And I think the idea of creating “challenges for organizations to help them learn” is the right one – it’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last few years

But I’ve never made any headway when calling it ‘training’. I’ve never managed to persuade an organisation to do ‘collective training’ but I have project managed ‘business development’/'service development’/'innovation’ programmes.

I like Gilbert’s idea of the Black Box. It reminds me of the idea of a barium meal – feed some new skills/information to an organisation and record how fast and with what fidelity the signal reaches the bowels of the organisation…

Which I suppose is where I struggle with the word ‘training’ – or, more accurately, my clients do. (Training has long been a term of art for me.)

Training = input = measurable improvement in ability against target. This we’re talking about here is utterly different in terms of metrics. Training the organisation ~= development ~= increased responsiveness (with any ‘target’ likely to have unintended consequences).

Not only do nodes need to be competent but the connections between those nodes need to work. That means “training” the network. Training meaning doing work and reflecting on how that work was done. I see this as a positive move in getting the organization to work better. The military knows this because it spends much time and resources on collective training, even though all personnel are individually trained. Few civilian organizations can conduct collective training because they are too busy getting work done.

This is the challenge for the networked organization; learning as we work and working as we learn.

All middle managers have to take a number of courses, some ‘intermediate’ and some ‘advanced’. Each of the courses is a day long and seeks to encapsulate the ethos of the organisation – this is how we do things round here.

There’s a million management models and a million ways to measure success/standards but managers in this organisation have to work to the ‘way we do things round here’ as laid out in the courses.

One course is ‘recruitment and selection’. All delegates learn how to use the company’s competency framework to test, interview and select new hires. No deviation from the procedures are tolerated. Anybody who brings up evidence for the potential weaknesses of competency profiling is politely but firmly told to follow the company line.

In setting the standards, often arbitrarily, the company is training the organisation – to be the organisation. If I was slightly more hysterical I might say that the training programme was designed first and foremost to inculcate workers into the preferred methods of upper management – training is part of command and control.

But I’m not hysterical and will say that this inculcation is merely incidental. Nevertheless, training in organisations has the effect of training people to be like the organisation.

You’re right that we don’t get groups of workers of all levels together for collective training. This is bonkers but, again, a symptom of using training as a tool to shape/reinforce the organisation rather than enabling personal development.

Am I right in saying that you’d see ‘training the organisation’ as a positive thing? Are we disagreeing on the definition of the word ‘training’? If it helps, when I talk about us having always trained the organisation, I’m talking about us doing something that we’ve called training but that has few of the positive connotations.

You can look at an organization as a black box. What would happen if you would give an exam to the black box.

Basically you contact the organization to test their knowledge. They could then use any of their internal resources and contacts to do the exam and come back to you within a prescribed period with the answers to the questions.

What you would find is that many organizations could not give you the right answers in their own domains of expertise. Although many individuals within the organization could. Frustrating for the individuals who know all the answers…lol

I have many times contacted organizations with the simplest questions about their own businesses and no one could give me an answer. The expertise was there inside the company but from the outside it sure didn’t look like it was.

You can improve each part in a system all you want, it doesn’t mean that the total system will be able to respond to situations.

Wirearchy and many of the discussions in this blog have the potential to create the intelligent organization but these semi-neural networks do have to be trained. And training the nodes is different than training the whole.

Organizations learn by doing mistakes and sometimes doing things right. So technically one could create challenges for organizations to help them learn. Its really just an instructional design problem..ah ah

Gilbert

First off (and slightly pedantic), I think we have always worked to train the organisation over the individual. A significant proportion of training has always been about developing a ‘culture’ in the workplace – the ‘self-development’ aspects took second place.

So, I guess part of the answer would be to allow a culture to emerge into the open that is a true reflection of how people are feeling.

Second, if we think *we’re* suffering from filter failure and information overload, can you imagine what organisations must be feeling? There are only so many experts and consultants you can bring in to deal with this.

it’s a cliche that ‘all staff are in marketing’. All staff are in Knowledge Management should become another.

“but evolution has not changed us that much and we still learn in much the same way as we always have, by watching other people do things”

I don’t agree that apprenticeship is learning by watching other people do things.

This said, I totally agree that we still basically learn the same way as we always have.

We might think in a more linear fashion, and that is changing fast, but we still learn the same way.

I also believe that ORGANISATIONS/SYSTEMS still learn the same way they always have. An organization has intelligence and it learns. And as individuals, organizations think in a linear way, but that is fast changing. .

A lot has been written on how to train employees/members but very little is being said about training the organization itself. And as silly has this concept sounds, this is the type of thinking that does lead to change.

So, if you had to train the organization instead of the individual, what would you do differently?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by snarethejob: Filtering is about trust http://bit.ly/aeCTOO #ELearning…