In some ways, it’s the knowledge equivalent of Gresham’s Law (“bad money drives out good”): make delivery cheap enough, and you get page-turners, repurposed PowerPoint, lectures transformed to podcasts, and videotaped lectures turned into webcasts.

In the same way that “digitized” doesn’t mean “video worth watching,” “informal” doesn’t necessarily mean “valuable and relevant.”

(At the same time, you and I both know there are many training departments that act like the Little Corporate Schoolhouse, or maybe like the Acme Sausage Factory: they just grind the stuff out.)

The real question centers on identifying worthy performance on the job, determining obstacles to that performance, and figuring out how to address them. My hunch has always been there’s more to that than asking who moved your cheese.

The challenges with seelou training are what caused one organization to hire me to create a training department. Everyone didn’t get the same quality of training, for example. The day shift, being more visible to senior management and more vulnerable to management-by-walking-around, had more ad hoc OJT, while people on the night shift were handed the latest updates on a piece of paper and told to figure it out. Then, some folks are better at explanations with clarity, and in altering their explanations/demonstrations if a colleague doesn’t get it. And, there’s the matter of competition. When organizations encourage individual performers to compete with each other to be the best, it may ultimately benefit the organization, but it encourages individual and group knowledge hoarding, reluctance to share or help train each other, sharing false information to stay ahead of others, and a work atmosphere that increases employee turnover. This can be detrimental to lesser performers who could use the assistance or those who are more uncomfortable asking someone to “show me.” Today’s asynchronous ad hoc learning feels to me like a pendulum swing away from formal training.