Category Archives: Informal Learning

We need more sandboxes

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Earlier this week I wrote that practices like personal knowledge management (PKM), and its potential for enhanced serendipity can give us the underlying structure to become better hackers and more creative. Behaviour change comes through small, but consistent, changes in practice. So how do you move from responsibility, to creativity, and potentially to innovation? Play, explore and converse. But first you need to build a space to practice. PKM can be your cognitive sandbox.

But what can be done at the organizational level to promote playing, exploring and conversing?

Informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum and for standardized tests. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions, about their own medical treatment, say, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust informal learning system that eschews grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends. – Scientific American

Organizations should think about building sandboxes as well. These could be shared resources, like the museums used by schools in the article, or even virtual spaces. The greatest challenge, if organizations did create learning sandboxes, would be resisting the urge to control them. Perhaps the best way to develop a “robust informal learning system” that eschews control would be through joint efforts, public and private. We have museums for the public, mostly aimed at basic levels of learning and often focused on children. Is there a new role for museums to develop spaces aimed at working adults? Can these be aligned with market needs? Instead of boring courses for the unemployed, how about access to a maker space instead? Again, it would mean giving up control.

Last year I witnessed a company close operations. A very good benefits package was provided as well as access to “re-training”. This was provided by an HR services company. Courses were available on how to write a resume or how to search for a job. I heard from attendees that these courses were interesting but not that useful. I suggested that something like PKM might be useful. However, the company would not provide anything beyond what the HR service provider offered. The company had met its legal commitments and it was time to turn the page.

sand playInstead, some employees set up their own sandbox. It was just a blog, connected to LinkedIn and other social media. People shared stories and passed on opportunities to others. Now this filled a gap, but it was temporary and the network was not that strong. Imagine if this sandbox had been in existence prior to the closure and was already a learning community of practice? What if community managers were already plugged in to other networks? Would this not be better for employees, the company, and especially society? Let’s build some sandboxes.

The post-job economy

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Learning may be the work in the network age, but that does not mean that learning will get you the work. Inge De Waard discusses this in MOOCs change education, but jobs decline in a knowledge era:

The simple truth is that not all of us get jobs even when graduating from universities, and if MOOCs add to that particular degree market (universities), we are stuck, for indeed if even the ones that graduate now are not always finding jobs, with the declining job market in mind, most of the new wave of graduates will get stuck as well. A knowledge era is a fine thing, it sounds great … for a minority of people. So how do we (re)find a balance between jobs and people having them?

I’ve highlighted Inge’s question because other people are asking similar ones. Much of my professional focus is about learning at work, and improving how people collaborate, cooperate and innovate in internet time. I call it sense-making for the connected workplace. Helping people adapt to this type of workplace is a big challenge. An even bigger challenge, for which I do not have any simple answers, is: How do people adapt to a post-job society?

Many MOOC’s are based on an educational model that has a curriculum from a body of knowledge that, so the logic goes, when mastered will prepare someone for meaningful work. Improving one’s education to get a job is often a primary motivator for participation. It’s the way the system has worked for decades. The “job” was the way we redistributed wealth, making capitalists pay for the means of production and in return creating a middle class that could pay for mass produced goods. That period is almost over. America has hit peak jobs TechCrunch informs us. The New York Times calls it  the rise of the permanent temp economy. The recession, combined with technology, is killing middle class jobs, reports the Associated Press.

We will not find a rebalance between jobs and people having them.

We have connected the world so that data and information can flow in the  blink of an eye. There are fewer information asymmetries, as companies like Amazon bust down one industry after another. One recent example is a local startup that is reducing information asymmetry in the used car business. This interconnectedness and increasing computational power will continue to automate work and outsource any job that can be standardized. New businesses are employing fewer employees, while manufacturing is moving to an increased use of robots.

One of my clients is an educational institution and I was heartened to learn that they are moving away from job preparation to a focus on entrepreneurship. They see the numbers. Their graduates are not getting jobs. Creating our own work will be the only option for many of us.

Ross Dawson provides some good advice on what we can do to prepare for a post-job economy.

As I often say, in a connected world, unless your skills are world-class, you are a commodity.

However there are three domains in which individuals and organizations can transcend commoditization and push their value creation to the other end of the spectrum, where they can command their price and choose their work.
The three domains are:

    • EXPERTISE …
    • RELATIONSHIPS …
    • INNOVATION …

The future is stark. There will be a large and increasing divide between those who have one or more of these core strengths, and those who do not and whose livelihoods are on an ongoing path of commoditization.

labour and talent

 

Image Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motor_Manufacturing.jpg

Scaffolding and capability building

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Jane Hart’s recent post on changing the role of L&D (learning & development) explains how training departments need to move beyond packaging content and toward scaffolding and capability building.

What I like about this matrix is that it makes it easier to describe my professional services in the organizational learning area. I have highlighted my areas of focus in red. The rest is not really my business, as there are plenty of companies that do that. I used to say I did ABC Learning [Anything But Courses]. Jane’s graphic makes it  much more clear, and it’s what our new Connected Worker site is all about.

scaffolding c4lpt

Work environment design for learning

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Catherine Lombardozzi writes, in Time for an Evolution:

To those of you who feel like you just stepped into the middle of a conversation, a learning environment (to my mind) is a collect of resources and activities for learning. The resources may be inanimate or human; the activities may be formal or informal. A well designed learning environment is curated with a specific need in mind. It may be curated by an individual (as in a personal learning environment), by a group (such as a community of practice), or by a designer who is supporting a specific complex need that can’t be met by training or other formal programs alone.

I’ve been promoting learning environment design as a way of thinking about what we used to call blended learning, and as a way of capitalizing on informal learning resources by curating the best materials (in your judgment) and making them easily accessible by your learners.

I have taken her image and added a 70:20:10 overlay. This could serve as a decision support tool for allocating time and resources for organizational learning and development.

70 20 10

Some thoughts from 2012

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Here is a review of the five most popular posts here this past year, with a short synopsis of each. One year, distilled into a few paragraphs.

Informal Learning: The 95% Solution

Informal learning is not better than formal training; there is just a whole lot more of it. It’s 95% of workplace learning, according to the research reviewed by Gary Wise.

To create real learning organizations, there is a choice. We can keep bolting on bits of informal learning to the formal training structure, or we can take a systemic approach and figure out how learning can be integrated into the workflow – 95% of the time.

You simply cannot train people to be social

Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making.

Creating a supportive social environment is management’s responsibility.

My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.

Three Principles for Net Work

Narration of Work – Transparency – Shared Power

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to learn and solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.

The Learning Organization

  1. Learning is not something to “get”.
  2. The only knowledge that can be managed is our own.
  3. Learning in the workplace is much more than formal training.
  4. When we remove artificial barriers, we enable innovation.
  5. Learning and working are interconnected.

Cooperation trumps Collaboration

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity.

Shifting our emphasis from collaboration, which still is required to get some work done, to cooperation, in order to thrive in a networked enterprise, means reassessing some of our assumptions and work practices.

Collaboration is only part of working in networks. Cooperation is also necessary, but it’s much less controllable than our institutions, hierarchies and HR practices would like to admit.

enhancing innovation

EEA Learning Day

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I will travelling and speaking for most of this week but will share what I have learned when I get back. This will be my first time addressing the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen and I look forward to meeting many new people. Here is what I will be talking about:

Keynote: Working Smarter in the Learning Organisation

As complexity increases in the networked economy, we need to integrate learning into the workflow. Communities of practice bridge the gap between getting work done and serendipitously connecting to looser social networks. Learning and development in the networked workplace must move from content delivery to community enablement. Harold Jarche will present a new framework for working smarter which includes the narration of work, transparency and knowledge-sharing to increase innovation.

I will also be running a workshop for managers:

Workshop: Coaching in the Learning Organisation

Harold Jarche will discuss some new approaches to support informal and social learning in the workplace. If problems and environments are becoming more complex, and are changing so quickly that our level of information will always be inadequate, there are some new qualities that learning coaches will need: 

1.       Openness to learning, not only from our peers, but from our employees and their contacts.

2.       Flexibility in our learning approaches; helping people understand how they learn best.

3.       The ability to be a generalist, moving in and out of learning situations as required.

4.       The skill to develop large-scale social networks in order to access help in solving  employee problems.

5.       An understanding of how networks operate in the exchange and development of knowledge.

What is learning’s role?

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My colleague, Clark Quinn, in Building a Performance Ecosystem states that the benefits of maximum information for people to get work done, combined with minium barriers to achieve their work goals, are good for the entire organization. “When they [workers] can get the resources they need and the right people to assist when necessary, the performance benefits are obvious.“ Alignment is necessary.

Some of that alignment is missing between departmental silos though. While Clark says that “learning leaders” should step up to the challenge, there is also a strong need to get aligned with IT, marketing, and operations, to name a few. As Clark concludes:

By aligning the use of technology with business needs in this way, learning leaders are demonstrating the strategic contribution to the organization that the executive suite wants to see. Failing to grasp the opportunity at this inflection point in business operations has a grim prospect. Folks know they can learn on their own and together. If learning leaders don’t get in and facilitate the full learning spectrum, it will happen without them. Then, just what is learning’s role?

What is learning’s role? First of all, in the network era, a coherent organization is one in which learning is no longer a specialty. Much as writing was no longer a specialty when the majority of workers became literate, learning today is more than putting an X in a checkbox. Work is learning and learning is the work. I may have said this many times before but it is the essential change in how we must view knowledge-intensive and creative work in a networked environment.

Learning is not something done to us, it is what we do together. Learning delivery in a constantly changing work environment is an outdated notion. For example, training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few. It is glaringly obvious in this time of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity that we can get pretty well any information we need whenever we want it. To make sense of this, we need network era literacies, and with these new literacies we no longer need the equivalent of learning scribes. Pulling informal learning, instead of having formal instruction pushed to workers, has to become the workplace norm. By norm, I do not mean something bolted on to a course or some function of an LMS. I mean integrated into the daily work flow.

Learning together is part of collaborating to get things done while also cooperating in order to participate in knowledge networks. “Strictly business” is less frequently the case in our lives, as our work/life boundaries get fuzzier. Meanwhile the work/learning boundaries also get fuzzier. We no longer limit our learning to classrooms, training centres, workstations, or our official company mobile devices. In this environment, we cannot leave the direction of our learning to a “learning professional”. If today’s learning professionals want to remain relevant in the coherent organization, then they need to participate in collaborative and cooperative work/learning flows. This will be a sea change for the training & development profession, but I am certain it will happen with our without their participation.

#itashare

A quick case for social technologies

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I have been reviewing a number of resources I have collected on social media, social learning and return on investment. The bottom line seems very clear to me. Social technologies remove artificial organizational boundaries and let knowledge be shared more easily. I create slide presentations so that I have something ready in case I need to quickly review a subject, such as an impromptu client brief. I put this one together as an aid that might be helpful in presenting a few aspects of the positive impact of social technologies in the workplace.

#itashare

Learning by doing

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What does life in perpetual Beta mean for your business on the internet?

First of all, there is no real privacy online [Cluetrain Thesis #13 - There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.]

But … social media are very powerful business tools.

Understand your business first, and then understand social media.

Then set negotiable boundaries and be flexible.

It’s all about Probes [as in Probe-Sense-Respond]

How to launch a Probe, such as a community of practice:

1. What are you testing?
2. How will you know if you have made progress?
3. What is the smallest probe we can do?
4. Measure the results.
5. Do it again, and again, with slight variations as needed.
6. Measure the results and either amplify it or stop doing it.

Ensure that over 50% of your probes fail.

Is this how your organization functions? What are doing to encourage failure and learning by doing?

Here is how Jane Hart and I have been doing some probes this past year.

We started running workshops at the Social Learning Centre after a discussion about getting connected with our actual customers. For example, in most consulting projects, the client is a manager/exectutive but the end-users are distributed throughout the company. The client may be satisfied but we often do not get to interact with all of the actual users. We thought we would like to try something different from a standard consulting arrangement.

We thought it would be good to try something that could be purchased directly by individuals. Jane had done some online workshops previously and had learned what works and what doesn’t, though this is constantly changing, as we have learned. I did my first workshop on personal knowledge management in April and  35 people signed up. I learned that there was an additional need for a live meeting that would get people talking a bit more, so this was added. I ran two more workshops on PKM and kept adjusting the schedule and resources. It was definitely popular. Jane and I then tried out a five-week Summer Camp that finishes this week. This was something quite new and a real joint effort. We learned that it’s a lot easier to do these workshops as a team.

As these workshops progressed, we wondered if this was the best way to reach out and if we could build a larger community. There are currently +1,700 members registered at the SLC, so we had an idea that some of them were looking for what we can offer in the way of workshops. In slightly over two weeks (September 2012), we are launching a full year of workshops, with six themes, a Summer camp, and a private Salon for discussions amongst community members. Themes are: PKM; social media for professional development; from training to performance support; online communities; social learning in business; and enterprise community management.

We don’t know how this will go, as it is another probe. It’s based on what we have learned so far, but we don’t kid ourselves that this will be a huge success. The feedback to date has been quite positive, so we are confident that most participants will gain something. We are doing it for one year, and during that time we will assess, monitior and evaluate our progress. Where it will lead, we do not know.

My hope is that the Social Learning Centre will become a dynamic community that we can support and guide with a gentle hand. Dealing with people who are directly paying you is a validating experience. Repeat customers mean you are doing something right. As people can vote with their feet, we will have to stay connected to the needs of community members. This year has been a wonderful learning experience for me and I am sure that next year will be as well.

By the way, if you are looking for an example of a failed probe, one workshop I proposed three years ago, has never been conducted.

Let the droids do the boring stuff

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Is simpler work getting automated and outsourced? I think so. That leaves complex and creative work that continue to be in demand, and even increase. Work that has a high degree of task standardization is getting replaced by machines, and this trend will only accelerate.

Andrew McAfee discusses technology’s impact on the labour force in a TEDx Boston presentation, particularly 1) language translation (already here & growing) and 2) automated vehicles (coming soon). If something as complex as translating an article or negotiating a vehicle in heavy traffic is already being automated, how many of today’s jobs will go that way? There will be less demand for standardized human labour, and the whole notion of a standard job will quietly go away. The end of Taylorism cannot come soon enough, in my opinion.

McAfee says that networked computers are as revolutionary as was the steam engine, in how they change the way people do work. The steam engine overcame our physical limitations and computers will help us overcome our cognitive limitations. Here’s why, says McAfee:

  • economies run on ideas, which drive innovation
  • computers are making innovation more open and inclusive (especially for the bottom of the pyramid)
  • technology is freeing us to do better things and this trend will increase

We are not just losing standardized work tasks but we are gaining the tools and the time to do greater task variety, and of our own choosing. Networked computers allow us to learn informally and share tacit knowledge, leaving the boring stuff to the droids. Probably our greatest limitation is our ability to cast away our old ideas about how we learn. We need to think for ourselves and take advantage of network technologies, wider social connections, improved peer interactions, and informal learning. Economies run on ideas, not assembly lines. Work is learning, and learning is the work.