Planning to implement informal learning?
February 2nd, 2010
The set up up was perfect! I was at one of the seminars at Learning Technologies last week and the speaker opened with the question: “How many of you are planning to implement informal learning this year?” About a third of the room raised their hands, 30 people, that’s a lot of implementation this year. I waited for the punchline, but it never materialised.
We did have a very good presentation about the value and impact of informal learning or “learning at the point of need” all of which led to the one logical concluding argument that if you bought the speakers product you would have solved your implementation issue. To be fair, insert GoodPractice toolkits at the end of the presentation and it wasn’t too far away from a lot of pitches I’ve made in the past.
Apart from the missed opportunity at the begiining something in this presentation and others I saw last week bothered me.
A very large part of the Learning Technologies was about informal learning, it was very much the buzz and for that I’m delighted, we’ve been preaching the value of it for years. Everyone was talking about 70, 20, 10 and this has led the big traditional LMS and learning product suppliers to jump on the bandwagon. What I saw last week was a lot of suppliers, with minimum tweaks to their products trying to pitch them as informal learning solutions. “Lets us help you manage and control your informal learning.”
I don’t blame them and anything that can help grow the market is a good thing, but not if it over hypes and devalues the idea of informal learning. Think back to the early days of e-learning when it was the panacea for all learning problems, well there were touches of this at the exhibition last week. If you are looking at informal learning, great, but make sure you understand the way it works and the best way to support it.
Back to my perfect set up question, the follow up from the speaker should have been: “You can’t implement informal learning it’s happening anyway and always has been.” You only have to look at our recent survey on ‘How Managers Learn’ to see that by far the most frequent and effective learning is talking to colleagues.
What you can do is support informal learning. For instance, help people to have better conversations or as our customers do make web resources easily available to people so that they can find answers when they need it. Giving people the skills to search effectively, think and analyse data and ideas and make decisions are all enabling skills which support informal learning. A much better question might have been: “How are you planning to improve the quality of the informal learning in your organisation?”
How do managers actually learn?
January 21st, 2010
We’ve spent the last couple of weeks writing and developing new content which we’re very excited about. For the last ten years at GoodPractice we’ve been fascinated by one question: How can organisations provide support to leaders and managers to improve their performance as work? To answer this, we need to understand what helps leaders and managers perform more effectively, and what they do when faced with workplace challenges.
We’ve taken a big step closer to understanding this, because in November 2009 we commissioned ComRes to undertake a survey of managers to find out what activities they undertake in a performance situation and how effective they found these activities. We’ll be publishing the results, which are fascinating, at the Learning and Technology conference in London next week and on our web site on 27 January 2010.
As a taster, managers find informal learning activities to be very effective. For instance ‘Trial and error’ really works for a large number of managers.
The conclusions also point to a need for learning departments to rethink their paradigm of learning and focus on performance and the activities that can enhance this within their organisations. And if that’s not enough next week we’ll introduce you to Alex who is passionate about helping his leaders and managers perform to their best.
Remember if you want to find out what’s the most frequent and effective method of learning for managers in a performance situation, download our next free White Paper in the The Learning and Performance Link series, ‘How Managers learn (in their own words)’ – available from 27th January.
Challenge for the next decade: Two Cultures in Learning and Development
December 29th, 2009
Over the last few years, I’ve become acutely aware of the growing development of two cultures in learning and development. Differences in mindset and approach have always been there, but the problem has become more pronounced as the use of technology has become more commonplace in learning initiatives.
Fifty years ago scientist and novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture titled ‘The Two Cultures‘. In it, he lamented “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” with the scientific community in one camp and the humanities in another. The debate around whether this is true for society as a whole is a question for others, but I’d make the case that there are strong parallels in learning and development today.
Two houses, both alike in dignity
I’ve posted before about the myths and misconceptions that abound in our profession, but these posts form only part of the debate that’s taking place on a much greater scale.
Two examples of this are the heated debates following ‘contentious’ articles on Training Zone: Garry Platt’s “Debunking, demystifying and discrediting” and Donald Taylor’s “Modern myths of learning: You only remember 10% of what you read“. In the comments below these articles, there seems to be a definite split between those who prefer a more scientific, evidence based approach to learning and development, and those who take a more pragmatic approach based on personal experience and results.
What interests me in particular, and what brings to my mind the Two Cultures lecture, is that there seems to be a lack of a shared frame of reference, a shared language of discourse, between the two groups. On the one hand, those in favour of using learning styles and simple conceptual models to understand how people learn [1] (the ‘humanties’ camp) dislike the tone of the ’scientific’ camp. They question whether lack of evidence is equivalent to lack of value and offer plenty of examples where ‘debunked’ theories and models have proved to be of value.
Those supporting an evidence based based view find it incredible that the ‘humanities’ camp hold onto received wisdom that is decades out of date, and question the professionalism of those who rely upon concepts that have been shown to be abject nonsense.
A plague on both your houses?
In truth, there is merit in both scientific and humanistic approaches to learning and development but it seems to me that the worst of both are often on display.
The robust challenge of ideas and preconceptions is how science works. The peer review process is ruthless and the tone of the debate is simply a clash of ideas – personal (ad hominem) attacks are quickly shut down – it’s the substance that lies behind the tone that’s important. To find fault with this approach is to misunderstand it completely and those who dislike having their ideas scrutinised should question whether their ideas are worthwhile. At the heart of many of the debates between the two viewpoints is the ‘humanities’ camp’s disquieting tendency to try to simplify things that can’t really be simplified. We’re often dealing with people and behaviour, and this means that there is a lack of absolutes. Any concept, theory or model that puts people into neat boxes should be viewed with suspicion.
Equally, the voices of the evidence-based camp often seem to spend a great deal of time critiquing how things are currently done without offering any pragmatic alternatives [2]. They’re often looking to the future and don’t have much time for the mucky, yet necessary job of navigating organisational politics. Just as people shouldn’t be put into neat little boxes, learning professionals don’t live in a world where they’re always dealing with enlightened leaders and managers. Sometimes we have to take short cuts, make assumptions and compromise.
That said, I’ll set out my stall here quite clearly. I believe that there are not enough people working in learning and development with an evidence-based mindset. The vast majority of learning professionals that I’ve met (and those working in HR in general, incidentally) have an educational background based in the humanities. This means there is a slant towards those who prefer personal experience over evidence because there’s simply not enough of those people trained to challenge that mindset effectively.
The tension, debate and collaboration between the humanities and science is a great driver of progress and many of our greatest thinkers were adept in both spheres of thought (Pythagoras, Da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Freud – the list is endless). We need more of that tension in the learning and development community.
An art and a science
There are two sides to the learning and development coin. As learning professionals, we must have a strong, up to date understanding about how: people learn, what facilitates memory retention, how to encourage application of learning in the workplace, etc. However, we must not be afraid of going with our gut instincts where there just isn’t any conclusive evidence; it’s just that we should be aware of any relevant evidence that exists in the first place.
If we only stuck with approaches we had evidence for, we wouldn’t try anything new. The intuitive leap can come from working with established theory but often it can come from someone, somewhere trying something out because it feels right.
Learning and development is both an art and a science. The science leads to a deeper understanding of what works, but getting the most out of people often requires more than that. If you’ve ever worked with a truly talented facilitator/educator/trainer, you’ll know that they get results above and beyond what can be taught. That sort of artistry can’t be studied and reduced to its component parts (or, at least, can’t be yet).
The next decade
The increasing use of technology in learning initiatives has brought into learning and development departments more of those who have an analytical, evidence based approach. However, they’re often marginalised, simply dealing with elearning and social media. For learning and development to grow into a professional discipline with a voice in the organisation, the next decade needs to see the recruitment of more people trained to think like a scientist.
How to attract the people we need is a serious question that requires answering. I believe that learning and development, and HR as a whole, does attract talented people, but with the humanities bias I’ve described. However, we’re losing the war for ’scientific’ talent by not even being in the game. That needs to change and the profession needs to make the first move. Without that re-balancing, and the resulting change in culture, the learning and development profession won’t keep up with the times and its influence will remain slight.
Published by Owen Ferguson for Peter
[1] Whilst in favour of simple conceptual models, I should like to point out that these are only of value when it’s clear to everyone that the model is a simplification of real life and the skills to identify a reductionist viewpoint are encouraged.
[2] However, for those who read the Garry Platt article, I’d like to point out that for every attack on current practice that Donald Clark makes on his blog, there’s a post that shares something positive. When I read Garry’s article, I literally tallied up Donald’s positive and critical posts and this is a case where Garry’s perception just doesn’t match up to reality.
Should an LMS be the only route to learning?
December 9th, 2009
We are having a number of interesting discussions with clients about their Learning Management System (LMS) and the need for all content to be available through their LMS, which has got me thinking about whether an LMS should be the only way for a learner to find learning. To summarise the argument we hear is, we have invested in an LMS and we need to maximise the investment so all learning content must be accessed through the LMS.
From my perspective an LMS can be a very useful tool to present and host learning options, schedule learning and provide management information on usage. Brilliant for statutory and compliance training. Looking at various blogs this morning from Tony Karrer (lots of great links from this post) and Nicole Fougere it appears that an LMS is still a major investment in terms of time and money and there are limited degrees of satisfaction with the end result.
My major concern with an LMS is whether the investment is based on a strategy that places the learner and their needs at the centre of the solution rather than the organisation. Too often I hear the reason we have an LMS is to measure and manage learning, which is a very different place to start. Tony Karrer’s post on what should go in an LMS is very pertinent
The sunk cost of the investment then leads to the need to have it well used (an economist will tell you this is an emotional rather than rationale need) and the paradox is that the lack of learner focus from the beginning often means that the controls and structure deter usage rather than encourage it, no matter the quality of the content. It seems to me that the Learning Department and the executives in such an organisation are trying to control all the learning that takes place, which given the amount of informal learning that takes place in an organisation is a complete illusion at the best of times. Is this about a need to justify investment decision and protect roles?
Our own experience at GoodPractice and usage measures across hundreds of organisations shows that where learners perceive an online resource as something to help them do their job they use if 4 or 5 times more than where it is seen as a learning tool. When asked, they say learning is something they do once their to-do list is complete. So they see learning as being separate from work. If we can present a toolkit as something to help with work, so placing learning at the heart of the workplace it improves performance, but often isn’t seen as learning. Not a problem from my perspective, if it helped the individual. So a very simple change in perception can have a massive impact on the real engagement with learning.
So I would advocate a learning strategy designed around making learning as accessible to learners as possible. This needs to start with how to support learners where and when they need learning most, when they are working. The simple solution of saying we have an LMS and everything needs to go through there is not good enough.
That said I understand the pressures learning executives are under to justify investment and drive usage. It just that if you are passionate about helping your learners be the best they can be, “I wouldn’t start here!”
Extraordinary Groups – video with Geoff Bellman
November 30th, 2009
If I was to form a personal virtual Board of advisers then Geoff Bellman would be one of the first people appointed. He has a wisdom and an insight that is rare to find and this shines through in his new book, ‘Extraordinary Groups’ which he has co-written with Kathleen Ryan. Together they provide us with valuable tool into the working of groups and how to create the opportunity for ‘the magic’ that exists in great groups. I had the pleasure to interview Geoff on Skype from his home in Seattle last week. Along with David Edgar, one of our editors we recorded a series of interviews for use in our toolkits. Here’s the first where Geoff introduces the book.
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