It is this.

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

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

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

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

Keeping the CEO out of Jail

In his article Donald quotes Andy Wooler, Academy Technology Manager at Hitachi Data Systems Academy, as saying:

“LMS too often stands for Litigation Mitigation Service.”

Andy was not dismissing the need for LMSs out-of-hand. He was simply saying that often the technology is used just to keep records in case something goes wrong and there is a need to produce evidence to support the organisation’s case in court – or, hopefully to avoid court altogether.  Many organisations – especially those in highly regulated industries – take this view. In the past that strategy provided a more robust defence than it does now (see an earlier article about compliance training for a discussion on that issue). A record that someone had completed a compliance course may have won the day in the past, but is less likely to do so now. However, compliance course completion often has little, if anything, to do with learning and certainly won’t contribute much to building the high-performing cultures every organisation needs to aspire to if it’s to be successful.

A Tool for (a fading) Industrial Society

In his article, Donald also gave a pen-sketch of the origins of the Learning Management System (LMS) as training administration systems.

LMS technology emerged from a need to automate process management and record-keeping systems in the post-World War II era when the focus was on industrialisation and the development of mass production techniques. With millions of returned servicemen and women re-entering education and training there was a need to manage the process of classroom training more efficiently. LMSs appeared alongside the automation of other organisational processes – financial systems and HR management systems (HRMSs).

But LMSs were a step on the road, not an end in themselves.

The management modules of Systems such as PLATO (arguably the first LMS) the Computer Assisted Instruction system which was developed at the University of Illinois in 1960 (and finally shut down in 2006), were developed to support automated teaching operations (the ‘ATO’ part of the name) in a world where standardisation and automation were the primary goal. They were conceived and developed to primarily solve an organisational problem, not necessarily to improve the learning experience for the individual learner or worker.

We need a lot more, and a lot different, from whichever technologies we select to support the development of our workforce today and into the future

Moving to the Future

The diagram below gives an idea of challenge facing us as we move into a world where learning management is in the hands of each individual and their supporting ecosystem.

In a world where the majority of learning is in the workflow and most of it is ‘informal’ (self-directed or undirected in the moment of need), the idea of pouring large amounts of your organisation’s L&D budget into a concept and technology that was designed to make easier the scheduling of courses and programmes is not a sensible one to take.

Of course we will need technology to support learning. Even more so than ever before. But, as noted earlier, the technology we need is a long stride away from that which most organisations currently have in place.

My colleague Jane Hart has written about this challenge for some years (see here for an article by Jane from 2010). She sees the future of technologies supporting learning as a mash-up of social co-operation and collaboration tools aligned with the emerging social workplace. More importantly, Jane provides advice that L&D can’t sit alone.  Learning leaders need to work with their colleagues in IT and Business Operations to get the right tools in place. To that I’d add the need to work with Internal and Corporate Communications colleagues, Brand specialists, Knowledge Management teams as well as your extended value chain.

I think Jane’s absolutely correct. The tools that will be used to support (but not manage) learning in the future will principally be drawn not from a learning-centric focus but from other areas(although I believe the LMS will live on to support formal education and may extend to a limited extent to supporting structured experiential learning). Her Top 100 Tools for Learning is probably a good place to start looking.

The Rise of PKM

My diagram above points to PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) as an important focus area in supporting the learning-work interlink. Harold Jarche has written extensively on PKM and you can download his PKM Whitepaper from here.  If you want to learn more about PKM I’d recommend mining Harold’s blog.

There is no doubt that both social learning tools and PKM tools and processes will be vital to support learning management of the future.

However, it’s important to always remind ourselves that any technology can never be more than a supporting actor in the play.

In the end we each manage our own learning to suit our immediate and longer-term needs at our own pace, in our own time, and in our own way.

————–

(I have written more extensively about the challenge of ‘Managing Learning’ in the ‘The Really Useful eLearning Instruction Manual’ a book to be published by John Wiley & Sons and edited by Rob Hubbard)

#itashare

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

One clear finding presented was that:

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

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

Context is Critical
Although the Corporate Executive Board study is a good one, it didn’t tell us anything new about the importance of context for effective learning.  We’ve known about that for 120 years or more.  Certainly since Dr Ebbinghaus’ ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ experiments in the 1880s, and probably much longer.

Other studies have also produced similar results to this Corporate Executive Board work. The general finding is that the more tightly bound learning is to the workflow, the greater the impact it is likely to have.

Adding Learning to Work

Many learning professionals and training companies have taken the lesson about the criticality of context to heart and are designing courses and programmes that link learning with work more closely than was done in the past.

Although this is a great improvement from the situation where the majority of learning activities were totally separated from work, it’s only a half-way house, if that.

The thinking is still principally about adding learning into work.

Jane Hart has observed a very similar trend with her study of the uptake of social learning. She noted (see her slides 10-21 here) that there’s a clear trend towards ‘social training’ in the professional learning and development and learning vendor communities (where social technologies are added to training events) rather than towards ‘social collaboration’ (where social technologies are used to support on-going knowledge sharing and collaborative working, and integrated with workflow).

In other words, Jane has observed that many learning professionals  link social technologies and activities to learning activities in order to support training outcomes – adding ‘social’ to learning – rather than facilitating and supporting social collaboration – where a social dimension is part of the workflow.

The latter is a whole new ball game for HR and learning professionals and involves extracting learning from work.

Extracting Learning from Work

Extracting learning from work employs very different approaches to the additive form of workplace learning.

Firstly the focus is not on learning but on performance improvement from the outset.

It’s also not about requiring workers to adjust their working time and flow to include specific activities that have the explicit purpose of assisting learning.

It’s simply about developing approaches that help workers to learn more from their day-to-day work.

The impact of this latter approach is profound.

The Corporate Executive Board study found that if managers were more effective at providing workplace experiences that helped development, the impact on performance was an almost 20%¹ uplift.

From this study, new and challenging workplace experiences were demonstrated to have almost three times greater impact on performance improvement than simply ensuring workers had the right knowledge and skills.

Similar results were found with the difference between ensuring that reflection occurred following the completion of a project or other piece of work, or just at regular intervals, and simply having the right knowledge and skills to do the job. there was found to be a 295% uplift in performance from reflective learning over ensuring the right knowledge and skills.

Impact on Flow and Measurement

Approaching workplace learning in this way – by supporting the extraction of learning from work rather than the injection of learning activities into work – presents a whole new set of challenges for HR, Talent and L&D professionals.

the challenges include the facts that:

• It can’t be built into a course or programme.
• It can’t be ‘delivered’.
• Managers need to be enabled and supported if it is to work.
• It can’t be managed and controlled in the way discrete training and learning injections into the workflow can be.
• most of the learning processes are opaque to HR and L&D and can only be made explicit through observation and other field survey and data collection approaches.

Also, the flow isn’t learning > work but a different and slightly more complicated work > learning > work. This ‘binds’ the learning more tightly into the workflow and any attempt to extract it ‘collapses the wave function’  (for explanation, see here).

So traditional attempts to ‘isolate’ the impact of learning becomes very difficult and we need to adopt more holistic types of analysis to determine what works and what doesn’t.

And it changes viable measurement approaches as well. The focus can no longer be on learning and learning metrics, but on performance and performance metrics. If we can’t measure intermediate steps (the ‘learning’) then we must focus on measuring the output (performance in the workplace) only. This is another new ball game for which HR and L&D must learn the rules (and there are rules).

New Opportunities

On the positive side, the ‘extracting learning’ approach opens up a new area of opportunity for L&D – beyond the module, course and programme and into the daily workflow as a mechanism for effective development, increased performance and greater productivity.

It’s there for the taking if we want.

—————————–

¹ This figure is arrived at as a statistical estimate of the maximum impact on performance calculated by measuring predicted differences in employee performance between direct reports who rate their managers as least effective and those that rate their managers as most effective at supporting rich workplace experiences – such as challenging projects, stretch assignments, new project work etc.

#itashare

Yesterday another great British institution slid into the history books.

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

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

HMV’s demise has come at a time that is tough for the retail trade. The global economy is still depressed, and confidence amongst consumers still low. Alongside HMV, other British consumer stalwarts have failed in past weeks – Jessops, the camera chain (founded 1935); Blockbuster, the DVD and video rental chain (founded 1989); Comet, the electrical retail chain (founded 1933). The UK and Irish Virgin music stores were sold in 2007 and went into administration two years later.

It seems that Deloitte and PwC are the only winners in a world where financial administrators are the current kings.

Lessons for L&D

I’ve been asking myself if there might be lessons for L&D departments here. I think there are.

A common strand runs through all of the above outcomes. Not just exposure to tough economic times and having to make changes to do more with less, and do things differently. Almost all individuals and enterprises are facing that.

Each of the above were overtaken by circumstances (and technologies) that changed faster and to a greater extent than they thought possible, grasped and planned for.

As with the many book shops that have been forced to close in the face of new entrants to the publishing and distribution market – Amazon and Apple – the retail music industry certainly saw what digitisation was doing, but didn’t grasp that it would create new distribution channels, new entrants from totally different industries, and that it would disintermediate significant parts of the old value chain, side-line others, and build new markets that rendered old ones obsolete in the blink of an eye.

I was struck by the sheer blinkered view, and ignorance, of two ‘experts’ in the retail world when they analysed the demise of Jessops on BBC Radio 4 last week. One said “the real advantage of going to a store like Jessops is that you can speak to an expert who can advise on everything you might need to know about buying the right camera for you. You don’t get that when buying online”. The other agreed.

Have they never posted a question online? or read Amazon reviews? or joined something like photo.net and read the Buyers Guide, joined a Forum or Community and asked one of the tens of thousands of experts for their freely-given advice?  Why would you put greater trust in someone who worked for a store with a vested interest in not only encouraging you to buy from them, but also to buy the products that gave them the highest return? Is it because you can ‘see the cut of their jib’ or you can assess their knowledge and honesty better by seeing what they look like? Does an expert look different to the rest of us? I think not.

Equally, I asked myself, why would people prefer to get information and learn through the intermediation of their L&D department if they can do so faster and easier from other practitioners and colleagues, or people in their network who may or may not work in the same team, company or country as them? Especially if they can gain that knowledge and expertise more easily and without leaving their desk or workflow.

the answer, I believe, is ‘they wouldn’t’.

Some L&D professionals will counter with the challenge ‘how will you know that you have been given the right information and have been helped to learn the right things?’. The answer is that I will only know that through developing a level of trust in my sources of information and learning. And I will develop trust relationships by using the information, advice and expertise I’m provided with.  If I find it helps me get my work done better, faster or smarter then I’m more likely to ask again, and a competence trust relationship builds.

I don’t have the data to prove it, but I have a gut feeling that over time any one of us will build a network of trusted colleagues and advisors that will give is equally, if not better, information and advice for action than any traditional L&D department can do. Especially if we take the advice of Harold Jarche in thinking about the power of loose hierarchies and strong networks, and if our organisation actively encourages building a sharing, co-operative and collaborative culture of continuous learning.

What’s the point about this?

the point is that L&D departments need to adapt and do things differently, or do different things, if they are to remain relevant. Information dissemination (often the bulk of many training courses) doesn’t constitute the best use of time for specialists in building workforce knowledge and capability. They should be focusing on understanding critical business problems that are being caused by underperformance and then designing the best ways to solve them.  This may, or may not, involve designing, developing and delivering physical or virtual training, eLearning or some other intervention.

The Importance of Speed

I think Eric Schmidt made an excellent observation when he explained why Google’s interface is so simple – no ads, no clutter, just a query box, a banner (sometimes replaced by a ‘doodle’) and two buttons – ‘search’ and ‘I’m feeling lucky’ (I’ve yet to find anyone who regularly uses the latter).

Schmidt explained that the basic Google interface is designed in that way, and won’t change fundamentally, because people “will always use the easiest and fastest way possible to find information”. If they have difficult-to-navigate interfaces, or if anything gets in the way, then they will go elsewhere if they think there’s an easier option for them. First they ‘google’ it, then they ask someone nearby, call, message or email a trusted friend or colleague, phone a help desk, or read the manual (if there is one) – in that order. If Google created any obstacles, it would not be first choice.

There is a lesson in Schmidt’s advice for specialist learning technology interface designers, although it may come too late for some. Many organisations have wondered why employees look for ways not to use their Learning Management Systems and other learning technologies. Poor interface design is often the answer. I recall using one enterprise LMS that required 13 clicks of a mouse (some counter-intuitive) to register and launch an eLearning module. And we wondered why the generic eLearning library was underused!

The point is that people need to work at speed, and anything that gets in the way will be bypassed or ignored. If an L&D department can’t respond at speed and deliver value it will be seen as a failure.

L&D Reinvention

HMV and the other failed institutions didn’t understand how rapidly and extremely their worlds were changing. By the time they did (if they did at all) it was too late.

L&D professionals need to take heed.

The world of learning and development has also changed. The same drivers are disrupting L&D as disrupted the music retail industry, and the camera sales industry, and the DVD rental industry, and the publishing industry, and the automotive industry, and the marketing industry, and the finance industry and countless other industries. People expect to be able to solve their problems with their performance quickly, and they expect to do so without leaving the workplace. They expect to manage their own career development, and build their own portfolios of experiences. They expect their employers to support them and provide resources to help, but they don’t expect their employer to ‘manage’ their learning and development from start to finish.

The lesson here for L&D professionals has been spelt out many times.

Most workforces are more like an orchestra than a battalion of soldiers. The role of L&D professionals needs to become more akin to a conductor (or even a page-turner for a pianist) than a sergeant-major. Expecting everyone to line up and follow the same instructions is a recipe for failure. We need to develop approaches and strategies to support organisational and individual goals.

If there’s one lesson L&D needs to take from the failure of HMV and the others it is to fully grasp the speed and nature of the changes that are sweeping through most organisations – increased expectations of speed, relevance, and solutions that are just-in-time and not a minute late. Not only that, but also the increased expectation that L&D departments will deliver high value solutions to organisational challenges and help drive performance and productivity.

If an L&D department can’t make the internal changes needed and build the capability to do these things, then it deserves to follow HMV into oblivion.

#itashare

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

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

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

The ‘Best Practice’ Conundrum

However, it seems that the majority of training and development approaches and processes are based on deterministic models.

“We first need to identify best practice” is a cry often heard in HR and L&D departments as organisations set out on their journey to develop a high performing workforce.

“What’s wrong with that, then?” you may ask.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with seeing how other organisations achieve their results and trying to learn from them.  But do not assume that if you do the same then your results will mirror theirs. That is simply bowing to determinism. Human behaviour and the nature of organisations both tend to be complex and highly variable, and neither lend themself to deterministic approaches.

Best practice is the result of deterministic behaviour and exists only in relatively simple systems.

If a chemical engineer is looking to design a new process or parameters for distillation in a chemical plant she may be able to identify the volumes and sequences that produce the highest amount of pure distillate. Others following an identical process will achieve identical results. This is the positive use of determinism – repeatable processes, identical results.

In more complicated and more complex systems there is no best practice, no single solution that can be transferred from one problem to solve the next without modification.

When we’re dealing with human and organisational learning and performance we’re dealing with highly complicated and complex systems. If we’re to learn from others we should be looking at good practice and novel practices that we can adopt and adapt and massage to work in our own specific context.

The point I am making is that we certainly need to learn from others on a continual basis, but don’t assume that if we find something working well elsewhere all we need to do is to follow the same ‘recipe’ to get the same results.

It’s Not Always Simple

I’d recommend that every HR, Talent and L&D professional make themselves familiar with Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework if they are looking to better understand the important differences between learning and managing in simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems. Cynefin is a sense-making model – where patterns emerge from the information and data – that explains how to respond to ordered and disordered systems.

The key point for HR, Talent and L&D professionals is that training is only appropriate in Simple and Complicated systems where cause and effect relationships exist, are discoverable, predictable and repeatable.

In other words, we can design, develop and deliver training to help people address future situations with the confidence that similar actions will produce similar results. Best practice exists only in simple working environments. Good practice (multiple good ways of achieving outcomes) exists in complicated working environments. In complex and chaotic environments (where most knowledge workers reside) traditional training and development approaches that are carried out away from the context of the workplace have little or no impact.

As such, Cynefin questions much of traditional management training and development.

Harold Jarche has been using the Cynefin model for some years to explain the nature of complexity. He offers some good guidance and potential strategies for working and learning in a complex world.

Together with Clark Quinn, Harold has also identified some of the challenges and opportunities created by complexity and how they can be addressed through employing the Coherent Organization Framework to understand and unpick the interrelations between work teams, communities of practice and social networks; define the differences between collaboration and co-operation; and explain how the interaction in the different contexts are synergistic.

Clark’s diagram here gives a clear view.

Jarche recommends coaching, mentoring, linking cognitive surplus with time surplus to solve real problems in the workplace, addressing difficult challenges, and building networks and communities. None of the recommendations include formal training.

This is an approach I have been focusing on for several years and why I have championed the 70:20:10 framework and established the 70:20:10 Forum to help organisations develop their people rather than train them.

Implications for Training

All of the above highlight some fundamental issues around the course/curriculum training model as the principal L&D tool in a complex world.

Where best practice can be defined it seems to make sense that the standard training and development model will work. Where good practice can be defined, training and development may also help by building better analytical capability and judgement. Beyond that, context is critical, complexity abounds and standard training and development approaches fail to have impact.

The issues are highlighted in the areas of management and leadership development. Despite huge budgets and huge amounts of time spent on designing, developing and delivering essentially away-from-work leadership training and development, we still have a situation where the overall quality of leadership is low, employee engagement is generally low and we are not innovating and exploiting our workforce potential nearly as well as we should be doing.

According to a survey undertaken by ORC International, a global customer research, employee engagement and financial services research firm, only 43% of UK workers believe that a positive relationship exists between staff and managers within their organisation. ORC also reports that just under half considered their company to be well-managed.

‘Engage for Success’, a UK Government-supported panel, estimates that the UK’s employee engagement deficit in 2012 to be costing £26bn in productivity each year.

Both of these data points tell us that something is broken.

But they also tell us that there is a great opportunity for improvement by adopting new approaches that will develop our workforce and, particularly, our leaders and managers, more effectively.

Development rather than Training

Mike Myatt identifies some of the important challenges around leadership development in a recent HBR blog article.

Myatt points out that “US businesses spend more than $170 Billion dollars on leadership-based curriculum, with the majority of those dollars being spent on Leadership Training”.

He goes on to say “Here’s the thing – when it comes to leadership, the training industry has been broken for years”.

Myatt touches on the limitations of the deterministic best practice issue in this way:

“When a trainer refers to something as “best practices” you can with great certitude rest assured that’s not the case. Training focuses on best practices, while development focuses on next practices”.

Myatt’s solution, like Jarche’s, is for organisations to create an environment where development occurs through mainly work rather than through training.  Myatt goes further and lists the limitations he sees as being offered by the ‘training solution’ and their alternative ‘development-focused’ perspectives.

Examples of the difference between ‘training’ and ‘development’ Myatt provides include:

You may or may not agree with these binaries. They may represent extremes.  However I think Myatt is right. There are changes we need to make:

• We need to address broken training models.
• We need to get better at matching our people-development solutions to specific contexts.
• We need to focus on equipping our workforce for the future, whatever that may hold, rather than trying to ‘fix’ them for the present.
• We need to help our leaders, managers and workers to better exploit the learning opportunities in their daily workflow.
• We need to ensure our HR, Talent, and L&D professionals develop their own skills and capability to help make all this happen.

——-

#itashare

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

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

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

——————————

Lessons from The Cluetrain

Back in 1999 the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto posited the significant ways the Internet and associated technologies would transform all business activity. “Markets are conversations” they said, and “companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on TV are kidding themselves”.

Equally, resilient companies understand that what constituted value in the past has changed significantly, too.

No-one would now argue that The Cluetrain Manifesto authors got it wrong. Speak to anyone across any number of industries – travel, consumer marketing, newspapers, finance and banking, and elsewhere – and you’ll hear how the new communication technologies have disintermediated the flow of information and changed the perception of value. What were once premium services can now be obtained or executed at the click of a button.

Intangible Trends

Twenty-five years ago intangible assets accounted for around one third of the valuation of U.S. companies. By the turn of the millennium more than 80 per cent of that value was intangible.

Value has migrated from property, plant and equipment to ideas, relationships, intellectual property and reputation. From assets created by people’s hands to asset held inside people’s head and hearts.

source: ocean tomo

As times passes the importance of these intangible assets, particularly of relationships (rich social networks) and reputation (customer centricity) will only increase.

The Agility Imperative

The impact of these changes are manifest no more starkly than in workers’ ability to delight customers.

No longer can workers expect their employers’ formal learning and training approaches to meet their needs. The past world where development was ‘delivered’ in a way decided by learning professionals – packaged and inflexible – simply isn’t adequate for today’s fast-moving and always-changing world. The imperative for business agility and increased customer focus demands ‘learning at the speed of business’, and social networks and new communication channels are essential tools and conduits to achieve appropriate levels of responsiveness.

This increased rate of change and demand for agility doesn’t accommodate the rigidity and lag times of formal training and development. Workers today expect to drive their own development based on (ever changing) personal needs, and they expect to do it in the context of their work and together with their colleagues.

They also expect to manage their development in consort with their wider social networks – both within and outside their work. The loose ties with people outside our organisations provide insights that would never come from colleagues, so the value for organisations is significant, too.

However the answer is not simply ‘building relationships’. A recent Harvard Business Review article pointed out that customers don’t necessarily want ‘relationships’. What they want is help in making decisions. Deep down, every customer-facing worker also knows this. The single biggest driver of customer ‘stickiness’, by far, is decision simplicity.

All of these factors point to the need for new skillsets, new capabilities and new support approaches for staff in customer-facing roles, and there is no doubt that new social tools and approaches will be the bedrock. No organisation will escape the inexorability of the need to provide better customer experiences. Changing approaches to employee development are a critical element in that process.

David Weinberger, one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto sums the situation up well:

“Your organization is becoming hyperlinked. Whether you like it or not. It’s bottom-up; it’s unstoppable.”

————

The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger & Rick Levine http://www.cluetrain.com/

‘To Keep Your Customers, Keep It Simple’. Spenner & Freeman. HBR May 2012. http://hbr.org/2012/05/to-keep-your-customers-keep-it-simple/ar/1

——-

#itashare

During the past 6 weeks I’ve had the pleasure of working with representatives from more than 60 organisations in a series of master classes identifying ‘quick wins’ and developing action plans for implementing the 70:20:10 framework.

In fact, over the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to work with many other organisations – from huge multinationals with hundreds of thousands of employees across the world, to small and medium-sized enterprises and regional government departments – all organisations that are exploring the best ways to deploy the 70:20:10 framework, or are actively making it work.

This work has provided me with a number of insights which I think the FIVE below are worth sharing:

• it’s not about the numbers, it’s about change
• top-down thinking and bottom-up action are both essential
• a new understanding of ‘learning’ is needed by everyone
• learning professionals have to step up and let go
• manager engagement and capability are both critical

[1] It’s not about the Numbers, it’s all about Change
70:20:10 is not about a fixed ratio. It’s a simple and extremely helpful framework for changing focus and aligning resources to support workforce development and learning with where most of it already happens – in the workplace.

So, why use ‘70:20:10’ at all?

The numbers are a useful reminder that most learning occurs in the context of the workplace rather than in formal learning situations and that learning is highly context dependent. The numbers provide a framework to support learning as it happens through challenging experiences, plenty of practice, rich conversations and the opportunity to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t.

It’s also useful to keep the ratios in the back of our minds to remind ourselves that learning naturally occurs this way. They’re not some tight formula that organisations should be targeting.

It’s well worth reading my Internet Time Alliance colleague Jay Cross’s article about formal/informal learning ratios on his Informal Learning blog. Jay makes clear something we all know deep down – that learning is not a binary process – it usually doesn’t happen exclusively formally or exclusively informally, but mostly part-formally and part-informally. The mix varies depending on the situation.

I’ve also stressed this point in my ‘70:20:10 Learning Approaches’ presentation on SlideShare.

The KPMG work with the global food manufacturer, Sara Lee, cited on the Informal Learning blog, provides a good example of the fact that the ratios will vary with specific situations and therefore shouldn’t be taken as a mantra.

One thing I do know from working with many organisations using the model is that The 70:20:10 framework is an extremely helpful change agent.

One of its most powerful uses is to provide a structure for de-focusing time and effort on sub-optimal away-from-workplace training and re-focusing on more efficient and effective types of development. Almost without exception in my experience organisations that have adopted 70:20:10 have achieved greater impact on performance at organisational and individual level at lower cost than was being achieved beforehand.

Recently I’ve seen variations on the numbers being put forward. Some of these ideas are the result of thoughtful and useful analysis. Others are ‘angels dancing on heads of pins’. It would be an exercise in futility to re-define the Sara Lee data above as the 45:30:10:8:3:2:2 model.

My own view is that as social media comes into more ubiquitous use in workforce development – from executive and leadership development to individual contributor functional development – the ‘20’ will strengthen at the expense of the ‘10’, so we may get to a time when the ‘70:20:10’ just doesn’t make sense anymore and we’ll need to find some new way to express the need for change. However, I think that we’ve some way to go before that point is reached.

[2] Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Organisations that succeed in deploying the framework are those that understand the need for adopting a clear strategy, but then focus on practical ‘low-hanging fruit’.

This top-down and bottom-up approach is essential. Clear direction plus senior stakeholders who are engaged, enrolled and prepared to act as ‘champions’ will get the change process underway and keep it on track, but then HR and learning professionals who can identify the quick wins and achieve them are also critical to ensure that change happens on the ground.

Simple things such as embedding 70:20:10 concepts into annual development planning and templates, educating workers and their managers that ‘development’ does not equal attendance on programmes and courses, ensuring that social learning and reflection is embedded into work practices, all contribute to the change process.

[3] Re-thinking ‘Learning’
The thinking that hard-wires ‘knowing’ to ‘learning’ has set our efforts to build high-performing organisations back many years.

Learning and knowing sometimes coincide, but they are different beasts.

There is still a huge focus on ‘knowing’ in organisational learning. We build formal classroom courses and eLearning programmes that consist of pre-tests and post-tests. We then assume that if we gain a higher score after some formal learning process (almost invariably assessed through a test/examination/certification based on knowledge recall) than we did before, then learning has occurred.

Most of us know deep down that this is bunk.

Passing knowledge tests immediately following a course tells us little about real learning. It may tell us something about short-term memory recall, but real learning can only be determined by observable long-term changes in behaviour.

The 70:20:10 framework, with it’s emphasis on learning through experience (the ‘70’ and ‘20’ bits, especially), helps push the understanding of what learning means towards ‘know-how’ from ‘know-what’. Towards demonstrating learning through action – behaving differently when confronted with specific circumstances. Morgan McCall, one of the researchers who carried out the Centre for Creative Leadership survey of managers that led to the 70:20:10 framework becoming more widely known and adopted, explains the power of experiential learning here.

Organisations that effectively incorporate the 70:20:10 framework into their workforce development strategies invariably build a wider understanding of what ‘learning’ means – and follow that up with empowering many people to think of learning opportunities outside the class/curriculum mind-set.

[4] Learning Professionals: Stepping Up and Letting Go
70:20:10 implementation challenges entrenched learning and development practices and, in so doing, puts pressure on quite a number of learning professionals.

It does this because one of the underpinnings of the framework is the acceptance that only a small percentage of organisational learning (the ‘10’) can be managed by the HR and L&D departments. The vast majority occurs outside their bailiwick.

The categorisation below, developed with my Internet Time Alliance colleagues Jane Hart and Harold Jarche, shows clearly that most ‘informal’ elements of learning can’t be managed, but can only be supported by HR/L&D. Others can only serve as lessons themselves.

So, a precursor for effective implementation of the framework is for learning professionals in the organisation to let go trying to control everything and look instead to support, encourage and learn from the learning that is happening all around them.

This is not to say learning professionals are necessarily redundant. However it does mean that they need to step up to challenges that they probably haven’t faced before and change their modus operandi from simply designing, developing and delivering formal learning activities and programmes.

Effective deployment of 70:20:10 usually requires significant support for line managers – as they’re the people who have the most influence over effective implementation of the ‘70’ and ‘20’ (and the most influence over learning and performance improvement generally). The L&D staff can play an important role in supporting line managers to identify, enable and encourage social learning, information sharing, collaborative knowledge building and other workplace development activities. But the skills they need to do this may differ from the skills that the learning professional role previously required.

[5] Managers: It can’t Happen without them
Every time I work on the 70:20:10 framework with an organisation I’m reminded of the fundamental role that manager/line leader engagement and capability play in overall success.

We know from the Corporate Leadership Council’s Employee Development Survey research into Driving Results Through Employee Development that line leaders who are focused and effective at developing their reports achieve around 25% better performance from their teams than line leaders who are not effective at developing their people.

It is essential that senior leadership and line leaders fully understand the implications of this research – that the greatest levers for learning and performance improvement are in the hands of people managers.

There is a large number of tools and techniques that are available to make this job easier for managers. These need to be an integral part of any 70:20:10 rollout – from simple techniques to help reflective learning as part of regular manager-report meetings, to guides, templates, tools and tips to support experiential learning and learning through people networks. I wrote about this in my previous blog post (below) ‘Managers and Mad Hatters: Work That Stretches’.

“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:

1. Experiences: learning through exposure to new and challenging experiences.
2. Practice: learning through having the opportunity to practice and improve.
3. Conversation: learning through our interaction with others – informal coaching and mentoring, and building social networks inside and outside work.
4. 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.

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:

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

This article is only available via NxtBook.com

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

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