As Roger reminded us recently, Online Education is dead. Online learning though, has become a way of
life for most of us - almost overnight. For knowledge workers most of their
learning (I.e. Informal learning) is now done online (I estimate that I average
90 mins a day, learning online). And as Jane's research shows networks, blogs and Google are now how we get things done.
I’m not going to waste
any time circling the black hole of the ‘Future of Education’ debate. Instead,
I’d like to talk about the bigger narrative: courses-resources-apps, something which
I have been asked to describe a few times recently. In brief, there are two
journeys ahead of us: the journey from courses to resources - about which Ihave talked a great deal - and the journey from resources to apps, on which my
team have only just embarked.
The pity is that
whilst the industry is just embarking on the first journey - beginning to take
performance support seriously - our customers are well on the way along the
second; turning their backs on the ageing resource that is the web, and instead
integrating apps into their behavior. (this TechCrunch post clarifies.).
So what does this
mean?
The truth is, the web
has been a mixed blessing for companies: they are only just waking up to the
fact that their employees are now Googling their way through work. Just discovering
that waves of employees who expect to change jobs every two years and do their
work equipped only with their smartphone and access to the internet are lapping
on their shores. And that there’s a tidal wave of them on the way. If you could
picture these organisations they would look like your granddad in a string vest
spluttering on a half-eaten sarnie as he struggles to get up out from his deckchair
in the shadow of the approaching tsunami.
On the plus side,
staff don’t need courses anymore (nobody really believed they did much good).
On the downside – who knows what the heck they are doing with their devices.
Accenture answers: ‘they are figuring it out’. Most organizations find this
less than reassuring.
But all is not lost.
They have already stopped Googling. Instead, they have apps. Project managers
will install their favorite PM app, leaders the top leadership app… and so on.
And there’s something really important here: I keep hearing talk of
‘capability’ and ‘talent’ which misses the point: capability won’t mean
capability of the individual anymore. The capability will move to the app. Your
‘talent’ will be in the apps. Don’t believe me? Think of what SatNav does for
taxi-driver capability. For your resourcing model. Imagine what it means for a
transport company if your navigation app is better than your competitors. At its heart, this is why the debate is now about machine learning and employee performance.
Now imagine SatNav
for everything. That’s what Google Now is: pushing the information you need,
based on what you’re doing. Apps aren’t little icons you jab at on your phone –
‘apps’ is just a way of saying ‘put the capability in the device’.
The competitive
advantage is no longer in the people. The ‘War for Talent’ is now an app war:
the perfect business app would crunch big data from every employee’s device,
figure out the best way to do a task minute by minute, and redirect everybody
around the world to do things that way (Amazon’s pricing algorithms do
something like this today). This is why curation is interesting: it's a name for people who are trying to do that. A stepping-stone.
So if your business
model relies on people figuring things out by themselves, then you have already
lost. Your competitive advantage will depend largely on your ability to keep
your organizational capability ahead of your competitors’ – via apps.
But if you can move
on from resources and develop apps that dynamically optimize employee
performance – then you are on the way. There's work to be done helping the machines to learn, and employees to perform. So that’s the target!
While it's interesting you seem to change your mind half-way through. It's all about machine learning and employee performance and then it's all about the machines.
ReplyDeleteFirst up, I've got to say I partially disagree. You're assuming the taxi-driver can drive and programme the SatNav perfectly. A taxi driver who spends 3 minutes entering an address on the best SatNav will lose out to one that spend 30s entering the address but has a SatNav that typically takes a route that's 1 minute longer for example. Both might lose on a route where a driver that doesn't use SatNav but knows there's an accident so goes around.
Similarly, if your business is the slightest bit more complicated - say loading a truck so you keep the SatNav - the app doesn't do the loading, even if it's telling you the loading order, you're relying on people to do the lifting and loading, or to drive the forklifts and so on.
A great app is wonderful, but people using it well matters too.
Thanks for your comment, Eloise. Another way to express what I am saying might be that firstly we need to shift the focus from learning to performance (in effect, removing learning) wherever possible. This is increasingly uncontentious it seems. The second - possibly more interesting point - is that once you stat doing performance support you quickly find that developing resources (checklists, maps, guides, job aids) gives way to context aware performance systems. Your SatNav can produce a list of directions, but this is much less useful that 'turn left in 300 yards' which is a specific context-sensitive instruction modifying your current behaviour. That someone who memorises a route may do it better misses the point: year on year people are holding less of what they need to know to do their jobs in their heads.
ReplyDeleteThis is where the lines blur between learning materials and online Help (which is now often called User Assistance), which is the space Technical Authors dwell in. It reminds me of John Carroll's work on minimalism (http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/minimalism.html ; http://everypageispageone.com/2013/07/02/what-is-minimalism/), which is a cornerstone of technical communication.
ReplyDeleteThe jump to apps may not be as smooth as you suggest. It may be the case in mature industry sectors, where the processes are well established and defined. However, many businesses don't have particularly robust processes, they rely on people doing "heroic deeds" to get things done. People may also be still trying to understand the mental model of the task. To quote Carroll, too busy learning to make much use of the instructions.
Hi Ellis. Thanks for this. I think I am probably saying something stranger than you imagine.
DeleteYou say that the jump to apps may not be smooth. How was the jump to SatNav? Pretty smooth. Pretty extraordinarily-overnight-everything-changed-your-map-business-is-dead smooth. Sure, people sometimes get lost. Sure, Inrix makes SatNav look dumb.
This is ‘online help’ in the sense in which I am using it. There is no question of people being ‘too busy learning to make use of the instruction’; learning has vanished, there is only the user interface. A SatNav is not a learning device: it is not trying to teach you the route at a time that suits you, or break your learning down into ‘byte-size’ pieces.
And imagine the sheer power – one small change in the central routing algorithms and tens of thousands of people pass through a sleepy village.
And now imagine that for leadership – and yes, we are really starting that development. What I observe is that the majority of leaders ignore even the most basic rules of the road – rules such as listening, supporting, developing. Imagine just how radically leadership could be improved by tiny, timely instructions: ‘turn left in 300 yards’, ‘speak to Bob about his job security on Thursday.’ I think it's interesting how learning is looking for a better host.