Dave’s Whiteboard

In comments to my post about seelou training, my friend Ann Yakimovicz talks about resistance she has toward “totally self-directed learning.”

It theoretically would be nice for each employee to choose his/her own learning path, but this adds to their self-service load. They have to have good online search skills to navigate the LMS, then evaluate the choices they find without manager guidance. As a result of HR outsourcing, managers are too busy filling out the latest quarterly goals report in the performance management system or filling out their own hiring or termination documents to hold conversations with their employees.

Ann sees more and more people relying on heyjoe training:

“Hey, Joe — do you know how to extract data and automatically create a graph in Excel?”

Sometimes, heyjoe training is just fine— though maybe it’s really heyjoe support.  You’ve got an immediate need; you look for an immediate solution.  When it works, great, but the drawbacks are equally obvious:

• What happens when Joe (or all the available Joes) don’t have the answer?
• What happens when you can’t frame your question well?
• What happens when Joe (a coworker, a contact, someone in HR or training) starts turning into a discount version of customer support — or of a security blanket?

I actually think it’s vital for people in the workplace to actively manage their own job-related learning.  But I don’t think that lets the organization off the hook.

The drawbacks I list (along with others you can think of) are systemic ones.  As an individual, your on-the-job learning is a personal concern.  The organization needs to concern itself not only with your learning but with everyone’s.  That means a systematic and systemic approach toward problems (or opportunities) for improving performance.

Seelou training and heyjoe support will tend over time to petrify and mythologize past practice.  The antidote is an effective way* to request, receive, provide, and give feedback on both training and performance support.

Coworker “support” photo by K W Reinsch.

A likely project has moved from off the stove onto the back burner, though not yet at a steady simmer.  It’s related to the National Flood Insurance Program, established 40 years ago “to protect communities from potential flood damage through floodplain management, and to provide people with flood insurance.”

At NFIP’s site, FloodSmart.gov, I found a little widget intended to help people grasp the potential cost of every small floods.  (You can click the image below to try it yourself.)

I tried eight or nine amounts of flooding, from 2 inches to 18.  It’s a pretty good effort, though some of the images are unclear — is the object used for 9 - 13 inches a bookshelf?  An entertainment center?

Still, far better than a spreadsheet or line graph or a dozen bullet-points about costs of flooding.

Hutch Carpenter reports on some research looking at whether a better ideas emerge from people in group sessions, or from people working independently.  His conclusion: “[R]esearch says that companies would be better off if employees had a way of coming up with ideas on their own, not in group meetings.”

Hutch points out that it’s not clear-cut. The MIT Sloan Management Review, for example, says:

Strictly speaking, the traditional brainstorming groups consistently came up with the very best idea — and the very worst one, too. In other words, the quality of their results varied much more than those that came out of the hybrid groups that combined individual and group idea generation. However, the hybrid groups produced more ideas that were, on average, of higher quality. Nonetheless “for the very best idea, you need to have a pure brainstorming group,” notes Girotra. “Random interactions are likely to produce better-quality ideas.”

(You can read the article or download the INSEAD research paper here.)

At the same time, traditional brainstorming is susceptible to groupthink, which my dictionary cheerfully describes as a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.

Thank God, there’s none of that in the blogosphere. No “what he said,” no echo chamber.

Hutch presents a model for “enterprise 2.0″ (Click the image for a larger version.)

While I wish we’d find a way to talk about this stuff without sticking a “2.0″ after everything, Hutch does show the potential in harnessing technology to generate lots of ideas, and — especially interesting — using technology to help filter those ideas.

I’m not completely convinced that tags, favorites, voting will necessarily mean that “the most useful stuff floats to the top,” but I certainly don’t see those as a hindrance.

“The key to getting the best of both worlds,” Hutch says, ” - more ideas of better quality, identification of the top ideas - is to create a culture where ideas are rapidly created and evaluated, while also letting advocates gestate their ideas to fix areas of weakness.”

That makes a lot of sense.  For one thing, I’m pretty iterative; my ideas get better when I have the chance to revisit them, to reexamine them after letting them incubate a bit. All along, I thought I was second-guessing myself, but really, I was gestating.

In two weeks I’ll be part of a group session grappling with the start of a large training project.  I’m hoping to find opportunities to increase the group’s effectiveness with tools other than Word and PowerPoint.

Will Thalheimer’s thinking out loud again, refining models he’s been working with. Specifically, he’s looking at how learning can prompt performance — in other words, how should work-related learning relate to on-the-job performance and the desired results.

Here’s his model (click for a larger version on his site):

I think Will’s focus here is more on what I’ll call scheduled learning (rather than “informal,” which is too loose a term). And that works well in many cases in organizations: if you’re managing properly, then you’re finding out where someone may need or want to gain additional skill; you determine ways that can happen; and — the key part of Will’s model — you connect that learning to the job, both in terms of performance and in terms of desired results.

For example — maybe I want to learn how to create cascading style sheets. Or maybe I want to make technical sales presentations to clients. That’s fine for me as an individual — but in the context of the organization, I need to figure out how that’s going to contribute. Am I trying to gain more responsibility in my current position? Do I want to have different responsibilities in the same general area? Am I trying to take on something entirely new?

And, does this make sense in terms of the organization? For most of the time that I worked for GE Information Services, the bulk of our revenue came from applications that ran on a proprietary operating system GE had developed. Many people had built impressive skills with Mark III, as we called it. In later years, though, both IBM mainframe applications and the PC came along, followed by the web.

As the company’s goals and needs changed, it had less and less use for Mark III skills, no matter how strong they were. If you wanted to stay only in that realm, you were in a sense closing out your own options.

Going back to Will’s chart, one of the additions I’d like to see (and Michele Martin had a similar opinion that I failed to read before adding my own comments) is a column for the learner.

After all, the individual is the pivot point for the performance system. Not only (as Will points out) do learning processionals need to understand business needs, not only do managers need to clarify them, but the individual needs to understand them as they related to that person’s own job.

I have other thoughts on Will’s chart — for example, I am mulling over ways it could reflect not only the somewhat linear sequence of preparation –> learning situation –> on-the-job, but also just-in-time learning.

Maybe it’s it’s just-after-time learning. I’m thinking of unplanned occasions in which the individual realizes he or she needs to learn about something, usually with a timeframe that precludes a more scheduled learning event (like a workshop or synchronous training). That’s much more learner-centric, and the “learning professionals” are not as likely to be able to help unless they’re well informed, flexible, and willing to aid the individual in making intelligent judgments on his or her own.

More on this in a future post.

Michele Martin looks at what the voice of the learner tells us. She’s drawing conclusions from a Masie Center survey on how people learn at work. Michele’s conclusions:

• More people are learning independently in ad hoc, asynchronous fashion.
• As options for learning have expanded, employees feel they have less time to learn.
• People want job rotation and stretch assignments, but rarely get them.

Michele sees great potential for addressing the high-tech / high-touch desires of employees. For instance, she believes that employers could use much more virtual mentoring.

I agree, though mentoring is not one of those make-it-so solutions that senior managers are so fond of.

The Masie Center probably didn’t explore the topic of seelou training, though I believe this is the single most common approach to learning on the job.

“See Lou?”
“Yeah?”
“Do what Lou does.”

People can learn on the job, of course — that happens all the time. The question is whether it makes sense, organizationally, to look for factors that increase the likelihood of learning. If you’re going to have mentoring, for example, how do you choose the mentors? What’s in it for them?

Allison Rossett tells of a mentoring program for a real estate brokerage. Experienced, successful agents seemed like the ideal mentors for new hires. But not every senior agent wanted to be a mentor, and not everyone who wanted to worked out well. The firm discovered it needed to provide training and support for the mentors, as well as for the new hires.

(There’s a difference between a war story and a real-life example; that difference isn’t always obvious.)

One organization change that this company implemented: compensating the mentors not only for time taken from their own selling activities, but also as a way of sharing in the success of the people they mentored.

I might be a skeptic, but I think it’d take quite some time for individual mentors to make that happen.