Informal Learning – the other 80%

Execution is the goal

This paper addresses how organizations, particularly business organizations, can get more done. Workers who know more get more accomplished. People who are well connected make greater contributions than those who are not. Employees and partners with more capacity to learn are more versatile in adapting to future conditions. The people who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do.

It’s all a matter of learning, but it’s not the sort of learning that is the province of training departments, workshops, and classrooms. Most people in training programs learn only a little of the right stuff, are fuzzy about how to apply what they’ve learned, and never address who are the right people to know.

People learn to build the right network of associates and the right level of expertise through informal, sometimes even accidental, learning that flies beneath the corporate radar. Because organizations are oblivious to informal learning, they fail to invest in it. As a result, their execution is less than it might be.

Let’s look at what informal learning is and what to do to leverage it.

Learning is social

Most of what we learn, we learn from other people — parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, playmates, cousins, Little Leaguers, Scouts, school chums, roommates, teammates, classmates, study groups, coaches, bosses, mentors, colleagues, gossips, co-workers, neighbors, and, eventually, our children. Sometimes we even learn from teachers.

At work we learn more in the break room than in the classroom. We discover how to do our jobs throughinformal learning – observing others, asking the person in the next cubicle, calling the help desk, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning - classes and workshops and online events – is the source of only 10% to 20% of what we learn at work.

Informal learning is effective because it is personal. The individual calls the shots. The learner is responsible. It’s real. How different from formal learning, which is imposed by someone else. How many learners believe the subject matter of classes and workshops is “the right stuff?” How many feel the corporation really has their best interests at heart? Given today’s job mobility, workers who delegate responsibility for learning to their employers will become perpetual novices.

In spite of this, corporations, non-profits, and government invest most of their budgets in formal learning, when it’s apparent that most learning is informal. This stands common sense on its head. It’s the 20/80 rule: Invest your resources where they’ll do the least good.

When I’ve pointed this out in presentations at conferences, members of the audience ask what they can do to improve informal learning. After all, they already have discussion boards and virtual classrooms and videoconference gear. I tell them they need to go beyond dumb technology. Linking me to a chat session is the equivalent of showing me the way to the library. Everything I need is in there, but it’s up to me to find it.

Achieving the proper balance

Neither investing in only formal training and education nor placing all your bets on informal learning is a good strategy. Extremism is rarely the answer to questions of human development. What you are after is the best mix of formal and informal means.

Achieving balance requires a scale of measurement. The metrics of our scale are the organization’s core objectives:

• Reducing time-to-performance
• Keeping the promises made to our customers
• Improving service and processes
• Understanding the organization’s mission and values
• Innovating in the face of change
• Optimizing the human value chain [2]
• Knowing enough to work smarter, not harder
• Replenishing the organization’s intellectual capital
• Creating value for all stakeholders

In the past, corporate America relied on training and indoctrination to meet these objectives. This worked better in yesterday’s command-and-control hierarchies than in today’s laissez-faire organizations. Now it’s often more effective to take control by giving control, by letting “the invisible hand” self-organize worker learning. The organization establishes the goals and gives the workers flexibility in how to meet them.

An organization named CapitalWorks [3] surveyed hundreds of knowledge workers about how they really learned to do their jobs.

• Workers reported that informal learning was three times more important in becoming proficient on the job than company-provided training.

• Workers learn as much during breaks and lunch as during on- and off-site meetings.

• Most workers report that they often need to work around formal procedures and processes to get their jobs done.

• Most workers developed many of their skills by modeling the behavior of co-workers.

• Approximately 70% of respondents want more interactions with co-workers when their work changes.

Combining the results of CapitalWorks’ formal and informal learning surveys, here’s how people report becoming proficient in their work.

Tell me why

Isn’t this amazing? What on earth has led us to a situation where corporations overwhelmingly invest in formal training but workers overwhelmingly learn informally?

In his new book, Clusters of Creativity [4] , Rob Koepp writes “The dot-com craze was often seen in humanist terms — a force democratizing information, building online communities, increasing opportunities for entrepreneurs. Yet dot-com mania’s article of faith was that the technologies of the Internet essentially made human beings irrelevant. People became abstractions, recognized only as hits, clicks and eyeballs that propped up the preposterous market values of e-commerce plays.”

Real people are complex, integrated beings. Each is whole, unto him or herself. Body, mind, intention and emotion are inseparably bound. Situating our brains in our heads oversimplifies the situation; our brains are distributed throughout our bodies. Nerves, eyes, and receptors are all part of the way we think. And emotion? It’s inextricably linked to the other mental and bodily functions. The amygdala shapes the internal movie we call our time-delayed “reality” with emotion before we become aware.

Adapting to one’s environment involves much more than exposure to content. It is a whole-body experience. You cannot learn while someone is stomping your toes. You won’t pay attention unless other people are involved.

Other factors work to obscure the importance of informal learning:

• Learning implies school. School is chock full of formal learning  — courses, classes, and grades that obscure the fact that most learning at school is either self-directed or informal.
• Vendors don’t make money from informal learning. Hence, it’s not promoted at conferences, in magazines, and through sales calls.
• The rapid pace of technological innovation and economic change almost guarantees that formal learning will be dated.
• One aspect of informal learning that makes it so powerful also makes the informal process forgettable: it often comes in small pieces.
• Who’s in charge of informal learning? Most of the time, it’s the individual worker. Another reason informal falls off the corporate radar.
• Most informal learning takes place in the “shadow organization,” oft described as “the way things really work,” as opposed to the boxes on the organization chart and their clearly delineated budgets.

Ottersurf’s Clark Quinn [5] notes that corporations invest in formal learning because it’s the one means they know – and know how to handle. “They’re still in the industrial model. Corporate learning lags the knowledge age and its associated technology. Sadly, this is a low priority with most CEO’s.”

How workers learn now

Think about a go-getter knowledge worker learns something new. [6]   The Training Department has been downsized. Even if it were at full strength, it’s unlikely Training would have much to offer on a new topic. So the worker checks Google or SlashDot or other resources on the web to see who’s got books or articles or blogs or case studies on her topic. In my case, I’d probably check the O’Reilly site since I maintain a virtual bookshelf there that gives me access to scads of technical books.

After the worker gets a sketchy framework of what’s to be learned, it’s time to dive in. Try things. Build on knowledge of similar subjects. Ask people in the office who’ve been there. Check with the technical equivalent of the jailhouse lawyer. The goal is not to master a subject area or pass a test; it’s to find out enough to dive into trial-and-error or to get the immediate job done. The worker doesn’t take off for a weeklong workshop; more likely, he picks up bits and pieces day-by-day for months.

This is self-directed learning, and that’s yet another reason it escapes notice. No one is responsible for toting up the learning every worker is engaged in. I wouldn’t be surprised if informal learning always outweighs formal learning in impact. Wonderful book title: All Learning is Self-Directed. [7]

At the beginning of this section, I said we were looking over the shoulder of a go-getter learner. Today, we’re in transition. Many learners are not self-directed; they are waiting for directions. It’s time to tell them that the rules have changed. It’s in their self interest to convert from training pawns to proactive learning opportunists.

Post 1   Post 2   Post 3   Post 4   Post 5

Post 1 People learn their jobs by doing their jobs. Effective managers make stretch
assignments and coach their team members. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape their teammembers’ experiences. Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn to do the job on the job. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The Coherent Organization. As standalone companies realize that they’re really extended enterprises, co-learning with customers and stakeholders becomes important as everyone faces the future together. Players throughout the corporate ecosystem need to be operating on the same wave-length. This can only happen when we’re adapting to the future, i.e. learning, at the same pace.Internally, everyone needs to stay current.

These posts offer guidance to managers who want to make learning from experience and conversation more effective. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management accelerates the development of future workers and gets the entireorganization working smarter. The potential is great.

Among the organizations that have adopted the 70:20:10 approach are Nike, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Mars, Maersk, Nokia, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, L’Oréal, Adecco, Banner Health, Bank of America, National Australia Bank, Boston Scientific, American Express, Wrigley, Diageo, BAE Systems, ANZ Bank, Irish Life, HP, Freehills, Caterpillar, Barwon Water, CGU, Coles, Sony Ericsson, Standard Chartered, British Telecom, Westfield, Wal-Mart, Parsons Brinkerhoff, and Coca-Cola.

Charles Jennings made 70:20:10 a guiding philosophy of learning during his eight-year tenure as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters, the world’s largest information company. (Disclosure: Charles and I are colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. He is the world authority on 70:20:10 and these posts draw heavily on his work.)

Post 2 The 70 percent: learning from experience. People learn by doing. We learn from experience and achieve mastery through practice. Experience is a difficult task master. We learn more from making a mistake than from getting it right the first time. That’s why wise managers throw team members into stretch assignments. It accelerates learning. Being ejected from one’s comfort zone is why some say that the only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Matching the most appropriately challenging experience to the developmental stage of the worker is the most powerful lever in the manager’s toolbox.

Charles Jennings reports that performance inevitably improves when managers ask their team members these three simple reflective questions:

1. What are your reflections on what you’ve been doing since we last met.
2. What would you do differently next time?
3. What have you learned since we last met?

Post 3 The 20 percent: learning through others. Learning is social. People learn with and through others.

Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Effective managers encourage their team members to buddy up on projects, to shadow others and to participate in professional social networks. People learn more in an environment that encourages conversation, so make sure you’re fostering an environment where people talk to each other.

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a social network of people who identify with one another professionally (e.g. designers of logic chips) or have mutual interests (e.g. amateur photographers). Members of CoPs develop and share knowledge, values, recommendations and standards. An effective community of practice is like a beehive. It organizes itself, buzzes with activity and produces honey for the markets.

Post 4 Formal learning includes courses, workshops, seminars, online learning and certification training. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations aren’t using online learning to its full potential, and the results at those organizations reflect that. Learning expert Robert Brinkerhoff figures only about 15 percent of formal training lessons change behavior.¹² This is a reflection of both formal learning creation and of the lack of focus on experiential and exposure learning. If what we learn is not reinforced with reflection and application, the lessons never make it into long-term memory.

Formal learning is typically conducted by an instructor. So why do we address it in a paper on managers? Because managers can make or break the success of formal learning programs. Research has found that the most important factor in translating formal learning into improved performance is the expectation set by managers before the training takes place¹³. Understanding the needs of the learners and following up after the event are also essential for formal learning success.

Post 5 You will need to become a champion for the new approach to developing talent. You must convince your sponsor that managers and supervisors are the linchpins to developing new talent. Without them, the company could find itself with nobody on the bench to take on future challenges. For your career, this lead role is high risk/high reward.

Managers have to learn how to develop their people. It doesn’t always come naturally, and managers can get too busy to pay much attention to it. Let them know you don’t expect them to train their people. Rather, they will set examples for their team; they will foster experiential learning by leading their team to tackle new challenges (the 70), by helping them reflect on the lessons of experience and by coaching them at every step (the 20), and by showing them how to get formal learning on the subject (the 10).

The Learning and Development Roundtable of the Corporate Leadership Council pinpointed three management practices that significantly improve performance.

1. Setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.
2. Providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.
3. Taking time to reflect and help team members learn from experience.

Managers who set clear objectives and expectations and explain how they measure performance are much more likely to succeed. Their teams outperform their peers by 20%. That’s an extra day every week to get the job done (and engage in deep learning). Managers should make explicit why they’re assigning particular projects, what they expect people to learn and what sort of debrief will occur after the assignment.

The 70-20-10 model depends on L&D teaming up with managers to improve learning across the company, but often managers do not appreciate how vitally important they are in growing their people. This is the absolute, must-do secret to success to improving learning and development. Frontline managers must take this as the very definition of manager: someone who develops others by challenging them with assignments that stretch them to the point of flow¹⁷. This takes a can-do manager who knows how coaching creates mental models and habits, how motivation activates a chain of high-performance activities and what success habits their team members need to adopt.

Charles Jennings says that the role that managers play is far more important than that of Learning and Development or HR. Your role is to help managers learn that:

• People learn from experience.
• Managers shape the experience of the people on their team.
• Experience coupled with reflection sticks lessons in memory.
• Daily mid-course correction is much more powerful than after-the-fact reviews.
• Every project they assign is a potential learning experience for their team members.

#itashare

Last year his class ran under his experimental class operating system in stealth mode. Howard Rheingold, Jerry Michalski, and others, myself included, have dropped by. The teacher will uncloak soon to reveal an interdisciplinary approach where students select what to learn from Open Education resources. Learning is experiential and self-directed.

We had scant time to talk because I’m under the gun completing a project but I immediately “got it” because I’d seen the same approach in business. This is Steve Denning’s concept of Radical Management applied to schools with a bit of Daniel Pink enlightenment stirred in. #1, delight the customer. #2 = see #1. Throw in the responsiveness of peer networks, the ability to prototype for pennies and ride the wave of complexity instead of fighting it.

Trust your customers/students. Empower them. You can’t lecture people into having sound values and acquiring the thinking skills to deal with complexity

Lots more to come…

If I may summarize 400 pages from a vague memory, the gist was that I acquire tacit knowledge experientially, say baking a brioche. When I’ve mastered the baking, I explain how I did it, thus making the knowledge explicit. The explicit knowledge is shared with others, who in turn internalize it, transmuting it back into tacit knowledge in their heads.

This would be cool if it worked, but it usually doesn’t. You can no more convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge without the experiential component than you can convert lead into gold. That’s implicit in the definition of tacit. I gave up on Nonaka and Takeuchi.

Workers master a skill by starting with the basics, the bulk of which is formal and explicit. If it were not explicit, instructors and non-SMEs would not be able to teach it in traditional fashion.

With the foundation of explicit knowledge under their belts, the novices know enough to begin practicing. Enough rubs off that the novices learn experientially. In some fields, the overall journey from novice to expert takes 10,000 hours.

In an ideal world, the expert retires (or graduates) to teaching the incoming generation of novices. This assures that what’s taught mirrors reality. Note, however, that the experienced guide provides only explicit knowledge. (It’s explicit because you can write it down.)

The instructor can accelerate the novice’s acquisition of explicit knowledge by having her undertake stretch assignments. Experience is the crucible where explicit knowledge is learned.

Since line managers are the people who generally counsel their teammates on what assignments to take on, they need to become active in the red portion of my chart.

Explicit knowledge does not become tacit knowledge and vice-versa. Explicit/tacit is either/or. There’s no word for a state between explicit and tacit. In other words, what I understand Nonaka and Takeuchi to say is simply wrong.

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework provides another way to look at tacit and explicit. Both complex situations and tacit knowledge “can’t be told.” Complicated and simple situations can be written down. This implies:

The faster a worker becomes proficient, the more profitable the firm. Companies that focus on shortening the time employees complete formal, explicit learning are looking at a drop in the bucket. Improving the effective of experiential, tacit learning adds much more to the bottom line. Managers who make apt stretch assignments produces productive workers sooner.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the make-up of the market value of the combined S+P 500 companies went from 80% tangible assets to 80% intangible assets, a dramatic shift in our economy.

I wonder if the same thing is going on with complexity. Does anyone have any statistics on this? I don’t even know where to look.

#itashare

Part 3 (Here’s Part 1 and Part 2)

The 20 percent: learning through others

Learning is social. People learn with and through others.

Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Effective managers encourage their team members to buddy up on projects, to shadow others and to participate in professional social networks. People learn more in an environment that encourages conversation, so make sure you’re fostering an environment where people talk to each other.

Several years ago, the local paper in Ottawa carried a story about voter betrayal. The politicians had gone back on their promise to provide every elementary student with a computer. It would be 2 kids per machine. I smiled. The kids will learn a lot more this way. Companies need to take advantage of the social nature of learning. Have two or three people go through eLearning together, before a single screen. Encourage them to talk. Retention will skyrocket, and conversation will mitigate the boredom of most eLearning.

Communities of practice

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a social network of people who identify with one another professionally (e.g. designers of logic chips) or have mutual interests (e.g. amateur photographers). Members of CoPs develop and share knowledge, values, recommendations and standards. What’s really great is that most CoPs are self-perpetuating.

Chefs and workers in the kitchen who aspire to be chefs are a community of practice. Newcomers learn the ropes from working alongside veterans.

Respected senior chefs add to the knowledge base; that fuels the evolution of the chef community. All take pride in membership, as one would in a guild.

An effective community of practice is like a beehive. It organizes itself, buzzes with activity and produces honey for the markets.

Silicon Valley is chock-full of communities of practice. Professionals there consider themselves programmers or chip designers or semiconductor engineers first and employees of HP or Intel or AMD second.

Etienne Wenger⁴, who with Jean Lave coined the term community of practice in 1987, notes that there “is hardly a Fortune 500 company today that does not have somewhere an initiative to cultivate communities of practice.” And it is not just business but also non-governmental organizations and government that are cultivating communities. Nonetheless, Etienne sees the need to continue building learning capacity.

An effective internal community of practice requires:

• A common practice and shared enterprise
• Active interaction and participation
• Mutual interdependence
• Overlapping histories, practices and understandings among members
• Respect for diverse perspectives and minority views⁵

The manager may get the ball rolling for a new community, nurture an existing one or ask an engaged and willing team member to kick-start the community. It’s vital to respect the autonomy of the community. The manager may free up people’s time to participate or make a meeting space available, but she should not try to shape the community’s agenda, for over-management stifles a community’s effectiveness.⁶

What worked at Google

When Google sought to find out what makes managers successful, far and away the most important factor was being a good coach⁷. Google says a good coach “provides specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive.” A good coach “has regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employee’s specific strengths.” That’s great context for talking about personal growth.

Coaching provides⁸:

• Individual attention and personal support
• Rapid resolution of conflicts
• Improved communication among team members
• Discovery, development and leveraging of strengths and potential
• Catalyst to support acceleration and maintenance of positive change
• Peek performance as individuals and teams
• Set high-outcome goals and eliminate obstacles

Coaching is not always one on one. Managers employ what’s known as Action Learning to guide teams that explore real organizational challenges to resolve work issues and gain skills in reflective questioning and listening. The practice originated in the 1940s with English coal miners working on mining issues⁹. Mary Broad suggests what it takes for Action Learning to be successful:

• A pressing, complex organizational problem that’s clearly worth solving
• A coach who guides the group’s learning (not necessarily the team manager)
• Four-to-eight diverse individuals assigned to problem-solving teams

• A process that values reflective questioning and listening more than making statements.
• The group’s ability to take action to solve the problem

Mentoring

There’s a fine line between coaching and mentoring. Mentoring is the deliberate pairing of an experienced person (the mentor) with a less experienced one (the protégé or mentee). Mentees are not always direct reports of their mentors¹⁰. Mentoring takes the form of tutoring, counseling, modeling and giving feedback.

Facilitated mentoring — planned, guided and evaluated — is typically more successful than informal sessions. Effective mentoring requires¹¹:

• Decision-maker support for identified needs, goals, opportunities and readiness
• Planning and design that are aligned with other performance interventions
• Criteria for matching mentors and mentees are agreed on by stakeholders
• Development plan in place

Next

My next post will deal with the improving the 10%: Learning from curriculum.

Questions?

When the Internet Time Alliance gives one- and two-day master classes in 70-20-10 implementation, we always field a lot of questions. If you have a question, please ask it in the Comments. We’ll post an answer for all to see. If you want to explore putting this philosophy in place at your company, let’s chat on the phone. You can reach me at 1.510.528.3105.

The 70:20:10 Forum will soon be out of stealth mode. Watch out for it. I’ll leave a notice here when the Forum debuts. Here’s my informal take on what’s going on:

Initial launch of the 70:20:10 Forum will take place in the first quarter of 2013.

Founded and curated by Charles Jennings it has been designed to be the complete online resource for professionals using the 70:20:10 framework to maximise performance and productivity throughout their organisation. The Forum provides a repository of practical information at your fingertips and connects you with a vibrant global community of fellow practitioners.

The Forum gives members benefits including: the latest research, papers and case studies, thought-leader webinar events, selected publications and an insight-rich newsletter, making it the most useful and up-to-date 70:20:10 information source available.

If the 70:20:10 learning strategy is something you are using, or intend to use, the 70:20:10 Forum will save you time, bring you in contact with the best and brightest thinking, and most importantly, help you implement it effectively.

The Forum is committed to supporting a charity in Bangladesh that Charles has been working with for some time.

 

The 70:20:10 Forum supports Sreepur Village, Bangladesh.

The Sreepur Village project was established in 1989 by British Airways stewardess, Pat Kerr.

It is a small non-religious, non-political organisation based rural Bangladesh. The project supports destitute mothers and abandoned children to give them the health, knowledge and skills they need to function independently in society. There are currently about 100 mothers and 450 children at Sreepur. The project provides safety, a loving environment, food, clothing, education, and vocational training so that the woman and children can look forward to independent lives in their communities.

www.sreepurvillage.org

 

About the Internet Time Alliance

The Internet Time Alliance helps clients understand and embrace complexity and adopt new ways of working and learning. We ask the tough questions and explore the underlying assumptions of how they do business. Then we work with them to develop strategies and plans for transformation and improvement. Email me for information on working with the Alliance.

About GoToTraining

Online Training Made Easy™

Citrix GoToTraining is an easy-to-use online training service that allows you to move your entire training program online for more efficient customer and employee training. Hold unlimited online training sessions with up to 200 attendees from around the world right from your Mac or PC. Reach more trainees, collect real-time feedback, record and store your training sessions and more – all while slashing travel costs. To learn more, visit www.gototraining.com.

Citrix sponsored the research and writing of much of the material in this set of posts. Please visit CitrixOnline to see the original paper in its entirety.

About the author

Jay Cross is an author, advocate and raconteur who writes about workplace learning, leadership, organizational change, innovation, technology and the future. His educational white papers, articles and research reports persuade people to take action.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is currently researching the correlation of psychological well-being and performance on the job.

Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from UC Berkeley. People visit the Lab to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Does your company need substantive white papers and webinars like this? Get in touch.

Part 2 (Here’s Part 1)

The 70 percent: learning from experience

People learn by doing. We learn from experience and achieve mastery through practice.

Apprenticeship & peer learning

Apprenticeship is a time-honored method of learning by experience, but I suspect that it didn’t go down like the history books tell us. Imagine being an aspiring sculptor in the studio of Michelangelo. Most of the time, the master is away painting the Sistine Chapel or executing a commission at some nobleman’s palazzo. In the meantime, junior apprentices learn from senior apprentices. Nothing new there: we learn more from our peers than from our superiors.

A master craftsman makes sure the people she’s developing work and learn from a wide group of people. She rotates them through novel assignments. She assigns challenges and celebrates what people learn from their mistakes. She goes along with Picasso’s sentiment that “I do things I do not know how to do in order to learn how to do them.” She tolerates their fumbles.

Apprenticeship isn’t the master and the apprentice sitting together in the studio. There are journeymen, senior folks, camp followers, groupies, newbies, politicians, young and old in this workscape, everyone helping one another to figure out how to do things and get better at doing them.

John Seely Brown is married to an architect. He notes that architecture students know precisely what’s up with their studio mates. The faculty conducts the equivalent of the hospital intern’s grand rounds. Everyone sees examples and assessments of her peers. Your work is in plain site on your board. JSB’s lovely wife predates computer-aided drawing. I wonder if architects even have studios any more. All you need is a workstation and the cloud. Or, more optimistically, you could eavesdrop on critiques by true masters, recorded for posterity in the bitstream.

Experience is a difficult task master. We learn more from making a mistake than from getting it right the first time. That’s why wise managers throw team members into stretch assignments. It accelerates learning. Being ejected from one’s comfort zone is why some say that the only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience.

Stretch assignments

Experiential learning is the gold standard. Matching the most appropriately challenging experience to the developmental stage of the worker is the most powerful lever in the manager’s toolbox.

Those were the two most importance sentences in this mass of verbiage. Let this one sink it. It’s a game changer.

As a reminder, what I said was “Matching the most appropriately challenging experience to the developmental stage of the worker is the most powerful lever in the manager’s toolbox…” Forget what the other guys told you. This is it. Embrace experiential learning. Craft a great mix of challenging assignments. Let them learn. Don’t teach. People are amazingly adept at rising to a challenge and figuring things out.

One more time, what’s the most common way we learn? EXPERIENCE. Replace jobs with experiences if you must move quickly.

Making the match requires knowledge of the work and the worker. The manager’s judgment in making the best match is what creates transformative learning experiences. Here’s a list of potential learning assignments that may lie just outside of the worker’s comfort zone.

Expand the scope of the work

• Increase the worker’s responsibilities.
• Increase span of control.
• Increase decision-making authority.
• Participate in a group to solve a real business problem.
• Fill in for the manager or someone else.
• Take on managerial responsibilities (e.g. budgeting, interviewing).

Change and adversity

• Work in a situation with rapidly changing circumstances.
• Handle a crisis.
• Work in a situation where something goes wrong or fails.
• Work on new initiatives.
• Build a new team from scratch.
• Champion a new product or service.
• Turn around a troubled project.

Enter challenging relationships

• Work with people from other business units or functions.
• Work with multiple people with contradictory and competing view.
• Work with customers or a customer service group .
• Interact with senior management (e.g. meetings, presentations).
• Lead a cross-functional team.

Persuade, teach and observe

• Persuade senior managers to take a specific action.
• Teach coworkers how to do a component of their jobs.
• Volunteer as a mentor for new hires.
• Reverse-mentor a senior person on social networking or technology.
• Introduce new productivity or organization techniques to the team.
• Shadow a coworker to see how he or she conducts his or her work.
• Work with a recognized expert.
• Do a front line job for a while (e.g. answering calls in the call center, loading suitcases onto the airplane, flipping burgers)

Make work visible and discuss it with others

• Narrate your work, share what you’re doing with colleagues.
• Write a process-oriented blog.
• Be active in social networks in the workplace and in the industry.
• Curate information and share with others.

Charles Jennings reports that performance inevitably improves when managers ask their team members these three simple reflective questions:

1. What are your reflections on what you’ve been doing since we last met.
2. What would you do differently next time?
3. What have you learned since we last met?

Next

My next post will deal with the improving the 20%: Learning with others.

Questions?

When the Internet Time Alliance gives one- and two-day master classes in 70-20-10 implementation, we always field a lot of questions. If you have a question, please ask it in the Comments. We’ll post an answer for all to see. If you want to explore putting this philosophy in place at your company, let’s chat on the phone. You can reach me at 1.510.528.3105.

The 70:20:10 Forum will soon be out of stealth mode. Watch out for it. I’ll leave a notice here when the Forum debuts.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws heavily on the work of Charles Jennings, a leading thinker and practitioner in human development, change management, performance improvement and learning. Charles is senior director of the Internet Time Alliance. He has deep experience in both the business and learning practitioner sides of learning and performance. He knows what works in the world of strategic talent and effective performance and productivity approaches.

Charles is the Founder of The 70:20:10 Forum, a global membership portal helping professionals implement the 70:20:10 framework to maximize performance and productivity. The Forum offers a vast repository of practical information and connects members with a vibrant global community of fellow practitioners. As part of its social responsibility, the Forum supports projects at Sreepur Village, a refuge in rural Bangladesh for destitute women as well as trafficked or abandoned children.

Another source of inspiration is Heather Rutherford, founder of Blended, an organizational learning solutions company. With a philosophy centered on the 70-20-10 framework, Blended supports clients in implementing a simple and powerful architecture supported by best-practice tools and resources to increase engagement, improve productivity, efficiency and performance.

About the Internet Time Alliance

The Internet Time Alliance helps clients understand and embrace complexity and adopt new ways of working and learning. We ask the tough questions and explore the underlying assumptions of how they do business. Then we work with them to develop strategies and plans for transformation and improvement. Email me for information on working with the Alliance.

About GoToTraining

Online Training Made Easy™Citrix GoToTraining is an easy-to-use online training service that allows you to move your entire training program online for more efficient customer and employee training. Hold unlimited online training sessions with up to 200 attendees from around the world right from your Mac or PC. Reach more trainees, collect real-time feedback, record and store your training sessions and more – all while slashing travel costs. To learn more, visit www.gototraining.com.

Citrix sponsored the research and writing of much of the material in this set of posts. Please visit CitrixOnline to see the original paper in its entirety.

About the author

Jay Cross is an author, advocate and raconteur who writes about workplace learning, leadership, organizational change, innovation, technology and the future. His educational white papers, articles and research reports persuade people to take action.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is currently researching the correlation of psychological well-being and performance on the job.

Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from UC Berkeley. People visit the Lab to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Does your company need substantive white papers and webinars like this? Get in touch.

part 1 of 5                      (Here are Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 4 and Part 5)

People learn their jobs by doing their jobs. Effective managers make stretch
assignments and coach their team members. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape those experiences.

These posts offer guidance to managers who want to make learning from experience and conversation more effective. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management accelerates the development of future workers and gets the entire organization working smarter. The potential is great.

Convergence of work and learning

The world of business is undergoing a phase change. Work and learning have merged. Earth-shattering forces snuck up on us when we weren’t looking, shifting major responsibilities from the institution to the individual.

Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn on the job to do the job. In a time of increased business speed, learning is vital. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The Coherent Organization

As standalone companies realize that they’re really extended enterprises, co-learning with customers and stakeholders becomes important as everyone faces the future together. Players throughout the corporate ecosystem need to be operating on the same wave-length. This can only happen when we’re adapting to the future, i.e. learning, at the same pace.Internally, everyone needs to stay current.

Workers need to know what one another are doing. No matter what silo we inhabit, we all need to be singing from the same hymnal. We may sing different songs (diversity builds strength) but we need be aligned to achieve a common purpose. We call harmonious companies Coherent Organizations.

In the old days, work was mechanical; workers learned the skills and knowledge to do their jobs from training sessions and then performed their job function. They did what they were told. Achieving coherence was easy. Twenty-first century employees do complex, unpredictable work. Their primary job is dealing with situations that are not written in any job description. It’s up to them to figure out what to do. They have to learn on the fly. Often the best way to accomplish the goal is to collaborate with other people.

Social networks, both in-person and online, are democratizing the workplace, and workers have an increasing amount of say in what they learn and how they learn it. Millennials entering the workplace expect to be in charge of their own development. They are used to having information at their fingertips. In high school and college, they did their homework in collaboration with friends, and now they expect to work in collaboration with colleagues.

Traditionally, training departments were designed for mechanical work processes. Instructional designers created curriculum around tried-and-true best practices. Training identified knowledge gaps and delivered courses to close them.

Today most of the information that workers need to know is unstructured and constantly changing. The Internet has switched our company hours to 24/7, and that often means making quick business decisions on a public stage. Hard-copy training material cannot train you to handle unique situations. Traditional training approaches are no longer enough.

Workers and managers have to shoulder responsibility for their own learning.

Does this imply that training departments are obsolete? Quite the contrary. In the coming years, learning and development professionals will have more impact than ever before. Many of them will leave the human resources silo to tackle challenges in a new integrated way across the company. By taking their expertise in learning directly into the organization and working more closely with team leaders, learning and development staff will increase the impact of their learning programs.The advice that follows comes from practitioners, not academics. As chief learning officer at Thomson Reuters, Charles Jennings¹ implemented the 70-20-10 model for the firm’s 55,000 employees. Heather Rutherford founded Blended, the Australia-based performance learning company that is the leading distributor of the Harvard ManageMentor program. Charles and Heather are the source of many of the suggestions and stories that follow.Let’s examine the 70-20-10 model, where it came from, how to take advantage of it and the opportunities it presents for learning and development professionals.

Origin of the 70-20-10 model

At its heart, 70-20-10 is all about re-thinking and re-aligning learning and development focus and effort. Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo originated the 70-20-10 framework at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina. Their 1996 book, The Career Architect², stated that lessons learned by successful managers came roughly:

• 70 percent from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks and problem solving

• 20 percent from feedback and working with and observing role models

• 10 percent from courses and reading

As Charles Handy says, “Real learning is not what most of us grew up thinking it was.”This simple formulation has gone viral.

You hear about it at every major training conference and read about it in all the learning journals. When I recently shared the 70-20-10 model with a senior group of instructional designers and educational planners, they experienced an “ah-ha” moment.

They realized that they’d been expending their energy in the formal realm, and that the formal accounts for only a small fraction of how people learn. You shouldn’t take this to mean that the 10 percent – formal learning – is going away. Rather, by starting to focus on experiential and collaborative learning too, you can improve your overall learning and development program.³

Without dealing with whether a given situation is 80:15:5 or 60:25:15, this group of instructional designers got the message that leadership development is overwhelmingly experiential. Experiential learning reinforces and boosts the results of formal learning. The 70 and the 20 increase the results from the traditional 10.

The simplicity of the 70-20-10 formulation makes it memorable. The message is that in business, we learn most by doing.70-20-10 is not without its critics. The model is based on observation. It is not a precise formulation like water boiling at 100 degrees Celsius/212 degrees Fahrenheit. Academics and purists complain that there’s no empirical evidence to back up 70-20-10. I counter that my colleagues and I have talked with thousands of managers about 70-20-10 and they agree that the proportions sound about right.

Among the organizations that have adopted the 70:20:10 approach are Nike, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Mars, Maersk, Nokia, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, L’Oréal, Adecco, Banner Health, Bank of America, National Australia Bank, Boston Scientific, American Express, Wrigley, Diageo, BAE Systems, ANZ Bank, Irish Life, HP, Freehills, Caterpillar, Barwon Water, CGU, Coles, Sony Ericsson, Standard Chartered, British Telecom, Westfield, Wal-Mart, Parsons Brinkerhoff, and Coca-Cola.

Charles Jennings made 70:20:10 a guiding philosophy of learning during his eight-year tenure as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters, the world’s largest information company. (Disclosure: Charles and I are colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. He is the world authority on 70:20:10 and this paper draws heavily on his work.)

Is 70-20-10 good or bad news for trainers?

Imagine that a top executive from your company read an article about 70-20-10 in a Harvard Business Review blog and wondered whether your company should do something with it.

Should you be worried or elated?You have been investing most of your energy in formal learning. That’s what management asked you to do. It’s important; the company cannot live without it. You understand it upside down and backwards. You have probably implemented classes, workshops, online learning, a measurement system and learning events. You believe in these components.

On the other hand, the experiential and exposure parts of the spectrum are virgin territory for you. But the upside of investing in the support of experiential learning, assuming you are successful, is job enrichment, more responsibility, recognition from senior management and career advancement.

Next

My next post will deal with the 70%: Learning from experience.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws heavily on the work of Charles Jennings, a leading thinker and practitioner in human development, change management, performance improvement and learning. Charles is senior director of the Internet Time Alliance. He has deep experience in both the business and learning practitioner sides of learning and performance. He knows what works in the world of strategic talent and effective performance and productivity approaches.

Charles is the Founder of The 70:20:10 Forum, a global membership portal helping professionals implement the 70:20:10 framework to maximize performance and productivity. The Forum offers a vast repository of practical information and connects members with a vibrant global community of fellow practitioners. As part of its social responsibility, the Forum supports projects at Sreepur Village, a refuge in rural Bangladesh for destitute women as well as trafficked or abandoned children.

Another source of inspiration is Heather Rutherford, founder of Blended, an organizational learning solutions company. With a philosophy centered on the 70-20-10 framework, Blended supports clients in implementing a simple and powerful architecture supported by best-practice tools and resources to increase engagement, improve productivity, efficiency and performance.

About the Internet Time Alliance

The Internet Time Alliance helps clients understand and embrace complexity and adopt new ways of working and learning. We ask the tough questions and explore the underlying assumptions of how they do business. Then we work with them to develop strategies and plans for transformation and improvement. Email me for information on working with the Alliance.

About GoToTraining

Online Training Made Easy™Citrix GoToTraining is an easy-to-use online training service that allows you to move your entire training program online for more efficient customer and employee training. Hold unlimited online training sessions with up to 200 attendees from around the world right from your Mac or PC. Reach more trainees, collect real-time feedback, record and store your training sessions and more – all while slashing travel costs. To learn more, visit www.gototraining.com.

Citrix sponsored the research and writing of much of the material in this set of posts. Please visit CitrixOnline to see the original paper in its entirety.

About the author

Jay Cross is an author, advocate and raconteur who writes about workplace learning, leadership, organizational change, innovation, technology and the future. His educational white papers, articles and research reports persuade people to take action.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is currently researching the correlation of psychological well-being and performance on the job.

Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from UC Berkeley. People visit the Lab to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Does your company need substantive white papers and webinars like this? Get in touch.

Here ’tis:

about informal learning than you did on the way in.

On my Walkabout I am experimenting with openness. I’m going to be much more open. I am narrating my work and being more transparent with my thinking. That’s one reason I just posted all my slides.

If the slides help me share foundation principles, you and I will be able to start on a higher plane.

Barbara Frederickson’s great book, Positivity, describes tools to help you experiment with mindful awareness while carrying out your day. #1 is Make your motto “be open.” Being open means cultivating both curiosity about and acceptance of whatever you’re currently experiencing. Attend to what’s happening without trying or wishing for change. It is what it is.

1-800-GOT-JUNK (“Junk”) came by Internet Time Lab to pick up 24 months of trash.

The two thirty-somethings who showed up were pleasant, hard-working, and efficient.

One fellow liked his job because it fix his life as a musician. For seven years, he has worked at Junk six months and then taken off to play music for six months. “It works for me; it works for them.” The other fellow recently graduated from Cal Berkeley; he was happy to have any job. Both enjoyed their work; it keeps them in shape.

“How do you learn what’s going on? How do you learn to do your job?”

The ten or twelve people going out for the day meet together every morning to share war stories and techniques. Everyone’s allowed to talk. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, yet many companies fail take it.

In its first nine years, Junk’s revenue grew from $1 million to $91 million.

Four years ago, Junk adopted the Net Promoter Score program:

I like these guys.