Some very quick thoughts based on our experience of the last ten years of integrating content into the workplace. Open content has a place and professional providers like us have to make sure we can continue to provide value beyond that of open content.

If you want to leverage open content, I’d suggest making sure that you are able to meet the criteria below which will help you maximise usage and the investment in making the content available.

Firstly, don’t call it learning. Content that is perceived as something that will help people do their job is used up to 5 times as much as content that is perceived as learning. We’ve got users statistics from the million plus managers in hundreds of organisations who use our toolkits to support this. Managers have a to-do list and the more you can align the content with this the better. “Learning is something I get to when I’ve got time” is a quote I hear regularly.

Be aware of what I call the four major failure points, the first of which relates to the above:

1. Employees need to know the content exists and what it will do for them. The me question; What’s in it for me?
2. Employees need to be able to access it easily, otherwise I’ll do what I’ve always done.
3. If it is workplace learning then users need to easily find something relevant to their task, challenge or problem.
4. The content has to help them move forward with the issue or challenge that they are seeking help with, so that they feel positive about the source content and will return in the future.

So the packaging and promotion is very important to get people to the content and then the content must provide answers and support that is relevant to the question being asked.

As a side note, we use much the same content with our private sector, public sector and university sector clients so the core of any good open content should be able to play well in all areas. There is a need to maintain and develop content and to ensure it continues to meet the audience’s needs and any open content model has to have a reliable means of achieving this.

Lastly, it is worth mentioning an earlier post by Owen on ‘Professional content – what is it good for?’

We’ve seen it for instance with knowledge management systems and elearning. I think it is particularly prevalent where somebody can systematise a solution and sell it to you in a box. I pointed out an example I’d heard in an earlier blog ‘Planning to implement informal learning’.

Buyer beware, means that it is our responsibility to understand and be able to spot the snake oil salesman  (I’m probably preaching to the choir if you’re reading this), but before you buy or implement anything that is being sold to help with informal or social learning it might be an idea to do the following:

1. Read widely around the topic, see my suggested list below.
2. Think about how models and trends are going to impact on your organisation.
3. Pay particular attention to your learning and performance culture, align this properly before you do anything else. Make sure the senior executives in the organisation really understand the impact and changes required of them before you start.
4. Think about the culture and behaviours in your organisation and how they will interact with any new system. A field of dreams approach of “If we build it they will come” is seldom going to get results, see all the the disappointment around LMS systems.
5. Be able to answer the question, “how will I know this will add value before I buy and implement it”. (Look for evidence and evaluate – See Owen’s post on ‘How to evaluate new management concepts’)

Reading list:

Jay Cross and the Internet Time Alliance and Jay’s books ‘Informal Learning’ and ‘Working Smarter’ which are available from his site. The benchmark and starting point.

Jane Hart – Social learning expert

Harold Jarche – integrating work and learning

Don Clark – worth thinking about some of the questions he asks about value (not to be confused with Donald Clark’s Plan B who’s also worth a read but less so on this subject)

Charles Jennings - Takes a great performance view of learning

I’d also recommend looking at some of the work of Josh Bersin and in particular the model he presented at Learning Technologies in London about where the market is going. But that’s the subject of my next post….

As a supplier of services in this area, I’d rather deal with an informed and inquisitive buyer who understands the complexity and constraints.  Together we can then find a solution that will work and that we can all feel confident about before we start. Buyers who buy and then are disappointed are not just bad for my business, they are really bad for the learning industry and actually damage the people and organisations we all want to help learn and perform better.

I started with Nick Shackleton-Jones’ post on a Unified Learning Theory  http://bit.ly/c3H9YZ. Nick picks up on the recent spat about Learning Styles see our blog http://goodpractice.com/blog/learning-styles-its-a-bit-more-complicated-than-that/ and uses that to present the need for a more unified research based theory of learning. I couldn’t agree more with the need for the research and I’m looking forward to reading his ideas and findings very soon.

Our own input to this wider research started with the survey we did on How Managers Learn (in their own words) and we’ve made the underlying data available from the same link.

The second blog that added to my thinking was Michael Eury’s Exploring the Learning Landscape. I enjoyed this because it gave me a new perspective on informal learning and the way we can map learning onto our current environment to get a feel for what we are covering and where the ‘deserts’ are.  The use of the axis of Structure and Control is interesting, as are his views on the motivation of the learner.

These are both really useful posts in helping to develop new ideas and I need to consider them further to see how I integrate them more fully into my own thinking. I know I’ll want to start with performance outcomes and work back from there as I outlined in Exploring the Performance Landscape. In terms of research I’d like to specific organisational research developed as I think that whilst there is cross-over to education the practical need to do something with the learning in terms of perfromance brings a different dynamic that cannot be ignored. I’d like to see this linked to performance outcomes rather than learning outputs. This takes the research into a range of fields beyond the narrow field of learning into a range of areas from communication, organisational culture, performance management, reward, leadership and so on. If learning in organisations is about improving performance outcomes then I think we need to develop a unified performance theory and then practice. Easy said and I know very complex due to the situational aspect of performance, but research rather than theory must be the starting point.

The Washington Post published a column by Jay Mathews highlighting the recent research published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. This was quickly followed by a blog post by Will Thalheimer and a snowstorm of follow up comments and posts.

What many people seem to want is a black or white, binary status. Learning styles are either right or wrong, good or bad. But the truth will most likely lie in that grey area that most of human psychology belongs to. There may well be some situations where a person’s expressed preference for how they learn will lead to better performance results. Conversely, there will be situations where the way something is learned is more important than a person’s expressed preference (you can’t learn to swim by reading a book).

The important question is, on balance, can we predict which approach works better? And the answer at the moment is absolutely not.

A learning styles questionnaire can be used to prompt discussion and self reflection about how we learn best. The results, when presented as a bit of fun, can help us to question which approaches will work best for us when we need to learn a new skill or increase our knowledge base. However, that’s not how they’re normally used and there are other ways of achieving the same outcome without using a questionnaire that maps onto a simplistic model for how people learn. This, combined with the way they’re used by people who have limited understanding of the background to them to ‘label’ people, makes the case for not using them at all pretty powerful.

The role of a workplace learning professional is to help people do their jobs more effectively. Understanding the current thinking about how we learn, and how that process might be optimised, is important because it enables informed experimentation. If we only ever used evidence based approaches, progress would be very slow indeed (just look at how long it takes for a piece of research to get published).

However, when it’s found that something we’ve been using doesn’t work, we should be sufficiently un-dogmatic that we simply stop using it.

Donald highlighted three learning myths in particular:

• You only remember 10% of what you read
• The right side of the brain is the creative half
• You only use 10% of your brain

And there’s many more that could be added to those three.

Why are such myths so widespread? What makes them attractive?

One of the main reasons is that not enough people are given the necessary training in critical thinking skills to analyse these claims with a sceptical eye. This isn’t unique to learning and development; as a society we’re too quick to take the word of journalists or people presented as ‘experts’ who are nothing of the sort [1].

Another reason for the popularity of these learning myths is that they are ’sticky’ ideas – they contain elements that are inherently attractive to us.

Firstly, they have the surprise factor; all these learning myths have something that would surprise someone the very first time they heard them.

Secondly, they sound like there’s some kind of scientific basis for them; indeed, many of those who pass on these ideas will say things like “research has shown …” or “scientists have found …”

Finally, they are easy to remember and understand; there’s no complexity in these ideas, no shades of grey or exceptions to be found. They can be gobbled up and regurgitated without much effort or thought.

Lessons and opportunities

The ’stickiness’ of certain ideas is a lesson that marketeers have learned and refined over decades, but it seems to me that they’re being used in the wrong way here. It’s fine to skimp on the detail when it’s obvious that something is being sold; people know to ask for more detail in these situations. However, passing on myths in the context of learning reduces our understanding over time and embeds exactly the wrong sort of thinking in the L&D profession.

However, there are opportunities here for L&D as well. These myths abound because of a skills gap. They cost us money because every decision made on the basis of faulty information will more likely than not cause problems down the line – just look at what happened to the banks.

So, how do we equip staff with the necessary higher order skills needed to lead and manage in the complex modern economy? How do we ensure that decisions made in our organisations are based on sound information and not hocus pocus? These are questions and challenges for learning professionals and I’ve no doubt that as a profession we’re up to the task. We just need to get up to speed a bit more quickly than we’re doing at the moment.

Posted by Owen for Peter

[1] Take the claim in today’s newspapers that one espresso can put your heart at risk. This story seems to come from a reputable source and there’s information about milligrams of caffeine and percentage reduction in blood flow. But how many people realise that a small study of 20 people in laboratory conditions isn’t that valid? Or ponder how interesting it is that the research was conducted in Italy, famous for its coffee culture, where the incidence of heart problems is amongst the lowest in the world?

Put this beside all the things about coffee that ‘research has shown’ and you get a picture where coffee cuts the risk of a range of cancers, diabetes and Alzheimer’s while putting strain on your heart, increasing your stress response and causing fatigue. All of it based on small cohort studies and not backed up with any really good epidemiological evidence.

UPDATE: A great analysis of the espresso story can be found on the NHS Choices site (worth a visit whenever you see a dodgy health story).

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?”

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.

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

[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.

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!”

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