Donald Taylor recently published an article titled ‘What does ‘LMS’ mean today?’. In it Donald posited something I’ve been advocating for years.

It is this.

Learning can only be managed by the individual in whose head the learning is occurring.

Of course external factors – such as other people (especially your manager and your team), technology, prevailing culture, general ‘environmental’ factors, and a range of different elements – can support, facilitate, encourage, and help your learning occur faster, better, with greater impact and so on.  But they can’t manage the learning process for you. That’s down to you alone.

This raises an important set of challenges. One of which is “if learning is managed by the learner, what will the technologies that support her look like in the next 3, 5, 10 years?”

One thing we know for sure. They won’t look like the learning management systems installed in the vast majority of organisations across the world today. Sadly, many of these meet Marc Rosenberg’s description as ‘course vending machines’. Read more →

A decade ago the Corporate Executive Board published a report detailing the findings of a study into the role managers can play in employee development.

By almost any standards the sample in this study was large – 8,500 cases drawn from 14 organisations across six industries in nine countries.

One clear finding presented was that:

“those activities that are integrated into manager and employee workflow have the largest impact on employee performance, while those that are distinct events separate from the day-to-day job have less impact.”

In other words if people have the opportunity to learn and develop as part of their work and they are supported by their manager, then learning will be much better transformed into measurable behavioural change and performance improvement. Read more →

Yesterday another great British institution slid into the history books.

HMV opened its first retail shop in Oxford Street, London, in 1921 with great brouhaha and composer Edwin Elgar taking part in the opening ceremony. Yesterday, 91 years on, the company shut its shops and handed its administration over to Deloitte with the expectation that its assets will be sold where possible and the company laid to rest.

Music lovers spent many hours (or weeks) browsing HMV stores, which were part of the only ‘chain’ for music when I first came to England in the early 1970s. Richard Branson’s sole Virgin Records & Tapes shop along Bayswater Road in Notting Hill was always worth a visit (although it specialised in ‘krautrock’ – not one of my favourite genres) as were the other independents in Charring Cross Road, but HMV had the variety and the volume. Read more →

Determinism is the philosophical idea that every event, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable result of preceding actions and that, given certain conditions, there is only one outcome. Nothing else can happen.

Deterministic views of the world assume everything is a jigsaw puzzle rather then a chess game and that for every problem there is a single solution.

The logic follows that if this single solution can be identified, then all that’s required is for the series of steps to be described that lead to it and the outcome can be repeated at will.

Although determinism is part of our world, we shouldn’t assume that its principles can be applied everywhere. Anyone who has even the most rudimentary understanding of chess knows that to adopt a strategy based on determinism is to often invite failure. Read more →

This  post is adapted from a commentary written for the Spark Interactive / ClerkWell 2012 Digital Customer Experience Report – an annual industry report that focuses on customer engagement and how businesses are using digital means to build closer relationships and interact with their consumers.

You can download the report from the Spark Interactive website. It contains excellent data and analysis.

Customer engagement is directly linked to employee development.  If employees don’t understand how to delight their customers, then their organisations will almost certainly fail.

The role that learning and development professionals play in this process is critical. If they are to deliver value they must focus on the things that matter and use the best approaches possible to help their organisations delight customers. Read more →

Remembering Prof. Allan Tough (died 27 April 2012 aged 76 years) – a great man, a pioneer researcher into self-directed learning, a futurist, and author. Allen’s research was fundamental to 70:20:10 thinking.
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