Maggie Shelton works for Ikea and talked about storytelling. She started her talk by showing some of the stories that Ikea allowed their staff to tell about their personal lives and how they relate to the culture at Ikea. See this one for an example (not the example Maggie used, the stories aren’t public):
Ikea’s Human Resources department actively uses these videos to share how their culture lives and it can be really be a tool that engages people with the company. Storytelling is all about gaining trust. Authenticity is important. This means there is a big difference between a message coming from high above or a message coming from “the workfloor”. I personally find these type of stories (consciously not using a big Ikea logo in the back) of which they have more than a thousand(!) incredibly valuable. According to Shelton they are also timeless.
She then shared the example of the “home furnishing introduction”. This was an assignment where she, as a learning person, had to help the home furnishing manager with some of her goals around how people should be engaged with home furnishing. She created a story about a guy who is a bit in mess and who starts reflecting on himself through his own home. She played us the first episode. The film was made with as little spoken language as possible as it had to be translated into 28 languages. The video is then used in a two-hour lightly facilitated workshop.
If you want to have maximum impact with your story (on learning), then it is very important to have discussions after watching the film, usually by asking questions about the video.
One more thing I learned from this session is that there is a circular Ikea store built in 1965 Stockholm inspired by New York’s Guggenheim, interesting!
Erik Duval is a professor at the Catholic University in Leuven. His team works on Human Computer Interaction. In the last few years, he has done a lot of work around Learning Analytics, which he defines as being about collecting traces that learners leave behind and using those traces to improve learning.
His students at the university do everything (and he means everything) using blogs and Twitter. He stopped giving lectures and instead works with students in a single place a few times a week. This makes it very hard for him to follow what is going on. The number of posts that are generated in his courses are too many for him to read them all. If you are facilitating a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) this gets worse. This is why we do learning analytics. This has a lot of attention now with a conference and a Society for Learning Analytics Research
Nike+ Fuelband
Next he mentions the quantified self movement: self-knowledge to self-tracking. If a tool gives you a good mirror about your behaviour, then this might make it easier to actually change your behaviour. He showed many examples from the consumer market (i.e. Nike+ Fuelband or the Fitbit. He is trying to see if you could develop similar applications for learning. Imagine setting a goal for how many words you want to learn every day and a device that shows you how many you’ve learned for the day. He wants to create awareness in the student, so that they can “drive” themselves better. This is different from the current efforts in learning analytics where they are mostly used to give more information to the institution (Duval doesn’t like that). He showed us an example of the dashboard that he uses to see the student’s activity on the blogs and on Twitter. The students have access to this information too and can see that data for their peers: openness and full transparency. This measuring leads to externalities that aren’t necessarily good (think students writing tweetbots to get good score). Duval depends on the self-regulating abilities of the group of students.
At the beginning of each course he tells his student that everything will be open in the course. He might have a debate about this, but he never gives in. He doesn’t think you can become an engineer without having the ability to engage openly with the society. If a student has very conscionable objections around privatey, then he sometimes allows them to publish under an alias.
What can we measure? Time, time spent artefact produced, socal interactions, location. Many other things might be important.
Privacy might become an issue: we will know so many things about everybody. One solution might be Attention Trust which defines four consumer rights for your (attention) data: property, mobility, economy and transparency. Our idea about privacy is changing, he referred to Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis.
When does support become enslaving (see this blogpost)
His solution for the problems (once again): openness.
Duval’s talk had a lot of similarities with the talk I will be delivering tomorrow. Luckily we both come from slightly different angles and don’t share all our examples. If you attended his talk and didn’t enjoy his, then you can skip mine! If you loved it, come and get more tomorrow morning.
Today and tomorrow I will be attending and speaking at the e-Learning Event in Den Bosch in the Netherlands. This should be one of the biggest learning technology events in the Netherlands. For some reason I have never been before, so I am curious to see how much I enjoy the event.
Theo Rinsema, General Manager Microsoft Netherlands
Rinsema talked about new ways of working (“het nieuwe werken”), a concept that in the Netherlands has been appropriated by Microsoft. His first point was that current times have accelerated the amount of change and that this means that we will have to learn contineously. Learning and change are very much related. The causes for this speed of change can be found in a couple of trends that drive change in the virtual world: cloud computing, data explosion, social computing, apps, natural interfaces, connections, computing ecosystems and mobile workplaces. Cloud computing, for example, lowers the barrier of entry in a market. This create more competition and this accelerates development.
Microsoft in the Netherlands went through a change process (1100 people work for Microsoft in the Netherlands). The focused on productivity (can we really become more productive every year or are we just working more hours?), talent (how can we attract more women to our mostly male organization?) and the boundaries between work life and private life (how do we solve the puzzle where our offices are only utilised 24% of the time, people like the flexibility, but don’t like their private/work mix). They were on a multi-year journey where they one of the key elements was creating trust between employees and about creating real conversations between staff (I wonder whether he has read the Cluetrain Manifesto).
They created a few things:
“Ruimte voor groei-dagen”: an event where the whole organizations get together and works on personal growth.
“Raad van Anders”: they have about 50.000 visitors a year coming to check out their offices to see how they are working. Rinsema thought that Microsoft was starting to believe too much in themselves. They instituted a “board of others”, inviting non-Microsoft people (young people, government workers, women, disabled people) to come into their offices, have open doors everywhere and then get feedback on what Microsoft does (with the press present). This enables Microsoft to “see with different eyes” (Proust would have said: “see with new eyes”).
“Silverlight Society a.k.a. project Crowley”: an alternate reality game in which Microsoft staff thought they were in a pilot from Microsoft research about collaborating in a virtual world. Members of this elite group of beta-tester had to solve more and more complex problems day by day forcing them to collaborate with each other and use social networks. 290 people participated.
I appreciated Rinsema’s talk for sounding authentic and for not mentioning SharePoint as an enabler for these new ways of working. This means he is smarter than 95% of the collaboration consultants in this space.
Erwin Blom on the Social Media Revolution
Erwin Blom from Fast Moving Targetsis a journalist who got addicted to the Internet in 1994 when he was working for Dutch media outfit VPRO. He produced a music program for the radio and found out that he suddenly wasn’t the expert anymore, his community of listeners knew more than him. He later became heaf of new media for the VPRO and now works for himself looking at how the net changes many aspects of society.
He showed Draw Something as an example of where people learn very naturally: his children play the game to learn English and learn how to visualize. It is incredible how quickly that game grew and for how much the creators were bought by Zynga. Another example of using game-based things is Codecademy. Another example is Foodzy. It teaches you about your own behaviours around food and teaches you a lot about food. Blom considers YouTube the largest collection of lessons in the world. In general these things work for one person, but they work even better if there are multiple people doing the same thing.
With social media everybody now is a publisher. We have endless means to tell each other stories. We underutilize the potential of storytelling (an important skill). We are now all connected and can ask each other questions and can have good conversations with people that were out of our reach (in many dimensions) before. Knowledge is now available everywhere, we need to learn how to find and select the information. Network building skills and “personal branding” skills are important for future proofing. You have to be present on this platforms and create narratives about yourselves.
He showed a nice example of what his daughter learns from her blog. She is learning about how to tell a story, about how to write headlines, about dealing with commentary about and she learns discipline (blogging twice a week). His son writes at Game Testers United and learns similar lessons. Blom asks himself why this isn’t a part of their school education. Can’t we make schools media production companies?
Tulser organised a masterclass with Etienne Wenger-Trayner at their fabulous Maastricht offices. The title (in Dutch) was “Slimmer werken in (online) communities” (“Working smarter in (online) communities”).
Learning How To Work Smarter
Jos Arets, Vivian Heijnen and Joost Robben kicked off the day. Their analysis of the issues around learning and development wasn’t groundbreaking, but is is interesting to see a company who have made this criticism a core part of their value proposition toward companies (they gave us a book titled: Preferably no Training).
According to them there is a lot of pressure on HR in general and the learning and development organization in particular. The shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy has profound consequences. The “Internet Storm” has only just started. It is starting to become a commodity and will the basis for completely different business models. If you see how the Internet has changed the music business, the newspaper business, the book business you can imagine how this will affect the learning organization. In most large organizations this shift has not yet happened in learning, they still work according to the old industrial paradigm: knowledge from books → in trainers heads → in participants heads → right or wrong knowledge at the workplace level → only 20-25% workers of the organization. A fast historical narrative would go something like this: Trainers delivered training, participants started to hate training so we develop e-learning instead and now participants hate e-learning too.
What are the problems in Learning and Development?
Alignment: HRD sits outside the business
Distribution (just in time, scalable, etc.)
Wrong solutions for 80% of the performance problems
Focus on formal learning
Business models don’t really exist
(Business) Metrics
Tulser’s solution to these problems is to change the focus from training towards performance. Most problems on the workplace are not caused by a gap in the knowledge of the people working in that workplace. They also advocate a shift away from competences towards a focus on tasks. They want to move away from e-learning toward micro-learning and performance support and from courses to resources and finally from classroom learning towards social and personalized learning.
Their final conclusion: “adapt or die”.
Social Learning Strategies
Etienne Wenger-Trayner
Wenger-Trayner, writer of the infamous Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, opened his talk by talking about his recent marriage and about finding a companion. His talk will be very much analogous to that story, you should try to find learning companionship. A good companion can make you a bigger “me” and that is really meaningful. In learning you might be able to find this in communities. The ability to have the experience of meaningful engagement is where we will be able to find informal learning.
Great quote from Einstein: “The positive development of a society in the absence of creative, independently thinking, critical individuals is as inconceivable as the development of an individual in the absence of the stimulus of the community”
A community of practice is a self-governed learning partnership among people who:
share challenges, passion or interest
interact regularly
learn from and with each other
improve their ability to do what they care about
define in practice what competence means in their context (he gave a great example where it was actually impossible to do the job according to how the people were trained, they had to find out their own methodologies)
In gangs they learn how to survice on the streets, in organizations they provide better service to clients.
Communities of practice is not a technique invented by a consultancy. It is a natural human technique.
In the industrial mode of production, the source of value creation is in the design, the formal is driving the informal and you leave your identity at the door. As we shift, we will see that formal will start to support the informal. The source of value creation is knowledge companies are conversations (compare the Cluetrain Manifesto). In a knowledge economy the distinction between soft and hard skills are not so clear anymore.
Next he started answering questions from the audience:
Is technology important? Yes, it can make a difference but it barely ever is the driver and it is not necessary for succes. You should think about the community first and the technology second.
In an organizations do you need to seed the community and be active to get it started? Good communities usually have people “occupying the space” and mature communities are actually full of leadership. And there is a difference between leadership and facilitation. The best leaders are “social artists” that have true ability to create a space where people can engage and also manage to avoid group think.
How to Implement Social Learning and Value Creation
One thing you can try to do is “Horizontalization”, the negotiation of mutual relevance (as an alternative to the Provider-Recipient relationship). The best way to understand the notion of a community of practice is to imagine a social discipline of learning. He has created a little framework with the key processes for this discipline (bring practice in, push practice forward, create self-representation and reflect and selfdesign):
A Social Discipline of Learning
Practitioners need a community to:
help each other solve problems (this is a very fundamental reason to participate, much better than the usual knowledge sharing imperative)
hear each other’s stories and avoid local blindness
reflect on their practice and improve it
build shared understanding
keep up with change
cooperate on innovation
find synergy across structures
find a voice and gain strategic influence
One question he often gets is why you should share knowledge if knowledge = power. Wenger-Trayner agrees that knowledge = power, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep it yourself if there is a platform for building a reputation (reflection from Hans: this is where Yammer currently is lacking a little bit).
He showed the following slide nearly as a teaser (apologies, it is hard to read, the top right says: 1. exchanges, 2. productive inquiries, 3. building shared understanding, 4. producing assets, 5. creating standards, 6. formal access to knowledge, 7. visits):
A Typology of Learning Activities
This is an extremely rich picture that shows the broad range of possibilities for informal learning.
Social learning can also be a strategy with communities of practice as the steward of strategic capabilities towards performance. The circle is as follows: Strategy → Domains → Communities → Practices → Performance → Learning → Sharing → Stewardship → Strategy. If you don’t do this, then you are not doing knowledge management. This makes social learning a strategic responsibility and consists of managing a portfolio of domains on a continuum of formality.
What is the difference between a network and a community? There are not two different things, instead they are different aspects of the learning fabric of an organization (i.e. characteristics of a social system).
Any real innovation in Learning & Development will necessarily change the prevailing business model. Changing business models is hard. This is one of the reasons why many innovations don’t take hold.
Only by making current and potential business models more explicit will it be possible fundamentally change the way learning operates in an organisation.
Willem Manders and I are starting a year of playing with business models. We need help.
