Today I attended two learning events in Paris, in the morning the iLearning Forum hosted by Sally Ann Moore and this afternoon Expo-Langues, the conference where Peter Isackson and I will be speaking tomorrow morning.

Looking at other cultures inevitably teaches me about nuances I had failed notice in my own.

Buzzwords travel from the U.S. to France incredibly fast.

Lots of French vendors are touting social learning although they no more get it than American LMS providers promising systems to manage informal learning. One outfit here claimed to deliver social learning experiences on CD-ROM. Catalog of courses? Social? Huh?

Gamification is big but here it’s always Serious Games. This is because French companies don’t believe learning should be fun. (And you can’t call these things joux serieux because in French the all-important adjective comes after the noun.)

Some concepts were missing in action. For example, no one was touting user-generated content or peer-to-peer. My friend Peter’s Learnscaper moves user-generated (and instructor-generated) content center stage but when he was explaining it to someone, we realized there’s no term for the concept in French!

The Internet Time Alliance and I have been pushing the meme Working Smarter for several years. The French are into smarter in a big way:

This one is right out of the Colbert Report, n’est-ce pas? “French, a language for tomorrow.” For whom?

How’s this for a lost cause? Learn Provençal, the dead language once spoken in Southeast France.

I saw some luscious graphics although the company showing this one admitted that it’s just the demo.

I don’t mean to be so negative. We had wonderful conversations at both events.

On Thursday, I’ll be addressing the social web and its impact on practical education at Expo-Langues in Paris. I plan to talk about the shift from push learning to pull that refocuses language learning from courses to learning environments. Du pousser au tirer. 

Today started with a black swan event: snow on the French Riviera:

I used to bring California weather with me wherever I travelled. Now I seem to bring snow and ice. Brrrrr….

Just got back to my apartment in Paris after a lovely dinner (grilled sardines, lieu noir, creme brûlée) discussing innovation, Sarkosy, and whether the Stoos vision of management will ever fly in France. (Oui, non, peut-w)

The metronome that measures the pace of human progress ticks ever faster. More happens in one of your seconds at work than in one of your grandfather’s hours. You can feel it, can’t you?

People and organizations around the globe are linking into a single vast network. Every new connection creates more value than it gives up. Membership is snowballing. Interconnections form like topsy. Time accelerates because the denser the interconnections of a network, the faster its cycle time.

As events come faster and faster, change becomes visible. We can see that what once appeared rigid is actually fluid.

This…

…becomes this:

Look at a flower in your garden. You see a still life that doesn’t appear to grow.

Watch a stop-action film that collapses a month of that flower’s life into minutes, and you see that the flower is growing all the time.

Organizations are not so different from flowers. They’re both alive. As time speeds up, constants become variables. New opportunities unfold. Nurture the growth of organizations or flowers and they thrive; neglect them and they wither.

I’m investigating how people learn to speak a new language.

More than a million people have signed up with Chinese Pod to learn to speak Chinese.

Co-host Jenny Zhu filled me in on how this Shanghai-based company is helping adult learners, 60% of them from the U.S., attain fluency. Podcasts, more than a thousand of them, are part of the answer, but it takes more than exposure to 12-minute podcasts to master a language.

Most of Chinese Pod’s learners are 25-50 year old adults who are learning Chinese for personal growth, as a hobby, or because they have Chinese spouses or kids. 75% are native speakers of English. Increasingly, they’re abandoning their desktops and using smartphones and tablets to access Chinese Pod. Some are expats living in China and some are university students supplementing what they learn in class.

What made Chinese Pod the leading choice for learning Chinese? For one thing, you can sign up for free. Fewer than 1% of those registered users are paying for the experience.

Also, when Chinese Pod debuted in 2005, most textbooks and training materials were disembodied from real life. Few teachers had ever visited China and knew little of Chinese culture. Chinese Pod’s approach was to focus on providing something useful; the alternatives were merely academic.

Personally, I think I’m immune to learning languages in a classroom. I’ve studied French, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and German and can’t speak any of them. If I wanted to learn Chinese, I’d give Chinese Pod a try.

This morning I revisited the delightful story of how people learn to do their jobs at New Seasons Market, a chain of nine natural food stores in Portland, Oregon.

New Seasons exemplifies taking a non-training alternative to workplace learning.

That New Seasons is a people-oriented business echoes in their approach to learning.

• New hires receive a brief orientation and are then let loose to learn by walking around and asking questions.
• The HR director explains “New employees are given time to look around and get to know the products, ask questions, go online, read literature and shadow experienced employees. From a training perspective, we’ve created an environment where an employee’s learning style is accommodated because they learn their own way, at their own pace and in an order that makes sense to them.”
• New Seasons executives host a Disorientation to go over values and what it takes to be successful a month after people come on board. It makes so much sense to conduct this after new hires understand what makes the organization tick.
• People keep up to speed by attending short two-way sessions with a dozen or fewer colleagues on the job floor.

New Seasons trusts its employees to do their best — and the employees return the favor by doing it.

Todd Hudson describes the New Seasons experience on his Maverick Institute blog. I fully agree with his takeaways:

1. How you deliver training should reinforce your values and business model. Is customer service key to your success? Face-to-face methods like mentoring might be best. Yes, everyone’s jumping on the e-learning bandwagon today, but before you do, ask yourself ‘How does sitting at a computer taking in information align with the value our employees deliver?’ There are plenty of situations where e-learning is the right choice. Just make sure it’s your situation.
2. Training should align with the environment. Learning by walking around at a grocery store is great. But at a copper mine? Not on your life! Too dangerous; more structure would be needed. Walking around ‘virtually’ in a simulation would be a great alternative. Whenever possible, let the work environment organically teach employees as much as it can and at their pace.
3. Training and learning should be a part of the natural rhythm of your company’s work day. Don’t let training stick out like a sore thumb and disturb your business. If you have night shifts, train at night. If your company’s work pace is irregular, then training should fit into these periods of inactivity. Here’s a simple rule: If people are complaining about training, you’re doing it wrong.

Todd’s white paper on Lean Knowledge Transfer is worth a read. I’m going to bring this to the attention of the Stoos Network; we’re on the lookout for examples of enlightened next practices. If you share my interest in mashing up agile development and corporate learning, you may want to check out Unmanagement.net.

Today’s New York Times tells the story of the MBA program at Frederick Taylor University, an unaccredited business school headquartered in Moraga, California. For a mere $5,000 you can earn an MBA from the “university.” The school is entirely online, has no classes, and measures student performance with open-book, multiple-choice exams.

The Times astutely notes that the program at Frederick Taylor is not as rigorous as those offered by its accredited peers although naive applicants don’t seem to notice. “I did not realize that it did not carry the same weight as Berkeley or Stanford,” said a recent MBA graduate.

In a front-page story, the Times also notes that Mitt Romney has been praising Full Sail University. To its credit, Full Sail does have a physical campus although the school has begun offering “a full slate of progressive and creative online degree programs.” Romney has said for-profit schools hold down the cost of education. Tuition for a bachelor’s in Film, Game Art, or Web Design is $80,000+. Full Sails’ CEO is co-chair of Romney’s fund-raising team in Florida.

Ten days ago I flew to Switzerland for a mountaintop retreat with twenty thought leaders from around the world to ponder better ways to manage organizations.

On the flight over, I watched the film Inside Job, a documentary about the shenanigans that led to the financial meltdown fueled by the subprime mortgage bubble. The movie’s incendiary. There are lots of bad apples out there: self-serving financial engineers, ratings agencies, regulators, bankers, and more. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

As a graduate of the “West Point of Capitalism,” I’d been reluctant to condemn the system but Inside Job pushed me over the edge. Business is broken. Right before watching the movie, I read a series of Harvard Business Review articles by Roger Martin about the wrong-headedness of maximizing shareholder value. This slippery slope leads to short-term thinking, cooking the books, and screwing everyone up and down the chain except grossly overpaid CEOs. Chasing shareholder value is like trying to make your car go faster by rigging the speedometer.

Dissatisfied workers, pissed-off customers, and lousy returns on investment are the outcomes of a broken system. The current business environment is a breeding ground for Murphy’s Law. Nobody’s happy and rebellion is in the air.

Stoos is a tiny village atop a mountain about an hour south of Zurich. It’s a beautiful spot for getting away from it all. Four people — a Swiss professor, a Dutch entrepreneur and author, an American agile development coach living in Switzerland, and an American management author — realized that lots of us were talking about the same malaise with management independently. They invited us to convene on the mountain to find common ground — and a better framework for doing business.

After the two-day session in Stoos, I took the train south to Lugano, a perennially sunny town that couples Swiss efficiency and Italian verve  (Mangiare!) on the shore of an Alpine lake. Fragments of the mountain top conversations rolled around in my head. My thoughts are still coming together.

Foremost is that the business world must shift its focus from things to people. Living things trump machines. Moreover, people are inherently social. We cannot thrive — or even survive — in isolation. Connections are vital to creating value. And how is that value created? By adapting to change — and that requires learning. Bottom-line: businesses are networks of learning individuals.

Financial success not the ultimate target. Chasing money for its own sake is wrong-headed and demoralizing. Drucker had it right: the purpose of business is to create and satisfy customers. People in sustainable organizations focus on doing this better and better, forever delivering more value to their customers. Do this right and the money will follow.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Newcomens_Dampfmaschine_aus_Meyers_1890.png

For several hundred years, the machine has been the metaphor for the organization. Management’s role was to make the machine work efficiently. People were cogs; managers controlled human resources as if they were interchangeable parts. Bosses did the thinking; workers were told to get the job done. It was as if workers lacked intelligence, emotion, and initiative. Shut up and do your job.

Machines work well when you need to do the same thing over and over. They’re not so hot when doing different things is required. Denser interconnections have transformed the world into one vast complex system. The past is no longer a guide to the future. Small things have enormous consequences. Logic breaks down. Shit happens. Everything’s different.

Organism, a living system. Source: http://tolweb.org/tree/learn/concepts/whatisphylogeny.html

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.

Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning.

On the flight back to San Francisco, I watched Werner Herzog’s fabulous film about the 32,000 year old Chauvet Caves in Southern France. Herzog says the Caves are the place “where the modern human soul was awakened.” A review noted that the paintings “are exceptional not only for their age or their historical importance, but for their beauty and grace, the strange window they offer into the development of man’s ways of looking at the world through art.” The Stoos Gathering resonates the same chord. It’s all about the creativity of people.

Those of us who took part in the Stoos Gathering are sorting through what we came up with. The punchline is “learning networks of (diverse) people creating value,” but I imagine that will be refined. You can track where we’re at and join the conversation on our website and LinkedIn group.

Next I’m going to explore the implications for professional learning and working smarter.

“This is business.” — Vito Corleone, The Godfather

Business is changing, and the learning function must change along with it.

Rigid, industrial-age corporations are not keeping up with the pace of change. Customer Spring, Shareholder Spring, and Worker Spring may break out any day. Everyone’s mad as hell. They won’t take it any more.

How bad is it? The lifespan of corporations is at an all-time low. The majority of workers are frustrated, unhappy, and disengaged. Shareholders are receiving a lower return on investment than ever before. Customers are fed up with mediocre service. Return on assets has declined every year for the last forty. The only class of people making money are CEOs, and there’s general agreement that their rewards are obscene and inappropriate. We can’t go on like this.

Now what?
Many people have suggested what business needs to do differently.

Social business, Enterprise 2.0, Radical Management, the Connected Company, Living Networks, Management 3.0, and Working Smarter suggest such techniques as putting the customer in charge, harvesting collective intelligence, self-organizing teams, speedy cycle times, collaboration, transparency, openness, agility, trusting one another, responding to feedback, bottom-up organization, peer learning, web 2.0 culture, and optimizing networks. Until now, most of the people working to bring this about were acting independently.

The Stoos Gathering

Last weekend a group of twenty-one people joined forces on a mountain top in Switzerland to collaborate on coming up with ways out of this mess. Our website tells the story.

Our evolving view is that successful future organizations will become learning networks of individuals creating value. They will become stewards of the living. This is a major break from the past — and an opportunity for L&D professionals to become essential contributors to their organizations.

Learning is no longer optional
Continuous improvement and delighting customers require a culture of pervasive learning. We’re not talking classes and workshops here. Creating a new order of business requires learning ecologies — what we’ve been calling Workscapes — that make it simple and enjoyable for people to learn what they need to get the job done. Companies that fail to learn will wither and die.

As all business becomes social business, L&D professionals face a momentous choice. They can remain Chief Training Officers and instructors who get novices up to speed, deliver events required by compliance, and run in-house schools. These folks will be increasingly out of step with the times.

Or they can become business leaders who shape learning cultures, social networks, collaborative practices, information flows, federated content management, just-in-time performance support, customer feedback mechanisms, and structures for continuous improvement.

Santa brought me a Nikon J1 camera a few days after Christmas. It’s a small shooter with interchangeable lenses. I’m having a ball trying it out.

Santa gave me the Nikon 1 J1 10.1 MP HD Digital Camera System with 10-30mm VR 1 NIKKOR Lens (Black). If I can get used to carrying around a camera that’s slightly larger than my pants pocket, I may get the 30-100 zoom lens as well.

Here’s a sample photo:

Here’s the same photo with a little retouching with a $30 app called Perfect Portrait.

Now that I have the camera, I’ve resolved to take higher quality photos this year.

Scott Skibell, video
Steve Tuffill coordination
Kimberly Caise, moderation and training

P.P.S.
Those were the days, my friends. We thought they’d never end. We’d sing and dance forever and a day.