This month’s big question asks, “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?”

Last month I opened the IADIS eLearning 2009 Conference in Portugal with an address on Redefining Instructional Design. Here is how I described some of the roles learning professionals will need to fill in our brave new world:

This is not entirely original. We addressed this question at the April 2009 Learntrends event. Charles Jennings, Ellen Wagner, and Curt Bonk vigorously tackled the issue. See Ellen’s Prerequisites for Instructional Designers. Also see Charles’ What Does a 21st Century L&D Department Look Like? wherein he writes:

NEW ROLES FOR LEARNING PROFESSIONALS

Ellen Wagner, Curt Bonk and I spent our 30 minutes facilitating a discussion on the topic of ‘New Roles for Learning Professionals’. Going back through my notes and the archive of the (very animated) chat/discussion that took place, some clear threads emerged on the types of capabilities that a 21st century L&D department need to have.

Here are some of the core capabilities identified:

1. consulting / coaching acumen (as well as learning acumen) that is focused on performance problems and outcomes. The ability to engage with senior (and not-so-senior) line managers to identify the root cause of performance problems, and not simply focus on learning.

2. the ability to ‘speak business’. An understanding of business goals is the ‘so what’ in learning. Everyone in L&D should be able to read and draw conclusions from a balance sheet and P&L account and understand the business drivers that line managers are focused on.

3. a good grasp of technology – across-the-board – but especially emerging technologies, and how they can fit into learning solutions

4. adult learning – an understanding of how adults learn in the workplace, and ‘what works’ in organisational learning.

Along with these, another set of attributes such as: ‘empathy, ’ listening’, ‘tolerance for ambiguity’, ‘basic communication ability’ were identified as essential by participants.

Harold Jarche also made the important point that ‘attitude trumps skills’ for a learning professional. We’ve known that in a more general sense for years – many of us have used the axiom ‘hire for attitude’ when we’re recruiting. I certainly have found it has served me well. I can’t think of any situation where I’ve hired on the basis of attitude where I would have done otherwise in retrospect.

I had written about this in my column in last month’s issue of CLO magazine:

When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes in favor of building “learnscapes,” we aren’t suggesting firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them in new capacities, serving as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors and performance consultants.

 

There’s no cookie-cutter formula for assigning these new roles and responsibilities. An active community of practice is a different animal from a bottom-up knowledge management network or a corporate news channel. New communities have different requirements than old.

 

In their bookDigital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith describe different community orientations in terms of meetings, open-ended conversation, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community cultivation and service context.

 

Digital Habitats posits the role of the community technology steward. Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.

 

A steward’s initial task is to shape a vision consistent with the community’s orientations. The steward then selects the simplest technology to advance the community as both the technology and the organization progress.

 

Digital Habitats also assigns these duties to the technology steward:

• Bringing new members up to speed with the community’s technology.
• Identifying and spreading good technology practices.
• Supporting community experimentation.
• Assuring continuity across technology disruptions.
• “Keeping the lights on” (including backups, permissions, vendor payments and domain registrations).

Pointing out that I foresee job enrichment and greater responsibilities for learning professionals who take on the challenge, I noted some other people’s observations:

TogetherLearn’s Clark Quinn sees the need for a learnscape architect who nurtures the health of the learning network for collaboration, communication and learning opportunities. More a leader than a technician, the learnscape architect is the network champion who carries the vision, monitors metrics, promotes network participation and encourages continuous experimentation.

 

Mzinga’s Dave Wilkins describes several production roles. Producers manage the contributions of others, drawing out the best in them while also opting not to include contributions that aren’t as good. Moderators help ensure an environment of high trust by ensuring that people play by the rules. Expert moderators may vet the accuracy and clarity of information in their domains. Yet other moderators seed discussions to channel conversations in ways that might provide insight to the organization. Reporters and bloggers unearth what is newsworthy and document it for the community.

 

These tasks won’t happen by themselves. Furthermore, people throughout the organization will need to share the burden of helping everyone learn. Distributing learning throughout the social fabric of an organization requires storytellers, mentors, bloggers, community elders, schedulers and editors. We’re all in this together.

 

Some instructors will continue to instruct, but they will increasingly do so with network support and in smaller bursts. It’s a better use of their time. Face-to-face instruction packs a punch but is difficult to scale. Economics dictate that traditional instruction will play a diminishing role in corporate learning.

 

Traditional instructors and instructional designers are ideally suited to excel in these roles. They understand how adults learn and how to transform information into learning. It’s important for corporations to benefit from their learning people, not give them pink slips

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
-Edgar Degas

Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.
-W. Edwards Deming

Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.
-Jim Rohn

If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things that cannot be learned in any other way.
-Mark Twain

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
-Malcolm S. Forbes

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
-Samuel Johnson (Performance support 101)

What we must decide is perhaps how we are valuable, rather than how valuable we are.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Education is the ability to think clearly, act well in the world of work and to appreciate life.
-Brigham Young

Working Smarter
Boosting Brainpower for Fun & Pro. (Amazon)

Informal Learning was the theme of Tony Bingham’s keynote presentation at ASTD’s International Conference and Exhibition in Washington this month.

To my surprise, he brought up a recent article I wrote for CLO magazine on the importance of making connections.

Here’s a recording of Tony’s presentation.

Learnscaping, Getting Things done in Organizations, is now available on Amazon for $25 + shipping. It’s a 160-page unbook, a continuing work in progress but containing enough meat to justify the price, I think.

Learnscaping describes a dozen learning patterns, e.g. processes that organizations are using to improve performance through networked informal learning.

Andy McAfee, late of Harvard B-School and now crossing the Charles River to MIT, has gone me one better with his discussion of Enterprise 2.0 patterns. His recent post, Toward a Pattern Language for Enterprise 2.0, details two sorts of patterns for optimal enterprise 2.0 technology, no-brainers and maybes. Both sets of patterns apply to Learnscapes, which are in essence a subset of enterprise 2.0 (a term Andy invented).

Patterns Where 2.0 Should Replace 1.0

Patterns Where 2.0 is an Alternative to 1.0

Andy’s book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, is due out soon. You can download the first chapter for free here.

The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness: 18 Interviews with Scientists, Practical Advice, and Product Reviews, to Keep Your Brain Sharp

Learnscapes are the factory floor of knowledge organizations; they are where workers connect to create value and learn from one another. Improving the inner workings of any aspect of a learnscape platform can increase organizational performance overall. Exercising workers’ brains boosts collective brainpower. That’s why the lessons in my friend Alvaro Fernandez’s new book provide a pathway to increased profitability.

Brains are dynamic systems that change over a lifetime. Scientists and researchers agree on the positive impact of four pillars of brain health:

• Balanced nutrition
• Stress management
• Physical exercise
• Mental stimulation

Years ago, American managers chuckled over reports of Japanese workers who engaged in daily, group calesthenics. Turns out this was the smart thing to do. Moreover, a variety of mental exercises builds strong brains in the same fashion that physical exercises builds strong bodies.

In our recent article in CLO magazine, Become a Chief Meta-Learning Officer, Clark Quinn and I argue that chief learning officers must take responsibility for the effectiveness of overall learning in their organizations. People who are mentally fit learn better. They are better at solving problems. They are more likely to innovate. Chief learning officers who fail to acknowledge that job stress and low self-esteem hinder learning and executive brain function are missing an opportunity.

What about brain training games and software? In large measure, the cards are still out. The book singles out some promising solutions but debunks many automated brain trainers as hype.

If you seriously want to increase your organization’s collective brainpower, you owe it to yourself to visit the SharpBrains site.

On Tuesday I led a session on Business Impact of Learning in the Real World for the Learning & Skills Group in London.

To implement social/informal learning infrastructure projects, learning and development professionals need to shift their focus from learning to earning. The place to begin is by identifying a business objective that is vital to a corporate sponsor.

I contend that networks have turned the world of learning upside down. Everything is business is becoming interconnected and this drives ever-faster cycle times. Groups have become more important than individuals. The interplay of complex systems has rendered the business environment unpredictable. And as a result, we must focus our attention on learning ecosystems instead of courses and workshops: platforms, not programs.

Measuring the impact of an ecosystem is a different exercise from evaluating a single program. Often the payback is so enormous that precision is unnecessary. We looked at an example where a combination of eLearning, performance support, and structured activities led to billions of dollars in new revenue.

When this project’s sponsor questioned the numbers, the learning manager asked if it would be reasonable to attribute, say, 3% of the increased revenue to the new approach to learning. The sponsor readily agreed. So the learning manager took credit for bringing in a mere hundred million in new sales.

A sponsor is an individual with the authority to make budget decisions. What are the appropriate metrics for success or failure of a learning ecology (a learnscape)? Whatever the sponsor buys into. This is a major theme of What Would Andrew Do?

If you can’t make the case for a learnscape project on the back of an envelope, it’s time to pick another project. We gave everyone in the room an envelope and challenged them to jot down their elevator pitch for their next encounter with their sponsors. If managers of learning can’t sell their projects on business terms, they won’t survive in these topsy-turvy times.

I expect to be leading sessions like this in-house at corporations that have been stymied by reduced funding and lack of forward motion.

Slides from the workshop are on SlideShare. A companion handout is available on Scribd.

After our presentations to the Learning and Skills Group, Jane Hart and I took a breather at the Pommery Champagne Bar in the Westfield Mall.

George Siemens echoes my feelings exactly in his post today on elearnspace titled Modernizing corporate training

I generally resist linking to organizations that monitor and use the ideas generated in the social/learning/tech space, and then produce reports that fail to acknowledge sources of inspiration. However, this post on modernizing corporate training is worth a read, even if only for the irony. It explores the history of corporate learning from 1980’s to today. Today, according to the report (and roughly every other consultant) is the age of collaboration. And then they freely sprinkle half a dozen “registered trademark” signs.

I must quibble with the assertion that “In 1998 the term ‘e-learning’ caught on.” The first citation I can find for e-Learning dates back to 1997. However, the term didn’t really catch on until October 1999 when CBT Systems was reborn as Smartforce, the e-Learning Company.

“In the mid 1990s we entered what I call the ‘blended and informal learning’ era” may be typo. Josh should know; he wrote the book. In 2004. The first time I recall hearing talk about blended learning was in 2000 or 2001.

And as to “…we are going through one of the most important transitions to corporate training in the last 10 years,” I’d probably make it the last 100, perhaps 200, years.

The important transitions are in how people interact with one another, networked business structures, instantaneous communication, collaborative intelligence, and the demise of the industrial era. This is earth-shattering stuff, and it doesn’t do it justice to frame it as a mere transition in corporate training.

Moodle is an open source course management system with a wide following. The Open University in the UK uses it to support 200,000 distance learners. My friends at CV&A in Spain have implemented Moodle to support informal learning in numerous corporations.

Ten years ago an Aussie webmaster named Martin Dougiamas at Curtin University created Moodle as part of his PhD thesis. The thesis was titled “The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry.” Moodle (the “M” is for modular) has sprouted extensions and capabilities you’d expect in a constructivist environment such as forums, chats, and wikis to supplement traditional course management features.

If you’re a teacher and you’re wedded to content-delivery as your primary means of instruction, Moodle can be an excellent choice of platform. Unlike Drupal or ELGG, Moodle enables you to set up courses and learning environments without any programming skills… as long as you have a step-by-step guidebook like this one.

Moodle Course Conversion is a step-by-step cookbook for transferring existing course material into Moodle. While I haven’t attempted to try this out, the instructions appear sound, and there’s plenty of hand holding provided by an author who clearly wants to help you succeed in putting courses online.

New book: What Would Andrew Do? by Jay Cross & friends
How to sell senior management on the value of learning.

Preview and Table of Contents

189 pages, $19.99 hard copy or download, $14.99 read-only

Blurb: Chief Learning Officers and training directors are struggling to convince executives they are making a difference. To be successful, they must think and act like business people. This takes more than jargon and metrics. This un-book explains what a training director must do to get budget, keep her job, and make solid contributions to the bottom line. What Would Andrew Do? will challenge you to convince a hard-nosed, self-made Scot that your proposed learning project is a worthwhile use of his money. If you can do that, convincing your organization shouldn’t be a problem.

This is version 4.5 of What Would Andrew Do? It is a work in progress. It’s incomplete. Don’t buy this book unless you’re willing to put up with messiness in order to get its message.

A few quotes from the text you give you the flavor:

A manager for a major pharmaceutical firm in
Canada told his sales trainers that henceforth
their bonuses would be tied to the sales of the
people they trained. “Hold on,” they said. “We
don’t have anything to do with that.”

Andrew Carnegie is the quintessential hardnosed
businessman. Your objective will often
be to do convince Andrew what you say/do is
worthy of investment. When in doubt about
ROI, just ask yourself “What would Andrew
Carnegie do?”

Business is about making sound decisions.
Every business decision is a trade-off. (If
there’s no trade-off, it’s a no-brainer.) An
important corollary: There is no free lunch.
List the pro’s of doing something and the con’s
of doing something else. Be aware of what
you’re trading off when making a decision.
Every trade-off is a risk. That doesn’t mean
you should shy away from risk. Quite the
contrary, for no risk means no reward. A
decision-maker who disregards risk is a fool, a
pauper, or both. Fortune favors the bold. An
astute business person seeks the most
lucrative balance of risk and reward.

People see what they focus on; they don’t see
what’s really there. An alcoholic sees the
liquor stores other people breeze by. A foodie
always remembers whether or not she has
eaten at a particular restaurant. A top
executive sees long-term trends; a factory
laborer sees the clock. (Training directors see
learners; everyone else sees workers or
employees.)

Leaders have shifted their focus from static to
dynamic, from physical to virtual, from
financial results to financial expectations, from
machines to people, from goods to service
from analytical to intuitive, and from
institutions to individuals.

Knowledgeable, can-do people are the heart of
competitive advantage. Keeping them
informed and inspired is vital. More than ever,
people matter, for human ingenuity is today’s
scarce resource.

The success of a learning initiative should not
require third decimal point accuracy. You
should be able to describe the logic in an
elevator pitch. If you can’t illustrate the results
on the back of a napkin, you should probably
be looking for more productive projects.
In the words of Fritz Perls, “Learning is
discovering that something is possible.”

The false precision of ROI comes from looking
backwards. Results are counted up after the
horse is out of the barn. The past is a sunk
cost. It’s over. Decision-making involves
placing bets on the future. Decisions are most
often guided by intuition, judgment, and gut
feel than by numbers. As the investment
prospectus reminds us, “Past success is no
guarantee of future performance.”

How can you say that training caused the
result? Maybe it was a new bonus system that
went into effect at the same time. Maybe our
products were better than the competition’s.
Maybe it was sun spots. Once again, it’s a
judgment call, most likely the judgment of the
person with authority to write checks to fund
training. Or not.

Speed matters. Getting a quick solution is
more important than finding the perfect
solution. The key is to get a solution that
works. Now. Weigh the trade-off of time vs.
cost toward time by considering the cost of
lost opportunity by not acting sooner.

Pull learning is more cost-effective. It doesn’t
require as much in the way of control
mechanisms, structure, and outside
assistance. Furthermore, lessons learned
through pull are more likely to stick because
they’re relevant to perceived need, delivered
when required, and usually reinforced with
immediate application. Pull learning delivers
more bang for the buck.

Earlier this year in London, I sat down with the editor of Learning Technologies magazine, Ben Chai, to share my views on natural learning, the credit crunch, slam-dunk ROI, social networking, closing the training departments, and more.

Tomorrow Learning, part 1 and part 2

Rumor has it that the podcasts are homework for some instructional design classes. If you want to discuss any of this, leave a comment below. I’ll do my best to answer you.