My new car is one year old! How did that happen? Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’ into the future. Midyear already! How did we get here so quickly? It’s making me dizzy.
I’m going to reflect on what I’ve been up to in 2009 thus far. Caution: this is what Jon Stewart would call old news.
Winter 2009
MacWorld: learning infrastructure and social network infrastructure are converging.
Surreal. I was coincidentally walking by a presentation by Clive Shepherd on the exhibits floor at Learning Technologies in London when he happened to flip my photo and a quote on the screen. Donald Clark, Charles Jennings, and I gave the closing keynote, Learning for Tomorrow, What a Difference a Decade Makes (pdf, mp3, mp4). Also gave session entitled Under the radar great technologies that you could be using.
Articles:
Get Out of the Training Business
“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.”
Building a learning ecology is a different exercise than building a training program. In lieu of top-down control, it relies on continuous experimentation and evaluation. It takes coordination, flexibility, and on-going conversation. These qualities are at the heart of the discipline of agile programming. Hence, I am exploring how well the principles of agile programming might be incorporated into a new framework for instructional design.
The Future of the Training Department (with Harold Jarche)
At this point in the 21st Century, the game is changing once again. Complexity, or maybe our appreciation of it, has rendered the world unpredictable, so the orientation of learning is shifting from past (efficiency, best practice) to future (creative response, innovation). Workplace learning is morphing from blocks of training followed by working to a merger of work and learning: they are becoming the same thing. Change is continuous, so learning must be continuous. To justify its existence from here on, a training department must shift direction in three areas:
* Embracing complexity and adaptation to uncertainty
* Inverting the structural pyramid
* Adopting new models of learning
Learning is woven into the fabric of every modern business. It’s the way we adapt to change. We’ve got to rid ourselves of the notion that learning is just the chief learning officer’s business. Learning is so much more than that. Learning is the lifeblood of commerce, and it’s every corporate citizen’s job to make it better. It’s time to invite customers to join the party. Learning and social networks and customer communications and partner relations and marketing and sales aren’t islands. They’re all facets of the same thing: the corporate commons of work and learning. Some astute companies are exploring how a social learning community can remove barriers separating customer and corporation. It’s all about learning conversations.
Trips
Up to my ass in snow in Taos, New Mexico. Charles Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa, California. Santillana del Mar and Bilbao, Spain. Rome.
Shaved off beard.
Decided to learn to shoot video. Hired a tutor. Learning to edit. Now paying more attention to editing and sequencing on television and movies. Perception is reality. And it is not that tough to manipulate.
togetherLearn went online. Jon Husband and Charles Jennings recently joined our braintrust.
Spring 2009
Founded Learning Irregulars.
Two major public meetings. Interviews with Curt Bonk, Dave Gray, Kevin Wheeler, Zann Gill.
Revamped Internet Time Research Page, one of the best-kept secrets in learning land
Presentation at AACE, PowerPoint is Tyranny
Continued to get my social network act together:
Flickr/jaycross
Facebook/Jay Cross
Linkedin/jaycross
Twitter/jaycross
YouTube/jakeross1
Del.icio.us/jaycross
Friendfeed/jaycross
Posterous/jaycross
Totally revamped jaycross.com, adding links to my viewpoints, articles, and chapters on how boosting brainpower accelerates innovation, inspires workers, and increases profits:
Seminal Documents
& Seminal videos
Articles:
The future is people, not technology
Companies should embrace network-supported informal learning because it works better, not because it reduces labor costs. People learn more efficiently at the time of need, in the context of work, from people in the know and through virtual conversation. When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes in favor of building “learnscapes,” we aren’t suggesting firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them in new capacities, serving as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors and performance consultants.
Not Your Father’s ROI (with Jon Husband)
Understandably, seasoned executives, chief learning officers among them, are having a devil of a time shifting from the industrial age mindset of logic, certainty and bounded constraints to the network gestalt of interaction, self-organization, unpredictability and fewer limits to potential. The pressure is constantly on to meet quarter-to-quarter revenue and earnings targets that in turn accentuate the need to take decisions that support achieving those targets. At the same time, we are shifting into an era in which knowledge work and learning occur where re-engineered business processes collide with a participative and interactive ecology of information flows. One cherished industrial age concept that is proving particularly difficult to let go of is return on investment (ROI).
Become a Chief Meta-Learning Officer (with Clark Quinn)
The scope of the job of the CLO is mushrooming. CLOs will neither prosper nor even survive if they fail to take responsibility for the overall learning process within their organizations. Here’s why — and what to do about it. Organizations must seize the opportunity to change while things are in flux. It’s time for them to leap from current conditions to the brave new world of the future. Crossing a chasm takes a bold leap; baby steps won’t get you to the other side. Getting to the future will require innovation, luck, and perseverance, but that’s the price of staying alive. In this article, we call this big-picture, longer-term viewpoint meta-learning, and we call upon all CLOs to become Chief Meta-Learning Officers. Your charter as Chief Meta-Learning Officer is to optimize learning throughout the organization, not just in the pockets that once belonged to HR. This takes a broader perspective than what you deal with day-to-day. You’ve got to rise above the noise to see the underlying patterns, and then optimize them.
The Internet is so pervasive that Internet values are blowing back into real life. For example, I have no qualms about walking out of a boring presentation, even if I’ve been sitting in the front row. The Web trained me to click past unrewarding pages and spend my time where it will do me the most good. I expect attitudes like Internet values to underpin exemplary corporate learning in the future. Here are nine to ponder.
Culture, soft of. California Railroad Museum, Peterson Automobile Museum, L.A. County Library, World Ice-Carving Championships, Museum of the North, Gene Autry Museum of the American West, Getty Villa, Die Walkure at L.A. Opera.
Vacation in Sicily. Fantastico.
What Would Andrew Do?, How to sell senior management on the value of learning. and Working Smarter, Boosting Brainpower for Fun & Profit, two new unbooks. Unbooks? See the Unbook with Dave Gray.
Workshop on Business Impact of Learning in the Real World for Learning and Skills Group in London. Challenged participants to select an important informal learning project and develop an elevator pitch for it, all in 90 minutes. Explain it on the back of an envelope… or pick another project.
Had a wonderful time in Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire. Avebury dates from 2400 BC! Food in class pubs surpasses that in French country bistros.
Jane and I bought “learning stones” in Avebury. They’re probably easier to learn from than shovelware.
Gave opening keynote at IADIS eLearning 2009 on Rethinking Instructional Design in Carvoeiro, Algarve, Portugal. Tastiest fish I have ever eaten!
Announced exclusive partnership with CV&A to offer advice and counsel on informal learning in Spain. Conducted four-hour workshop on How to Invent Your First Informal Learning Project.
Art overdose in Madrid. Reina Sofia, Thyssen, and Prado.
Becoming very comfortable working while standing up.
Related post: 2008 in retrospect
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