Sometime around the mid-point of the last century Tom (Thomas Henry) Delaney wrote the famous blues lyric, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” Over the years the phrase has been used to describe all kinds of situations where people “say” they want the benefits of something, but are unwilling to do what it takes to realize those benefits.  One could also call this the Wishful Thinking perspective.

One of the tell-tale attributes of people who embrace the Wishful Thinking point of view is the tendency to cut out essential pieces of “doing what works” and still expecting to get the desired result.  I’ll cop to the fact that I’m particularly guilty of cutting corners in my diet & exercise program and still wondering why I’m not slimmer and fitter.

In my experience, when it comes to the subject of demonstrating results in workplace learning, our profession is laboring under some serious wishful thinking.  This is because:

• On one hand, people want to believe that the training they are investing their lives in delivering is making a difference.
• On the other hand, in far too many cases, there is no evidence (using existing measurement tools) that substantiate that this training has a positive impact on performance.

Because of the lack of ability to demonstrate results, several schools of thought are emerging.

• On one end of the continuum there is a school of thought that says, “We believe in our hearts that our training does add value, but it’s too hard to quantify, so why bother trying to measure it at all.”
• At the other end of the continuum, there are people who believe that, in fact, traditional training approaches do not add much value and put 80% to 90% of the focus on informal learning.

I’d like to offer another perspective for consideration.  That perspective is this:

Most seasoned workplace learning professionals know what’s needed to design and execute on a learning process that can produce the desired capability development.   Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons (e.g. resource availability, customer appetite for doing what’s needed, not wanting to rock the boat, lack of leadership support, etc.) we end up compromising and cutting corners on what we know works. When we cut the corners we know we shouldn’t cut, the net result is a training that doesn’t produce the results we want.

Next month, in Part 2, I’ll discuss our experience on the corners not to cut if you do not want to leave the development of  new knowledge and skills to chance, and you want to produce real demonstrable results.

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The 2011 Talent Shortage Survey, conducted by Manpower Group last year shows that an average of 34% of companies across the globe are facing a lack of required talent.  It seems that companies are seeking far more specific capability sets and it is taking them much longer to fill the vacancies they have.  Most are hoping to “make do” until the world returns to normal.  But more and more it is looking as if that particular “normal” no longer exists.

According to the Manpower Group report:  “Instead, organizations are operating in the “new normal,” where the economic pressures of the last few years have forced them to do more with less, and they’ve discovered that they can accomplish amazing things despite reduced resources—as long as they have the right people in place. Talent is becoming the key competitive differentiator, and countries and companies with access to the right talent are positioning themselves to succeed in the rapidly changing world of work.”

If our people are talented enough, we should be able to train them to fulfill new roles. To do so, we need to start by asking  “What level of capability is really needed for any particular role in an organization?”  To begin to answer this question,  we can use a model  built on three levels of capability:

Knowledge
As defined in this model this is the ability to know intellectually what a topic is all about, what its terms mean, what models are part of that topic, in what kinds of standardized situations various models and terms are relevant, and the ability to both understand and explain the various procedures and processes are associated with a topic, role, or job.  This is a fairly easy level of capability to develop and verify.  It requires providing the learner with the needed information in and easily understood manner and then testing the learner to see if they can correctly do the things listed in the definition.

Skillfulness
Obviously, skillfulness requires acquiring knowledge but it goes beyond that.  Skillfulness is the ability to apply principles and procedures in a specified way, repeatedly, and predictability.  It is the ability to do an action, effort, process as defined with little or no variation.  In tennis, for example, it is the ability to get the serve in the right place the first time, every time.  In a processing center, it would be the ability to perform the process as taught over and over again without flaw in standard situations
This level of capability requires a bit more to develop than knowledge alone.  It repeated practice until the ability to apply the correct procedure to the situation flawlessly becomes nearly second nature.  Verifying that this level of capability has been achieved is often done through a variety of means such as tabulated error rates, direct observation, and speed of process rates.

Proficiency
As with skillfulness, proficiency requires the development of the preceding levels of capability.    The proficient person is the one who understands the capability area so deeply that they can extrapolate the fundamental principles of the capability in order to deal with completely new and unexpected situations and to develop even better processes and procedures.  Developing and verifying this level of capability requires a far more complex process than just the memorization of information or the repeated practice of skills.  It requires that the learner be placed in unfamiliar and unpredictable situations and required to solve new problems.

So how do you train to proficiency?  Some highly sophisticated (and very expensive) simulations are able to do this in a measurable way but the cost of that approach makes it a solution that can only be afforded for a limited range of needs.  The most cost-effective process of developing this kind of capability is to put the learner into situations in which he or she is confronting new and unexpected problems and attempting to solve them using the knowledge they’ve attained and the skill they’ve acquired but doing that in a way that they get continual and immediate feedback from a more proficient practitioner.  This is the basic, Learn, Do, Learn model.  In many cases employees acquire this level of capability with sufficient time just through the process of informal learning and trial and error.

But it is also possible to apply structure to this development process and greatly reduce the time and effort required.  A claims organization with a major insurer took its adjusters through a coached case study, in which at each juncture, the case got more and more complicated.  Adjusters were asked to write up the appropriate documents at each stage, receiving feedback from coaches who were recognized as subject matter experts. As a capstone exercise, they  brought  a case from their own files for the group to analyze using the tools practiced in the case study.  This combination of both informal and formal learning processes resulted in a dramatic reduction in losses experienced by the organization.

We may not be able to reduce training budgets, given the need to equip existing staff to take on new responsibilities. Manpower’s survey actually shows that most companies worldwide are increasing their training efforts.  But we CAN make training more efficient and effective by identifying the level of capability we require for each role.

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Here we are bright and early in 2012, and many learning organizations are honing in on their priorities for the year, prioritizing the organization’s training needs. Here’s a thinking framework that may help.

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Last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced MITx, saying “MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

• organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
• feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
• allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
• operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.”

We find this fascinating.

This development suggests that MIT has decided that merely offering access to content, powerful as doing so is, isn’t really sufficient to ensure actual learning. MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, now completing its first decade, includes nearly 2,100 MIT courses and has been used by more than 100 million people.  That’s certainly a grand success using the traditional “butts in seats” metric. But because assessment isn’t part of that package, they don’t know to what extent “use” correlates to actual incorporation of the material to the extent that users can demonstrate some form of mastery.

While no MIT profs will be performing instructor duties, the platform design is incorporating social learning technologies, to put learners in contact with one another.  There are aspirations to create  “a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.”

This is not just a public service. It’s also research project. MIT will undoubtedly be looking to see how well various online pedagogical methods work on a population which hasn’t made it through  their highly selective admissions process,  and which ones work well for their residential population.  What will they find? That the gifted students who make it through their selection process can learn from any process, no matter how ill-conceived?  That the kinds of courses traditionally offered to MIT students require significant adjustment in order to develop mastery in students who don’t come to the subject with MIT grade intellectual firepower?

And of course what are the implications for those of us in corporate training? To be successful, training has to result not only in intellectual mastery of the material we present, but also in actual behavior change on the job.  We think incorporating opportunities for learners to reflect on the implications of training materials in the company of peers and coaches is critical to achieving behavioral change, because work is almost always a collaborative process.  Wouldn’t it be something if those smart folks at MIT were able to prove it matters for intellectual mastery as well?

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I’ve been spending some time with the Internet Time Alliance’s 5 Stages of Workplace Learning diagram, and with a lot of folks who are champions of informal learning and the Workplace Learning Model. The desired end point is stage five, where there is no longer any traditional workplace learning managed and controlled by L&D, but rather there are autonomous learners, collaboratively working and informally learning together.

Color me old-fashioned, but the notion of a stage 5 organization where there is no formal learning; where the learning organization (if it still exists) is only in the business of encouraging autonomous, independent and inter-dependent, self-directed learners – well, honestly, that sounds like Narnia rather than the world that my customers, my colleagues, and I live in.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m an old baby boomer who went to a college with no grades and no required curriculum. I went through the human potential movement, taught college courses in self-actualization, and have the accolades, degrees, and scars to prove it. I get the importance of believing in people, encouraging autonomy, and putting lots of energy into the folks we work with.

But call me crazy, I’d still like to have my brain surgeon have a smidgeon of formal classroom instruction coupled with years of formal and informal on-the-job learning – much or most of which was probably not self directed. And yeah, I would even go so far as to buy into that old fashioned, command-and-control, hierarchical model that says that she should be certified as capable – using criteria that she didn’t have an equal voice in developing – before she cuts my skull open.

And similarly, if I were the VP Sales for a major corporation, with my livelihood dependent on quarterly sales figures, most likely I’d want learning professionals supporting my department who would not simply be encouraging self-directed learning on the part of my new hires. Nope. I’d want to have a seat the table when we determine what skills I’m looking for in sales reps, and I’d not only expect but demand that the learning professionals use whatever tools are in their toolbox to equip new hires with these capabilities as quickly as possible, and to help us determine which ones weren’t making the mark – even if this meant using some tools that were not, strictly speaking, self directed, informal, and non-hierarchical.

If you weren’t reading the papers, blogs, forums, and social networks created and inhabited by learning professionals, you’d probably think I was nuts to make what seem to be some pretty obvious points.

But here’s the thing – there are many, many “thought leaders” in the learning space who shudder every time they hear the dreaded word “training,” who think ADDIE (along with instructional design in general) has long outlived its usefulness, and who believe that the world would be a better place if we shifted entirely to a self-directed, informal model of organizational learning.

And, honestly, I understand where they are coming from. When two week, highly effective, off-site leadership courses emphasizing small group interaction in the 80’s became 160-slide death by PowerPoint eLearning “courses” in the late 90’s, we began to replicate the worst practices of education electronically. In effect, as a profession, we put on our stupid hats when we first got eLearning authoring tools. We added propellers when we eagerly agreed to devote most of our mind share and budget for two to three years to implement these monsters.

With a focus on compliance training (AKA litigation risk management), technology, and horrible eLearning courses that do not create capability changes, something had to give. And informal learning has been the new panacea, and its social media technologies the new shiny object.

But at the end of the day, it’s vital that we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Effective formal learning is still the intervention of choice in many, many situations. So is informal learning. So is creating performance support systems. Let’s use the right tool for the right job.

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You’d have to be living under a rock to be unaware that the use of social media is considered to be THE hot skill effective knowledge workers must master. What you might not realize is that you are probably already a pretty effective user of social media, even if you do not yet have a twitter account. Let’s take a look at how:

1. Search!

Just who do you think makes all those resources that show up on google search? Those would be people, though likely people you don’t know. Search is often the first place we go to find resources published by other humans. And if the thing you find which has the answer you are looking for is something which puts your mind in touch with somebody else’s thinking, it’s profoundly social. So think about the places you search and how often you search them –

a. Google and other Internet search engines
b. Local disk drive
c. Shared organizational disk drives
d. Shared organizational resources
e. Shared commercial resources (Lexis-Nexus, etc.)

2. Personal Inquiry!

a. Asking the folks you know who might know, calling, dropping by the office, or shooting an email to a colleague
b. Posting to a forum where the topic you need information on is under discussion (often found using search, above)

3. Crowdsourcing –  asking  a question of “Everybody” (for values of “everybody” which may exclude the folks you really need to contact)

a. Everybody following you on twitter
b. Everybody following a certain hashtag on twitter
c. Everybody following you on facebook
d. Everybody reading your blog
e. Everybody following you on linked-in
f. Everybody following your group ‘s discussion on linked-in
g. Everybody following you on Google+

There is a reason why crowdsourcing as a strategy is not as ubiquitous as search and personal inquiry are, and it’s the same reason that things are always in the last place we look – once we find it, we stop looking!

Most of us can find most of what we need most of the time through channels one and two. And for those of us whose jobs require us to locate proprietary organizational information, that stuff isn’t out on the open web, anyway.

In some fields of endeavor, the careful curation of contacts and followers on Twitter, Linked-in, Google+ and/or Facebook brings rich rewards (often, the addition of folks to one’s list of people to make personal inquiries of in the future!) But in others, the minds we need to touch just are not out there in the crowd hanging out on social media sites, and sifting through the responses offered by well-meaning folks who can’t really know the context within which our answers have to work is awfully expensive in terms of time. We need to find the right people where they live, which might be in an organizational knowledge base, or in the company directory.

Highly productive organizations develop a wealth of information on their “secret sauce” approach to answering tough questions. Forward-thinking organizations are finding ways to use social media tools to put their folks in touch with that store of info, and with subject matter experts within and outside of the organization. I’d argue that one measure of success in that enterprise will be the extent to which workers can find the organization’s answer to any given through search and personal inquiry, without ever having to turn to the anonymous crowd.

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Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has put together a list of 100 Top Learning Tools for 2011.  She surveyed 531 self-identified learning professionals, and these are the tools these folks mentioned.  Now, Jane takes a very learner-centered approach. She’s all about enabling informal, just in time learning for individuals to structure their own learning experiences.  So it’s not surprising that many of the tools named by the learning professionals she knows were selected from the point of view of the individual learner.   Because this is 2011, most of these tools are decidedly “social”.   In the top 5 (Twitter,  YouTube , Google Docs , Skype,  and WordPress) Skype is a communications platform for 1-1 or small group real time conversation (though skype messaging can be used asynchronously) The other 4 permit users to scan content others have produced, and/or publish their own.

Here at Q2, we’re focused on learning within the organization. We help structure learning experiences which enable organizations to equip their learners with the tools needed to make good judgments when the situation doesn’t quite fit into the normal mold. We’re all about social learning too. We use all of those top 5 tools and either actively use or have experimented with most of the top 65.  Some of us here are admitted toolophiles, who take pleasure in checking out all the new “toys.” But we’re aware that the learners at the organizations we work with have a lot on their plates. The last thing THEY need is 65 additional tools to learn as part of their learning process!  The Internet (and for that matter, the corporate intranet!) is, in many ways, a library on steroids – more resources are available than ever before, but finding the right ones is time consuming, and it’s easier than ever to spend hours wandering around in the stacks (or even in the wrong library building!)

We’re painfully aware that our eCampus represents Yet Another Platform with Yet Another User Interface to master, another bit of cognitive overhead to the learning process. It’s for this reason that we design a custom interface for each client.  We have a cornucopia of useful widgets, but we take the time to figure out which ones will really enhance the experience for each set of learners.  And we make it easy to build access to the go-to tools for each learner group into the spaces that group uses. Need a quick reference knowledge base in your learning space? We’ve got one.  Already have one in Google Docs or Sharepoint? Cool, we’ll link out to it.  Got a terrific library of SCORM objects in your LMS?  Of course you can build those into your eCampus courses!  Would you rather bolt a window into our coached learning spaces onto your existing portal? We can do that. Want to incorporate coaching of learners by the folks who really know this stuff into your course? We LOVE that! Do you want to do it in real time or asynchronously?

It’s expensive to take worker time away from production in order to provide time for training.  By providing thoughtfully structured learning experiences which pull together just the right learning resources from all corners of the organization, using just the tools which make sense for the initiative, we help our customers maximize the portion of training time which is spent gaining the required skills.

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In a post titled Vendor-neutral, Harold Jarche makes a pitch for SocialCast, suggesting that it “gets a critical part of workplace performance right. They understand that collaboration has to be embedded in the workflow. Their “secret sauce” is the ability to integrate with a wide variety of other enterprise software applications.” He also posts a picture of how integrated collaboration might look, where the collaboration platform can be accessed in-context from within existing applications.

To me, this seems like a great way to support informal learning “at the point of need,” so I totally support customers who maintain this as a requirement for their social learning system.

But I believe we need to go further – especially as learning professionals; and especially if you as a learning professional do not believe that informal learning is the whole of learning.

Integration with Learning Paths

It’s all well and good to have a link from an eLearning module in an LMS to a Yammer discussion, and call it a “community.” But most of our customers are busy professionals with day jobs, being asked to do more with less every year. They have neither the time nor inclination for optional “communities” following completing their training course.

Instead, when capability change is the issue, more and more organizations are constructing learning paths that transform training events into learning processes. And when we think back to face-to-face models, it is in the social activities that we learn the most – small group case studies, Q&A with an expert, de-briefing a personal assessment with a peer, etc. Moreover, corporate CLOs are increasingly wanting the balance of training to be less in the classroom and more on the job, with coaching and reinforcement to lock in new skills.

Finally, we are finding that in large enterprises, one obstacle to integrated onboarding programs, for example, is that learners must access learning resources from multiple LMS’s and content repositories, and there’s no way to “glue these together” into an integrated learning path.

To drive capability change, social components can’t be an afterthought or an optional “post-training activity.” Informal learning is great, but not enough. Our learning systems must have the capability to present seamless learning paths that integrate learning resources from multiple sources with social activities, coaching, and reinforcement. All of these activities need to be tracked and managed from one place – even the social ones.

Integration with Performance Support

Our learning systems must include robust performance support modules, that allow us to quickly create taxonomies that map to job functions, or provide a single source of truth when a reference system is required. These systems must not simply be taxonomies of dead files, but rather maps to concise explanations of what needs to be done, with back-up resources that include no only files, but links to discussions, learning objects, and experts.

Integration needs to happen at several levels. First, the performance support systems need to be integrated with the social media, content repositories, and eLearning modules to provide a social performance support ecosystem.

Second, these systems need to be integrated with the enterprise tools, so that from a telesales “dashboard” an individual contributor can click “Special Handling Instructions” and be taken immediately to that customer’s page in the performance support system.

So I would offer a different diagram than the Socialcast one that emphasizes, from an IT perspective, the ability to integrate with the enterprise. Rather, I think we need to always keep the learner at the center – in both our requirements and in our software – and would offer the following view of how a social learning system should integrate learning and work…

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We’ve been hearing a steady drumbeat for some time about what games have to teach us about the way learning works. Some people (unsurprisingly, people who sell game development!) assert that this research suggests that learning opportunities should increasingly be presented in the context of games.

I disagree. I think what gaming teaches us about learning is that learning is facilitated by contexts in which:

1.  Learning is primarily experiential – people do stuff and observe the results of their actions
2.  The rules are explicit, or alternatively, introduced through exercises which start with the basics and grow in complexity as the learner demonstrates mastery.
3. Errors are immediately apparent, and setbacks due to error commission are recoverable.
4.  Increasing mastery is explicitly rewarded with access to more complex “work.”
5.  Extraordinary performance is explicitly rewarded with a listing on a widely visible leader board.
6.  Rewards are issued promptly after demonstrations of mastery.

Interestingly, people who become engaged with a game tend to seek each other out, even if the game itself is only single-player. There are multiple YouTube videos out for each and every level of Angry Birds, demonstrating to those who are stuck how others have met this challenge.

These are lessons we should take to heart as we organize our work cultures. We know that 70% of learning takes place, informally, on the job. We can facilitate that learning by being thoughtful about the progression of assignments for new workers. If we are careful to create a non-punitive culture around mistakes, we can address errors more quickly, which in itself makes them more recoverable, but also encourages the sharing of war stories around similar experiences which are part of the tacit knowledge in every organization.

We can’t generally arrange for assignments to grow in complexity at the precise rate of our employees’ competency growth, but we can make a point of letting them know that we believe they have advanced to a new level and will be on our minds for the next appropriate assignment when it comes along. And we certainly can reward excellent work with wide recognition.

People who work in organizations with this sort of culture don’t need their training presented in the spoon-full-of-sugar format which games present. They’ll seek it out in whatever format is available if their colleagues have recommended it as a useful boost for getting to the next level on the “game” that is their job.

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Google Plus has been out widely for a week, and already, there are numerous articles speculating on its usefulness for education and training.

We at Q2 are skeptical.

Don’t get me wrong – we’re big Google aficionados here.  We actually PAY the good people at Google for hosting our staff email accounts and Google Apps.  But in a space overflowing with tools, we’re picky about using the right tool for the right job, and we don’t really see this new one as offering what’s needed to facilitate organizational learning.

The big leap forward Google Plus represents is greater control for the individual over who she is sharing with than is available on Facebook.  Which is great, and arguably makes it a better tool in one’s personal learning environment than Facebook ever could be.   I say this as an individual who does frequently learn about interesting things via my Facebook friends, and is already appreciative of the ability Google Plus offers  to tune who I’m paying attention to, and who I’m broadcasting to, a lot more precisely than Facebook and Twitter permit.

It’s just that if  you’re in the business of facilitating learning initiatives within the organization, as we are, then you are rather dependent on the ability to form groups at the organizational level.  For formal learning, we want to be able to organize people into groups with different roles — into coaches and learners and administrators.   And for informal learning,  the existence of silos in an organization means that people frequently don’t know people who we’d like them to become acquainted with.  All that crossing silos stuff we want to accomplish means creating groups with representatives from the silos we are trying to integrate, and actively facilitating conversations among the members of that group.

So we see Google Plus as a promising tool in the individual’s kit, but for organizational initiatives, we’re sticking to tools which give our customers the power to form and reform groups in their org.

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