From the conference program: Join us to break the ice, get to know one another, explain what we want to accomplish, preview what's ahead in the next three days, and decide to get the most out of the Workflow Learning Symposium. We kick off with a Workflow Learning primer. What is workflow learning? Why does it matter? What does it look like? What do we need to know? How do we prepare for it? What tools do we use to create it? What are the benefits? And what do XML, BPM, and KPIs have to do with it and why does my senior management care? Halfway through the session, we'll take our first steps as a community of practice.

This highly interactive session involved the Workflow Learning Community in some future visioning. Jay Cross kicked off the session by inviting us all to join in an inquiry into one possible future. “The world we live in today is a result of complexity,” Jay reminded us. “Two things contribute to that complexity: the world is unpredictable, and stuff happens.” Even so, we took a look at what the future might hold for Workflow Learning.

Our facilitator for the rest of the session was the process king, John Kelly. He offered a working definition of workflow learning: “Workflow learning is learning that takes place where the action is, where the customer is served, where value is created, where performance is measured, even where knowledge is still tacit and undocumented. Workflow Learning is about both, content and process.

The content we were working with in this kickoff session was events that might happen in the future. The process was a collaborative inquiry into future possibilities. John reminded us that “Predicting pales in comparison next to what happens when you ask a group of people to bet on the future. If Gloria Gery's definition of CBT was “thousands of answers to questions I don't have,” then what we are doing here is asking the few questions that might matter.

“What if you had to predict? What would you draw upon? What would your assumptions be? You won't have time to reflect on the results in this session, but we will post the results and try to integrate the implications in future sessions.”

At each table 6-8 people considered 13 future state scenarios, and guesstimated whether or not there was an 80% certainty of each event becoming reality in the next 2-5 years.

For example, the first item on the list was: “Service Oriented Architecture has replaced most client-server technology.” Most of the attendees weren't even sure what Service Oriented Architecture was. John defined SOA as software that walks a person through the steps of a task, and includes training. The “service” part is about breaking down the required functionality into very small pieces that can be combined to create customized workflow applications, as opposed to using an ERP, then Excel, then some other software to get one job done.

Each table of 5-8 people reviewed the entire list of 13 items and came to a group consensus. Then a representative from each table posted their consensus on a common tally board – if the net vote was +3 or greater, the item received a green dot. If the net vote was –3 or less, the item received a red dot.

Our vision of the future? Here are some of the things we think will happen:

• 70% of the Fortune 500 will integrate learning with enterprise technology by 2008
• Vendor revenue from application-specific eLearning courseware will decline more than 20% from 2004-2006
• All enterprise content management platforms will offer an LMS option by 2008
• 75% of the Fortune 100 companies will outsource major portions of responsibility for learning by 2009
• Most instructional designers will model business processes by 2008
• Fortune 500 trainees will use online reference material more than courses by 2006

Comments: The purpose of the vote is to have the conversations. Some of the things that were voted down had extreme language (“have replaced” “no longer possible”) that were difficult for people to agree with. Other statements were vague, or hard to define (“learning while performing”) That's OK. The important thing was, we had the conversations.