What would characterize the reasons why you might start with formal learning, versus performance support, versus social?  My initial reaction, after working with my ITA colleagues, would be that you should start with social.  As things are moving faster, you just can’t keep ahead of the game while creating formal resources, and equipping folks to help each other is probably your best bet.  A second step would then likely be performance support, helping people in the moment.  Formal learning would then backstop for those things that are static and defined enough, or meta- enough (more generic approaches) that there’s a reason to consolidate it.

However, it occurred to me that this might change depending on the nature of the organization.  So, for example, if you are in an organization with lots of new members (e.g. the military, fast food franchises), formal learning might well be your best starting point.  Formal learning really serves novices best.

So when might you want to start with performance support? Performance support largely serves practitioners trying to execute optimally. This might be something like manufacturing or something heavily regulated or evidence based, like medicine.  The point here would be to helping folks who know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and have a good background, but need structure to not make human mistakes.

Social really comes to it’s fore for organizations depending on continual innovation: perhaps consumer products, or other organizations focused on customer experience, as well as in highly competitive areas.  Here the creative friction between individuals is the highest value and consequently needs a supportive infrastructure.

Of course, your mileage may vary, and every organization will have places for all of the above, but this strikes me as a potential way to think about where you  might want to place your emphasis.  Other elements, like when to do better back end integration, and when to think about enabling via mobile, will have their own prioritization schemes, such as a highly mobile workforce for the latter.

So, what am I missing?

#itashare

On the negative side, we are seeing that simple work keeps getting automated, like automatic bank machines. Complicated work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labor.

On the positive side, complex work can provide unique business advantages and creative work can help to identify new business opportunities. However, complex work is difficult to copy and creative work constantly changes.

But both complex and creative work require greater implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, is difficult to codify and standardize. It is also difficult to transfer.

Implicit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships. It requires trust before people willingly share their know-how. Social networks can enable better and faster knowledge feedback for people who trust each and share their knowledge. But hierarchies and work control structures constrain conversations. Few people want to share their ignorance with the boss who controls their paycheck. But if we agree that complex and creative work are where long-term business value lies, then learning amongst ourselves is the real work in organizations today. In this emerging network era, social learning is how work gets done.

Becoming a successful social organization will require more than just the implementation of enterprise social technologies. Developing, supporting, and encouraging people to use a range of new social workplace skills will be just as important. Individual skills, in addition to new organizational support structures, are both required.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) skills can help to make sense of, and learn from, the constant stream of information that workers encounter from social channels both inside and outside the organization. Keeping track of digital information flows and separating the signal from the noise is difficult. There is little time to make sense of it all. We may feel like we are just not able to stay current and make informed decisions. PKM gives a framework to develop a network of people and sources of information that one can draw from on a daily basis. PKM is a process of filtering, creating, and discerning, and it also helps manage individual professional development through continuous learning.

Collaboration skills can help workers to share knowledge so that people work and learn cooperatively in teams, communities of practice, and social networks. In order to support collaborative working and learning in the organization, it is important to experience what it means to work and learn collaboratively, and understand the new community and collaboration skills that are involved. “You can’t train someone to be social, only show them how to be social.” Practice is necessary.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every existing business model. Leaders need to understand the importance of organizational architecture. Working smarter in the future workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust. The 21st century connected enterprise is a new world of work and learning.

For example, traditional training structures, based on institutions, programs, courses and classes, are changing. Probably the biggest change we are seeing is that the content delivery model is being replaced by more social and collaborative frameworks. This is due to almost universal Internet connectivity, especially with mobile devices, as well as a growing familiarity with online social networks.

Work is changing and so organizational learning must change. There is an urgent need for organizational support functions (HR, OD, KM, Training) to move beyond offering training services and toward supporting learning as it is happening in the digitally connected workplace. The connected workplace will not wait for the training department to catch up.

#itashare

The perspective riffs off of the concept of the relative value of formal versus informal learning methods shift as performers move from novice to expert. (And, as I’ve previously noted, what’s considered in/formal changes depending on if you’re the performer or designer.)  And, too often, we tend to restrict our interventions to the formal side, yet there are lots of things we can be doing on the informal side.

Largely, however, I see learning and development (L&D) groups as focusing exclusively on novices, or to beginning practitioners, and leaving practitioners and experts on their own.  Even if they’re addressing these more advanced audiences, they tend to use the ‘course’ as the vehicle, when it’s not really  necessary.  These audiences know what they need to know, and just want that useful information, they don’t need the full preparation that novices do.  Novices don’t know what they need to know nor why it’s important, so we provide all that in a course model.  We can be much more telegraphic to advanced performers, and the value of social networks starts kicking in here too.

The point I’m trying to make is that we can, and should, take responsibility for the rest of the performers. We can assist their performance, hence the term we’ve been preferring in the Internet Time Alliance: performance consultant.  This implies facilitating performance across the organizational roles, top to bottom and from beginner to expert.

I’d like to suggest that L&D groups need to become focused on facilitating organizational performance, which includes but is not limited to training.  It’s going to benefit the organization, it’s going to lead to greater strategic contributions and associated value, and it’s an approach that will likely preclude a long slow march to irrelevance and extinction.  Better the folks that understand how we learn and perform (and if you don’t, what are you waiting for?) take responsibility than having it devolve by default to business units and/or IT, eh?

#itashare

Post 1   Post 2   Post 3   Post 4   Post 5

Post 1 People learn their jobs by doing their jobs. Effective managers make stretch
assignments and coach their team members. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape their teammembers’ experiences. Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn to do the job on the job. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The Coherent Organization. As standalone companies realize that they’re really extended enterprises, co-learning with customers and stakeholders becomes important as everyone faces the future together. Players throughout the corporate ecosystem need to be operating on the same wave-length. This can only happen when we’re adapting to the future, i.e. learning, at the same pace.Internally, everyone needs to stay current.

These posts offer guidance to managers who want to make learning from experience and conversation more effective. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management accelerates the development of future workers and gets the entireorganization working smarter. The potential is great.

Among the organizations that have adopted the 70:20:10 approach are Nike, 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, and Coca-Cola.

Charles Jennings made 70:20:10 a guiding philosophy of learning during his eight-year tenure as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters, the world’s largest information company. (Disclosure: Charles and I are colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. He is the world authority on 70:20:10 and these posts draw heavily on his work.)

Post 2 The 70 percent: learning from experience. People learn by doing. We learn from experience and achieve mastery through practice. Experience is a difficult task master. We learn more from making a mistake than from getting it right the first time. That’s why wise managers throw team members into stretch assignments. It accelerates learning. Being ejected from one’s comfort zone is why some say that the only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Matching the most appropriately challenging experience to the developmental stage of the worker is the most powerful lever in the manager’s toolbox.

Charles Jennings reports that performance inevitably improves when managers ask their team members these three simple reflective questions:

1. What are your reflections on what you’ve been doing since we last met.
2. What would you do differently next time?
3. What have you learned since we last met?

Post 3 The 20 percent: learning through others. Learning is social. People learn with and through others.

Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Effective managers encourage their team members to buddy up on projects, to shadow others and to participate in professional social networks. People learn more in an environment that encourages conversation, so make sure you’re fostering an environment where people talk to each other.

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a social network of people who identify with one another professionally (e.g. designers of logic chips) or have mutual interests (e.g. amateur photographers). Members of CoPs develop and share knowledge, values, recommendations and standards. An effective community of practice is like a beehive. It organizes itself, buzzes with activity and produces honey for the markets.

Post 4 Formal learning includes courses, workshops, seminars, online learning and certification training. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations aren’t using online learning to its full potential, and the results at those organizations reflect that. Learning expert Robert Brinkerhoff figures only about 15 percent of formal training lessons change behavior.¹² This is a reflection of both formal learning creation and of the lack of focus on experiential and exposure learning. If what we learn is not reinforced with reflection and application, the lessons never make it into long-term memory.

Formal learning is typically conducted by an instructor. So why do we address it in a paper on managers? Because managers can make or break the success of formal learning programs. Research has found that the most important factor in translating formal learning into improved performance is the expectation set by managers before the training takes place¹³. Understanding the needs of the learners and following up after the event are also essential for formal learning success.

Post 5 You will need to become a champion for the new approach to developing talent. You must convince your sponsor that managers and supervisors are the linchpins to developing new talent. Without them, the company could find itself with nobody on the bench to take on future challenges. For your career, this lead role is high risk/high reward.

Managers have to learn how to develop their people. It doesn’t always come naturally, and managers can get too busy to pay much attention to it. Let them know you don’t expect them to train their people. Rather, they will set examples for their team; they will foster experiential learning by leading their team to tackle new challenges (the 70), by helping them reflect on the lessons of experience and by coaching them at every step (the 20), and by showing them how to get formal learning on the subject (the 10).

The Learning and Development Roundtable of the Corporate Leadership Council pinpointed three management practices that significantly improve performance.

1. Setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.
2. Providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.
3. Taking time to reflect and help team members learn from experience.

Managers who set clear objectives and expectations and explain how they measure performance are much more likely to succeed. Their teams outperform their peers by 20%. That’s an extra day every week to get the job done (and engage in deep learning). Managers should make explicit why they’re assigning particular projects, what they expect people to learn and what sort of debrief will occur after the assignment.

The 70-20-10 model depends on L&D teaming up with managers to improve learning across the company, but often managers do not appreciate how vitally important they are in growing their people. This is the absolute, must-do secret to success to improving learning and development. Frontline managers must take this as the very definition of manager: someone who develops others by challenging them with assignments that stretch them to the point of flow¹⁷. This takes a can-do manager who knows how coaching creates mental models and habits, how motivation activates a chain of high-performance activities and what success habits their team members need to adopt.

Charles Jennings says that the role that managers play is far more important than that of Learning and Development or HR. Your role is to help managers learn that:

• People learn from experience.
• Managers shape the experience of the people on their team.
• Experience coupled with reflection sticks lessons in memory.
• Daily mid-course correction is much more powerful than after-the-fact reviews.
• Every project they assign is a potential learning experience for their team members.

#itashare

A number of us are talking more about working out loud: Jane Bozarth and Harold Jarche talk about ‘narrating your work’, while I go on about ‘thinking out loud’ and ‘learning out loud’.  The point is capitalizing on the benefits that come from putting your thoughts out: people can give you feedback, helping you learn; and folks can learn from you.

And, as I’ve said before, conversations are the engine of business. You need to be interacting to be advancing.

The recent story of Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, struck me as an interesting case.  Here she’s bringing in folks who’ve been working remotely, or to put it another way she’s not allowing telecommuting any more. While there are obvious downsides, I can think of two justifications for that step:

• to get everyone back on the same page in regards to mission and vision
• to have folks sharing more

Both of these would be good outcomes for Yahoo.  And I can see in both cases that it could be temporary: once you get the mission message shared, and have developed a culture of and infrastructure for sharing, folks could then again work from where they want.  Of course, I have no idea whether that will actually happen.

The interesting thing for me was to contemplate those folks who don’t share.  What to do?  I know of folks who are happy to sit at home and do their job, and aren’t necessarily interested in the larger picture.  What do you do? Sometimes these folks have useful skills.  And they may have their own methods of keeping up to date.  But if they’re not sharing, not contributing, what’s the overall picture?

And the thought occurred to me that those are folks that you bring in as contractors or consultants, but not as employees.  Particularly in the case of a ‘no fire’ policy, who do you want on board?  It seems to me that the employees you want are the ones who are continually learning and contributing to the organization’s overall knowledge.

Sure, there’s lots more you’d have to get right: safety to speak out loud, tolerating diversity, openness to new ideas, but having folks who are willing to learn together seems to me to be one criteria for an organization that will thrive.

So, is this a plausible component of a hiring policy?  Those who demonstrably narrate their work are the ones to attract, develop, and reward?

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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.

For one, those work teams can be at any level. There will be work teams at the level that the work gets done, but there’ll also be work teams at the management and even executive levels.  Similarly, there are communities of practice at all these levels as well.  Even the top level executives can be members of several communities, including as executives of their org, but also with their peers at other orgs.

Moreover, at each of these levels they need to be tapping into what’s happening outside the organization, and tracking the implications for what they do.  They need to feed back out as well (of course, not their proprietary information).

The two way flow of information has to be in and out as well as up and down.  Communication, for both collaboration and cooperation, is key.

A second necessary component is alignment.  Those groups, at every level, need to be working in alignment with the broader organization’s goals, and vision.  When Dan Pink talks about the elements of motivation in Drive, the 3rd element, purpose, is about knowing what you’re doing and why it’s important.  So organizations have to be clear about what they’re about, and make sure everyone knows how they fit. Then you can provide autonomy and the paths to mastery (the other two elements) and get people working from intrinsic motivation.

The integrated focus on communication and alignment are two keys to developing the ability to continually innovate, and cope in the increasing complexity which will make or break an organization.  That’s how it seems to me.

#itashare

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)

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My experience is that communities of practice can help make the transition from hierarchies to networks, or as Jon Husband describes the resulting structure; wirearchy. Communities of practice, both internal and external; can be safe places between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. The Community Roundtable has a Community Maturity Model that describes this transition, in four stages. The model makes it relatively easy to see where your organization stands and where it should go.

The CMM aligns with my own way of looking at the need to balance structured work and the sharing of complex knowledge, with the concurrent requirement for unstructured social networking which can increase innovation through a diversity of ideas. I have added in the four CMM stages to the image below. Communities of practice can link collaboration and cooperation, and help weave the organization and its people into a wirearchy.

Wirearchy – “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.” - Jon Husband

Getting there may not be easy, but the evidence is showing that it is necessary. For example, here is how Yammer builds its products, according to Kris Gale, VP of Engineering:

Yammer’s biggest rule of thumb is 2 to 10 people, 2 to 10 weeks – which means they generally don’t do projects that are larger or more complicated.  There is a non-linear relationship between the complexity of a project and the wrap-up integration phase at the end.  If you go anywhere beyond ten weeks, the percentage of time in the wrap-up phase becomes disproportionate. - First Round Capital

This sounds like it’s aligned with the general rules of dealing with complexity, developed by Dave Snowden. Each project at Yammer is a probe. It’s also small enough so that the potential ROI does not drive the company off the rails. A small project failure is much easier to deal with than a large one. Yammer understands that working in a hyper-connected economy makes formal and complex work less predictable, so project cycles are kept short. As Gale goes on to explain:

I don’t think you should be building a product.  I think you should be building an organization that builds a product.

Be very wary of only trusting managers with engineering decisions; in fact, you should delegate these all the way down to individual contributors.  If managers are the only ones making decisions as you grow past thirty to forty people, this should be a red flag.  - First Round Capital

Becoming a wirearchy requires new organizational structures that incorporate communities and networks. In addition, they require new ways of doing work, like thinking in terms of perpetual Beta and doing manageable probes to test complex problems. It’s a new way of doing work, within a new work structure. Both are required.

Note: At the Connected Worker, we offer frameworks and coaching to develop these skills for your organization.

#itashare

We talked through how things are moving from complicated to complex (and how important it is to recognize the difference), and that organizations need to receive the wake-up call and start moving forward.  Using the Cynefin model, the value will not come from the simple (which should be automated) nor the complicated (which can be outsourced), but from dealing with the complex (and chaotic).  This won’t come from training and top down management. As I’ve said before, optimal execution will only be the cost of entry, and the differentiator (and hence the value) will be continual evaluation. And that comes from a creative and collaborative workforce.  The issue really is to recognize the need to seize new directions, and then execute the change.

One concern was whether we were talking evolution or revolution.  Rather than taking an either or, I was inclined to think that you needed revolutionary thinking (I like Kathy Sierra’s take on this), but that you fundamentally can’t revolutionize an organization short of total replacement (“blood on the streets” as one colleague gleefully put it .  I reckoned a committed change initiative to the place the revolutionary thinking pointed was what was needed.

The issue, then, is the vision and guidance to get there.  What’s needed is leadership that can lead the organization to be able to leverage complexity for success.  This will be about equipping and people to work together on shared goals: sharing, commenting, contributing, collaborating, and more.  It will be inherently experimental in an ongoing way.

What that means practically is an exercise I (and we) are continually working on, but we’ve coalesced on the top-level frameworks to form the basis of tools, and I think what’s needed are some organizations to co-develop the solutions.  Design-based research] if you will. So who’s up for working on the path to the future?

#itashare

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Return to: http://clomedia.com/views/articles/can-this-marriage-be-saved/

If I may summarize 400 pages from a vague memory, the gist was that I acquire tacit knowledge experientially, say baking a brioche. When I’ve mastered the baking, I explain how I did it, thus making the knowledge explicit. The explicit knowledge is shared with others, who in turn internalize it, transmuting it back into tacit knowledge in their heads.

This would be cool if it worked, but it usually doesn’t. You can no more convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge without the experiential component than you can convert lead into gold. That’s implicit in the definition of tacit. I gave up on Nonaka and Takeuchi.

Workers master a skill by starting with the basics, the bulk of which is formal and explicit. If it were not explicit, instructors and non-SMEs would not be able to teach it in traditional fashion.

With the foundation of explicit knowledge under their belts, the novices know enough to begin practicing. Enough rubs off that the novices learn experientially. In some fields, the overall journey from novice to expert takes 10,000 hours.

In an ideal world, the expert retires (or graduates) to teaching the incoming generation of novices. This assures that what’s taught mirrors reality. Note, however, that the experienced guide provides only explicit knowledge. (It’s explicit because you can write it down.)

The instructor can accelerate the novice’s acquisition of explicit knowledge by having her undertake stretch assignments. Experience is the crucible where explicit knowledge is learned.

Since line managers are the people who generally counsel their teammates on what assignments to take on, they need to become active in the red portion of my chart.

Explicit knowledge does not become tacit knowledge and vice-versa. Explicit/tacit is either/or. There’s no word for a state between explicit and tacit. In other words, what I understand Nonaka and Takeuchi to say is simply wrong.

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework provides another way to look at tacit and explicit. Both complex situations and tacit knowledge “can’t be told.” Complicated and simple situations can be written down. This implies:

The faster a worker becomes proficient, the more profitable the firm. Companies that focus on shortening the time employees complete formal, explicit learning are looking at a drop in the bucket. Improving the effective of experiential, tacit learning adds much more to the bottom line. Managers who make apt stretch assignments produces productive workers sooner.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the make-up of the market value of the combined S+P 500 companies went from 80% tangible assets to 80% intangible assets, a dramatic shift in our economy.

I wonder if the same thing is going on with complexity. Does anyone have any statistics on this? I don’t even know where to look.

#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.

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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.

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part 1 of 5

People learn their jobs by doing their jobs. Effective managers make stretch
assignments and coach their team members. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape those experiences.

These posts offer guidance to managers who want to make learning from experience and conversation more effective. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management accelerates the development of future workers and gets the entire organization working smarter. The potential is great.

Convergence of work and learning

The world of business is undergoing a phase change. Work and learning have merged. Earth-shattering forces snuck up on us when we weren’t looking, shifting major responsibilities from the institution to the individual.

Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn on the job to do the job. In a time of increased business speed, learning is vital. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The Coherent Organization

As standalone companies realize that they’re really extended enterprises, co-learning with customers and stakeholders becomes important as everyone faces the future together. Players throughout the corporate ecosystem need to be operating on the same wave-length. This can only happen when we’re adapting to the future, i.e. learning, at the same pace.Internally, everyone needs to stay current.

Workers need to know what one another are doing. No matter what silo we inhabit, we all need to be singing from the same hymnal. We may sing different songs (diversity builds strength) but we need be aligned to achieve a common purpose. We call harmonious companies Coherent Organizations.

In the old days, work was mechanical; workers learned the skills and knowledge to do their jobs from training sessions and then performed their job function. They did what they were told. Achieving coherence was easy. Twenty-first century employees do complex, unpredictable work. Their primary job is dealing with situations that are not written in any job description. It’s up to them to figure out what to do. They have to learn on the fly. Often the best way to accomplish the goal is to collaborate with other people.

Social networks, both in-person and online, are democratizing the workplace, and workers have an increasing amount of say in what they learn and how they learn it. Millennials entering the workplace expect to be in charge of their own development. They are used to having information at their fingertips. In high school and college, they did their homework in collaboration with friends, and now they expect to work in collaboration with colleagues.

Traditionally, training departments were designed for mechanical work processes. Instructional designers created curriculum around tried-and-true best practices. Training identified knowledge gaps and delivered courses to close them.

Today most of the information that workers need to know is unstructured and constantly changing. The Internet has switched our company hours to 24/7, and that often means making quick business decisions on a public stage. Hard-copy training material cannot train you to handle unique situations. Traditional training approaches are no longer enough.

Workers and managers have to shoulder responsibility for their own learning.

Does this imply that training departments are obsolete? Quite the contrary. In the coming years, learning and development professionals will have more impact than ever before. Many of them will leave the human resources silo to tackle challenges in a new integrated way across the company. By taking their expertise in learning directly into the organization and working more closely with team leaders, learning and development staff will increase the impact of their learning programs.The advice that follows comes from practitioners, not academics. As chief learning officer at Thomson Reuters, Charles Jennings¹ implemented the 70-20-10 model for the firm’s 55,000 employees. Heather Rutherford founded Blended, the Australia-based performance learning company that is the leading distributor of the Harvard ManageMentor program. Charles and Heather are the source of many of the suggestions and stories that follow.Let’s examine the 70-20-10 model, where it came from, how to take advantage of it and the opportunities it presents for learning and development professionals.

Origin of the 70-20-10 model

At its heart, 70-20-10 is all about re-thinking and re-aligning learning and development focus and effort. Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo originated the 70-20-10 framework at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina. Their 1996 book, The Career Architect², stated that lessons learned by successful managers came roughly:

• 70 percent from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks and problem solving

• 20 percent from feedback and working with and observing role models

• 10 percent from courses and reading

As Charles Handy says, “Real learning is not what most of us grew up thinking it was.”This simple formulation has gone viral.

You hear about it at every major training conference and read about it in all the learning journals. When I recently shared the 70-20-10 model with a senior group of instructional designers and educational planners, they experienced an “ah-ha” moment.

They realized that they’d been expending their energy in the formal realm, and that the formal accounts for only a small fraction of how people learn. You shouldn’t take this to mean that the 10 percent – formal learning – is going away. Rather, by starting to focus on experiential and collaborative learning too, you can improve your overall learning and development program.³

Without dealing with whether a given situation is 80:15:5 or 60:25:15, this group of instructional designers got the message that leadership development is overwhelmingly experiential. Experiential learning reinforces and boosts the results of formal learning. The 70 and the 20 increase the results from the traditional 10.

The simplicity of the 70-20-10 formulation makes it memorable. The message is that in business, we learn most by doing.70-20-10 is not without its critics. The model is based on observation. It is not a precise formulation like water boiling at 100 degrees Celsius/212 degrees Fahrenheit. Academics and purists complain that there’s no empirical evidence to back up 70-20-10. I counter that my colleagues and I have talked with thousands of managers about 70-20-10 and they agree that the proportions sound about right.

Among the organizations that have adopted the 70:20:10 approach are Nike, 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, and Coca-Cola.

Charles Jennings made 70:20:10 a guiding philosophy of learning during his eight-year tenure as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters, the world’s largest information company. (Disclosure: Charles and I are colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. He is the world authority on 70:20:10 and this paper draws heavily on his work.)

Is 70-20-10 good or bad news for trainers?

Imagine that a top executive from your company read an article about 70-20-10 in a Harvard Business Review blog and wondered whether your company should do something with it.

Should you be worried or elated?You have been investing most of your energy in formal learning. That’s what management asked you to do. It’s important; the company cannot live without it. You understand it upside down and backwards. You have probably implemented classes, workshops, online learning, a measurement system and learning events. You believe in these components.

On the other hand, the experiential and exposure parts of the spectrum are virgin territory for you. But the upside of investing in the support of experiential learning, assuming you are successful, is job enrichment, more responsibility, recognition from senior management and career advancement.

Next

My next post will deal with the 70%: Learning from experience.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws heavily on the work of Charles Jennings, a leading thinker and practitioner in human development, change management, performance improvement and learning. Charles is senior director of the Internet Time Alliance. He has deep experience in both the business and learning practitioner sides of learning and performance. He knows what works in the world of strategic talent and effective performance and productivity approaches.

Charles is the Founder of The 70:20:10 Forum, a global membership portal helping professionals implement the 70:20:10 framework to maximize performance and productivity. The Forum offers a vast repository of practical information and connects members with a vibrant global community of fellow practitioners. As part of its social responsibility, the Forum supports projects at Sreepur Village, a refuge in rural Bangladesh for destitute women as well as trafficked or abandoned children.

Another source of inspiration is Heather Rutherford, founder of Blended, an organizational learning solutions company. With a philosophy centered on the 70-20-10 framework, Blended supports clients in implementing a simple and powerful architecture supported by best-practice tools and resources to increase engagement, improve productivity, efficiency and performance.

About the Internet Time Alliance

The Internet Time Alliance helps clients understand and embrace complexity and adopt new ways of working and learning. We ask the tough questions and explore the underlying assumptions of how they do business. Then we work with them to develop strategies and plans for transformation and improvement. Email me for information on working with the Alliance.

About GoToTraining

Online Training Made Easy™Citrix GoToTraining is an easy-to-use online training service that allows you to move your entire training program online for more efficient customer and employee training. Hold unlimited online training sessions with up to 200 attendees from around the world right from your Mac or PC. Reach more trainees, collect real-time feedback, record and store your training sessions and more – all while slashing travel costs. To learn more, visit www.gototraining.com.

Citrix sponsored the research and writing of much of the material in this set of posts. Please visit CitrixOnline to see the original paper in its entirety.

About the author

Jay Cross is an author, advocate and raconteur who writes about workplace learning, leadership, organizational change, innovation, technology and the future. His educational white papers, articles and research reports persuade people to take action.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is currently researching the correlation of psychological well-being and performance on the job.

Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from UC Berkeley. People visit the Lab to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Does your company need substantive white papers and webinars like this? Get in touch.

• They improved their communication effectiveness.
• They made an effort to share their knowledge and expertise more widely. 
• They developed a broader perspective.
• They began to encourage cooperation rather than competition.

These four skills, of the nine identified by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, are some of the core skills for connected leaders. Leadership, like culture, is an emergent property of people working together. For example, trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This is connected leadership, or leadership that understands networks.

In complex environments, weak hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle. While many organizations have strong networks, they are too often coupled with strong central control. Letting go of control is what connected leadership is all about.

Here is how a connected workplace should function. It flips the traditional management pyramid.

Networked contributors (whether they are full-time, part-time, or contractors) do the bulk of the knowledge work at the edges of the organization. The narration of work  and PKM are becoming critical skills, as work teams ebb and flow according to need, but the network must remain connected and resilient. A key function of connected leaders is to listen to and analyze what is happening. From this bird’s-eye view, those in leadership roles can help set the work context according to the changing conditions and  work on building consensus.

The connected workplace requires collaboration as well as cooperation. Both collaborative behaviours (working together for a common goal) and cooperative behaviours (sharing freely without any quid pro quo) are needed, but most organizations focus their efforts on shorter term collaboration. However, networks really thrive on cooperation, where people share without any direct benefit. Practising and promoting cooperation is another important leadership skill in the connected workplace.

Connected leaders know that people naturally like to be helpful and get recognition for their work. But humans need more than extrinsic compensation, as our behaviour on Wikipedia and online social networks proves. For the most part, people like to help others. Cooperation makes for more resilient knowledge networks. Better networks are better for business.

Solving problems is what most knowledge workers are hired to do. But complex problems usually cannot be solved alone. They require the sharing of tacit knowledge, which is knowledge that cannot easily be put into a manual or procedural guide. Research shows that tacit knowledge flows best in trusted networks. Trust promotes individual autonomy and this becomes a foundation for more open social learning. Without trust, few are willing to share their knowledge. An effective knowledge network also cultivates the diversity and autonomy of each worker. Connected leaders know how to foster deeper connections which can be developed through meaningful conversations. They understand the importance of tacit knowledge in solving complex problems.

The power of social networks, like electricity, will inevitably change almost every business model. Those who emerge as leaders need to understand the new connected workplace. Working smarter in this workplace starts by organizing to embrace networks, manage complexity, and build trust.

Learn more about our Connected Leader Workshop, where we understand that you cannot train people to be social; you can only show them what it’s like to be social.

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Courses -> Search

The first is that too often we think of courses, but what’s happening these days is that people are increasingly self-helping.  Rather than take a course ‘just in case’, they’re getting the help they  need ‘just in time’.  It seems to me that we should be focusing on making sure that learners have good search skills, and searchable and well-organized portals, to ensure searching success.  Whether you view it as performance support or a ‘teachable’ moment, the fact is that learners are self-serving, going for pull solutions more.  The goal is to support performers how they want to, and are learning, rather than trying to force them into our models.

Instruction -> Coaching

As social media is more available, people are more available, and people are often reaching out to others for support rather than courses.  Whether it’s a quick query through a microblog or a full blown video chat, people are increasingly reaching out to folks for help. This is similar to the courses/search above, but sometimes they go for content and sometimes for people.  Are you making it easy to reach out to people?

Development -> Mentoring

Rather than developing people through programs, increasingly people are looking for mentoring. Programmed development is like taking the bus, when mentoring is like having a chauffeur.  It may seem extravagant, but folks like to help, and increasingly having a program of ‘each one teach one’, where those who’ve benefitted from mentoring pass it on, is workable. With digital support, this becomes both a more momentary, and longer term activity.  It’s increasingly viable, so it should be on your radar.

Read -> Watch

It used to be that to the only way to find things out was to read the manual, or a step-by-step job aid. That’s no longer true, and increasingly it’s easy to create videos that show how to do things.  So, for example, it’s now easy to create software ‘walkthrus’, and it’s not just the L&D department that are creating them.  Learners are getting them through services like Lynda.com, and creating their own with screen casting software.  Not to say reading won’t continue to play a role for concepts, but for procedures, the context and dynamism makes videos powerful.  Are you supporting video/screen cast creation, hosting, and searching?

Test -> Simulation 

The pragmatic barriers to creating simulations are falling down, and we now know that knowledge test isn’t an adequate assessment of ability to apply. We no longer have to have separate summative assessments, as digital environments can store performance as part of a portfolio of ability.  Most importantly, we can make the practice environment much closer to the performance environment.  When we’ve determined a real skill needs to be developed, we can and should be looking at rich assessments of ability.

“’til they get it right” -> “’til they can’t get it wrong”

Coupled with the above is the notion that we can move from minimal practice that isn’t sufficient to develop capability and confidence, and start providing sufficient practice to ensure ability.  We need to be spacing it out over time, and ensuring real competence, not just until folks have had a taste of it, but inadequate to develop real capability.  If it matters, we need to match practice to task and learner, and we can.

Desktop -> Mobile

People are now going ‘mobile first’, as are companies like Google.  The reality is that the mobile devices are more familiar, and more available.  People are getting in the habit of getting their support through a mobile device.  And enterprise platforms are increasingly making that solution available.  Are you enabling your workers to meet their needs with mobile?

These are just a few ways we can, and should, be shifting our thinking.  I’m sure you’ve got more, and I look forward to hearing them.

#itashare

My initial step would be to establish a social media system, supporting conversations and collaboration on work teams and communities of practice.  I’d make sure that folks could establish dialogs, work together on documents, and share files, quick pointers, and more fully developed thoughts. They’d also be able to both create and share media, video, audio, and screencasts.  I’d want to have some folks supporting the development of the use of this capability, in a performance consulting or performance strategist role.

Associated with this would be a big emphasis on transparency in communication, with the overall mission of the org percolating all the way through, and emphasizing the part each role plays in the overall picture.  Another emphasis would be on developing individual capability for self-learning.

My second step would be to set up a mechanism to support portals organized around work tasks (not by org silo), where media, files, and conversations around topics could happen.  The goal is to have tools ‘to hand’ as well as people.  Thus, any created job aids would be appropriately located. Again, with a performance strategy focus. This is related to the first point.

Finally, I’d consider formal learning to supplement the informal learning, in places where it demonstrably would add value, with a view to minimizing the use of this except where a sound business case could be made that the time spent was aligned to key business indicator, and that developing this skill was the necessary approach.  And, perhaps, on ways to effectively take advantage of the systems indicated above.  However, a longer term approach than the ‘event’ model would be used.  I’d want to track activity, not just content and assessment.  Compliance and onboarding, typically roles for formal learning, would have a different look than currently.

I’d supplement this with mobile access, and ultimately start looking for ways to add contextual support.  I’d be looking for  business impact across the board. I’d probably structure this as a performance unit, and ensure that the staff are trained to look at the full suite of opportunities to improve performance including social, and consider the emotional side – motivation, anxiety, and confidence – as well as the cognitive.

This is all hypothetical, of course, but I think it’s illustrative of a different way of approaching this.  I think that the way things are going: changing faster, dealing with more ambiguity ,and requiring more ingenuity and innovation, require a different approach than the assess, prepare, rollout model.  The focus increasingly is on supporting people meeting their needs, instead of attempting to meet their needs.  Organizations have to be more nimble, and this approach starts there and works back, instead of the other way around.

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One year ago, twenty management thinkers and agile software gurus met on a mountain top in Stoos, Switzerland, to assess and find alternatives to obsolete leadership practices. We concluded with this communiqué:

Reflecting on leadership in organizations today, we find ourselves in a bit of a mess. We see reliance on linear, mechanistic thinking, companies focusing more on stock price than delighting customers, and knowledge workers whose voices are ignored by the bosses who direct them. All these factors are reflected in the current economic crisis, increased inequity, bankruptcies and widespread disillusionment.

There has to be a better way.

We believe that we uncovered some of the common characteristics of that better way. For example, that organizations can become learning networks of individuals creating value and that the role of leaders should include the stewardship of the living rather than the management of the machine.

In celebration of World Stoos Day on January 25, the Stoos Satellite Netherlands has organized a TEDx-like event in Amsterdam. Join us. It’s free. Stoos Connect schedule. Live stream of Stoos Day.

During this sizzling day, we will offer lightning talks from a wide spectrum of well respected thought leaders such as Steve Denning, Jurgen Appelo, Niels Pflaeging, Franz Röösli and Dawna Jones. They will make you think, inspire you and tantalize you. If you’re involved in (or impacted by) management in any way, you should attend. Open your mind and be inspired!

Our Goodreads bookshelf.

Find us on LinkedIn.

If this is all new to you, here’s my summary of the first Stoos Gathering

Chasing shareholder value is like trying to make your car go faster by rigging the speedometer. Dissatisfied workers, pissed-off customers, and lousy returns on investment are the outcomes of a broken system. The current business environment is a breeding ground for Murphy’s Law. Nobody’s happy and rebellion is in the air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

#itashare

Much of PKM is about finding balance. In seeking knowledge sources, we have to balance aggregation, or getting as much information as possibile, with filtering, or ensuring that we have more signal than noise. Our networks need to be diverse and varied in order to be exposed to new ideas, but we cannot keep track of everything, so we have to be judicious with our time.  We need to constantly lump things together, such as with a feed reader, while filtering out the good stuff so we can find it again, such as with social bookmarks. It’s like breathing information in and out, while making sense of only a small portion at a time, sometimes built by many grains before trying to express our knowledge in order to make sense of it.

These processes are not taught in schools or training programes. There is no right answer in PKM. There are only processes that work. The test of PKM is whether it works for you. My experience is that a person’s PKM changes over time, and the most important aspect is being aware of how we seek sources of information, make sense of our own knowledge, and then share it at work, in communities or through networks.

As Helen Blunden has noted about her PKM, it’s about continuous learning.

It’s opened up a whole new world and it’s just made me eager to know more.  It’s also made me realise that our learning will never stop – and we should get comfortable with that idea.  (I believe the creativity is now coming from the “Seek” part of the model because information is not one-sided anymore; you get a variety of opinions, perspectives and angles and from a wider expanded network of people from all walks of life – different industries, different skillsets – my curiosity in life also helps me out here).

PKM practices can help make sense of the current environment, whether it be your profession, your job, or your areas of interest. A resilient learning network, that can develop from practising PKM, creates a more resilient framework from which to make decisions about the future. The more you give to your networks, the more you will receive. PKM provides a way to do this in a more structured, but personal, manner. The result is enhanced serendipity, always an advantage in a changing world.

 The next online PKM workshop starts this Monday.

#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