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Managers and Mad Hatters: Work that stretches

Charles Jennings — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:13:27 +0000

This is the third and final of three posts adapted from articles written for Inside Learning Technologies & Skills magazine. It was published and distributed in the magazine for the Learning Technologies Conference and Exhibition in London 25-26 January 2012.

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” says the White Queen to Alice.

In the previous two articles I addressed some of the challenges learning professionals face in the changing world of work and how they are responding. I also looked at some of the approaches an increasing number of organisations are using to exploit the fact that most learning happens in the workplace rather than in the classroom or through structured eLearning courses – especially the adoption of the 70:20:10 Framework.

This final article in the series addressed the challenge with which many L&D and HR departments struggle. This is how to enrol managers in the practice of people development, how to engage with them, and how to ensure learning activities are aligned with their priorities.

Manager support and active participation is vital to develop and support a culture of continuous learning. Arguably the role that managers play is far more important than that of either L&D or HR. The research supports this. It also supports the fact that the ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ when leaders, line managers, HR, and learning professionals align their efforts and each takes accountability for part of a combined workforce capability development strategy.

A Lessons for Managers from the Mad Hatter

The Mad Hatter’s tea party provides the first lesson.

When Alice sat down at the tea party with the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse, the Hatter (who, in fact, Carroll never referred to as ‘mad’) poses a riddle for Alice:

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

Alice and the Hatter then enter a dialogue that culminates in Alice giving up trying to guess the answer to the riddle, and the Hatter admitting he doesn’t have an answer himself anyway. Alice says wearily to the Hatter “I think you might do something better with the time than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers”. To which the Hatter replies; “If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it”.

So, what’s the relation to managers and learning?

Well, sometimes people feel that their managers are posing riddles just like this for them to try to resolve – expecting them to perform without providing any guidance or feedback, and without appearing to have an answer as to what they expect themselves.

Many managers simply don’t set clear objectives and explain their expectations, and don’t follow up and help to embed learning. This has a significant impact on performance.

In fact, research carried out by the Corporate Leadership Council/Learning & Development Roundtable showed that Managers who set clear objectives, explain their expectations, and clearly set out how they plan to measure performance have teams that outperform others by almost 20%.

That’s the equivalent of obtaining an extra day’s work from every team member every week – at no extra cost to organisation or employee! (see Fig 1.)

Fig.1: 15 manager-Led Activities That Improve Performance
Source: Corporate Leadership Council / Learning and Development Roundtable

As you can see from the table, the three activities that impact performance significantly more than any others are:

Managers setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.
Managers providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.
Managers setting aside time to discuss and reflect and help their team members learn from development experiences.

The impact of each of these actions on worker performance is almost 300% greater than through building or teaching necessary knowledge and skills – the core role of the L&D department!

Working Closely with Managers

This data tells us that the L&D department needs to work very closely with managers if it is to help build capability and provide real benefits. Focusing on building knowledge and skills is simply not enough.

It also tells us that experiential learning through ‘work that stretches’ is the most powerful tool we have in the box, and that managers have the greatest influence in providing those experiences. However, even more can be achieved if the L&D department and managers work together.

It’s all about providing an integrative environment to encourage development.

Here we can learn a little more from Lewis Carroll.

The Importance of Work That Stretches

It’s thought that the Hatter’s character in ‘Alice’ was inspired by a man named Theophilus Carter. Carter was a servitor at Christ Church College at Oxford University, where Dodgson taught mathematics. After attending university Carter became an eccentric furniture dealer and inventor in the city and became known as “the Mad Hatter” partly from his habit of standing in the door of his shop wearing a top hat, but also from some of his inventions (which included an alarm clock bed – exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851 – that tipped sleepers into a tub of cold water to wake them up (his Oxford education had some value!)

Clearly innovation, experience and work that stretched all were important to the ‘Hatter’ as they are everyone, mad or not.

Integrating Learning with Work

There are many theories of learning, but I think we can boil the sum of adult learning down into four key areas:

Experiences: learning through exposure to new and challenging experiences.
Practice: learning through having the opportunity to practice and improve.
Conversation: learning through our interaction with others – informal coaching and mentoring, and building social networks inside and outside work.
Reflection: learning through having the opportunity to reflect on all of the above and plan further activities that will improve performance further.

There is no doubt that experiential learning in the context of work is vital. In the second article in this series I talked about the work of Morgan McCall and his colleagues at the Centre for Creative Leadership. They identified the fact that ‘the lessons learned by successful and effective managers are roughly 70% from tough jobs; 20% from people (mostly the boss); 10% from courses and reading’. In other words, experiential workplace learning represents about 90% of all adult learning.

L&D professionals should hold up every away-from-work learning intervention they design and build – whether it’s a workshop, a course, or a programme – and ask ‘how much will this support each of the four elements of learning above – experience, practice, conversation, reflection – once the participants are back in the workplace?’ If the answer is ‘it won’t’ or ‘maybe only some’ and if the away-from-work learning is simply focused on updating information and so-called ‘knowledge transfer’ then it may be better to save your effort, write the information down and distribute it through the best channels available – online, email, paper or parchment.

A huge amount of L&D time, money and effort is spent on separating learning from work and expecting magic to occur once people are back in the workplace. My advice is to make every effort not to contribute to that.

Learning and work are merging even more now that change is the norm and the rate of change is relentlessly increasing in almost every aspect of life.

Learning and work have always been intertwined, but the development of the ‘curriculum’ and set subjects as a model for education in 18th Century Prussia and it’s uptake across the world (the USA was an early adopter) separated them and we’ve been locked into the idea that education and learning consists of a series of formal events ever since. We’re now breaking out of that mind-set and seeing the power of networks, of information sharing, of immersive scenario-based simulations and, of course, the power of learning in context.

For learning in context to occur effectively, we need managers who are aware of the role they have to play in learning and development, and we need L&D professionals to build relationships with line managers and support them to achieve their joint objective of improving individual, team and organisational performance.

And we need development solutions that are focused on workplace learning and that integrate learning with work.

Managers and Their Role in Formal Development

Managers also have a major role to play with formal learning. If they abrogate their responsibilities for people development and expect the L&D department to achieve performance improvement they are simply hoping for ‘magic’ to happen.

Mary Broad and her colleagues carried out research in the early 1990s that found the role of the manager and the integration of learning with work were essential to assure performance improvement, even with formal training and development (Broad’s work is well documented in her ‘Transfer of Training’ book).

The lesson is that the L&D department can’t do it alone, not even with support from HR colleagues.

Broad’s research demonstrated that the single most important factor in assuring performance improvement following off-the-job development activity (a training and development course) was what the manager of the delegates attending a formal learning intervention did before the delegate attended the course or programme. She also showed that what the manager did following the off-the-job development activity was almost as important.

So, what does this tell us?

Broad’s research highlighted the fact that the manager’s aspirations and needs in terms of the performance of her reports should closely align with the objectives and design of any formal learning course. Otherwise the course will be of little (or no) use.

And this doesn’t mean that the L&D department simply needs to carry out a training needs analysis.

It means that the manager should have a detailed understanding of any formal development activities designed by L&D professionals, and have thought about how she can build on these through stretch activities, new assignments and challenges, and providing opportunities to practice once the delegate returns to the workplace. Of course, she may also need to carry out some preparatory work with her reports before they attend any off-the-job development as well. There is no point agreeing for the wrong people to attend the right course.

Managers and Their Role in Workplace Learning

This tight-coupling of the manager to away-from-work learning activities pales into insignificance when we turn our focus to workplace learning. Here, the manager’s role is absolute. She’s flying solo.

Jack Welch, the oft-quoted, admired, and sometimes disliked former CEO of GE understood the role of the manager in development. He saw his prime job as leader being the development of the company’s senior talent and his role as coach and mentor to his senior team. He also understood the role of continuous learning, saying:

“An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

In order to maximise learning through work managers need to continually look for opportunities to stretch and challenge their reports, both individually and as a team. Typical approaches might include:

Providing opportunities to apply new knowledge and skills in real situations.
Assigning stretch assignments focused on new initiatives.
Providing cross-divisional and cross-regional experiences.
Arranging co-ordinated swaps and secondments.
Creating challenges through assigning greater responsibility.
Providing opportunities for team members to reflect and learn from work activities.

A Simple Technique to Support Manager-Led Development

“Alice looked back once or twice, half hoping they would call after her: the last time she saw them they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot”

Many L&D people struggle with the challenge of engaging and enrolling business managers in employee development. Trying to wedge them into a place they don’t really want to be.

Yet we know that managers who are focused and effective at developing their people have teams that out-perform those that are not by around 25%[1]. So it’s worth thinking about the best approaches to get managers actively involved in learning and development activities in the workplace.

There’s one simple technique I’ve often employed to overcome reluctance and make it easy for leaders and managers to support practical workplace learning. It’s straightforward and managers really appreciate having it to hand. It involves the following simple advice:

During your regular one-to-one meetings with each member of your team, ask them these three questions:

Question 1: Can we talk about your reflections on what you’ve been doing since we last met?

Question 2: Can you tell me if there is anything you would do differently next time?

Question 3: What do you feel you have learned from your activities since we last met?

Some managers ask their reports to keep an ‘experiential learning log’ to record the sessions. Others simply find it a useful way to focus on experiential learning and reflection and, at the same time help identify opportunities for further development. It also helps managers themselves develop their coaching skills.

The approach you take is not important. What is important is the fact that, without active support of managers at all levels in your organisation you will struggle to achieve any significant level of success in the area where most learning happens – the workplace.

[1] Source: Corporate Leadership Council / Learning and Development Roundtable Employee Development Survey

Original Article: http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/2012/01/managers-and-mad-hatters-work-that.html

Through the 70:20:10 Looking Glass

Charles Jennings — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:47:31 +0000

This is the second of three posts adapted from articles written for Inside Learning Technologies & Skills magazine. The original has been published here.

The third article will be posted here a little while after it has been published in the magazine for the Learning Technologies Conference and Exhibition in London 26-27 January 2012.

In the first article in this ‘Alice’ series I focused on the changing world of work and the evidence that workplace learning is usually more effective and efficient than formal learning. I also spoke of the need for learning departments to ‘join the dance’ (like the lobster inAlice) and develop new skills and capabilities so they can incorporate learning outside classrooms into their armoury, along with the development of structured learning.

In this article I want to turn to the ‘how’ of change and transformation in organisational learning and look at one specific approach that many organisations are finding useful to help them adapt to meet changing requirements and demands – the 70:20:10 framework.

As with the first article, I’m going to call on some insights from Mr Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) for some help.

Who Stole The Tarts?

At the beginning of his account of the trial of the Jack of Hearts (it was he who stole the Queen’s tarts) Carroll describes a fundamental truth about the frailty of human memory.

Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books. The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. ‘What are they doing’ Alice whispered to the Gryphon. ‘They can’t have anything to put down yet, before the trial’s begun.’

‘They’re putting down their names,’ the Gryphon whispered in reply, ‘for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial.’

Maybe we can all remember our own names (although my wife tells me I could hide my own Easter eggs..) but the truth is that humans forget things quickly unless they’re learned in context.

We have known for a long time that learning works best when it takes place within the same context where the learned skills, practices and behaviours are to be used. Dr Hermann Ebbinghaus demonstrated the importance of context for memory as long ago as 1885. From his research, and from the research of others, we know that if learning and context are not tightly coupled, and if we don’t have the opportunity to put what we’ve learned into practice as soon as we’ve learned it, we will forget a significant amount very quickly (Ebbinghaus’ figures suggested a forgetting rate of around 50% within the first hour).

Also, if we don’t have anyone to turn to for help and support once we’re back in the workplace we often simply continue on doing what we did before we attended a learning event. I’ll discuss this last point in some more depth in the next article when I’ll look at the role of managers in organisational learning.

So it’s not surprising that with this reawakening of an understanding for the need for context in learning over the past ten years, much of the sheen has been rubbed off training for which we need to leave the workplace to attend. Of course away-from-work training and development serves a purpose. But that purpose is being seen as an increasingly narrow one.

Prior to the turn of the millennium the world of training was much simpler. If you worked in an organisation with commitment and budget devoted to employee development you discussed your development needs with your manager at the annual appraisal meeting and agreed the courses you would attend during the following 12 months. If you were in middle or upper management tiers, you did the same but called it ‘management development’ or ‘executive development’ and sometimes wrapped coaching and other activities in too. The courses for these groups were designed and delivered along the same lines as those for individual contributors. They were often just more expensive and usually run in a delightful green and leafy hotel or centre in some exotic part of the world, or in Surrey if you were based in London. Today the world of learning is a much more complex endeavour needing more than courses as the solution.

Continuous Learning is Becoming the Work

‘But then’ thought Alice, ‘shall I NEVER get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way – never to be an old woman – but then – always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like THAT!’

For many people, particularly those that earn their living with their heads rather than their hands and those that work in the knowledge industry, learning and work are becoming intertwined.

In order to improve the performance of our work we need to embrace a culture of continuous learning. This means viewing our work as a series of on-going learning experiences, continuously reflecting and improving as part of our daily activity.

A focus on continuous learning is leading the death of the out-of-date idea that formal training and development programmes are the principal answer to the challenge of improving performance in the workplace.

In place of event-driven learning we are seeing two things happen:

Firstly, many structured programmes are quite rightly extending into the workplace. Both pre-learning activities and experience and support and coaching back in the workplace are being integrated with formal away-from-work events. Most business schools and many in-house programmes now do this as a matter of course.

This represents an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary approach. There’s no doubt it is a step in the right direction but I don’t know if we can adapt to our rapidly changing world by taking a series of small steps rather than a few large ones.

Secondly, along with developments in technology we’re seeing increased interest in, and focus on, ‘informal’ learning approaches – ways we can support our colleagues’ learning and development as part of their daily tasks. Out of this trend have emerged new, or newly-revised, learning approaches – eLearning, social learning, workplace learning, on-job coaching and mentoring, mobile learning, and performance support to name a few. Together, these all provide greater flexibility and increased access to information and knowledge resources.

Informal learning and social learning are no doubt stealing the tarts. But there is no point attempting to introduce new informal and workplace learning approaches without a clear plan and a framework.

70:20:10 the Looking-Glass House

‘And if you’re not good directly,’ she added, ‘I’ll put you through into Looking-Glass House.’ Then Alice began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that the rest was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next to the fire seemed to be all alive…’

The 70:20:10 framework is just a little like Alice’s Looking-Glass House. It helps organisations to take a different view of the way learning and development can be approached. It moves focus to where most of the ‘real’ learning happens – in the workplace – yet retains some on the elements of formal, structured learning where it works.

At the outset it’s worth dispelling a common myth about the 70:20:10 framework.

A Reference Model, not a Recipe

The basic 70:20:10 framework

70%	20%	10%
Learn & develop through experience	Learn & develop through others	Learn & develop through structured courses & programmes

The 70:20:10 framework is a reference model not a recipe. If you adopt it for your organisation you will need to apply the principles of the framework to your own context. For some organisations experiential learning (the 70+20 parts) may be the best approach for virtually all learning. For others, for example where compliance and proof of compliance training activity is critical, a greater focus on structured courses may be necessary.

The lesson here is not to become stuck on the exact ratios and percentages like a rabbit in the headlights . Everything will depend on context.

The Background to the 70:20:10 Approach

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

The research most often referred to as the origin of the 70:20:10 model is often misunderstood and misquoted.

Morgan McCall and his colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina carried out surveys with accomplished and high-potential executives and asked to them to describe key developmental events in their professional lives that made a difference to their management effectiveness. The results suggested (and reported the 1996 book ‘The Career Architect Development Planner’ by McCall’s colleagues Michael Lombardo & Robert Eichinger) that ‘the lessons learned by successful and effective managers are roughly’:

70% from tough jobs
20% from people (mostly the boss)
10% from courses and reading”

The point about this data is that it’s a rough extrapolation of the survey data only and the data collection methodology probably doesn’t hold up to robust academic scrutiny.

That, however, is no reason to dismiss the framework out-of-hand.

When these findings are put together with the growing number of other studies and surveys that have drawn similar conclusions[1] it becomes evident that most of what people learn (or retain and put into use) is learned as part of doing their work, not through formal training. Earlier work looking at adult learning carried out in the 1960s and 1970s by Alan Tough, now emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, also revealed the 70:20:10 pattern.

Additionally with the recent rise of social media the ability to learn with, and from, others has become much easier. So the rough 20 percent of ‘learning through others’ will no doubt increase in many cases.

However, regardless of the fine detail of the 70:20:10 model, and regardless of industry, worker age, technique or individual learning style, it is clear that most adult learning is balanced heavily towards experiential learning.

The basic principle of the framework is that it provides a structured approach to de-focus on event-based learning and re-focus on the broader aspects of organisational learning, principally the experiential elements. It helps approach the challenge of building an environment and encouraging a culture to support efficient and effective learning and development provision in an integrated way. We all know that learning is essentially a rather ‘messy’ business that varies from person to person and from organisation to organisation. The 70:20:10 framework helps build an operating model to manage it.

First Steps with the 70:20:10 Framework

There are a number of important factors you need to think about before you embark on using the framework in your organisation.

Step 1: Work towards developing a ‘results-led’ L&D culture
The 70:20:10 framework widens L&D’s focus and activity from building and maintaining catalogues of courses, programmes and curricula to managing workscapes (work/learning environments) and supporting learning experiences in the workplace. Although, of course, some resource and effort will need to continue to focus on the former, the vast majority of L&D’s work within the 70:20:10 framework will be involved with supporting experiential learning in the workplace.

For this to happen, L&D thinking and mind-sets need to move from ‘inputs’ (learning) to ‘outputs’ (impact and change in the workplace and helping people ‘work smarter’). As such L&D culture, the behaviours and attitudes of learning professionals, needs to reflect this change. L&D teams need to buy into this new thinking. You may need to build an internal change management process for your L&D teams to make sure everyone has taken this step.

The framework also places new demands and responsibilities on learners. They will need to accept greater accountability for their own learning as the environment evolves from one of “push” teaching to one of “pull” learning.

Step 2: Establish a robust engagement approach
Because the 70:20:10 framework moves L&D away from any ‘order-taking’ activities – by always looking to implement the fastest, smartest, most effective solutions to help people do their jobs better – you will need a robust, consistent and efficient engagement process to use with the executives, managers and team leaders across your organisation. It is important, whichever engagement approach you build or adopt, that it is consistent. A manager who engages with L&D to help her solve one business issue should expect the next engagement process to be identical, even if inputs and outputs are very different. This helps build confidence and relationships.

Step 3: Build an effective governance model
‘Governance’ defines the structures, systems, practices and processes that are put in place to ensure the overall effectiveness and accountability of the L&D function. If you plan to embed 70:20:10 thinking and practices it is important that you bring your organisation with you on the journey. Creating a governance council or board populated and led by key stakeholders is the first essential step to achieve this.

Step 4: Ensure you have the right L&D skills
I mentioned the need for new L&D skills in the first article (‘Croquet with a Flamingo’) but it needs reinforcing here. The 70:20:10 framework places very different demands on learning professionals from those that they may have been used to in the past. It demands they extend their repertoire beyond formal learning design and delivery. As such you will need to ensure your L&D team has the skill and experience to work with your stakeholders to create environments that facilitate learning and that they can design learning powerful experiences. Step away from content-centric learning design and into experience-centric design.

Some Actions for L&D to Deliver Results through 70:20:10

Below are a few practical actions L&D organisations and Learning professionals can take to deliver results through the 70:20:10 framework. Of course there are many more. There is no ‘cookie-cutter’ approach. If you are ever offered one, run away as fast as possible. Every solution needs to be driven by the needs, context and nature of your own organisation.

Support the informal learning process	Help workers improve their learning skills	Create a supportive org. culture
Provide time for informal learning in the workplace	Explicitly teach workers how to learn effectively	Establish a budget for informal and workplace learning
Create useful peer-rated FAQs and knowledge bases	Support opportunities for meta-learning	Support innovation and help make small failures ‘OK’
Provide places for workers to congregate and share experiences	Share ways others have learned topics and subject areas	Incorporate informal learning into the heart of your L&D strategy
Supplement self-directed learning with mentors and experts	Enlist learning coaches to encourage reflection	Position learning as a growth experience and not something that workers need others to ‘do to them’
Build networks, blogs, wikis, and knowledge bases to facilitate discovery	Explain the ‘know-how’ and ‘know-who’ framework to facilitate a shift from ‘know-what’	Conduct a learning culture audit
Use smart technology to make it easier to collaborate and network	Calculate the lifetime value of a learning customer’ to L&D	Add learning and teaching objectives and goals to job descriptions
Encourage cross-functional gatherings	Encourage leadership of these gatherings from amongst the group	Encourage learning relationships and professional communities

[1] Incuding studies by: Loewenstein and Spletzer for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics; A 2-year study involving Boeing, Ford Electronics, Siemens, and Motorola by The Education Development Center in Massachusetts; A CapitalWorks study; and a 2010 survey by Peter Casebow and Alan Ferguson at GoodPractice in Edinburgh.

‘Real Learning’: The Role of Context

Charles Jennings — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:55:37 +0000

In 1885, Herman Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, carried out an experiment that led to the formulation of the famous Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. Many people know of the experiment and that the Forgetting Curve suggests adults will remember less that 50% of what they’ve learned within an hour of learning unless they have the opportunity to reinforce and practice it during or immediately afterwards…

This article is only available via NxtBook.com

In a Complex World, Continuous Learning and Simple Truths Prevail

Charles Jennings — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:48:06 +0000

The book ‘The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine’ is Michael Lewis’ marvellous account of the idiocy and greed that led to the sub-prime bubble and the resulting global financial crisis.

Lewis’ book focuses on a few smart people who saw the simple truths beneath the complex world of financial jiggery-pokery that led to wealthy people becoming even wealthier on the backs of others who were sold the dream of owning their own homes irrespective of their income, assets or ability to pay.

These few smart people bet their shirts against what they saw as a house of cards. The house they saw was built on a belief that the complexity of asset-backed securities, credit default swaps, collateralised debt options and other sophisticated financial instruments were a valid contribution to national and international growth and would make banks and bankers a whole lot of money along the way.

Apart from their aspirations the smart folks were interesting in another way. Most were outliers of one type or another – people who lived and worked outside the norm. One was a one-eyed doctor with Asperger syndrome, others were ‘rejects’ from Wall Street, or anti-social smart-thinking loners who had turned their backs on steady jobs and big salaries. Most had no desire to work and intermingle in mainstream financial services and markets.

Of course we know now that these people were right and the armies of financial experts and self-styled ‘masters of the universe’ in the big investment banks were wrong. The outliers saw stupidity and self-interest for what it was. They won their bets. The outcome was that almost everyone apart from these ‘oddballs’ suffered.

So what does this story have to do with my world – a world focused on new ways to help organisations thrive in the 21^st century? Encouraging them to change, adapt and modify the approaches they use to increase performance and productivity – and enabling their employees to work smarter, innovate, and continuously over-deliver?

Quite a lot, as it happens.

What caught my eye early on in ‘The Big Short’ was Lewis’ observation that ‘ ..there are some things that can’t be taught’.

He could have added ‘but those things still need to be learned..’

Despite the sophistication, the big brains and the resources available to the traders and executives in Lehmann Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and the rest, it appears they failed to see this simple truth. That no matter how smart you are, you still needed to carry on learning.

It also appears they were unaware of another simple truth – thatcontinuous learning is the only sustainable asset in a world of constant change.

This is not really surprising. These are common oversights and blind-spots when people believe they know best and ignore the insights, experience and wisdom of others.

If the people working in the banks and rating agencies had taken the time to step back, ponder and question some of the fundamentals that underpinned their assumptions and decisions, then they would have been able to see that the roller-coaster they had started was running out of control.

They didn’t. Most had tunnel-vision.

Now no-one was telling or teaching (or ‘instructing’) them to do this. The tools they’d created and the methods of using the tools had not been taught in business school. There was often an assumption that once the ‘smart work’ of setting them up the work was all finished and done – no need to think about them further.

However, managing these beasts (and deciding when to ‘kill’ them) needed mind-sets that appreciated the need for continuous learning, relearning, and re-adjustment of thinking in situ.

The smart outliers certainly understood the need for continuous learning.

And they were self-directed learners.

Some of their learning didn’t require a sophisticated understanding of the arcane financial instruments that were driving the world towards the precipice (although they each had that). But it did require passion for, and an understanding of, self-directed learning and being aware of the changing world around them.

And the continuous learning sometimes required effort. Two of these outliers spent time walking the back-streets of down-beat towns in Florida, looking at the ebb and flow of communities there, who had jobs, who didn’t, what type of work and security was available, and re-framing their views on the percentage of defaults on mortgages likely to occur.

The Wall Street bankers left their 40^th floor offices to go to expensive restaurants. They didn’t consider learning, unlearning and re-learning were of any great value to them.

The Lessons

I think there are some simple lessons we can learn from this story.

Firstly, in complex environments self-directed learning is not optional, it’s absolutely essential.
Also, we know the world is changing on a daily basis. What we knew to be true yesterday may not be true tomorrow. Continuous learning is the best tool available in dynamic environments.
And we know that reflection and critical ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking are are essential to help direct the focus of continuous learning.

For learning professionals the message is also this:

The most important single thing you can do to ensure your organisation develops a continuous learning culture is to help the development of self-directed learning skills. Help your workforce improve its meta-learning.

These meta-learning skills don’t live in isolation. They live with other ‘core skills’ that thoughtful, flexible work needs.

I have written about these core continuous learning skillspreviously, but I think it is worth listing the main ones again:

Effective search and ‘find’ skills	To quickly and find the right information when it’s needed.
Critical thinking skills	To extract meaning and significance from situations and data, and be prepared to go back and review and re-frame as often as possible.
Creative thinking skills	To generate new ideas, and new ways of using information. Always avoiding the belief that there is only one solution.
Analytical skills	To visualise, articulate and solve complex problems and concepts, and take decisions that make sense based on the available information.
Networking skills	To identify and build relationships with others who are potential sources of information, knowledge and expertise within and outside your team, your organisation and your domain. Actively seek ‘outliers’ and people who may see the world differently from you.
People skills	To build trust and productive relationships that are mutually beneficial for information sharing and sense-making.
Logic	To apply reason and logical argument to extract meaning and significance from situations.
A solid understanding of research methodology	To validate data and the underlying assumptions on which information and knowledge is based.

There is no doubt that a first step is changing our mind-set from one that sees learning as a series of events to one that acknowledges learning is a continuous process that happens at any time, anywhere. We know that learning doesn’t just happen in controlled and structured environments but that most learning is embedded in the flow of work.

A second step should be to do something to about changing the way we work, and create environments that provide tools and support to workers so they can do their jobs better through bringing learning into their work.

An adage I’ve found helpful to keep focus on the importance of continuous learning is ‘when working is learning, then learning is working’.

Learning Transformation & Governance

Charles Jennings — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 07:37:46 +0000

Slide deck from Plenary presentation at the World of Learning Conference, NEC Birmingham, UK. 27 September 2011.

Why the Real Power of eLearning is Social

Charles Jennings — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:48:41 +0000

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

Looking Back

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

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

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

Plato IV LMS circa 1972

Personal Journey

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

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

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

Why Look Back?

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

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

Significant Hurdles

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

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

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

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

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

This also raises another fundamental question for me.

The question is this:

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

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

The Changes Needed

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: Leaving Content-Centricity Behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content to Context

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

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

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

New Channels

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

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

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

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

Step 2: De-Focusing from Courses

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

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

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

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

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

http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-real-power-of-elearning-is-social.html

8 Reasons to Focus on Informal & Social Learning

Charles Jennings — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:40:48 +0000

Slides from a webinar for the eLearning Network of Australasia – July 2010

Work That Stretches: The Best Teacher You’ll Find

Charles Jennings — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:29:08 +0000

Think back to one great personal learning experience you’ve had. It may have been in childhood when you realized you could ride your bicycle without training wheels or a parent’s guiding hand. Or it may have been when you finally understood the basics of solving quadratic equations. It could have happened more recently – for example when you were involved in a debrief after a tough project and realized through the process that the project had taught you some very useful new skills.

If you can identify at least one great personal learning experience (and I would be very surprised if you can’t) can you remember where that learning occurred?

I have asked these questions to many groups of people over the past few years. The answers given are remarkably consistent. Around 80 percent say that their great learning experiences occurred while attempting to complete a specific task. Around 20 percent say it occurred in a classroom, seminar or workshop – in a formal learning context.

These results are not terribly surprising. Research indicates that we develop the vast majority of our “know-how” through experience in the context of work, not through learning “know-what” in content-rich but experience-poor formal learning environments.

These facts raise some interesting questions for training and development professionals.

Learning through Work

If workers learn more about their work through their work and have greater learning experiences through experiencing work, then training and development professionals need to re-think some of their approaches. Training departments need to develop strategies to make best use of learning opportunities where most of the learning happens, in the workplace.

One thing, however, is certain. Simply lifting traditional training models into the workplace won’t achieve the desired results. If we are to fully exploit the power of learning through work we need to focus on changing mind-sets, and on helping individual workers, and (more importantly) their supervisors, look for opportunities to make work a continuous learning experience.

This requires supervisors to be on the lookout for “work that stretches” for each and every one of their team members. It may be that a new project is starting. The supervisor needs to think of this as a potential learning experience for her team. Rather than giving the lead role to a team member with a long track-record of successful projects, she could ask a less experienced team member to lead, and have the more experienced member act as mentor.

Networking as Learning

Active encouragement of networking is another excellent development driver that supervisors can call on. No individual or team has all the answers. Every worker will benefit and develop through building effective and resilient social networks at work and beyond the walls of their workplace. A solid network will provide far greater learning and impact than any number of formal training courses.

The benefits of a good network are not only realized in increased performance and productivity, but also in the availability of the experience of others that can be brought to bear on challenging problems at the point-of-need. In my CLO role, I continuously exchanged ideas and discussed challenges across my network and obtain support – from strategic advice to practical ideas. In return, I helped other CLOs out.

The “work that stretches” approach may require a supervisor to accept a degree of risk that she may not be used to – for example, it’s always easier to put faith in a “safe pair of hands” – but the overall rewards will far outweigh that risk. Using challenging tasks and encouraging social networking in the workplace will not only fast-track learning and development across the organization; it will build teamwork and job satisfaction faster than 100 training courses.

http://www.duntroon.com/documents/TIQ_Fall%202011.pdf

21st Century L&D Skills

Charles Jennings — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:17:35 +0000

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

If we’re to believe the experts rather than the man-in the-street, the 21stCentury started on 1st January

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

So, what’s changed?

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

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

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

Then two things happened.

Change 1: The web – changing things for ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L&D Capabilities for 2010 and beyond

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

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

Capability 1 - ‘fachidiot’ to polymath

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

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

Capability 2 - technology-savvy

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

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

Capability 3 - performance consultancy

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

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

Capability 4 - business-savvy

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

Capability 5 - adult learning-savvy

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

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

Other important capabilities/attributes

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

New roles

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

The final nail – attitude trumps skills

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

The 70:20:10 Framework

Charles Jennings — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:10:46 +0000

There is a more comprehensive discussion of the 70:10:10 framework on my blog. You can find that here http://bit.ly/nEzWjW

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

Charles Jennings — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:44:12 +0000

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

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

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

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

Social and Workplace Learning

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Experience

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

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

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

The 70:20:10 Framework

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

‘Proof’
70:20:10 is a reference model or framework. It’s not a recipe. It’s based on empirical research and surveys and also on a wide sample of experiences that suggest adult learning principally occurs in the context of work and in collaboration with others (as the great educational psychologist Jerome Bruner once said ‘our world is others’).

70:20:10 is being used by many organisations to re-focus their efforts and resources to where most real learning actually happens – through experiences, practice, conversations and reflection in the context of the workplace, not in classrooms. They have found the 70:20:10 framework a useful strategic tool to help them transform the way their organisations allocate resources and approach employee development – whether it’s leadership, management or individual contributor development.

Anyone trying to ‘prove’ that the percentages fall in exact ratios, or anyone searching for peer-reviewed papers demonstrating the same is not only wasting their time, but clearly doesn’t ‘get it’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 70:20:10 Framework in Practice

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

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

In practical terms what does this look like?

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

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

Or any of these ‘20’ approaches:

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

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

Whose Responsibility?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is Using 70:20:10?

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

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

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

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

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

Working Smarter: New Ways of Learning (PDF)

Charles Jennings — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:30:39 +0000

More recently at the Internet Time Alliance, we’ve been focusing not on training and learning but on ideas around “working smarter.” Jay Cross, one of my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance, is well known for his early work and books on informal learning. Jay describes working smarter as being the key to sustainability and continuous improvement, and to productivity. Working smarter requires learning in new ways.

Harold Jarche, another Internet Time Alliance colleague, advocates that learning is the new work in the knowledge economy. Harold argues that learning and working are meshing together and highlights the need for individuals to develop the skills of the networked learner if they are to work smarter.

Networked learning is certainly a critical skill for all workers whether they are in high-end technical roles, in co-ordination and administrative roles, or working in any professional capacity in the modern economy.

The types of questions a networked learner needs to continually ask are:

How do I keep track of all of this information?
How do I make sense of changing conditions and new knowledge?
How can I develop and improve my critical thinking skills?
How can I cooperate with my colleagues and others?
How can I collaborate better?
How can I engage in problem-solving activities at the edge of my expertise?

If we focus on addressing these questions we will certainly help people work smarter. However the role of training and learning in this environment will differ significantly from its traditional role.

Training may help address some of the challenges above, but probably not through a formal course/curricula approach. The formal training approach can possibly help workers improve critical thinking and other core skills (I wrote about the key skills for high performance in the Fall 2010 edition of this journal, and critical thinking skills was one). However, the responsibility for continuous learning falls not to the training department but to individual workers themselves. Of course line managers and supervisors also have a responsibility to provide support and to give time and space for development.

Workscapes are the infrastructure required for working smarter. Workscapes involve diff erent ways of looking at how we organize and execute work, taking into account all of the challenges above. Once again, building workforce capability in workscapes may involve training and development, but not always. In fact the workscape approach may even make some training departments obsolete.

The traditional approaches of event-based, awayfrom- work training are no longer helpful in a workscape world with ever-increasing rates of change where workers operate in an ocean of information and knowledge.

We need to look at new approaches beyond formal training. Continuous learning and a working smarter mindset may be the only solutions.

Charles Jennings is the director of Duntroon Associates (www.duntroon.com) and a member of the Internet Time Alliance.

Download PDF.

When it’s just so obvious NOT to train it’s painful to watch it happen

Charles Jennings — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:08:36 +0000

The amount of time, effort and money wasted on formal ILT training prior to rollout or upgrade of enterprise platforms (particularly ERM and CRM) and other new software systems is really quite amazing.

Some managers and L&D people just don’t seem to get it.

It reminds me of the remarkable insight of the author Aldous Huxley when he said “I see the best, but it’s the worse that I pursue”

The evidence has been around for a long time that formal training on detailed task and process-based activities in advance of the need to carry out the task or use the process is essentially useless.

The logic and evidence both point to the fact that the “we’re rolling out a new system, so we’ve got to train them all” approach employed by many (read ‘most’) organisations, and offered as a service by training suppliers across the globe, is both inefficient and fundamentally ineffective.

You might as well throw the money spent on these activities out the window. Actually, a better option would be to spend the diminishing L&D budget on approaches that do work. Not only would new rollouts and upgrades come into use more smoothly, but am prepared to bet that it would leave budget over to use for other things, or to take as savings (perish the thought!)

Even if you’ve never been involved in training for rollout and upgrade and then finding that users demand re-training or simply call the help desk as soon as go-live happens, it helps to be aware of some fundamental truths about this flawed model.

Truth 1: Too much information for any human to remember

Most pre go-live training is delivered through ILT or eLearning and is content-heavy. The instructional designers and SMEs feel the need to cover every possibly eventuality and load courses with scenarios, examples and other ‘just-in-case’ content.

I have seen multiple PowerPoint decks of 200-300 slides delivered over 2-3 days for CRM upgrades. Few humans can recall this amount of information for later use, or even a fraction of it. Maybe if they have photographic memories they can, but designing for photographic memories is not really a sensible strategy. The rest of us just park most of what we do remember at the end of the session in the ‘clear out overnight’ part of our brains.

And all those expensively-produced User Guides are simply a waste of the Earth’s limited natural resources. They tend to be too detailed, linear, full of grabs of screens that the user will never refer to, impossible to navigate, and the last thing people reach for when they need help in using a new system. They are far more likely to reach for the phone and call the Help Desk. Training User Guides are quintessentially shelfware. Usually the only time someone picks user guides off the shelf is to throw them in a bin (hopefully one marked ‘recycling’) during a clear-out or an office move.

Truth 2: Too much time between the training and use

Embedding knowledge in short-term memory and long-term memory are two very different processes. Even the information that can been recalled immediately after training – and that’s likely to be minimal – will be lost if it isn’t reinforced through practice within a few hours.

Practice and reinforcement are required for the neurological processes of conversion to long-term memory to occur – chemicals in the brain such as seratonin, cyclic AMP, and specific binding proteins do that job.

Do you think Tiger Woods’ brain retained the details of how to arrange his body to hit a ball 400 yards without practice and reinforcement?

Truth 3: Post-Training Drop-Off

Harold Stolovitch & Erica Keeps carried out some very interesting research on desired vs. actual knowledge acquisition and performance improvement. The work uncovered some important observations.

The graph above shows the results. During the training event, following an initial dip – the ‘typing/golf pro dip’ – where performance drops as new ways of carrying out tasks are tried out, knowledge and performance then improve to the end of the training session. The individual walks out the door knowing more and being able to perform better than when they started the training.

Then the problems start.

The drop-off following the training event (called ‘post-training re-adjustment by Stolovitch and Keeps) can kick-in very quickly, possibly in a matter of hours. You finish a day’s training course, go home, sleep, and by the next morning a lot of what you had ‘learned’ has been cleaned out of your short-term memory. Bingo!

Then next day you get back to work and try to implement what you learned in the class. The trouble is, you can’t remember exactly what to do, you don’t have any support (that trainer who you called over to prompt you when you went through the exercises in class yesterday isn’t there), so you try a few things, find they don’t work (unless you’re lucky) and then you simply go back to doing what you did previously….

The result?

Performance improvement = zero
Value added by the training = zero
Return on investment = zero

Upwards – Following the Dotted Line

The only way knowledge retention and performance can follow the dotted line upwards is if plenty of reinforcement and practice immediately follows the training. Even better if this is accompanied by some form of support – from line managers setting goals and monitoring performance, from SMEs providing on-demand advice and support, or even from learning professionals providing workplace coaching.

An even better (and certainly cheaper) option is simply to cut out the training and replace it with a support environment from the start

Where Performance Support Trumps Training

There are some very good ePSS (electronic Performance Support Systems) or BPG (Business Process Guidance) tools available now. They are economic and generally straightforward to implement and trump training every time for following defined processes found in ERP and CRM systems and other software products

Just Like a GPS System

ePSS/BPG tools provide context-sensitive help at the point-of-need and “act like a GPS system rather than a roadmap” as Davis Frenkel , CEO of Panviva Inc., the company that produces the very impressive SupportPoint BPG tool, explains. “When you’re learning to follow a process, you just want to know the next 2-3 steps you need to take. You don’t want to have to remember the entire 20-30 process steps and all the options”, Frenkel says. I think he’s absolutely right and it’s a good analogy.

A GPS tells you that you need to ‘turn left at the next intersection’ or ‘take a right turn then keep straight ahead’. It instructs incrementally, and doesn’t tell you every turn on the journey when you set out.

When there’s no access to GPS and the driver has to revert to a map (and doesn’t have a flesh-and-blood GPS sitting beside them reading the map and instructing in increments) they will tend to read and memorise just the next 2-4 turns on the journey and then re-read the map to get the next set of instructions. Job done, destination reached.

So why don’t many organisations and L&D folk wake up to the failings of using the wrong approaches to achieve their required outcomes?

Why are millions of $/£/€/¥ spent every year training employees on using enterprise systems in this way when there’s evidence to prove that it simply doesn’t work?

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

Charles Jennings — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:20:54 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving the Golden Age of Training

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

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

Learning Maturity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other questions that were asked in the Citrix webinar:

1. “How can flexible learning tasks be presented around scheduled and assessed experiential learning in environments where emergencies and interruptions occur 24×7?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/2011/04/when-learning-is-work-approaches-for.html

Five Barriers to Effective Learning in Organisations

Charles Jennings — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:34:38 +0000

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: EfficiencyNo 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’s 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 (1996), 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. Conspiracy of Convenience was

Barrier 4: Training MindsetThe 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.

The Power of Conversations

Charles Jennings — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 10:06:18 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

a. Through the experiences to which we are exposed

b. Through the opportunities we have to practice

c. Through our conversations with our colleagues and managers

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

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

Incorporating Conversation into learning and performance design

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

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

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

Conversations are a great way to facilitate this process.

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

http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/2011/03/power-of-conversations.html

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

Charles Jennings — Sun, 09 May 2010 13:57:28 +0000

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.

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.

Manager Input: Vital for Learning Success

Charles Jennings — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:29:12 +0000

For training to be effective, managers need to be actively involved in the process. Some years ago, Mary Broad and her colleagues found that of all the actions and activities taking place before, during and after a formal training intervention, the manager’s input before and after training constituted two of the three most important factors influencing improved performance. The third factor was the trainer’s actions before the event, which also involves close coordination with managers.
Training will fail if managers can’t identify their teams’ performance gaps and aren’t able to explain the performance they expect to achieve so that appropriate remedial action can be designed, developed and delivered. It’s also likely to fail if managers don’t follow up, encourage and check behavior change and performance improvement following a training event.
If managers are both supportive and actively involved in development activities, then the key outputs—improved performance and productivity—are far more likely to succeed than if the job is simply handed off to the training and development specialists.

What About Informal Learning?
While engaging managers in supporting their teams’ formal training activities has been a challenge for many organizations, manager engagement in informal employee development activity is an altogether different challenge.
On the surface, the challenge of informal learning may appear to be even greater. In fact, evidence points to a number of “easy wins.”
First, it appears that managers themselves tend to use informal learning approaches rather than formal off-the-job training to help improve their own performance. In 2009, Peter Casebow and his team at GoodPractice in Edinburgh, Scotland, surveyed managers across industries. They found the five most frequently used development activities to be:

Informal chats with colleagues
Search engines
Trial and error
On-the-job instruction by their own manager or a colleague
Using professional magazines/literature

Not only are managers using informal learning in preference to formal learning themselves, the vast majority also report that informal learning to be either very or fairly effective as a means of helping their performance.
I have always encouraged managers to ask team members three questions at their regular meetings.

What have you done since we last met?
What have you learned from these activities?
What would you do differently next time?

These simple questions provide an opportunity for both manager and team member to reflect on the informal learning that’s occurred and plan how best to exploit it in the future.

http://www.duntroon.com/documents/TIQ_Spring%202010.pdf

Accountability for Business Results

Charles Jennings — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:43:43 +0000

UK politicians have been in the spotlight over the past few weeks with their creative use of the parliamentary allowance scheme. “Flipping” was one common way that some found to maximise their allowance income. This involved declaring one of their homes – either in their constituency or in London closer to the House of Commons – as their main residence, then claiming all manner of expenses against their second home. Then they’d “flip” and claim expenses on the other house. This was a really neat, if totally immoral and possibly illegal, way to spend taxpayers’ money. Now they’re being found out and punished.

L&D departments have been ‘”flipping” for years. In some organisations they are moved from being embedded in HR to reporting into the business line and back again on a regular basis. Some also “flip” between local and global accountability as well.

Most L&D “flipping” is an attempt to ensure a better workforce development service to the organisation.

In fact, there’s no right answer – some L&D departments sit in HR and deliver a great service to the business lines, some don’t. Equally, some L&D departments sitting in the business do a great job and others don’t. There’s no structural silver bullet out there.

ACCOUNTABILITY – THE SILVER BULLET

The silver bullet, however, lies in two accountabilities. Firstly, L&D’s ability to be accountable for business results (or organisational results if you’re in a public sector or not-for-profit organisation). Secondly, there’s an equal need for L&D to be accountable for the efficiency and effectiveness of it’s services. If an L&D department is using sub-optimal approaches, flying ILT trainers around the world to deliver content-heavy classes for example, or is developing expensive media-rich eLearning programmes that only small numbers of employees need to use, it will likely be failing to deliver on these two requirements respectively.

A strategic approach (from both top-down and bottom-up) is needed and get both business accountability and an efficient and effective L&D operation in place. The diagram below is an attempt to break out the high-level parts in these accountabilities. [1] standardising; [2] globalising; [3] integrating; [4] aligning; [5] optimising. Focus on these will result in greater likelihood in L&D being able to deliver a service that brings value to the entire organisation.

ALIGNING L&D WITH ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY

AUTONOMY vs STRATIGIC ALIGNMENT

I spent most of my 8 years as CLO at Reuters involved in L&D transformation in one way or another. One tool I found very useful in planning a structure that would work for the organisation was the ‘C’ curve for an accountability-oriented L&D framework. The Global HR Director at Reuters and I developed this ‘C’ curve for L&D to help us make the initial changes.

We used the ‘C’ curve model to define the journey needed to build an L&D function that was accountable for business results, whose operation was closely aligned with the company’s overall strategy, that embedded the ‘efficiency & effectiveness’ mantra but – at the same time – where the component parts of L&D could have some autonomy to operate and make decisions locally.

This ultimately resulted in a federated organisational structure – a small core L&D team sitting in the corporate HR centre managing the overall strategy, alignment, standards, infrastructure etc. while the majority of L&D resources (and their budgets) sat in the various business lines delivering operational L&D services to their stakeholders. L&D was held together by a central governance board (mostly senior business managers, but chaired by the HR Director), and functional reporting lines for each of the Heads of Learning (every major business unit had one) into the CLO (my role).

The ‘C’ curve below shows the steps that were taken to move to an accountability oriented structure that worked for us.

Ideally organisations want to move from [1], where pieces of the L&D puzzle are operating autonomously without being strategically aligned, to [4] where they still have a level of autonomy, but arestrategically aligned.

Many organisations are still living with [1] and don’t really know how to move away from having a gaggle of un-coordinated L&D/Training groups who are all doing their own ‘thing’ and often competing internally.

The ‘C curve model is a mechanism for making that move.

It’s highly unlikely that a 1->4 move is achievable without the intermediate [2] and [3] steps. That’s the way found it at Reuters. We first needed to bring all the L&D resources (or as many as we could put our arms around) into the corporate centre’s zone of influence – at [2] – and put the ‘twin pillars’ of standards and infrastructure in place. This meant removing the previous autonomy for the sake of alignment. Then we established a solid governance model [3]. Only then could we return autonomy to the groups by restructuring as a federated service, creating the functional Heads of Learning role and moving most of the L&D people into the various business lines.

The result was a structure that worked for the company. Operational L&D was aligned with the business. Business managers chose how to deploy their L&D resources, how to prioritise their L&D budgets etc. At the same time, corporate HR maintained overview of L&D and ensured that strategy, standards and infrastructure services were consistent across the organisation.

As I said, there’s no structural silver bullet, but this model can be very useful as a means to get both alignment and accountability.

http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/2009/05/accountability-for-business-results.html