Yesterday a dozen senior learning professionals met for four hours in the board room at Thomson Reuters in London. We came together to discuss the future of organizational learning, given such factors as:
* economic slowdown and corporate reconfiguration
* increasing democratization of the workforce
* pervasive internet infrastructure for social networking
* convergence of knowledge, knowledge work, and learning
We are reflecting on the discussion, and David Price is loading the issues into DebateGraph, an interactive mindmap and dialog tool. The group expects to pick up the discussion at Learning Technologies 2009 in London next month, perhaps continuing our talks in a public fishbowl context. I am busily writing articles about what we discussed. Jane Hart and I are factoring the discussion into the new release of togetherlearn.
A few pithy quotes…
“The economy is going to get worse before it gets better. It’s a ‘phony war’ at the moment, like watching a train crash in slow motion. People won’t get it until they are hurting.”
“Nobody at the top has ever lived through something like this. Only two FTSE 1000 CEOs have held their jobs for more than 10 years.”
“The altruistic sharing that is baked into web 2.0 has not made it to the board room yet.”
“Wilhelm von Humboldt brought it up long ago: you can’t teach languages, you can only create an environment where people will learn them”
“There’s a positive spin to all of this. It’s the death of training and birth of learning. Training is severely broken.”
“We need to change the focus from solutions to learning process. Are we having the right conversations?”
“The spend on learning will go down 25-30%. How can we deliver the same amount of change for 25-30% less?”
“Using learning nuggets to help customers use products is much smarter. Learning is not just a cost.”
“Learning providers will go out of business in a short time and businesses need to realise they are also learning providers as well.”
“It’s about speed to competence.”
“Learning is not a cost.”
“Forget learning and development. Become a performance consultant.”
(Me, at The Red Lion Pub half an hour later. I was out of the picture earlier because I’m the photographer.)
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Sounds like you had a lively discussion! Who was it who said “The altruistic sharing that is baked into web 2.0 has not made it to the board room yet”? I touched on this in the article I submitted for the next issue of Learning Technologies.
Karyn, we were in the Board Room, but we were not the board.
I’ve only just spotted your follow up comment thanks to (finally) finding a tool that keeps track of these conversations!
Misunderstanding. Someone in your meeting said “The altruistic sharing that is baked into web 2.0 has not made it to the board room yet.” You quoted in your post. I liked that very much and wanted to cite it, but I didn’t know who was behind the quote… so I asked.