Greetings!! We're not sure if most of you have heard, BUT we've moved the PS Blog to a new NING community. This blog site still contains all of our old postings, but we won't be adding any new content here going forward.
Our intent is to allow for greater opportunities to share ideas. Our new NING site includes not only all the information found in this Blog, but it also allows for MANY other Social Media features such as forums, My Pages, photos/video posts, webinar recordings, podcasts, and much more. We hope you will join us at our NEW location.
If you're interested in joining our new space simply send us an email and we'll send you an invitation. This is a members only website, at least for now.
Bob Mosher - b.mosher@ontuitive.com
Conrad Gottfredson - c.gottfredson@ontuitive.com
Looking forward to seeing you there! Please let us know if you have any questions...
Yours in Service,
Con and Bob
Friday, June 4, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Beyond Job Aids
Providing Access to Reference Information @ the Moment of Apply
In previous blogs we have discussed the three time phases of apply: the time before performance, the time during performance, and the time after performance ends.
The “time during performance” has been the primary focus of performance support focus for decades. Allison Rossett, in her book: Job Aids and Performance Support: Moving From Knowledge in the Classroom to Knowledge Everywhere, calls the solutions we build to support performers during this moment of time “sidekicks”
Rossett also introduces another time phase of apply—the need to plan prior to actually performing. She calls these kind of performer support solutions “Planners.”
The third time phase of Apply is a critical area for any organization interested in continuous performance improvement. In this phase, following the actual act of apply, performers conduct an assessment called a “quick check.”
But there are times when the moment of Apply doesn’t require a planner, sidekick, or quick-check. All that is needed to ensure effective performance is intuitive access to the right information at the moment of Apply.
In these instances, performers have the skills but the information required to complete the task has changed or was never internalized because it’s always changing, too vast, or infrequently needed. Whatever the reason, many times performance requires information that the performer lacks.
To illustrate further. Once upon a time, a long time ago, people actually knew everything they needed to know to do their work. Hard to comprehend in today’s work environment where people are continually being asked to learn at or above the speed of change and at a time when the information pool we’re all drinking from is growing at breakneck speed.
In 2003, Chevron's CIO reported that his company accumulated data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day. According to research conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC) the world created 161 exabytes of data in 2006, that’s "3 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written." in 2009, the size of the World's total Digital content was estimated at 500 billion gigabytes, or 500 exabytes. And it is predicted that this year we will generate more than 988 exabytes. [4][5][6] IDC also predicts that nearly 70% of 2010’s digital universe will be created by individuals and/or organizations (businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments, associations, etc.)
This same pace of information growth is occurring within the individual work requirements of people. Today, people can’t store in their internal knowledge-base all they need to know to do their work. It’s all too vast and fluid.
Clearly, in these times an organization’s PS strategy needs to include providing intuitive access to the right content in the right form. Here are some tactical suggestions for how you can go about this.
1. Identify critical content for which performers need access to at the moment of Apply.
2. Anticipate and provide for multiple access options to that content based upon job roles and work requirements. Search covers a multitude of weaknesses in a performance support strategy. The challenge of search is that it often yields too many hits. Searching through search results can be costly for organizations. Certainly narrowing accessible content by job role can help reduce the number of hits search delivers, there is another option that can prove effective. Here’s what you do:
3. Push for parametric search. Some search engine employ parametric search to narrow its search based upon parameters like job role, work group, type of information (e.g., task, concept, report), unique access option (e.g., if the type of information were “reports” options might be by date or by data source.) All these parameters are attached to the content as metadata tags and it takes very few of the parameters to drill into a specific instance of needed information.
4. Provide contextual access to content via workflow.
Many years ago, Robert Mager and Peter Pipe published a brilliant little book titled, “Analyzing Performance Problems, or Your Really Oughta Wanna”. In it they provided a decision tree for determining whether training is really required in the pursuit of solving a performance need. Their insight is that there may be other reasons why people aren’t performing outside of their skill set. This is still the reality today. In our pursuit of supporting effective performance we must have the wisdom to support people when knowing how to perform isn’t the issue. What performers need is specific information called for during that performance. For example, a performer may need specific product information or the information from a report needed to make a judgment that will influence performance decisions, etc..
The realities of performance also suggest that performers may need both, help in knowing how to perform and information to support that performance. Whatever the case may be, information access is a vital consideration in performer support.
In previous blogs we have discussed the three time phases of apply: the time before performance, the time during performance, and the time after performance ends.
The “time during performance” has been the primary focus of performance support focus for decades. Allison Rossett, in her book: Job Aids and Performance Support: Moving From Knowledge in the Classroom to Knowledge Everywhere, calls the solutions we build to support performers during this moment of time “sidekicks”
Rossett also introduces another time phase of apply—the need to plan prior to actually performing. She calls these kind of performer support solutions “Planners.”
The third time phase of Apply is a critical area for any organization interested in continuous performance improvement. In this phase, following the actual act of apply, performers conduct an assessment called a “quick check.”
But there are times when the moment of Apply doesn’t require a planner, sidekick, or quick-check. All that is needed to ensure effective performance is intuitive access to the right information at the moment of Apply.
In these instances, performers have the skills but the information required to complete the task has changed or was never internalized because it’s always changing, too vast, or infrequently needed. Whatever the reason, many times performance requires information that the performer lacks.
To illustrate further. Once upon a time, a long time ago, people actually knew everything they needed to know to do their work. Hard to comprehend in today’s work environment where people are continually being asked to learn at or above the speed of change and at a time when the information pool we’re all drinking from is growing at breakneck speed.
In 2003, Chevron's CIO reported that his company accumulated data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day. According to research conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC) the world created 161 exabytes of data in 2006, that’s "3 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written." in 2009, the size of the World's total Digital content was estimated at 500 billion gigabytes, or 500 exabytes. And it is predicted that this year we will generate more than 988 exabytes. [4][5][6] IDC also predicts that nearly 70% of 2010’s digital universe will be created by individuals and/or organizations (businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments, associations, etc.)
This same pace of information growth is occurring within the individual work requirements of people. Today, people can’t store in their internal knowledge-base all they need to know to do their work. It’s all too vast and fluid.
Clearly, in these times an organization’s PS strategy needs to include providing intuitive access to the right content in the right form. Here are some tactical suggestions for how you can go about this.
1. Identify critical content for which performers need access to at the moment of Apply.
2. Anticipate and provide for multiple access options to that content based upon job roles and work requirements. Search covers a multitude of weaknesses in a performance support strategy. The challenge of search is that it often yields too many hits. Searching through search results can be costly for organizations. Certainly narrowing accessible content by job role can help reduce the number of hits search delivers, there is another option that can prove effective. Here’s what you do:
Step 1: For every type of content (e.g., task, concept, business policy, etc.) identify all the access options. For example if the content type were recipes performers might want to access them by occasion, primary ingredient, preparation time, dietary requirement, course, etc.
Step 2: Narrow the access options to those that would be of highest use to your audiences and build those access options into your content management system.
3. Push for parametric search. Some search engine employ parametric search to narrow its search based upon parameters like job role, work group, type of information (e.g., task, concept, report), unique access option (e.g., if the type of information were “reports” options might be by date or by data source.) All these parameters are attached to the content as metadata tags and it takes very few of the parameters to drill into a specific instance of needed information.
4. Provide contextual access to content via workflow.
Many years ago, Robert Mager and Peter Pipe published a brilliant little book titled, “Analyzing Performance Problems, or Your Really Oughta Wanna”. In it they provided a decision tree for determining whether training is really required in the pursuit of solving a performance need. Their insight is that there may be other reasons why people aren’t performing outside of their skill set. This is still the reality today. In our pursuit of supporting effective performance we must have the wisdom to support people when knowing how to perform isn’t the issue. What performers need is specific information called for during that performance. For example, a performer may need specific product information or the information from a report needed to make a judgment that will influence performance decisions, etc..
The realities of performance also suggest that performers may need both, help in knowing how to perform and information to support that performance. Whatever the case may be, information access is a vital consideration in performer support.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Is Being a “Learning Organization” Enough?
I was once debriefing a training class with a senior manager from an organization who had purchased a large training program from us. We were specifically discussing the results of the post assessments each student had completed. Overall the students had done fairly well. As the instructor I was pleased and anxious to hear what I was hoping to be glowing feedback from this particular manager. I was a bit taken back when he handed me the results and said, “These numbers mean nothing to me.” When I asked him to clarify he replied, “I don’t care what my people learn in training. I only care that they perform better or differently AFTER the training.”
Peter Senge and his colleagues spent most of the 1990’s helping us better understand the qualities of becoming a “Learning Organization” and many of us did our best to meet these guidelines. But after having spent the last 3 years of my professional life solely focused on Performance Support (PS) and the profound impact I have seen it have on organizations, I’m wondering if the goal of becoming a Learning Organization is enough. Should becoming a “Performing Organization” be the goal of the millennium and beyond?
The past 3 years have taught me that although learning is a key part of the overall success of any individual learner and the organization at large, sometimes learning is simply not enough. Focusing heavily on learning may play a huge part in why we don’t achieve the ultimate outcome we are striving for.
It may help if I take a second to share what my definition of learning has become. For me, the overall goal of any organization and its employees is to successfully and consistently outperform their potential. Learning is clearly a prerequisite to performance, but to have learned does not always translate into, or guarantee, performance. This is the one of the hardest things for training departments to understand. We have spent years and billions of dollars on classroom programs, e-learning libraries, certifications, and compliance training only to find that we’re still not getting the performance we need and want from our workforce. That’s because we are missing a key component! We need to be offering an intentional instructional model that takes what someone has learned and helps them transfer and adapt that knowledge into their daily workplace. This is the job of PS. Until an organization begins to create, deliver, maintain, and measure PS with the same focus, budget, resources, and rigor it has always dedicated to learning they will never truly realize the overall productivity growth they have been tasked with achieving.
In order for a learner to achieve peak performance they need to journey through two stages: mastery and competency. Each is a critical part of the journey, but in most organizations mastery is the area most served by the training organization leaving competency up for grabs. Mastery is the acquisition of knowledge. It’s what training and learning organizations do brilliantly, and should continue to do! Competency is when a learner takes what they have learned and can apply and adapt what they have learned to their unique work setting and the plethora of challenges they encounter.
This is where PS comes in. Its role is to help take a learner from mastery to competency. When a training organization adopts PS as a compliment to their learning strategy they will begin to impact both mastery and competency. At this point they will begin achieving an entirely different level if impact on the organizations they serve. In a time when training budgets and training departments are being held accountable at a level like never before, being able to show a direct impact on the competency of the learners they support will position them in a highly strategic way.
The Learning Organization of today needs to become the Performing Organization of tomorrow which includes a more robust and mature view of what is the entire learning journey. Although learning is key, it is not enough to sustain the growing and every changing world of those we support. Creating a comprehensive performance strategy which includes both mastery and competency is the only way to ultimately serve our organizations. Adding PS is a key step in achieving that goal!
Monday, March 1, 2010
Why Focus on Workflow Process?
Pursuing Competency Beyond Mastery
When you add performance support to the mix, the pursuit of skill mastery changes. There are levels of mastery with performance support. Mastery obviously includes complete internalization of an independent skill. With this highest level of mastery a performer has the ability to complete a task automatically. This capacity is securely encoded into long-term memory and can be executed without conscience thought – it just happens when it needs to happen. On the other end of the mastery spectrum is the ability to efficiently complete a task using a job aid without any direct training on a specific skill. The successful use of the job aid is made possible by a generalizable understanding of how to use it.
Competency embraces mastery at all its levels. But competence is only fully achieved when performers have integrated what they have mastered into actionable skill sets within the context of their personal workflow. This generally requires integration with other existing skill sets within the performer and also with other people via collaboration.
These integrated skill sets must be internalized at the appropriate level so they can be successfully executed as needed with a justifiable amount of effort. What is more, competency always carries with it sufficient conceptual understanding to facilitate proper judgment and the capacity to adapt, on-the-fly, to the unique challenges that occur in the workflow.
Here's an example: Suppose you completed a course titled “Mastering Spreadsheets.” The course was facilitated by a remarkable instructor who taught you all the details for using your organization’s spreadsheet software. During the class you practiced and mastered 10 fundamental skills associated with that software. Suppose, also, that your day-to-day work doesn’t require you to use that software but you do need to use it as part of periodic ongoing project work with others in your organization. In this work, you receive digital spreadsheets from several team members and you do the following:
We once were asked to help a multi-national company design and implement an enterprise training solution for an ERP reengineering effort. The project involved completely changing the way they managed their financials. Every associated workflow process was redesigned to involve people on the front-line of the business who had never engaged in the organization’s financials before.
We opted to train on business processes. We linked business and non-business tasks with workflows and job-roles. We developed a web-based performance support system that provided access to specific task instructions via role-based online workflow diagrams. We used the online system as the primary training resource in every class. Our objective, to train everyone to use the online performance support system to help them “do their job.”
The result? The go-live day was a non-event. We had put extra support personnel at the help desk but by the end of the first week we sent the extra help back to their work areas because they weren’t needed. The company had completed changed how several thousand people performed their jobs without a hiccup. Why? Because work-flow process was the backbone of the training effort coupled with a web-based performance support “broker” that supported those processes.
Workflow process is the primary means for ensuring that performance is purposefully and effectively directed. It should be the backbone for all training and performance support efforts and most certainly is the key for any organization interested in pursuing competency beyond the mastery of independent skills.
When you add performance support to the mix, the pursuit of skill mastery changes. There are levels of mastery with performance support. Mastery obviously includes complete internalization of an independent skill. With this highest level of mastery a performer has the ability to complete a task automatically. This capacity is securely encoded into long-term memory and can be executed without conscience thought – it just happens when it needs to happen. On the other end of the mastery spectrum is the ability to efficiently complete a task using a job aid without any direct training on a specific skill. The successful use of the job aid is made possible by a generalizable understanding of how to use it.
Competency embraces mastery at all its levels. But competence is only fully achieved when performers have integrated what they have mastered into actionable skill sets within the context of their personal workflow. This generally requires integration with other existing skill sets within the performer and also with other people via collaboration.
These integrated skill sets must be internalized at the appropriate level so they can be successfully executed as needed with a justifiable amount of effort. What is more, competency always carries with it sufficient conceptual understanding to facilitate proper judgment and the capacity to adapt, on-the-fly, to the unique challenges that occur in the workflow.
Here's an example: Suppose you completed a course titled “Mastering Spreadsheets.” The course was facilitated by a remarkable instructor who taught you all the details for using your organization’s spreadsheet software. During the class you practiced and mastered 10 fundamental skills associated with that software. Suppose, also, that your day-to-day work doesn’t require you to use that software but you do need to use it as part of periodic ongoing project work with others in your organization. In this work, you receive digital spreadsheets from several team members and you do the following:
- Consolidate those spreadsheets
- Add specific data, gathered from several other applications to the now combined set of spreadsheets
- Perform a number of calculations
- Make judgments based upon those calculations
- Enter those judgments into another application along with specific data points
- Forward the revised spreadsheets onto other members of your work team
- Monitor the completion of your team members calculations
- Reconcile any discrepancies in their conclusions via a virtual meeting
We once were asked to help a multi-national company design and implement an enterprise training solution for an ERP reengineering effort. The project involved completely changing the way they managed their financials. Every associated workflow process was redesigned to involve people on the front-line of the business who had never engaged in the organization’s financials before.
We opted to train on business processes. We linked business and non-business tasks with workflows and job-roles. We developed a web-based performance support system that provided access to specific task instructions via role-based online workflow diagrams. We used the online system as the primary training resource in every class. Our objective, to train everyone to use the online performance support system to help them “do their job.”
The result? The go-live day was a non-event. We had put extra support personnel at the help desk but by the end of the first week we sent the extra help back to their work areas because they weren’t needed. The company had completed changed how several thousand people performed their jobs without a hiccup. Why? Because work-flow process was the backbone of the training effort coupled with a web-based performance support “broker” that supported those processes.
Workflow process is the primary means for ensuring that performance is purposefully and effectively directed. It should be the backbone for all training and performance support efforts and most certainly is the key for any organization interested in pursuing competency beyond the mastery of independent skills.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Upgrading - A PERFECT time for Performance Support
I remember teaching my first Lotus 1-2-3 release 1.A course in 1987. No laughing please... I know that this may have been before some of you were even born! But seriously, we did have computers back then and many users were struggling to master the complexities of things called Spreadsheets, Word Processors, and Databases. These were the emerging technologies of the time. Of course, many of these applications are common place today. My children, for example, have been using all three to help with their homework since they were in middle school (two of whom are now using them for their university studies).
Back in 1987 I thought I would be teaching Lotus 1-2-3 forever! Who could ever need more then Lotus had to offer? And there was also a software product called Symphony, a Lotus product that came with all 3 technologies (a precursor to what we now know as the Microsoft Office suite). The technology was mind blowing, revolutionary, and it all fit in 128 K of RAM and on a 5.5" floppy disk (Remember those??) Wow, was I ever wrong - Nowadays the average shelf life of commercially sold software is somewhere between 6 months to a year. Somewhere in the early to mid-90's a new term was born: Upgrades!! As fewer and fewer "new" technology disciplines were launched software companies quickly learned that a majority of their money wasn't to be made through a new product launch, but rather through an endless stream of upgrades.
This shift impacted the learning industry. Gone were the days of filling our classrooms with newbies who were taking our "Intro to PC Literacy" courses. Now we had to shift our attention to "New Features" and upgrade classes. Eventually, it became harder and harder to fill even these classes. As the learner matured and grew, so did their intolerance for sitting in a classroom with 20 other strangers, or even colleagues, waiting to hear about a new feature they cared about.
Enter E-Learning, E-Learning initially did a nice job of stepping up to fill a much needed gap in the upgrade arena. It was cheaper than the classroom and was delivered to the desktop. What could be better? Well, even e-Learning has since struggled to meet the increasing upgrade demand. Learners have matured and become savvier on these applications. It is much more difficult to create an on-line course that meets the individual upgrade needs of today's demanding learners.
Another fundamental problem is in the overall design of these courses. Whether online or in the classroom, our instructional model hasen't adequately addressed the "moment of need" that emerged with accellerating upgrade cycles.. If you've followed our blog for any length of time, you have heard us repeatedly reference Con's work around the "5 Moments of Learning Need". Clearly upgrade learning falls within the "When things change" or "When things go wrong" categories. If you look at most e-learning or upgrade courses they still take a "learning for the first time" or "learning more" approach. Candidly, upgrade learning is often neither of these. Upgrade learning requires "unlearning".
You may have heard Con tell the story about being driven to the Atlanta airport after completing some work with a client. He quickly struck up a conversation with his driver and in no time they were having a grand old time. After a good amount of time, Con mentioned to the person driving that he didn't see any planes in the air and asked how close they were to the airport. The fellow promptly hit his breaks and announced, "I'm almost to my house!!". Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever arrived home and can't remember the last 5 turns you took to get there? This is a principle of learning theory called automaticity. Things that we do over and over can become so engrained in our skill set that we begin performing without conscious thought. Such is the life of most software end-users today. For example, much of what we do in Microsoft Word has become so "automated" that we barely think about the action when performing it.
Unlearning automated skills is one or the most challenging types of learning. Traditional training approaches, including most e-Learning methodologies, aren't suited to meet this need. They are too removed from the moment of need to help a learner make the mental jump from how they used to do something to a new way of performing.
Enter Performance Support!! Performance Support is perfectly suited for upgrade learning. It lives in the last 3 moments of need - Apply/Remember, When things change, When things go wrong. The key here is its contextual nature, and the architecture in which good PS and PS Brokers are designed. As we've shared in an earlier posting on PS frameworks, well designed PS starts by introducing the steps and then escalates to more in-depth learning assets and resources. It also lives within the application and not behind an LMS or in a brick and mortar classroom. The combination of these two design elements make PS ideal for helping overcome automaticity and accelerating the adoption of upgrades. It has also been known to significantly lower support calls during these often stressful times for learners.
With some major upgrades on the horizon (Window 7 and Office 2010 just to name a few) we as learning professional need to equip those we serve with the most effective approaches to make these difficult transitions. We also owe it to our organizations to do this in the most cost effective way possible while, at the same time, helping our learners become as productive as we can as quickly as we can. Performance Support can meet all these needs if orchestrated well!
Back in 1987 I thought I would be teaching Lotus 1-2-3 forever! Who could ever need more then Lotus had to offer? And there was also a software product called Symphony, a Lotus product that came with all 3 technologies (a precursor to what we now know as the Microsoft Office suite). The technology was mind blowing, revolutionary, and it all fit in 128 K of RAM and on a 5.5" floppy disk (Remember those??) Wow, was I ever wrong - Nowadays the average shelf life of commercially sold software is somewhere between 6 months to a year. Somewhere in the early to mid-90's a new term was born: Upgrades!! As fewer and fewer "new" technology disciplines were launched software companies quickly learned that a majority of their money wasn't to be made through a new product launch, but rather through an endless stream of upgrades.
This shift impacted the learning industry. Gone were the days of filling our classrooms with newbies who were taking our "Intro to PC Literacy" courses. Now we had to shift our attention to "New Features" and upgrade classes. Eventually, it became harder and harder to fill even these classes. As the learner matured and grew, so did their intolerance for sitting in a classroom with 20 other strangers, or even colleagues, waiting to hear about a new feature they cared about.
Enter E-Learning, E-Learning initially did a nice job of stepping up to fill a much needed gap in the upgrade arena. It was cheaper than the classroom and was delivered to the desktop. What could be better? Well, even e-Learning has since struggled to meet the increasing upgrade demand. Learners have matured and become savvier on these applications. It is much more difficult to create an on-line course that meets the individual upgrade needs of today's demanding learners.
Another fundamental problem is in the overall design of these courses. Whether online or in the classroom, our instructional model hasen't adequately addressed the "moment of need" that emerged with accellerating upgrade cycles.. If you've followed our blog for any length of time, you have heard us repeatedly reference Con's work around the "5 Moments of Learning Need". Clearly upgrade learning falls within the "When things change" or "When things go wrong" categories. If you look at most e-learning or upgrade courses they still take a "learning for the first time" or "learning more" approach. Candidly, upgrade learning is often neither of these. Upgrade learning requires "unlearning".
You may have heard Con tell the story about being driven to the Atlanta airport after completing some work with a client. He quickly struck up a conversation with his driver and in no time they were having a grand old time. After a good amount of time, Con mentioned to the person driving that he didn't see any planes in the air and asked how close they were to the airport. The fellow promptly hit his breaks and announced, "I'm almost to my house!!". Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever arrived home and can't remember the last 5 turns you took to get there? This is a principle of learning theory called automaticity. Things that we do over and over can become so engrained in our skill set that we begin performing without conscious thought. Such is the life of most software end-users today. For example, much of what we do in Microsoft Word has become so "automated" that we barely think about the action when performing it.
Unlearning automated skills is one or the most challenging types of learning. Traditional training approaches, including most e-Learning methodologies, aren't suited to meet this need. They are too removed from the moment of need to help a learner make the mental jump from how they used to do something to a new way of performing.
Enter Performance Support!! Performance Support is perfectly suited for upgrade learning. It lives in the last 3 moments of need - Apply/Remember, When things change, When things go wrong. The key here is its contextual nature, and the architecture in which good PS and PS Brokers are designed. As we've shared in an earlier posting on PS frameworks, well designed PS starts by introducing the steps and then escalates to more in-depth learning assets and resources. It also lives within the application and not behind an LMS or in a brick and mortar classroom. The combination of these two design elements make PS ideal for helping overcome automaticity and accelerating the adoption of upgrades. It has also been known to significantly lower support calls during these often stressful times for learners.
With some major upgrades on the horizon (Window 7 and Office 2010 just to name a few) we as learning professional need to equip those we serve with the most effective approaches to make these difficult transitions. We also owe it to our organizations to do this in the most cost effective way possible while, at the same time, helping our learners become as productive as we can as quickly as we can. Performance Support can meet all these needs if orchestrated well!
Monday, February 8, 2010
THRIVING IN THE NEW NORMAL:
LEARNING ORIENTATION AND LEARNING AGILITY
By Magaret Martinez http://trainingplace.com/
In the previous blog, Timothy R. Clark and Conrad A. Gottfredson discussed how many businesses are struggling with achieving or maintaining competitive advantage. To help, they suggest that organizations should learn to pursue learning agility—the ability of an organization to learn at or above the speed of change—to sustain competiveness. In the Five-Factor Model of Organizational Learning Agility, they suggest that there are five primary factors that interact to promote or hinder learning agility within organizations. One of the factors, the second factor, is Learning Mindset, i.e., the prevailing assumptions, beliefs, and dispositions relating to the way people learn. As competitive environments increase in speed, complexity, and volatility, they propose that organizations and individuals need to move “towards a dynamic learning mindset. Dynamic learning is defined as rapid, adaptive, collaborative, and self-directed learning at the moment of need. The new mindset recognizes learning as the source of sustained competitive advantage in the context of a protean organization.”
A learner-centric culture has never been more important to organizations than it is today and the most successful organizations have realized the criticality of supporting a “learn how to learn” environment. How to achieve this is an obvious next question. To help employees learn in a rapidly changing environment is first to understand how people learn and especially how people expect and want to learn differently.
To explore this question, let’s look at student data captured over the past few years. Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson, the faculty, have been offering their Performance Support Lab and Seminar offered by the Masie Center. Participants are generally training leaders and instructional developers who are seeking new ways to improve, particularly in the area of performance support. A critical goal for them is achieving a high performance workforce in times of rapid change.
Before the seminar, each participant takes the Learning Orientation Questionnaire (LOQ), described below. The LOQ is based on three factors that consider the level of the learner’s emotional investment in learning and performance, strategic self-directedness and independence or autonomy. Scores help the faculty examine individual differences in their learning audience. High scores indicate learners are more successful in the learning domain and demonstrate use of sophisticated learning skills, e.g., holistic thinking, problem-solving, non-verbal and creativity skills. High scorers typically seek complex, exploratory challenges, are self-motivated, autonomous, self-directed and comfortable with change and setting and achieving long-term goals. In contrast, low scores identify learners that are less sophisticated, less self-motivated and less autonomous and more risk and change aversive. One hundred and eighteen participants have taken the LOQ and their scores are shown here in the graph below.
Clearly, those who are choosing to attend the Performance Support Lab and Seminar are high LOQ scorers (3.5 and higher), like to learn and are seeking ways to provide better learning and performance solutions.
The LOQ uses the learning orientation research and recent advances in the neurosciences to describe learning orientations or dispositions to learn. The learning orientation research explores the theoretical and neuroscience foundations for understanding sources for individual differences in learning. Neurosciences in the last ten years have revealed the extraordinary complexities of brain activity and multiple aspects influencing thinking processes. These theories highlight more than the cognitive element, they explore the sometimes dominant power of emotions, intentions and socialization on learning, performance, memory, and decision making.
What do these scores mean? LOQ scores offer explanations for individual differences in learning, communication, and performance, including expectations, beliefs, preferences, strategies, skills, values, and approaches. In this data set, the 3.5 scores describe high performing learners and the 4.0 scores describe transforming learners.
High Performing Learners are assertive, persistent, low-maintenance, skilled learners that rationally, systematically, and capably use psychological processes, strategies, preferences, and self-regulated learning skills to achieve challenging learning objectives and tasks. They like to focus on process, principle, details, task completion and the right steps towards attaining critical, worthwhile goals. These learners take responsibility and control of their learning and become actively involved in managing the learning process. These learners will avoid situations that provide highly structured, non-discovery, low learner-controlled environments, explicit guidance, and low-standard achievement. In contrast to transforming learners, high performing learners are not as theoretical or passionate, committed or persistent about all learning. They are more selective about how hard they work and on which learning goals. To improve learning agility, performing learners should acquire more abstract and holistic thinking, strategic planning, change management and long-term goal setting skills.
Transforming Learners deliberately use personal strengths, deep desires, strong emotions, persistent and assertive effort, and sophisticated, abstract or holistic thinking ability and strategies to self-manage learning successfully. They enjoy talking about new concepts, exploring new ideas, taking the initiative and risk, and making mistakes to attain greater expertise. They aggressively take responsibility and control of their learning and become actively involved in managing the learning process. They use stimulating beliefs and emotions, e.g., motivation, passion, personal principles, and desires for high, challenging standards towards high-effort achievement of challenging personal goals. They also are assertive, low maintenance learners that learn best in environments that encourage and support: risk-taking experiences; mentoring relationships; self-directed learning; complex, problem-solving situations; and transformative goals. They too will avoid situations that provide highly structured, non-discovery, low learner-controlled environments, explicit guidance, and low-standard achievement. To improve learning agility, transforming learners will learn greater discipline, consider details, ensure accuracy, efficiency, reliability and task and project completion and learn to communicate in a less theoretical, more practical manner.
Conforming, performing and resistant learner orientations are also shown in the data sample in much fewer numbers. These learners are less ready to embrace learning, change and improvement with eagerness, independence or passion. While, research in the neurosciences has shown that neuronal structure and activation (brain plasticity) can change in response to experiences and learning opportunities, these learners need the resources to help them change, especially with reasons, roles, models and guidance for change.
Learning agility is a process of change and continual, committed persistent efforts towards improvement. When trainers or teachers are striving to support better learning agility, they must consider the gap between the dynamic mindset that exists and what needs to exist in their learning audience. The learn-to-learn domain of their audience needs to be analyzed and areas of improvement need to be identified. The learning audience for today’s workforce must be much better at rapidly scanning, finding, synthesizing, collaborating, reflecting, innovating and producing or reproducing. Learning agility for an organization is limited if these skills do not exist or are not supported in their workforce. Trainers and teachers can close these learn-to-learn gaps, by strategically infusing informal learning, non-formal and formal learning opportunities with more sophisticated learn-to-learn skills that are too often taken for granted, including holistic thinking, creativity, problem-solving and critical thinking. Closing the gaps is not an easy task, but understanding how learners learn differently and knowing that all learners can improve with the right support and motivation can ease the challenge.
As we get better at understanding the learn-to-learn domain, we can get better at supporting the learning mindsets of our learners and improving learning agility across the organization.
Available Resources.
If readers would like to take the Learning Orientation Questionnaire (LOQ), they can use the following access code: LJ230306QD to sign in as a new user at: http://training.trainingplace.com/loq/.
This limited free offer will be available for one month.
After taking the LOQ, they can find their LOQ scores, interpretations for their scores and their learn-to-learn domain, and links that offer strategies and interventions for improving learning agility at: http://www.trainingplace.com/loq/strategies.htm.
By Magaret Martinez http://trainingplace.com/
In the previous blog, Timothy R. Clark and Conrad A. Gottfredson discussed how many businesses are struggling with achieving or maintaining competitive advantage. To help, they suggest that organizations should learn to pursue learning agility—the ability of an organization to learn at or above the speed of change—to sustain competiveness. In the Five-Factor Model of Organizational Learning Agility, they suggest that there are five primary factors that interact to promote or hinder learning agility within organizations. One of the factors, the second factor, is Learning Mindset, i.e., the prevailing assumptions, beliefs, and dispositions relating to the way people learn. As competitive environments increase in speed, complexity, and volatility, they propose that organizations and individuals need to move “towards a dynamic learning mindset. Dynamic learning is defined as rapid, adaptive, collaborative, and self-directed learning at the moment of need. The new mindset recognizes learning as the source of sustained competitive advantage in the context of a protean organization.”
A learner-centric culture has never been more important to organizations than it is today and the most successful organizations have realized the criticality of supporting a “learn how to learn” environment. How to achieve this is an obvious next question. To help employees learn in a rapidly changing environment is first to understand how people learn and especially how people expect and want to learn differently.
To explore this question, let’s look at student data captured over the past few years. Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson, the faculty, have been offering their Performance Support Lab and Seminar offered by the Masie Center. Participants are generally training leaders and instructional developers who are seeking new ways to improve, particularly in the area of performance support. A critical goal for them is achieving a high performance workforce in times of rapid change.
Before the seminar, each participant takes the Learning Orientation Questionnaire (LOQ), described below. The LOQ is based on three factors that consider the level of the learner’s emotional investment in learning and performance, strategic self-directedness and independence or autonomy. Scores help the faculty examine individual differences in their learning audience. High scores indicate learners are more successful in the learning domain and demonstrate use of sophisticated learning skills, e.g., holistic thinking, problem-solving, non-verbal and creativity skills. High scorers typically seek complex, exploratory challenges, are self-motivated, autonomous, self-directed and comfortable with change and setting and achieving long-term goals. In contrast, low scores identify learners that are less sophisticated, less self-motivated and less autonomous and more risk and change aversive. One hundred and eighteen participants have taken the LOQ and their scores are shown here in the graph below.
Clearly, those who are choosing to attend the Performance Support Lab and Seminar are high LOQ scorers (3.5 and higher), like to learn and are seeking ways to provide better learning and performance solutions.
The LOQ uses the learning orientation research and recent advances in the neurosciences to describe learning orientations or dispositions to learn. The learning orientation research explores the theoretical and neuroscience foundations for understanding sources for individual differences in learning. Neurosciences in the last ten years have revealed the extraordinary complexities of brain activity and multiple aspects influencing thinking processes. These theories highlight more than the cognitive element, they explore the sometimes dominant power of emotions, intentions and socialization on learning, performance, memory, and decision making.
What do these scores mean? LOQ scores offer explanations for individual differences in learning, communication, and performance, including expectations, beliefs, preferences, strategies, skills, values, and approaches. In this data set, the 3.5 scores describe high performing learners and the 4.0 scores describe transforming learners.
High Performing Learners are assertive, persistent, low-maintenance, skilled learners that rationally, systematically, and capably use psychological processes, strategies, preferences, and self-regulated learning skills to achieve challenging learning objectives and tasks. They like to focus on process, principle, details, task completion and the right steps towards attaining critical, worthwhile goals. These learners take responsibility and control of their learning and become actively involved in managing the learning process. These learners will avoid situations that provide highly structured, non-discovery, low learner-controlled environments, explicit guidance, and low-standard achievement. In contrast to transforming learners, high performing learners are not as theoretical or passionate, committed or persistent about all learning. They are more selective about how hard they work and on which learning goals. To improve learning agility, performing learners should acquire more abstract and holistic thinking, strategic planning, change management and long-term goal setting skills.
Transforming Learners deliberately use personal strengths, deep desires, strong emotions, persistent and assertive effort, and sophisticated, abstract or holistic thinking ability and strategies to self-manage learning successfully. They enjoy talking about new concepts, exploring new ideas, taking the initiative and risk, and making mistakes to attain greater expertise. They aggressively take responsibility and control of their learning and become actively involved in managing the learning process. They use stimulating beliefs and emotions, e.g., motivation, passion, personal principles, and desires for high, challenging standards towards high-effort achievement of challenging personal goals. They also are assertive, low maintenance learners that learn best in environments that encourage and support: risk-taking experiences; mentoring relationships; self-directed learning; complex, problem-solving situations; and transformative goals. They too will avoid situations that provide highly structured, non-discovery, low learner-controlled environments, explicit guidance, and low-standard achievement. To improve learning agility, transforming learners will learn greater discipline, consider details, ensure accuracy, efficiency, reliability and task and project completion and learn to communicate in a less theoretical, more practical manner.
Conforming, performing and resistant learner orientations are also shown in the data sample in much fewer numbers. These learners are less ready to embrace learning, change and improvement with eagerness, independence or passion. While, research in the neurosciences has shown that neuronal structure and activation (brain plasticity) can change in response to experiences and learning opportunities, these learners need the resources to help them change, especially with reasons, roles, models and guidance for change.
Learning agility is a process of change and continual, committed persistent efforts towards improvement. When trainers or teachers are striving to support better learning agility, they must consider the gap between the dynamic mindset that exists and what needs to exist in their learning audience. The learn-to-learn domain of their audience needs to be analyzed and areas of improvement need to be identified. The learning audience for today’s workforce must be much better at rapidly scanning, finding, synthesizing, collaborating, reflecting, innovating and producing or reproducing. Learning agility for an organization is limited if these skills do not exist or are not supported in their workforce. Trainers and teachers can close these learn-to-learn gaps, by strategically infusing informal learning, non-formal and formal learning opportunities with more sophisticated learn-to-learn skills that are too often taken for granted, including holistic thinking, creativity, problem-solving and critical thinking. Closing the gaps is not an easy task, but understanding how learners learn differently and knowing that all learners can improve with the right support and motivation can ease the challenge.
As we get better at understanding the learn-to-learn domain, we can get better at supporting the learning mindsets of our learners and improving learning agility across the organization.
Available Resources.
If readers would like to take the Learning Orientation Questionnaire (LOQ), they can use the following access code: LJ230306QD to sign in as a new user at: http://training.trainingplace.com/loq/.
This limited free offer will be available for one month.
After taking the LOQ, they can find their LOQ scores, interpretations for their scores and their learn-to-learn domain, and links that offer strategies and interventions for improving learning agility at: http://www.trainingplace.com/loq/strategies.htm.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
THRIVING IN THE NEW NORMAL:
THE FIVE FACTORS OF LEARNING AGILITY
At stake is the fundamental capacity of organizations to adapt to rapidly changing conditions—and do it again and again. It’s becoming increasingly clear that strategy will not save us. As the span of competitive advantage shortens, strategy cycles come more frequently. Whatever competitive advantage an organization enjoys today is melting away. The only question is the rate of the melt.
How can organizations sustain competiveness? We believe the answer is found in the pursuit of learning agility—the ability of an organization to learn at or above the speed of change. Organizations must accelerate knowledge cycles to keep pace with competitive cycles.
Organizational learning agility is an enterprise capability that requires deliberate and systematic design, including essential cultural, structural, process and technology support elements. Based on our research, there are five primary factors that interact to promote or hinder learning agility within organizations.
Figure: The Five-Factor Model of Organizational Learning Agility
The first factor is the intelligence function, which is intended to be the distant early warning system and interpreter of the outside world to the organization. Some organizations approach business intelligence-gathering in a systematic way. Most are haphazard and ad hoc. Regardless of the configuration and maturity of the intelligence function, it is critically tied to the learning agility of an organization.
To move to a high level of learning agility, organizations must establish a comprehensive, balanced, and systematic process for gathering, integrating, and interpreting intelligence from a variety of intelligence domains that bear on the competitive position of the organization. They must have an established framework and logic to help them organize, prioritize, and inform the organization. Finally, there must be direct communication and coordination among the intelligence function, the strategy function, and the learning function. Otherwise, the learning function will be blind-sided with unforeseen events and no time to respond. It will remain a tactical, passive, and uninformed business partner.
Factor 2: The Learning Mindset
The second factor in the five-factor model is the organization’s prevailing learning mindset. The dominant learning mindset across organizations is undergoing a second major shift since the postwar period. For centuries permanent learning was the prevailing model, which envisioned “one-time learning for permanent qualification.” As markets became more turbulent, learners gradually embraced a continuous learning mindset as a response to relentless disruption and skills obsolescence. It was during this time that the notion of the learning organization came into currency. Today, organizations find themselves in the midst of a second major transition. As competitive environments increase in speed, complexity, and volatility, organizations and individuals are compelled toward a dynamic learning mindset. Dynamic learning is defined as rapid, adaptive, collaborative, and self-directed learning at the moment of need. The new mindset recognizes learning as the source of sustained competitive advantage in the context of a protean organization.
As organizations move toward dynamic learning, they face a number of challenges. For example, employees across every demographic cohort demonstrate a general need for guidance in the use of social networking and digital media as learning tools. Many fall into patterns of inefficiency and ineffectiveness, and need help avoiding super saturation, working memory overload, non-productive learning, or irrelevant learning.
Learning leaders should consider more carefully the return-on-instruction for teaching employees how to develop skills for problem definition, scoping, searching, filtering, integrating, and interpreting to replace the unguided, free flow, and stream-of-consciousness patterns that prevail among employees. It may be time for learning organizations to take a step back and offer new “learn how to learn” solutions to help employees learn in the digital environment. Even Millennials, who are natural swimmers in social networking and digital media, don’t necessarily know how to learn in the domain. Swimming and learning are not necessarily the same thing.
Factor 3: Leadership Behavior
The third factor is leadership behavior, which we define as the dominant patters of leadership within an organization. The new behavioral requirement is shifting from knowledge and skills to the ability to acquire knowledge and skills. Competence is becoming a matter of individual dynamic learning. Not surprisingly, the new requirement can be personally threatening and psychologically unsafe for many leaders who have operated on the leader-as-expert model for so many years.
Leaders must stand first in line to model patterns of high performance learning. This requires a very different emotional and social posture. Leaders must become comfortable portraying themselves as competent by virtue of their ability to learn and adapt rather than on the basis of their current knowledge and skills. The new environment requires a level of humility and curiosity that is simply alien to most traditional conceptions of leadership. Ironically, leaders are being challenged to develop and engender confidence in the very act of their not knowing. Leaders need to be able to acknowledge publicly when reality moves beyond their knowledge and skills, and do so based on their demonstrated ability to learn and adapt. They must be submissive to the fact that they will pass through periods of temporary incompetence as they move through learning and change cycles. But they will do so based on their underlying ability and willingness to learn. What’s different today is that credibility is based on personifying the qualities of a high performance learner more than those of an expert.
Indeed, we are starting to see the emergence of a new kind of leader. It may in fact be the biggest shift in emphasis in leadership development theory in several decades. As a pattern, the new leader is exceptionally attuned to the changing environment and the perishable nature of competitive advantage. Because of this ongoing acknowledgement, the new leader is less wedded to trappings of status and privilege, less ego-driven, less yearning for deference, and certainly less attached to the status quo. Instead, dynamic learning leaders are more concerned with understanding the changing ecology of their organizations and protecting the value the organization has created through a vigilance and readiness to learn and adapt. The leader understands that learning is where advantage comes from, that it represents the highest form of enterprise risk management, and that the biggest risk a firm can take is to cease to learn. It seems increasingly clear that leaders who don’t possess deep patterns of aggressive and self-directed learning in their dispositions are almost certain to fail, whereas the ones who do are almost certain to succeed, provided, however, they combine those learning patterns with the ability to engage people.
Factor 4: Organizational Support
The fourth factor is organizational support. High agility organizations support learners at all five moments of learning need:
There are other critical aspects of organizational support. Learning agility is a co-creative process that springs from richly enabled interactions within and beyond the organization. There must be a process-oriented view of the business as a whole rather than fragmented sets of siloed activities.
In addition, highly agile organizations embrace collaborative learning and apply effectively the collective knowledge and skills within and even beyond their borders. Collective knowledge and skills encompass not only what is resident and evolving within people, but also all that has been captured and stored along the way, made and kept useful in a form that is immediately accessible and adaptive to individual needs.
Factor 5: Technical Support (Learning Technology)
The fifth and final factor is technical support. As organizations step into a full-out pursuit of learning agility, they must guard against being techno-dazzled, and instead pursue learning technology as a means to enable the previous four factors. In spite of the lost paths that many organizations pursue, there is promising news.
The learning technology market is finally turning serious attention to the informal side of learning. In response, performance support, authoring, delivery, and brokering tools are going mainstream. In addition, performer-generated content through social networking is extending performance support capacity in response to the widespread need for fingertip knowledge support.
Learning Content Management is also reasserting itself in the form of multi-channel publishing from single-sourced, metadata-enriched content. Other broader knowledge management technologies and practices are beginning to wrap around these LCM systems, enhancing the ability to capture, store, manage, and maximize the usefulness of content capital.
Other types of technology that accelerate collaborative work are integrating as mashups, further disallowing structure, aggregating human capability, and harnessing innovation and value out of what, at a tactical level, is a chaotic creative process.
And as Web 2.0 tools and systems continue to integrate, orchestrate, and extend across the traditional siloed boundaries within and beyond the formal structures and firewalls of organizations, they will continue to enhance but not drive learning agility.
All of this reflects a beginning of what technology can and is doing to help organizations learn at or above the speed of change. The key, here, is to apply these technologies to this vital mission.
The Pursuit of Learning Agility
Two decades ago, Peter Senge challenged organizations to develop the capacity to learn and adapt quickly. Most leaders acknowledged his point, but did very little to make the learning organization a reality. In the meantime, markets have become more unforgiving. The good news is that leading companies are making significant gains in various aspects of learning agility. However, few are excelling in all five factors. There simply isn’t a more important leadership challenge today than to move an organization to higher levels of learning agility. For learning leaders, the call to action is clear. A seat at the table is available for those who are prepared to meet this challenge and thrive in the new normal.
Note: The following is a reprint of an article written by Timothy R. Clark and Conrad A. Gottfredson. We include it in this blog because Performer Support is a core contributor to organizational learning agility.Organizations have reason to ponder their mortality these days. A few short months ago, a financial tsunami hit the United States. The rippling effect sent the economy reeling into a recession second only in magnitude to the Great Depression. Out of the wreckage a permanently altered reality—a new normal—has emerged. Organizations now compete in faster, more complex, and more volatile markets. And casualties are mounting. Consider that six of the top ten bankruptcies in US history have occurred since September of last year. Those six corporations had a combined asset value of over $1.25 trillion. What’s more, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reports that corporate bankruptcy filings have doubled in the past twelve months. We’re not out of the woods.
At stake is the fundamental capacity of organizations to adapt to rapidly changing conditions—and do it again and again. It’s becoming increasingly clear that strategy will not save us. As the span of competitive advantage shortens, strategy cycles come more frequently. Whatever competitive advantage an organization enjoys today is melting away. The only question is the rate of the melt.
How can organizations sustain competiveness? We believe the answer is found in the pursuit of learning agility—the ability of an organization to learn at or above the speed of change. Organizations must accelerate knowledge cycles to keep pace with competitive cycles.
Organizational learning agility is an enterprise capability that requires deliberate and systematic design, including essential cultural, structural, process and technology support elements. Based on our research, there are five primary factors that interact to promote or hinder learning agility within organizations.
Figure: The Five-Factor Model of Organizational Learning Agility
- Intelligence Function— The capacity of an organization to survey and interpret its entire business ecosystem, including the internal competitive environment and the external competitive environment. The intelligence function interprets information and feeds the strategy function, which feeds the learning function.
- Learning Mindset—The prevailing assumptions, beliefs, and dispositions relating to the way people learn.
- Leadership Behavior—The dominant patterns of leadership within an organization.
- Organizational Support—The processes, systems, structures, and other forms of support that organizations provide to help employees in their formal and informal learning and execution activities.
- Learning Technology—The forms of technology employed to enable learning at individual and organizational levels.
The first factor is the intelligence function, which is intended to be the distant early warning system and interpreter of the outside world to the organization. Some organizations approach business intelligence-gathering in a systematic way. Most are haphazard and ad hoc. Regardless of the configuration and maturity of the intelligence function, it is critically tied to the learning agility of an organization.
The second factor in the five-factor model is the organization’s prevailing learning mindset. The dominant learning mindset across organizations is undergoing a second major shift since the postwar period. For centuries permanent learning was the prevailing model, which envisioned “one-time learning for permanent qualification.” As markets became more turbulent, learners gradually embraced a continuous learning mindset as a response to relentless disruption and skills obsolescence. It was during this time that the notion of the learning organization came into currency. Today, organizations find themselves in the midst of a second major transition. As competitive environments increase in speed, complexity, and volatility, organizations and individuals are compelled toward a dynamic learning mindset. Dynamic learning is defined as rapid, adaptive, collaborative, and self-directed learning at the moment of need. The new mindset recognizes learning as the source of sustained competitive advantage in the context of a protean organization.
As organizations move toward dynamic learning, they face a number of challenges. For example, employees across every demographic cohort demonstrate a general need for guidance in the use of social networking and digital media as learning tools. Many fall into patterns of inefficiency and ineffectiveness, and need help avoiding super saturation, working memory overload, non-productive learning, or irrelevant learning.
Learning leaders should consider more carefully the return-on-instruction for teaching employees how to develop skills for problem definition, scoping, searching, filtering, integrating, and interpreting to replace the unguided, free flow, and stream-of-consciousness patterns that prevail among employees. It may be time for learning organizations to take a step back and offer new “learn how to learn” solutions to help employees learn in the digital environment. Even Millennials, who are natural swimmers in social networking and digital media, don’t necessarily know how to learn in the domain. Swimming and learning are not necessarily the same thing.
Factor 3: Leadership Behavior
The third factor is leadership behavior, which we define as the dominant patters of leadership within an organization. The new behavioral requirement is shifting from knowledge and skills to the ability to acquire knowledge and skills. Competence is becoming a matter of individual dynamic learning. Not surprisingly, the new requirement can be personally threatening and psychologically unsafe for many leaders who have operated on the leader-as-expert model for so many years.
Leaders must stand first in line to model patterns of high performance learning. This requires a very different emotional and social posture. Leaders must become comfortable portraying themselves as competent by virtue of their ability to learn and adapt rather than on the basis of their current knowledge and skills. The new environment requires a level of humility and curiosity that is simply alien to most traditional conceptions of leadership. Ironically, leaders are being challenged to develop and engender confidence in the very act of their not knowing. Leaders need to be able to acknowledge publicly when reality moves beyond their knowledge and skills, and do so based on their demonstrated ability to learn and adapt. They must be submissive to the fact that they will pass through periods of temporary incompetence as they move through learning and change cycles. But they will do so based on their underlying ability and willingness to learn. What’s different today is that credibility is based on personifying the qualities of a high performance learner more than those of an expert.
Indeed, we are starting to see the emergence of a new kind of leader. It may in fact be the biggest shift in emphasis in leadership development theory in several decades. As a pattern, the new leader is exceptionally attuned to the changing environment and the perishable nature of competitive advantage. Because of this ongoing acknowledgement, the new leader is less wedded to trappings of status and privilege, less ego-driven, less yearning for deference, and certainly less attached to the status quo. Instead, dynamic learning leaders are more concerned with understanding the changing ecology of their organizations and protecting the value the organization has created through a vigilance and readiness to learn and adapt. The leader understands that learning is where advantage comes from, that it represents the highest form of enterprise risk management, and that the biggest risk a firm can take is to cease to learn. It seems increasingly clear that leaders who don’t possess deep patterns of aggressive and self-directed learning in their dispositions are almost certain to fail, whereas the ones who do are almost certain to succeed, provided, however, they combine those learning patterns with the ability to engage people.
The fourth factor is organizational support. High agility organizations support learners at all five moments of learning need:
- Learning how to do something new for the first time.
- Learning more based on prior learning experience.
- Learning at the moment when learners apply what they have learned in the context of workflow.
- Learning when things change in order to adapt to new ways of doing things.
- Learning when things go wrong in order to solve a problem.
There are other critical aspects of organizational support. Learning agility is a co-creative process that springs from richly enabled interactions within and beyond the organization. There must be a process-oriented view of the business as a whole rather than fragmented sets of siloed activities.
In addition, highly agile organizations embrace collaborative learning and apply effectively the collective knowledge and skills within and even beyond their borders. Collective knowledge and skills encompass not only what is resident and evolving within people, but also all that has been captured and stored along the way, made and kept useful in a form that is immediately accessible and adaptive to individual needs.
Factor 5: Technical Support (Learning Technology)
The fifth and final factor is technical support. As organizations step into a full-out pursuit of learning agility, they must guard against being techno-dazzled, and instead pursue learning technology as a means to enable the previous four factors. In spite of the lost paths that many organizations pursue, there is promising news.
The learning technology market is finally turning serious attention to the informal side of learning. In response, performance support, authoring, delivery, and brokering tools are going mainstream. In addition, performer-generated content through social networking is extending performance support capacity in response to the widespread need for fingertip knowledge support.
Learning Content Management is also reasserting itself in the form of multi-channel publishing from single-sourced, metadata-enriched content. Other broader knowledge management technologies and practices are beginning to wrap around these LCM systems, enhancing the ability to capture, store, manage, and maximize the usefulness of content capital.
Other types of technology that accelerate collaborative work are integrating as mashups, further disallowing structure, aggregating human capability, and harnessing innovation and value out of what, at a tactical level, is a chaotic creative process.
And as Web 2.0 tools and systems continue to integrate, orchestrate, and extend across the traditional siloed boundaries within and beyond the formal structures and firewalls of organizations, they will continue to enhance but not drive learning agility.
All of this reflects a beginning of what technology can and is doing to help organizations learn at or above the speed of change. The key, here, is to apply these technologies to this vital mission.
Two decades ago, Peter Senge challenged organizations to develop the capacity to learn and adapt quickly. Most leaders acknowledged his point, but did very little to make the learning organization a reality. In the meantime, markets have become more unforgiving. The good news is that leading companies are making significant gains in various aspects of learning agility. However, few are excelling in all five factors. There simply isn’t a more important leadership challenge today than to move an organization to higher levels of learning agility. For learning leaders, the call to action is clear. A seat at the table is available for those who are prepared to meet this challenge and thrive in the new normal.
Monday, January 18, 2010
New Year's Resolutions
I’ve always been a big New Year’s resolution guy. I’m not sure why I don’t muster up the same determination and focus throughout the year, but there’s something about that “clean slate” feeling of turning another page in the calendar to get me going. Although 2009 CLEARLY had its challenges, it was an amazing year for Performer Support and the growth of this community. We doubled in size and now have over 600 member companies visiting the site on a fairly regular basis. The conversations and energy around the many PS solutions occurring across this community are overwhelming. Both Con and I are anxious to see the many exciting things 2010 holds for this community and PS as a discipline. We both firmly believe that as we begin to come out of this recession that the training as we once knew it will never be the same, and are anticipating that PS will play a major role in how we serve our learners going forward.
With that said, I would like to share my Professional New Year’s Resolutions with you and see what you may be thinking about for 2010. PLEASE click on the comment “envelop” at the end of this post and add your two cents. We’d love to hear and share how this community sees training and Performer Support progressing in the upcoming calendar year.
New Year's Resolutions:
1. To continue to grow this community by over 500 new members this year. This may be a bit aggressiveJ but as the energy continues to grow we feel that this number is possible. Please feel free to invite any of your colleagues from within your company or those you know in your network. The more we add, the stronger and more helpful the community becomes. If you’d like to send them our email addresses so they can be added to the e-mailing list that would be fine.
2. Redesign and expand the PS Blog and community experience. Con and I have been hosting this blog for over 2 years now. Although we have enjoyed the dialogue, it’s time to take this discussion to a whole new level. We will be moving the blog to the NING platform in the first quarter of this year. This new technology platform will allow us to add other social networking capabilities which will enable us to serve each other better. We’d love to hear your feedback on what features/functionality you would like to see us add first. If you'd like to take our online survey please click here.
3. Explore, and continue to expand, new form factors such as mobile support – Having worked on a few mobile support projects in 2009, this platform seems to be perfectly positioned to play a strong role in performer support going forward. I’d like to see this community become a testing ground for the best ways and tools with which to deliver PS.
4. Single Source will explode in 2010 – Singe-Source publishing seems to be the tie that binds when it comes to effectively designing and integrating PS into an already vibrant learning strategy. Most organizations already use too many tools with redundant outputs and out-of-date content. Single-Source publishing has finally come of age and can do an amazing job of serving outputs for all 5 moments of need. I’m anxious to continue exploring this area and would love to see us share our collective experiences.
5. Elevate the moment of Apply – In these difficult economic times, and frankly any work environment I’ve ever known, the moment of Apply is where it all comes together. I would like to see the training/learning industry better recognize this all too critical moment of need for what it truly is and begin shifting our attention and efforts toward supporting it better. As a colleague of mine recently said, “If all we do isn’t about apply. Why even begin the journey”. For too many years we have been mired in formal instruction and helping our learner stall at only acquiring knowledge, or the first two moments of need. I hope we see 2010 as the year of Apply where we move beyond old models, tools, and strategies to an approach that is first and foremost performance driven, not simply knowledge driven.
Again, we’d love to hear your PS resolutions for 2010!! Please feel free to contribute a comment as we’ll post them to be shared across the community.
With that said, I would like to share my Professional New Year’s Resolutions with you and see what you may be thinking about for 2010. PLEASE click on the comment “envelop” at the end of this post and add your two cents. We’d love to hear and share how this community sees training and Performer Support progressing in the upcoming calendar year.
New Year's Resolutions:
1. To continue to grow this community by over 500 new members this year. This may be a bit aggressiveJ but as the energy continues to grow we feel that this number is possible. Please feel free to invite any of your colleagues from within your company or those you know in your network. The more we add, the stronger and more helpful the community becomes. If you’d like to send them our email addresses so they can be added to the e-mailing list that would be fine.
2. Redesign and expand the PS Blog and community experience. Con and I have been hosting this blog for over 2 years now. Although we have enjoyed the dialogue, it’s time to take this discussion to a whole new level. We will be moving the blog to the NING platform in the first quarter of this year. This new technology platform will allow us to add other social networking capabilities which will enable us to serve each other better. We’d love to hear your feedback on what features/functionality you would like to see us add first. If you'd like to take our online survey please click here.
3. Explore, and continue to expand, new form factors such as mobile support – Having worked on a few mobile support projects in 2009, this platform seems to be perfectly positioned to play a strong role in performer support going forward. I’d like to see this community become a testing ground for the best ways and tools with which to deliver PS.
4. Single Source will explode in 2010 – Singe-Source publishing seems to be the tie that binds when it comes to effectively designing and integrating PS into an already vibrant learning strategy. Most organizations already use too many tools with redundant outputs and out-of-date content. Single-Source publishing has finally come of age and can do an amazing job of serving outputs for all 5 moments of need. I’m anxious to continue exploring this area and would love to see us share our collective experiences.
5. Elevate the moment of Apply – In these difficult economic times, and frankly any work environment I’ve ever known, the moment of Apply is where it all comes together. I would like to see the training/learning industry better recognize this all too critical moment of need for what it truly is and begin shifting our attention and efforts toward supporting it better. As a colleague of mine recently said, “If all we do isn’t about apply. Why even begin the journey”. For too many years we have been mired in formal instruction and helping our learner stall at only acquiring knowledge, or the first two moments of need. I hope we see 2010 as the year of Apply where we move beyond old models, tools, and strategies to an approach that is first and foremost performance driven, not simply knowledge driven.
Again, we’d love to hear your PS resolutions for 2010!! Please feel free to contribute a comment as we’ll post them to be shared across the community.
Monday, January 4, 2010
When Things Go Wrong
IT’S BEST TO “SOLVE” WITH SELF -SUPPORT AND COLLABORATION
One of the realities of life is that things don’t always work the way they’re supposed to work; life doesn’t always happen according to a script. And sometimes, in our rapid pursuit of doing what we need to do we make the wrong turn and experience those unique learning moments called road blocks or even failure. In the New Normal, it isn’t enough to know how to do something correctly, it is also vital to be able to diagnose and solve problems that happen along the way. The situations we call “problems” can be caused by unforeseen circumstances, other people, and ourselves. Regardless of the source, these moments of “Solve” require diagnostic skills coupled with performance support.
The traditional organizational bandage for solving problems that arise in the workflow are “help desks” and sometimes intentionally created support networks—both backed by capable troubleshooters. When life was copasetic with only a few twists or turns along the way, this may have been a sufficient solution. But, today, this model, alone, absolutely won’t solve the “solving” challenge.
The New Normal has shifted the definition of competence from simply applying knowledge and skills to continually acquiring and adapting knowledge and skills. Competence is now a matter of individual learning agility and the moments of “Solve” are prime contributors to the agility challenge.
Learners, today, must be comfortable in their ability to “Solve” unanticipated challenges. They must have confidence in the very act of not knowing. They must be disposed to face challenges beyond their current knowledge and skills. This confidence at these critical moments will come from:
It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. Albert Einstein
Leaders are problem solvers by talent and temperament, and by choice. Harlan Cleveland
The traditional organizational bandage for solving problems that arise in the workflow are “help desks” and sometimes intentionally created support networks—both backed by capable troubleshooters. When life was copasetic with only a few twists or turns along the way, this may have been a sufficient solution. But, today, this model, alone, absolutely won’t solve the “solving” challenge.
The New Normal has shifted the definition of competence from simply applying knowledge and skills to continually acquiring and adapting knowledge and skills. Competence is now a matter of individual learning agility and the moments of “Solve” are prime contributors to the agility challenge.
Learners, today, must be comfortable in their ability to “Solve” unanticipated challenges. They must have confidence in the very act of not knowing. They must be disposed to face challenges beyond their current knowledge and skills. This confidence at these critical moments will come from:
- A performer support infrastructure that has anticipated their needs at the moment of solve
- The training they have received to engage those tools in solving problems,
- The on-the-job successes they have along the way
- Organizational acceptance of failed attempts that may happen in the process
In addition, microblogging technologies provide remarkable opportunity for instantaneous access to the collective wisdom within and beyond the organizations we serve. Immediate collaboration at the moment of “Solve” combined with the capacity of individuals to resolve the core challenges that come their way are the scalable resources help desks need to meet the demands of the New Normal – a work environment in the state of constant flux.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Reflections on 2009: Who Would Have Thought??
To borrow the opening line from Charles Dickens’ classic novel Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”. I’m not sure if we could find 12 better words to describe my thoughts when reflecting on the past calendar year. It will be interesting to see how historians recall 2009, but we think it’s safe to say that it will be remembered as a wild one on almost every level. Clearly, to say that these have been difficult economic times is an understatement for many. Most every company we’ve worked with or spoken to this year has been impacted by the current economic climate. With budget issues in the corporate boardroom, there can’t help but be budget issues in the corporate classroom. The interesting thing to have watched was how the learning community, and its leaders, has reacted to the requests which came their way.
One almost universal comment we’ve heard from the CLO’s and training directors we’ve spoken with is that they are busier then they have ever been. With difficult times, come interesting measures. Even though many companies have experienced cut-backs of some kind, the learning department has had to be creative in how they continue to support and, in many cases, reeducate the people who remain. Many learning leaders are also challenged with how their departments will be structured and the type of services they will provide once things turn around and they begin rehiring again. The encouraging news is that we have begun to hear more and more positive news regarding things stabilizing, if not picking up again, which is reinforcing the thought that hopefully some type of economic recovery is underway.
The interesting thing about the Dickens quote is that it clearly states that although these are difficult times, they can also be our best! When things turn around training budgets and approaches will never be the same again, and that may not be a bad thing. These times have forced training professionals to be creative in their offerings, think outside their conventional approaches, and really examine the merit of every program they offer. This has created some incredibly exciting trends with some very powerful outcomes. We would like to share a few here.
Well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s reads this blog has heard us speak, but it’s very exciting to see Performance Support (PS) finally getting the attention it has long deserved! With all that’s outlined above, learning departments are seriously looking at their impact on performance, NOT just training, and PS is stepping up as a very powerful, effective, and economical solution to that need.
Another trend we’ve been watching is the emergence of single-source publishing. Our journey into “Reusable Learning Objects” back in the 1990’s was met by many challenges, both from a technical and a design standpoint. The dream of authoring once and publishing too many outputs just wasn’t actualized for most. The exciting news is that with the emergence of more sophisticated and user friendly XML authoring tools we’ve seen tremendous up serge in this powerful and cost efficient methodology. Now learning departments are maintaining content in one place and publishing that content in outputs such as a manual in the classroom, an electronic performance support tool on the desktop, a SCORM compliant e-Learning course behind an LMS, and even as a mobile learning object on a Blackberry, iPhone, or Windows mobile device. Not only is there an economy of scale here, but the consistency across the learning experience and all moments of need is powerful. One of the biggest gains achieved with this approach is in the back-end maintenance of the content. Gone are the days of chasing redundant content across multiple tools and outputs. In this approach you simply change the original source content, republish, and the change is reflected across all the modalities outlined above.
Finally, the strongest trend which surrounds all this is that learning groups are finally leaving their all to familiar world of just supporting formal instruction and are being seen as vital across the enterprise at all 5 moments of learning. Their ability to show direct business impact and ROI is being accomplished in ways rarely achieved before. This is particularly important when we’re living in a time when budgets and “wasteful spending” is being watched like never before. Once the learning department moves toward directly impacting the bottom line by aligning itself with performance and not just training, it becomes a need to have not a nice to have. This is something our industry has been asking for as long as we’ve been associated with it, and it’s exciting to see us finally being able to address that challenge.
What many don’t know is that the next line which follows Dickens’ famous quote is “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness”. We believe that 2009 will be remembered as the age of wisdom within our industry. We will look back on this year as a time when we stepped up and actually did what we have always asked of our students, we learned and became wiser! And in doing so we have turned a corner in our ability to serve the enterprise in ways we hadn’t dreamed of just a year to two ago. Here’s to a continuation of that wisdom well into 2010 and beyond.
Happy Holidays everyone! We couldn't have thought of a better community to have worked with throughout the year. We hope you found that being a part of all this has been of benefit to you and your organization. Thanks for joining us on the journey… Here's to a SAFE, SUCESSFUL, and Happy 2010!
One almost universal comment we’ve heard from the CLO’s and training directors we’ve spoken with is that they are busier then they have ever been. With difficult times, come interesting measures. Even though many companies have experienced cut-backs of some kind, the learning department has had to be creative in how they continue to support and, in many cases, reeducate the people who remain. Many learning leaders are also challenged with how their departments will be structured and the type of services they will provide once things turn around and they begin rehiring again. The encouraging news is that we have begun to hear more and more positive news regarding things stabilizing, if not picking up again, which is reinforcing the thought that hopefully some type of economic recovery is underway.
The interesting thing about the Dickens quote is that it clearly states that although these are difficult times, they can also be our best! When things turn around training budgets and approaches will never be the same again, and that may not be a bad thing. These times have forced training professionals to be creative in their offerings, think outside their conventional approaches, and really examine the merit of every program they offer. This has created some incredibly exciting trends with some very powerful outcomes. We would like to share a few here.
Well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s reads this blog has heard us speak, but it’s very exciting to see Performance Support (PS) finally getting the attention it has long deserved! With all that’s outlined above, learning departments are seriously looking at their impact on performance, NOT just training, and PS is stepping up as a very powerful, effective, and economical solution to that need.
Another trend we’ve been watching is the emergence of single-source publishing. Our journey into “Reusable Learning Objects” back in the 1990’s was met by many challenges, both from a technical and a design standpoint. The dream of authoring once and publishing too many outputs just wasn’t actualized for most. The exciting news is that with the emergence of more sophisticated and user friendly XML authoring tools we’ve seen tremendous up serge in this powerful and cost efficient methodology. Now learning departments are maintaining content in one place and publishing that content in outputs such as a manual in the classroom, an electronic performance support tool on the desktop, a SCORM compliant e-Learning course behind an LMS, and even as a mobile learning object on a Blackberry, iPhone, or Windows mobile device. Not only is there an economy of scale here, but the consistency across the learning experience and all moments of need is powerful. One of the biggest gains achieved with this approach is in the back-end maintenance of the content. Gone are the days of chasing redundant content across multiple tools and outputs. In this approach you simply change the original source content, republish, and the change is reflected across all the modalities outlined above.
Finally, the strongest trend which surrounds all this is that learning groups are finally leaving their all to familiar world of just supporting formal instruction and are being seen as vital across the enterprise at all 5 moments of learning. Their ability to show direct business impact and ROI is being accomplished in ways rarely achieved before. This is particularly important when we’re living in a time when budgets and “wasteful spending” is being watched like never before. Once the learning department moves toward directly impacting the bottom line by aligning itself with performance and not just training, it becomes a need to have not a nice to have. This is something our industry has been asking for as long as we’ve been associated with it, and it’s exciting to see us finally being able to address that challenge.
What many don’t know is that the next line which follows Dickens’ famous quote is “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness”. We believe that 2009 will be remembered as the age of wisdom within our industry. We will look back on this year as a time when we stepped up and actually did what we have always asked of our students, we learned and became wiser! And in doing so we have turned a corner in our ability to serve the enterprise in ways we hadn’t dreamed of just a year to two ago. Here’s to a continuation of that wisdom well into 2010 and beyond.
Happy Holidays everyone! We couldn't have thought of a better community to have worked with throughout the year. We hope you found that being a part of all this has been of benefit to you and your organization. Thanks for joining us on the journey… Here's to a SAFE, SUCESSFUL, and Happy 2010!
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The New Blend for the New Normal
Blending Formal and Informal Learning
The learning tradition of pre-modern society was for centuries defined by two enduring patterns. The first was informal learning in the form of on-the-job training. It was customary to apprentice young workers in the skilled trades by having them observe and work alongside competent craftsmen until they acquired enough knowledge and skill through experience to work independently. Here, learners learned in the workflow. The second pattern was that of formal learning in which a teacher pulled learners from the flow of their work and taught them through formal instruction. For centuries, society held to these two approaches: one experiential, the other didactic, and there seemed to be little impetus to change.
In the early 18th century, the arrival of the Industrial Revolution created major developments in agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing. Overtime organizations began to move away from the “apprentice” informal learning model to greater emphasis on formal training primarily using external resources and after-work hours. Gradually, formal training was brought into the organization and delivered during work time but completely removed from the workflow. Cognitive and behavioral psychology contributed to the formalization of training development and delivery. National associations emerged advancing training as a necessary part of organizational success.
The nature of training continued to evolve on the formal side. Basic skills training became supplemented by interpersonal skills and management training. Organizations who could afford it bought technology-facilitated media because of its promise of greater productivity in the workplace. The training function became more widely recognized as important, which led to a greater investment in formal training in the form of event-based courses
Eventually additional layers of organizational support emerged in an effort to support learners beyond their formal learning at their moment of apply. For the most part, this assistance consisted of support services (e.g., help desks), and publications. Support services picked up where training left off, often cultivating an environment of educational welfare where problems and needs were resolved with great proficiency, but often left those who had made help desk calls no more proficient after the call than they were before. Publication groups were charged with developing ongoing support solutions such as printed and electronic documentation and online help. Between support service groups and documentation groups, the informal learning needs within an organization were supposedly covered. But that was not the case. Informal learning, where it is estimated that 70 to 80 of all learning takes place, had gaping holes. Informal help networks flourished to fill the void where, too often, unconsciously incompetent workers helped others achieve the same status. And when someone demonstrated real competence, the less skilled would rob him or her of productive work time.
Today, the patterns of market disruption and accelerated change have become the new normal. And given the technological, economic, social, and political forces that drive the new environment, there is no evidence to suggest that organizations will somehow return to conditions of stability and equilibrium. The volatility and speed of the new era appears irreversible, which is tough news for leaders and organizations struggling to survive. Organizations confront increasing complexity in globalizing markets. They find themselves constantly challenged to learn and change, as Gary Hamel observes, “in a way for which they have no precedent.”
Google’s initial public offering on August 14, 2004, signaled the entrance and game-changing impact of web 2.0. Technologies such as wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, peer-production were not new at the time, but the Google offering coincided with the point at which virtual communities finally gained massive traction and scaled to orders of magnitude beyond anything of the past. Of course the internet was already heavily populated, but 2004 saw a select few websites consolidate anchor positions in a virtual land grab. The web presence of not only Google, but also YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Wikipedia, eBay, and Blogger.com created a force multiplier effect for social networking and mass collaboration.
These technological and environmental advancements have fostered the new millennial learning mindset and opened the door for blending formal learning with intentionally defined informal learning practices. Here’s one example of what this kind of blending looks like:
New Blend Example 1
In reality, the distinction between formal and informal learning should look more like this:
Formal Learning, of course, is what training groups have traditionally done—they build, deliver, and manage learning solutions to support organizational needs. The point of this blog is to make the case for broadening the scope of this work to embrace both formal and informal learning and to correlate these efforts with others whose charter plays in this same field (such as support services, technical publications, etc. In doing this, organizations establish a complete learning ecosystem.
The New Blend Example 2
It is readily apparent that there is a great amount of learning going on outside the formal structures we have so adeptly put in place. The reality is that the informal side of learning is where real learning occurs in any organization. Formal learning can either help or hinder those informal learning.efforts.
Today simply building and deploying a set of formal learning events doesn’t cut it. The New Normal requires the blending of formal and intentional informal learning practices and making available the permissions and resources that support dynamic learners when they choose to learn independently.
In Summary
The learning tradition of pre-modern society was for centuries defined by two enduring patterns. The first was informal learning in the form of on-the-job training. It was customary to apprentice young workers in the skilled trades by having them observe and work alongside competent craftsmen until they acquired enough knowledge and skill through experience to work independently. Here, learners learned in the workflow. The second pattern was that of formal learning in which a teacher pulled learners from the flow of their work and taught them through formal instruction. For centuries, society held to these two approaches: one experiential, the other didactic, and there seemed to be little impetus to change.
In the early 18th century, the arrival of the Industrial Revolution created major developments in agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing. Overtime organizations began to move away from the “apprentice” informal learning model to greater emphasis on formal training primarily using external resources and after-work hours. Gradually, formal training was brought into the organization and delivered during work time but completely removed from the workflow. Cognitive and behavioral psychology contributed to the formalization of training development and delivery. National associations emerged advancing training as a necessary part of organizational success.
The nature of training continued to evolve on the formal side. Basic skills training became supplemented by interpersonal skills and management training. Organizations who could afford it bought technology-facilitated media because of its promise of greater productivity in the workplace. The training function became more widely recognized as important, which led to a greater investment in formal training in the form of event-based courses
Eventually additional layers of organizational support emerged in an effort to support learners beyond their formal learning at their moment of apply. For the most part, this assistance consisted of support services (e.g., help desks), and publications. Support services picked up where training left off, often cultivating an environment of educational welfare where problems and needs were resolved with great proficiency, but often left those who had made help desk calls no more proficient after the call than they were before. Publication groups were charged with developing ongoing support solutions such as printed and electronic documentation and online help. Between support service groups and documentation groups, the informal learning needs within an organization were supposedly covered. But that was not the case. Informal learning, where it is estimated that 70 to 80 of all learning takes place, had gaping holes. Informal help networks flourished to fill the void where, too often, unconsciously incompetent workers helped others achieve the same status. And when someone demonstrated real competence, the less skilled would rob him or her of productive work time.
Today, the patterns of market disruption and accelerated change have become the new normal. And given the technological, economic, social, and political forces that drive the new environment, there is no evidence to suggest that organizations will somehow return to conditions of stability and equilibrium. The volatility and speed of the new era appears irreversible, which is tough news for leaders and organizations struggling to survive. Organizations confront increasing complexity in globalizing markets. They find themselves constantly challenged to learn and change, as Gary Hamel observes, “in a way for which they have no precedent.”
Google’s initial public offering on August 14, 2004, signaled the entrance and game-changing impact of web 2.0. Technologies such as wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, open-content, file-sharing, peer-production were not new at the time, but the Google offering coincided with the point at which virtual communities finally gained massive traction and scaled to orders of magnitude beyond anything of the past. Of course the internet was already heavily populated, but 2004 saw a select few websites consolidate anchor positions in a virtual land grab. The web presence of not only Google, but also YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Wikipedia, eBay, and Blogger.com created a force multiplier effect for social networking and mass collaboration.
These technological and environmental advancements have fostered the new millennial learning mindset and opened the door for blending formal learning with intentionally defined informal learning practices. Here’s one example of what this kind of blending looks like:
New Blend Example 1
- A workgroup completes self-tailored pre-work prior to attending a virtual class.
- They attend 4 virtual meetings each lasting 2.5 hours spread out over 8 weeks.
- Following each virtual meeting, learners independently complete “Expand” assignments requiring them to use their personal learning network to learn more about what they learned during each virtual session. They document what they learned in a course wiki.
- Also following each virtual meeting learners complete “Apply” activities tied directly to their personal work and submit the results to their trainer. They work on these activities using a digital performance support broker that provides learners finger-tip access to all the resources they need to apply what they have learned.
- Students work together in virtual groups to help each other.
- Trainer holds virtual feedback/coaching session for each set of “Apply” assignments for each learner.
In reality, the distinction between formal and informal learning should look more like this:
Formal Learning, of course, is what training groups have traditionally done—they build, deliver, and manage learning solutions to support organizational needs. The point of this blog is to make the case for broadening the scope of this work to embrace both formal and informal learning and to correlate these efforts with others whose charter plays in this same field (such as support services, technical publications, etc. In doing this, organizations establish a complete learning ecosystem.
A learning ecosystem comprises all the factors that support a vibrant learning community of interdependent people in gaining and maintaining the skills necessary to perform effectively together. It can exist at different scales in an organization (e.g., work group, division, company.)Informal Learning, as you can see by the graphic, can be divided into two areas: Informal Intentional and Informal Independent. Informal Independent is learning that individuals and teams may choose to do outside what is planned, implemented, and managed by the training arm of the organization. This has been the elephant in the room for a long time. Two-thirds of learning taking place within most organizations has been happening in the Informal Independent area. But, as learning teams begin to focus on a broader view of their role, learning solutions are beginning to include intentional informal learning activities. This new blend can look something like this:
The New Blend Example 2
- An Employee is in the middle of a pressing work project. She consults her digital performance support broker and identifies four areas where there are several unique twists that require additional knowledge and skills to complete the project.
- She immediately accesses directly from her broker, several microblogs where she shares her learning need out through several follower groups (internal and external to the company.)
- A representative from the learning group along with other microbloggers immediately provide recommendations. She sorts through those recommendations and does the following:
- Schedules and takes 3 recommended e-learning courses, 2 from within the companies LMS and 1 purchased independently from an independent eUniversity.
- Schedules and participates in 4 virtual coaching sessions –two internally sponsored and two from a colleague/friend from another company.
- Spot reads through 3 books (two digital.), one of which was purchased online
- As she moves forward to complete the project, she frequently accesses her electronic performance support broker to guide her as she and her team completes each critical task.
- After she completes the project, she takes 10 minutes and accesses a “Lessons Learned” template via the performance support broker and documents lessons she learned, enriches it with metadata, posts it and then pushes it out to the her direct manager as a project report.
It is readily apparent that there is a great amount of learning going on outside the formal structures we have so adeptly put in place. The reality is that the informal side of learning is where real learning occurs in any organization. Formal learning can either help or hinder those informal learning.efforts.
Today simply building and deploying a set of formal learning events doesn’t cut it. The New Normal requires the blending of formal and intentional informal learning practices and making available the permissions and resources that support dynamic learners when they choose to learn independently.
In Summary
- Although informal and formal learning practices have been around a long time they have most often been approached as separate paths for learning and skill development. Over time, formal learning has become the primary arena for investment by organizations. This is changing today.
- Historically, most learning and other siloed support groups have not blended their practices to provide unified performer support to those they are charged to serve. This needs to change.
- The current environment of unrelenting change coupled with the disposition of an increasing number of learners to learn informally, has opened the door for learning teams to lead out in blending formal and informal learning practices.
- This blending has created a healthy division within the informal learning arena: intentional informal learning and independent informal learning. Intentional informal learning is anything planned for and supported when people learn on their own or with others independently.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Social Networks: Are they the "Learning Portals" of today?
Con and I had an AMAZING time at Learning 2009. It was great seeing many of you there, as well as meeting the new members of this ever growing community. We are now up to over 550 member companies worldwide! Although communicating with you through a blog like this is has always been wonderful, still nothing beats seeing each of you face to face from time to time! Our thanks and kudos to Elliott and his entire team for hosting such a wonderful event. It was very well attended by today's standards with over 1,300 learning professional from around the world in attendance. The enthusiasm and energy level was great. Con and I ended up delivering 6 breakout sessions and a pre-conference all centering on some aspect of Performer Support (PS). We were overwhelmed by the turnout and by the excitement surrounding this discipline. Clearly PS is on the rise and is quickly becoming a vital part of any learning organization's offerings.
There was one moment in particular which helped validate this feeling for both of us. Elliott likes to use audience response units throughout the conference, especially during the general sessions. It's a very powerful and effective way to quickly take the pulse of a large group like this. At one point, he let the attendees submit questions to be asked of the entire conference. Obviously there are plenty of topics being showcased and it's often hard to get a feel for which
are hot and which are not. So, someone from the audience asked which learning trends or technologies we felt were overrated: Mobile Computing and Learning, Social Networking, Gaming, User Content, and Performer Support. And the two clear "winners" were...Gaming and Social Networking with both receiving over 30% of the vote. The "loser", which in our case was a GOOD thing :), was Performer Support with 9% of the vote. Not only is our industry finally seeing PS as a powerful learning approach, but we are also seeing it as something achievable.
For the sake of this week’s blog, I would like to focus on our industry’s discussions around Social Networking. First, let’s start by stating that although Social Networking may appear to be overrated, our belief is that it is, or will become, a powerful learning resource for many. Being overrated does not necessarily mean that something is bad or ineffective. Our concern surrounds the long term effects on social networking if it continues to be poorly positioned or implemented in its early stages of development. Many a powerful and viable learning approach and/or technology never got off the launching pad due to poorly positioned expectations. For instance, I still know of organizations where you are carried to the curb if you even mention the acronym LMS. Does that make LMS's bad? Clearly not! But for some the promise, investment, and overhype of the technology and approach eventually outweighed the benefits and that's unfortunate. The question is, will Social Networking suffer the same fate?
Lately, we've been asked to speak with organizations about the integration of social networking into informal learning frameworks. At times the vision ends up being a bit broader than that. The dream is to create a one stop launching pad of vibrant and supportive communities that will act as a learning portal for informal learning. If you've been around the learning industry long enough you'll remember that this approach was also what killed many efforts around corporate learning portals in the 90's. They were overrated as a one stop landing page for every learning asset imaginable. Although the premise was good, the execution left much to be desired. Most learners visited once or twice, were immediately overwhelmed, and never returned again. Will we let history repeat itself and allow the Social Networking sites of today become the "learning portals" of a decade ago?
It always makes Con and I anxious when we see a single modality being labeled informal learning or PS. As we've shared in this blog many times, effective PS is rarely driven by any one modality, but rather an overarching framework that supports learners across the 5 moments of need. Social Networking can be a highly effective tool as a part of that framework, but there are reasons why it may be dangerous to position it at THE primary one. Here are some issues to consider:
1 - Searching, navigating, and digesting a Social Networking site takes time: A PS framework is made up of shades of grey. Some elements are meant to be experience over time, processed, and applied, while others are meant to be quick, short, and easy to access, or what Dr. Allison Rossett would call a "Sidekick". When a learner expects an immediate answer they become highly frustrated and disillusioned with resources that don't provide this level of support. Social Networking can struggle when positioned as one of these types of tools. Although the information can be vast and powerful, it typically takes time to search and sift through these communities. They are a wonderful support network, but not an immediate one.
There was one moment in particular which helped validate this feeling for both of us. Elliott likes to use audience response units throughout the conference, especially during the general sessions. It's a very powerful and effective way to quickly take the pulse of a large group like this. At one point, he let the attendees submit questions to be asked of the entire conference. Obviously there are plenty of topics being showcased and it's often hard to get a feel for which
are hot and which are not. So, someone from the audience asked which learning trends or technologies we felt were overrated: Mobile Computing and Learning, Social Networking, Gaming, User Content, and Performer Support. And the two clear "winners" were...Gaming and Social Networking with both receiving over 30% of the vote. The "loser", which in our case was a GOOD thing :), was Performer Support with 9% of the vote. Not only is our industry finally seeing PS as a powerful learning approach, but we are also seeing it as something achievable.For the sake of this week’s blog, I would like to focus on our industry’s discussions around Social Networking. First, let’s start by stating that although Social Networking may appear to be overrated, our belief is that it is, or will become, a powerful learning resource for many. Being overrated does not necessarily mean that something is bad or ineffective. Our concern surrounds the long term effects on social networking if it continues to be poorly positioned or implemented in its early stages of development. Many a powerful and viable learning approach and/or technology never got off the launching pad due to poorly positioned expectations. For instance, I still know of organizations where you are carried to the curb if you even mention the acronym LMS. Does that make LMS's bad? Clearly not! But for some the promise, investment, and overhype of the technology and approach eventually outweighed the benefits and that's unfortunate. The question is, will Social Networking suffer the same fate?
Lately, we've been asked to speak with organizations about the integration of social networking into informal learning frameworks. At times the vision ends up being a bit broader than that. The dream is to create a one stop launching pad of vibrant and supportive communities that will act as a learning portal for informal learning. If you've been around the learning industry long enough you'll remember that this approach was also what killed many efforts around corporate learning portals in the 90's. They were overrated as a one stop landing page for every learning asset imaginable. Although the premise was good, the execution left much to be desired. Most learners visited once or twice, were immediately overwhelmed, and never returned again. Will we let history repeat itself and allow the Social Networking sites of today become the "learning portals" of a decade ago?
It always makes Con and I anxious when we see a single modality being labeled informal learning or PS. As we've shared in this blog many times, effective PS is rarely driven by any one modality, but rather an overarching framework that supports learners across the 5 moments of need. Social Networking can be a highly effective tool as a part of that framework, but there are reasons why it may be dangerous to position it at THE primary one. Here are some issues to consider:
1 - Searching, navigating, and digesting a Social Networking site takes time: A PS framework is made up of shades of grey. Some elements are meant to be experience over time, processed, and applied, while others are meant to be quick, short, and easy to access, or what Dr. Allison Rossett would call a "Sidekick". When a learner expects an immediate answer they become highly frustrated and disillusioned with resources that don't provide this level of support. Social Networking can struggle when positioned as one of these types of tools. Although the information can be vast and powerful, it typically takes time to search and sift through these communities. They are a wonderful support network, but not an immediate one.
2 - The information can often be dated or incorrect: The number one killer of a PS tool/strategy is inaccurate information. Since many of these resources are accessed at critical moments of need, any wrong answers can have significant consequences. Although there can be a definite ”wisdom of the crowd" benefit to these communities, there is a huge overhead in keeping the information current and accurate. Many struggle with maintaining this thus making the information suspect.
3 - Social Networks are often not integrated well into the workflow: The most effective PS tools and resource are found within the environment and workflow they are designed to support. The simple fact that many Social Networking websites are accessed out on a network can impact their ability to act as an effective PS resource. An effective PS framework offers an immediate and concise answer to the issue being addressed often based on the learner's job role or workflow. Although many social networking sites are role based, they are anything but contextual. The more removed a PS asset is from the problem or situation being addressed, the less likely a learner is to stay the course and use the resource.
With this said, how can we make Social Networking sites work and optimize the power of communities? The simplest answer is to broker them appropriately in the context of all the other resources available through an organization’s PS strategy. The danger is that Learning Assets are often positioned to over promise and under deliver. A Social Networking community should be positioned as a fundamental tool that can sustain the underpinning of an overall PS Strategy. They are rich repositories of an incredible amount of acquired knowledge from peers, experts, and mentors throughout the organization. That's an amazing resource when consumed at the right moment and under the right circumstances.
Let's continue to see PS as a powerful overarching discipline made up of a rich array of well positioned learning assets. Social Networking is but one of these tools. Allowing it to do what it does best relative to all that surrounds it is the best way to move beyond the hype and make it a reality.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Trainers: A KEY stakeholder in a successful PS implementation
One concern I have always had when I speak about Performance Support is that I will be perceived as “bashing the classroom”. I recently delivered a keynote on Informal Learning and Performance Support for the Institute on IT Training Conference in London. I had an attendee, or delegate to be geographically correct:), come up to me after my session asking if I felt that the classroom, and the instructor’s role specifically, was diminished by adding PS to a blended offering. That couldn't be further from the truth!!
Con and I are often asked to name the perfect place to introduce PS into an organization – EASY answer: The classroom! What better place to begin the journey towards independent and self-directed learning than the classroom? But for this to be successful you need a dedicated and gifted instructor at the front of the room. This is where true blended learning comes in. In one of our earlier posts on blended learning we talk about how PS is key to providing a true learning ecosystem. Just blending formal learning assets may save money and appear to be blending options, but it’s not truly supporting a learner across all 5 moments of need.
We have found that the most successful PS initiatives begin in the classroom and are introduced in the context of formal learning. Buy-in and support from the trainer is critical to this success and involves considering a few important factors:
1 – Involve the trainer early in the development process: In many of the learning organizations we work with, developing courses is a well oiled machine. It's a process where the trainers may be asked to participate, and one they have learned to trust to create fairly standard courses. Once you begin introducing PS into the mix the trainers need to be involved as early as possible so they can understand the intended outcome, design, and presentation. If they feel that PS has been thrust upon them many will not engage, in fact we have seen trainers even disrupt a PS roll out because they felt removed from the process. Many trainers see PS as a threat. It’s perceived as a tool designed to lessen their role. Again, not true! In fact, a trainer is key to making PS successful.
2 – Help your trainers to see their role differently: Integrating PS into a classroom involves more than just “demoing the PS tools at the end of class”. For these tools to be truly internalized and seen as being of value, the trainer needs to position them as an integral part of the classroom experience. They need to be seen as something that will truly help the learner in the context of their job, and as a tool that the trainer believes in! To make this work the trainer will need to teach a different level of skills than the ones they may have typically focusing on. Enabling PS is not about learning a particular rote piece of material, but rather the critical thinking skills needed to effectively problem solve and enable a PS tools in the context of doing their job. This will be a different way of approaching instruction. It begins with simply not answering as many questions and guiding the students toward the solution through the PS frameworks being introduced. The “industry term” for this type of learning strategy is “Metacognition” or learning how to learn. It involves teaching a learner about when and where to use particular strategies for learning or problem solving. This is PS’s greatest strength. The trainers who have mastered this technique are teaching at a level above all others. PS tools enable this to happen.
3 – Teach them the “Ramp up/Ramp Down” technique - This is an approach to instruction where the instructor intentionally eases themselves out of the “support” business while replacing their it with an equally effective PS strategies. As the graphic shown here illustrates, as the trainer’s level of support lessens over time, they replace that support with 3 PS tools – Peer, Job Aids, and Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS). Each moves the learner that much farther away from dependent strategies and that much close to self directed learning.
Trainers have a new and vital role to play in the overall success of a PS initiative. They simply need to be integrated and involved in a way that makes their role apparent and intentional.
Con and I are often asked to name the perfect place to introduce PS into an organization – EASY answer: The classroom! What better place to begin the journey towards independent and self-directed learning than the classroom? But for this to be successful you need a dedicated and gifted instructor at the front of the room. This is where true blended learning comes in. In one of our earlier posts on blended learning we talk about how PS is key to providing a true learning ecosystem. Just blending formal learning assets may save money and appear to be blending options, but it’s not truly supporting a learner across all 5 moments of need.
We have found that the most successful PS initiatives begin in the classroom and are introduced in the context of formal learning. Buy-in and support from the trainer is critical to this success and involves considering a few important factors:
1 – Involve the trainer early in the development process: In many of the learning organizations we work with, developing courses is a well oiled machine. It's a process where the trainers may be asked to participate, and one they have learned to trust to create fairly standard courses. Once you begin introducing PS into the mix the trainers need to be involved as early as possible so they can understand the intended outcome, design, and presentation. If they feel that PS has been thrust upon them many will not engage, in fact we have seen trainers even disrupt a PS roll out because they felt removed from the process. Many trainers see PS as a threat. It’s perceived as a tool designed to lessen their role. Again, not true! In fact, a trainer is key to making PS successful.
2 – Help your trainers to see their role differently: Integrating PS into a classroom involves more than just “demoing the PS tools at the end of class”. For these tools to be truly internalized and seen as being of value, the trainer needs to position them as an integral part of the classroom experience. They need to be seen as something that will truly help the learner in the context of their job, and as a tool that the trainer believes in! To make this work the trainer will need to teach a different level of skills than the ones they may have typically focusing on. Enabling PS is not about learning a particular rote piece of material, but rather the critical thinking skills needed to effectively problem solve and enable a PS tools in the context of doing their job. This will be a different way of approaching instruction. It begins with simply not answering as many questions and guiding the students toward the solution through the PS frameworks being introduced. The “industry term” for this type of learning strategy is “Metacognition” or learning how to learn. It involves teaching a learner about when and where to use particular strategies for learning or problem solving. This is PS’s greatest strength. The trainers who have mastered this technique are teaching at a level above all others. PS tools enable this to happen.
3 – Teach them the “Ramp up/Ramp Down” technique - This is an approach to instruction where the instructor intentionally eases themselves out of the “support” business while replacing their it with an equally effective PS strategies. As the graphic shown here illustrates, as the trainer’s level of support lessens over time, they replace that support with 3 PS tools – Peer, Job Aids, and Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS). Each moves the learner that much farther away from dependent strategies and that much close to self directed learning.
Trainers have a new and vital role to play in the overall success of a PS initiative. They simply need to be integrated and involved in a way that makes their role apparent and intentional.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Performer Support and the Moment of Change
Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning
In an earlier blog article (http://performancesupport.blogspot.com/2009/05/moment-of-apply.html ) we stated that the moment of “Apply” is the “most critical moment in any person’s individual learning process.” Certainly preparing learners for this “most critical” moment should be at the heart of all we do – after all, if people can’t perform at that moment, what good have we done with all our efforts leading up to it?
But there is another moment of need that directly impacts how we address the moment of “Apply.” Change is a fundamental reality in today’s work environment. It is often unpredictable, absolutely unrelenting, and, more often than not, terribly unforgiving. Alvin Toffler, writer and futurist, has observed that change, today, is “non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways". He further describes how we must respond to this dynamic change environment, in his book Rethinking the Future:
Take on the Challenge of Deep Rooted Change
Years ago, after completing work for a client, a participant in the project offered to drive me to the airport so we could continue our discussion. After a long drive I became a bit nervous about missing my flight. I interrupted our discussion and asked my driver, “How long before we arrive at the airport.” As he hit his breaks he turned to me and said, “I’m almost home.” Has something like this ever happened to you – where you have acted in an automated way? The cognitive principle at play in such circumstances is “automaticity.” Things that we do, over and over, tend to become automated in our skill set – to the point that we can do them without conscious thought. And when this has occurred within a workforce and the workforce is then called upon to change that automated performance, organizations face one of the most significant performer support challenges it can face.
Software companies have paid dearly in their failure to provide meaningful solutions to this moment of change—where skills have become “deep-rooted.” For example, Microsoft had to force feed Vista through its market channels. There was very little pull from the marketplace. Why, because Vista, with all of its remarkable capabilities, lacked the performance support infrastructure necessary to help people “unlearn” their automated skills and “relearn” how to perform the same tasks in Vista. Had Microsoft provided this support, the uptake by their existing customer-base would have not only been dramatically faster (thereby accellerating revenues) but the good-will generated within that customer-base would have suppressed rather than fed Microsoft’s competing market forces.
When organizations face any major change initiative, there is high probability of deep rooted skills that require overriding. This can best be done with a robust solution that supports performers in their workflow, at the moment of apply when they are called upon to “unlearn” and "relearn." Too few change initiatives adequately make this crucial investment.
This challenge of deep-rooted change has been around for a long time. We now have the knowledge and wherewithal to address it directly. We simply need to understand the realities of deep-rooted change and step up to it, ahead of it, before it’s upon us.
Grow Dynamic Learners
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there is a new era of change confronting organizations today. This unpredictable, unrelenting, and unforgiving environment of change requires organizations to cultivate dynamic learners – learners who know how to be rapid, adaptive, and collaborative in how they learn, unlearn, and relearn. Today’s learners must cultivate a mindset that anticipates change. These dynamic performers must also have access to tools to help them detect change before it is on top of them. Because they live in a state of continuous change they must also cultivate personal learning strategies that minimize the probability of their own skills becoming automated (deeply rooted) unless those skills merit becoming so. These dynamic learners learn on the run and rely on performance support tools to assist them at every moment of learning, unlearning, and relearning. And when these dynamic learners see change coming at them, they know how to assess their current readiness to perform, identify what skills and knowledge they need to cast aside and then determine how to take advantage of performer support systems to assertively adapt to the conditions around them.
Is it possible to help learners develop these dynamic learning skills and disposition? Absolutely. Here are some blog articles we’ve posted that partially address how this can be accomplished:
Where to from Here?
Our performance support community needs examples to help us move forward in this area. We have many excellent examples that address typical moments of “Apply.” But how are you addressing the moment of “Change?” How are you cultivating “Dynamic Learners?” Share with us what you’re doing and we’ll continue to share back.
In an earlier blog article (http://performancesupport.blogspot.com/2009/05/moment-of-apply.html ) we stated that the moment of “Apply” is the “most critical moment in any person’s individual learning process.” Certainly preparing learners for this “most critical” moment should be at the heart of all we do – after all, if people can’t perform at that moment, what good have we done with all our efforts leading up to it?
But there is another moment of need that directly impacts how we address the moment of “Apply.” Change is a fundamental reality in today’s work environment. It is often unpredictable, absolutely unrelenting, and, more often than not, terribly unforgiving. Alvin Toffler, writer and futurist, has observed that change, today, is “non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways". He further describes how we must respond to this dynamic change environment, in his book Rethinking the Future:
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."The fundamental difference between how we support learners at the moment of “Change” and how we do at the typical moment of “Apply” lies in the requirement change makes of learners to “unlearn” and then “relearn” a new way. Our profession, for the most part, hasn’t provided the support it can and should when learners face this performance twist. Here are a couple of recommendations:
Take on the Challenge of Deep Rooted Change
Years ago, after completing work for a client, a participant in the project offered to drive me to the airport so we could continue our discussion. After a long drive I became a bit nervous about missing my flight. I interrupted our discussion and asked my driver, “How long before we arrive at the airport.” As he hit his breaks he turned to me and said, “I’m almost home.” Has something like this ever happened to you – where you have acted in an automated way? The cognitive principle at play in such circumstances is “automaticity.” Things that we do, over and over, tend to become automated in our skill set – to the point that we can do them without conscious thought. And when this has occurred within a workforce and the workforce is then called upon to change that automated performance, organizations face one of the most significant performer support challenges it can face.
Software companies have paid dearly in their failure to provide meaningful solutions to this moment of change—where skills have become “deep-rooted.” For example, Microsoft had to force feed Vista through its market channels. There was very little pull from the marketplace. Why, because Vista, with all of its remarkable capabilities, lacked the performance support infrastructure necessary to help people “unlearn” their automated skills and “relearn” how to perform the same tasks in Vista. Had Microsoft provided this support, the uptake by their existing customer-base would have not only been dramatically faster (thereby accellerating revenues) but the good-will generated within that customer-base would have suppressed rather than fed Microsoft’s competing market forces.
When organizations face any major change initiative, there is high probability of deep rooted skills that require overriding. This can best be done with a robust solution that supports performers in their workflow, at the moment of apply when they are called upon to “unlearn” and "relearn." Too few change initiatives adequately make this crucial investment.
This challenge of deep-rooted change has been around for a long time. We now have the knowledge and wherewithal to address it directly. We simply need to understand the realities of deep-rooted change and step up to it, ahead of it, before it’s upon us.
Grow Dynamic Learners
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there is a new era of change confronting organizations today. This unpredictable, unrelenting, and unforgiving environment of change requires organizations to cultivate dynamic learners – learners who know how to be rapid, adaptive, and collaborative in how they learn, unlearn, and relearn. Today’s learners must cultivate a mindset that anticipates change. These dynamic performers must also have access to tools to help them detect change before it is on top of them. Because they live in a state of continuous change they must also cultivate personal learning strategies that minimize the probability of their own skills becoming automated (deeply rooted) unless those skills merit becoming so. These dynamic learners learn on the run and rely on performance support tools to assist them at every moment of learning, unlearning, and relearning. And when these dynamic learners see change coming at them, they know how to assess their current readiness to perform, identify what skills and knowledge they need to cast aside and then determine how to take advantage of performer support systems to assertively adapt to the conditions around them.
Is it possible to help learners develop these dynamic learning skills and disposition? Absolutely. Here are some blog articles we’ve posted that partially address how this can be accomplished:
The last blog article (listed above) references a research report we published last fall that discusses the vital need for organizations to cultivate the capacity to “learn at or above the speed of change.” Since publishing this report we have been engaged in a year-long benchmarking study with ten remarkable, and in most cases, multi-national organizations. The results of this study have reinforced the need to cultivate dynamic learners and the reality that it is possible to do so. It has never been sufficient to build exceptional learning and performance support solutions. The ultimate key to success in all we do lies in the choices people make and the way they choose to go about it. This is especially true when we work to support performers at the moment of change.Friday, January 9, 2009 “Flourishing During Rough Economic Times”
http://performancesupport.blogspot.com/2009/01/four-recommendations-for-learning.htmlWednesday, November 5, 2008 “The Role of Engagement in Performer Support”
http://performancesupport.blogspot.com/2008/11/delivering-even-greater-strategic-value.htmlThursday, September 25, 2008 “Surviving Unrelenting Change”
http://performancesupport.blogspot.com/2008/09/challenge-worth-pursuing.html
Thursday, August 14, 2008 “Organizational Learning Agility and Performance Support”
http://performancesupport.blogspot.com/2008/08/negotiating-churning-waters-of-change.html
Where to from Here?
Our performance support community needs examples to help us move forward in this area. We have many excellent examples that address typical moments of “Apply.” But how are you addressing the moment of “Change?” How are you cultivating “Dynamic Learners?” Share with us what you’re doing and we’ll continue to share back.
Friday, September 4, 2009
If I could start the jouney all over again...
As I sit here waiting for the long weekend to arrive (for our non-US readers, this coming Monday is a holiday called "Labor Day" here in the states) I've had a moment to reflect on my week. I was filled with appointments, presentations, and travels talking about the value and application of Performance Support (PS). Candidly, I've been overwhelmed of late by the huge upsurge in the popularity of this discipline. Whether it's the economy, conversations sponsored by industry leaders such as Elliott Masie, or just the natural evolution of learning, PS has clearly moved into the spotlight in many organizations and is quickly becoming a vital part of their overall learning strategy. It's ALL very exciting and long overdue...
The more I think about my own journey and the conversations I've had this week, the more I wish I could do this whole learning thing all over again. I would do it all so differently. Those of you who have known me for a while, know I've been at this learning arena for a long time - 26 years to be exact. The first 5 were spent as an elementary school teacher in upstate NY. After getting my Masters in computer education, I joined what is now Element K in its VERY early years (I was the 26th employee to be exact back in 1987) and spent 16 years there. I then went to Microsoft for 3 years and was a Director in the learning group. And finally, for the past 3 years I have been with LearningGuide. The irony of that journey is that I didn't utter the word "Performance Support" during the first 23 years of it! I built a lot of GREAT training assets, many of which I am very proud of, BUT never broached the world of PS until very recently.
I think I have found a home! Throughout most of my professional life I have struggled with the fact that although I was certified in training/teaching, it seemed like very little of my teachings had a long term and direct impact. People may have liked me and probably learned a whole lot of good stuff, but I grew tired of hearing that much of it didn't "stick", was hard to truly apply, or just didn't have the long term impact it should have. Why was that?
If I had to do it all over again, I would throw out much of what I learned about ID and do it very differently. Don't get mad a me here, but frankly the last 3 years of my professional life have strongly challenge much of what I had been taught during the first 23, including all that wonderful academia stuff. Fundamentally I was taught that everything could be solved with good training. It was the proverbial "hammer looking for a nail" and EVERYTHING looked like a nail!! My latest journey with Conrad into a deep study and intentional work in the PS arena has changed my outlook.
If I could do it all over again, I would stop even worrying about training, at least initially, and architect all my learning solutions around PS. If that didn't work, or couldn't stand alone, which in many cases it can't and shouldn't, I would build good sound training to back it up and fill in the gaps. Until 3 years ago I did it in the opposite order. I RARELY build job aids or EPSS tools to support my training initiatives, and because of that very little of my training continued on into the learner's real world. PS is such a strong and powerful discipline that I now view it as the first line of attack and defense when it comes to a learning problem, and I'll build training as a secondary approach.
Now, many of you who are reading this may accuse me turning my back on training. That couldn't be further from the truth. Training is still important. It still has a vital role to play in an overall effective Learning Ecosystem. My point here is that PS actually makes training better and allows it to do what it does best - make someone knowledgeable. PS on the other hand helps make them productive and acts as a perfect complement to training. My point here is that I feel PS needs to lead the charge, not take a back seat to training as it has for years.
Since hindsight is 20/20 I'm going to leave that argument in the past and move on. The learning solutions I design going forward will all pivot around building, implementing, and maintaining effective and relevant PS which is supported by an just the right amount and type of training. My experience of the past 3 years has taught me that, in the end, that's what learners have wanted out of "training" all along... Care to join me in the dialogue?
The more I think about my own journey and the conversations I've had this week, the more I wish I could do this whole learning thing all over again. I would do it all so differently. Those of you who have known me for a while, know I've been at this learning arena for a long time - 26 years to be exact. The first 5 were spent as an elementary school teacher in upstate NY. After getting my Masters in computer education, I joined what is now Element K in its VERY early years (I was the 26th employee to be exact back in 1987) and spent 16 years there. I then went to Microsoft for 3 years and was a Director in the learning group. And finally, for the past 3 years I have been with LearningGuide. The irony of that journey is that I didn't utter the word "Performance Support" during the first 23 years of it! I built a lot of GREAT training assets, many of which I am very proud of, BUT never broached the world of PS until very recently.
I think I have found a home! Throughout most of my professional life I have struggled with the fact that although I was certified in training/teaching, it seemed like very little of my teachings had a long term and direct impact. People may have liked me and probably learned a whole lot of good stuff, but I grew tired of hearing that much of it didn't "stick", was hard to truly apply, or just didn't have the long term impact it should have. Why was that?
If I had to do it all over again, I would throw out much of what I learned about ID and do it very differently. Don't get mad a me here, but frankly the last 3 years of my professional life have strongly challenge much of what I had been taught during the first 23, including all that wonderful academia stuff. Fundamentally I was taught that everything could be solved with good training. It was the proverbial "hammer looking for a nail" and EVERYTHING looked like a nail!! My latest journey with Conrad into a deep study and intentional work in the PS arena has changed my outlook.
If I could do it all over again, I would stop even worrying about training, at least initially, and architect all my learning solutions around PS. If that didn't work, or couldn't stand alone, which in many cases it can't and shouldn't, I would build good sound training to back it up and fill in the gaps. Until 3 years ago I did it in the opposite order. I RARELY build job aids or EPSS tools to support my training initiatives, and because of that very little of my training continued on into the learner's real world. PS is such a strong and powerful discipline that I now view it as the first line of attack and defense when it comes to a learning problem, and I'll build training as a secondary approach.
Now, many of you who are reading this may accuse me turning my back on training. That couldn't be further from the truth. Training is still important. It still has a vital role to play in an overall effective Learning Ecosystem. My point here is that PS actually makes training better and allows it to do what it does best - make someone knowledgeable. PS on the other hand helps make them productive and acts as a perfect complement to training. My point here is that I feel PS needs to lead the charge, not take a back seat to training as it has for years.
Since hindsight is 20/20 I'm going to leave that argument in the past and move on. The learning solutions I design going forward will all pivot around building, implementing, and maintaining effective and relevant PS which is supported by an just the right amount and type of training. My experience of the past 3 years has taught me that, in the end, that's what learners have wanted out of "training" all along... Care to join me in the dialogue?
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