Pilots or Beta?

If you take the cynefin approach for working in complex environments you first Probe then Sense and then Respond in order to develop emergent practices. Backward-looking good or best practices are inadequate for changing complex environments. Constant probes of the environment are necessary to see what works.

Enterprise performance should be [...]

PKM in 2010

Personal Knowledge Management
Updated 5 Feb 2010: changed “Filter” to “Understand”
[This post is a continuation of Sense-making with PKM (March, 2009)]
Personal = according to one’s abilities, interests and motivation (not directed by external forces)
Knowledge = the capacity for effective action (know how)
Management = how to get things done
What is PKM?
PKM is an individual, disciplined process by [...]

Group-centric work and training

Individual Training
In the +20 years I spent in the military, much of it was as a student on course. In the military there is a whole system that governs individual training, in our case it was CFITES.

CFITES comprises several volumes of instructions, including all of the ADDIE steps. A lot of resources are put into [...]

The Future of the Training Department

The latter 20th Century was the golden era of the training department. Before the 20th Century, training per se did not exist outside the special needs of the church and the military. Now the training department may be at the end of its life cycle. Join us for a brief look back at the pre-training [...]

Mind Map: The Networked Society

Over the years of writing this blog I’ve reorganized, added tags, categories and the Key Posts & Toolbox pages in order to help make sense of over 1,500 posts. A major theme in my writing has been our shift to a networked society and what that means in how we work and learn. I’m especially [...]

The marginalized training function

Tony Karrer clarifies his comments about traditional training becoming “marginalized”, which is worth a full read but I’d like to pick up on this comment:
If you look at what makes a good situation for formal learning:

Large Audience
Similar Level / Needs
Known/Stable Content
Few Out of Bounds cases

How many organizations have these conditions and are they increasing or [...]

Skills for learning professionals

In a Learning 2.0 world, where learning and performance solutions take on a wider variety of forms and where churn happens at a much more rapid pace, what new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?
That’s the LCB big question, and my article on Skills 2.0, written one year ago, addressed this very question. [...]

Barriers to Collaboration

In Why Businesses Don’t Collaborate, Stewart Mader and Scott Abel ask 523 workers about their information sharing habits. In reading through the responses and sample comments, it becomes obvious that there are two technologies that limit workplace collaboration – e-mail & meetings. Both can do certain tasks well but these “technologies” have become overused and [...]

Integrating Learning and Work

Tom Gram discusses the integration of learning and work (my professional passion) and gives a list of ten strategies for integration, of which three are discussed in detail in Part 1 (I’m already looking forward to Part 2):
1. Understand the job
2. Link Learning to business process
3. Build a performance support system
Of Tom’s 10 suggestions, not [...]

Workers, Management and Work Support

Learning professionals are facing similar issues that others (HR, KM, IT & Marketing) do, but in many ways it’s a case of the blind men and the elephant. We are constrained by the blinders of our profession’s models. That’s one reason I like to take my models from a variety of fields, not just training [...]

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