Author: Clive Shepherd

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We start the new year with the second part of chapter 9:
The abundance of information is weighing heavily on the knowledge worker. The statistics are frightening, as Jay Cross reports:

• “In many professions, knowledge workers spend a third of their time looking for answers and helping their colleagues do the same.”
• “Only one in five knowledge workers consistently find the information they need to do their jobs.”
• “Knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information they were unaware of than creating original material.”

While we’re doling out statistics, let’s add some more from Charles Jennings:

• “The information available to humans is currently growing at a rate of 30% per year. This growth is increasing year on year and showing no sign of slowing.”
• “Ninety percent of the new information generated each year is stored on magnetic media of some type.”

The message hasn’t necessarily got through to the l&d department, as Jennings explains: “Even though we are all aware that we are operating in a world awash with unstructured information, many learning professionals and managers are still obsessed with the task of transferring information into the heads of learners/employees. They, and many of their managers, see that as the end-game of their endeavours.”
The inability to find the right information at the right time has a huge cost, as Paul Strassman, former VP at Xerox, reports: “Most businesses that are well endowed with technology lose about $5000 a year per workstation on ‘stealth spending’. Of this, 22% is for peer support and 30% for the ‘futz factor’. The second includes the time users spend in a befuddled state while clearing up unexplained happenings and overcoming the confusion and panic when computers produce enigmatic messages that stop work.”
So how do we respond to these pressures? Well, according to John Seely Brown and John Hagel: “Because you don’t know what to expect, planning is folly. It’s better to be as responsive as possible when the future arrives.” That’s on-demand learning.
References:
Learning is strictly business by Jay Cross, 2007
The Point-of-Need: where effective learning really matters by Charles Jennings, article in Advance series from Saffron Interactive, 2008
Quoted in The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duquid, Harvard Business School Press, 2002
The only sustainable edge by John Seely Brown and John Hagel, Harvard Business School Press, 2005
Coming next: The argument for on-demand learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We close the year with the first part of chapter 9:
We move on to look at the third element in the contextual model, on-demand learning. To refresh our memories, on-demand learning is a form of ‘learning to’. It occurs because we don’t know how to perform a particular task and therefore need immediate help to acquire the necessary knowledge. To use more familiar terminology, on-demand learning can be regarded as ‘just-in-time learning’ or ‘learning at the point of need’.
Some would argue that on-demand learning isn’t learning at all, because the objective is to support performance not to teach. There’s no guarantee, indeed there may be no real concern, that an employee acquires in any permanent way the knowledge needed to carry out the task, just so long as they can do it right now. After all, a task may only ever need to be carried out once or only so occasionally that the effort required to retain the knowledge may not be justifiable. However, there’s a very blurry line between just-in-time performance support and long-term learning. The information itself is likely to be the same; the same people may be approached to provide this information; the same materials may be used in each case. The main difference comes with the strategy:

• When the goal is performance, the information must be available at the point of need for easy reference.
• When the goal is learning (a more or less permanent set of new connections in the brain), the intervention must go beyond providing information to include practice, assessment and feedback.

L&d professionals may argue that it is not their role to provide reference information. There may even be a completely independent team responsible for technical documentation. But this argument doesn’t stand up to close analysis:

• Trainers have always contributed to the provision of reference material through the handouts and job aids that they provide with their classroom courses.
• Technical documentation may be an option of last resort, but is unlikely to be a user-friendly and easily-accessible resource that does the job on a day-to-day basis.
• The fact that much of the same content is required for both training and for performance support makes it uneconomic to develop separately.
• L&d professionals are uniquely well equipped to present information clearly and simply.

Another way to reconcile the concept of performance support with learning is to conceive that knowledge can exist beyond the individual, in their own personal network of digital and human connections. The idea of the ‘outboard brain’ is closely associated with a new theoretical perspective to learning called connectivism, as developed by George Siemens:

“Instead of the individual having to evaluate and process every bit of information, she/he creates a personal network of trusted nodes: people and content, enhanced by technology. The act of knowledge is offloaded onto the network itself.”

Connectivism places new demands on the l&d professional who, as a facilitator of learning networks, should help to provide the infrastructure that enables employees to more easily make connections with sources of expertise. Underpinning this role is a realisation that “the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing. ‘Knowing where’ and ‘knowing who’ are more important today than knowing when and how.”
As Jay Cross reminds us, “Successful organisations connect people. Learning is social. We learn from, by, and with other people. Conversation, storytelling, and observation are great ways to learn, but they aren’t things you do by yourself.”
References:
Knowing Knowledge by George Siemens, 2006
Learning is strictly business by Jay Cross, 2007
Coming next: The plight of the knowledge worker
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. Here we bring chapter 8 to a conclusion:

Top-down approaches

Employers have a wide range of non-formal options at their disposal that they can implement on a top-down basis:
On-job training
Coaching
Webinars
Podcasts
White papers
Mini-workshops
Rapid e-learning
Internal conferences
Online video
Bottom-up approaches
There may well be a plethora of opportunities available for top-down non-formal learning, but there’s still plenty of scope for bottom-up initiatives:
Open learning
Continuing professional development
Communities of practice

Conditions for success

To enjoy success, it is important for the l&d professional to recognise that:

• learning needs to be continuous throughout employees’ careers;
• not all learning needs to be packaged as formal courses, because more informal approaches are often perfectly adequate;
• many, short inputs will have more impact than a few lengthy ones;
• many players can contribute to the provision of learning experiences and materials, not just learning and development professionals;
• skills in the development and provision of learning experiences and materials should be widely distributed within the organisation.

Coming next: We move on to focus on on-demand learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. Here we continue with the third part of chapter 8:
We’ve already argued the case for formal learning, but it should be clear that, although running a course can often be the right way to address a need, there are many more cases where an alternative will be more effective and more efficient. Back in 1970, Peter Honey pleaded for us to ‘stop the courses, I want to get off.’ He argued that organising courses was the easy option, but that to create effective learning situations which were meaningful in terms of the job called for much more effort, imagination and innovation.
Nearly forty years later, Donald Clark took up where Peter Honey left off: “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that great staple of train the trainer courses, is typical of the simplistic junk that is thrown about in the training world, but he did have one great line: ‘If you walk around long enough with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail’. That’s training, folks. Our hammer is the ‘course’ – the pat solution for every problem.”
He elaborated as follows: “Courses are also at odds with the psychology of learning. We know that ‘spaced practice’ is a necessary condition for almost all learning, yet almost all courses do the opposite, delivering large, single doses. We also know that most skills need a ‘learn by doing’ approach, yet most courses are skewed towards knowledge. We know that learning is about long-term memory, yet most courses focus on short-term memory and assessment. We know that learning needs to avoid cognitive overload, yet most courses suffer from an obesity of content. We know that learning benefits from being situated in the context in which the learning is to be put to use, yet most courses pluck people out of this context. I could go on and on, but perhaps the greatest problem is the sheer lack of knowledge and awareness of the basics of the psychology of learning, and its application in training. It’s like engineers who build bridges but know nothing about physics.”
Perhaps, if you’ll excuse the pun, it’s just a case of horses for courses. There are many good reasons why some learning should be formal, why some should be conducted in groups, why some courses should be carried out in real-time as opposed to being self-paced, and why some should be face-to-face as opposed to online. And there are equally good reasons for doing the opposite. In the end the choices you make should be made on the basis of the particular situation, not familiarity, prejudice or predisposition. And if that choice is made well, effectiveness will then depend on how well you carry the job out.
Reference: Stop the courses, I want to get off by Donald Clark, TrainingZone, March 2009.
Coming next: The non-formal learning toolkit
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Throughout 2011 we will be publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. Here we continue with the second part of chapter 8:
On-demand learning is just-in-time performance support – it’s there when you need it. But, although performance support has many advantages, it is not a panacea. Alison Rossett and Lisa Schafer have identified four situations in which you need to have the knowledge and skills before you undertake the task:
When aided performance would damage credibility: There are times when you would look amateurish if you had to go seeking out information that others might expect you to know. The obvious example is when you are dealing directly with customers or clients. No-one’s going to be bothered if you have to obtain help to deal with an unusual situation, but they would be justifiably annoyed if, say, you were a sales assistant in a retail store and couldn’t operate the till, or were an electrician who couldn’t wire a plug.
When speedy performance is a priority: In some jobs, there simply isn’t the time to go tracking down the right information or asking for help. A lawyer may have time to consult the books, but an airline pilot needs to be able to respond to an emergency using their own resources; a business person may be able to consult with a specialist before determining a strategy, but a professional sportsperson has to be able to swiftly select the right tactics to deal with a situation that arises unexpectedly.
When novel and unpredictable situations are involved: Some jobs are relatively stable and it may be possible for an employer to prepare performance support materials or systems to cope with every eventuality. Many other jobs are much less predictable and it is vital for the employee to be equipped with the core skills and problem-solving strategies to deal with the unexpected when it occurs. Take the example of an investment banker: although much of their work might be routine, they have to be able to deal swiftly with crisis situations that sometimes have no precedence.
When smooth and fluid performance is a top priority: Performance support is disruptive – it interrupts the task and disturbs the flow. No audience is going to wait while a presenter consults Wikipedia to look up a fact or asks for help in operating PowerPoint; similarly a telephone sales representative will not want to keep the customer waiting while they consult with a colleague.
Reference: Job Aids & Performance Support by Alison Rossett & Lisa Schafer, Pfeiffer, 2007
Coming next: Then why not formal learning?
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect