Learning for the 21st Century

Unprecedented changes in the role of the worker, the nature of business, the pace of innovation, the importance of intangibles, the explosion of information, and the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy have rendered traditional corporate learning obsolete. Jay Cross exposes the inadequacies of traditional learning and discusses a new paradigm for learning in the 21st Century.

WHAT IS LEARNING?
Learning is the process of figuring out how the world works. Neurons in the minds of learners forge pathways and form patterns that convert the booming, buzzing cacophony bombarding our senses into the simple vista we call reality. Learning develops new capacities, skills, values, understanding, and preferences. Organisms only stop learning when they die.

Learning is not one activity. It’s a dog’s breakfast of acquiring skills, information, knowledge, savoir faire, and more. Its dimensions are emotional, cognitive, physical, sensory, and social. The common denominator is that learning enables the learner to function better in his or her environment. The measure of learning is performance at one’s calling and fulfillment in life.

Most organisational learning is built on nineteenth-century principles, and these days that’s a formula for disaster.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK
In the days of textile factories in Manchester, railroads criss-crossing continents, and assembly lines mass- producing automobiles, most work was physical. Training consisted of supervisors showing workers how to run things. Workers were then expected to do them; the less variation, the better. Innovation was not a worker’s responsibility. In fact, Frederick Taylor told workers, ‘You’re not paid to think’.

Along came knowledge work. In the sixty years between 1947 and 2007, America shifted from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. The trend has swept the globe, and the service sector is outstripping the industrial sector in every country. What’s a service? It’s a product that is created and consumed as it is delivered. The worker is part of the deliverable.

A parallel and not un-related shift occurred in the valuation of corporations. Between 1982 and 1999, intangibles (things like intellectual capital) surpassed tangibles (e.g. plant and equipment) in the market valuation of public American companies. Shareholders placed their bets on soft assets like customer relationships, know- how, and a track record of innovation. In a knowledge company, you are paid to think; that’s where intangible assets come from. Networks subvert hierarchy. Workers today demand autonomy in decision-making and they get it. Re-engineering and downsizing eliminated entire layers of middle managers who told workers how to do their work. Increasingly, workers are boss- less. They make their own decisions. There’s no one to check with. There’s no policy for unprecedented issues. Faced with a stream of novel situations, work becomes improvisational.

SCHOOLING
Corporations often confuse learning with schooling. This is why most senior executives think learning unimportant. Schooling is a crummy model for the sort of learning that’s required by corporations.

In school you learn to do your ABCs, speak French, recite poems, dissect frogs, complete geometry proofs, write essays, and explain the significance of 1776, 1789, and 3.1416. For extra credit, you learn to play team sports, flirt with the opposite sex, drink beer, take tests, and butter up teachers.

Students do not see the relevance of the subjects taught at school. By and large, they’re right. At work, you probably don’t spend much time speaking Latin or calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle. Even if this sort of knowledge was worth knowing, waiting two decades between learning it and applying it erases the memory banks. I asked Father Guido Sarducci where he got the idea for his Five Minute University, where you learn in five minutes as much as the average college graduate remembers after five years. “It’s all true, man,” he told me.

The best learning is self-motivated. You learn something because you feel the need to know it, not because someone told you to. Most of the time, you reinforce the lesson immediately by putting it to work. Youï’re interested because you chose what to learn, not told to by some authority figure. You remember because you put it into action on the spot.

School is plagued by yet another wrongheaded conception, namely, that people learn in isolation. Throughout school, people study on their own, struggling to cram facts into their heads. Superior academic performance is rewarded with grades. Amazingly, grades correlate with nothing outside of the school system. The person who almost flunked out will end up just as wealthy, powerful, and happy as the straight-A student. How can this be? It’s because working with others is the pathway to life’s rewards. In school, it’s called cheating.

THE INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING
People, ideas, computers, processes, and media are all connected in networks, and interconnections among them are mushrooming. The denser a network’s connections, the faster its cycle time. The pace of our lives is faster, faster, faster. Can’t you feel it? Scientist/inventor Ray Kurzweil suggests that in the twenty-first century, instead of living a hundred twentieth-century years, we’ll experience 20,000 of them.

The story goes that when a reporter asked Albert Einstein for his phone number, the physicist looked it up in the phone directory, explaining “Why should I memorise something when I know where to find it?” Zoom forward in time, and Google puts such a staggering array of information in front of us that it becomes confusing to figure out what pupils need to memorise in school. Or trainees need to learn in workshops and events at work.

A well-read citizen in the eighteenth century read fewer words in her lifetime than appear in a single edition of the Sunday New York Times. Today it’s common for office workers to spend two hours a day reading email.

There are more bits of digital information out there than stars in the universe, and their number is projected to grow ten-fold in the next five years. Moreover, as the boundaries between disciplines erode, it’s no longer viable to be the specialist who knows more and more about less and less.

Not so long ago, the logic of cause and effect could explain how the world worked. Other things being equal, if you did X, you received Y as a result. However, other things are never equal because nothing exists in a vacuum. The butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil contributes to the birth of a hurricane that destroys the south coast of Texas. Matter is a particle or a wave, depending on how you look at it. Reality emerges from the interplay of complex adaptive systems. The world is no longer predictable.

A superlative industrial worker was 25% more productive than average. An exemplary knowledge worker can be 200x more productive than average. The former worked better within the system; the latter re-invents the system.

So in addition to the baggage we inherit from schools, we inhabit an unpredictable world of rampant change, ambient information, disruptive volatility, and digital overload. Deloitte’s Center for Edge Innovation says:

As we look to the future, the digital infrastructure that surrounds and connects our world continues to advance with no sign of stabilising. Excelling in this environment requires a different kind of learning, one that emphasises knowledge creation in addition to knowledge transfer, reflection as well as commentary, and new degrees of openness with fewer constraints.

WHERE’S THE CURRICULUM GOING TO COME FROM?
Back in the days when change was glacial, what worked for your grandfather would work for you, so learning what had worked in his day was enough to get you by. Past principles and practices were captured in books, stored in the library, and described in lectures. You could pilot your learning by looking in the rear-view mirror.

The only certainty about the future from here on out is that it won’t resemble the past. Instructional designers no longer have time to develop formal courses. Survival requires people who can navigate a rapidly-changing maze at high speed. They need to find their own curriculum, figure out an appropriate way to learn it, and get on with it. It’s cliché to say that people have to learn how to learn

They will also have to be their own instructional designers, selecting the best methods of learning. Furthermore, given the increasingly reciprocal nature of knowledge work, they will have to know how to teach. Each one-teach-one is at the heart of invent-as-you-go learning.

Until recently, knowledge itself was thought to reside in people’s heads. The new view is that knowledge is collective intelligence, a shared consensual reality that lives among us rather than inside our individual heads. We aren’t mere consumers of knowledge; we’re contributors as well. Increasingly, we co- create knowledge in the course of collaboration and work.

WHY MUST LEARNING CHANGE?
When you run the numbers, you discover that plain old learning in corporate workshops and courses is not cost- effective, even if you had the lead time to do it.

What’ s the impact of learning on overall corporate performance? Rummler and Brache suggest that learning accounts for perhaps 10% of the overall influence a corporation can bring to bear to change employee behaviour. Other factors are things like job descriptions, performance support, incentives, and so on.

Most of the learning going on is informal. The bulk of the way people learn their jobs is through watching others, asking questions, trying and failing, listening to the grapevine, and ponying up to the bar. Study after study pegs the formal proportion of learning at around 20%. Now we are working with 10% of 20%, about 2% of the potential influence on behaviour.

Brinkerhoff and others find that only 15% to 20% of what’s learned in a corporate training event shows up on the job. The fall-off is attributable to irrelevant content and delivery too far in advance of need. Now we’re dealing with 20% of 2%, less than half a percent of the potential behaviour change in the organisation. That’s insufficient to capture the attention of a senior executive for one floor of an elevator pitch.

NOW WHAT?
Knowledge work has so many options that there’s always a better way to do a job; learning stretches minds to cope with new situations. Successful knowledge workers are rewarded for innovation and ingenuity. In other words, learning is the work and the work is learning.

To think about re-framing corporate learning for the twenty-first century, let’s go back to the outcomes we are seeking: solid performance on the job and fulfilment in work.

The key to performance has shifted from replaying what worked in the past to adapting rapidly to surprises that pop up in the future. The goal of learning shifts from acquiring skills to doing whatever it takes to prosper in one’s evolving ecosystem. Learning must be non-stop. It needs a proper home.

Getting to the new promised land requires working at the process level. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid encouraged this approach nearly a decade ago in Stolen Knowledge:

“… the best way to support learning is from the demand side rather than the supply side. That is, rather than deciding ahead of time what a learner needs to know and making this explicitly available to the exclusion of everything else, designers and instructors need to make available as much as possible the whole rich web of practice-explicit and implicit- allowing the learner to call upon aspects of practice, latent in the periphery, as they are needed.”

Industrial age workers created value in factories. Where do knowledge workers create value? I will call the knowledge-age factory floor a learnscape. Learnscapes are the platforms where knowledge workers collaborate, solve problems, converse, share ideas, brainstorm, learn, explain, communicate, conceptualise, tell stories, help one another, teach, serve customers, keep up to date, forge partnerships, build communities, and distribute information. Learnscapes define where and how modern work is performed. Training programs are events; learnscapes are longterm processes.

Every organisation has learnscapes. Trouble was, happenstance learning platforms were as water to the fish: too close to be seen. No one noticed that the parts didn’t mesh, work was fragmented, learning was separate from doing, and everything was ad hoc. A learnscape approach brings these things into focus and integrates them into a whole.

A well thought-out learnscape is a flexible, loosely-coupled framework that sets the boundaries within which workers are free to learn as they choose.

Courses end; learnscapes persist. Organisations and their members are living things, and the landscape/learnscape analogy invites us to consider nature, symbiosis, interconnections, genetic makeup, adaptation, the change of seasons and life cycles. Life is for learning.

Jay Cross is a strategist, speaker, consultant, and designer of corporate learning and performance systems. Jay will be speaking at the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference and can be contacted at jaycross@internettime.com