be obese or smoke.

New Paradigm: Working Smarter

• Dirty words:  training, learner eLearning, informal, social, school, learning.  Don’t use these words in an elevator with an executive!   Now call it working smarter.

Beta: Not ready for final release. Still buggy. Life is perpetual beta.

Blink: Rapid cognition, or gut feeling. Making snap judgments, often valid, on the basis of a few data points. Popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in a book of the same name.

Blog: Great way to narrate your work to enable others to learn from your example.

Boiling the ocean: Trying to cure all problems at once, often with a single tool. Don’t even try.

Brain rules: Don’t design learning experiences that defy human nature. John Medina’s book lists 10 basic truths about how people learn.

Complexity: It’s a nonlinear, interconnected world, and you will never figure it out.

Course: Rigid unit of learning, generally expressed in hours or days and “led” by an instructor. Opposite: “Just enough.”

Doggie treats: Incentives, targets, measurements and other directional signals. These drive organizational behavior. Coined by Art Kleiner in Who Really Matters.

Entropy: Disorder. Closed systems decay over time. Margaret Wheatley has proposed that this is why scientific managers are so hung up on control.

Flow: Why you cannot step in the same river twice. Nothing is permanent; everything flows. Also, the euphoria that accompanies flowing in sync with your reality.

Free-range learner: Someone who learns as he or she chooses. Often discovery learning.

Frog boiling: Apocryphal science experiment. Drop a frog in a pot of boiling water; he jumps right out. Put a frog in a pan of cool water and slowly heat it on the stove; the frog never senses a big change in temperature and stays in the water until poached.

Grades: Random numbers used by academics to exert social control over students.

Hospicing: From Nancy White, “We are hospicing things we no longer need/should do. Sometimes that means turning them over to others to care for until they die.”

Internet cloud: Like a black box. Stuff goes in and stuff comes out; whether it bounced across continents and satellites doesn’t make any difference.

Job: Increasingly obsolete way of packaging work.

Learning: Work.

Metadata: Information about information. Often, metatags that describe what’s inside a chunk of learning. Generally machine-readable. Analogous to a barcode on an incoming shipment.

Mindful: Opposite of mindless. Take a deep breath. Pay attention.

Next practices: Guidelines for building a sustainable future. Best practices look backward, providing advice that worked in the past; next practices focus on what to do in the time ahead.

Opportunity cost: The cost of not doing something — e.g., the sales the rep didn’t make because he or she was away at a seminar. Often the largest cost associated with training programs.

Presence awareness: If the urinal in the airport bathroom knows when I’m there and when I’m not, should we expect anything less from our computer networks?

Social learning: What e-learning was supposed to be.

Synchronous: (pretentious) Live event.

Technophilia: The belief that technology will solve all ills. Especially prevalent during the dot-com delusion, fostered by Wired magazine.

Tweet: 140-character fragment of a global conversation.

Unlearning: Making way for the new by throwing out the old.

WikiLeaks: Warning shot to all secretive organizations. There are no secrets. Might as well go transparent.

Work: Learning.

Working smarter: Executives rail against informal learning; I’ve yet to find one who is not interested in having people work smarter.

Workscape: Performance ecosystem. Metaphorical environment where work and learning converge. Covers the entire ecology and could include the water cooler, the break room, the Friday beer bust, the conversation nook at the office, Wi-Fi in the cafeteria, the enterprise.

YMMV: “Your mileage may vary.” Recognition that your results may not be the same as mine. Other things are never equal.

http://clomedia.com/articles/view/working-smarter-glossary/print

Working Smarter is a holistic approach to doing business.

An article by Jonah Lehrer in today’s Wall Street Journal describes the impact of the color of workplace walls on performance. People in red-walled rooms were “much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory.” People in blue rooms “did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children’s toy.” I’ve noted before that people who work in yellow-walled rooms are more optimistic and happy — and therefore more productive.

Does this mean interior design could be a factor in working smarter? Sure.

Jack Welch has said, “Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.” People are most productive when they’re creating lots of value doing things they like and are good at. Is slotting people into the best jobs for them working smarter? Sure.

Business organizations are undergoing a grand convergence. Work and learning are becoming one and the same. Smart companies don’t send workers away for training; they enable them to learn in the course of work. Learning well is working smarter.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” wrote John Muir. He was writing about nature, but the same holds true for the human side of enterprise. The “people disciplines” of organization development, talent management, training, and management development are all interlinked. You can’t do one without impacting the others. Who cares? It’s all just working smarter.

I don’t talk much about training or learning these days.

Just because you train people doesn’t mean they learn.

Learning is higher ground than training, but learning is not enough to make sure the job gets done.

The goal is achieving the outcomes you seek. How you get there is immaterial. Sometimes it’s easier to add smarts to the workflow (performance support) than to stuff things into people’s heads. Moreover, people often fail to put what they learn into practice.

I have reframed how I help organizations get things done. It may or may not involve learning. I call it working smarter.

Impatient? Go here. If you like what you see, come back for an explanation.

Working smarter begins with a holistic view of performance. The bottom line is getting more done and doing it faster.

Working smarter involves trusting individuals to do what’s right and giving them the latitude to do it. Empowering people to take action rests on clearing obstacles out of the way and incorporating next practices into workflow. Motivation, respect, and aspirations play a role. It’s about cultivating a healthy learning ecology.

Everyone agrees that working smarter is a good thing. Next time the economy nose dives, can you imagine an executive calling for people to work dumber?

Working smarter is the key to sustainability and continuous improvement. The accelerating rate of change forces everyone in every organization to make a choice: learn while you work or become obsolete. Work and learning are two sides of the same coin. Imbed what we know about learning theory into how people work, and working smarter results.

Multi-disciplinary. In spades

Working smarter draws ideas from design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, complexity theory, and more. Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines.

Keeping up with developments in all of these fields is daunting. New developments are spread all over the place. There’s no one-stop shop for news about working smarter. Important discoveries fall through the cracks. Most organizations take a piecemeal approach.

We all have our favorite sources on the web for keeping up. My must-reads include David Snowden on complexity, George Siemens on network learning, Jonah Lehrer on neuroscience, Steven Denning on management practice, Nancy White on building communities, Dan Pontefract on collaborative culture, and Ross Dawson on living networks. Of course, I also read the posts of Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and Charles Jennings; we five are always building upon one another’s thinking.

Less is more

My feed reader (I use Google Reader) tracks 160 blogs. That’s unwieldy. I broke them into groups. It was still like drinking from the fire hose. I whittled my essential reading down to three dozen sources. Keeping up with only those proved difficult.

When pressed for time, all I want to read are the most important posts. How to separate the wheat from the chaff? Social signals. Just show me what’s attracting the most attention. At long last, there’s now a way to find the most important, essential writing about working smarter.

Working Smarter Daily

Working Smarter Daily presents me with the crème de la crème every day. It pulls the best stuff to the top of the page. If I can only find time to read the essence of what interests me, this is where I go to get it.

Go to http://workingsmarterdaily.com. Bookmark it. Take a look around.

Jay the Curator

Working Smarter Daily displays the most relevant and interesting content from sites I choose.

That’s right: there’s no democracy at work in selecting the sources that feed the site. Jay decides. But everyone has a hand in selecting the content that is automagically drawn from those sources. That’s determined by social factors.

Jay the dictatorial curator favors:

• individuals, not institutions.
• depth, not breadth.
• original ideas, not the 2.0 echo chamber.
• inspirational thinking that I can build on.
• most of the time, people I’ve met

Tony Karrer (more on Tony coming up) wondered if the “mostly people I’ve met” filter was too exclusionary. I don’t see it that way. I make a point of meeting the people who matter to me. Know someone who’s making a difference in working smarter? Introduce me. (And I don’t know four or five people in the curent bunch.) I’m open to your suggestions for whom should be heard here, whether I know them F2F or not.

Under the hood

Play around with the site.

• Clicking on a name in the right column brings up that person’s greatest hits. Example: Andy McAfee
• Clicking on a topic or tool brings up the most popular articles on it. Example:collaboration
• Use the search to see what this crowd has said about a topic. Example:sharepoint
• Click Change Edition up top and see what was hot last year or the year before. Example: 2006

This is both a smart aggregator for what’s hot in working smarter and also a research tool.

Working Smarter Daily in practice

Among the top four pointers in last Thursday’s edition was a post from Jane Hartabout Twitter as a learning tool for surgeons. It pointed to this over-the-top clipYouTube clip from Gray’s Anatomy. Just what I needed to explain the potential of microblogs to a client. In eight minutes.

Yesterday I came upon a post from Ross Dawson that pointed me to just what I was looking for about implementing enterprise 2.0 networks in-house.

This evening I came upon Donald Clark’s wonderful diatribe about why teaching Latin in schools is so ridiculous. Good for reflection and a belly laugh.

Unlike my experience looking at general sources, I find an item or two every time I look at Working Smarter Daily. If we’re kindred spirits, maybe you will, too.

Have it your way

My friend Tony Karrer has been developing smart aggregators for some time now. You may be familiar with eLearning Learning and Nancy White’s Communities & Networks Connection. Last year, Tony and I used this technology to create a site called Informal Learning Flow. The software has evolved. Tony recently set up a company, Aggregage, to make the technology publicly available. I am encouraging companies to consider using private versions behind their firewalls for dynamic knowledge management.  This kind of curation + social signals has the potential to become a primary means for professionals to filter content in their specialties.

Supporters

Xyleme is sponsoring this experiment. Xyleme enables companies to free legacy information for distribution on mobile devices and modern information systems. Their philosophy of simplifying our complex world fits with what I’m trying to do with Working Smarter Daily. They generously chipped in enough money to get us going.

My colleagues at Internet Time Alliance helped write the Working Smarter Fieldbook with me. We talk working smarter every day.  They turned me on to many of my favorite sources.

When chefs travel, they meet with other chefs. They eat together. They share techniques. Were it not for this sharing, we would not enjoy the broad, international array of food on our tables. When a top chef wants to move to a new job in a particular location, he tells a few chefs, the grapevine spreads the word, and within a week he has several job offers.

In his book, Bourdain describes how he started out as a dishwasher in a restaurant on Cape Cod. Then he lands a job as a fry cook. From that point on, the chef running the kitchen he’s working in is looking out for young Anthony. When will the kitchen worker be prepared to advance from washing lettuce to making salads? What does he need to know to advance to pastry chef? How can the chef help the dessert chef advance to sous-chef? Good chefs take developing their staff very seriously. They see that their apprentices learn to create satisfying yet economical food.

Anthony Bourdain decided he needed to accelerate his development, so he attended the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) for formal training. This enabled him to understand the intertwined relationships of ingredients, cooking and customers. The curriculum at the CIA taught him frameworks for various cuisines; he learned practices that would have taken years to learn on the job. And indeed, when Bourdain went back to cooking, he rapidly advanced up the ladder to become a chef.

Chefs are a community of like-minded individuals who identify with one another, advance the practice of their profession and help new entrants join the industry. They are proud of their work. They work extremely hard, and they are proud of that, too.

Ten years ago, the common wisdom was that you could not establish a community of practice. If you found one that was working, the best you could do was to nurture it. In essence, they were like truffles: They grow in the wild, so if you want them, you put a pig or a well-trained dog on a leash and encourage it to dig around the roots of oak trees in southern France or northern Italy.

Authorities were wrong on both counts. Half the world’s truffles are cultivated on truffle plantations in Spain. Thousands of corporations have established thriving communities of practice that advance both the careers of their members and their shared body of knowledge.

The cook becomes a chef when she feels she’s a chef. Likewise, professional firefighters, insurance salespeople, plumbers, accountants and architects don’t just master subject matter — they become members of their profession. They learn to be.

Beyond acquiring know-how, a professional hangs out with other professionals, builds relationships with others in the profession and contributes to the collective wisdom of the industry. Most important, the professional knows deep inside that she has joined the profession. Experience is the best teacher. You can’t become a chef without working and learning in a kitchen.

Any group of professionals who identify with one another is a potential community of practice. Professionals learn from one another; through experimentation; and by following the advice of mentors. In time, they pay back the community by shifting from “what’s known” to “what’s next.”

Are communities of practice part of your learning and development program? Don’t you wish your organization had dedicated communities of practice that nurtured newbies, helped everyone get up to speed and advanced the professional knowledge of the field? Have you assessed who might form natural communities?

A sponsor is the person who pays those bills. Sponsors are responsible for championing the case for change (i.e., the vision), visibly representing the change (i.e., walking the talk), and providing reassurance and confidence (i.e., the implementation plan).

Someone once interrupted me during a webinar when I was talking about how trainers need to be aware of corporate objectives and rate their contributions by their impact on the business. “Wouldn’t that require us to understand how the business worked?” he asked. Yes, of course. How could you do your job right without knowing how the corporation worked? Several others jumped in, essentially saying that organizational success and helping to meet strategic objectives was “not my job.”

The days when corporations were larded with layer upon layer of management whose job was to translate strategic imperatives from above into job descriptions and projects down below are long gone. Now all of us are supposed to sing from the same hymnal without the intermediaries.

There’s no cookie-cutter formula for applying metrics, but there is an underlying process.

Measure results throughout your program, not just before and after. Keep your sponsor informed. Frequency is sometimes more important than quantity. Monitoring things early on may enable you to make mid-course corrections.

The Responsibilities You Share

Peter Drucker, hailed as the father of management, is a business guru’s guru. Drucker singled out eight characteristics of effective executives:

• They asked, “What needs to be done?”
• They asked, ‘‘What is right for the enterprise?”
• They developed action plans.
• They took responsibility for decisions.
• They took responsibility for communicating.
• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.
• They ran productive meetings.
• They thought and said “we” rather than “I.”

The Metrics Cycle

There’s no cookie-cutter formula for applying metrics, but there is an underlying process.

Generally, you’ll follow these five steps to identify, agree upon, assess and use metrics. This is not rocket science. It’s the same process you already use to accomplish a lot of things in life.

Let’s briefly consider each step.

1. State the desired outcome. Results do not exist inside the training department. In fact, results do not exist within the business. Results come from outside the business. Imagine a no-nonsense businessperson, such as Jack Welch, GE’s former boss. If you can explain yourself to Jack, you’ve mastered this step.

2. Agree on how to measure. The only valid metrics for corporate learning are business metrics. Examples are increased sales, shorter time to market, fewer rejects and lower costs. How do you decide what measures to apply? You don’t. That’s the responsibility of your business sponsor, the person who signs the checks. Together you agree on what’s to be done and how you’ll measure success or failure. Once you’ve settled on the project and its metrics, get it in writing.

3. Execute projects. The projects could be training, an incentive bonus plan or more advertising. Training programs are often part of a larger scheme, and it’s fruitless to try to isolate them. In fact, savvy training directors look for major corporate initiatives they can hitch a ride on.

4. Assess the results. You must evaluate the impact of your efforts with the measures you set up back in the second step. In other words, you are not allowed to mimic Charlie Brown, who would shoot an arrow and then paint the target around it. Why stick with the measures you came up with before? Because that’s how you maintain credibility with your sponsor. You can bring up unforeseen outcomes or anecdotal evidence, so long as you follow up on those original methods first.

5. Begin anew. The only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Your post-mortem on the completed project should include a section titled “What to do better next time.”

http://www.internettime.com/2010/07/its-all-relative/

CLO magazine - Published June 2010

Among our recommendations were:

• Informal         Live webcasts
• Informal         Recorded webinars
• Informal         Video conferencing
• Informal         Workshops
• Informal         Audio/ podcasts
• Informal         Learnshop
• Informal         Case Studies
• Informal         Non-formal video
• Informal         Discussion group/ forum
• Informal         SharePoint
• Informal         RSS Feeds
• Informal         Communities of practice
• Informal         Community e-news
• Informal         Guerilla video (Flip cams)
• Informal         iPad Leadership Channel
• Informal         SpacedEd Reinforcement
• Informal         Mentoring
• Informal         OJT
• Informal         Job shadow/job rotation (Experiential)
• Informal         Websites
• Informal         Lunch ‘n learns
• Informal         Conference/tradeshow
• Informal         Road shows
• Informal         Books/case studies
• Informal         Simulations
• Informal         Reference docs/job aids

• Social                  SharePoint 2010, eRoom/Documentum
• Social                  Mentoring/ coaching
• Social                  Websites?
• Social                  Books?
• Social                  Collaborative projects
• Social                  Wikis
• Social                  Blogs (written/ video)
• Social                  Micro-blogging
• Social                  Social bookmarking, ranking/rating/tagging
• Social                  Web jams
• Social                  Bodystorming
• Social                  Group reflection
• Social                  Celebrate successes
• Social                  Tweetchats, Tweetups
• Social                  Appreciative inquiry
• Social                  Unconferences
• Social                  Rypple feedback
• Social                  On-job collaboration
• Social                  Collaborative writing
• Social                  Collaborative presentations
• Social                  Podcasting
• Social                  Photo-sharing
• Social                  Social networking

http://www.informl.com/2010/04/10/2-0-is-a-philosophy-not-a-technology/

The sooner workers are productive, the larger their contribution to the organization. This makes time-to-performance, the amount of time required to begin performing at target levels, a vital metric. Here’s an example.

At the end of the last century, Sun Microsystems was a high-flier in the workstation business. Sun was bringing 120 new salespeople a month to a one-week immersion course in Santa Clara. The new hires went through briefings on equipment, applications, competition, Sun, and more. Undoubtedly, most of this gusher of information pouring in one ear and out the other. Fifteen months later, the graduates were selling at quota: $5 million/year.

Sun’s most vigorous competitors in the workstation market, IBM and Hewlett Packard, were training new sales reps for eight and six weeks respectively. Couldn’t Sun provide at least one more week of sales training? asked a maverick in Sun’s sales training apparatus. No, replied the managers of the sales force. They said they needed the new people in the field. Otherwise, revenue would drop.

The maverick, let’s call him Jerry, promised not to take the new recruits out of the field but asked if he could have the budget it would have taken to keep them in Santa Clara an additional week? The sales managers okayed the request, and Jerry set to work assembling a supplemental, non-residential sales training experience.

Instead of coming to Santa Clara cold, new hires would henceforth take eLearning to get up to speed on hardware and specs. Passing a pre-test was the ticket of admission to the on-site program at corporate headquarters.

Since they had already mastered the explicit aspects of the job, the week in Santa Clara was refocused on a case study that got the recruits working together with the same people they would need to coordinate with when in the field. More time was set aside for motivational meetings with such enthusiasts as CEO and founder Scott McNealy and hard-charging President Ed Zander.

The recruits also learned the ins and outs of Sun’s brand new sales information system and were certified as trainers on the new system. The newbies became the go-to people for experienced salespeople in their branch offices who needed to use the system. Veteran sales people had little choice but to interact with the new hires.

The program was a success. Nine months were shaved off the time-to-performance. New hires were selling at quota level in six months instead of fifteen!

The financial impact was astounding. Consider: 120 new hires/month = 1,440 new hires a year who on average were selling at $5 million/year nine months (3/4 of a year) earlier than before.

1440 sales people x 3/4 year x $5 million = $3.5 billion in incremental revenue.

Jerry ran up to Ed Zander in the parking lot to excitedly report that the new program was bringing in more that $3 billion in new sales.

Zander looked Jerry in the eye and said “No.” He explained that Sun’s equipment was the best on the market, Sun was hiring better people than IBM and HP, and besides, Zander himself was getting people charged up.

“Would you credit me with 1% of the increase?” asked Jerry. Zander said he’d attribute perhaps 3% of the revenue increase to the new program.

Not bad, said Jerry. That’s $100 million in new sales (3% x $3.5 billion).

A few lessons from this parable:

• The returns on decreasing time-to-performance can be so huge that even the crudest measure of ROI is often enough to demonstrate merit.
• Time-to-performance is a metric a business executive can understand and believe in.
• Time-to-performance provides a better goal for instructional designers than merely attaining competence.
• Performance takes motivation, comfort, and sometimes courage as well as knowledge. The time-to-performance metric takes this into account.

Executives want execution, not learning. They want action, not knowledge. It’s unacceptable for a worker to know something but do nothing. Action is what counts.

The sooner workers are productive, the more profitable their enterprise. This makes time-to-performance, the amount of time required to begin performing at target levels, a vital metric.

http://www.informl.com/2010/03/27/time-is-money/

Chief Learning Officer, April 2010

The conference program would lead you to assume that the Learning Technologies conference would be a hotbed of social and informal learning.

Jane addressed how L&D is changing. “People naturally learn from each other, and as technology-supported social learning becomes main stream, what effects can we expect it to have on organisational Learning and Development? She argued that social learning offers the L&D function great scope for widening its impact and increasing its effectiveness. But it is also a potential threat: people will use social learning regardless of L&D – so where does this leave the L&D department of the future?”

Charles talked about experiential learning, saying “Most learning takes place outside formal training events. It comes from our daily experiences and from practice. It also comes from conversations and from reflecting on our experiences and on those of others. Smart organisations and managers recognise this, and make space for staff to cultivate these different approaches to developing their capability.”

My friend Mark Oehlert presented, “‘Making social learning work in your organisation”, drawing on his experience establishing a social learning environment at Defense Acquisition University.

BT’s Peter Butler  noted, “Formal learning is costly, takes time to produce and more often than not it takes the employee off the job. BT’s new web 2.0 social learning environment enables more informal learning. The results, according to Peter Butler, are lower costs, improved time to competence and less time ‘off the job’. In this session Peter examined data from 11,000 users of the system showing its popularity and usefulness.”

Thomson Reuters’ Andy Jones described the journey from eLearning to knowledge-sharing, saying “Thomson Reuters Technology Operations has taken business-focused learning to a new level. In the 2,000-strong department, things move so fast that normal courseware production isn’t viable. Instead, learning is built into each project though a unique L&D workshop engagement model: Content is produced by experts on the project  (facilitated by a learning consultant), published on the project SharePoint server, and the delivery medium decided by whether the content is conceptual or skills-focused.”

However, in our debrief yesterday, both Jane and Charles reported that many attendees are only just starting to shift to delivering some eLearning. Social and informal learning are not on their radar.

Lots of training directors have yet to grasp the concepts of learning through collaboration, the power of social networks, and less is more. Bear in mind that people who attend Learning Technologies are the leading edge. If they are just beginning the journey away from the classroom, imagine what things are like for those who don’t attend!

Americans should not feel smug because their brethren in the U.K. don’t get it. “New data on e-learning usage do not signal the death of the classroom. And despite some of the buzz, the direction of e-learning has not shifted much over the past several years,” report Allison Rossett and James Marshall in an article in this month’s T+D magazine.

Opportunities are being left on the table. Today, there is little evidence of collaborative and user-centered approaches in corporate and government settings, though there are suggestions of influence to come in the future. It is the same for mobile devices, ranked last in reported current practice, and jumping closer to the top of the list as practitioners look forward. The virtual classroom and blended learning were also less prevalent in reported practice than anticipated.

Old favorites dominated in our study. E-learning today appears to be mostly about delivering assessments and designs, testing, personalization, scenarios, and tutorials. All these are familiar, and they all have deep roots in the training and development community. Should we lament that the habits identified in this study are not much different in 2009 than they were in 1989 (although, of course, enabled by technology)? Is this good news or bad? And most important, what do you intend to do about it?

Reading between the lines, I suspect that many organizations are accustomed progressing one step at a time. They expect gradual, comfortable change. One step a year seems a break-neck pace.

Incrementalism is the worst enemy of innovation. We’re playing a new game now and it’s fruitless to follow yesteryear’s pathways.

Business is operating to an ever-faster metronome. Cycle times for product design, manufacturing, and deployment are shorter and shorter. The pace of change itself is picking up. The future is unpredictable. Our old models of training can no longer keep up. They’re racing along so fast that the wheels are falling off.

As the environment becomes more complex, linear approaches are giving way to emergent behavior. People take different paths to learn what they need to do. Our task is to prepare them for things we don’t even see coming!

Former IBM visionary Irving Wladawsky-Berger cautions us to expect resistance.

When first launching a project based on a new technology or idea, you really don’t know what lies ahead.  You cannot answer lots of the questions people will have.  Incremental changes are much easier, because you are essentially improving existing products and services while continuing to sell to and support a similar client base.  But, with disruptive changes, the new products and services you will be working on are likely to be quite different from what you have done in the past….

One of the major reasons why breakthrough innovations have been very difficult for large, established companies is that they treat such efforts as they do any other projects.  If the new venture is organized and managed based on typical business metrics, it will be buried within a much larger operational unit.  It is then only a matter of time before the effort is forgotten and eventually terminated.

Disruptive change requires buy-in, something L&D professionals have not traditionally excelled at.

It is thus imperative to reach out to other parts of the company, sit down with their management and technical leaders and see how the new innovation you are leading can help their existing business.  You want to make them feel part of your virtual team if at all possible.  It is hard for another part of the company to support your new efforts if they feel that it will compete with them for funds, senior management attention or customers in the marketplace.

The fundamental shift toward informal learning is taking place on internet time. Instead of plodding along step by step, Internet Time Alliance is encouraging organizations to leap over the intervening steps and adopt social and informal learning patterns immediately. Our model looks like this:

Our proposal is analogous to implementing telephone service in developing countries. In much of the developing world, fixed telephone infrastructure is poor. In 2008, India had only 3.3 fixed telephone lines per 100 and Nigeria 0.9 lines per 100 inhabitants. Rather than planting telephone poles and stringing copper wire, developing countries are going straight to mobile. Fixed telephone infrastructure is costly to set up, while wireless technology is cheap to deploy.*

Courses, delivered in-person or online, are the phone poles and copper wires of learning technology.

Are you laying land lines or going directly to wireless? Here’s a final note from Irving Wladawsky-Berger:

There are many reasons why disruptive innovations fail.  A surprising number do so not because the company put together a flawed strategy, executed it poorly, or the market was not ready.  They fail because proper attention was not paid to the organizational and cultural changes required so that the institution and its people will embrace the innovation and work hard to make it succeed.  In the end, these human elements of innovation are likely to make the most important difference between success and failure.