Mike’s Doc Blog

One of the things that I struggle with both professionally and in my doctoral studies is being in conversations with people who lack the skills needed or experience needed to see the vision and help craft the way. The red flag for me is someone who asks for your need, fails to respond to queues about possible enhancements, and delivers exactly what was originally outlined in the need.

Sometimes when I see the end goal or the vision, I cannot always see the intermediate steps or possible enhancements that could make the vision better. It is like seeing that tall building when you are in a city but not knowing exactly how to reach it. I like to work with people who have the skills and experience around a subject, product, service, or process so they can fill in the gaps and help map out the solution.

My last conversation with my mentor was one of the those golden conversation with someone that has vision. She was able to see the end and help me with the steps needed to get there. At the end of the conversation, I had a way and enhancements to make it better (along with some homework to do). Consequently, I am on my way to the proposal and ARB/IRB submission. Tremendous value!

Conversely, I’ve been working on some service offerings outside the classroom and find that the group I am working with do not have the “vision”. The service is being  hosted in some powerful and commonplace software for business knowledge management. However, most of the people that hold the keys are figuring out the software as they go and lack the experience or skills needed to really “get it”. They are well intentioned but just underdeveloped in regards to the software. Consequently, the products that come out look pieced together and rough. Tremendous opportunity cost!

Creative problem solving aside, sometimes we just don’t know what we don’t know and that has a cost associated with it.

There seems to be a value when we get people involved that actually possess the skills and experience necessary to bring a vision to life in a way that the original visionary might not have realized possible. At work this is a project that takes off and delivers outstanding results. In school this is getting over the hump or building an amazing project on something really cool.

I find it easier, more productive, and more valuable to vision with people who have vision and skills enough to help. It might have a direct cost associated with it but the indirect value far outweighs those costs.

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We’ve all spent time wondering what it is that training departments and trainers do all day. In fact, if you read my blog often enough you’ve probably caught some posts about the change in training departments from being all formal learning to being a full-service provider of learning including multiple modalities, multiple styles, and multiple approaches. My research is focused on one such activity: the learning impact of using blogs and poscasts in corporate training.

I’ve spent my career becoming a learning and performance professional. I study the profession, experience the profession, and think about the profession. A lot. Just as you study your jobs and careers, I study mine. It is, in fact, what makes us professionals. You won’t catch me going around claiming to be a professional in another venue and yet I often find people coming along to pretend to be professionals in mine without the experience, education, of skills to do so.

That said, or written, some recent activity in my experiencing of the profession has caused me to think about how best to work with professional training departments. For those in the know and not-in the know, feel free to add to the list below:

• Staff the department with people who demonstrate an understanding of learning and performance.
• Involve the department early in your projects and processes so they get the benefit of knowing what is going on and how to make that sound training for your people.
• Be a partner, not an autocrat, that listens to the advice of these professionals and works with them to a mutually beneficial end.
• Assist in finding performance benchmarks that can be used to evaluate learning beyond the ’smile sheets’
• Get the group involved in communities of practice so they can continually enhance and evolve the learning in your organization
• Provide the department realistic resources to do the job expected of them
• Insist that learning and performance leadership ’sit at the table’ with you
• Incorporate more learning modalities, styles, and approaches than PowerPoint driven classroom training
• Don’t send your cast offs into training departments. We don’t want them either.
• Don’t constantly ‘move the ball’ on the training department. Leaders stick to the plan.

I am sure there are a lot more, but the essence you should draw from this list is that this group should aid in leading your organization. Moreover, the new economy is going to be creative and thought leadership; you’d be well advised to position your organization for that change now.

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Clark Quinn, writing for TogetherLearn, posted an interesting response to criticism about the informal learning. Quinn’s point was simply that training is changing and a true professional will include elements of informal learning into the spectrum of services provided for clients and organizations. I couldn’t agree more.

In my research people often think that I am advocating the overthrow of classroom learning. I am not. Like Quinn, and others, I don’t think classroom learning will go away but it does need to change both in purpose and in implementation. Quinn talks about the purpose of classroom learning under the guise of formal instruction (which is more comprehensive than simply classroom learning):

there [is] a role for formal instruction (when you’ve new folks, or are moving to a new suite of skills)

he continues…

Most classrooms (live or virtual) focus on knowledge dump, don’t present appropriate practice, don’t assess in meaningful ways, and aren’t leading to the necessary changes in behavior.  Classrooms persist more because they’re efficient, not because they’re effective!

What you should be paying attention to is that expertise is no guarantee of quality.  Learning designed by listening to SMEs often is fact-heavy, and irrelevant. Experts don’t even know how they do things, and rely on the knowledge they’ve learned.

I’ve lived this all my training life, knowledge dumps, and it only sets me to take the materials and learn it on my own using informal techniques. Personally, this suggests the the role of formal instruction is to convey knowledge. In fact, I tell people this all the time…training closes knowledge gaps not performance gaps. I get a chuckle out of people that feel training is the hammer to fix all problems. It is expensive, time consuming, and according to research not meeting expectations or objectives.

When you think about how and what you learn everyday (and I mean really reflect on it) it is done through other means than formal instruction. Today that looks like website, web communities, podcasts, blogs, talking to people, emailing people, IMing people. Oh yes, people still attend the occasional class but that is to learning something new.

Quinn sums up, in a way I feel is spot on:

Yes, formal is part of the full spectrum, the full ecosystem, the full learnscape of solutions.  But the ‘classroom’ shouldn’t be the standard bearer.  We aren’t calling for the death of formal instruction, we’re calling for a) acknowledging and incorporating informal learning, and b) death of the classroom as a ’showup and throwup’ or ’spray and pray’ proposition.

Being a full spectrum provider means that you have a multitude of tools available that match the situation and need (not necessarily want). Think about where you’d rather shop. Do you want to drive all over town to hit the specializations you need or look for the mall or location that has the most things to offer. As a learning professional, I want to be the provider of as many things as possible, not a generalist but  a specialist in many areas. I also want to know about many things and have the connections to bring them in when needed.

For my dissertation this means that I am providing some further evidence to support one area of informal learning and help organizations make a conscious choice about what to use, when, and how.

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All my life, I’ve been told to expand my vocabulary. The reasoning ranges from the fun of new words to the importance of being intelligent. As of late, I’ve been told that the words I use intimidate those that do not have expansive vocabularies. The feedback has come in combination with other feelings that the intelligence I portray in my speaking, writing, and everyday tasks make me appear aloof and intimidating.

I make no apologies for continually developing myself and moving into new realms of thought. My upbringing has encouraged me to be smart and let others know that I am capable of performing the tasks ahead.

What concerns me is that the feedback has been attached to possible negative repercussions associated with my job and performance. It strikes me as odd that people would label intelligence as a bad thing. Especially when working in learning and performance, as I do.

A friend told me last week that he has had to look up words used in some written and verbal communications with me. He said this as possible evidence of what others see but remained thankful for the improvements in his own vocabulary. Heck, I travel with my dictionary and access to web resources so that I can look up words used in communication so that I can both learn and keep up with the conversation without asking for it to be dumbed down. I don’t think that is a bad thing at all. I also don’t associate it with weakness. I see that as living a value of continual development.

I personally don’t think my vocabulary is that expansive. Evidence of this is how poorly I play scrabble and boggle. I truly don’t do well. Moreover, I know people with far more expansive vocabularies and never slighted them unless they were so far beyond normalcy that it warranted some regulation. Even still, I was more impressed than intimidated. I looked at it as a learning opportunity. I guess you could chalk that up to a Jesuit education.

I’m uncomfortable with being told to dumb down my language so others don’t think ill of me. I am uncomfortable with the idea that only simplistic words and phrasing are preferred vs. something more accurate and might potentially expand the vocabularies of others.

In a world that is changing, in an economy that is becoming more of a knowledge economy, intelligence needs to be rewarded. Vocabulary is one (albeit a small) aspect of the new economy. If you have to look words up, good. I do too.

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I use the term metalearning alot when talking about the underlying principles in my training and development work. I used it yesterday and got a funny look (over the phone). The other party said “you mean learning, right?”

I responded in the negative and reassured the person I meant metalearning. But what is it?

Metalearning refers to the practice of learning how I learn or in your case, learning how you learn. Like metacognition, thinking about thinking, metalearning helps us become more powerful and thoughtful contributers to the organization. I post about leading through learning and how learning is the precondition to growth in the new economy but did not include my thoughts on metalearning. I simply hadn’t drawn the connection until my conversation late yesterday that leaders learn to learn.

Metalearning, for me, has enabled me to control and own my own learning and thus performance and productivity. I know how I learn and I control that in my interactions. The hard part is helping others understand that they do not know what is best for me in terms of learning.

For example, I was invited to review a training program and promptly agreed asking for the materials to be sent to me electronically so I can review them and offer insights. The response was a romantic posturing about how vital it was to see the delivery of the content, the nuances instructor’s banter, the pageantry of workgroups tackling problems, and a bunch of hokum about coming out for a week long program about a topic with which I am intimately familiar. The problem here is that the person feels that all people learn in one or few ways and that I, in fact, don’t know how I learn best.

As a Bill Kirwin, recent commenter added, “The state of knowledge work today can be summed up in one word. Overload.” I totally agree. Bill went on to offer guidance, “The key change that will allow innovation and creativity to arise is to reduce (not eliminate) the noise of email, info-feeds, social networks, etc.” Bill is talking about the influx of electronic media but the point goes well beyond that. It is about control what and how we learn and process knowledge for productive use in our environments.

Metalearning paves the way for you to own the learning and interact with knowledge in ways that are best and most productive. Moreover, it helps you to know when to switch the modality so you can get more. Probably the most powerful thing about metalearning is that you learn more about learning as you go. My mind is always on and I can absorb knowledge and process it at amazing rates, leaving some to wonder if I have got too much time on my hands.

So how do you learn to learn? I learned to learn in a Jesuit college. I mastered this when I took on the role of learning professional and began noticing how my information comes in, how it processes, and how it goes out. I took notes, I reflected on my learning, and began to practice and experiment with different modalities. It was almost like metacognition leading to metalearning.

Today’s task is for you to recognize when you are learning something and take a few notes about the modality of that experience and what you take from the situation. Do this a few times and you’ll be metalearning.

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The March 2009 issue of Atlantic Monthly featured an article titled, “How the Crash will Reshape America” by Richard Florida, a professor at University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. I caught the interview on NPR and the idea intrigued me to begin thinking about learning and creativity.

Florida’s primary tenet was that the economic reset the world is feeling know will result in a new economy driven by creativity and knowledge workers. As both a creative and knowledge worker, this was good news to me but caused some reflection about how learning can lead the economic reset and the next economic growth area — knowledge.

Tom Gram wrote about his reading of “The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation“, in a post named for one chapter, Let Learning Lead. Gram’s summary and captured points included how important learning was as the predeccessor for Toyota’s innovation, and in fact all innovation.

In it May argues that learning and innovation are intimately linked but that learning must come first–that it is a precondition for innovation. Through learning, ideas are converted into action.

A chief approach I use when leading training or learning interventions is that I want to create a thinking worker who can use learned knowledge, experience, and demonstrated skill to positively impact the organization. In other words, I don’t want robots, I want knowledge workers. Automatons just won’t do and if we heed Florida’s prophecy, automatons will not add value or grow the economy.

After reading Gram’s post, I headed off to Toastmasters, thinking about how learning was important to me. One of the speech’s delivered was titled, “Acres of Diamonds”. The speech, given by Jim Howe, was a throw back to Russell Conwell. Conwell was the founder of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Jim’s speech summarized Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds speech which Conwell delivered over 6000 times to raise money to establish Temple University. Jim concluded with the primary point of the speech was that learning, knowledge, are the precursors to growth and riches.

Last night, I lay awake thinking about all these things and something Jim said in his speech. Jim said, “Mike knows”. Apart from the dramatic imagery of using knows in a speech about knowing, the point that I have my acres of diamonds, my precursor to growth, my precondition to innovation and sustainability, and the prerequisite skills for a new economy was particularly salient.

Leaders have long known that learning is a foundational skill to leadership itself. Learning is why my research is taking the profession to a new area so that we understand the impact of using technology in learning interventions. With this new (and old) importance shed on learning as the root of the future, I am re-doubling my efforts to complete my dissertation and get onto the next economy.

Tom Gram asked, in a recent post dubbed Fun with Learning Taxonomies:

Have learning taxononomies been useful or irrelevant in your own instructional design work?

The post serves as a nice summary of the most popular taxonmies for learning from Bloom to Merrill. As Tom points out many people use taxonomies as the end all be all of development following a rigidly prescribed methodology for determining learning. More adeptly, Tom points out that a skilled professional can adapt elements of several taxonomies to attain the right blend for achieving performance.

I’ve used taxonomies in many ways, from the prescribed through a blending of element to attain results. All of which have served my purpose at the time. What is important to understand is that everything has a purpose and use when in the right context. A colleague recently talked to me about having an understanding of many models, items, subjects, and then blending them to achieve the results required for the project, task, or job.

To Tom’s question. Yes, I find the understanding of many models of learning taxonomies helpful in my work. As an artisan of the trade, I find that pulling from here and there can be useful when the project calls for such activity. Moreover, I can often attain higher performance than anticipated when I use these models to capture authentic performance.

Right now, I am using Bloom’s taxonomy as the driving force behind my objectives development. Largely because the client is not sophisticated enough to see beyond some basic levels of assessment and performance. Can I move the needle on this? Yes, and over time I will broaden the thinking to really look at performance in terms of a blended model. Why not now? Like most things, I feel that some skill, experience, and tenure with taxonomies and in the trade lead us to the artisan level of blending models to serve our needs.

Last week I was speaking to a few people about podcasting as a form of learning intervention. My research is narrowing to look at the podcasting technology solely and this gives me the impetus to reflect on the tool in terms of learning and other aspects. I began to think about podcasting in the ways the literature I am reading suggests, as a standardized communication of a message to a massive or varied audience. In my experience, though, podcasting serves largely as a 1-way method of communication. I have something to say, I record it, I podcast it, you receive it, done. Podcasting, again in my experience, has not been a 2-way collaborative modality. The quote I delivered twice last week was “no one ever podcasts back”.

This is not entirely accurate. Podcasts often beget other podcasts, some retort from another podcaster but rarely will people interact with a podcast by sending a recorded comment directly to the producer. Instead, podcasts often serve as the front of a large collaborative community filled with blogs, wikis, and other social media. Podcasts alone are like radio stations, you may react but I won’t hear you.

On the other hand, I sit in a lot of teleconferences where I can interact with the hosts. However, I sit in a lot of teleconferences originating from the same source but with different hosts. Along with that, a slightly different message. Sometimes this is valuable and sometimes it is not valuable. Regardless of value, it is interactive and people comment or collaborate back and forth.

Do I see podcasting as an inferior technology for collaborative learning? Not really. Of course, research will bear this out quantitatively. I am truly neutral on this matter; curious really.

I don’t theorize that podcasting needs to be 1-way or non-collaborative in nature. With the advent of microphones, low/no cost recording software, built-in cameras, and the like, anyone can create a recorded comment and podcast back as it were. Podcasts are hot items these days and I wonder about the impact on learning.

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Many years ago I made a decision to go into training and development. I loved the idea of educating job performers at something and watching it come to fruition on the floor (so to speak). A nice side benefit is the feeling of glory and pride when people know you and come to you for advice, counsel, and knowledge. What I quickly realized was that training departments and trainers were just the quickest path to knowledge and not necessarily the keepers of knowledge. It is a lesson I was happy to learn.

Harold Jarche blogged about Close the Training Department. Harold talks about the use of social media, or as I often call it collaborative learning technology, as a tool that is poorly used inside the traditional training mindsets.

I think that social media can be powerful tools for collaboration, working and learning, but they are rather useless inside a training box.

It is a trend to take social media devices and drop them into a training portal as if it were some oracle for people looking for learning services. I just completed a survey that showed a majority of people felt blogs, wikis, collaborative discussion forums, and the like were undesireable in a training portal (SharePoint in this case). However, the same respondent group felt that something being pushed to them would be more helpful. This went to another point Harold made:

Talk to the people at the coal face and find out what they really need. Few will say training. The days of developing & delivering are almost over. Connecting & Communicating should be the focus of learning and performance professionals in a networked environment.

I did and training was part of what they wanted but they wanted it delivered to directly to floor of the operation and not to some classroom. This leads me to believe that training is not a real need but a perceived need. People are smart, they need to know how to find knowledge quickly so it can be used effectively. So Harold’s point is well taken: connect people to knowledge and communicate it effectively for that group of people.

My realization of training as the quickest path to knowledge early on in my career enabled me to hone in my performance and deliver services that are needed. It is a paradigm shift for many training departments but as social media captures the interest of many in the training world, real learning and performance professionals are taking the reigns. We are trying to figure out if the tools impact learning, how the tools are used best, and what is needed by the performers of the job. Most importantly the transition needs to continue so that training departments become performance boosters.

The research I am doing helps address some of the popularity of social media devices with quantitative understanding of impact on learning. This can be expanded by looking at the real impact of using the tools in various ways.

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I’ve been reading Harold Jarche’s posts on change in the L&D industry, the future of training and development, and proficiency-based training. Harold is right on target with his predictions and sensitivity to the industry as it is happening now. I have no doubts Harold has been saying this for years and people looked at him like he had a third eye. I’m right there with him and have been saying the same things for some time.

By and large, learning and development professionals fail to understand performance and so they spend time teaching things without linking them to job or company performance. Thus, as Harold wrote,

Training is seen by this group of CEO’s (and I would wager many others) as superfluous to the company’s bottom line.

Harold’s simple advice is to be relevant to the business. Linking training and development to individual, departmental, and/or organizational performance is key to keeping the department relevant. Harold wrote,

I have met too few L&D professionals who can actually analyze work performance and come up with something other than training as the solution. Well, it seems that the days of the one trick pony are over.

Training is only one arrow in a quiver of available solutions for companies. Using it as a silver bullet (or one trick pony) will only lead you to buying a lot of silver bullets and not really looking at the problems and solutions.

Harold pointed me to another blog, Gram Consulting’s Performance by Design blog, and it too has had me reading and thinking. Tom Gram discussed what learning and development departments can do to stave off cuts during hard times. Tom gives five points to help grow training and development into a real learning and performance organization:Go and read the post for the full details, it is intriguing and valuable.

1. Expand your solutions: Break out of the training box
2. Improve your business processes
3. Consolidate your programs
4. Introduce (or improve) performance consulting
5. Develop a technology plan

Go and read the full post. It is intriguing and valuable but lengthy to copy directly into the Doc Blog.

Between Harold and Tom I found myself amongst kindred spirits of learning and performance. So much so that I took a hit list of posts and forwarded them to some folks I work with to get them thinking about what is possible. One person shouting for change is a lunatic on the corner, more people shouting for change is a movement to watch.

One post from Tom really got my juices flowing. I am working on developing a new model of learning and performance for an internal group that I serve. The group is unserved or underserved with regard to training and development but unlike a lot of companies, mine is investing. I was scooped up to lead the charge on this and thrilled for the chance. Still, this is an audience that is used to being in a classroom or flying for a seminar and cannot see how tools they use everyday for information can be altered to serve a real learning and performance need.

Tom’s post on Digital Performance Support: an alternative to e-learning captured just what I was thinking. The idea is that learning and performance professionals can be deploying digital tools that serve learning and job performance needs as they occur vs. scheduling a class or putting them through eLearning courses to no end. Tom’s point is simply that if we serve people with tools to help they will approach them at their own pace and eventually call on them less and less as they learn. Brillant! Give smart people smart information and they get smarter.

Part of my learning and performance model is just the thing Tom was writing about. If we create training and don’t support it or link it to performance we failed. As my fellow bloggers and industry colleagues have written, learning is changing and so should the services we offer.

As I continue to look into the impact of blogs, wikis, and podcasts on learning performance I am keeping an eye on how training is changing. Research will bear out some of the thinking here and hopefully move the industry into understanding what to adopt and how to use it more effectively.

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