There are a few things happening in the corporate learning world:
The business is changing faster than the Learning function can keep up with.
Effectiveness of learning is low with constant questions of the Return on Investment.
Knowledge work (defined by Drucker as that work that can only the knowledge worker themselves can understand) is so complex that no curriculum can be made that can fit the very personal needs of each professional.
There is a high mobility for employees, making it hard to defend investing in them.
At the same time the world is changing:
Much of the world is globally connected.
Effective tools for collaboration are ubiquitous and cheap.
This means that learners will start organizing their own learning. They will become their own designers and the role of the learning function will have to change.
Principles
We thought of five imperatives for the learning function to enable DIY learning and empower their staff:
Through a very energetic process (first collaborative and then argumentative) the group of participants came up with a tentative set of statements for a Do It Yourself Learning Manifesto:
[vimeo 52056127]
A big you thank you to everybody who participated!
John Abele was the first one on stage. He has a background in medicine, but is now mainly focused on collaboration. He is the founding chairman of First. He shared a taxonomy of collaboration:
Facilitate
Command and control
Self organizing
Adversarial
Mass
Crowd Sourcing
Cascading
Pseudeo
Next he talked about the characteristics of collaboration leaders:
Lead without power (cede control to gain control)
Manage divas
Empower individuals and groups
Understand the power of theater
He applied these characteristics to Masie himself, leading to the following slightly hagiographic list: clothing as a court jester, humble self promoter, sharing learning leader, shameless persistence, interview style, frames, sets agenda, digs under the surface inoffensively, uses the power of theater, produces, curates, personalizes well, effusive complimenter, introverted extrovert, shares self reflection, celebrates political incorrectness, amazing connector, genuine, authentic, inclusive (always uses “we”), optimist and benevolent independent (so not part of the establishment).
Next up on the stage was Kevin Oaks from I4CP (which does the bulk of the research for ASTD). He has looked a lot at the difference between high and low performing organizations. They first discussed performance management and the performance review. Nobody really seems to like them. We know that the annual review is not the most effective way to do performance management. Managers need to do these hard discussions on a continuous basis. He sees companies talking about talent risk in the same way as financial risk. Kevin next references this Vanity Fair article about the Forced Ranking performance system at Microsoft. Next question: How do you manage a virtual workforce? This is a new competency of top leaders and we are still finding out how to really do this well. Kevin thinks we should use technology more here. He mentioned an example of a manager who would put a video station in a shared office and a video station in her home office so that people could just walk over to the station and talk to her in a “normal” way as if she was there.
Any blogpost gets better with a Steve Ballmer picture!
Elliott Masie loves his Apple products so much that he showed a clip of of the new iPad mini. He is once again interested in the affordances of this particular type of device and buys them before he has a real understanding of those.
Martha Soehren is the Chief Learning Officer for ComCast. She received a spotlight award.
John Ryan is the president of the Center for Creative Leadership. What are some of the top challenges of top leaders nowadays? Suddenly all of them need to become global leaders. The CCL has done research into boundary spanning leadership (the whitepaper is here. They’ve come up with a new assessment tool on the basis of this research: the global six (this hasn’t been published yet). These dimensions are not valuable everywhere in the world: it depends on where you are whether they work. Some of the biggest mistakes that leaders make is that they only focus on people’s performance. You should focus on learning agility (innovating, challenging the status quo, taking risks, performance, make sure you never stop listening). John finished by plugging the WorkLife Indicator.
Could we have a realtime learning center in our own businesses?
The last speaker for the day is from the ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement: Lisa Toenniges. The ISPI focuses on performance that allows organizations to reach their best business results. She kicks off by saying how training should usually be the last thing you try to improve performance. Nice. She then lists a set of standard performance consulting things to look at.
This whole session felt a little bet too much like an incrowd talking on stage. A pity…
At the US Department of Veterans Affairs they have managed to connect Agile to ADDIE (Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate). Agile works especially well in the Design and Development parts of ADDIE, allowing you to iterate there. Using the agile methodology allows them to go through the ADDIE process in about 40% of the time it used to take.
ADDIE
The standard development time ratio for this type of learning is benchmarked as 184 hours for 1 hour of learning. Their first few modules were much higher than that, but they learned and after two modules manages to sustain a ratio of about 100 development hours for 1 hour of learning.
Conrad Gottfredson led a session on employee engagement about which he has co-authored a book with the same title.
Jack Welch has said that there are three key metrics for any business: employee engagement, cash flow and customer satisfaction. The first is the most important, because you will never have the second and the third without the first.
For the book they interviewed highly engaged people. Their findings were that engaged people…
feel the least entitled,
usually stay engaged wherever they are, and,
take charge of their engagement and feel responsibility for their own engagement.
Engaged employees also use the following six personal action drivers: shaping, connecting (there are four ways to connect with your work: social , intellectual, environmental and inspirational), learnig, stretching (pushing beyond your comfort zone, through your discomfort zone to your outer limits, you anchor yourself there until it become your comfort zone), achieving and contributing.
According to Masie there are a few things different this year in comparison to previous years:
Eight years ago everybody was rushing to a session on how to buy your LMS. We have now realized that the LMS is an important form of “air conditioning”: if it doesn’t work you’re screwed (so you do need it), but it doesn’t necessarily create the next step in learning.
We are now having a clear conversation about personalized learning. How can I learn what I want/need to know in the timeframe that makes sense, in the style that is appropriate, with the level of collaboration that I want and in the location that I am?
Another interesting question is: What will be the role of content created by the users (user generated content).
They had a short conversation about how they teach not just the health professionals and students but also the patients and the “concerned” public. Education is really one of the cornerstones of their mission.
Diana Oblinger from Educause was on stage next. Educause is an organization in the field of Higher Education. There often is a disconnect between the world of corporate learning and the world of higher-ed. Diana made an argument that technology is enabling large changes in learning. We now have the ability to deliver large scale learning at a low cost. She also mentioned DIY Learning which is a topic that I did a session on too. Masie asked her how come higher-ed campusses only deliver a smart part of the learning in corporations. She does see this changing: MOOCs are an example. Masie then urged us all to connect with her and ask her about something like portfolios in higher education to see what we can learn from that world.
Charles Duhigg is a New York Times journalist and has written a book titled The Power of Habit. His inspiration for the book came from the military where habit formation is a key element to success. Because of advances in neurology in the last decade we now finally are starting to understand how habits work. In research with rats they have found out that as a habit forms the rat stop thinking. We now know that habits consist of three parts:
There is a cue that kickstarts the habitual behaviour
The behaviour itself is called the routine
Finally there is a reward, this is why we continue to show the behaviour in the future
The Habit Loop
We used to focus on the middle part, but the cue and the reward are very important too. The cue is usually easy enough to find, but the reward is harder to find. In the context of learning we are of course interested in shaping the habits of other people. Duhigg gave a couple of examples from Starbucks where they are trying to imbue will power habits in their young employees. One thing they use is the L.A.T.T.E. loop (they Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred). Duhigg also showed the marshmallow experiment (it relates to will power):
Changing individual habits can best be done by giving people insight in to how habits work. Habits take place just below our consciousness. They happen without us really thinking about it. Organizational habits are different. This is about culture. Some habits are more powerful than other in organizations, these are called keystone habits. Once you shift the keystone habits other things will start changing too. This is a way of unlocking cultural change in the organization. Masie related this story of habits to gamification (badges, etc.). He is afraid that we are overly simplifying things when we think about gamification as a way to shape habits. According to Duhigg we understand very little about rewards. There are two types of rewards: expected rewards and unexpected rewards. For rewards to be effective we need to have both. We usually only create expected rewards in our incentive systems. This is a problem because we tend to discount expected rewards when we get them and are overdelighted by unexpected rewards. There is also the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Often we need to have extrinsic rewards to kickstart or bootstrap a new habit which can then be sustained through intrinsic motivation.
They also discussed an article that Duhigg wrote about (software) patents. According to him we are starting to realize that software patents are broken (more information about how bad software patents are can be found here). Masie talked about the ridiculous story of IP learn. This is what some would call a patent troll set up to sue LMS companies. The company has already managed to pick up about 17 million dollars without ever having invented anything.
Unfortunately I had to miss Josh Bersin speaking as I had to prepare for my own session.
