Category Archives: Informal Learning

PKM starts new workshop series

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So far in 2012, I have hosted three online workshops on personal knowledge management (PKM), as well as a Summer Camp that included one week on the topic. Over 125 people have participated in these online sessions, compared with about a dozen who came to the on-site classroom course that I offered through the University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute for the past two years. I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves.

The format has changed, as Jane Hart and I have learned about what works. The next PKM workshop will be offered as a one-month activity this September, with much more time for discussion, reflection, and dealing with competing activities in our professional lives. It will also be offered as the first in a series of seven workshops at the Social Learning Centre over the coming year. Our theme will be: learning in the networked era.

Participants this year have commented that the workshops have changed how they think:

This program has made me think differently about my professional practice.

Learning in this community has been different to the way I am used to but I enjoyed it immensely.

I’ve had more “conversations” and been exposed to many points of view that I would not have encountered any other way.

My Seek-Sense-Share framework (which took several years of trial & error) has proven to be useful:

Reducing my seeking and spending more time sensing (converting things into high quality content) is my most important goal for the next few months.

I need to increase the proportional amount of time I spend in “Sense.” I read a lot, I share quite a bit…yet when it comes to making sense of patterns and other “stuff” in the whole, I don’t always make time to do it.

I very much appreciate the simpleness of the Seek Sense Share model and the fact that together they lead to Serendipity (enhanced Serendipity to be sure). S/S/S = S.

As we stay in touch with participants, we get feedback that their practice is already changing:

Without any coherent strategy I often was not persistent in my undertakings. This course gave me an excellent opportunity to evaluate my position and to work out an appropriate approach.

Connecting with those who are in the know (Harold, Jane …) is the best way to learn how to navigate this new learning environment.

My take-aways:
1. Take risks & engage,
2. Focus on who, not what,
3. Less is more,
4. Ritualize and organize to make time to reflect,
5. Trust the process.
6. Have fun.

Reducing email

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I noted last year that workers waste a lot of time doing useless activities, like managing unwanted communications, and suggested that the cause of the problem, digital overload, was also the potential solution: social media. The ROI for social media in business is quite obvious: reducing wasted time. That’s how we can also find the time for networked learning.

The Atlantic Monthly reports a similar study that shows workers spend 28% of their time managing email. They also spend another 33% of their week managing communications and gathering knowledge, which can probably be done more effectively and efficiently, if my observations are indicative of most businesses. Without becoming industrial-era efficiency experts or doing detailed time & motion studies, we can still look at redundant work tools and habits and find ways to replace them.

Reducing email seems to be a very good place to start, as Luis Suarez has described in a world without email.

Skills 2.0 redux

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We are now in the second week of our Summer Camp on informal and social learning. The first week’s assignment was to read and comment on an article I wrote in 2008. I wondered what had changed in the last four years and if these thoughts were still pertinent. Here’s what I asked:

  • What has changed?
  • What has not?
  • Do you agree with the thoughts here?
  • What do you think are Skills 2.0, or perhaps even Skills 3.0, for you, your colleagues and your fields of expertise?

One participant said that, “This article is as pertinent to 2012 as to 2008.” Another wrote: One of my favourite quotes from the article is “Being a learning professional is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.” 

I have noticed with my writing here over the past eight years that timing is very important. Some articles get little notice when originally posted and then are picked up by the network many years later. It’s one reason I never close commenting on my posts. You never know what might be of interest.

Here is the article, Skills 2.0 (PDF).

Informal rule of thumb

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I was talking to a financial advisor at a bank the other day and I asked her what kind of professional development she did. The bank has a central online learning portal where employees can take “courses”, particularly compliance training. The financial advisor told me she just went to the end of each course and did the test. She found it rather useless. I talked about some of the communities that we have supported for sharing professional development, like our workshops, and she said it would great to have access to something like this, but it would be blocked by the IT department.

I have heard similar stories from many professionals in different industries and government agencies over the years. Developing all of this compliance training must account for a significant amount of revenue for the e-learning industry (anyone have figures on this?). It cannot be very satisfying though. It’s probably demoralizing to think that most of these courses are actually detested by the end-users. But then humans have excellent coping mechanisms for cognitive dissonance.

One reason I support the 70-20-10 framework is that it can change management’s focus.  It’s a way to see the forest and not just count trees. First, let me say that 70-20-10 is a rule of thumb, not a recipe.

A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination. ~ Wikipedia

This rule of thumb is supported by evidence though. Studies show that informal learning accounts for between 70 and 95% of workplace learning  [USBLS: 70%; Raybould: 95%; EDC: 70%; CapitalWorks: 75%; OISE: 70%; eLG: 70%; Allen Tough: 80%]. I have previously referred to Gary Wise and his extrapolation of Josh Bersin’s data from 2009. According to Gary, as much as 95% of workplace learning is informal.

Many organizations only offer sanctioned courses as professional development. This is completely inadequate in a complex work environment. It is like the central planning policies of the Soviet Union. It is arrogant to think that we can know in advance what people need to learn on the job today. For example, roles like online community manager did not exist a few years ago.

In complex environments, the people who know best are those doing the work, which is why we need loose hierarchies and strong networks. The job of learning professionals, in my opinion, is to help build strong learning networks. We need to let workers learn and instead support the work being done.  Frameworks like 70-20-10 can start the conversation by asking what are we doing about the other 90%. It’s a big number; bigger than that 10% for formal instruction. Consider 9:1 a rule of thumb.

Pulling informal learning

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Take a look at these 8 demand-side knowledge management principles by Nick Milton.

  1. People don’t pay attention to knowledge until they actually need it.
  2. People value knowledge that they request more highly than knowledge that is unsolicited.
  3. People won’t use knowledge, unless they trust its provenance.
  4. Knowledge has to be reviewed in the user’s own context before it can be received.
  5. One of the biggest barriers to accepting new knowledge is old knowledge.
  6. Knowledge has to be adapted before it can be adopted.
  7. Knowledge will be more effective the more personal it is.
  8. They won’t really know it until they do it.

They highlight the difference between Push and Pull learning. Training is Push. Informal learning is mostly Pull. Look at what Push can mean in the context of demand-side KM:

  1. How often are training courses aligned with the moment of need?
  2. Do participants request and value compliance training?
  3. How credible are trainers with those in the business units they support?
  4. How much time and affordance is there to put training courses into individual context?
  5. How is old knowledge respected and then challenged in a non-confrontational manner?
  6. What kinds of tools are available to adapt new knowledge?
  7. How personal are courses and classes?
  8. What opportunities do people have after a course to practice and get feedback?

There are many do-it-yourself applications available today that let people take control of their learning. Traditional courses can be designed or taken from a wide variety of sources, such as Udemy. Professional communities on platforms like LinkedIn abound. Knowledge workers are shifting their professional development from Push to Pull. They are also more in control of who Pushes to them, through social networks and other sources of online information. Networked sense-making frameworks like PKM can give more control over one’s learning.

For learning & development departments, a Pull workplace changes the traditional expert-led dynamic of content creation. The shift to more Pull and less directed Push learning also challenges the role of the instructional designer. The ID, who spends a long time getting a course “just right” with  learning objectives aligned to Bloom’s taxonomy, engaging graphics, and absolutely correct wording; may be becoming an anachronism. By the time the instructionally-sound course has been developed, the work requirements may have changed (again).

It’s not that informal learning support is better than anything instructional design can deliver, it’s really a question of time. Getting roughly integrated knowledge assets and professional advice from a network is better than waiting six months for a polished course to be developed. It’s also a matter of  increasingly complex work requirements and dealing more with exception-handling, rather than routine procedures. Exceptions cannot be taught through training; but learning about them on the job, and in networks, can and should be supported.

In the network era, the days of an instructional design team working in splendid isolation to produce award-winning courses may be numbered. The pace of change and the level of complexity are outpacing the ability to Push the knowledge artifacts needed for an agile workforce. Connections are more important than content in the networked enterprise. As workers take control of their learning by Pulling it in, the training department had better adapt.

The learning organization: an often-described, but seldom-observed phenomenon

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This post is in response to the Adidas Blog Carnival on a New Way of Working and Learning and more specifically responding to the question, “What should a true learning organisation look like?”

W. Edwards Deming understood that systemic factors account for more organizational problems, and therefore more potential for change, than any individual’s performance. The role of managers should be to manage the system, not the individual functions. The real barrier to systemic change, such as becoming a learning organization, is command & control management. This is why the third principle for net work, shared power, is a major stumbling block to becoming a learning organization. Narration of work and transparency are easy, compared to sharing power. But learning is what organizations need to do well in order to survive and thrive.

In 2009 I listened to Peter Senge’s keynote address at the CSTD national conference. Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline is the seminal text for learning organizations. His later research findings showed that a key factor in sustaining an enterprise is organizational learning. Knowledge, Senge said, is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in business and life. Value is created by teams, but mostly by networks of people. Even team-based knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks.

This year I have reviewed and synthesized several of my observations on learning in networked environments. Here is what I have found.

1) Learning is not something to get. Individuals need to take control of their learning in a world where they are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local. Organizations must also move learning away from training and HR, as some external band-aid solution that gets called in from time to time. Learning must be an essential part of doing business in the network age. Learning has to be owned by the workers and learning support has to be a business function.

2) The only knowledge that can be managed is our own. In my opinion, knowledge management should be about supporting personal knowledge management in networks, with a distributed, not a centralized, approach. Net Work Literacy entails self-organized learning while cooperating in diverse networks. Each of us is responsible for our own learning but we are now obliged to share this learning. If nobody shared what they have learned, there would be no Wikipedia or other free learning resources on the web. The same pertains to sharing inside organizations.

3) Learning in the workplace is much more than formal training. There are many relatively simple and fairly inexpensive things that can be done to support workplace learning. These include creating real and virtual spaces to encourage conversation. In an open environment, learning will flourish, as it has on the Web.

4) When we remove artificial boundaries, we enable innovation.

“The central change with Enterprise 2.0 and ideas of managing knowledge [is] not managing knowledge anymore — get out of the way, let people do what they want to do, and harvest the stuff that emerges from it because good stuff will emerge. So, it’s been a fairly deep shift in thinking about how to capture and organize and manage knowledge in an organization.” ~ Andy McAfee

5) Learning is everywhere. Learning and working are interconnected in the network era. If learning support is not connected to work, it’s rather useless. Learning is the new black – it’s everywhere. Net workers need more than advice (training), they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative, support. This is management’s primary responsibility in a learning organization.

In my experience, these three indicators would suggest a true learning organization:

Image: E. Irving Couse; The Historian

It’s time to focus on your LQ

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Learning is everywhere in the connected workplace. Networked professionals need more than advice (training); they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative, support.  However, many of us have relegated our own learning to the specialists over the years – teachers, instructors, professors. We’re not used to handling all of this learning on our own. But if we want to thrive in complexity and if we want our work teams to be effective, we have to integrate our learning into the workflow.

On 11 June 2012 we will start the next online personal knowledge management workshop.  PKM is the foundation of connected work. It’s up to each of us to develop, and continuously revise, our sense-making frameworks as we work inside and outside the increasingly permeable walls of our organizations. Unlimited information, distributed work, self-publishing, and ridiculously easy group-forming all point in one direction – the organization will no longer address all your learning needs in the network era.

Additional skills are needed to help groups and teams learn as they work. Narration is a base skill for the networked workplace. Other skills include network weaving, curation, and network analysis.  We also have workshops on how to use social media for professional development, as well as setting up and sustaining an online community. These workshops are not just for ‘learning professionals’ but for any role; from sales to marketing to production, and especially for management. More workshops are in development and we are always interested in getting suggestions. Custom workshops and skills coaching can also be arranged.

To improve our own and our organization’s learning quotient, we need to look at ways to be more self-directed,  social, and agile learners. Life in perpetual Beta requires a high LQ.

Learning is everywhere

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There are lots of “learning specialists” in organizations and they work for variously named departments. As learning specialists, I assume they are supporting workplace learning, so let me ask:

  • If I’m sitting at my desk with a work-related problem, can I call the Training Department to quickly get me up to speed?
  • If I want to learn about a new market sector, will the Learning & Development specialist help me?
  • If I need some coaching to prepare me for a meeting with a new client, can I call Human Resources to connect me with the right person who is available?
  • If I’m stuck on trouble-shooting an unfamiliar piece of software, can I get someone from Training to walk me through it?
  • If I’m looking for great examples of collaboration and social learning, do the folks in Training & Development model them?
  • If I want to become a better networked learner, can I call a Training specialist to get me started and coach me?

Learning & working are interconnected in the network era. If learning support is not connected to work, it’s rather useless. Learning is the new black – it’s everywhere; and that’s exactly where learning specialists should be. Net workers need more than advice (training), they need ongoing, real-time, constantly-changing, collaborative, support.

It is time to simplify

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The five informal learning methods described in yesterday’s post on Learning in the Workplace have one thing in common. They are all relatively simple.

Most of today’s larger companies have a complicated structure. Over time, to enable growth and efficiencies, more processes have been put in place. New layers of control and supervision continue to appear, silos are created, and knowledge acquisition is formalized in an attempt to gain efficiency through specialization. As companies get bigger, internal growth and innovation reach a tipping point, and companies rely on mergers and acquisitions to maintain the illusion of growth.

But knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge, are still key factors for innovation and effectiveness. To compensate for its complicated processes, the enterprise attempts to shift to another paradigm, and tries to become a learning organization, putting significant effort into training. Unfortunately, training is often not the right solution.

Today’s large, complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally influence the organization’s effectiveness. Faster evolving markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control; thereby decreasing agility. Training, as “the” solution to workplace learning needs, fails to deliver and then gets marginalized, often being the first department to have its budget cut.

Organizations (and training departments)  need to understand complexity, instead of simply increasing complication. This lack of understanding is a major barrier to adopting social business concepts and practices. We should always take into consideration that people can handle complexity much better than our constructed systems can.

We need to think of organizations as parts of Value Networks.

We need to move away from shareholder value and become client-focused

We need to base growth on cultivating ecosystems, not the illusion of mergers and acquisitions.

We need to think of knowledge acquisition and sharing as social.

We need to constantly develop emergent practices.

All of these changes can be started by doing a few  simple things. As with Lego bricks, using a single unifier (the pin size) we can create an infinite variety of solutions. The examples of how to support informal learning do not require expensive technology or detailed needs analyses. They can be implemented quickly and modified over time. For too long our organizations have suffered from the disease of complication. It’s time to simplify.