Disruption

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision. It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of "existence." I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery  - Sartre, Nausea

What do learning and beauty have in common? In their most essential form both are disruptive experiences. Experiences where reality crashes in upon us, disrupting our constructs, forcing us off the rails, opening us up to the possibility of being reshaped. Of course, not all learning or beauty is experienced in this way – but there is something to be learned by considering their essential character.

By now, I imagine this seems very abstract. It’s not. Consider your own experience. If you recall the milestones in your own learning trajectory. I’m prepared to bet that ‘disruptive’ is a pretty good descriptor: starting a new job, a new school, an accident, a sudden change of health, a personal comment that cut you to the core – your first child, perhaps. Of course we tend to remember distinctive events but this is hardly incidental. The distinctive, the disruptive, the ‘worthy-of-a-story’ experiences form the cornerstones of our learning and the gravitational centres of our personality and world-view. These are indeed our ‘defining moments’. These are the things with affective context.

From this perspective it is easy to frame a more vague dissatisfaction with learning experiences: not only do they often fall short of being disruptive – the opposite is true: the most common descriptor applied to school by my children is ‘boring’. I think most people probably think of elearning as boring too.

Now I am not arguing for disruption for disruption’s sake – nor should we be too hasty in conjuring up an image of what counts as ‘disruption’. An example might help: at a recent event we were all encouraged to give very direct feedback to colleagues that we had only just met - our first impressions. The experience was clearly disruptive for at least some of the people there. At school disruptive experiences are field trips and challenges . Odd, then that we use ‘disruptive’ to apply to the kinds of people we don’t want in the classroom.

Looking back, I think much of what I have been striving for in Online (at least at the ‘push’ end) is the disruptive experience – something that bursts through the protective shell of our expectations and succeeds in making someone really care about diversity… or safety… or leadership. Generally speaking, people avoid learning - they reach equilibrium, their schema suffice, they remain cognitive misers – and it seems to become harder to bring about learning as people’s attitudes harden around them. How do you pitch data protection or safety to an audience in such a way that it doesn’t merely ‘bounce off’?

We do two kinds of things, I think: as learning professionals we create disruption – for example we engineer failure in an attempt to bring about learning – or we arrange resources that help people cope with disruption. This latter activity is more commonly called ‘performance support’. The former is ‘push’, the latter is ‘pull’; but neither are at all effective without the disruption that calls for learning.

In conclusion, the role played by disruption in learning serves as a reminder of how ‘fallen’ learning presents itself – as convention. The worst fate that can befall a learning professional is to become high-priests and curators of convention; and in so doing become boring.

Work is no Game

If only it were. A small group of us gathered round the headmaster as he began explaining the ‘smiley system’ that the infants school had implemented: “when the children do something good, such as opening a door or behaving well in class they get a smiley. We keep track of these and when they get a certain number they are allowed to choose something from the reward basket. We used to have a system of awards at the end of each year, but we felt this was a bit demoralising for students who were doing small things – but positive things – every day.”

Sound familiar?

World of Warcraft works like this. Every behaviour earns a variety of possible rewards – from experience points to virtual coin to honor points. There is a variable reinforcement schedule built in as well – random item drops – which help give the game its addictive nature. The trick then is to convert these rewards into something meaningful – what good are smileys after all? The big story is the rise of virtual meaning (to coin a phrase): it turns out that in a uniquely human fashion people identify with their avatars. Unless you are a Korean gold farmer the things you are playing for don’t equate to real money, instead they equate to virtual items (such as clothing or items), virtual status (such as levels), or virtual abilities (such as invisibility). Which people want.

Sure, there are social dimensions to the game but as this blog points out the true motivation is something baser, be it greed or power. Interestingly many games which have no social dimension (such as the excellent Dragon Age 2, or Fallout) still utilise the same mechanisms to great effect. The thoroughly modern craving for upgrades is greatly amplified in the virtual realm.

So the thing to note is that ‘gamification’ can mean a variety of very different things: to some people it implies making something (such as learning) ‘fun’ – through an exploratory dimension for example (some games do this). For others it means the introduction of mechanisms which provide token reinforcement. This latter class of games may well not feel like fun: if you understand the expression ‘grinding for XP’ then you know what I mean.

So what are the implications for learning?

I can think of a couple that generally tend to go unnoticed:

1)    Do we want ‘token learning’? Think back to the ‘smiley’ system implemented at some schools. Does anything trouble you about this? What if it results in children who only exhibit positive behaviours in the expectation of a reward? What happens if those rewards are taken away? If we indulge in ‘gamification’ in the way that most commentators describe, the result may be to rob learning of intrinsic value – paradoxically, to make it a chore. I can easily picture a system in which people complete quizzes to score points; I’m not confident that resulting learning will be more than tokenistic.

2)     Work is not a game. Maybe it should be, but right now it isn’t. This point is consistently missed by advocates of gaming mechanisms. Work differs from games at a fundamental level. Firstly your activity does not relate in any simple way to rewards (unless you work in a contact centre, perhaps). If you were to try to translate work into a game it would be a very odd sort of game. Most of the rules would not be clear. You would not move anywhere. You would guess at the correct responses to thousands of cryptic messages without ever quite knowing how you were doing. You would only ever know if you had done something very wrong. And that might turn out to be something someone else had done. Your reward would be static and monthly – or come at the end of a year, and be subject to economic conditions outside your control. One of your key attributes would be patience.

The reason that this latter point is significant is that at some point, gameification of learning would entail a translation into non-token rewards: financial, status etc. And organisations don’t work that way: if they were going to start rewarding people for the things they do or promote people for their accomplishments, then learning would probably not be where they start. Plenty of organisations have a noble aspiration to be more meritocratic – and I wholeheartedly support this; but along with the aspiration comes the tacit recognition that we are a long way from this today. To put it bluntly why would we start rewarding people for learning, when we don’t yet reward people for completing tasks or solving problems?

You might object that I am describing a narrow sense of ‘gameification’ – but what are the alternatives? Making learning fun is not exclusive to gameification. Teachers and educationalists have been doing this for years; if you’re not already thinking about how to make your learning engaging and enjoyable then you have some catching up to do. And there are lots of ways to do this. That said, ‘good’ learning doesn’t have to be fun: we all hear a great deal about learning from mistakes, and failure is rarely experienced as fun.

But I don’t think it’s all bad: I haven’t touched on ‘mastery’ as a game mechanism, and this holds out hope. Games, simulations or scenarios which allow for mastery via repetition can work well: the challenge then becomes transferability – the extent to which mastery of the game leads to mastery of something meaningful for the business. Typing games such as word invaders seem to do this well.

I do think that gameification has a bright future. Probably not in learning, though. Rather, just as performance consulting looks to provide solutions to performance problems, so gameification (used here to refer to token reward schemes) will be a tool to be used in combination with learning interventions to effect performance gains. Gameification (in the guise of immediate feedback and reward) is the complement to performance support. Starting with more junior roles, the organisation of the future will recognise and reward effective behaviours and track and remedy ineffective ones - as they happen. And gameification will more often than not remove the need for learning: take, for example the Honda Jazz, where a virtual plant flourishes on your dashboard when you drive economically. No 30 min e-learning course about sustainable living required.

Gyre and Gimble

"Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe." - Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll

I was looking for a metaphor for learning and development and came across this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

And this was the first time that I realised that gyre was a real word (albeit a noun rather than a verb) rather than just nonsense. It's also a pretty good descriptor of the world of learning.

Whilst working at Siemens, I carried out a modest piece of research which rejected the hypothesis that there are such things as 'learning styles': in brief, we differentiated materials according to learning style and mode of representation and found that people actually learned the most from plain text.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time since then unraveling exactly why but today, twelve years later, I’m still reading articles announcing that learning styles are mumbo-jumbo.

What is remarkable about learning and development is the slow pace of change. This is probably because the area remains at the 'proto-science' phase of development; characterised by numerous 'gyres' - micro debates, conversational eddies - permitted to circulate because the industry is predominantly opinion-based. Here are some that you may recognise:

- learning styles
- NLP
- 70:20:10
- kolb's learning cycle
- blending
- right brain/left brain
- learning by doing
- the role of the line manager
- assessment/evaluation/Kirkpatrick
- the certified learning professional
- games
- mobile learning

These are the things discussed at conferences, in industry publications, and in blogs such as this one. My point, is not that these are all non-sensical, but that most of these debates have remained essentially static for a couple of decades. What little change there is in L&D has come about largely as a consequence of external influences (such as Google or Apple). While circulating in the gentle currents of these gyres is surprisingly soothing - and a temptation to which I frequently succumb - I believe that real change is driven by practice. Progress takes place when people tackle problems with an open mind and an honest appraisal of the results (I think Rob Hubbard tends to make a similar point, but then he is an engineer by nature).

It shouldn't be that way, of course: we don't build bridges on a 'suck it and see' basis, but there was a time when engineering too was a proto-science and that is exactly what people did.

We've been filming a lot of new starters recently, and it got me thinking. To anyone new to online learning I would say that it is an exciting area to work, but don't assume that anything you hear is true -  and don't get distracted by the debates lest you too ‘gyre and gimble in the wabe.’

Social Media: If you build it, they won't come.

As his colleague fiddled with the technology a young man shuffled nervously in his suit. These few minutes in front of the executive team were precious, but he was confident of his pitch: the internet was going to revolutionise things, was going to revolutionise learning. The ridiculous inefficiencies of classroom training were a thing of the past. Web-based training ushered in an era of anytime, anyplace, anywhere learning (he was happy to overlook the tautology on the grounds that his audience would appreciate the Martini allusion). The year was 1999, and he was surfing on the tidal wave of change. The senior team agreed a million dollar investment in a learning management system and online portfolio, based on his impressive ROI projections. Soon, everyone would be learning this way.


I wonder why we so rarely look back and wonder where we went wrong. Probably there were two problems: firstly, recognising the opportunities that technology presents is a lot easier than predicting how people will interact with that technology. Secondly, we failed to think about the implementation. We assumed that if we built it, they would come.


Four years ago, together with the Head of Creativity at the BBC Academy, I commissioned a pioneering project: it was called MOO. The project was shaped by a number of BBC visionaries - people at the bleeding edge of Web 2.0. The idea was simple: why not allow people throughout the BBC to share their ideas, their links, their creative genius. The rationale was solid: the BBC is full of people, at all levels of the organisation, with something to contribute - indeed we attract people wanting to be part of 'the most creative organisation in the world', people versed in the latest technology. People who bring new skills and perspectives to the organisation. People who craved the respect of their peers. And the BBC itself: an organisation striving to embody the principles 'creative, simple, digital, open'. We did the research, people thought it was a great idea.


So we built it - a place where people could share video, links, blog, comment and tag. A place where communities could flourish and serendipity take root. Our viral marketing campaign featured mysterious cows positioned strategically around the Beeb. We knew that only 1% of people tended to post content, but with 25,000 staff those still looked like healthy numbers. Forrester foretold a generation of participants - we needed to be ready.


But hardly anyone posted anything. It was as if we had erected a giant marquee and said 'you can do whatever you like in this space' - people came, had a look round, saw an empty marquee and left. It didn't take us long to realise that people use social media for specific things - and we didn't have a specific thing. We needed something to drive usage. Danny Cohen, then Head of BBC 3 kindly obliged: we would run a competition. 'Give us your creative idea and the best one would be made into a programme'. What a brilliant idea: the BBC short-circuiting the tired commissioning mechanisms and drawing on creativity from all around the corporation. It was a modest success: we had over a hundred entries and the winning submission 'Wu How' was made into a programme. But ultimately I got the impresion that not everyone welcomed a new, subversive, commissioning model: in fact many of the important people preferred things just the way they were. We were fighting a good fight, but probably a losing battle.


We talked about MOO at conferences. At one conference one of our visionaries - Andy Tedd - was approached by a young developer working on a similar idea for a company called BT. That was the first in a number of fruitful exchanges with Peter Butler and his team.


I continue to believe in social media for learning: if only because Twitter is my principal learning tool, and blogging encourages me to reflect and engage with the wider community. Together with my team at BP and the irrepressable Morten Bonde we are working on what I like to think is the next generation of social media for learning platform - The Hub. Social media for learning 2.0 if you like. All that really means is that we are trying to avoid the mistakes common to organisations who implement sharing platforms, only to find that nobody shares, leaving them to nurse their virtual ghost towns.


What are the common mistakes? Firstly, the consensus seems to be that you go where your people are and make yourself part of the conversation rather than trying to force them into a closed environment where you control the conversation. If your staff are on Facebook, start a Facebook group. If they are on linked in or Twitter, become part of the community and have something to say. This is now the conventional view of how to 'do' social media well.


But I believe there is a second option: focus on your content generation/harvesting strategy and implement carefully. By the time the Hub launches we will already have a couple of hundred videos, selected carefully from a bigger set that the team have filmed, and aimed at specific challenges that staff face: such as joining BP, becoming a leader or improving safety. Respected experts, enthusiastic peers and senior leaders tell stories and share best practice. Why story-telling? If you just tell people something, then you are doing comms. If you tell a story, then you are doing learning (the distinction is the affective context: one has it, the other doesn't). Initially participation is limited to rating. We plan to move to commenting in phase 2. We hope that people will come not to contribute, but because there is something worth watching. Our small production team are working with teams across BP to identify voices that need to be heard. Honeybees and flowers.


Is this 'true' social media? I argued this point with @cliveshepherd at the social media workshop we ran: it may not be, but it may be a way to get there. For sure, technology alone won't get you there in 99% of cases. My point, I suppose, is 'it's the content, stupid!'. If you a creating a social media for learning platform, where is all your content going to come from? Don't assume it will happen by magic.


In summary, I firmly believe in the value of social media for learning, just as I continue to believe in the value of elearning. But the same is true of both: they work in specific contexts, when implemented thoughtfully and most of all - they depend on good content.

Learning, culture, shoes

I always try to wear smart shoes. Early on in my career I was in a meeting to discuss the sale of some elearning we had created. We were talking big numbers. I thought the meeting went well. Afterwards I turned to my commercial partner 'what did you think?' he shook his head dismissively 'Did you see his shoes?'. Nothing came of the meeting. Whether coincidence or not, it taught me that some people may judge you solely on your footwear (apologies for the pun).

On those occasions where we have the chance to talk to learners before creating learning content, I often find that there is quite a difference between what stakeholders view as the learning requirement, and the needs as described by the intended audience. This will be a familiar picture to most of us; for my part I frame the challenge as how we properly dovetail the 'top-down' requirements ('these are the things they need to know') with the 'bottom-up' requirements ('these are the things we need to know'). But over the last few months I have been wondering about the role of culture, and the learning department's relationship to culture. I think that historically learning hasn't had much of a relationship - because culture is the stuff of informal learning, and l&d activity has tended to focus on formal ('top-down') learning. But as our intention shifts to informal learning, we find ourselves encountering culture. Informal learning accounts for 85% of organisational learning - at a guess culture probably features to a similar degree in explanations of why employees do what they do.

Rather than trying to define culture, I'd like to put yourself in the shoes of a new starter: culture are the norms you observe, the stories you hear, the ways in which people present themselves and the sets of expectations implied thereby. In many cases concerns about the effectiveness of internal communication or learning can be traced back to the overwhelming influence of culture in shaping organisational behaviour. Culture is all around us, and through our innate tendency to conform it defines us. Conformity is what gives our organisations their cohesiveness. At a microscopic level whenever there is any uncertainty - second by second in meetings - social referencing guides our behaviour.

A central challenge has been to understand how learning interventions can influence culture. One thing becoming clear is that beyond observational referencing, stories and storytelling are the normal format for cultural exchange: stories which are handed down to new starters, stories which are told on Monday mornings between colleagues, stories which form the cornerstones of our life's architecture.

People develop as if governed by Newtonian mechanics: given momentum and direction during their early years then continuing on the same track unless something intervenes, knocking them into a new trajectory. These rare moments are typically characterised by emotion, and archived in story format ready for transmission: it may be something as simple as observing remarkable leadership behaviour in a line manager, or as dramatic as a life-threatening error of judgement. In each case a story forms the means of wrapping a learning point in it's emotional context. It is through stories we learn the importance of good leadership, or safety.

So often the critical error made in formal communication or learning is abstraction: conveying the message whilst stripping away the story. The 'sender' understands the significance - they know the story, after all - but in the absence of the story, the message is near meaningless to the receiver - 'data protection matters' etc. By contrast a good speaker knows the importance of stories: they are memorable, they keep our attention, they have impact. Storytelling is the stuff of childhood, since it is then that we have so much to learn. Only in a world where adults had no further need to learn, would storytelling be restricted to children.

At present my team are heavily engaged in story capture and story creation (story, scenario, simulation) - because we hope to influence behaviour, because we hope to influence culture. When we capture a story or create a story, I hope that by sharing it we augment or create attractors in cultural space - i.e. formats which will stick in people's minds, form part of their conceptual architecture, be passed on or absorbed into a model of 'how things are done around here'. We hope to take something which exerts a powerful influence at local level and share it globally - or to take the lessons of one generation and share them with the next.

Anyway, I guess by now you have looked at your shoes.

Learning as Care

On page 83 of 'Being and Time', Martin Heidegger explains that what is fundamental to Dasein, i.e. what is means to be human, is 'concern'. He goes on to clarify that he is using the word 'concern' in a special sense - laying the groundwork for revealing the true nature of our essence: as care.

Whilst language and the complexities of translation shroud his work in obscurity, it is easy to convey what he is saying in more familiar terms: what sets us apart from other creatures is our ability to stand back from things and wonder about them - not just to use a table, for example, but to look at it in front of me and consider it as a table, and to wonder about it. Cats lie on tables, people ponder them. We 'care' about the table - we don't just use it.

The sad reality though is that in this sense we live most of our lives more like animals: caught up in the rush we conform, we follow norms, we do what we do because that is what we have seen others do. Even chickens have been shown to learn through observation. Heidegger doesn't actually say we behave like animals - he says we are 'fallen', meaning that we are so caught up in everyday activity and in using things that we cease to stand back and wonder or care about them. We lead 'unexamined lives'. Of course if someone were to say 'you don't really care about your life' you and I would probably object - we would cite our career, our future plans perhaps. But if this is different kind of concern than that which we would experience if we were diagnosed with a terminal illness.

A similar point in sometimes made by colleagues in learning: every once in a while someone will stop a meeting about a learning system, about a learning project, about a learning strategy to say 'do we even agree what learning is?'. I have observed that generally the reaction is to nod in appreciation of the profundity of the question then politely resume what we were doing before - planning, implementing, busying ourselves with the concerns of learning without ever being concerned about learning. Move along, no need to be embarrassed - everyone else is doing the same.

Over the last few years it has become clear to me that whilst people certainly derive much of their learning from the mechanisms that we share with animals - classical and operant conditioning, observational learning - that there is a large area of human learning that works differently, and which we will never understand until we appreciate that learning is characterised by care. To put it another way: any theory of adult learning which does not place care at its centre is simply wrong.

I have tried to sketch what this theory might look like elsewhere in this blog: the 'Affective Context Model'. But in fact is perhaps easier to get across if we just stop and reflect on learning. I routinely ask people what they remember from school and it is clear that care is the common denominator: they remember good teachers - teachers who cared about their subject, teachers who cared about their students, teachers who cared about them. They remember subjects which interested them - which they cared about. They remember friends, girlfriends & boyfriends, triumph and embarrassment. They remember exciting school trips and activities, they remember things they hated. They remember their first day.

A very similar pattern holds true of organisational learning. This is an approach which explains which Sir Ken Robinson is right to care about passion, why Roger Schank is right to insist on storytelling, why Cathy Moore is right to entreat us to orient learning around goals. This is an approach which will tell you who is a good teacher and who is not. Schools create a kind of artificial concern with tests; businesses make the flawed assumption that for everyone on a course, the topic is close to their hearts.

We naturally recoil from a definition of learning which involves care - because we have come to feel that such terms are not a proper part of a scientific theory or a businesslike dialogue. But care is foremost in my mind at the outset of every learning project: if only because if people really cared about something we would have no work to do. And if we can't make people care, then we have usually done no work. All around us, informal learning goes on - is the engine that lies at the heart of every organisation - fueled by care. People who join our organisations and find themselves 'in at the deep end', on a 'steep learning curve' - for no other reason than that they care what their new colleagues think of them. Because they don't want to embarrass themselves.

In overlooking care in our formal learning interventions we frequently make two big mistakes: we disseminate information without giving people a reason to care (indeed if we simply gave them a reason to care they would learn things for themselves), and we fail to provide learning resources to people who do care, who have an appetite for learning but are nevertheless starved of information.

In looking at the range of learning media which we intend to deploy in support of a desired outcome, only care enables us to identify the proper approach: if our target audience care about a topic (for example because it is relevant or needed for a pressing challenge) then the format can be simple, plain, text. Many years ago my team at Siemens built an immersive story-based simulation in order to train people to use their phones. A great experience - but not much help if you actually have someone on the line and need to know how to transfer a call. Then, you need a quick reference guide. I have tried to sketch roughly what I have in my head, below.

Equally, the tendency of organisations to spread mandatory messages in a top-down fashion frequently misses the mark: don't tell people what is important, tell them why, tell the story. A story or a scenario or a simulation are all effective precisely because they carry the affective context - they tell us about something and why we should care at the same time.

There will be some people who read this and think 'of course - we all know that motivation is important' - but this is not what I am saying. Motivation is a small subset of care. Care is a complex thing only partly under our control. To give an example: if two speakers at a conference were to have a punch-up on stage this is something that would stick in your memory a long time (and affect your behaviour towards the speakers), despite it not being something that mattered deeply to you in a professional sense. Our minds are designed to care about some things more than others, and we have only limited influence over this. But we do have some: I have started remembering more of what I hear about energy markets since I joined BP, and learning professionals will remember more of what is said at conferences than will the average person - because learning is something they care about. I can't recall the words from the hymns I sang every morning at school - I didn't care about them.

Still in doubt? Imagine how quickly you would learn about a serious illness if it turned out that you, yourself possessed this illness. (there is an interesting TED piece on this). So care is not simply a matter of motivation. Care is the central mechanism at the heart of all human learning - it governs both how we store information and how we subsequently use it.

On page 427 Heidegger writes "As care, Dasein is the 'between'." I know he intends something different but I quite like this image: of the careful teacher bridging the divide between what the learner is, and what she can be.

The Future of Learning & Technology

This is a 25 min version of a presentation that I gave to my colleagues in the BP Leadership Learning and Development team. Best viewed at 720p, fullscreen (click play then change the option in the lower right):