My life just hasn’t been busy enough lately. Too much time on my hands. So, in the midst of Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation, I said okay to participate in another event. An email just reminded me:

>> INFORMAL LEARNING: JAY CROSS – “Learning Their Way or Yack at Them: Your Choice”

Don’t miss this fun session on discovering how leading organizations are building platforms to support collaboration, informal learning, and real-time problem solving. Register.

Alternatively, join Tony Karrer’s talk on Work Literacy at Corporate Learning Trends. We’re speaking at precisely the same time. Both talks are being recorded. I imagine my content will be superior, but Tony is taller and better looking, so you’re facing a tough choice on this one.

Bryan Chapman and Julie Groshens presided over Training magaine’s Technology in Action Awards Ceremony.

Brian Chapman

Julie Groshens

Here’s an interview with a guy at DoD who qualifies for one of my Slam-Dunk-ROI awards. They cut delivery cost from $300/learning to $4! The cost for developing a course-hour of instruction fell from $34,000 to $10,000. In year one, the program saved the U.S. Joint Forces Command > $50 million! Wow!

Find more videos like this on Internet Time

Some friends and I drifted into the awards ceremony last night after dinner, attracted by the promise of complimentary vino. Once in the room, I realized that I had been one of the judges for this competition. (It’s easy to forget stuff like this when you do it for free). In fact, I was the only judge who showed up. Also, the folks I voted for didn’t win. I don’t plan to volunteer for this one again.

My DevLearn photos of the last 24 hours

San Jose has its moments

Brent Schlenker’s debut as a conference impresario
(Watch out, Elliott!)

Mark Oehlert trying to convince Tim O’Reilly he’s an alpha geek

Tim O’Reilly keynotes

The Tweet board is converting people into Twitterers

Nice logo, interesting application

The Great eLearning Research Panel, Session 101 here at DevLearn

• Kevin Oakes, Institute for Corporate Productivity
• Claire Schooley, Forrester Research
• Chris Howard, Bersin & Associates
• Kevin Martin, Aberdeen Group
• Will Thalheimer, Work-Learning Research

Will Thalheimer

Kevin Marks

Chris Howard

Chaire Schooley

Kevin Oakes

My observations will appear in red.

• WT: Steve Wexler has left the post of director of research for the Guild.
• KO: The Institute for Corporate Productivity was born in the sixties, founded by George Odiorne and Rensis Likert.
• CS: Claire, describing Forrester’s independence, says they don’t do white papers for clients.
• CH: Chris Howard is next, describing Bersin & Associates as an amalgam of Kevin’s and Claire’s approaches. (Bersin does write white papers for clients. And endorsements. But I don’t consider this a taint on Josh’s reputation.)
• KM: Kevin Martin has done Human Capital Management for Aberdeen since before it was called eLearning.

What are the top trends?

• CH: Learning 2.0. Get informal out sooner, get people working with one another. It addresses the informal and on-the-job.
• CS: It’s collaborative. It’s also putting the learner in charge.
• KM: Learning finally come to the point where learning is the strategic driver. Talent management. This is the year when Learning and Performance Management converge.
• KO: 86% companies more likely to use 2.0 than they do today. 41% respondents using informal learning to a high extent. Learning is getting left behind as talent management becomes the new focus.

I had to jump into the conversation. 41%??? Every company has informal learning going on. Some are better at it than others. KO said the 41% referred to companies that support informal learning with technology.

CH: Talent management and learning 2.0 are antithetical. Talent is organized; learning 2.0 is chaotic.

Learning 2.0

• KO: Trust is a big barrier. Culture of knowledge hoarding retards it. Silos. Time issues.
• CH: Culture is the big issue. Sharing information is the key.
• KM: Start small, go to CEO.
• CS: (Seconded by others). It must be top down.

Hold it, folks. Web 2.0 is about empowerment, bottom-up, start small and grow, and beta-beta-beta. While it’s great to have the backing of senior management, it’s no longer an imperative. Intelpedia became a success before managers ever heard of it.

The imploding economy
Auto sales in the 3rd quarter off 32%. Yuck.

• CH: Training budgets already down.
• CS: Still a lot to do with technology. People getting creative about use.
• KM: Economic crisis pushing learning agenda. Lower retirement rates in store. Focus on improving productivity.
• KO: 99% of the companies cut training in economic downturns.

Talent management: leaving training function behind?

• CS: Learning and talent management are peas in a pod.
• CH: Makes learning more important, not less.
• KO: “About us” descriptions of LMS vendors — all of them say they’re into talent management. Talent function and learning functions fight one another for scarce corporate resources. Innovation is hot, hot, hot.
• KM: Definition of quality hire: new employee retention, performance reviews, informal reviews, time to productivity.

Measurement

• KO: Top priority, but using business measures
• CH: Not a top priority
• WT: Only 17% happy with their measurement process now
• KM: They are not doing it…

What proportion of a learning professional’s time should be devoted to informal learning?

• 20%
• 20%
• 25%
• 50%

Uh, do people not understand what this means?

Let me spell out what I think is at work here:

KO: Informal learning good for process, not for things like leadership.

Argh. Leadership is best learned experientially and informally, is it not? Anyone have an example of a leadership course that’s worth its salt? At Crotonville, they tout the informal sessions at the big house as the secret sauce.

What should elearning professionals be doing differently?

• CH: Recognize that things are changing all the time.
• CS: You have to listen to the employees today, to understand their needs. What are their interests?
• KO: To get funding, you must clue in senior management to what problems you are solving.
• KM: Be business problem finders as well as solvers. Use business metrics and review against performance. Set up a process for gap identification and analysis. Web 2.0 is a learning style thing, not a generational thing.

November 14:

1765 - Robert Fulton was born (steamboat, submarine)

1832 - First streetcar (New York)

1840 - Claude Monet is born (waterlilies)

1851 - Moby Dick published

1900 - Aaron Copland is born (Fanfare for the Common Man)

1922 - BBC begins radio broadcasts

1940 - Luftwaffe bombers demolish Coventry Cathedral

1948 - Prince Charles is born

1954 - Condoleezza Rice is born

1971 - Mariner 9 becomes first spacecraft to orbit another planet (Mars)

2008 - Jay leads two sessions at DevLearn (Hot Topics at 7:15 & Learnscaping: When Learning is the Work at 11:15)

A new version of the Learnscaping un-book became available for purchase today.

Learnscaping 1.32 consists of 150 pages in print, 80 articles online, and a handful of videos. The price for the hardcopy book remains unchanged at $25. The completely electronic edition is $36.

Check out the preview. Purchase here.

The red version (two months ago) had but 100 pages.

This is where I’m headed this morning at 10:00 Pacific. I’m so confident Tony’s webinar will be great that I’ve already decided to come back in three weeks!

By the way, that’s not really the title of my upcoming talk. I mean “yack at them,” not “yack to them.” It’s more presumptuous (and typical) to yack at learners. More in their face. Take this.

Howard Rheingold’s post on the Britannica Blog, R.I.P.: Lectures, Notes, and Tests (Scrapping the Old Ways), should be required reading for trainers and teachers the world over.

and since my classrooms did not have fixed chairs — what an abomination it is to attach chairs immovably to the floor! what does this tell students? — I asked the students to move their chairs into a circle.

So I began thinking about radically changing the way I taught. What about eliminating lectures entirely, and assigning the students to co-teach with me?

Collaborative inquiry requires individual commitment to active participation

These are the same issues my colleagues and I are facing in the corporate arena as we construct the Learnscape Sandbox.

Related posts:

Serge Ravel: Don’t teach them to learn; teach them to teach.

Secret Life of a Wiki Gardener (Beth Kanter)

Southwest Airlines and Dell (the original, not today’s flavor) executed disruptive business strategies that were successful but entailed betting the ranch. The increasingly fluid nature of business infrastructure and the opportunities it affords for asymmetrical results enable daring companies to make major, disruptive advances without placing all-or-nothing bets.

Salesforce.com is a poster child for succeeding by playing a higher-order game. By tirelessly and persuasively selling the concept of software-as-service in place of enterprise software, Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff didn’t compete with existing players so much as create a new market. Google AdSense, by targeting individual interests, and Facebook, with its open APIs, have accomplished much the same thing.

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison call these “shaping strategies” in an article in this month’s Harvard Business Review. They write:

The historical pattern — disruption followed by stabilization — has itself been disrupted. A new kind of infrastructure is evolving, built on the sustained exponential pace of performance improvements in computing, storage, and bandwidth.

Today’s new digital infrastructure … gives relatively small actions and investments an impact disproportionate to their size. To use a boxing metaphor, companies can now punch above their weight class.

…each…company aspired to do something far bolder than simply shape the performance of its own enterprise — it strove to shape global ecosystems and thereby fundamentally alter industries and markets.

Corporate visions tend to be too narrow — they describe only the direction of the company articulating the vision. Shaping views instead start with a clear perspective on the direction of the relevant market or industry and articulate the value-creation implication for all companies involved.

I foresee the same forces at work on a lesser scale inside corporations. Learnscaping (creating networked platforms that combine work and learning) is an in-house shaping strategy for knowledge work and informal learning.

Last week, the authors of the HBR article and their peers at the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation invited me to participate in a workshop on Exponential Learning. I love their description of the “Big Shift” in the global business environment:

The Center for Edge Innovation is cooking up formulas for shaping strategies for learning, but I saw only a thin slice of their thinking. Hence, I’ll use their framework as a springboard to my own take on the potential for hyper-learning.

Visionary companies will focus on developing learning platforms instead of learning content. Content has a short shelf-life. Often it’s best when spontaneously created rather than planned in advance.

Learning platforms, henceforth learnscapes, lay the framework for co-creation, innovation, and self-service learning. A platform can support limitless programs. Furthermore, a platform does not set a bar for performance; it enables creative individuals to be all that they can be.

Learnscapes yield returns far above their weight class. An investment of tens of thousands sets the stage for earnings of tens of millions. The only bet-the-ranch aspect of this is doing nothing. Not that such outsize promise has created a stampede. Three out of four companies I talk with say their current approach to learning and development is not preparing their people to deal successfully with the future. Two out of three say their organizations are slow to change, even when it would be in their best interest to do so. Duh.

Think of a learning platform as a sandbox. Kids invent new ways to play in a sandbox long after the excitement of the latest toy wears off. Consider how BarCamp evolved from dinner-table conversation to full-blown professional conference in six days. When I first heard the idea, a few hours old, my first question was, “Where’s the wiki?” The wiki was already there, with a listing of information and needs. Ideas traveled on blogs, wikis, and social networks that were part of the sandbox some of us were already playing in.

If yesterday’s disruptive strategies exemplify thinking out of the box, shaping strategies are an entirely new box. My shape-shifting strategic vision is that businesses will prosper by inviting customers to join their learnscapes to co-create better worlds. Pedestrian thinking on this is not sustainable. As the Deloitte guys say in their HBR article:

Turbulent times demand that we learn how to shape the turbulence around us by creating an effective management ensemble that moves beyond adaptation to a shaping aspiration. More fundamentally, we need to understand how we can turn the instability created by digital infrastructure to our advantage by mobilizing many other participants to shape a more rewarding future.