Responding to the Big Questions(s) of the month:
- Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?
- Shouldn’t they be starting with themselves and helping to develop it throughout the organizations?
- And then shouldn’t the learning organization become a driver for the organization?
- And like in the world of libraries don’t we need to market ourselves in this capacity?
No, no, no, no.
Web 2.0 is more than a sack of tools: it’s becoming the basic paradigm for doing business.
Global business is shifting out of the industrial age and into the network era. Knowledge workers have replaced factory workers. Ideas and relationships are more valuable than tangible assets. Shareholders owned the factories, but workers own their minds. Information spreading through network connections empowers workers to make decisions and take responsibility for them. Collaboration rules.
Network connections are toppling the walls that separated corporations from customers. Businesses that thrive in the new climate are those that are easy to work with. Hence, the major task for learning professionals will shift from training workers to helping customers and workers learn from one another.
IBM’s Global 2008 CEO Study describes an Enterprise of the Future that:
- is capable of changing quickly and successfully. Instead of merely responding to trends, it shapes and leads them. Market and industry shifts are a chance to move ahead of the competition.
- surpasses the expectations of increasingly demanding customers. Deep collaborative relationships allow it to surprise customers with innovations that make both its customers and its own business more successful.
- radically challenges its business model, disrupting the basis of competition. It shifts the value proposition, overturns traditional delivery approaches and, as soon as opportunities arise, reinvents itself and its entire industry.
Training people what worked in the past is not going to get us there. We need to help equip people with the capabilities they will need in the future. Our job is to help create the environment like that IBM describes.
Back to the Big Questions. (You thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?)
It’s presumptuous to assume learning professionals are going to be “leading the charge.” This is not some independent effort. Organizational stakeholders better be taking the lead. And we’d better be supporting their vision.
Of course we must use network technologies ourselves. Understanding how to apply social networks to improve organizational performance is a prerequisite for shaping learning and development from here on out. People who are illiterate in network technology need not apply.
The learning organization should not be the driver for the organization. Learning plays a supporting role, not the lead. That’s not the way the world works. At the Online Learning conference ten years ago, Gloria Geary told the audience,”Training will be either strategic or it will be marginalized.” Sadly, most learning professionals chose the second option.
Don’t we need to market ourselves in this? Yes, yes, yes. But what we need to focus on is fostering innovation, improving business process, and laying foundations for the future.
Obvious? I don’t think so. How many of us allude to the needs of the organization of the future in our replies to the big question instead of working on the needs of people who need to be trained?
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Couldn’t agree more, Jay. The process is slow and because it’s a cultural paradigm shift nobody sees it happening. Or perhaps because it’s happening with no specific decision-making on the part of learning professionals (i.e. no “final cause” to cite Aristotelian logic) people don’t recognize that it actually is happening.
I conducted training sessions for two groups of managers at Goodyear Luxembourg last week. The theme was managing across generations. One group (the plant managers) denied that collaboration had any meaning and summed things up with the slogan “fit in or leave” (”shape up or ship out” would be a more idiomatic version). That certainly has the merit of simplifying the problem. The other group – essentially global HR and R&D – is dealing permanently with innovation, the evolution of corporate culture. In the session, which was a halfway effort between training and coaching, when I suggested that one of the areas to focus on for improvement was encouraging collaboration, I learned that there are ongoing projects to develop collaborative networking. They asked me how you “get people to collaborate” because the ones they tried to push in that direction didn’t seem to respond. I told them that the beauty of the situation is that they’re not the ones who will have to do it. I reminded them that for the first time in history people are learning to do things without having to rely on the enterprise to set them up and tell them how to do it. I suggested that they have to help it happen instead of thinking they can make it happen. The social web is doing half their job… getting it going, turning it into a major cultural shift. But the result isn’t automatic and the effects aren’t uniform. It’s all about accompanying the movement, not forcing it. But that means understanding it… accepting the paradigm shift oneself. Not an easy lesson for “learning professionals” who are often obsessed by showing what their own efforts have achieved!
Peter, you know more about culture shifts than I, so permit me to ask: Is this not one of those rare times in history when everything is doing a total flip-flop?
It strikes me as the greatest thing since the industrial revolution and urbanization. The Kuhn quote grabs it: “What were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterward.” And if, as I believe, we are in a phase change, what can history teach us about this one?
I nod when people tell me humanity has gone through this before. Yes, we have. And then I think of your city in 1789 with ankle-deep blood flowing in the streets and the opposition’s heads on pikes on those beautiful bridges over the Seine. I’d like to avoid that part.
Jay, it’s always risky to predict revolutions, but I really do think we’re in the midst of one, which is real precisely because there are so few revolutionaries. Revolutionary leaders tend to be fundamentally conservative and focused on transferring power to themselves. But the leaders this time aren’t even aware of being leaders and don’t think they are any closer to power in the traditional sense. More like a vague feeling of empowerment, which isn’t quite as inebriating and therefore a lot less risky.
That’s what culture shifts are all about, largely unconscious empowerment of a fundamentally anonymous group of people discovering an interest in doing things differently and having the means to achieve it. The deeper and more complex it is, the longer it takes for the principles of efficiency to emerge. But they do emerge and continue to evolve.
For me, there is no doubt that it’s happening. The natural reflex is to say, “if I can see it coming, I can control it”, but the millions who witnessed or succumbed to the tsunami three years back can tell you that just ain’t the case. Even an expert surfer knows he can’t conquer the wave that propels him to momentary glory, but only share the effect of its energy for a very brief spell.
This is a revolution of opportunity, not rebellion (as in 1789 or even 1776). It’s happening, nobody’s controlling it, but it can be harnessed for art’s sake (the art of surfing or of learning, according to one’s interests) or alternatively submitted to as a violent unwanted force of nature. Didn’t Hamlet warn us against the folly of taking arms against the turbulent waves?
As for the flip-flop, yes indeed. Now that politics, the economy and nearly everything else we have built and believed in as a rational self-perpetuating system appear to standing on clay feet, we should heed Othello’s words (”chaos is come again”) and, referring to the kind of chaos theory Shakespeare couldn’t have read about, realize that something like Self-Organized Criticality is probably at work. That isn’t an everyday phenomenon and generally fits into a longer term pattern of “punctuated equilibria”. Which is simply to say that this has very little to do with self-appointed rabble-rousers.
Vive la révolution ! (la vraie !)
Peter, it seems to me that a central tenet of the revolution is that the past is no longer a guide to the future. Thus, the authority of those who control a society’s sacred wisdom are being disenfranchised. Does this ring true for you?
Kia ora Jay!
My sentiments exactly. And I’ve watched training being marginalised for 20 years – almost to extinction during that time. What’s coming back in is so-called ‘PD’ which is often workplace training that’s been marginalised – it’s NOT Professional Development. It’s not even decent training (sigh!).
Ka kite
from Middle-earth
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