Onlignment Archive

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the first part of chapter 10:
As learning and development professionals we are most alert to those opportunities which will help employees to ‘learn to’ carry out some task or fulfil some responsibility; we want to get ahead of the game, to equip employees with the knowledge and skills needed to meet the requirements of current and future job roles. Even when we put in place facilities and resources to support just-in-time learning-on-demand, we still have a forward looking focus, trying to get ahead of the game, even if only at the last minute.
Yet for many people, the greatest insights come not through ‘learning to’ but by ‘learning from’ our day-to-day work activities. Experiential learning is literally learning from our experience. It occurs consciously or unconsciously as we reflect upon and react to our own successes and failures at work as well as those of our acquaintances. It introduces an extremely valuable feedback loop into our everyday work.
Without experiential learning, all we are left with is the ‘doing’. We repeat the same actions over and over again, never improving and constantly at risk to every new threat that appears in our environment. Experiential learning is ‘doing’ plus an essential additional ingredient – reflection. Without reflection, we can have many years of experience and learn less than someone who is a relative newcomer but who has learned how to learn.
The natural way to learn
Experiential learning is the natural way to learn. According to Charles Jennings, “70% of adult organisational learning takes place on the job. This learning is gained through experiences that develop, through facing challenges, through solving problems, through special assignments and through other activities that an employee carries out on a day-to-day basis.”
We are hard-wired for experiential learning, as John Medina explains: “When we came down from the trees to the savannah, we did not say to ourselves, ‘Good lord, give me a book and a lecture so I can spend ten years learning how to survive in this place.’ Our survival did not depend upon exposing ourselves to organised, pre-planned packets of information. Our survival depended upon chaotic, reactive information-gathering experiences. That’s why one of our best attributes is the ability to learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas.”
And what’s more, this ability does not fade with age: “The adult brain throughout life retains the ability to change its structure and function in response to experiences.”
Employees are well aware of how important experiential learning can be. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) asked 2076 employees in the UK to identify the activities that had been useful in helping them to do their job better. Here’s what came back. The figures show those who found the activity ‘very or quite helpful’, with those who found the activity ‘of some help’ shown in parentheses:

1. Doing your job on a regular basis 82% (13%)
2. Being shown by others how to do certain activities or tasks 62% (23%)
3. Watching and listening to others while they carry out their work 56% (26%)
4. Training courses paid for by your employer or yourself 54% (20%)
5. Reflecting on your performance 53% (30%)
6. Drawing on the skills you picked up while studying for a qualification 45% (21%)
7. Using skills and abilities acquired outside of work 42% (29%)
8. Reading books, manuals and work-related magazines 39% (24%)
9. Using trial and error on the job 38% (27%)
10. Using the internet 29% (18%)

Unfortunately these options are rather ambiguous and overlapping, but it is safe to say that numbers 1, 3, 5 and 9 are all aspects of experiential learning.

References

The Point-of-Need: where effective learning really matters by Charles Jennings, article in Advance series from Saffron Interactive, 2008
Brain Rules by John Medina, Pear Press, 2008
Practice Makes Perfect from NIACE, 2007, www.niace.org.uk
Coming next: The argument for experiential learning
Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the fourth and last part of chapter 9:

Top-down approaches

A number of options exist for organisations to support employees with on-demand learning:
Performance support materials
Mobile learning
Help desks
Online books

Bottom-up approaches

On-demand learning can also be supported from the bottom-up through the use of technology:
Online search
Using forums
Using wikis

Conditions for success

On-demand learning occurs whether or not an organisation takes active steps to provide encouragement and support. Every time an employee turns to a colleague for help with a task, they are engaging in on-demand learning. However, on-demand learning is more likely to thrive when l&d professionals recognise that:

• it is often unnecessary, if not completely futile, to try and teach employees everything they need to know to do their jobs; there is too much to know and it changes too quickly;
• resources need to be shifted from teaching everything there is to know, to covering the key underlying concepts, principles and skills formally (unless, of course, the job situation clearly demands that these be memorised / fully embedded) and then providing high quality, context-sensitive, usable, easily-accessible information at the point of need;
• in many organisations it is impossible to provide all necessary information on a top-down basis; employees need to be encouraged and empowered to form communities of practice, to develop knowledge networks, to share best practices, and to collaborate in seeking solutions;
• everyone knows something, nobody knows everything.

Coming next: Chapter 10 – experiential 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 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