In thinking about the coherent organization, a couple of realizations occurred to me.  One is about how those layers actually are replicated at different levels. The other is how those levels need to be aligned in the organization to the overall vision. Read more →

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

It is this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One clear finding presented was that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

kevin dooley / Water Photos / CC BY

In an ongoing quest to better understand how Education can be improved utilising both new technologies and smarter ways of working and learning, I’ve been reading up on the Adaptive Learning approach utilised by Knewton. The snippets below, from a recent post about how to make students smarter, provided the inspiration for the commentary that follows. In other areas of recent research, the work done by the Kahn Academy and that of Peter Norvig have also inspired. The combined reading leads me along the path of how (big) data can be used to get a much more accurate view of real learning, both from the student and the teachers’ perspective. Read more →

As excited as I am about the Coherent Organization as a framework, it’s not done by any means.  I riffed on it for a Chief Learning Officer magazine, and my Internet Time Alliance colleagues have followed up. However, I want to take it further.  The original elements I put into the diagram were ad-hoc, though there were principles behind them.  As a start, I wanted to go back and look at these elements and see if I could be more systematic about it. Read more →

Fourth post in a series. In case you missed them, here are the first, second, and third posts.

Is your organization ready?

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We launched a new online workshop today called, From Training, to Performance, to Social. It’s a Beta version, at a reduced price, but we have had a good number of participants sign up. I came up with the idea while conducting one of the PKM workshops and noticed that many people either mixed up training with performance improvement, or thought of social learning as merely a bolt-on to a formal course.
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Remembering Prof. Allan Tough (died 27 April 2012 aged 76 years) – a great man, a pioneer researcher into self-directed learning, a futurist, and author. Allen’s research was fundamental to 70:20:10 thinking.
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This post is in response to the Adidas Blog Carnival on a New Way of Working and Learning and more specifically responding to the question, “What should a true learning organisation look like?”

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