Dave's Whiteboard

For a while there, I thought Joe Gerstandt was full of crap.

A while back, George Siemens wrote a post, Questions I’m No Longer Asking. I like the title, and the post even more–because the heart of the post is what he believes about learning, and it’s from that viewpoint that he talks about questions that don’t interest him any more.

(Example: “How can educations implement [whatever tool] into their teaching?  Simple: do it.”)

Siemens lists several points that he’s firmly convinced of.  I read them with an eye toward what I believe in terms of learning in the workplace.  I think several of them are essential to an organization’s ability to effective encourage work-related learning.

No, that’s not the most felicitious phrase I’ve ever written.  It’s apropos, though, because of how I see the way most people earn their living.

Ideally, the workplace is a for-hire alliance.  Whosis, Incorporated (or, for some, the Department of Whosis) wants to get things done and will pay people to help do them.  Individuals presumably want to get paid and possibly have some interest in the things Whosis does.

So there’s a partnership.  And the give-and-take of that partnership extends to work-related learning.

You as an individual need the opportunity, support, resources, and systems to get better at what you do or what you’d like to do, while Whosis needs people who are more and more effective at achieving results that Whosis values.

What does that mean in terms of some of Siemens’s points?  I want to take up this one:

Learners should be in control of their own learning.
Autonomy is key.

For a successful partnership, those workplace learners should be able to relate what they’re learning to key parts of their own job, or to key results that the employer values.  Not every minute, not every task, but definitely over the long haul.

I don’t have much argument with Siemens’s point that “meaningful learning requires learner-driven activity.”  Neither would anyone who’s ever had to present a training course to people who didn’t need or  value the training.

The difference is that in the workplace, over time, most of that meaningful learning has to connect to the organization’s goals.  If not, eventually you won’t have that workplace.

If we’re the Fast Twitch Gym, the ultimate outcome is profitability.  To achieve that, we value things like the breadth and depth of workout options, the availability of a skilled and friendly staff, rate of renewals, class offerings that customers enroll in and stick with, and so on.  If as an organization we thought that we’d accomplish more profitability by selling cars, we probably wouldn’t be in the gym business.

If we’re the Division of Motor Vehicles, then valuable outcomes are things like efficient and convenient issuing of driver licenses and license plates.  Related to those are quantity and quality measures for our record-keeping, our delivery of service, and our cost-effectiveness.

So what?  Well, as an individual, if your personal goals and values press you toward becoming a paralegal, you might not always be able to satisfy those desires entirely through your job at Fast Twitch or the DMV, because these particular workplaces don’t employ that many paralegals.

Siemens is certainly right: nobody’s going to be as interested in your learning as you are.  At the same time, if you’re an employee in an organization, that organization will have goals and values that aren’t necessarily identical with yours.

For the individual, the challenge is to find a satisfactory degree of autonomy: working with problems that engage you; collaborating with coworkers or clients who encourage you do get better at what you do; finding assignments or specializations that are fulfilling.

For the organization, the challenge is often getting away from a not-really-working, event-focused, dose-and-exposure-oriented approach toward skill in the workplace.  If standardization and compliance are important (as in, say, pharmaceuticals or high-tech manufacturing), your workforce already knows that.

Workplace learning isn’t us versus them (or me versus them).  At its best, it’s the individual and the organization having interests and goals that mesh well.

CC-licensed photos:
collaborating at work by Christina Xu;
boredom by Quinn Dombrowski.

Koreen Olbrish of Tandem Learning has a post about using games to assess learning, and she addresses both opportunities and problems.

Games are a natural environment for assessment…in essence, they are assessing your performance just by nature of the game structure itself. Unless, of course, there aren’t clear success metrics and you “win” by collecting more and more meaningless stuff (like Farmville)…but that’s a whole other topic.

So let’s assume there are success metrics built into the game and those metrics align with what your learning objectives are.

Koreen’s main topic is game design, but I want to talk about that last idea:  
the game’s success metrics need to align with your learning objectives.

This sounds like Instructional Design 101, since it is Instructional Design 101.  Ever more fundamental — Instructional Design 100, maybe — are these questions:

What do you want people to do?
Why aren’t they doing that now?
How will this make things better?

No, the first question isn’t about instruction at all.  Nor is it about, “How do you want them to act?”

It’s about what you want people to get done.

When you can’t articulate what you want people to accomplish, it hardly matters what interventions you try.  You have no way to measure progress.  Might as well just run them all through whatever you feel like.

Making your goals less fuzzy

“Sheep dip” refers to a kind of chemical bath intended to prevent or combat infestations of parasites.  (Videos of older, plunge style and newer, spray style processing of sheep.)

Farmers dip or spray sheep because… well, I’m no farmer, but here are some guesses:

• It’s more cost-effective than diagnosing the needs of each sheep.
• A dip-tank of prevention is better than a barnful of cure.
• Sheep on their own rarely propose new pest-management processes.

Ultimately, sheep farming has a few key outputs: leather, wool, mutton.  While the sheep play an essential role, I don’t think you can successfully argue that these are accomplishments for the sheep.  So what matters is the on-the-job performance of farm workers.

Speaking of on-the-job, many industries and organizations impose mandatory, formal training.  Even there, the accomplishment shouldn’t be “training completed.”

One client delivered “equal-employment awareness” training annually to every employee.  The original charter was full of “increase awareness” and “understand importance.”  Here’s what that looked like after a lot of “how can I tell they’re more aware?”

• You can recognize examples of discriminatory behavior on the job.
• You can state why the behavior is discriminatory.
• You can describe steps for resolving the discrimination.

That’s not exhaustive (and the legal department would probably say you need to sprinkle “alleged” all over the place), but the three points are a first step toward a success metric that connects the individual and the organization.

Sometimes, it is a training problem

When people in an organization can articulate overall goals, it’s easier for them (as individuals and in groups) to think about how their activities and their results relate to those goals. They’re also likelier to be better problem-solvers, because they won’t corral every problem into a formal-training solution.

Even when a major cause of a performance problem is the lack of skill or knowledge, you benefit from revisiting those Design 100 questions:

• What are the results you expect when people apply the skills they currently lack?
• What could interfere with their applying them?
• How will this approach help them learn and apply the skills?

Slightly more diplomatic language led that EEO-awareness client to decide that knowing the date of the Americans with Disabilities Act didn’t have much impact on deciding whether, in a job interview, you can ask an applicant, “Do you have a handicap?”

I’m no expert on workplace games, but I’m pretty sure I get what Koreen Olbrish is talking about.  It’s the workplace first, then the learning goal, and then the application of good design in pursuit of worthwhile results.

The same is true for any planned effort to support learning at work. You need to focus on what’s important, on how you know it’s important, on why you think training will help.

Then you use that information to guide your decisions about how to help people acquire and apply those skills when it matters.

Mindlessly grinding out courses (instructor-led, elearning, webinars, whatever) isn’t the answer, regardless of how many completion-hours people rack up.

It’s just…well, you know.

CC-licensed images:
Bigg’s Sheep Dip (Glenovis) adapted from this photo by  Riv / Martyn.
Bigg’s Dips (yellow/black) by Maurice Michael.
Quibell’s Sheep Dips by Peter Ashton aka peamasher.

Once upon a time — the time of the first-century poet Juvenal — the phrase black swan implied something that didn’t exist.  More recently, the black swan theory refers either to highly improbable things, or to outliers with an outsized influence on events.

Of course, if you had lived in western Australia before the arrival of Europeans, black swans would have been the only ones you’d ever heard of.

Which simply says most people go with what they know.

I’ve seen something of this in online discussions about the world of work.  If all your virtual dealings are with consultants, academics, freelancers, and and the folks who contract with them, you can easily get the impression everyone’s working independently.

Even though I’m a consultant myself, I’m skeptical about that broad a generalization.  So I’m revisiting something I wrote about more than three years ago: who works where (or, who’s an employee and who’s not)?

I’m getting this information from various business and non-employer statistics published by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

• In 2008, there were 21.4 million non-employers in the U.S.  Their total receipts were $963 billion, or roughly $45,000 per firm.
  • According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a non-employer is an organization with no paid employees, with $1,000 in business receipts, and subject to federal income tax. 
    (For some reason, a non-employer in the construction industry needs only $1 in receipts to be counted.)
• In 2007, there were 120 million employees working at 6 million firms.  Total receipts were $29.8 trillion.

Certainly with the economic downturn since 2007, those figures have changed, but I doubt they’ve changed that much.  Even if every single non-employer were a unique individual, and even if none of the non-employers also had a job working for someone else, 120 out of 141 million people in the U.S. were employees.  And, as the Census Bureau says, “Most non-employers are self-employed individuals operating very small unincorporated businesses, which may or may not be the owner’s principal source of income.”

I wondered where all those non-employers worked.    Here’s a breakdown by number of non-employer firms — in other words, the fields where you’d find these folks:

• Professional, scientific, technical services: 3 million
• Construction: 2.5 million
• Real estate, rental, leasing: 2.1 million
• Retail trade: 1.9 million
  • “Store and non-store” retail — the latter would include things like catalog and home-based sales
• Other services: 3 million
  • A catchall taking in everything from equipment repair to dating services to pet care

Four of these sectors (construction, real estate, retail, and “other services”) account for almost half of all non-employers.  Though perhaps the numbers would look different if the Census Bureau had a category for “social media expert.”

Meanwhile, back where you find 120,000,000 people:

• 5.1% of employees work for firms having 0 – 5 employees.
  • The zero apparently takes in seasonal work when the work’s out of season.
• 30.3% of employees work for firms having 5 – 99 employees.
• 14.2% work for firms with 100 – 499 employees.
• 5.2% work for first with 500 – 999 employees
• 12.4% work for firms having 1,000 – 4,999 employees.
• 32.7% work for firms with 5,000 or more employees

All this to demonstrate that most Americans who work, work for someone else.  And of the 120 million who are employees, nearly half work for firms with at least 1,000 employees.

I don’t have a big conclusion to finish this off with a flourish.  I just think this kind of information helps set in context some workplace learning and performance-improvement issues.

CC-licensed image of a black swan by specksinsd.

Are you in a corporate training environment? Dick Carlson in his mild-manner way muses on how learners feel about training (Learner Feedback? You Can’t STAND Learner Feedback!).

Dick and I have some differences — I think dogs ought to have noses that they themselves can see — but not in this area.  The core of Dick’s post is the ultimate assessment: can you now accomplish whatever this training was supposed to equip you to accomplish?

(Yes, that does mean “that you couldn’t accomplish before due to a lack of skill or knowledge.”  Don’t be cute.)

Because — if we start with a true skill deficit that prevented you from producing worthwhile results — that’s vastly more important than whether the training fit your purported learning style, whether the ratio of graphics to text was in a given range, and whether the person helping you called herself a trainer, a teacher, a facilitator, a coach, or the Bluemantle Pursuivant.

If you need to learn how to recover from an airplane stall or how to control paragraph borders through a class in CSS, learning assessment comes down to two words: show me.

With all that, I do think that how the learner feels about what’s going on does  influence the learning situation.  I just want to make clear: that’s very different from saying that those feelings matter in terms of assessing the learning.

High profile?  You bet your assessment.

I was once in charge of instructor training and evaluation for an enormous, multi-year training project.  In the final phase, we trained over 2,000 sales reps to use a laptop-based, custom application.  90% of the them had never used a personal computer.

Which was a drawback: the client decided that as long as the sales reps were coming for training on the custom application, we should “take advantage of the opportunity” to teach them email.

And word processing.  And spreadsheets.  And a presentation package.  And connection to two different mainframe applications using simple, friendly 3270 emulation software.

In a total of five days (one 3-day session, a 2-day follow-on one month later).

Our client training group was half a dozen people, so we hired some 30 contractors and trained them as instructors.  I mention the contractors because we needed a high degree of consistency in the training.  When a group of sales reps returned for Session 2, we needed to be confident that they’d mastered the skills in Session 1.

(If the informal learning zealots knew how we electrified the fences within which the instructors could improvise, they’d have more conniptions than a social media guru who discovered her iPhone is really a Palm Pre in drag.)

We used a relentlessly hands-on approach with lots of coaching, as well as “keep quiet and make them think” guidance for the instructor.  The skills focused on important real-world tasks, not power-user trivia: open an account.  Cancel an order.  Add a new contract.

We conducted nearly 600 classroom-days of training, and we had the participants completed end-of-day feedback after 80% of them.  I never pretended this was a learning assessment.  I’m not sure it was an assessment at all, though we might have called the summary an assessment, because our client liked that kind of thing.  We had 10 or so questions with a 1-to-4 scale and a few Goldilocks questions ( “too slow / too fast / just right” ), as well as space for freeform comments.

Why bother?

I made the analogy with checking vital signs at the doctor’s or in the hospital.  Temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate aren’t conclusive, but they help point the way to possible problems, so you can work on identifying causes and solutions.

So if we asked how well someone felt she could transmit her sales calls, we knew about the drawbacks of self-reported date.  And we had an instructor who observed the transmit exercise.  We were looking for an indication that on the whole, class by class, participants felt they could do thist.

(Over time, we found that when this self-reporting fell below about 3 on the four-point scale, it was nearly always due to… let’s say, opportunity for the instructor to improve.)

When we asked the Goldilocks question about pace, it wasn’t because we believed they knew more about pacing than we did.  We wanted to hear how they felt about the pace.  And if the reported score drifted significantly toward “too fast” or “too slow,” we’d decide to check further.   (2,204 Session 1 evaluations, by the way, put pace at 3.2, where 1 was “too slow” and 5 was “too fast.” )

Naturally, to keep in good standing with the National Association for Smile-Sheet Usage, we had free-form comments as well.  We asked “what did you like best?” and “What did you like least?”  (In earlier phases of this project, we asked them to list three things they liked and three they didn’t.  Almost no one listed three.  When we let them decide for themselves what they wanted to list, the total number per 100 replies went up. )

Early in the project, our client services team sat around one evening, pulling out some of the comment sheets and reading them aloud.  It was my boss at the time who found this gem, under “what did you like best?”

My instructor made me feel
safe to be dumb.

Everybody laughed.  Then everybody smiled.  And then everybody realized we had a new vision of what success in our project would mean.

We wanted the learners to feel safe to be dumb.  Safe to ask questions about things they didn’t understand.  Safe to be puzzled.  Because if they felt safe, they felt comfortable in asking for help.  And if they felt comfortable asking, that meant they felt pretty sure that we could help them to learn what they needed to learn.

What about weaving their feedback into the instructional design?  In general, newcomers to a field don’t know much about that field, which means they’re not especially well equipped to figure out optimal ways to learn.

Please note: I am not at all saying newcomers can’t make decisions about their own learning.  In fact, I think they should make ‘em.  In a situation like this, though, my client wasn’t the individual learner.  It was (fictionally named) Caesar International, and it had thousands of people who needed to learn to apply a new sales-force system as efficiently as possible.

Mainly procedural skills.  Low familiarity with computers, let alone these particular applications.  High degree of apprehension.

(By the way, Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb online eight months after our project ended, so don’t go all social-media Monday-morning-quarterback on me.)

I felt, and still feel, that our design was good.  So did the Caesar brass: within six months of the end of the project, a nearly 25% increase in market share for Caesar’s #1 product, and the honchos said that resulted from successfully training the reps to use the new sales software on the job.

When you feel safe to be dumb, you don’t stay dumb long.

CC-licensed images:
Yes / no assessment by nidhug (Morten Wulff).
“Cover-the-content” adapted from this photo by antwerpenR (Roger Price).