Closing Session of Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012

The last general session of Learning 2012 started with thanking all the people who were involved in producing the conference and making it happen. I have to commend Elliott Masie and his team for putting together a truly amazing event. He himself does seem to be an incredibly reflective practicioner and thus a great role model for other learning professionals.

The first speaker for the day was Greg Urban (from University of Pennsylvania) via live video connection. As an anthropologist he talked about why culture is important in corporations. Culture in the most modern sense of the word is whatever gets socially learned and socially transmitted. Urban thinks that learning isn’t about individuals. He thinks that from an anthropological perspective it actually is organizations that are learning. Individuals get their notions from the group: every individual is born into a culture. So this can also happen inside organizations. He has come to realize that organizations are “little tribes”. Masie asked Urban how a culture gets created in relatively new organizations. Urban’s main research interest is what forces move cultures. One important force is inertia (the fact that you have been doing it in a particular for a long time), another key force is entropy. An important concept to understand is “meta-culture” or reflexive culture, culture that looks back at other culture. This is important when creating a new company: it will have to come from there. The last force is the force of interest. He does believe that culture can be influenced, but you can’t just pick it up and change it to something else. Urban also gave us a couple of takeaways:

  • Be a little suspicious about the official statement of the company about what their culture is and compare it to how it really is.
  • Pay attentions to emotions and to stories (and maybe the rituals).

Next up was Marhall Goldsmith an executive coach who gives a lot of talks and writes a lot of books and articles. Masie and him have created a set of videos which are interesting from a content perspective (basically Marshall makes the same point using Drucker as we did in our DIY Learning session), but also very much from a process or format perspective. The short videos were easy to create and have a huge value.

Marshall Goldsmith on video
Marshall Goldsmith on video

Next up was Donald H. Taylor to talk about the emerging competencies in the field of learning. He has been in learning and development for 25 years. Anything that describes the skills to do something will need to be simple enough to be usable but complex enough to be useful. He is trying to create a language of skills in our field. The tool is called the LPI Capability Map. The first and most important thing you should be doing is to keep learning. Masie made a case that we need to be ferocious samplers of learning (“Who would eat at a restaurant where the chef doesn’t do a lot of eating and tasting themselves?”). There is so much stuff out there already. Do you really need to make it again? In the new producer role the curation angle should become more obvious. You aren’t creating, you are helping people find what might be useful for them. We have moved from “knowledge is power” to “information is free”. This means our role should change.

The last speaker of the conference was Nigel Paine. What excites him about learning right now is the relationship of learning to everything else. He believes it is moving into the mainstream. Learning organizations have some much impact that companies really can’t do without them anymore. Next, he shared the BBC video story once again. He thinks we should do less learning catalogs, less trying to control and more trying to be open. One tip he gives to everybody in the audience: “Get involved in culture”. From knowing, to doing, to being. There is no chance you can be a learning leader anymore if you don’t understand technology. The most important part though is that you have to be able to relate learning in the language of the business.

Masie added three more important sagely pieces of advice (which I agree fully with):

  1. Engage yourself as a storyteller.
  2. Become experimental: you have to be able to do an experiment without becoming too risky. Don’t do a pilot just as a first step to an implementations, do multiple pilots.
  3. Practice your negotiation skills.

As Masie doesn’t really like feedback, he prefers feedforward, I would like to ask him the following. In the past you asked every single speaker what great book they had read recently. You didn’t do that this year. Would you please do it again next year?

Self Defense: Justifying Your Role

Nigel Paine
Nigel Paine

The original title for this session was “how not to get fired”. Nigel Paine talked about strategies you can use that help you stay relevant and create a bit more security for yourself:

  1. If you make yourself more accountable and more visible, then you make yourself more employable. Don’t run and hide. “I know that name” is very important and a good relationship with your line manager is not enough.
  2. Be pro-active. Where things are getting tough, get noticed more instead of less. Make sure you have an impact. Find people who can sponsor you and who can mentor you. Most people are flattered to be asked to become a mentor. You can even have more than one mentor (but don’t play them off against each other).
  3. Build partnerships outside of your team. Don’t self-limit. Every single meeting is an opportunity to have presence. A lot of HR staff is still totally tactical, it is important to frame things correctly: away from operational towards more strategic.
  4. Data is important. You should have the data from your organization and try and get some insights from it. Most people never take the trouble to go through the data.
  5. Focus on yourself a little bit. People take you at the value you set in yourself.
  6. Governance. Nigel talked about the learning board he created at BBC (chaired by the chief executive). He gave his budget to the board to allocate (people thought he was crazy). Find people from outside HR and Learning to give you some governance. They will help you make decisions that are totally business focused.
  7. Go on a listening mission in your organization.

Somebody in the audience referenced this TED talk by Amy Cuddy:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks-_Mh1QhMc]

Another person talked about the book Seeing Yourself As Others Do.

I shared my personal strategy for staying in my job: it is to stay fully employable outside of my organization! I was hoping this session would be about the role of the learning organization as a whole (that might also be in need of self defense I would say), unfortunately it came closer to a motivational speech. You can’t have it all!

Do It Yourself Learning at Masie’s Learning 2012

Marcel de Leeuwe and I hosted a session at Elliott Masie’s Learning 2012 about Do It Yourself Learning. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously preparing for the session and created a special website for the conference: doityourselflearning.org.

Why DIY?

One of the Learning 2012 buttons
One of the Learning 2012 buttons

There are a few things happening in the corporate learning world:

  • The business is changing faster than the Learning function can keep up with.
  • Effectiveness of learning is low with constant questions of the Return on Investment.
  • Knowledge work (defined by Drucker as that work that can only the knowledge worker themselves can understand) is so complex that no curriculum can be made that can fit the very personal needs of each professional.
  • There is a high mobility for employees, making it hard to defend investing in them.

At the same time the world is changing:

  • Much of the world is globally connected.
  • Effective tools for collaboration are ubiquitous and cheap.

This means that learners will start organizing their own learning. They will become their own designers and the role of the learning function will have to change.

Principles

We thought of five imperatives for the learning function to enable DIY learning and empower their staff:

  1. Devolve responsibility
  2. Be open
  3. Design experiences
  4. Provide scaffolding
  5. Stimulate reflection

Examples

To give people some idea of what DIY could look like we listed a set of examples: Self Organizing Learning Environments (SOLEs), MOOCs, Open Space Technology, a Juggling Convention, Yammer, World Without Oil, Uncollege, a virtual reading group and Livemocha.

We are always looking for new examples.

A DIY Manifesto

Through a very energetic process (first collaborative and then argumentative) the group of participants came up with a tentative set of statements for a Do It Yourself Learning Manifesto:

[vimeo 52056127]

A big you thank you to everybody who participated!

General Session on Tuesday Afternoon at Masie’s Learning 2012

John Abele was the first one on stage. He has a background in medicine, but is now mainly focused on collaboration. He is the founding chairman of First. He shared a taxonomy of collaboration:

  • Facilitate
  • Command and control
  • Self organizing
  • Adversarial
  • Mass
  • Crowd Sourcing
  • Cascading
  • Pseudeo

Next he talked about the characteristics of collaboration leaders:

  • Lead without power (cede control to gain control)
  • Manage divas
  • Empower individuals and groups
  • Understand the power of theater

He applied these characteristics to Masie himself, leading to the following slightly hagiographic list: clothing as a court jester, humble self promoter, sharing learning leader, shameless persistence, interview style, frames, sets agenda, digs under the surface inoffensively, uses the power of theater, produces, curates, personalizes well, effusive complimenter, introverted extrovert, shares self reflection, celebrates political incorrectness, amazing connector, genuine, authentic, inclusive (always uses “we”), optimist and benevolent independent (so not part of the establishment).

Next up on the stage was Kevin Oaks from I4CP (which does the bulk of the research for ASTD). He has looked a lot at the difference between high and low performing organizations. They first discussed performance management and the performance review. Nobody really seems to like them. We know that the annual review is not the most effective way to do performance management. Managers need to do these hard discussions on a continuous basis. He sees companies talking about talent risk in the same way as financial risk. Kevin next references this Vanity Fair article about the Forced Ranking performance system at Microsoft. Next question: How do you manage a virtual workforce? This is a new competency of top leaders and we are still finding out how to really do this well. Kevin thinks we should use technology more here. He mentioned an example of a manager who would put a video station in a shared office and a video station in her home office so that people could just walk over to the station and talk to her in a “normal” way as if she was there.

Any blogpost gets better with a Steve Ballmer picture!
Any blogpost gets better with a Steve Ballmer picture!

Elliott Masie loves his Apple products so much that he showed a clip of of the new iPad mini. He is once again interested in the affordances of this particular type of device and buys them before he has a real understanding of those.

Martha Soehren is the Chief Learning Officer for ComCast. She received a spotlight award.

John Ryan is the president of the Center for Creative Leadership. What are some of the top challenges of top leaders nowadays? Suddenly all of them need to become global leaders. The CCL has done research into boundary spanning leadership (the whitepaper is here. They’ve come up with a new assessment tool on the basis of this research: the global six (this hasn’t been published yet). These dimensions are not valuable everywhere in the world: it depends on where you are whether they work. Some of the biggest mistakes that leaders make is that they only focus on people’s performance. You should focus on learning agility (innovating, challenging the status quo, taking risks, performance, make sure you never stop listening). John finished by plugging the WorkLife Indicator.

Could we have a realtime learning center in our own businesses?

The last speaker for the day is from the ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement: Lisa Toenniges. The ISPI focuses on performance that allows organizations to reach their best business results. She kicks off by saying how training should usually be the last thing you try to improve performance. Nice. She then lists a set of standard performance consulting things to look at.

This whole session felt a little bet too much like an incrowd talking on stage. A pity…

Agile and ADDIE Add Up

Jeffrey Kachik and Deborah Gadsden talked about Agile and ADDIE. They first referenced the 2001 Agile Manifesto which states:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

They say: That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

The manifesto writers also follow a set of principles

Next they mentioned SCRUM.

At the US Department of Veterans Affairs they have managed to connect Agile to ADDIE (Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate). Agile works especially well in the Design and Development parts of ADDIE, allowing you to iterate there. Using the agile methodology allows them to go through the ADDIE process in about 40% of the time it used to take.

ADDIE
ADDIE

The standard development time ratio for this type of learning is benchmarked as 184 hours for 1 hour of learning. Their first few modules were much higher than that, but they learned and after two modules manages to sustain a ratio of about 100 development hours for 1 hour of learning.