Here’s an oversimplified view of a learning ecosystem. Bear with me.
A learner interacts with stuff through what I’ll call pipes and with people through relationships. A net connection is one form of pipe; webpages and other information are stuff. Interactions with people and stuff lead to learning.
Optimal learning occurs when every element is firing on all cylinders, and everything is working in harmony. For example, relationships with others work best when there’s trust and you have an idea what the other person knows and can do. The best pipes are those with optimal bandwidth, filtering for good stuff, and amplification when required. The right stuff is rich, for real, and relevant. Last, but hardly least, the optimal learner has great pattern recognition, communicates effectively, and is tuned in for great reception.
Corporate learning is funded to improve performance. Trainers and others are working to improve pipes and relationships, as well as stuff and information about people. Why do they stop short of the learner?
In the manuscript of my book on informal learning, I describe how people can learn to communicate effectively, to calm their emotions, and to be happy. My review team thinks these topics irrelevant. I am perplexed. I don’t understand how building the learner’s learning capacity can be excluded from the equation.
Have I been drinking too much holistic, systems-theory Kool-Aid? Is it okay for a Chief Learning Officer to blow this one off with “That’s not my department”? Send me an email or leave a comment below. I just don’t get this.
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In observing learning, particularly with our children, I’ve found that it’s all about intrinsic motivation. Therefore, you are right – you have to take the learner into account. No motivation; no learning, though you may get some behaviourial control which could be construed as learning.
I’m interested in your pipes, and question if they remain separate from each other. Is stuff, without the context of relationships, of any value to the learner? I think that the two pipes have to come together at the learner. The model of “stuff + relationships” combining at the learner to create a bond that influences long-term behaviour, would make more sense to me.
I understand you. And I know that you are right. I think, however, that the corporate ethos is still living in the Enlightenment, purely rational; Google and basketball hoops notwithstanding. Happiness is what you do in your sabbatical year. It cannot be part of the equation, because it is not measurable. Google stories, and stories of chief executives who understand the need for happiness will continue to be sideshows and they will fill airport bookshelves, and continue to be endlessly misunderstood, or ignored as “not apllicable here”
CLOs will always blow it off, it is not part of their worldview. Can we change that? Can we stop people voting Republican? It is seen as part of the personal, not the public, and however much mumbo jumbo is spouted, however much we can tout the benefits, if it doesnt clearly translate to shareholder value, it won’t be bought. There are many places, (I like the photo by the way, I have similar experiences) where your message would help. I think the corporate world however may be barren ground, you are talking about treating people as people. This is very radical.
You’re touching on one of the largest challenges we face in making the transition from the traditional classroom / passive learning model to the workflow / anywhere learning model – it requires that learners take responsibility for their own learning far more comprehensively than any formal learning environment has ever required.
From that perspective, you can say that it becomes part of our responsibility as learning professionals to help learners enhance their ability to learn. At a minimum, we need to make it clear what different skills are required to engage with learning in an workflow-learning world. Helping learners understand the changes they’ll need to make to get the most out of new learning models is part of the process – helping them surface the resistance they’ll have to making those changes can also be useful.
But is it our job to teach them how to learn, beyond surfacing behavioral differences implied by different models? I hope not. Taking on the work of the school systems requires, first, a way to identify which employees need to learn how to learn and which don’t, so that we don’t waste learners’ time and companies’ money teaching, say, meditation to people whose own learning strategies already work for them just fine. Then we need to agree on what learning strategies we want to teach. Then we need to design the curricula to teach them. This feels like an enormous effort, with questionable payback, particularly if the internet generation of learners already has a pretty well developed self-learning skillset.
So I would say that our basic approach – focusing on the pipe, the stuff, and the relationship rather than on the individual learner – is actually a good model for corporate learning now, and going forward. We can certainly do much better with the model, but that’s an execution issue, not a problem with the model itself.
I love this. I have been pondering this for several months and quite frankly the reality is troublesome. First of all, I think its important to differentiate Corporate Training and the traditional school systems. Yes, both are impacted by the major changes we are experiencing, but as Nick states, the corporate side of learning is barren ground. Corporate training is important when it protects the company from litigation or is required for global certification of some sort to increase sales via this “seal of approval” (i.e. ISO cert.) Corporate learners learn most about those things that motivate them outside of the factory/cubicle halls. If there is not extrinsic motivator applied, more money, or your fired if you don’t, then its just not important. With that said I do believe in and have witnessed those that are embracing the “free agent nation”. There continued learning is all about intrinsic motivation, improving their craft, and career focused.
More to the point I believe as the training profession migrates towards Learning we are beginning to enter the realm of the Organizational Development Professional. I see more value in impacting informal learning by creating effective learning environments than I do in ISD and creating click2death online courses. However, as someone else stated its very hard to get hard data to quantify progress and improvement and ROI in the informal learning spaces. I see the day coming with OD and Learning are more closely connected because we will start looking more at the individual learners and how the environment and systems support continual learning.
I’m thinking exclusively about business organizations here, not schools. The explosion of knowledge, the accelerating rate of innovation, the fragmentation of the modern corporation, and the increasing complexity of our world all require increased learning, simply for survival.
Is OD the answer? I thought OD dealt with groups of people, not individuals. Sort of like sociology as opposed to psychology. Is this interpretation wrong? Has OD ever championed learning to learn?
Elsewhere, I’ve been pondering business’s absurd fixation with numbers, especially the use of currency as the sole yardstick. It’s time to wake up and smell the intangibles coffee. The most important aspects of business are generally things that cannot be reduced to numbers: people, values, reputation, direction, spirit, relationships, dedication, and so on.
Updating the obsolete industrial age truism, you can’t measure what you must manage.
“The most important aspects of business are generally things that cannot be reduced to numbers: people, values, reputation, direction, spirit, relationships, dedication, and so on.”
As a deep-dyed liberal I’m surprised to find myself disagreeing so strongly.
Sooner or later a business (a for-profit enterprise) has to make a profit. If it doesn’t, it goes out of business. People may have had a great time working there, but many if not most now need new jobs.
In terms of organization size: in 2001 there were 5.5 million employers (firms that have payrolls) in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau, employing 115 million people. 38% of those people worked for firms with 2,500 or more employees. Another 55% worked for firms of 250 – 2,499 employees. That’s roughly 93% of all employed individuals. (www.census.gov /epcd /www /smallbus.html)
(There are nearly 21 million business firms, but three-quarters of them have no payroll; they are mainly self-employed people, not all of whom have their firm as their principle source of income. These account for only 3 percent of business receipts. Thus, 5.5 million employers.)
This is not to say that profit is the sole reason for being in business. In fact, I do think that reputation, direction, relationship, and so on can definitely contribute to a business’s success. That’s can, though, and not must.
Shifting to a more central point of your post, I agree absolutely that a crucial task in the world of corporate / business learning is making sure people learn how to learn. That includes creating formal systems (e.g., by providing the communication channels) and encouraging informal ones; capitalizing on techniques like Ruth Colvin Clark describes in Building Expertise; looking for ways to encourage attempts to learn and deliver useful feedback on how that’s going.
Dave, I consider profit a by-product of having the right people, values, reputation, direction, spirit, etc. I don’t think anyone manages profit directly unless they’re cooking the books.
Lest others think I’ve changed my attitude about the inadequacy of current accounting practices, I should mention that cash flow is more important to business survival than profit. Profit is an accounting fiction; cash is, as they say, money in the bank.
jay
I think we’re in general agreement. I wouldn’t call profit a fiction so much as one of the decisions you make when you have positive cash flow — e.g., you can put that money to work by investing in equipment, developing new products, expanding facilities, or paying dividends to shareholders.
My point was more of a long-term one: if my employer (or my clients) can’t at least break even, then in the long run they’re not going to have money for me. Even nonprofits depend untimately on someone choosing to give money to them rather than someone else.
In addition to the people, values, reputation, you’ve got to have products or services that the marketplace values. Unfortunately, there’s a real interia factor — as someone who grew up in Detroit, it’s puzzling to me how GM has lasted so long. It’s a form of financial evolution, maybe, something that you can’t notice quarter by quarter.
The only company from the original DJIA that’s still in the DJIA is GE.
Yeah, and GE is more than a lightbulb company these days.
Your mention of breakeven hits the nail on the head. Positive cash flow does not mean profitability nor vice-versa. I call profit a fiction because it values intangibles at zero; we know that’s wrong.
It’s as if someone asks me the distance to San Jose. I know it’s about 50 miles. Because I can’t specify the distance precisely, I tell the questioner it’s zero miles or that it doesn’t really matter. Like the exact distance to San Jose, intangibles are hard to evaluate with precision so accountants don’t put them on the books.
jay