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.

We wanted to know where managers looked for learning when faced with a challenge in the workplace, how frequently they did it, and how effective they perceived the different methods to be. Most importantly, we wanted to take a learner-centric approach and ask managers, not HR or learning and development professionals, whose perceptions and needs may be different.

As such, we commissioned ComRes to conduct a survey, and the findings show that managers frequently use informal activities to help them learn, and that on the whole they find them to be very or fairly effective.

Download your free copy of ‘How managers learn (in their own words)’

View the full data tables from the survey.

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How do managers learn?

GoodPractice recently published the latest white paper in the Learning and Performance Link series. Presenting the survey findings of over two hundred managers from mid-size to large organisations, ‘How managers learn (in their own words)’ is a compelling read, providing an insight in to the perceived effectiveness of current leadership and management development and training methods. The report has been well received and sparked a phenomenal response from the TrainingZone audience. If you have not done so already, read the full report.

Industry Spotlight

Top Posts and Hot Topics

Industry Spotlight Top Posts and Hot Topics If like us and Tony Karrer, you struggle to keep up with all the latest blogs and must read articles, then we hope you will find this of use. Tony recently posted a list list of blog posts and hot topics for the month, allowing us to keep up to date on leading thinking from some great writers. What’s more our very own Peter Casebow made the list at number 11 with his blog post on planning to implement informal learning.

Exploring the performance landscape

What’s your mental picture of the learning landscape and the tools you have available to you, as a learning professional, to do your job? One of the conclusions from our White Paper on How Managers learn (in their own words) was that Learning and Development professionals need to revaluate their perspective of the learning landscape and start to think about a performance landscape. Exploring the performance landscape sets out our thinking on this idea further, and you can read the full article.

Top 5 toolkit search terms

What over 1 million managers have been searching for this month

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2. Motivation
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4. Competencies
5. Values

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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?”

• learning to handle information, knowledge and ideas
• learning for the purpose of work

In the past, there have been some areas of overlap between the two fields but until relatively recently, work has been mostly focused on the creation, buying and selling of goods and services whereas ‘knowledge work’ has been motivated by a desire to better understand the world around us. The way that those ideas have eventually made their way into the world of work doesn’t take away from the fact that the original intention was generally of a less practical nature. [1]

Given that more of the work carried out in developed countries is knowledge work, what lessons can be learned from history to help us support learning and development in the modern economy?

The changing face of work

Society has come a long way in terms of both intellectual development and the type of work people do. In the last few decades, there has been dramatic growth in what Peter Drucker termed knowledge based work. That is, work for which there is no tangible output but is instead defined in terms of information produced, analysis of information or the generation of new ideas. For most managers and nearly all senior leaders in an organisation, this is a significant part of their role.

This is a major shift from the work of previous generations, where most employment was of a more physical nature or did not require such a high degree of knowledge in order to perform. For example, to work as a technician in a hospital laboratory used to require achieving three O-Levels; now it’s difficult to get a place in a lab without a postgraduate qualification because of the complex nature of the work and deep level of expert understanding required to interpret the results. This isn’t just true of sophisticated scientific work, postgraduate qualifications are often required to work in human resources in many organisations, yet it wasn’t that long ago that school level qualifications would suffice.

A review of the history of learning at work (see appendix) reveals that it has evolved from simple observation and imitation to the plethora of different learning strategies employed today. However, the majority of the commonly used instructional techniques used in the modern workplace attempt to improve upon methods developed during the two World Wars. It was at this time that there was a need to train large numbers of people to perform technical, yet mostly physical, tasks and the tools that we had were limited to face-to-face instruction.

Work has changed in the last 50 years but the main instructional and learning support strategies used to support that work haven’t.

The original knowledge work

The development of new knowledge and the application of ideas has taken a rather different path from how people have traditionally learned to do their jobs. When looking at the development of philosophy, science, mathematics and the arts, patterns start to emerge in the types of activities that those engaged in these disciplines participated in:

• accessing the knowledge of experienced practitioners (whether in person or through some other media, such as books)
• informal networking between experts in the field
• collaboration with others
• problem-solving
• debate and constructive criticism
• experimenting with new ideas in practice

The higher order skills required to take advantage of these activities can’t be learned by following simple step-by-step instructions. However, when the hubs of knowledge development and creativity of the last several hundred years are examined, many of the common attributes listed above are demonstrated by the successful, creative and innovative organisations today. Whether it is Microsoft or Google, WL Gore or 3M, the learning culture in these organisations is not a top-down, push of information but a collaborative environment where access to new ideas is used to stimulate and inspire.

A struggling discipline

The huge range of new initiatives and fads over the last 30 years in the field of Learning and Development tells the story of a discipline that has lost its way slightly. The old tried and tested methods of the industrial age no longer work as well as they used to, and this is because the nature of work itself has changed.

Learning and Development departments need to change, learn lessons from the knowledge work of previous generations and apply the tools we have today to improve upon how they carried out work.

Indeed, this is already happening with the dissemination of expert knowledge through the web, the growth of online discussion groups, email exchanges between people working in similar professions (in different organisations), the sharing and debating of ideas through blogs and collaboration between people in different parts of the world through collaborative tools. Forward thinking organisations are tapping into these mechanisms to make it easier for their employees to connect, share and learn.

These aren’t new ways of doing things. The letter writers and coffee house dwellers of the 17th century, the public lecturers of the 18th century, the scientists at Princeton in the 1930s and 1940s, and the developers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were learning in exactly the same ways; they just used different tools. It’s a very different type of learning than Learning and Development departments have been involved in supporting in the past.

The normal paradigm of scheduled events won’t work in the knowledge economy; in order to get a fresh perspective on how they operate, learning professionals could do worse than ask themselves the following questions:

• How do we provide people with access to expert ideas and knowledge without pushing it out through scheduled events and spoon-feeding methods?
• How do we help people connect and collaborate more easily?
• How will we create a culture where mistakes are tolerated and experimentation is encouraged?
• How do we ensure that new ideas are debated and criticised constructively?

More importantly, learning professionals need to work with senior executives to identify the learning and performance culture they want to create to support this type of learning, and the changes that need to occur to make this happen.

There are no one-size-fits-all answers to these questions, but asking them will help Learning and Development departments look at what they do in a different way and begin to find a way forward that really meets the learning and performance needs of the organisation.

[1] I’m painting a story with a very broad brush here, and quite happily admit that exceptions can be found for every statement that I can make. However, I’d argue that the general thrust of the argument is valid.

Appendix: A brief history of learning

A book could be written on the subject of work and knowledge based learning through history, so the notes in this appendix stick to the main trends and significant developments. There is is a European bias to the timeline to keep things simple, but this should not detract from the significant achievements of the Far Eastern and Arabic cultures over the same time period, especially through the Middle Ages, when European cultural development stagnated. Despite these limitations, the main points remain valid.

Pre-history (before 4100 BC)

In the early days of civilisation, before written records were made, knowledge and wisdom gathered by previous generations were passed down through oral recitation. Often this was in the form of stories and poems that were easier to remember.

The concept of work was not yet the same as it is today. People’s ‘work’ was survival, but skills needed to be shared and developed. This was done through observation and imitation in a very similar way that a new person joining an organisation today might spend some time shadowing and watching an experienced member of staff.

Predominant methods

Ancient civilisation (approx 4100 BC to 500 BC)

The development of civilisation enabled people to specialise in ways that were not possible before. The accumulation and passing on of knowledge became something that someone could do for a living.

Outside of the upper echelons of society, the world of work was dominated by the making, buying and selling of goods. During this time, the skills needed to work a trade were usually passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. This concept of someone experienced passing on their knowledge and skills to a younger, inexperienced individual would eventually develop into the concept of an apprenticeship system that we still have in place today.

Predominant methods

Classical antiquity (500 BC to 500 AD)

The Classical period saw the explosion of wealth in certain parts of the world that enabled certain civilisations to develop ideas and the concept of critical thinking to previously unsought levels.

Two developments stand out as influencing how knowledge was passed on to this day. These were the the precursors to modern day universities such as Plato’s Academy, and the first great collections of knowledge such as the great Library of Alexandria .

Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum are examples of the formalising of an informal structure that had developed naturally. The Academy grew from informal meetings held at Plato’s home, where educated men would debate ideas and try to solve intellectual problems. New thinking was developed through Socratic questioning and the studying of problems which needed to be solved.

The Library of Alexandria was just one of several great libraries that were built at this time. These acted as centres of scholarship and research, and attracted scholars from around the known world.

Learning for the purpose of working at this time was still very much based on the passing of skills from one generation to another, observation and imitation. There were several fields, such as scribing, law and certain military roles, where this was not the case. The classroom, or training ground, was used to provide instruction in writing, the law and military strategy. However, these knowledge based jobs were a tiny percentage of the overall jobs market and tended to be the prerogative of the upper classes of society. In addition, the schooling that these professionals received was seen as a first step towards official status, and usually there was a period of apprenticeship to be observed first.

Predominant methods

Middle Ages (500 AD to 1600 AD)

The Middle Ages were when the concept of apprenticeship was formalised and run by official organisations. A master tradesman would employ a young apprentice as an inexpensive form of labour in return for food, board and formal training in his craft. These arrangements were often overseen by guilds or local government.

This period also saw the establishment of what we would today recognise as universities, including the Universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. Initially, these awarded general degrees based on accomplishment in all the taught subjects, before going on to offer more specialised degrees. Teaching at the university was very similar to today, with students attending lectures, participating in small group tutorials and self-directed study before proving competence in an exam form of assessment.

However, the main focus of these medieval universities was the passing on of knowledge and the development of critical and analytical thinking skills. Towards the end of this period, universities started to change and focus more on encouraging productive thinking – the development of new ideas and ways of viewing the world – which is when active research became a core university activity.

Predominant methods

17th century

The 17th century saw an explosion in unofficial collaboration that led to new ideas and concepts being proposed and expounded upon at ever-increasing rates.

Intellectuals in the fields of science, maths and history were constantly corresponding with one another, sharing ideas and challenging current thinking over significant distances (Pierre de Fermat and Sir Isaac Newton being two famous examples).

The 17th century also saw some well known examples of the clustering of like-minded individuals who went on to change how we view and interact with the world. Coffee houses in London and Paris housed serious intellectual debate: Paris had the philosophers and artists, while the London coffee houses had a big part to play in the development of the Royal Society and Lloyds of London (a wager made in a London coffee house even led to the publication of Newton’s greatest work, Principia Mathematica).

From this point on, the way that those involved in the development and generation of ideas are prepared to do their work hasn’t changed all that much. The tools used to collaborate, debate and experiment may have changed over time, but the essential approach remained much the same.

Predominant methods

18th and 19th centuries

In the 18th century the Industrial Revolution changed the world of work. The explosion of factories and new ways of working meant that there was a requirement to train a large number of people in a short time on simple techniques, especially on how to operate machinery. This led to the birth of classroom ’sheep dip’ training, with employers taking a lead from schools on how to train a group of people at the same time.

The main influence in the 18th century on the development of new knowledge was the widening of the debate. Up until the 17th century, intellectual debate and collaboration was limited to a relatively small group. The coffee house culture saw an expansion of this, and the 18th century saw the introduction of public lectures and the first wide circulation of groundbreaking works in print. The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was of international interest, and the debate went back and forth across the public domain. Ideas had started to spread far more widely, and more quickly, than they had in previous centuries.

Predominant methods

Mid 20th century

Two events dominated the first half of the 20th century, and these in turn affected every aspect of those societies involved, including work. During the two world wars, countries that used conscription to swell the ranks of their military needed to find a way of training large numbers of people to perform complex technical tasks. In addition, the civilian workforce needed to transform the output of the country’s factories to supply the war effort. This experience, coupled with the work of management researchers such as B.F. Skinner, led to the development of instructional design – a process informed by tested learning theories.

These instructional models all had a similar make up: steps to identify the requirements of the learner and the stated objective of the learning activity; steps to design and deliver an appropriate intervention; and steps to evaluate the success of the intervention designed.

Similar to the classroom approach of the Industrial Revolution, instructional design was developed with the achievement of competence at a physical task in mind (such as building an aircraft, stripping a machine gun or carrying out military manoeuvres).

Until the the 1950s, managers usually carried out training. However, the success of structured training led to the creation of training departments and training experts. Adam Smith’s timeless economic imperative of the division of labour made this change inevitable.

The 20th century also saw the speeding up of intellectual development. Where new ideas were needed, the environment and the methods were largely unchanged from previous generations. The Manhattan Project involved teams of people collaborating together to solve difficult problems, often at universities. The scientists heading that project corresponded at first, and then were brought together to work near each other and engage with each other socially. Through the process of sharing ideas, challenging each other and debating ideas, the scientists cracked problems in months that it was thought would take years to solve.

Predominant methods

1980s to 2010

The last 30 years have seen the increasingly wide-ranging search for ways to improve upon classroom training and instructional design. These include formal coaching and mentoring, accelerated learning, neuro-linguistic programming, brain friendly learning, games based learning, computer based training, elearning, learning management systems, learning content management systems, talent management, and action learning to name but a few.

The predominant methods of learning for the purpose of doing a job, however, have remained classroom training and instructional design, while apprenticeships have fallen in and out of favour with successive governments.

Training for the professions remains largely unchanged, as the route from university to a junior, apprentice-like role that is served for a time before moving up the career ladder has remained the same for doctors, lawyers and accountants for several hundred years.

Predominant methods

Other useful resources

A Developmental History of Training in the United States and Europe (a more academic take on the development of training from a researcher at Michigan State University)

A Time Capsule of Training and Learning (a collection of historical developments on Donald Clark’s Big Dog & Little Dog site)

Training: a short history (the CIPD’s take on the history of training)

What’s your mental picture of the learning landscape and the tools you have available to you, as a learning professional, to do your job?¹

One of the conclusions from our White Paper on ‘How Managers learn (in their own words)’ was that Learning and Development professionals need to revaluate their perspective of the learning landscape and start to think about a performance landscape.² This paper sets out our thinking on the idea further.

The White Paper was based on a survey of 206 managers and established the frequency and effectiveness of a number of informal learning activities.³

Before going any further, it is worth stressing that this paper is not about informal learning as such, nor are we saying that informal learning is good and formal learning is bad! There is an unquestionable place for all formal learning methods, but as they only amount to 30% of effective learning in organisations is it right that our focus and starting point is with these methods?

History of learning

A good starting point is to consider the history of learning and how it has evolved over the years. My colleague, Owen Ferguson has written an excellent article, ‘The Convergence of Knowledge and Work’ tracing the development of training and learning through the industrial revolution to today’s knowledge environment. In summary, most of our thinking about learning and training is stuck in the industrial age of the classroom, instructional design and control of learning.

The issue, as Owen points out, is that we live and work in a knowledge economy with a culture that is more questioning and curious than ever before. At the same time, technology has transformed access to knowledge and creates a range of opportunities that a learner will instinctively grasp when they need help to meet a challenge.

Indeed, one of the things that most of us fail to realise when undertaking informal learning is that we are learning! Chatting to a colleague about a problem is not seen as learning. Learners are as pre-conditioned as learning professionals to think of learning as being something that is controlled and delivered to them, whether in the classroom or through an e-learning module.

Purpose of learning – performance

Not only has the mental model of learning not evolved, but in many cases it seems to lack a clarity of purpose.

Why does Learning and Development exist and what value does it add? To my mind this is simple: Learning and Development exists to serve the organisation, by improving performance. It is not responsible for performance; that role needs to lie with line management, but it should be measured on its impact on the performance of the organisation. It is responsible for bringing specialist knowledge of how people learn in order to perform and to maximise the opportunities that exist within the organisation.

The expertise of Learning and Development professionals should enable them to:

1. help executives and managers identify performance gaps (a performance gap is where the potential of the organisation is not being achieved).

2. act as trusted guides as to the best method of achieving the desired improvement.

3. articulate a clear set of responsibilities around what needs to be delivered and the various interdependencies.

4. deliver their part of the plan to close the performance gap.

The language they should speak is not about learning outcomes, but performance outcomes. What really matters is what learners actually do when in the performance arena.

This may well mean learning professionals acquiring a new set of skills in order to thrive in this new environment.

If we accept that learning is about performance and that the paradigm we have of learning needs to evolve, what models and tools exist to help us build a new performance-based view of learning?

New ways of thinking about learning

Charles Jennings sets outs a learner focused model called the ‘find/access model’⁴ , in a blog about the future of learning.⁵ The model is very useful in terms of thinking about what people need to learn in order to be able to perform. Charles calls it ‘content-right learning & content-light learning’ and argues that the amount of content learning departments should deliver needs to be dramatically reduced from the existing traditional model.

He also provides a useful framework around what learners need to know, and the idea of core concepts, together with the stages of Memorisation, Familiarisation and On-Demand, set out well the split between training and performance support.

To be effective, we need to start with a clear view of the performance required and the performance gap, and then take a learner-centric perspective based on what is effective in the performance situation. This means moving away from seeing formal learning as the starting point and learning outcomes as the focus.

The performance landscape

The model (although simplified) benefits from placing performance as the sole focus and bringing the effective and frequently used informal learning tools to the fore.

This is a radically different starting point and perspective from most mainstream current thinking, and reflects our suggestion that the starting point and main area of focus for learning departments should be on supporting informal learning, rather than seeing it as a ‘nice-to-have’ bolt-on.

Charles Jennings suggests that this means that learning departments need to therefore focus ‘on basic conceptual tools such as creative thinking, critical thinking and analytics skills, logic, search skills, data validation skills, research methodologies skills, networking and communication skills.’ These are the core workplace skills which underpin better informal learning and therefore facilitate improved performance. (This is also supported by Tony Karrer ⁶ and his view of workplace literacy.⁷ )

A focus on performance also moves the measurement process from inputs and outputs to performance outcomes and the methods of achieving them, and makes for a much more meaningful conversation with line executives about their concerns and requirements.

So the learning department of today may want to think about changing its name to ‘Performance Support’ and shift the focus to, as Jay Cross says, ‘helping people perform better, faster, cheaper’. In this world your paradigm needs to be based on a performance landscape.⁸

To conclude as I started: what’s your mental picture of the performance landscape and the tools you have available to you to improve the performance of your organisation?⁹

¹ We define a learning landscape as a range of learning opportunities that exist within an organisation to provide learning outcomes.

² Available at goodpractice.com.

³ Informal learning definition by Jay Cross: ‘anything that is not easily recognisable as formal training and performance support.’

⁴ http://www.duntroon.com/index.html

⁵ http://charles-jennings.blogspot.com/2009/12/getting-to-core-of-learning-content-in.html

⁶ http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/03/workplace-productivity.html

⁷ http://www.workliteracy.com/

⁸ http://togetherlearn.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/the-training-department-of-the-future/

⁹ The performance landscape is the range of learning opportunities that exist within an organisation to improve performance. These are hugely influenced by the performance culture of the organisation.