This is the thesis of the book I’m working on. It’s not yet beta; this is alpha. Give me feedback and I’ll continue to post as I write.

Overview

     In the network era, learning is the work. It is the survival skill and the key to prosperity. This book advocates investing in learning that demonstrably improves organizational performance.
     Pragmatic and grounded in experience, this is a re-think of how organizational learning can increase profits, spur innovation, and help businesses prosper.
     This is a book for managers about applying common sense to build a workforce that improves performance naturally, without prodding. It’s about eliminating training bureaucracy and sacred cows that have failed to keep pace with the times. It’s a new way of looking at how people become competent in their work and fulfilled in their professional lives.
     In today’s volatile, unpredictable times, learning is the key to corporate responsiveness and survival.
     While learning is ascendent, training is in decline, for workers are embracing self-service learning; they learn in the context of work, not at some training event divorced from work.
     Learning and development professionals won’t like this book. It explodes too many myths; it declares training departments obsolete; it deals only with learning that improves organizational performance.
     Learning is not schooling. Quite the contrary. For the most part, the learning we propose does away with instructors, classrooms, report cards, and graduation. In the new business learning, everyone is a teacher, the workplace is our classroom, on-job performance is the measure of success, and learning continues throughout one’s career.
     Embedding learning in work reduces overall spending while improving performance. Abandoning obsolete notions of training cuts costs. Relying on natural, peer-based learning improves business results.

Push and Pull

     Organizational learning tends to be mostly push or mostly pull. Push is the sort of learning you encountered in school, where authorities selected the curriculum and lessons were imposed on you. Pull describes the way you learn from Google or discovered how to kiss a lover. With pull learning, you select what you want to learn and how you want to learn it.
     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.
     Organizations that increase the ratio of pull to push can lower their overall investment in learning without sacrificing results. Given the greater payback of pull learning, the objective is to achieve greater results while spending less.

     Why am I advocating cutting the overall spend? Because it’s an easier concept to sell. Managers have been skeptical of the value of training for decades. One hopes that the lure of the Holy Grail of achieving more from less is an offer they can’t refuse.

At an online conversation at Learntec last Wednesday, I described a few things I had learned about a networked culture that sustained itself again all odds for tens of thousands of years. By dedicating more than half of their resources to intangibles such as learning, relationships, and the technology of eco-farming, the Aborigines of Australia created a society without war, crime, poverty, or taxes.

These people learned through story and ritual kept alive through a pattern of living in one another’s communities. Men moved from one country to another from the age of 14 until the age of 32, learning the culture of an entire continent. Eco-farming produced sufficient food to enable people to devote most of their time to refining and passing along knowledge. Multi-dimensional stories told around community campfires transmitted the law, cultural mores, respect for one another, ecological awareness, and entertainment. Interpreting the stories in all their meanings was each individual’s responsibility. There were no schools. These people had no word for knowledge, for what we Westerners call knowledge was for them simply the way one led one’s life.

The Aborigines had neither kings nor chieftains. Everyone was a leader. When guided by respect for others, deep connections among all members of society, and a culture of sharing, there was no need for hierarchy. Or police. Or government.

My fellow participants in the conversation cautioned me against taking lessons from romanticized versions of distant cultures. They are correct. The Fortune 500 would be ill-advised to implement 18-year job rotation training or to train assembly-line workers through campfire stories. However, I do think other cultures and disciplines can act as catalysts to innovation in how we think about our environment. This is where innovation comes from: mashing up ideas and methods from different realms in order to explore similarities and differences.

European civilization is barely ten thousand years old; Aborigine culture thrived for thirty to fifty thousand years (until it succombed to European diseases). Europe has been plagued with war, inequality, intolerance, torture, and starvation throughout its history; all of these were unknown in Aboriginal Australia. Surely there are some lessons in this.

Questions — not prescriptions — that occur to me as I contemplate learning among the Aborigines and learning in modern corporatios include:

What’s the appropriate balance of learning and doing? Might we do better by dedicating more time to sharing what we know and less to tangile production? In other words, are there opportunities for us to work smarter, not harder?

Should we dedicate more time to learning that takes a while to sink in (like oft-told campfire stories) and less on transferring bare-bones knowledg nuggets? Does “rapid eLearning” really help us become better workers?

Can we integrate knowledge and work so that the distinction between the two disappears? If life is for learning, why would we ever want to separate the two? Why do we need the corporate equivalent of school?

Might mutual respect and a common worldview enable our organizations to do away with rulebooks and management mechanisms? Wouldn’t helping customers be a better use of our time than trying to control one another internally? Doesn’t innate motivation to do what’s right trump the carrot-and-stick variety?

Mashing up concepts from different disciplines is the direction my friends and I are headed with the Learning Irregulars. My hope is that dwelling on questions like these can open our heads to innovation. I’ve just scratched the surface here. (Also, my knowledge of Aborigine culture is appallingly thin.)

What do you think?

Related:

Social Network Dreamtime

Nancy White: More than conversation

Yesterday morning I flew from Bilbao to London, changed terminals at Heathrow, and flew from London to Rome. Twenty minutes after landing, I was online from the back seat of Robin Good’s car, taking part in Learntec in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Robin interviewed me while we waited for my session at Learntec to come alive.

Once we got going, I engaged in an online conversation with Nancy White, Dave Cornier, and Heike Philp as if we were in adjoining rooms, which felt odd since I was actually in short-term parking at the Rome airport.

To say that we live in interesting times is extreme understatement.

Appearing in today’s issue of Axiom News, Building Better Organizations:

Better to begin from positive assumptions about employees
by Michelle Strutzenberger

Jay Cross, thought leader in the field of self-directed learning in the workplace, says promoting individual strengths is at the heart of his philosophy.

“Empowering individuals to learn through discovery how to lead from their strengths is a major fulcrum for my work,” says Cross, who has written extensively on the subject of self-directed and informal learning and its increasing relevance and effectiveness — as compared to company-provided training — in today’s knowledge economy.

One of his articles, Informing Learning – the Other 80 Per Cent, Cross makes the point that training is inherently pessimistic.

“Managers often start with the mindset that learners are deficient, and the objective is to bring them up to par,” Cross writes.

He adds that the consequences of assuming the role of training is to fix what’s broken rather than make what’s already good better are “enormous and disastrous.”

Some of these consequences include unmotivated learners, reinforcement of the negative rather than maximizing the positive, unengaged workers and little authentic team building.

He refers to David Cooperrider, champion of an approach called Appreciative Inquiry (AI), who is helping inspire organizations to build on their positive aspects through illustrative stories.

Cross says he agrees that it is better to begin from positive assumptions about employees and organizational development “until proven wrong” rather than let “negativity eliminate options before they have been tested.”

As the term implies, self-directed and informal learning in the workplace refers to the learner initiating the learning and making decisions about training and development experiences.

At its core, it is about recognizing the capabilities of employees, not only to get the job done but to work towards becoming the best they can be.

One survey has shown that self-directed learning is three times more important in helping knowledge workers become proficient on the job than company-provided training.

However, organizations don’t have to leave learning entirely up to chance, according to Cross. He suggests corporations can in fact boost the results of self-directed learning.

For instance, they can streamline the informal learning process by providing time for learning on the job, building networks and knowledge bases to facilitate discovery, or providing places for workers to congregate and learn.

He also recommends helping workers learn how to improve their learning skills as well as creating a supportive organizational culture.

In the latter case, this might involve supporting innovation, which requires making failure ‘okay,’ and supporting participation in professional Communities of Practice.

To read more by Cross, visit this link for free chapters from his book Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance, and http://informl.com for continuing dialogue on the topic.

Jay’s column on Effectiveness, CLO magazine, February 2009

The dawn of a new age

If you’re looking for a way to weather the economic downturn, the first thing you need to do is realize that it’s a permanent climate change, not a passing storm.

What we are experiencing today is fundamental. The industrial age is in its death throes, making way for the unfolding of the network age. This is akin to when the Industrial Revolution overwhelmed the agrarian age. During that time, people moved from farms to cities. Clock watching replaced working to the rhythm of the sun.

Repetitive, mindless factory labor replaced working holistically with nature. Taking orders replaced thinking for one’s self. Slums were born; society unraveled.

One hopes this economic revolution will be more positive than the last. Nonetheless, it’s time to get ready for massive change. Industry won’t disappear, but about a third of all industrial companies probably will. The ranks of the permanently unemployed will swell. New categories of work will pop up to address network optimization, making connections, reconfiguring functions, real-time enterprise design, constructive destruction, virtual mentoring and so on. Hallowed laws, regulations, standards and memes will evaporate.

Management itself, the art of planning, organizing, deciding and controlling, will fall by the wayside. After all, planning is suspect in an unpredictable world. Organizing takes on new meaning when things self-organize. Deciding is everybody’s business when networks rule. Control is a nonstarter in a bottom-up, peer-powered society.

As networks continue to subvert hierarchy, successful organizations will embrace respect for the individual, flexibility and adaptation, openness and transparency, sharing and collaboration, honesty and authenticity, and immediacy. Training is obsolete because it deals with a past that won’t be repeated. Learning will be redefined as problem-solving, achieving fit with one’s environment and having the connections to deal with novel situations.

Impending doom unfreezes organizational structure to make room for reorganizing, rearranging and replacing the status quo. Survivors will develop and present agendas for change while things are in flux. Here’s the pitch I’d offer the most senior person I could get a hearing with:

“Next week, we will close the training department. We are shifting our focus from training to performance. Any remaining training staff will become mentors, coaches and facilitators who work on improving core business processes, strengthening relationships with customers and cutting costs.

“I’m changing my title from VP of training to VP of core capabilities. My assistants will become the director of sales readiness and the director of competitive advantage, respectively. The measure of our contributions will be results, not training measures. We’re scrapping the LMS posthaste. Wherever possible, we’re replacing proprietary software with open source.

“All of our energies will go into peer-to-peer, self-service learning. If something doesn’t dramatically improve the capabilities of our people, we won’t do it. We are scrapping lengthy program development projects in favor of quick-and-dirty rapid development. We are abandoning classrooms.

“We are eliminating all travel and helping others do the same by introducing Skype and free real-time conferencing. We’re setting up a corporate FAQ on a wiki to capture and distribute the information we once received from people who are no longer with us. In this and all of our efforts, we intend to work smarter, not lower our standards or quality of service.

“Recognizing that informed customers make better customers, we are opening up most of our platforms for learning to them, as well as our employees and former employees. To the extent that we help them cut costs, improve performance and implement better methods, we both win.

“Everything has a price tag. When we wring out costs, I want commitment from senior management to allocate time for people to help one another, exploit the benefits of social networks and converse with one another freely. This is a multiyear program. It will not work if we try to implement it while still doing business as usual. Burning people out is not a survival strategy.

“That is my plan for this week. If I have your support, I’ll be happy to come back with a few more things next week.”

Learning Technologies 2009

Track 1 Session 1

Learning technologies: the road ahead

Under the radar: great technologies that you could be using

• URL for this page:http://www.informl.com/2009/01/27/under-the-radar-great-technologies-you-could-be-using/
• TInyURL for this page: http://tinyurl.com/asge7d

This is the jump page for a presentation January 28. That’s why the syntax is choppy — and why I keep changing it.

Blip.fm for exploring music (and our soundtrack) MariaFernanda choconancy

Backnoise for back channel, to get more conversations going. Go here to take part.

Poll: Jane’s Top 100 List

• Write a blog?
• Twitter
• TED talks
• RSS Reader
• YouTube, SlideShare
• Skype/Instant messaging
• Google Docs/collaborative writing

Learner redefined. Prospering in community with others. Becoming who you are. Getting good at what you do. Figuring out how to do a good job. Preparing for an uncertain future. More.

Aggregation

Smart Search, e.g. Informal Learning Flow. Tony Karrer. Jay Cross

Activity streams, e.g. Jay’s FriendFeed. FriendFeed. Jay’s Tumblr.

Jay’s learning ecosystem

jaycross.com is Jay’s home page. It maps to lots of things we’ll talk about.

Research page is a starting point for feeds, searches, and proven destinations.

interface is my personal launch page, and it includes links to many of the technologies we’ll cover today.

blogs, one of which is home to this page.

Community, where you can add comments and ask questions after this session.

overview of these pages on Jing

Publishing

Mimeo on-demand publishing for training

Lulu on-demand publishing for books

Veodia video directly to the cloud. Example.

EyeJot for video email and a sample

Scribd “social publishing” for documents

Collaboration

Google for an ever-greater array of services. Docs.

Delicious tools for shared bookmarks

MindMeister for collaborative mind-mapping

Professional learning is increasingly driven by demand, not supply. You decide what you need or want to learn and you go get it when you feel like it. Since you chose your topic rather than being told, you’re more likely to retain information you find.

To keep from drowning in the gusher of discoveries, news, and insight on the net, astute foragers use services to filter the noise and present headlines worthy of further investigation. For generalized answers to “What’s happening?”, they visit sites like Original Signal, Digg, PopURLs, or Buzzfeed, where poplar items rise to the top.

Keeping one’s finger on the pulse professionally is a tougher nut to crack. In the realm of informal learning, I learn from David Weinberger, George Siemens, Nancy White, Ross Dawson, Mark Oehlert, Marcia Conner, and dozens of others. I follow people on blogs, Twitter and Friendfeed. I rapidly tire of any single format, so I have been using a variety of tools to keep up with my favorite feeds: a river of news or Google reader or Pageflakes. (FYI, these links and more adorn the top of my personal search & re-search page.) When someone asked where to get up to speed on informal learning, I haven’t had an ideal place to send them. Until today.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been consuming knowledge from a site that better fits how I learn. Called Informal Learning Flow, the site pulls together the feeds of the people I read and topics that I care about. You’ve got to see this in action to understand its power. Go to the site and click on a concept, say, informal learning. Then click on another concept, say, formal learning. You’ll call up entries that use both terms. Experiment a little; there’s more going on under the hood here than meets the eye.

This information engine is the brain child of my pal Tony Karrer whom you know from the eLearning Technology blog, enthusiastic conference presentations, the recent Corporate Learning Trends Event with George Siemens and me, and TechEmpower.

This is still beta.* The site grows richer every day. Help us make it better. Give your suggestions as comments to this post. Need more information? Tony just mentioned some new features that help show a weekly Hot List . Play with the widget-maker at the bottom of the page.

This sort of lightweight, custom-tailored information gatherer has a future. You can experience the same technology at the eLearning Learning content community. Selfishly, I’m happy to help Tech Empower find other homes for this technology, for it can only make the Informal Learning Flow more useful. Overall, I see a big future for technology like this, for it exemplifies the sort of self-service, pull, get-it-when-you-need-it learning style of learning I champion. It makes me life easier.

_________
Oh course, everything in life is beta. We all have, or will have, room for improving how well we fit with the environments we inhabit. (Return)

Related:
Jay’s search and re-search page

eLearningLearning

Work Literacy

Reading the New York Times about the new ways MIT is teaching physics (previous post), this headline caught my eye:

M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry, Citing Flaws in Center He Designed

Whoa! Researching Informal Learning, I interviewed MIT’s Chief Architect, Bill Mitchell, about this very building. Here’s an excerpt about the Stata Center from Chapter Four, Emergence.

Creating Learning Spaces at MIT

Buildings at MIT must support learning communities. Social space (cafeterias, nooks, atriums, and other public spaces) are much in demand. In fact, demand is high and getting higher for informal, multi-purpose spaces. Demand for private offices and cubicles is dropping. 

An effective learning space combines push and pull. The push is to create fringe spaces where disciplines overlap; this is a prerequisite of innovation. The pull is the portability that goes with a wi-fi connection. You used to meet in an office surrounded by your books, your files, and your phone. That’s no longer necessary. 

Now this seems like a no-brainer, but it’s hard to do. For one thing, you must fight obsolete metrics. A traditional measure is the “net-to-gross ratio,” the proportion of the building that’s productive. The problem is that social space is defined as unproductive. That’s crazy. The most unproductive space you can find is an empty office, where nothing is going on. 

Another vestigial metric is the “surface to volume ratio.” Less is more, unless you care about people, who want windows, corners, nooks, and other things that create more surface, not less. 

Many have compared MIT’s old Building 20 to the Media Lab. Building 20 was totally informal, the ultimate in flexibility. By contrast, the Media Lab is quite formal, in a way that deters collaboration. Bill Mitchell, Chief Architect at MIT,  notes that people forget that Building 20 was also cold, rat-infested, falling apart, and loaded with asbestos.

An open plan floor space is flexible. It physically breaks down the walls and barriers, replacing them with undefined boundaries. You can see what others are up to; their work becomes transparent, enabling people to interact. Not everyone likes the idea. As Tom Davenport said, they want their privacy. They see open plan architecture as social engineering, and they have a point. Most find that they like openness once they become accustomed to it. It takes courage to fight for the new, but the results are worth it. In the new data center, robots are running around, you see things going on, it’s an exciting space. 

You need to build support from the bottom up. Frank Gehry’s approach to building MIT’s Ray and Maria Stata Center was exemplary. The Center is home to engineering and computer science faculty. Gehry began by engaging the community. They interacted. He’d put a model on the table. No, that wasn’t it. He created another prototype. This was important to gain commitment; he put physical things out there. This fostered more discussion and more mutual understanding. He didn’t fear the tension; he welcomed it as a means of making progress.

Of course, highly charged atmospheres can create misunderstandings. Gehry challenged the faculty to rethink their conception of the relationship of offices and workspace. He suggested they think of a village of orangutans. At night they sleep apart, way up in the trees. In daylight, they form a community on the ground. Maybe the new MIT building should work like an orangutan village. The faculty complained to Bill Mitchell, “He called us orangutans.”  

I visited the Stata Center a couple of years ago to see if it was working. Students in conversation filled the weird nooks and crannies. Looked like a learning space to me.

The piece in the Times says:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued the architect Frank Gehry and a construction company, claiming that “design and construction failures” in the institute’s $300 million Stata Center resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs.

The center, which features angular sections that appear to be falling on top of one another, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2004. Mr. Gehry once said that it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”

Leaks? Mold? BFD.

“It is a joy to work in this building,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics, “and I know that many of its occupants feel the same as I do about it. We asked Frank to give us a building that fostered communication, and he delivered.”

Yesterday’s New York Times carried this wonderful article on introductory physics lectures at MIT. It brought back bitter memories.

I recall sitting in a crowded lecture hall listening to a profesor prattle on about Physics 101 with several hundred fellow bored Princeton students some forty years ago. The professor, who had written the text, reproduced the illustrations from the book with chalk on the green boards before us. Over the greenboard hung a 12′ long slide rule, a relic that had seen duty in World War II calculating bomb trajectories. Zzzzzz. I decided I was not cut out to be a physicist and dropped back to the more popular physics for dummies course at midyear. I didn’t study hard science again for two decades.

The physics department [at MIT] has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

My hat’s off to MIT. Had physics been taught this way, I might not have opted to become a sociologist. Doesn’t this sound like fun?

At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related concepts in small groups. Teachers and students conduct experiments together. The room buzzes. Conferring with tablemates, calling out questions and jumping up to write formulas on the white boards are all encouraged.

Hearty thanks to my pal Joe Wehr for bringing this article to my attention. I’m putting online media ahead of the dead-tree variety this year and am  lucky to read the Times one day a week.

At Online Educa Berlin last month, I hosted a small discussion on Learning in Times of Economic Meltdown. A dozen of us talked across a round table over lunch. Here are my notes:

Massive, disruptive change is underway. This change is fundamental: the network era is replacing the industrial age. Things will never be the same. A “new normal” is on the way.

Life-threatening crisis unfreezes organizational structure. This fluid state affords re-organizing, re-arranging, and replacing the status quo. Survivors develop and present agendas for change while things are in flux. Doing nothing is a sign of holistic corporate dyslexia: the inability to read the handwriting on the wall.

The challenge for organizations is to use smart delivery, to replace classes with technology, to embrace open source, and perhaps to adopt a software-as-a-service model. Since adaptation is the key to survival and learning is the enabler of adaptation, the learning function may be able to get on to the CEO’s agenda. People have become the primary means of production; it’s time to give the people functions in organizations equal standing with finance, sales, and production.

• Temporary workers and the “company of one” will be providing more service — and corporations need to figure out how to develop these non-employees.
• Tough times will force the training function to focus on value.
• The drive for value will increase demand for learning in smaller chunks. “Just give me what I need to know.”
• Companies will eliminate measurement and control systems that do not deliver value. Good bye to the fancy LMS.
• Travel is easy to ban and yields an immediate, tangible cost saving. Virtual delivery and meetings will boom.
• Specialty areas, for example language learning, will be outsourced.
• Bottom-up learning will come into its own. Personal challenges (think of the Volkswagen 5000 program and Google’s policy of dedicating 20% time to independent innovation projects) will be come more common than costly top-down attempts to impose projects from the top.
• As we have seen with mergers and acquisitions, project management skills will be in high demand.

Inge de Waart blogged the conversation.

All of us agreed that the economic crisis will be here for a couple of years, resulting in job losses. Seeing that in the past the learning department was one of the first departments to be cut in companies, estimates are that nearly 70 to 80 % of the learning budgets will be cut in the next couple of years. So we all better gear ourselves to overcome this crisis, both on a personal and on an institutional level.

Inge captured some points that didn’t make it into my notes, among them:

• more emphasis on open source/open resources;
• shift in company ethics, durable (energy) solutions;
• equiping people to manage the recession => that would be a business worth investing in.
• dare to invest time to seize the day the opportunity to be prepared for the long-term future.
• in times of crisis you go in search of the essence of what you have and what you need => a personal process;
• learning is personal.
• being confronted with dire straights inspires, the ones that dare in these times flourish.
• personal knowledge/learning techniques will benefit the whole or the communities to which the learners belongs.
• personal learning is essential in addition to managemental learning change.
• learning touches all societal issues.
• outsourcing the learning department to some extent might be a possibility.
• increase the consciousness that learning has a definite positive impact on the complete organisation or/and person (if you cut a department, it will effect the whole; if you cut knowledge, everyone will be challenged).
• knowledge on new learning techniques should be increased.
• more really tailored content has to be provided. In many cases we now buy a complete package from which we only use a small percentage, because only this content is of interest to us. So focus on small content tailored for the user and standardized so it can be build on.
• learning touches all the society.