At the turn of the century, my vision of corporate learning put the learner at the center of resources that included the web, online learning activities, communities of practice, an intranet, and instructor-led training. My thinking has changed. Can you guess several ways I would re-draw the picture today?
The center should contain more than one person
For the most part, learning is social. This notion of the learner as individual is a legacy of the machine-age. The manager in the factory says “Just do what you are told. You are not paid to think. Don’t waste your time and ours talking to your co-workers; they should be doing what they are told, too.”
Childhood schooling mimics the factory. Study on your own. No talking during class. Collaborating to accomplish the job is called cheating. Grades measure individual performance. In school, a loner can finish at the top of the class; at work, loners are losers.
Don’t call it learning
Because most people are now knowledge workers, learning is the work. Treating learning and work as though they are separate is wrong-headed. Schools wall themselves off to protect their students from the distractions of the real world. Business managers know in their gut that taking workers off the job in order to learn defies common sense. The separation of workplace and classroom has tainted the word learning. What’s most important is know how to do the job well.
When conversing with corporate clients about how to get the job done, I try to avoid words like classroom, course, instructor, curriculum, and training.
Everything is connected
Remote islands in distant seas, once cut off from the rest of the world, are now plugged into the global grid. They read the New York Times at the same time as the rest of us. Nothing exists in isolation. The learning community, the individual, the intranet, the chat groups, and everything else in the picture are connected to one another. We’re looking at a network; functional networks do not have a center. A mesh is a more apt metaphor than hub-and-spoke.
Add the missing pieces
Learning often occurs via conversation, trial-and-error, mimicry, discovery, sharing, and collaboration. Ten years ago, I left them out. Now I know better.
Help me develop a better picture.
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This is absolutely true. a few years ago Zerox hired anthropologists in order to found out where and how knowledge is created and what are the ways it shared. The finding show that the main knowledge development and sharing took place in the non-working areas such as the coffee counter, the cooler, locker rooms etc.
The knowledge distributed in these occasions was the concealed one. The kind of knowledge one obtains only after a few months in roll. Zerox tried to formalize these occasional meeting but it didn’t work. At the end, the company increased breaks and others actions that increase workers sharing time.
A few years ago I did the same with a group of managers, giving them ling breaks and linking those with same interest. The formal reason for meeting was a lecture but as one of them once told me: “I love the presentation, but I get much more from talking with others, they understand me and what I’m dealing with and I can learn from their experience”.
As Vygotsky said: ” learning is social”.
Beautiful! I thought what I had observed was wrong. When we can meke it mimic and interlace learning with social behaviors it will be effective. I am learning writing in first person with some very dear friends in my blog and this way it’s fun and really fun. Thanks for confirming what I believed in .
Regards
Rina
Jay, the comment about work and learning is very true we provide work based toolkits to ove 1 million managers and if we position them as something to help them do their job the usage is 5 times higher than when they are perceived as learning. When we ask them ‘learning is something that is seen as something I do after my to-do list is finished.
Also I just reviewed our top 50 toolkits and it shows that managers tend to download less than 2 tools from the toolkit when it is seen as a work-based resource. i.e. I grab my hammer and screwdriver and get on with the job.
I’ve now heard myself several times saying that what all people development process should be doing boils down to increasing the quality of conversations between people in and around organizations. Conversations between team members and leaders, leaders and leaders, team members and team members, etc. It seems so simple for the lofty goals of Human Resources, a profession I’ve practiced now for over 20 years. But the real learning seems to come more from a really good conversation, with someone who is good at it.
Conversation or simply put communication is the basis of all advanced development, if information is not carefully communicated advancement is made more difficult. This is true in school, science and even in your home life.
Like the post going to be back to read more,