If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.

This quote from Rummler & Brache in Improving Performance, sums up many of the symptoms of hierarchical systems, whether they be schools, businesses or even prisons.

The great work to be done at the beginning of this century is the democratization of the workplace. Efficiency and effectiveness are not enough, and too often become mechanistic. It’s time to discard industrial management models that emphasize command and control and ensure that individuals at all levels have opportunities to engage in and question the system.

Without questioning, things can quickly go awry.

Gary Stager discussed the well-known Milgram Experiments, conducted in the 1960′s to see how far people would go in administering electric shocks to learners. These experiments were replicated by ABC News and Stager picked up the direct link to public education [please read the whole article]:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7^th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phoney. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

This is why we need to change the entire education system – constraining curriculum; compulsory testing; useless homework; irrelevant subjects; classrooms cut off from the world; systemic bullying; etc. More or better teachers won’t help; we need to change the system.

In this interview, Dr. Philip Zimardo discussed the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

As Churchill said, “First we shape our structures, and then our structures shape us“. This reminds me of the question about who is the most important person on board a ship. Is it the Captain, the Navigator or the Engineer? Actually, it’s the Architect, because the initial design influences everything else.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the way things work in an organization. The problem may be the organizational model itself and it may be better to leave and create an alternative model than help keep a flawed one going.

Clay Burell had guest blogger Bill Farren discussing the hidden curriculum of school architectural design. He asked what hidden messages are our schools themselves asking by their inherent design:

• Did the building’s designers take into consideration its location?
• Who decided how (if) it should be built?
• Does the building make an attempt to connect students with their outside world?
• What does the formal, intentional curriculum teach?
• How is this formal, intentional curriculum taught?
• How is the school run?
• How is security portrayed?
• What is sold or advertised on campus?

There was an article I read many years ago, but never see cited, about designing learning environments. It’s Rodney Fulton’s SPATIAL model (1991) [my emphasis added]:

While a body of knowledge does exist that documents the relationships between learning and physical environment, there are problems that need to be resolved before the present level of understanding can be systematically advanced. One problem is that common vocabulary does not exist. Thus, in the literature, concepts are often described with similar but not identical terminology. Conversely, the same terms are used for similar but not exactly the same concepts. But this confusion in vocabulary is only a symptom of the fundamental problem: the lack of a conceptual model that explores relationships of physical environment to learning rather than to behavior in general. Architectural models address built environments, emphasizing both interior and exterior features of building design that allow, encourage, prohibit, or inhibit various behaviors. Psychological models discuss environmental attributes that set conditions for or even control human behavior. Sociological models emphasize the importance of environment in terms of how it facilitates human interactions. By emphasizing individual appreciation of the environment, aesthetic models address the relationship of values to human behavior. Workplace training models, including human factors engineering, emphasize the fit between environment and person and seek out optimal conditions for performance.

Each of these perspectives can add to a global understanding of the learning environment; however, a model that addresses learners in learning environments is a needed first step in refining educational research. The model described here – satisfaction-participation-achievement-transcendent/immanent attributes-authority-layout (SPATIAL) — can serve as a fundamental basis for organizing research designed to identify relationships between and among components of the learning environment and attributes of the learner. Further, this model has potential for weaving together findings from architectural, psychological, sociological, aesthetic, and human factors engineering studies.

Rodney Fulton responded, when I originally wrote this post in 2008:

I found it very interesting that some 17 years after I published the SPATIAL Model in a Jossey-Bass publication there was discussion that included the model. I am not aware of any significant use of the model or of any real impact on the field of Adult Education in the United States. I have longe since moved on from the field of Adult Education and am now very involved in Public Education at the Elementary level in the US. But again, it was gratifying to see my model referenced in 2008. If you know of any other people using or interested in the model, I’d be happy to hear from you. Thanks Rodney Fulton

There is still much structural work to be done.

Photo by Atelier Teee

Note: this post is an update of two previous posts from 2008

Everything I know, I did not learn in kindergarten. I didn’t go to kindergarten. Perhaps that was good, as that was the year that my father died, and I still did not speak much English anyway. It could have made for a stressful year. No kindergarten meant I could start school a bit later and I think I was really ready when I entered that one-room schoolhouse which was probably the best learning environment I ever had.

There were only three of us in Grade One, so I was also able to listen to what was going on in the Second Grade, in the same row, just ahead of me. Recess and lunch were usually fun, with all ages playing games together. There were not enough students in any one grade to form a dominant group. I was later home-schooled by my mother who never had any formal education in English. This was my introduction to public education.

I went to university straight out of high school and did a standard four-year degree. I got a gentleman’s pass from the Royal Military College and then put my books away. What remains of my undergraduate education is not so much my knowledge of History as my fluency in French. It wasn’t the classes that helped me master the language, but the girl I met in Québec between first and second year. That was real informal learning, watching morning TV cartoons with her young niece, whose French wasn’t too much more advanced than mine. I was one of only a few of my classmates who achieved fluency from no ability at all on entry. Motivation was the critical part of my learning.

Thirteen years later I went to graduate school part-time, with a full-time job and a young family. I could not have done it without the support of my wife. I received a graduate degree in Education but my real education has been in the 14 years since. I have been learning mostly online, first by accessing all of the information available on the web that interested me and more recently by connecting to a worldwide network of people, most of whom I have not met face-to-face. This network now numbers in the thousands.

I have learned that it was a shotgun wedding between robber baron capitalists and progressives, who at the turn of the last century helped to create our public education system, with age-based cohorts, classrooms, bells and a standardized curriculum. The capitalists needed workers who could read instructions, while progressives, like Moses Coady, founder of the Antigonish movement, felt it their mission to help society.

I have noticed with our boys now finishing up at school, that for the most part, the current system does not help them learn. If anything, it stops them from learning. One-size fits nobody, I call it. We were lucky, in that one or both of us parents could be at home during the day. Our boys could stay at home from time to time, such as the year one was frequently bullied – by the teacher. They knew they always had an option not to go to school. If I had to do it over again, I would pull our kids out of the system during middle school and let them become self-directed learners, later having them rejoin their friends in high school. Middle school was a needlessly stressful time for our family.

When I went to school, if a book was not available in the library system, in reality, it did not exist. Now my children can find and read most of what they need. The shift from scarcity to abundance of information is one of the many reasons we need educational reform. There can be no standard curriculum when everything is miscellaneous, as Cluetrain.com co-author Dave Weinberger says. Courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. With ubiquitous computing, that time is over. Our children know that.

I watch how our kids learn to play computer games. There is no rule book. The fun of the game is in figuring it out. This is always done collaboratively. Collaboration seems natural to this generation. While studying, Facebook is usually open and classmates send messages back and forth as they share in their learning. The whole notion of cheating may be gone in a generation.

I think this generation will be one of the last in the current system. I hope the next public education system is not another shotgun wedding, or a reaction to change, like charter schools can be. Actually, I hope that it’s not a system at all. It should be a network, like the Internet – open, with no centre, using only basic protocols and allowing for innovation at the edges. If we let our children design it, that is most likely what it would be like. It might look like Stockholm’s school without classrooms or something even more radical.

The government [update: actually it is an unelected group, NB2026, consisting of a variety of people, including several serving and past politicians] is asking how New Brunswick can be the learning province of Canada. Similar questions have been asked before, so I’m just going to amalgamate some of my responses.

Learning at School

Public Education: The problem is not that we don’t teach enough math or science or English. The problem is the structure itself. Until the structure is addressed, I don’t imagine that any fine-tuning of our current system will address the systemic problem that our schools promote childishness and discourage learning. Curriculum is the confinement of the human experience. It is a blunt tool that winds up bullying someone.

There is no shortage of good information on how we can improve public education.

Education’s three conflicting pillars – this shows the fundamental weakness of the system.

Learning in the Workplace

The major shift needs to be toward network thinking and supporting informal learning in the workplace. Each worker needs to take control of his or her own learning (e.g. personal knowledge management) and be given the opportunities and support to do so. My response to CCL’s question:

The overwhelming majority of the learning needs of Canadian adults are not addressed by formal training and education. In this post-industrial era, adults today require self-directed learning skills to thrive in the unstructured work environments outside of school. Efforts should be focused on the development of practical tools and strategies for adults to learn in a networked information society.

Learning in the Community

We need to encourage a Read/Write society. We also must encourage an aggressively intelligent citizenry that is empowered with access to its own ideas, not blocked by corporate interests.

A book that influenced many of my opinions on education is Kieran Egan’s, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape our Understanding. Egan says that Western education is based on three incompatible ideas:

1. Education as Socialization (age cohorts, class groupings, team sports)
2. Education as learning about Truth & Reality, based on Plato (varied subjects, academic material, connection to culture)
3. Education as discovery of our nature, based on Rousseau (personal sense-making, teacher as facilitator)

One of these ideas may be dominant at any given time but no education system can foster all three at once. Therefore we keep trying to re-balance something that can never be balanced. It’s a constantly shifting three-legged stool. In addition, each one by itself is inadequate in a modern society, writes Egan.

Socialization to generally agreed norms and values that we have inherited is no longer straightforwardly viable in modern multicultural societies undergoing rapid technology-driven changes. The Platonic program comes with ideas about reaching a transcendent truth or privileged knowledge that is no longer credible. The conception of individual development we have inherited is based on a belief in some culture-neutral process that is no longer sustainable.

I think Egan’s recommendations for a different system make more sense than any other I have read over the years and it’s a shame his work has not been picked up by educators. However, my aim in this post is not to review these. I’m interested in a conversation Dave Cormier has initiated because this is what Egan has articulated in the first chapter of his book. Dave asks:

 The why of education should be the first question that we answer in any discussion in the field. The answer to the ‘why of education’ question should be debated, mulled and hammered, on and on, and be at the centre of the work that we do. Sadly, it seems to be very difficult to say anything about “what learning is” and “why we educate our children”.

I don’t think it can be adequately answered because our society has not gone beyond the initial three incompatible ideas. Until we address these, we will keep spinning in circles. Dave suggests a shift to a nomadic education model and this might work, but not without addressing the baggage of the three core ideas. Maybe we need three distinct school systems. Perhaps we can examine Egan’s model that breaks from the three core ideas and suggests one where there is no set curriculum and any subject is “grist for the cognitive mill”.

B.H. Liddell Hart, military historian, wrote that “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is getting an old one out.” And so with the educator’s mind.

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Many thanks to the E-learning Council, members and their readers for the vote of confidence

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This morning I’m heading to Toronto to participate in the Innotribe stream for the Sibos conference. Peter Vander Auwera invited me and I’m really looking forward to what is already a most interesting conference, as I read the tweets and posts. I’m presenting on organizational models over time with Stowe Boyd and the session is moderated by the always-interesting Mark Dowds.

Peter’s blog has been covering many of the themes that will be discussed – Digital Identity; the new physics of big data; and new economies for example.

Some comments via Twitter so far:

@petervan - Decrease the bank’s AND the customer’s risk should be one of the principles

@dsearls – Has anybody ever drowned in a Deep Dive? Just wondering.  Corollary to last tweet: I have been rained out in a brainstorm.

@marovdan – # innotribe  has grown and matured into something very important. The future course of finance is being debated and decided. Here.

There should be lots to learn and much to write about, which of course I’ll share here. Hugh Macleod is the official cartoonist for the event, so that should be a real treat!

Five years ago I suggested that those who teach will not test:

• Anyone who teaches is not allowed to test.
• Those who design the tests are answerable to those who learn and those who teach.
• Those who teach are only responsible to those who learn and are subjected to tests.

Keith Lyons points out some more fundamental questions about the efficacy of providing feedback:

Royce [Sadler] observed that “feedback is about telling … that is the problem”. He discussed this dilemma and noted its roots in the transmission model of education. He proposed an alternative model in which teachers were the bridge in students’ journeys from what they know to incorporating information they did not know to develop their knowledge.

Directed feedback and assessment keep learners in a dependent situation whereas the real aim should be to get learners to notice their own progress.

Royce argued that ‘traditional’ assessment practices require the assessor to judge a problem, repair the response and give advice. Yet these are a student’s responsibility.  He argued forcefully that Noticing is a key to student flourishing.

My observations are that trades or craft schools often get students to notice their own progress but this is lacking in general education and corporate training. There is still a culture of dependence, stemming from early school years and copied by so many training and educational bodies:

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.  Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.  It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.  The expert makes all the important choices; only I can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I enforce.

Shifting from external to internal assessment reinforces what we already know about social learning from Albert Bandura:

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

Self-ownership of our learning, taking responsibility for our mistakes, all in a collaborative work environment that helps us learn socially – these are the hallmarks of a real learning organization.

The Epic social learning debate for Summer 2011 states:

“This house believes that as social learning grows, so the requirement for traditional training departments shrinks.”

Let’s examine why they grew in the first place. Training on a massive scale was a requirement for preparing citizen soldiers for war and initial methods were tested during the second world war (1939-45). A systems approach did not become standardized until after the war, led by applied research done by Robert Gagné, as noted by Donald Clark:

One of the interesting system development projects discussed in Gagne’s book is building a revised course of instruction for armor crewman training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The project was code named SHOCKACTION and undertaken during the late 1950s. The course trained tank crewmen to act as a tank commander, driver, gunner, or loader of the Army’s main battle tank. The course was considered important and worthy of considerable investment of research and development funds. It was noted by officers that the present course was not training armor crewmen to a level of proficiency.

The famous ADDIE model did not get adopted until 1975, just as the baby boomers were entering university and the business world. There was a need to train lots of people in North America and later elsewhere as economies grew. Training departments rose to the challenge.

For thousands of years people have developed work skills through apprenticeship. This worked for small numbers and developed into the highly structured guild system in Europe. Industrialization marked the fall of the guild system. The nation state and the industrial economy adopted a new competency development framework, from which we have modern training departments, professional associations, job competency models, etc. But the industrial economy no longer drives the developed world. Even the information economy  is giving way to the creative economy.

In Social learning, complexity & the enterprise, I go over many of the factors that are forcing us to change how we think about learning and work, which is what training departments are supposed to focus on. The most significant change is in how we relate to, and deal with, information and knowledge. We no longer have to go to the library to get a book and we have access to a growing network of expertise from people (like bloggers) who are willing to share their knowledge for free. Instructional content is no longer a scarcity. Neither are “instructors”. Expertise is becoming ubiquitous though the likes of Wikipedia and social networks.

The draining of the hierarchical pyramid will change not only training, but also intellectual property and the social contract with workers. In a shifting networked world, every artificial  structure will be affected, so why should the training department be impervious to these effects? Even money will change, as this article about  The Bitcoin Epoch being akin to the Printing Press Revolution shows.

We are in a management revolution, testing out new models such as the social enterprise, democracy in the workplace, chaordic organizations and networked free-agents. Will the rise of social learning be the “cause” of the shrinking training department? Probably not. But it will be one of the effects.

The adaptive organisation is the second-last chapter of Adapt: Why success always starts with failure, followed by Adapting and you. In the final chapters, Tim Hartford examines how groups and individuals can strive to adapt, and here are some highlights.

“So let’s first acknowledge a crucial difference: individuals, unlike populations, can succeed without adapting.” This statement explains a lot about what happens in organizations

Case study of Timpson:

The first thing Timpson does when it buys another business is to rip out the electronic point-of-sale machines (there are always EPOS machines) and replace them with old-fashioned cash registers. ‘EPOS lets people at head office run the business’, explains John Timpson. ‘I don’t want them to run the business.’ EPOS machines empower head offices but they make it harder to be flexible and give customers what they need.

… how senior executives must feel when their cutting-edge, market-leading business finds itself being disrupted by a foolish-looking new technology:

A sufficiently disruptive innovation bypasses almost everybody who matters at a company: the Rolodex full of key customers becomes useless; the old skills are no longer called for; decades of industry experience count for nothing. In short, everyone who counts in a company will lose status if the disruptive innovation catches on inside that company – and whether consciously or unconsciously, they will often make sure that it doesn’t.

These, then, are the three obstacles to heeding that old advice, ‘learn from your mistakes’:

1. denial, because we cannot separate our error from sense of self-worth;
2. self-destructive behaviour, because … we compound our losses by trying to compensate for them;
3. rose-tinted processes … whereby we remember past mistakes as though they were triumphs, or mash together our failures with our successes.

How to overcome these obstacles:

“Honest advice from others is better.”

Perhaps there is one reason why researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receve feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.

“So it’s worth remembering once again why it is worth experimenting, even though many experiments will, indeed, end in failure. It’s because the process of correcting the mistakes can be more liberating than the mistakes themselves are crushing, even though at the time we so often feel that the reverse is true.”

The book covers and cites several key points from The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Future of Management, which may make it a bit tedious for those who’ve read many management books, but overall I would recommend it as a fresh perspective on some key organizational and structural issues

Higher value, paid work is increasingly complex and requires greater creativity. This is how the world works today.  Competition is global. Everything else is getting automated & outsourced it seems. Even lawyers are not immune to this.

In a workplace requiring creative solutions to complex problems, learning and working must be integrated. We need to actually implement the notion of the often-quoted term “continuous learning” Today, learning really is the work.

This is what separates high value work from the stuff getting automated and outsourced. The ability to figure things out, especially wicked problems, is now a key competency. There is no answer sheet here.

Building better courses or getting a learning management system with more features won’t help either. The solutions will not be found in the training department, but in the workplace.

Learning is a process, not an event. It’s a process that is integral to knowledge work, not separate from it. Creative knowledge workers need time to learn on the job, time to reflect, and time to discuss and get feedback. This is often not possible, given the design of the work environment. Instead, we provide sub-optimal methods of learning that are centred around courses, classrooms and hours or days of training, all separate from the work. No wonder it doesn’t work.

Do you want to fix workplace learning? Fix the workplace.