Closing General Session at Learning 2008

We were introduced to the final version of the "telework" game created by the students form Chamberlin College! The game will be available on-line and is opensource so any compoany can use it. They named it "Teletrust" because trust was identified as a HUGE part of teleworkers being successful and managing their time. It was an incredible game. Almost everyone in the conference said they'd use the game when we got back to our organizations. Definitely check out the Masie website (http://www.masie.com/ or http://www.learning2008.com/) down the road to find out when it will become available.

We had two great keynote speakers today to close out the event:

Charles Fadel from Cisco - Multi-Modal Learning - Myths and realities of multimodel learning. One of the myths refuted was the old "we learn 10% of what we learn... to 90% of what we do". These statistics basically are not true. Muliti modal leanring is better then single modal, BUT... mastering basic skill is hurt by high degrees of interactivity at the same time. Students reach congnative overload. Teaching higher-level skills is the complete opposite. (See a picture of the slide - sorry about the tilt!)

The concept of telepresence was also discussed. This is a technology where you don't "see" the room as in teleconferencing. Instead, you see a representation of the individual and can see expressions and reactions better then the "old" video conference technology. The point was that we waste congnative energy trying to see the "room" and reactions in the video conference domain. With the telepresence tool we see these important communication cues more seamlessly. This has tremendous impact on learning and the teleworker/remote worker.

Steven M.R. Covey - Author of "The Speed of Trust" - Trust in Difficult Times - Steven has traveled to 20 countries in the last year since writing his book and has found Trust to be a universal issue. Trust is the currency of today's world and can be learned. Transparency is vital for trust. The foundation of trust is intellectual, but there is an emotional side. We need to learn to hire for BOTH character and competence. Workers trust peers more then their CEO's and managers. Social networks can use techology and ratings to help "see" this trust dimension.

Competences of trust - A combination of crediblity and behavior. Only 13% of organizations at the conference are systematically measuring trust (we used audiance response voting tools throughout the conference to take random surveys like this). 22% measure trust exteranlly with shareholders and customers. Organizations focus more on building trust and brand externally then they do buiding it internally with employees. We need to make an economic case for trust. It will have more staying power.

• Make the creation of trust a defendable objective like other business objectives.
• Start measuring trust.
• Start modeling it from the inside out and top down.

Trust can't be faked over the long term. Motive matters and will manifest itself. This is a long run play. The first job of a leader is to INSPIRE trust. When we give it we can receive it.

That's it for now!! Time to head home, collect our thoughts, AND get some REST!! We hope more of you can attend with us next year... Let us know if you have any questions!!

Day 2 from Learning 2008

Great 2nd day!! We had a number of exciting things going on. This will be an overview for now, BUT Conrad and I will do a deeper dive on all these issues in future blogs:

• We delivered our 2 final sessions today (PS Expert Panel, Paper-based Job Aids). Both went very well! We'd like to thank our 4 panel of experts (Jan-Jan Lam - Disney, Stacey Jewesak - Bank of America, Gary Wise - Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Dave Fogleman - Sprint) for doing a tremendous job! The room was packed and there was a tremendous amount of information shared. Questions ranged from introducing PS into an organization to dollars and time saved when blending PS with formal training. Disney has seen some amazing returns taking a 20 hour course down to 3 hours with PS as a compliment! The final question was to share one "gotta know" insight for anyone doing PS. The answers were: "Build examples so your organization see it as they're trying to get it". "Don't do this alone. Find experts to help and others who have done this.", "Make sure the design and delivery is all about business context!", "We should call this Performer Support not Performance Support. Performer Support is more about what we're actually doing here and gets a much better response from key stakeholders"


• Paper-based breakout- We were PLEASANTLY surprised at both the attendance and volunteers around the Paper-based workshop. Elliott asked attendees to bring samples from their organizations and we had 15 diverse and powerful examples to show. We have those scanned into a PPT which we're working on getting permission to post. We discussed 7 key principles for designing effective Job Aids which we'll post as a dedicated blog entry soon.

We had two PS community "reunions" while on site - Dinner at the Boardwalk (see picture) and a lunch round table sharing our current projects and challenges since our time together in Saratoga. We had 3 of the 4 workshop alumni groups represented. It was great to hear how everyone was doing. There were some amazing projects shared as well as issues around getting things started. The group felt that we should try starting two follow-up webinar series. One for a "Show and Tell" around projects being done, and one focused on issues of integrating and "selling" PS back into the organization. We'll be sending more details out soon in our weekly email blast.

Well, it's almost time for the final general session to start. This one is featuring Steven M.R. Covey, author of "The Speed of Trust". Should be a great final session. THEN we head over to Disney University for a special focus group session on PS, Mobile Learning, and Social Networking. We'll blog out the results!!

Greetings from Learning 2008!!

Conrad and I are literally sitting in Orlando listening to the closing general session for Day 1 of the Learning 2008 conference. It's been a great day with some amazing dialogue AND great talk around PS! More on that in a minute...



I've included a picture from today's General Session. Elliott has been doing a lot of talk around Next Gen - how to work with them, what's their make-up and learning preferences. We've also done some talk around gaming. This picture is BOTH! This group of students from a local College are developing a game for teleworkers. It's been great to watch them create the game and to interact with them through out.



Con and I have already done 2 of our four sessions on PS - (PS 101, and PS vs. Training). Great discussions. There is a tremendous interest in moving beyond training and truly having an impact on performance in the workplace. It's amazing how many organizations are considering changes to their learning strategy to blend and integrate this effectively. A few topics that came up:

• ROI - How does PS impact training?
• Maintenance - How does a learning organization reorganize itself to meet the tremendous demand and the immediacy of PS?
• Blending -What's the right mix? Can training stand along, OR can PS stand alone.

There were some very powerful discussions around all this. Conrad and I will be blogging throughout the event and writing some for detailed observations after! We'd love to hear from each of you and ALSO hear from any of you who are attending or attended the event! Any comments or additions would be great!