Onlignment Archive – Page 6 – Legacy posts from Onlignment

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part Three

In part two we looked at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling. In this third and final part we’ll consider the key benefit and share a few tips.

Stories Sell

We may not always like to acknowledge this, but a lot of what we do as learning and development professionals is about selling. We sell the benefits of different ways of doing something, we sell the concept of a new process, we sell people tools and techniques that can make them more effective or efficient.
What any good salesman know is that it’s not enough to just tell someone about the features of a product or service. The emphasis has to be on the benefits it will bring to the individual (and it’s worth remembering that only the most dedicated of employees will be interested in the benefits it brings to the organisation more than the benefits it brings to him!).
One of the most effective ways of selling the benefits is to do so in the form of a story, and most importantly that story needs the right context.
There are many ways that social media can help us with this, but here are a few ideas.

We can use it to publish stories about the benefits that the training has brought to other people who have completed it. Better still, we can use social media as a vehicle for those people tell those stories themselves
We might ask people to use a hashtag to identify posts about this particular topic and then pull together all of them into one place.
We may select more active posters and invite them to blog regularly about their experiences, to tell the story of applying their learning in the workplace.

Tips

If you want to use stories more in your social media activities, here are a few tips.
The heart of a good story is often personal experience, so get into the habit of sharing your experiences, good and bad. Learning from your own mistakes is good, but learning from other’s mistakes is even better. By sharing your own bad experiences you can become that other person for your audience to learn from. This may require a shift in mindset; publicising our mistakes may not come naturally.
It’s not just about our own stories though. We may have no experience of a particular subject, or someone else’s experience may be more relevant or useful, so get into the habit of collecting stories. Write them in a notebook, store them on online or make audio recordings, do whatever works best for you but just make sure you keep them somewhere. Sometimes it’s a good idea to keep a note of who told the story, but unless they give their permission to be mentioned you should probably make the story anonymous.
If you feel comfortable doing so, make use of video. It’s an incredibly powerful medium that can make a really strong connection with your audience. For some people it’s actually much easier to record a video that tells a story than it is to write that story down. It doesn’t have to be slickly produced; most smartphones have a good enough video camera for recording online content.
As well as using it to record ideas when you hear them, you may want to use audio as a way to share your stories. Services like AudioBoo are a great way to record and share short snippets, and if you want to produce something longer maybe you could consider producing a regular podcast.
Go on, tell your story.

Step 6: Decide how best to support experiential learning

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the seventh part of chapter 11:
You don’t have to make a conscious decision to support experiential learning, as it will happen naturally as a matter of course. Having said that, there is much you can do encourage this form of learning through targeted interventions.
Experiential learning will flourish when:

essential skills and knowledge have already been acquired through other formal and non-formal approaches;
practical experience is critical to the process of refining and consolidating skills and knowledge;
employees are motivated to take on greater responsibility or broaden their experience;
the organisation is committed to a culture of continuous improvement and not of blame.

Top-down approaches such as benchmarking, job rotation, job enrichment, project reviews, performance appraisals, action learning, continuous improvement will all serve to promote and encourage experiential learning. Bottom-up activities, such as personal reflection, reflecting with others, blogging and learning from out-of-work activities, will all flourish in any culture that genuinely supports learning and development.
Coming next: Step 7: Implement and evaluate
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Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

The vision: 3. Learning and development that is scalable

In the first post in this series, we expressed a vision for learning and development that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and, above all, powerful in terms of the results it achieves. In this post, we look at the argument for l&d to be scalable.
Learning interventions are scalable when they are capable of delivering high quality results to ever larger audiences. There’s little doubt that, when used for the right purpose and well executed, one-to-one learning can be extremely effective but it is hardly scalable; after all, there are only so many hours in a day that any instructor, coach or mentor can dedicate to the task. While there is often a need to include an element of one-to-one or small group learning in a blend, because that’s the only way of making sure the job gets done right, there are many occasions on which far more scalable methods can be applied.
Some fantastic progress has been made recently in realising the concept of massively scalable education. Particularly exciting examples are the Khan Academy, which has contributed to the maths education of millions, and the free online courses being run by faculty at Stanford University. An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, led by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted some 160,000 enquiries, of which 25,000 or more have made it through to its conclusion. If you are not familiar with these projects, you can see Khan, Norvig and Thrun discussing the implications of their work in Reinventing Education – 45 minutes of very watchable YouTube video.
So, yes, you can teach maths and science to millions at practically no cost using videos and quizzes, and this is a fantastic step forward, but can we make similar gains in workplace learning? Currently, skills development is a labour-intensive and very costly business, typically involving a great deal of face-to-face contact with a trainer or coach. Some individuals, some organisations, some countries have been able to afford this and will be able to sustain this investment even in a harsh economic climate. That leaves an awful lot of skills gaps and unemployed people.
The pressure for more scalable learning and development at work is accentuated by the increased pace at which change takes place within organisations. More often than not there simply isn’t the time available to wait for ‘high-touch’ training. L&d needs a plan B; one that much better leverages limited subject expertise and teaching skills.
Coming next: The vision: 4. Learning and development that is flexible

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part Two

In part one we considered why stories are so important to learning. Now we’ll look at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling.

User Generated Context

We work in an industry that was, and in many cases still is, driven by the production and distribution of content. No surprise then that many of the early conversations about elearning included the phrase ‘content is king’. Along with the rise of social media tools came another phrase, ‘user generated content’, and there was much talk of how they enabled anyone to produce their own content. This is true, but social media also opens up other possibilities.
Using storytelling as a technique for training is not new, but social media allows us to do so in new and interesting ways. We can go beyond just delivering stories, and invite our learners to become part of them. We can move away from a scenario in which the trainer tells the story and learner receives it, to one in which they work together to co-author an evolving story.
The learner’s ideas can extend, enhance and improve the original story. Most importantly, they can give it the right context. In previous roles as a training manager, one of the more common issues with training was when learners didn’t recognise the situation or the people in it, and therefore don’t connect with it. By giving our learners the opportunity to become part of how the story develops, they are able to make it more useful to themselves and to others, by adapting it to fit their context.

The Making Of…

Something that we don’t often do, is give our learners an insight into the story behind the learning; how and why a course or programme was created, why we chose certain topics and techniques and so on. Social media gives us an opportunity to give our people an insight into that process. You can use tools like Twitter to provide regular snippets of information about the programme, blogs to provide more in depth updates and features and videos of key people involved in the programme.
It doesn’t have to stop once the programme is running. More and more programmes are using social media to connect the learners with each other, but what about taking the opportunity to connect them with people not on the programme? You only have to look at the rise of reality TV to know that people have an interest in what other people are doing. We can give our learners the chance to share their story as it happens.
Imagine a manager getting her team involved and engaged with her own development by providing them with regular updates about what she’s doing. They are already part of her development, whether they know it or not. This approach invites them to take an active part in the story.

Engagement and Support

The history, and future, of your organisation is nothing but a sequence of stories. Some of those stories are positive (successful new product launches, new premises, big sales increases) and others less so (downsizing, closures, drops in the share price) but they all contribute to the wider story of what makes your organisation what it is. Of course, you can’t really have a story unless something is happening, and if something is happening that usually means change, and we all know that can be a difficult thing to manage.
The trouble is that we often forget that our employees are all part of the story, and we use staff magazines and intranet pages to tell them that story as if it was happening to someone else. If you want to check whether this is what happens in your organisation, just listen to people talking and see if they refer to the organisation by its name or as ‘we’. If it’s the former, you may have a problem.
What we can do is use social media to build a framework around the story and give people the opportunity to get involved, by encouraging feedback and discussion. The key is to stop thinking about your staff as an audience, and instead to treat them as collaborators.

The Two Screens Approach

You may have heard the term backchannel, usually in relation to conferences and perhaps live online events such as webinars. In essence this involves the audience using social media tools to interact with each other, with others who aren’t physically present and occasionally with the presenter themselves.
This is something that has become quite common in many areas, and a broad social media backchannel has existed around traditional media such as TV and movies for some time. Until recently this has been driven by consumers themselves and by dedicated sites such as GetGlue and Miso. It is becoming more common to see content producers embracing what is referred to as ‘two screen viewing’, in which additional content is made available on your smartphone or tablet at the same time as you watch the programme on TV. It isn’t just about content though, with services such as Zeebox adding a social layer to TV by pulling in Tweets and other social content related to what we watch.
No matter what its format, we need to start designing our learning with the backchannel in mind. The backchannel is the place where the learners can become fans who will go on to tell their own stories and in doing so promote the learning to others.
In part three we’ll share a few storytelling tips.

Step 5: Decide what can be addressed on an on-demand basis

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the sixth part of chapter 11:
Having identified those needs which require a proactive approach, whether formal or non-formal, you can turn your attention to the ways in which you can support performance reactively, on a just-in-time basis. On-demand learning is likely in most cases to act as a support for formal and non-formal learning, but could in some circumstances stand alone.
On-demand learning will be most effective when:

the task is performed infrequently;
the task is complex, involves many steps or has many attributes, and is therefore hard to remember;
the consequence of any error would be intolerable;
performance depends on knowledge, procedures or approaches that change frequently;
there is a high turnover of employees and the task is perceived to be simple;
it is realistic for employees to have the time to consult a reference resource before carrying out the task;
there is little time or few resources to devote to training.

Top-down approaches to on-demand learning, such as the use of performance support materials, online books, help desks, and mobile learning resources will work best when:

the knowledge and skills in question are important and/or used regularly;
expertise is not widely distributed;
it is important that you control the quality of the support provided;
the employees in question are less independent as learners.

Bottom-up approaches such as consulting colleagues, online search, using forums and using wikis will work best when the employees in question:

have little commonality in terms of their needs;
have more discretion over how they use their time;
have access to the necessary communication channels;
are more independent as learners.

Coming next: Step 6: Decide how best to support experiential learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

The vision: 2. Learning and development that is economical

In the first post in this series, we expressed a vision for learning and development that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and, above all, powerful in terms of the results it achieves. In this post, we look at the argument for l&d to be economical.
It almost goes without saying in today’s testing times that learning and development needs to be economical. In fact, there has always been this need. It is incumbent on any manager, regardless of function, to utilise as few of the organisation’s resources as possible in fulfilling their responsibilities. L&D is no different. It makes no difference whether you regard training as a cost or an investment. If a cost, then the organisation’s profits will be maximised by keeping this to a minimum. If an investment, then you are obligated to keep this as small as it can be without unduly threatening the returns.
Although it is dangerous to generalise, it is probably fair to say that, until 2008 and the credit crunch, l&d budgets had not been the subject of much critical examination as long as they were in line with historical levels and comparable to those of other, similar organisations. This situation has changed and how. Budgets in the USA took a hit of 20% or more and the story in the Europe is not so different. Even richer organisations, not seemingly under pressure, have become defensive about expenditure. Conserving cash is the name of the game. Senior managers no longer take the l&d budget as a given; it has to be justified from the bottom-up as just one of a number of means for influencing performance and competitiveness. This should alway have been the case. It is best to assume that, from now on, it always will be.
One way that l&d can have a much greater influence on organisational expenditure is by making sure that it considers the full cost of any intervention, not just the obvious ones which require a cheque to be written. By far the greatest cost in any intervention is learner time. Every hour spent away from productive work is a cost to the organisation and one that should be minimised. Sometimes this cost is directly visible because overtime has to be paid or contractors brought in to cover the lost time. But even if this is not the case, the cost is still real; time spent learning could have been used productively elsewhere – in other words, there is an opportunity cost. Indirect costs occur within the l&d department as well. Time spent by salaried staff on design, development and delivery of any intervention should be costed against that intervention. And yes, we are proposing that time sheets are maintained, so the cost can be accurately monitored.
It is hard to argue against accurate budgeting and cost monitoring of l&d interventions, yet this is very rarely carried out in practice. Yes, the obvious, direct, external costs – like the use of external trainers and e-learning developers – are closely watched, but these are only a small proportion of the true cost. It’s time l&d took responsibility for its true effect on the finances of the organisations that it serves.
Coming next: The vision: 3. Learning and development that is scalable

Telling Stories with Social Media – Part One

As human beings, we’re natural storytellers. Outside of the confines of academic and scientific discussion, much of our communication is done in the form of stories. When we talk about our weekends, what happened to us at work today, a great day out we had or a sporting event we attended, we do so as stories.
When a significant event happens in our lives – a child is born, we get married, a friend or relative dies, we get a new job – we don’t tell people about it by just reporting the facts. We tell stories about it; how it happened, how we felt, how people reacted, where we were.
It’s how we make sense of things, and that’s as true of conversations in the workplace as it is of those that take place outside.
In fact, the idea for this post came out of a conversation with some collaborators on a recent project during which we talked about our experience of conferences and similar events. We all agreed that we learned something from presentations about theoretical subjects, learned a bit more from case studies, but gained the most from the conversations with other delegates in the breaks.
We asked ourselves why this might be the case? The conclusion we reached was that the break time conversations are more likely to be in the form of stories. In those stories we share our own experiences, both good and bad, and in doing so we take the theoretical and make it more real. We also agreed that the most memorable presentations we saw were the ones that were story based, or at least had a storytelling element to them.
Stories also provide a form of learning that is safe and risk free. One example we discussed was surgeons, who can learn much about routine operations from typical theory and practice, but often learn about more advanced techniques from the stories told by other surgeons.
Just to prove that you can’t get away from storytelling, the previous three paragraphs are just that; a story about a conversation I had.
Social Media and Storytelling
When we talk about connected learning, we often start by saying that it’s nothing new; that in fact it’s just the application of technology to the things that we’ve always done. We may have replaced the coffee machine conversations with Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. Indeed, we might have moved much of the in person social interaction online, and in doing so opened up those conversations to much wider groups of people. What hasn’t changed is that at the heart of each and every one of those conversations is a story.
What social media does is open up new possibilities for how those stories are developed, shared and adapted. In part two we’ll explore some of those possibilities.
In part two we’ll look at four ways in which we can use social media to enhance our storytelling.

Step 4: Decide what can be addressed using non-formal approaches

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the fifth part of chapter 11:
Having identified the situations in which a formal approach is necessary, your next task is to decide how non-formal interventions can contribute to meeting the remaining needs in question or to support formal learning.
Non-formal solutions are likely to be appropriate when:

on-going efforts need to be made to ensure that the skills and knowledge that employees gain through formal training are successfully transferred to effective job performance;
there is no requirement for the learning in question to be formally assessed;
on-demand learning is not enough, i.e. when aided performance would damage credibility or when smooth and speedy performance is a priority;
the employees in question need to be kept up-to-date with on-going developments in their fields of expertise or prepared for a business change.

Top-down approaches to non-formal learning, such as on-job training, coaching, mini-workshops, rapid e-learning, white papers, podcasts, webinars, internal conferences and online video, are likely to be the most appropriate when:

the knowledge and skills in question are important and/or used regularly;
the employees in question are less experienced and/or less independent as learners.

Bottom-up approaches to non-formal learning, such as the use of communities of practice, open learning and continuing professional development, will work well when the employees in question:

have little commonality in terms of their needs;
are motivated to learn and develop;
have more job experience;
are more independent learners;
have some discretion over the way their time is allocated (or can be allocated time specially to engage in these activities);
have access to the necessary communication channels, e.g. internet access.

Coming next: Step 5: Decide what can be addressed on an on-demand basis
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

The New Learning Management

At the Learning Technologies conference in January, I took part in a debate about the future of learning management with Andy Wooler and Charles Jennings. We each had ten minutes to make our point. Here’s mine.

Some Background

If you’ve seen me speak at conferences, read articles I’ve written, or just got in to conversation with me, you’ll know that I’ve been an advocate of collaborative and connected learning for more than eight years now (I say collaborative and connected because no one was calling it ‘social’ back then).
I believe that such collaborative and connected activity has a key role to play in organisational learning, today and in the future; at the same time I still believe that there’s a good case for managing learning. Those two statements are not mutually exclusive; this isn’t a zero sum game.

Learning Management <;>; LMS

First of all, let’s clear up one big misconception.
Learning Management does not equal LMS.
Learning management is a process, a way of doing things; there’s certainly a lot more to it than LMS.
If you do make the mistake of thinking that LMS is the be all and end of all of learning management then you’re on the way to the next flawed assumption; that managing learning means tracking it.

Management Should Not Be The Default

That’s not to say that I believe everything needs to be managed, nor that management should be done in the same way it always has been.
Last year, Clive wrote a book called the The New Learning Architect, and one of the ideas he put forward was that when you are designing a learning solution the default option should be online, and that you should have to make a strong argument for any other approach, such as face to face.
He has since extended this to suggest that the default option should also be asynchronous – and again you should have to make a robust argument for doing something synchronously.
I’d like to further extend that and suggest that as a default we should not be managing learning. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be managing anything, but just as with the choice of online vs offline and asynchronous vs synchronous, it puts the onus on us to make a solid case for doing so.

Why We Should Manage Learning

And there are some very good arguments for managing learning.
It’s too important
Some things are too important to leave to chance. This is a really broad category, but some of the more obvious things that fall in here are compliance and regulatory subjects; things that are being done to ensure legal compliance and to mitigate risk.
It also includes things that are critical to the way you do things in your organisation, for example; customer service standards, reporting procedures or keyholder responsibilities – in essence things that have a ‘right way’ to do them.
You should think very hard about what really falls into this category – when designing learning content, I think most of us would expect SME’s to say that people need to know everything, and they’re also likely to think that everything needs to be managed; be prepared to really challenge that.
Every day is someone’s first day
Every day is someone’s first day, whether that’s their first day in the organisation, their first day in a new role or just the first time they do something.
It’s tempting to assume that everyone knows how to go about finding the information they need and where they should go to look for it. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a novice; someone who lacks the necessary knowledge, skills and organisational context.
This is a serious issue. If you look at attrition rates in newly recruited managers, by far the most commonly stated reason for leaving is some variation on “I didn’t know what to do, or how to do it”.
They want and need some structure; they want their learning to be managed.
There’s another problem too. Even if it is possible for someone to explore and discover these things themselves, it’s often much quicker if their learning is given some structure; if it is managed. Reducing the time to competency is a very reasonable business goal.
But remember what I said earlier – even if we make the case for managing the learning we shouldn’t assume that means tracking elearning modules or face to face workshop in an LMS. It could just as easily be other employees adding content to a wiki, or on blogs or whatever platform you want to use.
The business of learning
Then there’s the business side of learning. I’ve been an L&D manager, in traditional face to face delivery environments as well as technology driven ones, and a lot more of my time was spent on management than it was on learning delivery – and that’s as it should be. I had a responsibility for managing budgets, and suppliers and the management and allocation of resources. Just like managers in every other department.
To do that effectively I needed the right tools and the best possible data, otherwise how would I know where to focus my resources? That’s learning management.

Learning or Training?

I’ll leave you with one final thought. In this post I’ve used the word learning a few times, but is that actually what we’re talking about? Ten years ago the kind of jobs we did were called training, and we worked in a training department. Some time after that the name changed to learning and development, but has the job really changed? Indeed, has the business changed it’s expectations of us? I don’t think so.
In the debate all three of us agreed on one thing; only learners can manage learning.
The thing is, that much of the time when we say ‘learning’ what we mean is ‘training’ and that can, and in some cases should, be managed.

The vision: 1. Learning and development that is aligned

In the first post in this series, we expressed a vision for learning and development that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and, above all, powerful in terms of the results it achieves. In this and the five posts that follow, we’ll take each of these in turn, starting with the need for learning and development that is aligned. In this case, we’ll use an extract from The New Learning Architect:
It is nothing new to be told that training should be aligned to the needs of the business, but that doesn’t mean that it ‘goes without saying’ or is ‘common sense’. All too often, common sense is anything but common. Ask yourself how many of the training interventions in your organisation are clearly aligned to current business needs, rather than fulfilling requirements articulated sometime in the distant past, but which have no current relevance. And how many interventions have originated from the l&d department on the basis of where they believe the organisation should be heading, regardless of the views of senior management? No organisation ever set up an l&d department so this department could then determine the direction for the organisation. It is not up to l&d professionals to decide what is good leadership, what is good customer service or what are appropriate values for the organisation. Their job is to help senior management make their vision a reality, regardless of whether that vision is shared by the professionals that staff the l&d department.
A good question to ask is this:
What behaviours are critical to the future success of this organisation?
Let’s unpick this a little. You need to know about ‘behaviours’ because, of all the various factors which influence the success of an organisation, only these can be influenced by learning and development. You need to find out which are the ‘critical’ behaviours, because you don’t have the resources to devote to the non-critical. And you need to focus on ‘future success’, because learning and development is an investment in the future and can do little to influence what happens right now. The only people who can answer this question with any authority are senior management.
The question can and should also be addressed for each of the main functional and regional departments and divisions within the organisation, as well as at various levels. For example: “What behaviours are critical to the future success of the IT department or European region”; “What middle management behaviours are critical to the future success of the organisation?”
Once you know what behaviours are required if the organisation is to succeed in the future, you need to assess the extent of the task in front of you:
To what degree are employees already exhibiting the behaviours that are critical for success?
Answering this question is no small task. If you work for a larger organisation, then ideally you’ll have set up a performance management system which enables you to keep track of how individuals are performing. This will include a competency framework covering every job position; one that is up-to-date with the constant and inevitable changes in job responsibilities and which describes the behaviours that senior management are looking to encourage. In order for you to assess the extent to which these competences are evidenced in actual performance, all employees will have been regularly assessed against this framework or will have conducted some form of self-assessment. Smaller organisations may not have gone so far, but they should at very least be conducting regular performance appraisals.
If, having carried out your research, you find no gaps, then your only problem is ensuring the continued supply of employees who exhibit the desired behaviours. You should be so lucky! Chances are you’ll have to ask one more question:
What influence can learning and development have on these behaviours?
Performance is influenced by a lot more than skill and knowledge. Situational influences on the performer include the clarity of roles and objectives, the suitability of the working environment, and the tools and other resources at the performer’s disposal. The performer him or herself has aptitudes (indicating his or her potential to learn) and motivations, as well as their accumulated knowledge and skills. The performer’s responses are also influenced by outcomes (the incentives and disincentives that are likely to result from performing in a certain way) as well as the timely availability of relevant feedback. The whole performance system has to be functioning correctly if performers are to exhibit the desired behaviours. Learning and development is only going to work if (1) unsatisfactory performance can at least partly be attributed to a lack of knowledge or skills, and (2) the employees in question have the aptitude to acquire these.
L&d professionals may have to be assertive in conducting and communicating this sort of logical analysis. As Wick, Pollock, Jefferson and Flanagan remind us, “The problem typically begins when someone in upper management decrees that the company needs to have a programme on some particular topic. And when the goal of having a programme is defined as ‘having a programme’, the initiative is in trouble from the start.” Senior managers may be experts in determining the problems that are getting in the way of performance, but they are not experts in finding the solutions – that’s your job, and this is your time to speak up.
Coming next: The vision: 2: Learning and development that is economical