Learning/Change/By Design

Challenging learning styles and learning retention beliefs

I am not sure what this says about me, but I was reminded of the interesting work and commentary of blogger Will Thalheimer by blogger Jack Vinson, who teaches in the same program I do at Northwestern University. Both fellows are worth reading because of their keen perspective and sharp eye for credibility and logic (or lack thereof) in learning and knowledge management.

Jack cited a posting by Will from May, 2006 which completely debunks the oft-used "wisdom" that people retain 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear, etc. You can read the full debunking, but the gist is that the data are fabricated and have just simply been repeated without questioning the cited sources (Will did) or taking a critical eye to the logic (how did someone differentiate between "reading" and "seeing?").

More recently, Will has renewed his challenge concerning the application of learning styles/preferences to instructional design:

"Can an e-learning program that utilizes learning-style information outperform an e-learning program that doesn't utilize such information by 10% or more on a realistic test of learning, even it is allowed to cost up to twice as much to build?"

Will isn't challenging the idea that there are such things as learning styles -- just that their application to real-world instructional design situations isn't a valuable exercise.

The larger point -- and the reason I read both Will and Jack -- is that we need to be much better consumers of "research" that informs our expertise.

The problem with using another organization's business case

I have been traveling a great deal lately -- 20 cities during the past few weeks -- on Learn.com's Tour on Talent, talking to training and HR professionals about making the business case for learning, knowledge and talent management initiatives. The fundamental message is about really understanding the organizational operations, and what metrics the organization's leaders and managers use to assess progress and success. If you can discover where your learning, KM, or talent initiatives can help improve some critical operational factor, you've got the beginnings of a business case.

It's easier said than done, and requires some experience in poking around the inside of a business to develop the kind of expertise required to see opportunities to make an impact.

But one of the questions I get routinely after delivering this message is some variation of this: "OK, I get the idea. But can you just tell me the business case measures that other people have used so I can sell my initiatives to my executive team?"

People seem to want the quick answer (or a formula) and not a lesson in the practice of how to discover an answer. The problem is -- and this is a issue in any case where you are looking at "best practices" or external experiences -- without doing the discovery work, how do you know that the business case from another organization is even addressing something of importance to your organization? The business case may have very sound logic but may also be entirely misdirected in your case. If you do great surgery on the knee when the problem is in the elbow, what's the point?

Don't get me wrong. Case studies, benchmarking and best practice research are great tools to help you gain insight into your own organization. But what they provide is a perspective and not necessarily a prescription. Do we have exactly the same issues? Are they important to us in the same way? What's different about our situation or environment that we should take into consideration if we adopt the logic behind this business case?

Asking those questions, of course, is part of the practice of discovery. We need to get comfortable in that space and less dependent on seeking out formulas.

Learning for the long term

The July/August issue of Harvard Business Review is built on the theme of "Managing for the Long Term" and includes three articles that touch on organizational learning and knowledge management issues: "Building a Leadership Brand," by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood; "The Making of an Expert," by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula and Edward T. Cokely; and a "Best of HBR" reprint of Ikujiro Nonaka's 1991 article "The Knowledge-Creating Company."

I've written about Nonaka briefly in a previous post and will undoubtedly write more. "The Knowledge-Creating Company" is indeed a classic piece that still has tremendous value in framing how we should think about organizational knowledge creation and management. It is about both tacit and explicit knowledge and the interactions among individuals and the organization. His work is a great starting point for breaking the mindset that "learning" = training and "knowledge management" = databases or intranets. And I find it encouraging that HBR editors chose to include it in their issue on managing for the long term.

The other two pieces are equally fascinating for the point-of-view they contribute to the "long term" issue.

Ulrich and Smallwood argue that organizations must define leadership competencies that are meaningful to their unique brand promise -- in other words, that the leadership competency model is not made up of generic competencies that might be applied to any organization. This has long been a troublesome point for me in working with organizations trying to define competency models. It's hard work to define (and gain agreement on) a set of competencies that clearly articulate who WE are and how we should operate -- but isn't differentiation the core of competitive advantage? Why do we insist on believing that differentiating our products or services is meaningful, but it's okay to develop generic leaders?

Ericsson et al also touch on an issue close to my heart: The nature of expertise. In this piece, the authors remind us that research shows that experts are made, not born. But making an expert requires significant time (10 years is a rule of thumb), deliberate practice, and the kind of reflective coaching that you can only get from another expert practitioner or teacher. The time scale -- 10 years -- is consistent with Howard Gardner's view in writing Five Minds for the Future. Gardner's "disciplined mind" is the outgrowth of years spent learning a craft or profession. The other four minds -- synthesizing, creating, respectful and ethical -- seem to me the attributes of wisdom that emerge from the experience and reflective effort required to develop the disciplined mind.

In either case, this 10-year rule begs us to evaluate the way we currently think about learning and development in organizations.

What drives organizations to focus on 'informal learning?'

I've been on a 20+ city speaking tour as part of Learn.com's Tour on Talent, sharing thoughts on how to develop effective learning and knowledge management strategies. We're about a third of the way through the tour and I've been getting some interesting responses to the question I ask the audiences about their efforts to develop support for "informal learning" activities.

Some audience members want to check on definitions. "What do you mean when you say 'informal learning,'?" is a typical question. I try to avoid giving too much of a direct answer because I am interested in learning more about what comes to mind in the heads of learning & development practitioners when they think about "informal learning." And usually there are one or two people in the audience who will raise their hand and say they've been experimenting with mentoring or coaching, or providing some support for groups to gather (in-person or virtually) and share knowledge and insights. It's not a very broad view of informal learning, which to me suggests that 1) people don't associate some things they are doing with "informal learning" or 2) the concept is still not very well formed in practice. Or both.

What is more interesting are the responses I get when I ask those who have begun to experiment with informal learning activities "what is motivating your interest in focusing on 'informal learning'?" The answer is always a lack of money, time, or both. Formal training budgets get cut, so people are forced to begin to look at "other" ways of accomplishing learning goals. Or no one has time to attend formal training, so again organizations look for "other" ways to "deliver" the learning.

The quotations marks around "other" and "deliver" are intentional, because it gets at a mindset that is still prevalent and requires shifting. It's a mindset that says that learning occurs through formal courses or seminars -- any other way is a (presumably less attractive) alternative. To substantiate this point, several people who have attended the Tour on Talent sessions have said they have not gotten much traction on "informal learning" efforts because you cannot count these activities like you can count course completions. In other words, if you cannot count it, the learning doesn't exist.

This is really a counterproductive mental model. The mindset should be a reverse of what it is today: The only real learning occurs in the day-to-day activities of the workplace, and formal courses or seminars are one small part of a large set of activities with the sole purpose of attempting to trigger some new workplace learning.

It is also clear to me that learning practitioners, in general, understand this mindset. The difficulty is in bucking the system in place -- where the focus of tracking and measuring learning "results" is based on things you can count. And I'm as guilty as anyone for contributing to this system. But I also know there is a way to evolve it to another, more productive system. I'll be writing about that in the next few days...

Geek Squad socializing: Paying attention to context

I've been catching up on some past-due reading and ran across a great example of the different kind of thinking required to do new things in organizational learning. The story came out of Wikinomics, the book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and involves the mastermind behind the Geek Squad, Robert Stephens.

The Geek Squad is (now) a very large computer service organization whose "agents" travel to client sides in a Geek-mobile, a Volkswagen Beetle painted on police-car black and white. Needless to say, this is an organization with a distinctive culture -- but a record of high performance and quality service.

In Wikinomics, Geek Squad founder Stephens tells the story of attempting to create an internal Wiki to capture technical insights, practices etc. Seemed like a reasonable approach -- a self-managed tech space for a group of technical professionals. But the site never really took off. Puzzled, Stephens began to investigate.

What he discovered is that Geek Squad agents weren't spending time contributing to the Wiki because they spent downtime at work playing an online, multiuser battlefield game. But while they were playing the game, they were (online) chatting, socializing and swapping technical tips and practices. Stephens' reaction is quoted in the book:

I just stood there in the hallway going, 'Oh my God," I'm sitting here trying to build this shiny playground with all these tools for collaboration and I failed to notice what the agents were already doing. While I had my head down doing this in preparation to open the Wiki's floodgates, the agents had self-organized online probably the most efficient collaborative tool that's already out there.

And here's his lesson learned:

Instead of trying to set an agenda, I'm now going to try and discover their agenda, and serve it.

Isn't that the way we should all be thinking about organizational learning efforts? Leveraging the practices and context of the groups we serve -- rather than build something in hopes of adoption and acceptance?

Experimenting with technologies

Fellow Northwestern adjunct faculty member and uber-blogger Jack Vinson posted a summary of his experiment in using blogging as a required part of his graduate class in knowledge management. I note this because I've just come from a conference session with members of the Society of Pharma and Biotech Trainers (SPBT), where I co-presented with Ken Shapiro of GlaxoSmithKline on experimenting with new technologies that might improve organizational learning and knowledge sharing efforts.

Bottom line: I don't think we do enough of the kind of experimenting that Jack did. He didn't just ask the students to use blogs as part of his class and then sat back and observed -- he also asked the students to reflect on the whole experience. Jack is an astute observer of online communities, and the interactions that develop. But I think even he was surprised by some of the reflections and insights posted by his students. Which, of course, is why he asked them to share their thinking -- you don't get surprises or insights if you don't ask.

Here's to experimenting more often, and getting beyond a "rate your experience" survey by creating more inventive ways to listen deeply.

SPBT Conference: Learning technologies to experiment with

The .pdf file in this post is a handout from the Society of Pharma and Biotech Trainers (SPBT) Conference session that I am co-presenting with Ken Shapiro of GlaxoSmithKline. Our goal was to engage in a discussion with session participants on experimenting with new technologies -- a practice that should really be on-going for learning professionals.

Ken has been very successful over the years in helping bring new technologies into GSK that catch on and then ultimately provide tremendous value. His expertise -- in my view -- is in keeping one eye on the technology landscape and another on GSK's internal business practices. That sounds simple, but people who are successful at planting new technology seeds that grow and thrive have a way of understanding both technology and practice that gives them insight into opportunities for experimenting. And they know how to nurture their efforts.

The document below is a brief summary of some of the technologies Ken and I see as worthy of continuous experimentation within organizations. I am sure there are more, but this list is a good starting point.

Download 2007_handout_v2.pdf

Benefits of Nonaka's knowledge-creation perspective

Ikujiro Nonaka is one of the must-reads in the syllabus of the knowledge management course I teach at Northwestern University. Among the benefits of his theoretical and applied work is that it attempts to incorporate the social nature of knowledge creation, a longer term time scale, and the concepts of explicit and tacit knowledge. More than anything, an exploration of Nonaka's work begins to build an appreciation for how the complex process of new knowledge creation (learning and meaning) in an organization can be unpacked by understanding a few core concepts -- and shifting your perspective to incorporate a longer-term point of view.

At the core of his thinking is the SECI model -- Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization. This model describes a spiral of activity -- a continuous movement through each of the four components. It's best to think of it less as a linear process and more of way to "see" four important elements at play in an on-going, integrated system. Socialization describes the space where individuals with different bits of knowledge can interact. Externalization is the time when the group begins to make explicit some if its insights (new meaning). Combination is when these insights are put together in a new form (think prototype here). Finally, internalization is the phase when prototypes (new knowledge) are brought fully into operation.

That's a very light explanation of a complex model that is worth diving into deeply. But my experience in teaching this model shows that its primary benefit is in shifting the perspective of learning and knowledge management practitioners -- to one which incorporates both individual and group/organization processes, and appreciates the long-term nature of new knowledge development.

The lesson: It's a both/and issue. If you cannot appreciate the long-term interplay between the group and the individual, you're missing the key elements of organizational learning.

Integrative thinking

Roger Martin's article in the June 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review ("How Successful Leaders Think") is another interesting exploration of cognition as it applies to organizational management and leadership. In his view, looking at cognitive processes in the context of leadership is more productive than looking at behaviors (i.e., what successful leaders do). Cognition is the "antecedent of doing," he writes.

What Martin has discovered is that successful leaders are comfortable with complexity and ambiguity, and in fact leverage complexity to envision solutions and make decisions that more conventional thinkers might view as "either/or" choices. Martin terms this ability to hold seemingly opposing ideas in mind at the same time as "integrative thinking." As successful leaders process complex situations, they look for attributes and insights that help them see options that bridge seemingly opposing ideas and create a new, more interesting path.

Martin's "integrative thinking" seems to have similar attributes to Howard Gardner's "synthesizing" and "creating" minds. Gardner is the heavyweight in this discussion -- having literally written the book that helped define the field of cognitive science in 1985. But what I take away as important is this new focus on cognition -- and cognitive research -- as a legitimate element of organizational and leadership study.

What's missing (especially from Martin's piece) is more insight into the practices and experiences that help develop these positive cognitive capabilities. Gardner spends time on the "how to develop" issue in his book, Five Minds for the Future, but his focus is a bit more on the educational system vs. the workplace.

I believe there are practices that can be embedded in organizations to accelerate the development of "integrative thinking." One is mentoring -- especially if the mentors are themselves integrative thinkers, and share their mental processing about important decisions or insights with their proteges. (Allan Collins, with others, coined the phrase "cognitive apprenticeship" to describe a similar process). The point, though, is that we first need to understand the cognitive attributes we wish to encourage before we begin designing practices that may help accelerate their development. 

Online mentoring connections: A lesson in the value of prototyping

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune highlighted efforts at Aon Corporation and Abbott Laboratories to utilize online social networking software to facilitate mentoring relationships. (Companies such as Triple Creek Associates are offering solutions for this type of application).

Embedded in the story is one of the payoffs for organizations that begin to experiment with new approaches. Abbott and Aon both are learning about the nuances of online mentor match-making, and the benefits and limitations of maintaining what are sometimes virtual or long-distance relationships between mentors and proteges.

But Talethea Best, Aon's Director of U.S. Learning and Development (and a graduate student in Northwestern's Learning and Organizational Change program), captured what is to me the most important benefit of carefully observing what happens when you begin to experiment with new technologies. As she explains in the article:

"The tool has really shifted the thinking we've had around traditional mentoring. There is reverse mentoring going on. There is group mentoring going on. There's peer mentoring that is taking place. It's really done some really cool things in terms of our own thinking about mentoring"

This is an example of what I refer to as a prototyping-mindset. New technologies, when first introduced, often create very valuable residual benefit that you simply cannot foresee -- but users (with real issues) do. If you always think of your technology introductions as "prototypes," you begin to pick up on these non-standard uses and see them for what they are -- opportunities to create more value from your tools.