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The vision: 4. Learning and development that is flexible

April 4, 2012 By Clive Shepherd Leave a Comment

In the first post in this series, we expressed a vision for learning and development that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and, above all, powerful in terms of the results it achieves. In this post, we look at the argument for l&d to be flexible.

Flexibility is an important element in the vision for a transformed l&d. What it implies is more control for l&d’s customers – the employees of an organisation. Adults expect to have control over what they learn, when and where and will increasingly demand it. They expect it because they have grown accustomed to finding whatever information they need at the click of a mouse from Google, YouTube and Wikipedia. Synchronous learning (that takes place with others, at a specific time, perhaps in a virtual classroom) can be powerful, but it is certainly not flexible. It means you have have to compromise on when you learn in order to suit others. Similarly, face-to-face learning can add a great deal of value when used for the right purposes, but is highly inflexible. Being face-to-face means you have to compromise on where you learn in order to suit others.

Flexibility can take many forms. For the learner it can mean:

Controlling what you learn and to what level: So much traditional training is one-size fits all. Everybody starts and ends at the same place, regardless of need. But every learner is different in terms of their prior knowledge and goals, and it is not rocket science to organise training in a modular fashion. Providing this sort of flexibility is not always practical, but it should at least be an aim.
Controlling how you learn: This is a tricky one, because there has been a lot of nonsense talked about learning styles and how different we are in how we like to learn, yet we are actually much more alike than we are different and it is usually uneconomical to offer training in alternative forms. However, there are sometimes obstacles that get in the way of learners taking advantage of a particular form of learning (disabilities, access to technology, inability to travel, etc.) and providing alternatives can be beneficial, if not compulsory.
Controlling when you learn and at what pace: By and large, learners would prefer not to have to wait to learn something which is important to their work. They’d also like to control when they learn, for how long, how fast and how slow. Having to conform to someone else’s timetable is always going to be a compromise solution.
Controlling where you learn: Having to travel to a central location for training is sometimes necessary, but is typically an expensive and time-consuming activity. If you can avoid it you should. It also makes sense to provide learners with the opportunity to continue their learning when they are on the move, so they can take advantage of the inevitable dead times on trains, in airports and hotel rooms.

Of course it can be extremely difficult to provide all this flexibility without impacting heavily on our other objectives of scalability and economy – we have to strike the right balance. But flexibility is a worthwhile target to have in mind and you can make big strides in this direction by creating more modular interventions, with a greater use of self-paced components, and by delivering online when possible.

Coming next: The vision: 5. Learning and development that is engaging

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: transformation

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part Three

April 3, 2012 By Barry Sampson Leave a Comment

In part two we looked at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling. In this third and final part we’ll consider the key benefit and share a few tips.

Stories Sell

We may not always like to acknowledge this, but a lot of what we do as learning and development professionals is about selling. We sell the benefits of different ways of doing something, we sell the concept of a new process, we sell people tools and techniques that can make them more effective or efficient.

What any good salesman know is that it’s not enough to just tell someone about the features of a product or service. The emphasis has to be on the benefits it will bring to the individual (and it’s worth remembering that only the most dedicated of employees will be interested in the benefits it brings to the organisation more than the benefits it brings to him!).

One of the most effective ways of selling the benefits is to do so in the form of a story, and most importantly that story needs the right context.

There are many ways that social media can help us with this, but here are a few ideas.

We can use it to publish stories about the benefits that the training has brought to other people who have completed it. Better still, we can use social media as a vehicle for those people tell those stories themselves
We might ask people to use a hashtag to identify posts about this particular topic and then pull together all of them into one place.
We may select more active posters and invite them to blog regularly about their experiences, to tell the story of applying their learning in the workplace.

Tips

If you want to use stories more in your social media activities, here are a few tips.

The heart of a good story is often personal experience, so get into the habit of sharing your experiences, good and bad. Learning from your own mistakes is good, but learning from other’s mistakes is even better. By sharing your own bad experiences you can become that other person for your audience to learn from. This may require a shift in mindset; publicising our mistakes may not come naturally.

It’s not just about our own stories though. We may have no experience of a particular subject, or someone else’s experience may be more relevant or useful, so get into the habit of collecting stories. Write them in a notebook, store them on online or make audio recordings, do whatever works best for you but just make sure you keep them somewhere. Sometimes it’s a good idea to keep a note of who told the story, but unless they give their permission to be mentioned you should probably make the story anonymous.

If you feel comfortable doing so, make use of video. It’s an incredibly powerful medium that can make a really strong connection with your audience. For some people it’s actually much easier to record a video that tells a story than it is to write that story down. It doesn’t have to be slickly produced; most smartphones have a good enough video camera for recording online content.

As well as using it to record ideas when you hear them, you may want to use audio as a way to share your stories. Services like AudioBoo are a great way to record and share short snippets, and if you want to produce something longer maybe you could consider producing a regular podcast.

Go on, tell your story.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: connected learning

Step 6: Decide how best to support experiential learning

March 30, 2012 By Clive Shepherd Leave a Comment

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the seventh part of chapter 11:

You don’t have to make a conscious decision to support experiential learning, as it will happen naturally as a matter of course. Having said that, there is much you can do encourage this form of learning through targeted interventions.

Experiential learning will flourish when:

essential skills and knowledge have already been acquired through other formal and non-formal approaches;
practical experience is critical to the process of refining and consolidating skills and knowledge;
employees are motivated to take on greater responsibility or broaden their experience;
the organisation is committed to a culture of continuous improvement and not of blame.

Top-down approaches such as benchmarking, job rotation, job enrichment, project reviews, performance appraisals, action learning, continuous improvement will all serve to promote and encourage experiential learning. Bottom-up activities, such as personal reflection, reflecting with others, blogging and learning from out-of-work activities, will all flourish in any culture that genuinely supports learning and development.

Coming next: Step 7: Implement and evaluate

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: newlearningarchitect

The vision: 3. Learning and development that is scalable

March 28, 2012 By Clive Shepherd 1 Comment

Learning interventions are scalable when they are capable of delivering high quality results to ever larger audiences. There’s little doubt that, when used for the right purpose and well executed, one-to-one learning can be extremely effective but it is hardly scalable; after all, there are only so many hours in a day that any instructor, coach or mentor can dedicate to the task. While there is often a need to include an element of one-to-one or small group learning in a blend, because that’s the only way of making sure the job gets done right, there are many occasions on which far more scalable methods can be applied.

Some fantastic progress has been made recently in realising the concept of massively scalable education. Particularly exciting examples are the Khan Academy, which has contributed to the maths education of millions, and the free online courses being run by faculty at Stanford University. An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, led by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted some 160,000 enquiries, of which 25,000 or more have made it through to its conclusion. If you are not familiar with these projects, you can see Khan, Norvig and Thrun discussing the implications of their work in Reinventing Education - 45 minutes of very watchable YouTube video.

So, yes, you can teach maths and science to millions at practically no cost using videos and quizzes, and this is a fantastic step forward, but can we make similar gains in workplace learning? Currently, skills development is a labour-intensive and very costly business, typically involving a great deal of face-to-face contact with a trainer or coach. Some individuals, some organisations, some countries have been able to afford this and will be able to sustain this investment even in a harsh economic climate. That leaves an awful lot of skills gaps and unemployed people.

The pressure for more scalable learning and development at work is accentuated by the increased pace at which change takes place within organisations. More often than not there simply isn’t the time available to wait for ‘high-touch’ training. L&d needs a plan B; one that much better leverages limited subject expertise and teaching skills.

Coming next: The vision: 4. Learning and development that is flexible

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: transformation

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part Two

March 27, 2012 By Barry Sampson Leave a Comment

In part one we considered why stories are so important to learning. Now we’ll look at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling.

User Generated Context

We work in an industry that was, and in many cases still is, driven by the production and distribution of content. No surprise then that many of the early conversations about elearning included the phrase ‘content is king’. Along with the rise of social media tools came another phrase, ‘user generated content’, and there was much talk of how they enabled anyone to produce their own content. This is true, but social media also opens up other possibilities.

Using storytelling as a technique for training is not new, but social media allows us to do so in new and interesting ways. We can go beyond just delivering stories, and invite our learners to become part of them. We can move away from a scenario in which the trainer tells the story and learner receives it, to one in which they work together to co-author an evolving story.

The learner’s ideas can extend, enhance and improve the original story. Most importantly, they can give it the right context. In previous roles as a training manager, one of the more common issues with training was when learners didn’t recognise the situation or the people in it, and therefore don’t connect with it. By giving our learners the opportunity to become part of how the story develops, they are able to make it more useful to themselves and to others, by adapting it to fit their context.

The Making Of…

Something that we don’t often do, is give our learners an insight into the story behind the learning; how and why a course or programme was created, why we chose certain topics and techniques and so on. Social media gives us an opportunity to give our people an insight into that process. You can use tools like Twitter to provide regular snippets of information about the programme, blogs to provide more in depth updates and features and videos of key people involved in the programme.

It doesn’t have to stop once the programme is running. More and more programmes are using social media to connect the learners with each other, but what about taking the opportunity to connect them with people not on the programme? You only have to look at the rise of reality TV to know that people have an interest in what other people are doing. We can give our learners the chance to share their story as it happens.

Imagine a manager getting her team involved and engaged with her own development by providing them with regular updates about what she’s doing. They are already part of her development, whether they know it or not. This approach invites them to take an active part in the story.

Engagement and Support

The history, and future, of your organisation is nothing but a sequence of stories. Some of those stories are positive (successful new product launches, new premises, big sales increases) and others less so (downsizing, closures, drops in the share price) but they all contribute to the wider story of what makes your organisation what it is. Of course, you can’t really have a story unless something is happening, and if something is happening that usually means change, and we all know that can be a difficult thing to manage.

The trouble is that we often forget that our employees are all part of the story, and we use staff magazines and intranet pages to tell them that story as if it was happening to someone else. If you want to check whether this is what happens in your organisation, just listen to people talking and see if they refer to the organisation by its name or as ‘we’. If it’s the former, you may have a problem.

What we can do is use social media to build a framework around the story and give people the opportunity to get involved, by encouraging feedback and discussion. The key is to stop thinking about your staff as an audience, and instead to treat them as collaborators.

The Two Screens Approach

You may have heard the term backchannel, usually in relation to conferences and perhaps live online events such as webinars. In essence this involves the audience using social media tools to interact with each other, with others who aren’t physically present and occasionally with the presenter themselves.

This is something that has become quite common in many areas, and a broad social media backchannel has existed around traditional media such as TV and movies for some time. Until recently this has been driven by consumers themselves and by dedicated sites such as GetGlue and Miso. It is becoming more common to see content producers embracing what is referred to as ‘two screen viewing’, in which additional content is made available on your smartphone or tablet at the same time as you watch the programme on TV. It isn’t just about content though, with services such as Zeebox adding a social layer to TV by pulling in Tweets and other social content related to what we watch.

No matter what its format, we need to start designing our learning with the backchannel in mind. The backchannel is the place where the learners can become fans who will go on to tell their own stories and in doing so promote the learning to others.

In part three we’ll share a few storytelling tips.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: connected learning

Why training may not always be the right course of action – part 8

March 26, 2012 By Phil Green Leave a Comment

In part 7, we took a critical look at the questions trainers use for diagnosis and asked whether they are the best ones to use. Now we’ll give you a brief challenge through three questions. Then later in parts 9-12 we’ll share with you a tested diagnostic process and examples of how it has been used to support human performance in a wide variety of contexts.

A challenge

Now we’ve set out the problems and some of the causes, the next step will be to look at the solutions, alternatives which may not be meant to replace training, but to form part of a mix, a cocktail of solutions that go beyond mere knowledge and skills to locate training within a performance improvement strategy that is guaranteed to bring improvement.

We are humans, and humans make errors, but the right combination of support can result in right first time on many more occasions than training alone can accomplish.

In the remaining parts of this series I’ll share with you a simple but powerful antidote to human error that ought to be in the war chest of every trainer.

In the meantime, I have three questions to intrigue you and set you thinking – I’ll give you some answers in part 9.

Question 1

If you had to rely on just one of these to protect you against terrorist attack at an airport, which one would you choose?

a) The training of security personnel

b) Sniffer dogs

c) Honey bees

Question 2

Suppose you need radical surgery to your hip. Which of these two would be more likely to result in a comfortable process with a successful outcome?

a) A robot

b) A surgeon

Question 3

This questions deals with a performance issue that’s close to my heart, since I’ve needed to give blood on three occasions in the recent past because the first sample was incorrectly gathered by a trained, competent and qualified phlebotomist.

Sally collects blood samples. Many patients are having to return for re-test.

What should be done?

Would you be sending her for more training and more qualifications, or would you adopt the approach of a human performance engineer?

What will your solution be?

That’s the end of Part 8.

In Parts 9-12 we’ll give you our answers and solutions and share with you a tested diagnostic process and examples of how it has been used to support human performance in a wide variety of contexts

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: performance support

Step 5: Decide what can be addressed on an on-demand basis

March 23, 2012 By Clive Shepherd Leave a Comment

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the sixth part of chapter 11:

Having identified those needs which require a proactive approach, whether formal or non-formal, you can turn your attention to the ways in which you can support performance reactively, on a just-in-time basis. On-demand learning is likely in most cases to act as a support for formal and non-formal learning, but could in some circumstances stand alone.

On-demand learning will be most effective when:

the task is performed infrequently;
the task is complex, involves many steps or has many attributes, and is therefore hard to remember;
the consequence of any error would be intolerable;
performance depends on knowledge, procedures or approaches that change frequently;
there is a high turnover of employees and the task is perceived to be simple;
it is realistic for employees to have the time to consult a reference resource before carrying out the task;
there is little time or few resources to devote to training.

Top-down approaches to on-demand learning, such as the use of performance support materials, online books, help desks, and mobile learning resources will work best when:

the knowledge and skills in question are important and/or used regularly;
expertise is not widely distributed;
it is important that you control the quality of the support provided;
the employees in question are less independent as learners.

Bottom-up approaches such as consulting colleagues, online search, using forums and using wikis will work best when the employees in question:

have little commonality in terms of their needs;
have more discretion over how they use their time;
have access to the necessary communication channels;
are more independent as learners.

Coming next: Step 6: Decide how best to support experiential learning

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: newlearningarchitect

The vision: 2. Learning and development that is economical

March 21, 2012 By Clive Shepherd Leave a Comment

It almost goes without saying in today’s testing times that learning and development needs to be economical. In fact, there has always been this need. It is incumbent on any manager, regardless of function, to utilise as few of the organisation’s resources as possible in fulfilling their responsibilities. L&D is no different. It makes no difference whether you regard training as a cost or an investment. If a cost, then the organisation’s profits will be maximised by keeping this to a minimum. If an investment, then you are obligated to keep this as small as it can be without unduly threatening the returns.

Although it is dangerous to generalise, it is probably fair to say that, until 2008 and the credit crunch, l&d budgets had not been the subject of much critical examination as long as they were in line with historical levels and comparable to those of other, similar organisations. This situation has changed and how. Budgets in the USA took a hit of 20% or more and the story in the Europe is not so different. Even richer organisations, not seemingly under pressure, have become defensive about expenditure. Conserving cash is the name of the game. Senior managers no longer take the l&d budget as a given; it has to be justified from the bottom-up as just one of a number of means for influencing performance and competitiveness. This should alway have been the case. It is best to assume that, from now on, it always will be.

One way that l&d can have a much greater influence on organisational expenditure is by making sure that it considers the full cost of any intervention, not just the obvious ones which require a cheque to be written. By far the greatest cost in any intervention is learner time. Every hour spent away from productive work is a cost to the organisation and one that should be minimised. Sometimes this cost is directly visible because overtime has to be paid or contractors brought in to cover the lost time. But even if this is not the case, the cost is still real; time spent learning could have been used productively elsewhere – in other words, there is an opportunity cost. Indirect costs occur within the l&d department as well. Time spent by salaried staff on design, development and delivery of any intervention should be costed against that intervention. And yes, we are proposing that time sheets are maintained, so the cost can be accurately monitored.

It is hard to argue against accurate budgeting and cost monitoring of l&d interventions, yet this is very rarely carried out in practice. Yes, the obvious, direct, external costs – like the use of external trainers and e-learning developers – are closely watched, but these are only a small proportion of the true cost. It’s time l&d took responsibility for its true effect on the finances of the organisations that it serves.

Coming next: The vision: 3. Learning and development that is scalable

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: transformation

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part One

March 20, 2012 By Barry Sampson Leave a Comment

As human beings, we’re natural storytellers. Outside of the confines of academic and scientific discussion, much of our communication is done in the form of stories. When we talk about our weekends, what happened to us at work today, a great day out we had or a sporting event we attended, we do so as stories.

When a significant event happens in our lives – a child is born, we get married, a friend or relative dies, we get a new job – we don’t tell people about it by just reporting the facts. We tell stories about it; how it happened, how we felt, how people reacted, where we were.

It’s how we make sense of things, and that’s as true of conversations in the workplace as it is of those that take place outside.

In fact, the idea for this post came out of a conversation with some collaborators on a recent project during which we talked about our experience of conferences and similar events. We all agreed that we learned something from presentations about theoretical subjects, learned a bit more from case studies, but gained the most from the conversations with other delegates in the breaks.

We asked ourselves why this might be the case? The conclusion we reached was that the break time conversations are more likely to be in the form of stories. In those stories we share our own experiences, both good and bad, and in doing so we take the theoretical and make it more real. We also agreed that the most memorable presentations we saw were the ones that were story based, or at least had a storytelling element to them.

Stories also provide a form of learning that is safe and risk free. One example we discussed was surgeons, who can learn much about routine operations from typical theory and practice, but often learn about more advanced techniques from the stories told by other surgeons.

Just to prove that you can’t get away from storytelling, the previous three paragraphs are just that; a story about a conversation I had.

Social Media and Storytelling

When we talk about connected learning, we often start by saying that it’s nothing new; that in fact it’s just the application of technology to the things that we’ve always done. We may have replaced the coffee machine conversations with Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. Indeed, we might have moved much of the in person social interaction online, and in doing so opened up those conversations to much wider groups of people. What hasn’t changed is that at the heart of each and every one of those conversations is a story.

What social media does is open up new possibilities for how those stories are developed, shared and adapted. In part two we’ll explore some of those possibilities.

In part two we’ll look at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: connected learning, social learning, social media

Why training may not always be the right course of action – part 7

March 19, 2012 By Phil Green Leave a Comment

In Part 6 we considered the need for physical and mental supports, and drew lessons from the US Coast Guard and the writer Rudyard Kipling. Now we’ll think about the questions trainers use for diagnosis and whether they are the best ones to use.

Silver bullet

When the costs and consequences of non-compliance can be so high, it’s no wonder organisations pour thought, effort, time and money into training. Many see it as a silver bullet. But let’s be clear that training is a clear attempt to change the worker. It can have no direct impact on the place or character of the work. And so all of that thought, effort, time and money, and all of those Kipling questions translate into the thing that training does – in order to change the worker – training; in all its many guises, formal and informal, tutored or self-administered, at work or away, instructing, coaching, managing. Building knowledge and skills, and seeking to influence attitudes.

And still catastrophe happens. Does that prove training doesn’t work? Does it mean all of that time, effort, thought and investment is wasted?

Well my answer is no … and yes!

Sometimes it is well spent – after all we have no measure of the incidents that didn’t happen. Training is optimised if it results in a blend of solutions rather than one or two discrete strategies. But sometimes we forget that training is only one method amongst many of engineering effective performance. It is not always the right tool for the job. As trainers we are not accustomed to thinking about changing the work or the circumstances and environment in which it is done. If only we asked more questions of the right type, we might resist the belief that training must be the answer, or the only answer.

Six honest serving men

Let’s return to Kipling and take a fresh look at the six questions. What follows is not meant to be a prescriptive, nor a comprehensive list; it is a starting point, and ought to serve as a general direction in which questioning might point. Crucially it is not predicated on the assumption that training, or any other performance support must be the end result.

What?

What seems to be a problem or needs to change?
What conditions exist when the problem shows itself?
What is the scale of the “problem”?
What is the cost to the organisation?
What is the cost to you particular stakeholders in person?
What will be the biggest advantages of fixing it?
What will “finish” look like?
What will we hear people say?
What will we see people doing in a different way?
What happens if we leave it alone?
What solutions have already been attempted?

Why?

Why is it a problem?
Why should we invest time, effort and resources in this?
Why is this the right time to deal with it?
Why should I get involved?
Why has the problem not been fixed before now?

When?

When is the problem most inconvenient?
When is it least inconvenient?
When do we need the change to be initiated?
When do we need the change to be complete?

How?

How can we get reliable, objective and scientific evidence of the current situation and its impact on our business?
How will we prevent matters from slipping back to as they were?
How can we win support for making a change?
How will we know that the change has happened?
How could the change be made apart from through Training?

Where?

Where does the need for change appear most obvious?
Where have we dealt with this kind of situation before?
Where can we see the accounts of others who’ve already done what we’re considering doing?
Where might we find a new slant on this, for example in another organisation, sector, profession or domain?

Who?

Who is accountable for the current situation?
Who is responsible for it?
Who are the witting contributors?
Who might be unwitting contributors?
Who is most affected?
Who stands to gain most from making the change?
Who might block the change?
Who might champion the change?
Who has the capacity to supply resources, people or information that will help me to understand the situation and change it?
Who can help us to understand better what is happening?

That is the end of Part 7. In Part 8 we’ll give you a challenge through three questions. Then later in parts 10-12 we’ll share with you a tested diagnostic process and examples of how it has been used to support human performance in a wide variety of contexts.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: performance support

The vision: 4. Learning and development that is flexible