WorkFLOW

This Tuesday and Wednesday, I'll be attending the Business Process Management Conference down the Peninsula. Why? I'm learning as much as I can about BPM because it underpins the revolution I foresee in business, computing, and learning.

Besides that, the Workflow Institute is conducting a conference on Workflow Learning in October, and I'm one of the ringmasters. It's always a good idea to know what you're talking about.

Workflow is the convergence of work+flow to achieve an optimal balance of work results and individual fulfillment. Business culture is breaking free of the industrial-age mindset that bottom-line results and worker happiness are natural enemies. Work can be among life’s greatest joys; flow drives a loyal, over-achieving workforce. Workflow research investigates how work and flow can converge to replace an unproductive either/or situation with a mutually beneficial worldview of both/and.

The Work I deal with is knowledge work, usually in an environment of next-generation computing which embraces Web Services, agent-based software, enterprise interoperability, extreme adaptability, and many lessons from the Internet. The goal of work is production and accomplishment.

Flow is the trickier piece of the puzzle. I am thinking of Flow in the psychological sense, as Mihaly Csizentmihalyi describes it.

People in flow are fully enjoying their work because they are so engaged in tackling difficult and worthwhile tasks. Channeling flow into work draws on meta-learning, appreciative inquiry, worker empowerment, instructional design, emotional intelligence, and a new concept of the nature of work. Flow is vital because drudgery is avoidable.

Roaming through Half-Price Books a few days ago, I spied a copy of Csikszentmihalyi's latest work, Good Business, marked down from $25.95 to $9.98. I'm already 75 pages into it.

Mihaly's writing is uplifting, for example:

He says that instead of One-Minute Managers, we need hundred-year managers. The author is quite pragmatic about business taking a long-term view. Happy people do better work. They have higher morale; they are less likely to jump ship.

We've had opportunities to improve working conditions again and again. The peasant's lifestyle was impoverished and hard, but the early factory hand or coal miner working 12-hours days in wretched conditions certainly had it worse. People were not treated as machines. Foremen didn't beat machines. Supervisors didn't yell at and berate machines. Plant managers didn't abuse machines to the breaking point. No, the industrial workplace treated people worse than machines, as if they were throw-away tools.

We've come a long way, you think. Out of sight out of mind. But sweatshots, slave labor, stoop labor, lost limbs, and the working poor are all there if you look. Not to mention McJobs.

At least you can see the McJobs. I fear something nearly invisible: the working environment we are creating for knowledge workers.

Twenty-five years ago, the common wisdom was that by the time we reached the 21st century, our biggest dilemma would be figuring out what to do with all our leisure time. Even scooting around in your personal helicopter gets boring after a while.

Instead, we've got a world where nearly everyone has to work. Nobody feels they have enough time. Uncertainty reigns. Cancer, ulcers, and stress are leading us to premature graves. Our institutions are a shambles. Fewer and fewer people take pride in their work. Work encroaches on family time. Labor-saving technology merely raises the bar on what's expected. One in five American workers do nothing on their jobs but show up. The mass of knowledge workers lead lives of quiet desperation. We're rats in a maze.

I am optimistic about the future. Breakthrough technologies are poised to shower us with many gifts. We have in our grasp the ability to create jobs that challenge the worker and grow with her. We can provide clear goals, immediate feedback, and a balance between opportunity and capacity, the very things that define Flow. We can leverage the coming networks and interoperable, smart software to pull ourselves out of our ruts. Or we can engineer the most mind-numbing, rote, awful jobs the world has ever seen.

At the Workflow Symposium, I'd like to get these issues out in the open. How can we learning professionals make the future world of work a more enjoyable and, therefore, productive place? How can we apply our knowledge of learning and behavior to humanize the workplace? How can we ourselves attain flow in our work by performing in an enlightened manner?

I hope you'll join me in taking the higher ground.

Don't Lose a Common Sense: LISTEN

When Jennifer Hoffman asked me to record a few thoughts from Training Directors Forum on a tiny RadioShack IC recorder, it struck me as kind of hokey but since I'm always open to experimentation, I recorded a blurb.

Someone responded yesterday, so I trekked over to InSync Center to post a reply. Once there, I saw a few friends' faces and felt obligated to hear what they had to say. When I heard Lance, Ghenno, Marc, Saul, Harvey, and others giving their extended sound-bites, it triggered their larger messages. It helped to have their photo alongside, tool

As I upgrade the Workflow Institute site, I plan to add some soundbites you can call up with a button. Jennifer's done a great job of making this easy to use. I suggest you take a look.

Meanwhile, on the screen, this message just arrived in my gmail box:

A year ago, I would have opened the attachment and answered this chap's questions. Not now. For all I know, this is a virus-bomb being lobbed inside my firewall from a spoofed address. A wolf in sheep's clothing.

A pity this crap is so commonplace.

It's only natural

The San Francisco Bay Area has been blessed with great weather for a few days, and nature is ripping me away from my computer to go for walks. This morning I wandered down the hill to join the Saturday ramble of the path wanderers. Along the way, I plucked ripe purple and yellow plums from the trees overhanging the sidewalks. Then a season first brought a smile to my face: the first blackberries of the season. Yum. I'll be nibbling as I hike for the next couple of months! Picking wild berries as I walk is one of life's greatest joys, right up there with discovering cool shells on the beach.

The best back-to-nature walks around here are in Tilden Park, about a mile from here. When I started out yesterday, a buck was standing at the end of the block. (Today a small specimen raced past us on a busy shopping street down the hill, startling drivers and pedestrians alike.) Tilden is hilly and rugged. The grass is already brown but flowers and the red leaves of the poison oak punctuate every vista with color.

Tromping up the hill, a fellow with a dog passed me. "This is the cardiovascular section," he said. I told him that's why I was here.

Health was only one justification for my tromp. I'm hatching a new concept of what's going on in the world, and nature's a great place for quiet contemplation. It blows my mind that I can see San Francisco from the East Bay hills. It's jam-packed with people. Yet the guy and his dog are the only creatures I see during an hour of hiking.

This morning, when I awoke, I wrote: "We are at the dawn of an era that will change the structure of business, the nature of work, our view of the world, and our impressions of ourselves. Our culture and institutions are stretched to the breaking point. After a quarter-millennium of the Industrial Age, humankind is poised to rewrite the rules, abolish modern slavery, stop plundering the earth’s resources, and focus on using our time wisely.

Imagine the opportunities of businesses that are distributed, decentralized, collaborative, and adaptive. Everything flows. Slack evaporates. Cooperation replaces competition. Learning and work merge into a single stream.

I'm refining the mission of the Workflow Institute. We want to make the world a better place. Luckily, I've got some great advice to draw upon.

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." Albert Einstein

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."
Abraham Lincoln

Gmail!

Yesterday evening my friend Jason at Google/Blogger asked me, "Got your Gmail account yet?" I said I thought I'd wait until the privacy and intrusion issues died down. My said I should give it a whirl. I just signed up.

In the press coverage of email-with-Google-ads, I'd missed a valuable benefit of Gmail. With a gig of storage, you only need to delete old mail once a decade. In fact, when you push the "Trash" button, this message apprears: "No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 1000 MB of storage?!" Furthermore, you don't need folders. You can tag an email with multiple labels for retrieval purposes. When you want something, just search for it. I'll take Google's word for it that their search is faster than that of Outlook or Eudora.

It would certainly be handy if I could upload my past emails into Gmail, so I'd have everything in one place.

For the present, I'm going to forward mail from other email accounts to Gmail. If I decide it's not my cup of tea, I can always cut off the forwarding and go back to my original set-up.

I'll add comments as I gain experience with Gmail.

There's no way to import a contacts file. Agh. My Outlook file has 1,000 names.

The contact list contains a place for free form entry. I may use this for my frequently called directory. (I don't have a PDA and don't really want another gadget in my life right now.)

Pro: I like being able to label emails for easy recall. It's less klutzy than folders and one mail can have multiple tags. Also handy to be able to attach a star to an email that requires follow-up (which you can easily remove when you've done it.)

Con: When I send an email with an attrachment, I am locked out while the attachment uploads from my machine to the mail server. This interrupts the pace of my work.

Go with the flow

Jerry Johnson, one of my instructors at business school, taught us facetious business maxims such as "There are always three things." As I've become grayer and wiser, I've found that Jerry's rules often held up well. There often are three things.

Jerry's universal, three-step model of everything has proved itself particularly useful.

Applied in a learning context, it's a reminder to pay attention to what comes before and after a focused learning experience. Pre-work, screening, and maybe a getting-to-know-you pizza party before, and follow-up sessions, an alumni support network, and recognition after, can turn a lackluster workshop into something inspirational.

Thoughtout most of my life, I've been in a hurry to complete the 1-2-3 and get on to the next project. The fourth letter of my Myers-Briggs is always a big "J," indicating that I value Closure. I thought of projects like phone calls: 1. Ring, 2. Talk, 3. Hang up.

On Tuesday I was chatting with a friend in the U.K. We were using Skype, a nifty combination of instant messaging and free VOIP phone calls. We had been talking about all manner of things for twenty or thirty minutes when a client call interrupted our conversation.

When my friend started to say good bye, I suggested we not think of it like that. We weren't terminating our conversation; we were merely putting it on hold. We'd pick up where we left on whenever Skype showed that we were both online and available. Recognizing our conversation as a flow of information rather that a discrete event let me keep it open. Our conversation is like my connection to the net. It's up 24x7 but frequently idle. It's not off, it's merely not in use. Our conversation is not over, it's merely on hold.

Tuesday night half a dozen of us went to see the interminably long screed against business called "The Corporation." This movie slams business very hard, saying that if the corporation is legally a person, it's a psychopathic one. Examples abound: Monsanto shutting down a (true) Fox news story, Bechtel trying to charge Bolivians for water, Kathy Lee and Nike employing child labor, a market research outfit counseling retailers to increase sales by teaching children how to nag, and IBM colluding with Nazis. Noam Chomsky tells us it doesn't have to be this way. Michael Moore cuts up and tells us the only thing the corporation cares about is the bottom line. Milton Friedman agrees.

This movie is anything but balanced. Corporations = bad, bad, bad. Nonetheless, it raises some fundamental questions. The corporation is heartless. It has no morals. It leaps borders, becoming more important than government. It pollutes the environment and suffers no consequences. It pledges allegiance to only its shareholders. Public companies are following the old 1-2-3 model:

How can we get corporations to focus on the longer term? How can we hold them accountable for damaging the earth? What would make corporations support sustainability?

Time Out for the Fair

Click to see the animation

Informal get-together in SF this Wednesday

Flash Meeting in San Francisco

Wednesday 6/16/04. 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Meeting Coordinator: Jay Cross, jaycross@internettime.com

Topics:

1. Post mortem on ASTD and TDF
2. Suggestions for fun places to meet
3. Whatever moves you

Venue::

ThirstyBear Brewing Company
661 Howard Street (next to Chevy's on Third)
San Francisco, CA 94105
415 974-0905
http://www.thirstybear.com/

How to identify the group:
Jay will wear his name tag from TDF

Notes:
This is an informal meeting.

The Thirsty Bear is the only combination tapas bar and microbrewery in the world. The tapas are quite good. You need not feel embarrassed if you are a non-drinker.

Repetition, reverb, and echoes

It's Sunday morning and I've giving myself the luxury of interspersing web crawling with work. I just landed on Robin Good's Online Collaboration news page.

Robin filters, reviews, and points to noteworthy items on the web. His interests and mine dovetail, so I can spend beaucoup time sifting through what's here. For example:

• Group Collaboration Vs. Individual Achievers = 1-0 Wired
  "The evidence is clear: groups - whether top executives evaluating a potential acquisition or sales reps and engineers analyzing a new product - will consistently make better decisions than an individual. Companies have spent too long coddling the special few. It's time for them to start figuring out how they're going to tap the wisdom of the many."

• Small Technologies Loosely Joined. The Small Technologies Loosely Joined presentation is a complementary and fascinating participatory online event, focusing our attention on the emerging use of readily available, mostly free, discrete sets of "small" and "loosely joined" technologies - weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, audio video conferencing tools.

  There's the start of a great debate over centralization vs decentralization. The decentralists picture their position as:

  

• The Individual Is The Epicenter Of The New Media Revolution is a theme with which I could not agree more.

  How's this for a self-referential play-within-a-play? "Individuals, the future "newsmasters" and "digital information librarians" will
  be the ones that will elect themselves to become active filters and aggregators
  of the increasingly vast amounts of information becoming available online.
  Without them, you would be either submerged or you would have to surrender to the poor, superficial and frequently manipulated reporting available through
  mainstream media channels only. Individuals are also the new sustainable artists of tomorrow.

So much great information, so little time.

But that's not what I intended to ponder and write about this morning. Robin's Online Collaboration blog also lists this pointer:

Collaboration Technologies Empower The Enterprise Jay Cross shares his original live presentation at the ASTD Conference. The presentation containing his original audio and all of the accompanying slides gives an extraordinary overview of just some of the critical issues relevant to effective collaboration inside the enterprise, while exemplifying in very simple words how the greater facility of communicating and sharing in groups can so dramatically enhance the work and the results we are to obtain with it. Jay covers RSS, information overload, blogs, wikis, social networking and much, much more. In his familiar, uncontrived and direct tone, he breezes through an interesting and textured panorama of skills and technologies no organization can afford to do without. Highly recommended. (1:06' Breeze streaming format).

(Thanks, Robin!)

When I posted my presentation to the Web, I mentioned it on thisblog. In typical blog fashion, that entry has scrolled off the page. For visibility, that's worse than being "below the fold" on the front page of the paper. Off the page means Lost in Space.

As anyone who has run an ad campaign knows, nothing really happens until the ad is repeated again and again, sinking into the buyer's consciousness. Imagine the multiplier effect of hitting a diverse group of readers again and again that this post is out there for free viewing. Maybe I'll put a pop-up box of faves on the front page to give the good stuff longer tenure there. While I enjoy creating new stuff, the 80/20 rule tells me there's more payback from seeking exposure from what's already here.

Who Knows?

Effectiveness
CLO magazine June 2004 - Jay Cross

What would you think of an assembly line where workers didn’t know where to find the parts they were supposed to attach? Absurd, you say. Heads would roll. Yet for knowledge workers, this is routine. Consider a knowledge worker stymied by a lack of information—hardly an uncommon situation. In fact, in many professions, knowledge workers spend a third of their time looking for answers and helping their colleagues do the same.

How does our knowledge worker respond? She’s five times more likely to turn to another person than to an impersonal source, such as a database or a file cabinet. Often she asks whoever happens to be close by, the denizen of the next cube or someone getting a cup of coffee. Half the time, this person doesn’t have a clue.

Only one in five knowledge workers consistently finds the information needed to do their jobs. This happens to “knowledge customers,” too, half of whom bail before completing online orders. Other studies have found that knowledge workers spend more time re-creating existing information they were unaware of than creating original material.

All this slows the pace of the enterprise, burns out the workforce with scut work, reduces responsiveness to customers and increases job dissatisfaction. Reinventing the wheel, looking for information in the wrong places and answering questions from peers consumes two-thirds of the average knowledge worker’s time. Slashing this waste time provides a lot more time to devote to improving the business, reducing payroll or, more likely, a bit of both.

This knowledge productivity problem is destined to get worse before it gets better. The haystack is getting bigger exponentially. Corporate information doubles in volume every 18 months. Half of the recorded information in the entire world has been created in the past five years!

Specialists used to keep their heads above the floodtide of incoming knowledge by knowing “more and more about less and less.” In today’s interconnected world, boundaries between disciplines are becoming porous. Everything’s multidisciplinary. We have to know more and more about more and more.

Successful organizations will connect people. Learning is social. We learn from, by and with other people. Conversation, storytelling and observation are great ways to learn, but they aren’t things you do by yourself.

Job one is to help knowledge workers find the answers they need. Rob Cross and others describe many ways to go about this in a marvelous new book, “Creating Value With Knowledge,” edited by IBM’s Eric Lesser and Laurence Prusak (Oxford University Press, 2003).

If people are going to go to other people for answers, make it easy for them to get to people in the know. (Get them to look for their keys where they’re likely to find them, not where the light’s better.) Set up help desks to support new product rollouts and organizational initiatives. Have the help desk apply the 80/20 rule and document the common queries in a mercifully short FAQ. Then, tier responses by triage. First query the FAQ, then ask the help desk, and if those don’t work, contact the prime subject-matter expert.

Learning a new software release is a special case. Since a release generally builds on an existing foundation, workers more often need answers to specific questions than the sort of overview that workshops and courses provide. Trial-and-error is a great way to learn—as long as there’s a way to deal with roadblocks. Since the release is new, learners won’t find answers in-house. In this case, outsource mentoring to a firm that does have the answers.

Web standards and smart software can monitor workflow to provide lessons or contacts precisely when they are needed.

Now that business organizations have been de-layered, downsized and re-engineered to the bone, how will they transfer their special ways of doing things to new employees?

The answer lies in exploiting the savvy of seniors, the wise elders who have “been there, done that” and can offer counsel and know-how to the newcomers. Old hands often make outstanding sales and service coaches, too.

Ur-blogging

Here's a baker's dozen of interesting things. I offer them up in hopes that you'll reciprocate.

1. eCornell Reference Blog

2. IBM Research

   

3. Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools

4. Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp

5. Chris Allen's Life with Alacrity, home of the awesome EditThisPagePHP

6. AllLearn

7. Positive Psychology Center

8. Time for the Blind
   This is soooooo retro. This link went dead a few hours after I posted it.

9. OnFocus

10. Zoom into San Francisco (NASA)

    

11. Eric Weisstein's World of Science

12. Werblog

13. Ray Ozzie's Blog

In the early days of the Web, proto-bloggers shared links with one another. "Look what I found"! Karma ruled the day. Let's share what we've got, man. Someone on the Well pointed to Yahoo! and we were enthralled. You could go through every link on Yahoo! in few hours but it was the largest link list we'd ever seen.

If you enjoy any of these links, post a link to one of your special places in the Comments section. Share the wealth. Maybe we can start a movement! Make the gift economy a reality!

Cognitive Mapping

Bob Horn, inventor of Information Mapping, visualized and described hypertext long before the Web was invented. His "maps" of connections and thoughts explain concepts better than any 10,000 words, often nearly instantaneously.

Many a workshop or conference on strategy or a reorganization or a new product launch could be replaced by a good cognitive map and a discussion. I imagine the lessons would stick better, too. Workshops try to fancify and retell what's going on. PowerPoint reductionism. Cognitive maps, by contrast, attempt to diagram the real thing.

Three years ago, Bob Horn, Jim Spohrer, and a bunch of other polymath geniuses got together under the auspices of the NSF to discuss the convergence of cognition, biology, nanotech, and information technology. The common thread of Nano-Bio-Cogno-Info? It's all code. This is better than science fiction.

I had the good fortune of chatting at length with Bob right after he returned from the NSF session several years ago. The event was a catalyst for his thinking deeper about unravelling the Human Cognome. Cognome? You got your genome and your bionome. Why not?

Today I was delighted to see where Bob has taken this. Here's his preliminary cognitive map of for researching the Human Cognome itself.

A small chunk:

Bob suggests these major themes for study of the Human Cognome.

• Cognitive prostheses for human limitations.
• Reduce fragmentation of social-psychological disciplines.
• Visual language to manage complexity.
• Understanding each other's worldviews.
• Sequencing the Human Cognome.

Push vs pull

The Big Picture on ROI

Capitalworks' Jeff Kelley addressed this morning's meeting of the Learning Economics Group on the topic of Dimensions, Dynamics and Drivers of Learning: Optimizing Learning Value for Capital Effects. If you really want to get to Level 4 at the highest level, Jeff's your man.

Lucky for you, you can grab Jeff's PowerPoint presentation here.

Capitalworks' logic and findings are the best I know of. They inspired my understanding of informal learning and metrics. The Capitalworks material is so compact yet so eloquent that it's almost poetry. Let me amend that. It's poetry if you're conversant with the concepts of finance.

Jeff and his partners get it. Jeff contends that "Learning is the single greatest contributor in all enterprises to superior operating performance and robust value creation."

Capitalworks stalks Learning Effectiveness, defined as:

The performance of an organization's applied learning portfolio in contributing to operating performance and value creation. Applied learning includes formal learning (training) and informal learning occurring naturally in social practice.

Why is learning vital?

• Learning enables flows and exchanges of knowledge through diverse intra- and inter-enterprise interactions.
• Learning transcends hierarchical constraints.
• Learning connects demand drivers.
• Learning accelerates systemic effects.

Learning is the great enabler of flows and exchanges of knowledge. With flow, you are primed. Everyone has workarounds. Workarounds are really positive. Learning transcends hierarchical constraints. Organizations are not optimized to connect demand drivers. In fact, we're living with obsolete, 19th century organizational structures created for an illiterate workforce long before the advent of computers. Jeff points out that "Optimizing dimensions, dynamics and drivers of learning are natural means of transforming costs of coordination in all enterprises and their ecosystems." Learning itself is the ultimate workaround.

Learning is one of our primary earning assets and we should manage it that way. Looking at the flows, here's the Value Creation Circulatory System:

It's nonlinear, continuous. Process orientation. Feedback loops are critical. A single measure doesn't get us there. (Emergence, emergence....)

What enables flow? Self-study contributed as much to job proficiency as instructor-led training programs. Own volition. Regard selves as professionals. Informal learning dynamics contributed 70-to-80% of operating performance. Cohesion of social practice contributed to learning effectiveness, with informal learning as an enabler. Conversations are the primary conduit:

Read this one twice if you need to; it's important. "We see contributions by learning, like other intangibles, through value drivers. They enable us to depict causal relationships in the interactions associated with transactions, decision flows, procedures and other normal activities. Value drivers interact in clusters and sets throughout organizational work practices."

Intangibles, which we had thought of the sauce, is what it takes to drive performance.

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
Albert Szent-Györgyi

Capitalworks

Art Break

The world would be a more attractive place if every company devoted a moment at least once a month to art and humor.

TDF Finale

Training Directors Forum wrapped up midday. I am an exhausted but happy camper. Phil Jones told me 475 people attended (including 83 faculty and about 40 sponsor reps). I felt much more intimate. Talking with vendors and with friends, everyone agreed that small is beautiful. Training Directors Forum has the most loyal customers of any VNU training event.

Informal Learning Center

The small size, combined with healthy breaks, sponsored meals and open bar, and inviting facilities, encourage schmoozing. I talked myself hoarse.

Real Learning

More real learning.

Watch out for this bunch!

I have more notes and scribbles...but no more energy tonight.

New Community of Practice Forming

Since the lack of Wi-Fi access in the conference center here has put the kabosh on my plans to blog this event in real time, I'm going to experiment with another format. This entry reports on a session that's not on the program and will take place right on center stage before the afternoon keynote address about four hours from now.

"The fellow who invented local area networks once said that no matter how much you hyped the power of the Internet, it wasn't enough. That's the way I feel about the Future of Learning that IBM has been describing. But it's not just IBM. It's all of us. It's the convergence of learning and work."

Instructional design and business process design are becoming one and the same. Our role will be to facilitate the flow of work rather than dispensing contentl. It's an exciting new world.

Talking with some of you here reminds me of Napoleon saying to one of his field marshals, "We must plant trees along every major road in France to protect our soldiers from wind and cold when they march off to new conquests." "But, mon emporeur, it will take decades for them to grow." "Alors, better start right away."

So today we're forming a community of practice around workflow learning. You don't build a CoP step by step. It's more like lighting a match and fanning the flames.

I don't know what shape this will take. I'll volunteer the WorkflowInstitute site to host the discussion. VNU has established a conference within a conference on workflow learning at Training West to be held in SF this October. If you want to be in on something big, join the community. Help me fan the flames. Let's talk at the reception immediatey following the zebra guy.

Dropouts

Tammy Galvin has stepped down as editor-in-chief of Training magazine, along with Stacey Marmalejo. I'm looking forward to a revitalized Training mag.

More TDF04

The Wild Horse Pass Resort is a classy operation. The help smiles and says hello in the hallways. The towels are full-sized and plush. The fake boulders in the lobby have fake petroglyphs.

Saguaro cactus ribs are built into the gigantic Native American fetishes on the ceilings. The morning OJ is served in handsome wine glasses. But (there’s always a “but”)…there is no Wi-Fi in the conference rooms. So I’m writing this on the fly and will periodically go back to the lobby to upload.

Saul Carliner is exhorting people to take some of the empty seats at the front of the room, saying that it has been proven that people in the front of the room learn more. Saul’s hosting this event, the 20th annual TDF.

Research Results You Can Use

Brenda Sugrue, ASTD’s research director, challenges each of us to jot down a research question as a warm-up for her presentation on Benchmarking. Benchmarking is the ultimate performance improvement strategy. Benchmarking research can focus on expenditures, cost/hour, outsourcing, etc., across companies, award winners, profit leaders, etc.

Sample question: How large should the annual training budget be?

Issues: “Dirty data.” 50% of that submitted to ASTD is rejected.

Brenda displayed data on training budget as a percent of payroll and per employee. The mean % of payroll is 3.6% but the variance is wide. The mean budget is $1626 per employee, averaging $231 to $4,970.

This is interesting but doesn’t tell that much. It doesn’t address the organizations’ strategy, correlation to results, spending patterns, a training industry value chain, a more sophisticated diagram.

ASTD has discontinued its former benchmarking service. The new Benchmarking Forum is asking new questions and developing a Benchmarking Performance Scorecard. It will evolve into an online performance support tool.

Jim L’Allier, CLO of Thompson NETg, is preparing to talk about the impact of various combinations of learning methods. Jim’s framework is Kirkpatrick Levels (agh) and blended/unblended. He just about lost me until he said the measure of evaluation was ability to use the skill (completing a spreadsheet).

The instructor-led blend cut the time to complete the task in half. However, the non-blend option did not include the opportunity to use the software. More meaningfully, there was no significant different between ILT, text, and sim. Blended learning is not about blended media. It’s about how the media is designed to be used. The important factors are job-specific scenarios, realistic job problems, competencies linked to the learner’s job. The questions to ask are:
• Does the instruction contain job-specific scenarios?
  
• Are the scenarios realistic?
  
• Are the competencies being taught linked to the worker’s job?
  
• Is the learner given opportunity to practice?
  
• Does the learner received corrective feedback?

27% of the population of the U.S. are boomers (born 1946-1964). We have an aging population. Life expectancy is up nearly 10 years in the past fifty years.

Time to consider retention, succession planning, mentoring programs, knowledge capture, KM, training burden, for in seven years, the boomer begin to drop out of the workforce.

Let’s see now. We have all these wise people about to leave the workforce. Why don’t we redefine their roles where we can continue to tap into their strengths, their knowledge, and their judgment? Instead of putting oldsters out to pasture, make them into coaches, mentors, and high-level help desks. I think the training community continues to draw too tight a boundary around their turf.

Once upon a time, fulltime employees were the only beneficiaries of training. Then we began to add subcontractors and part-timers. Then partners and distributors came on board. Now we talk of training everyone in the value chain, from suppliers to customers. It’s about time to add corporate alumni to training’s charter.

Sam Adkins gave a presentation on the latest in learning technology.

• Benjamin Bloom found out long ago that tutored students learn as much as the top 2% of classroom students. New work finds that cognitive tutors produce even better results!

• Enterprise application training (SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, etc.) has accounted for 55% - 65% of all corporate training, but several years from now it will be dead, replaced by the smart single business interface.

• 17% of the American workforce is actively disengaged from work.

• Business process design is indistinguishable from Instructional Design.

IBM’s Nancy Deviney gave the lunchtime keynote on The Future of Learning. You’ve heard my thoughts on IBM’s learning strategy before. In sum, it’s great.

James Sharpe and Andy Sadler showed a variety of integrated tools for supporting informal, unstructured learning. The demo was compelling because it dealt with realistic examples (figuring out an Excel spreadsheet rather than trying to boil the ocean). Within an on demand workplace, Jim and Andy built a course, enrolled in a class, located experts, set up an emeeting, and more. Guidance was built right in every step of the way.

Training Directors Forum 2004

Training Directors Forum kicked off this evening at the five-star Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort and Spa outside of Phoenix. We're in the middle of an Indian Native American Reservation in the Sonora Desert. This enables the hotel to run a casino which is (thankfully) located away from the resort proper. I hitched a ride in with Marc Rosenberg. It's so pleasant to hop into a car with the air conditioning on full blast when it's 100 degrees outside." border="0">

TDF attendance is up 9% over last year. The evening reception was a chance to catch up with old friends and make new acquaintances. (Note to ASTD: The bar here was free. After what you pay to attend one of these events, the cash bar thing is insulting. It's nickel and diming your best customers.) Many familiar faces: IBM's Margaret Driscoll, Nokia's Andreas Forsberg, Julie Groshens (who's training to run a marathon!), Deborah Stone (we go back decades), Saul Carliner (who kicks this thing off tomorrow morning), Lance Dublin, Phil Jones (who has his heart in this business, as do a lot of the former Lakewooders), Ghenno Senbetta, Fred Posar, Leah Nelson (great smile!), Brenda Sugrue, and many others.

I remember reading Robert Cialdini's book Influence when it was published. Click, whirr, act as if you are a robot. The concept has legs. Bob is presenting here. We talked about Influence, its longevity and rebirth, and his current projects. He's focused on time, specifically, what moments have the most impact. One of his latest experiments was testing which environmental-friendly cards in hotels ("Don't replace the sheets") were most effective. The winner: "Most people do this...."

Richard Leider challenged us to think about "What makes you get up in the morning?" He's spent his time on earth as a "student of the second half of life." Most of us were clearly in the second half; those in the first half were probably in the pool, dancing, getting new tatoos, or doing things that defy description in a professional blog.

Richard has asked many oldsters what they'd do differently if they could relive their experiences. They tell him:

1. More itme for reflection. Grow whole, not old. Come closer to the magic of the fire. Stare into the flame. Join the village elders in the front row.
2. Courage. Take more risks in work and love. "What do you intend to do in your wild and crazy life?"
3. Purpose. Everyone wants to make a difference, to leave a dent in the world.

Great grounding talk. I asked Richard if he knew the Fritz Perls remark that at the end of his life, he didn't want to be saved. He wanted to be spent.

The gang from Enspire Learning, demonstrating what it's like to work in a start up. I remember these folks from when it was six guys in a house in Austin. Bjorn tells me they now number more than 20 and are hitting the targets in their original business plan in spite of the recession. Enspire creates cool simulations.

Jack Phillips and I talked for 90 minutes about ROI, values, lifestyle, the future, and more. The power of face-to-face: i now respect a fellow I'd previously classified as focused entirely on yesterday's news. Jack's a delightful fellow and has his head screwed on right.

A Rare One-Liner

Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.

This is what OPEN means.

PlaNetwork LIVE 2

Brian Narelle, "CEO/Janitor" of Narelle Creative captured and replayed thoughts from the "assembly" sessions in his delightful cartoons.

Drat! Wi-Fi access is getting spotty.

MoveOn

Joan Blades of MoveOn is the first speaker after lunch. MoveOn is the poster child for political activism on the net. "Democracy is changing. MoveOn Primary: Ending the Money Primary." Over 300,000 MoveOn members participated in the online primary. (More than Iowa and New Hampshire combined.) Substantive communication to and from candidates is possible through online.

MoveOn Ad Conetst: Political ads by and for Real People. 100,000 MoveOn members rated the ads. (1,000 were submitted.) www.bushin30seconds.org Members are contributing funds to run the ad.

Bake Sale for Democracy. Raised $750,000. People are getting together. It starts online but results in face-to-face.

"Driving Votes" encourages people to move to swing states where their votes will count. MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country explains "how to find your political voice and become a catalyst for change."

Where does the connection take us? Beyond the broadcast culture that creates cynicism. Fox News. Events reported like professional wrestling. Conversation in politics is being reborn.

People have a hunger for connection to core values. Compassion, fairness, justice, opportunity, diversity, community, family, country, freedom, responsibility, democrcacy = WE

Two Americas? But progressive values are American values.

Commercials.... Child's Play, Polygraph, What Are We Teaching Our Clildren? If the Bush admoinistration was your roommate, Al Keyda. These are great.

MoveOn has 2.2 million members, the AFL-CIO 1.7 million.

Lead from the Heart. Don't split the difference. Make the difference.

I asked if other nations have an equivilent of MoveOn. Joan's not certain. The next question asks if we can do it. We're going to need international rules; this administration has been very poor in international cooperation.

Right now, the Iraq War is George Bush's war. If we re-elect Bush, it becomes our war. That's the sort of rallying cry that sets MoveOn apart.

Club of Rome. I'm tired. Raoul is speaking in monotone and I'm drifing off to sleep. I hate to walk out since I'm sitting in the front row and the speaker has been making frequent eye contact. The Club of Rome, Raoul assures us, is more optimistic that the (infamous) Limits of Growth report by Jay Forrester in the 60s. The new concept, pretty loose at the present time, is to educate the world via satellite. Someone asked me, "Why should we believe them this time?"

At this point, my battery died.

Top-Down vs Bottom-Up

Brad de Graf talked of complexity, drawing parallels to human systems. The patterns of cellular autometa demonstrate how order can come from simply acting according to what your neighbors are doing.

Brad contends we no longer need the old model. This is precisely the feeling I've been getting.

Zephyr Teachout, who was part of the Dean Campaign, began by saying "Nobody understands what they're talking about." Look inside any campaign and you find a mess. Organizing, if you can call it that, centers around the message.

A key to getting active participation is having the transparency to see that others are taking part; it gives you the feeling of being part of something larger.

Chapters were a dying organizational form (cf Bowling Alone) but technology may revive them.

Marty Kearns began with a poster of a bear catching a leaping salmon with the caption, "A journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly."

Marty likened a nonprofit to a business value chain. An advocacy network exists only so long as it provides value. (Is there workflow?) A shared story propells the activities.

This doesn't do justice to Marty's message, so check out his Green Media Toolshed.

Moderator Bill Pease of GetActive made dozens of summary points such as:

• link online and offline activities
• support critical roles (e.g. clusterers, connectors, leaders)
• hierarchy is not inherently bad; it's what makes us human
• MoveOn's viral networking infects existing social clusters

Other items:

• del.icio.us is a shared link list worth checking out
• upcoming.org enables nonprofits to manage and track events
• check out favors.com and Live Directory for help
• Progressive Pipes takes mail list entries, aggregates them, and provides an index by type of issue or type of message. Think of it as email converted to RSS format.

I will miss Sunday's session, for I'm hopping a plane to attend Training Directors Forum in Phoenix.

Isn't the Presidio gorgeous?

PlaNetwork LIVE

Once again, I'm at the PlaNetwork conference, sort of a loose confederation of people interested in sustainability, privacy, political activism, networking, and social justice. The location is wireless-enabled and these are my as-it-happens notes and observations. I'll come back to add photos later. (And indeed, it's Sunday morning and I'm adding pictures and commentary I missed when my battery died yesterday.)

The demilitarized Presidio, now part of the Golden Gate National Recretation Area, is a great place for an event like PlaNetwork. Aside from the guns-into-plowshares parallel inherent in a decommissioned 200 year old army post, The Presidio is another world, far from the hustle and bustle of San Francisco proper.

Collaboratory is becoming the core of the event, which organizer Jim Fournier sees as "applied network theory". The network islands are coming together. The electronic agenda is getting in sync with the human agenda, for I think of PlaNetwork as a sort of gathering of the tribes. Kindred spirits for the preservation of progressive values, sustainability, and defeating W.

Complexity

We know we need to reinvent our social system. (I should tap Gail for advice for Emergent Learning Forum.) Our work is to tease out the synergy (this weekend and ever after). I hope so. Last year's participants vowed to keep the ball rolling but then dropped it.

This theme resonates with what Emergent Learning Forum is after: Fitness. "Through perturbing and nudging each other - each part seeking to optimize its own wel being -- the whoel is strengtehed. When taken together a complete 'answer' emerges that enables the whole parts to be at their 'fittest'."

A "patch" is an analogy drawn from ecology, as in a patch of grass in the prairie; in network theory: a a node or cluster , also a work group, project, company, affinity group, or community of practice.

The rules of engagement are: (1) converse, (2) share, (3) use what you get, and (4) optimize your own patch.

Blue Oxen is hosting the wiki that underlies the conference. They've also set up an IRC and linked to Living Diretory and Neosociety. Wikis confuse the daylights out of some people, even the techno-literate.

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not rellly there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.” Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

enames

What is the value of an ename? A universal private address. Unspammable. A single identifier containing any information you want to share. It’s persistent and portable. Corollary to a personal name. The hard part is privacy and security. The most important thing is control.

I don't quite get it. A fellow describing the ename project alluded to a reported exchange between Isadora Duncan and a porter:

ASTD 2004 Leftovers

This is the fourth in a series of reports on ASTD 2004.

"Profits, like oxygen, are necessary for life, but you don't live to breathe." Arie de Geus

Pat Galaghan charms the crowd at the Canadian Embassy by offering her thanks in both English and French.

Telling Ain't Training is the ASTD Press best seller of all time. (7,500 copies)

Words I heard over and over again: Perform, organization/individual, leadership, change, engagement.

Leverage positive energy for change.

Gloria Gery: "It's a Rubik's Cube sort of problem but you have to solve it in a short time."

Grand Canyon University, "Arizona's only private, Judeo-Christian, liberal arts university," is renaming its business school "The Ken Blanchard School of Business." I imagine a zany curriculum of The One Minute Manager, Gung Ho!, Raving Fans!, Whale Done!, and Full Steam Ahead! Perhaps students will earn an MBA! degree.

Sam Adkins: "Service-oriented architecture is the end of software as we know it."

Sam also suggested we check out www.alicebot.org, and that soon led me to the Prosthetic Head.

DDI's Periodic Table,
a well-executed concept.
(Click for humongous view.)

Washington has the most beautiful Metro in the land.

Googlism

Worker Effectiveness Improvement, not KM

The Internet Time Glossary defines Knowledge Management as "whatever you want it to mean."

David Pollard has posted a wonderful description of how KM ought to work on his blog, How to Save the World.

His views on Knowledge Management echo many of the themes I've talked about here on the Internet Time Blog.

1. The measure of success is high performance of the worker. Personal knowledge management -- enablement -- is more important than flowcharts and databases.
   
2. KM should leverage natural processes, not try to change the basic ways things are acomplished.
   
3. Collaboration -- making and maintaining connections -- is more important than trying to capture and store ideas.
   
4. KM must be bottom-up, not top-down. The holistic systems viewpoint, e.g. Nonaka's model, means nothing to the individual in the trenches.

Dave comes up with these bottom-up processes:

That covers just about everything a knowledge worker is challenged to do. Do what you can to improve these dozen processes and forget the top-down stuff.

My thinking is so conceptual that I sometimes see patterns where none exist, but Dave's approach seems like yet another illustration of this:

It is so difficult to free our minds to recongize that context trumps content. There's life outside of classrooms, books, and databases.

Upcoming Events

This Saturday I'll be attending PlaNetwork in the San Francisco Presidio. It's a great venue for strengthening weak ties.

Sunday afternoon I arrive in Chandler, Arizona, for Training Directors Forum. I'll be there through Wednesday afternoon.

eLearning Effectiveness?

Oxymorons.info lists more than 800 combinations of contradictory or incongruous words, such as 'Cruel Kindness' or 'Jumbo Shrimp.'

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For a non-laughing matter, how about this post to David Farber's IP maillist:

From: "Trei, Peter"
To: dave@farber.net
Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 10:58:50 -0400
Subj: The worst case of password abuse - ever.

This is just Strangelovesque....

What was the password which controlled the firing of America's ICBMs for years during the height of the Cold War?

00000000

That's right. For *all* of them. The Permissive Action Link codes for all of Americas missiles provided less protection than on an average suitcase.

Jay's Talk at ASTD

This is the third in a series of reports on the 2004 ASTD Conference.

Collaboration Supercharges Performance

Fifteen minutes before the last breakout session of the Conference, I found myself at the front of a nearly empty room with seating for several hundred. When the big hand got to twelve, fifty or so people had joined me. Whew. I'd hate to give a presentation on collaboration to just two other people.
This afternoon I meshed my PowerPoint deck with a recording from the Conference. Then Macromedia Breeze uploaded the narrated presentation to the web, converted it into Flash for rapid playback, and stuffed it onto a publically accessible website. This is the way life oughta be.

The full presentation, narrated, is here. I'll describe the flow of things since you may want to pick and choose what you listen to.	Here's what a sixty-minute mpg3 of my presentation looks like. Sort of pretty, eh?
We began by looking at a universal model of everything.

This led into a discussion of blogs, RSS, plogs, and customer education blogs. You'll note in the online presentation that major changes in direction are indicated as SHIFT GEARS.
Next up: the scary part. We are drowning in information, the world grows ever more complex, time is speeding up, and everything is topsy-turvy. Rigid organizations won't make it through this. Flexibility is prerequisite to survival.

	Networks are the next step in computing, business organizations, and more. As internodal communication costs drop, networks replace hierarchies.
	The age of collaborative learning is at hand.

Mentoring used to be tied to events. Collaboration can be omnipresent. We considered examples.
We wrapped up with the evolving framework for Emergent Learning Forum.

Mintzberg & Cooperider

Henry and I met the next day at a buffet table at a reception at the Canadian Embassy. I'll admit that I baited him. He had complained that MBAs don't learn management. I pointed out that is was he who had a Master of Science in Management and a PhD from a School of Management. My Masters is in Business Administration; it was awarded by the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Wasn't he attacking the wrong school? The day before, the subject of Harvard's case method had come up. I said that I didn't think any program should slavishly commit to a single method of instruction. In fact, my reaction to the case method had been to develop the first business curriculum for the University of Phoenix. "The University of Phoenix? Is that Thunderbird?" he asked. No, it's a different operation. "What is the University of Phoenix?" I explained that it was the largest accredited, for-profit university in the world, with an enrollment of 125,000. Its students are working adults who average 34 years of age. 36% of them are enrolled in undergraduate management programs; 20% are taking graduate management courses. At this point, I was called away to the podium to give the opening remarks. When I returned, I couldn't find the professor. I hoped to find out how someone can study management education for decades, conclude that it's wasted on the young and learned through practice, and not know of the University of Phoenix.

We must learn to scale wholeness, to ask what's possible rather than what's wrong, and to move from systems thinking to systems living. While the AI methodology sounds touchy-feely, the results are real. One organization's recent AI Summit focused on: Customer retention Market share growth Exploiting market position Entry into adjacent markets New lines of business Who's doing AI? Blue Cross, BBC, Boeing, Bristol Myers Squibb, British AIrways, BP, British Telecom, Cap Gemini, GE Capital, GlaxoSmithKline, John Deere, Roadway... Soren Kaplan is working to support AI with Icohere. David said the potential "sends chills up his spine."

David concluded with two of my favorite Einstein quotations: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew." "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."   Visit the AI website

T - 20 minutes, Thursday morning.
Will anyone fill the chairs at Jay's session?
FInd out in the next installment.

Lest ye forget

Bloom's Taxonomy

Benjamin Bloom created this taxonomy for categorizing level of abstraction of questions that commonly occur in educational settings. The taxonomy provides a useful structure in which to categorize test questions, since professors will characteristically ask questions within particular levels, and if you can determine the levels of questions that will appear on your exams, you will be able to study using appropriate strategies.

* Adapted from: Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York ; Toronto: Longmans, Green, via University of Victoria.