Hold On a Minute...

CLO magazine has a good, quick article that highlights what I think is an important point, especially for WLP professionals to consider. The article discusses the pitfalls of implementing best practices, especially in the information age, when those practices could change every other month, if not more.

I think this point is similar to an answer I once heard a corporate executive give in response to the question: "Why don't we have a company vision statement?" The executive's response was that by creating a vision statement, and following that sort of guiding principle for the company, and all that comes with it, there is the potential for the company to lose the very focus it seeks. There are surely disagreements with this, and anything properly policed will tend to function well over time. But the implicit point behind the response is regarding company culture, and in my anecdote the company in question was one that had never previously adopted vision statements. No small thing for a very large international corporation to just decide to create a vision, and then organize everything to meet that mold.

I find that the CLO article relates in that relying too heavily on best practices - especially very highly detailed ones - could have the opposite effect, in "legalizing" specific ways of conducting major, common work. And if these practices are given too much weight, who will be in control of these practices, and how is the inevitable force of change going to be accounted for?

No, I'm not advocating a wholesale jettison of the best practices concept. The point is, like many initiatives, these will have to exist at the right level, and be malleable enough that they can change without internal cultural or productive disruption.

What's the "High Concept, High Touch" Solution for Organizational Learning Today?

June's Big Question over at LCB asks how WLP professionals might break down organizational walls to learning. I recently read Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, and one of the central themes of the book is that we are in an age where we have to think more conceptually, and less analytically, partly because the tools to free our minds from rote work are readily available. I want to borrow that theme in my answer to the BQ.

From my perspective, one of the most impactful ways for WLP professionals to break down organizational walls to learning is to think about the 'big picture' of learning within their organization, or the wider organization in general. Ask questions:

• What is the organization trying to achieve in near and long term scenarios?
• What is happening with learning in the organization, right now?
• What isn't happening with learning in the organization, right now?
• What may be maintaining the 'walls'?
• What level of shift is needed?
• How feasible is that shift if it were begun today?

In short, what WLP professionals need to have is vision. Not vision statements, but what the concept of the high-performing, high-learning organization in their respective settings looks like. This "high concept" will be "high touch", meaning its maintenance will be a very active process. The tools will be myriad and the networking will need to be diverse and, well, interconnected. To use another analogy, WLP professionals will have to seek and create new relationships (Harold Jarche's response is one specific way), and curate them over time and other pockets of leadership and skills evolve.

What I'm describing isn't big on specifics, but no two organizations are alike, and to twist a cliche, all learning is local. The point is that WLP professionals more than ever have the ability to couple the best our industry has to offer with the pulse of the organizations, and then facilitate the best possible solution (with a solid change management plan).

Easier said than done?

New Insights into 21st Century Information Sources and Organizations

There is an emerging discussion about how individuals cope with the flood of information sources that are available at present. I recently wrote a white paper that highlighted the importance of understanding the ways in which individuals in an organization select and use sources of information, and how an individual's "information habits" are an important dynamic in creating meaningful skills development programs in the workplace. Harold Jarche has spent a lot of time over the last 18 months thinking about something that is a central theme in my paper: Personal Knowledge Management, or PKM (a simple description can be found here, PKM in a nutshell). Harold has a great series of posts on this that I highly recommend anyone to review, if just to understand their own methodology and organization skills.

There have been several studies about how individuals select, process, and use sources of information on both a personal and professional level. Here are some of those studies:

Study	Results
Heo & Cho (2009)	Study of 300 media users in print-oriented, mediocre-passive, and video-audio groupings.
Stefl-Mabry (2005)	Through observing that there is a heavy reliance on self-reporting in research subjects, Stefl-Mabry asks the question: “...do respondents ‘know’ themselves?”
Zhang, Zambrowics, Zhou, & Roderer (2004)	The researchers study how a range of professionals in a medical environment perform various activities like searching and research using an internal portal.
Byrne & Bates (2009)	Study of a virtual learning environment at University College Dublin shows that learning environments need to foster communication and connections between learners (p. 136-137).
Kink & Hess (2008)	Study of the use of search engines for information versus traditional paper-based media like encyclopedias by people aged 14-66.
Flynn, Smith, & Freese (2006)	Study finds that variations in one’s “psychological and health characteristics” could be determining factors in when an individual seeks information online about their condition (p. 1298-1300).
Mikulincer (1997)	Shows that adults receive and process information best in “secure attachment” environments (p. 1226).

The model of individuals selecting information sources - particularly those on the internet - has been around since the very late 20th century, and continues to diversify in the 21st with more options. But potentially complicating our understanding of individual information habits is another new discussion that impacts the question I based my white paper on, is the notion of new technologies - foremost of which being Facebook - that shift the dynamics of our personal interactions with information to curation. Steve Rosenbaum of Magnify.net discusses this phenomenon in a Huffington Post editorial, and WIRED has also been discussing curation for a while. Tony Karrer has also had some good Facebook updates about curation.

So what does it mean to a modern organization if each worker has different methods of selecting, processing, and using information sources, and curates their own content? This means that, as Mr. Jarche points out, individual "sense-making" is likely to be different for each person, but that each person must pass through that step in order for new knowledge to be useful for them and others. The question ultimately becomes: How does a WLP professional, ensure that a group of stakeholders arrives at the same general point in their development? How do I help generate a common understanding of material in that group's scope?

My central concern is, what does this emerging paradigm mean for workplace performance? The trends appear to indicate that individuals will increasingly have to develop skills that allow them to navigate the cascading volumes of information available in their field. In fact, development of an effective PKM system that is then curated could become a central measure of a person's information literacy not just in their professional group, but in the workplace. Extrapolating further out appears to have implications for a person's overall performance and development in a given environment.

The next step is to understand how the current trend may be beginning to map to professional development goals, and also how it functions within modern training designs.

The Economy of Performance: The Tenor of Trust in Tense Times

Spherion has just published the results of a study by Monster.com on how the wavering economy has affected the relationships between managers and their staff in the workplace. The results are not good. Surprising numbers of workers are finding their relationships with their managers deteriorating, and many responding that they could do a better job managing than their current boss. One particularly important issue is professional development, which many workers say is either not encouraged, followed up on, or supported by leadership. What's worse, many cite instances of a manager taking credit for their development, amongst other things.

As the economy continues to struggle for footing, it appears many factors of performance in the workplace are also under serious strain.

If What You Mean Is the Opposite of the Thing, then Yes...

This month's Learning Circuits Big Question is:

DOES THE DISCUSSION OF "HOW THE BRAIN LEARNS" IMPACT YOUR ELEARNING DESIGN?

I think there is some further parsing that's needed in the question, but in my case the answer is a simple yes, but not in the way that's implied. The details are problematic.

In instructional design there are some established best practices when breaking up content into appropriate pieces, how to handle visual presentation, the quality of narrators, as well as other considerations. All of these and others are based on responses human audiences have given to instructional events and their design. While none of the above should be taken as "gospel", many of these best practices are generated from experience and research in evaluating learning programs and their effectiveness. To this end we have discovered at least some of how the brain works (or rather, behaves), and we as professionals incorporate these success-minded considerations as we design and develop solutions.

The best practices are, at least in some cases, not directly derived from direct application of learnings from research on the brain itself. In this sense many of us are not using knowledge of brain functioning but rather knowledge of human behavior. Clark Quinn expresses a somewhat similar point of view. After all, we got pretty far into the twentieth century without knowing a whole lot about how our brains learn, and our more primitive instructional strategies were fruitful in some significant way. This is of course not to excuse or endorse bad or traditional strategies, but simply to point out that we may not know enough yet to say we're applying the concept deeply. And that's my main point in answering this month's query.

Jason McDonald explains some of my sentiment as well. I put some heavy stock in Jason's point about the disconnect between what science has actually found, and what is communicated by journalists in periodicals. Not to paint too broadly here, but scientific results are consistently mis-represented/mis-communicated in the press. An assessment of the average person's understanding of evolutionary theory's basic thrust is enough to confirm that.

My question in response to the Big Q: Do we know enough about the brain to really say we are applying the fruits of brain-based research? At the risk of sounding like a denier of the evidentiary discoveries thus far, I do not think we know enough yet for the actual science of brain functioning to impact WLP work. I think what we have gained from pure practice and evaluation, and from other sciences such as human psychology, has been and may be enough for a while.

Management and the Potential for Performance Improvement

TDblog had a posting last week citing figures from a survey conducted by Right Management about the frequency of career discussions between employees and their managers. More than a third – thirty-seven percent - of the 683 respondents reported that they never hold such discussions with their manager. Thirty percent reported doing so once a year, and around twenty-eight percent reported having career discussions two or more times annually. The numbers appear to indicate some pretty stark realities. The article however seems to indicate that only one question was asked: “How often do you engage in career discussions with your manager?” I see a potential problem here, in that the survey is remarkably short. How is the term “career discussion” defined in this survey? It appears fairly self-explanatory, butI would appreciate more detail and clarity.

Taking the results as given, it appears that several companies could be missing out on some significant performance improvement opportunities, especially if almost two thirds of them never talk to their people. A promising number however is the twenty-eight percent that have at least two discussions per year with managers. Granted this is barely more than a quarter of the companies polled according to the results given. However, pulling from a relatively small group of people this seems promising. What we don’t know is the potential size variance in the polled companies. Secondly, at what level within each company were the respondents?

The general takeaway of this story is the importance of feedback. This is Gilbert BEM Cell 1-level stuff. Thirty-seven percent of respondents is (apparently) receiving no feedback at all about their career. This contributes to wider systemic issues in a company, as employees just keep humming along doing what they’re doing and not sharing or building networks and skill sets internally to increase performance. I will have to seek more research on this question to determine the accuracy of these numbers, but in this tense economic climate, it’s as important as ever for management to keep close ties with employees and to develop resources internally, and in many cases externally with former employees.

Tacit Knowledge And Performance Improvement

There's a concept that's been around for some time in training. That concept is tacit knowledge (TK), and the term defines what I think is the holy grail for training analyses and designs to convey to learners: The between-the-lines knowledge that expert workers have that they use to accomplish work. When I say "between-the-lines", I mean the bits of knowledge they form and/or pick up throughout the course of their daily work. These bits often contribute to a greater quality of the work. This is what we as WLP professional seek to identify and to communicate.

Wikipedia has a good synopsis of TK. After reading through the information and examples there, I reflected on my own collection and use of TK and the ways in which I came to collect that information and ultimately use it in context. I specifically recalled a job I had after graduating high school. I was working in a rebar production facility, starting out as a general worker. The number of individuals staffing the place was quite low, and so specific skills were at a premium when someone was on vacation or sick. As time progressed I learned the basics of forms bending for different types and kinds of bars through simple curiosity, and small opportunities to take over when someone had to leave for a few minutes. I took in knowledge through observation and impromptu action learning moments; teachable moments as others call them. Repetition was part of the job as well so the environment made it difficult to forget after a few goes. By the end of the thirteen month period I worked there, I had added myself as a skilled worker within the workforce. To this day I remember a lot of the specific bits of TK. I remember how the bars had to be set in the machine, the quirks of the aged equipment that would prohibit or maintain performance, ways in which the equipment would break down, the signs to determine potential breakdowns that didn't happen according to the manuals...this was all important stuff for a skilled bending technician in the workplace.

I recalled a later career experience in my first career position after getting my undergraduate degree. I had joined an elearning company (which is now part of SkillSoft) early on when it was hiring many people to build its workforce. Over the course of several years we became such a close and efficient team that when the company tried outsourcing some development to an outside vendor, the results were not satisfactory or up to standards. As a team we had a working language; we knew how each individual member operated, we knew who could solve specific problems quickly, why certain tools functioned certain ways, etc. And once I had considered this past experience, I had an idea.

Tacit knowledge, in pretty much all the cases I have seen it referenced, has been discussed in relation to individuals. But what about groups? I Googled "group tacit knowledge" quickly to see what turned up. Amazingly, very little did, and digging harder reveals little more. I found two items that discuss the concept within the context of a group. Those are here (a study from 2008) and here (book chapter from 1998). I also found one short paper from 2007. I was struck by how little information there appears to be on the subject. I would think that there would be more about this.

Taking things into consideration however, I think there may be some difficulty in today's workplace in studying group-based tacit knowledge, and in implementing any findings. Many of today's workplaces are high turnover environments relative to past decades. This brings the potential to break "unit cohesion" when attempting to gather or even develop a group with deep expertise. In that sense it may remain more advantageous to pursue TK at an individual level. However, in my current work context, group tacit knowledge could potentially be a very real thing. Employees stay with the company a very long time, and while project teams break up and reassemble in different mixtures every few years, there is a lot of internal networking and collaboration. The goal of any training effort for each of these projects would be to collect the "group-operational" knowledge and pass that down to the wider workforce for faster take-up and more immediate performance increases.

I have ideas now of who in my contact list I need to talk to about this, and some of the questions I need to ask. Feel free to comment and leave your experiences and suggestions.

IOB as Replacement for ROI?

In the latest issue of CLO magazine, one of the stories that caught my attention from the front cover was the one by Timothy Hill of Blackboard, Inc., entitled Measure Smart: Trade ROI for IOB (it's in NXT book format). After reading it, I must confess I'm not sure what the hubbub is about. Have I missed the point?

Before I go further let me reveal that I am currently pursuing my ROI certification through my Capella University Masters program. The CLO article is very timely actually, as I am at the point in the course where I am putting together my project plan and data collection and analysis strategy. So naturally, being in the thick of the issue at the moment, I was more than interested in seeing what Hill had to say.

Hill's article is making the case that the return on investment evaluation model - well known by its acronym ROI - is insufficient for measuring the true impact of training interventions on a business. Hill proposes a new system, called impact on business, or IOB. As Hill says, IOB "...directly aligns employee development to business goals." He goes on to detail the ways in which business must tie training results to bottom-line goals. Bottom-line goals. That's a phrase I've been hearing a lot about of late. Why? Because that's exactly what Jack Phillips' ROI methodology targets.

Hill does little to explain what IOB actually is. He says it is a means for understanding how well learners in a training program are engaged, and that understanding this can lead to understanding how the business was substantively affected by the training. However, he doesn't appear to offer a model or particular perspective that backs up his case, and for all intents and purposes, I can't see how the ROI methodology doesn't do what Hill says it doesn't. After all, when running a Level 2 eval, the results of such a tool should report the knowledge level of students after they have completed the program. This can be compared to any pre-test measures or other baseline metrics. The results of levels 1-3 would be known through proper application of appropriate measures. Level 4 would then answer the question Hill appears to be asking of ROI and claiming for IOB.

Through parts of the article Hill refers to how ROI only measures quantitative factors such as materials costs, travel, etc. But this is not correct. The ROI methodology definitely takes into account quantitative items in order to arrive at a final answer, but it also seeks to understand intangible items as well. Mind you, Hill does not bring intangibles up, but I point this out about ROI in order to take issue with the way that Hill appears to perceive that process. Hill also refers to ROI, seemingly, as simply another level in the evaluation process for a program. This is not untrue - ROI is typically known as Level 5, sometimes Level 6 if Schneiderman's Balanced Scorecard is factored in - but ROI is without question the biggest step, and the one that requires the most planning. ROI as Phillips defines it is a total process, not a taxonomic action item that WLPs must remember to do. A well-thought out and planned ROI evaluation can span an entire project from conceptualization, well past implementation. ROI can take this long because to complete the process, all relevant business metrics must be accounted for properly and sufficient data collected and analyzed. This includes the data points Hill mentions for IOB; things like learner satisfaction with the training program, learner engagement (realized through the Results, or Level 4, portion of an evaluation), application to the job once back at the desk or on the floor. If Hill is attempting to point his readers to another possible way, he appears to have missed the mark.

The inset for the article doesn't help me understand Hill's position either. The case study in the inset discusses an extensive sales training program at a pharmaceuticals company putting three major new products on the market. But all the time is spent talking about the specifics of the program and how well it was implemented and received. IOB isn't mentioned once, let alone any sort of evaluation that affirmed and confirmed how well the learners actually applied. There is mention that they did, but not even a singular figure is offered as evidence. All I really found was: "The representatives were engaged, and empowered to sell with confidence." That may be so, but this thin explanation of the result says nothing of IOB, and is not at all different from thinly pursued evaluations that are conducted but end up not reporting a simple concrete figure to back the perception of results up.

Now, I'm not expecting a dissertation; I can go find plenty of those over at ProQuest, and a monthly periodical is surely no place for such detailed work. But as a student of the ROI methodology who is learning just how complex the process can be when taking into account organizational complexities, I was ready for a lively challenge to ROI, and a depth of counter-perspective. I didn't get that from this article, and I need more before I can take his proposal into consideration.

Informal Learning And the Empowerment of Curiosity

ASTD, in a study on informal learning conducted in conjunction with the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), published a short synopsis of the results of their study yesterday. As the post on ASTD's blog states:

...e-mail emerged as the top-ranked informal learning tool at 68%. Accessing information from a company Intranet came in at a close second, with 65% of respondents citing its use to a high or very high degree...

Without having seen the report in full yet, I think these numbers are pretty spot on. Most recently, the work environment in which I worked had a significant number of informal learning tools. In congruence with ASTD/i4cp's results, email and intranet were the most available forms, though I would place this particular company's intranet above email in my wholly experiential rankings. The company went to great lengths to provide a rich intranet site with access to company and world news, separate portals for each global site, blogs, benefits information, more than I can even recall here. The intranet site was a vital function of the business for employees, and itself provided several informal learning tools like a company wiki for groups to collaborate on and other infovorous groups to consume.

But ASTD/i4cp's study had me reflecting on my own informal learning activities within the workplace, and without. Informal learning is the kind of mode one does not always realize they switch into. Yet, I use informal learning rather extensively on a daily basis. Reading a news story can reveal a topic or concept I may never have heard of previously, or have had limited exposure too. The Internet allows me to change my level of performance on the topic on the spot. In the workplace, the quality of the intranet site allowed me to fill my self-identified information gaps quickly, or at the very least put me on the right path.

And my appetite for informal learning has only grown with the purchase of an iPhone, and now any topic no matter the level of its mundanity or marvel gets a quick Wikipedia perusal or Google search. In fact, as my wife and I were deciding what to eat while dining out the other evening, I looked up a type of fish neither of us were familiar with. I think informal learning will continue to grow as more and more people of all ages become empowered to make learning more of their own responsibility than ever before. Informal learning is the antidote for what I would call "catalyzed curiosity", and can satiate both formal and informal queues to initiate learning. This study points the way for WLP professionals as we continue applying technology to learning, and I look forward to future developments for this method .

The iPhone and mLearning

DailyTech posted a story this evening about a Forrester Research report looking into the take-up of the iPhone in the corporate space. Heretofore Apple's entry into the smart phone market has been seen as more consumer than prosumer, and as DailyTech points out, the iPhone still has many counts against it for many corporations. My most recent client had and continues to have many of the same issues cited in this story about allowing the iPhone in, regardless of how much the employees are clamoring for it.

Nonetheless, the story discusses the coming improvements for the iPhone in OS release 3.0. But the interesting part is the part about three corporations that did adopt the iPhone and allow its use in the workplace:

What the companies discovered was that by giving the employees what they wanted, the employees were more motivated to explore the phone on their own. At all three companies, active wiki communities to troubleshoot problems had been created and managed by employees. This in turn made interactions with IT less frequent and more positive, cutting cost and hassle.

This is a big deal. Through application of a dynamic tool, non-IT employees were able to solve their own problems and share knowledge as a collective. On some level it was surely already feasible that this might happen, given the preponderance of apps available for the iPhone, particularly those dealing with social networking and other Internet 2.0 fixtures like wikis. I'm definitely interested to know more details about these cases from these corporations.Time will tell, but I think the writing is already on the wall, and things are looking good for the iPhone. The smart phone wars are going to heat up to be sure, and I think this means nothing but good for the future of training and performance improvement.

InformationWeek also closes with exactly what I'm thinking: Imagine your computer as being your smart phone in the not-so-distant future. Is it possible we will see the day when we carry everything with us in a pocket supercomputer, and simply plug into hardware located wherever we go?

Devloping Solutions and Empowering Clients

I must send another thanks to Tony Karrer, for Tweeting me this article this morning. The writer describes a project he was once a consultant on, where his unconscious interjection of his concept of the "perfect" solution and its related characteristics colored what he provided the customer. In the end he says, his solution did not function as fully as expected because he didn't initially realize his perspective colored his work.

To resolve the problem, the writer switched modes from simple solution provider to a facilitator, helping the customer see how they can have a hand in the process, and understand and help solve the problem concurrently.

My studies this quarter have been focusing on the art of facilitation, and this article by Peter Bregman I think is a wonderful example of how performance consultants can and should facilitate properly. The core lesson of the piece is that we are all coming into a project with either an individual or small group perspective that can very easily color the work we do for others. It's a salient point, and one that has been driven home over the course of my own work and studies, particularly in courses dealing with research and the proper conduct of it. Bergman's anecdote is especially instructive because it shows the process of "letting go" of having to control all the details in a given project (which is a part of facilitation - helping the customer or members realize possibilities), and truly collaborating to find the right solution. As he demonstrates, often times a solution is not as "perfect" as we conceive it must be, but nevertheless it ends up being more correct - and more effective - than we would allow ourselves to consider.

Instructional Design and HPI...Cosmic Convergence?

As I continue in my Masters coursework at Capella University, each successive quarter project has increasingly driven home the sense that Instructional Design (ID) and Human Performance Improvement (HPI) are converging. Never has this been more apparent than my project this Q1. I am helping a friend and former manager at a company (who shall remain nameless...research ethics) who is seeing this very same convergence.

His training group has reached an impasse and has been unable to make significant improvements in the behavior of the workforce through training alone. To compound matters, the work environment is extremely dynamic and fast-paced, while having a very (to my eye) myopic focus on performing to benchmarks set by HQ. While benchmarks are not bad things, focusing on those alone will cause an organization to lose focus over the long term. My friend's training group has found itself in the classic struggle of nearly every training organization: How do we quantify and show our value-add to the business?

The problem goes beyond simple ROI measurements of training, and moves further into questions regarding the things that perhaps should be tried that are not. The culture in the environment tells them, in the traditional sense, that no problem can be solved without training. But HPI as a field of study shows that this is not the case. As such, due to the trend I am seeing with my friend's organization, I felt compelled to pose the question to my professor, and to myself, as I continue my studies. Are ID and HPI converging? The answer is certainly not known at this point in time, but there are signs out there, and as practitioners of ID (and later on HPI in my case) it's best I keep my eye out. My professor also sees some cause to think that the two fields are no longer parallel. Here's an abstract for a study I found on this phenomenon after a quick Google-timeout. Stolovitch and Keeps also help keep things in perspective.