aconventional

E-learning is dead. Long live online learning.

2012-05-01T07:59:00.002-07:00

Looking back, the elearning course will be viewed pretty much as the fax machine: there will still be times when we need to use it, but the days when it seemed ubiquitous and something everyone needed to have are over. The demise of both have similar roots: overtaken by a flurry of smaller, more agile technologies.

So what comes after the course? The resource. I have been talking about the shift from courses to resources for some time, and it might seem that the point is merely a semantic one: 'courses/resources, whatever - we still do online learning'. But what has struck me in recent months is just how different the two ambitions are - affecting every stage of the ADDIE model. We approach the analysis differently, we approach the design and development differently, we implement differently and we evaluate differently. As a team, we've been on a bit of an adventure: trekking through the uncharted realm that lies 'beyond elearning' and I'd like to tell you a little of what we've discovered. It's a story of the journey from the world of formal elearning courses to the world of informal online learning.

Analysis: I tend to sum it up in the phrase 'the care curve'. Conventional learning projects were very 'top down' - more often than not we would start with a message that needed to be communicated across the organisation, or the materials developed by an expert trainer. (see weneedacourse for an amusing cartoon) The model was 'broadcast' in other words. Where a TNA was involved, it would often confirm expectations about broad knowledge/capability gaps and the solution would be left up to us.

Building resources works differently: it's a much more 'bottom-up' approach starting with identifying those things that the audience really cares about and the specific goals and tasks that they have. There is then a process of matching resources and resource types against these granular needs, giving rise to a much richer variety of resource objects, typically in much smaller form, sometimes distributed across a range of platforms. In order to get going with their IT equipment, a new starter may need a simple, printable guide. Authentic engagement with the culture of an organisation may require videos of peers. Often the resources already exist, or are best generated by the problem-solving community itself (we used to call this 'crowd-sourcing'). So instead of the TNA (adapted for level 2 stuff) we run focus groups, develop user profiles, seek to understand 'tribes' and - most importantly - pinpoint challenges. The end result is an array of different 'assets' matched to specific needs, to be called upon as the need arises - i.e. when people care. Resources is a broader category than performance support, subsuming it.

Design: in the days of learning we would employ the dark arts of instructional design to improve the interactivity of our learning courses, essentially in order to put distance between them and the powerpoint presentation. The end result would be some 40 minutes long, broadly 'teacherly' in tone; typically a mix of text, images and interactions. There was probably never really any hard evidence that any of this stuff worked. We know that level 2 outcomes were better than classroom - but that's not saying much.

Meanwhile the way in which actual people learn online took different direction: people Googled stuff as they needed to know it, generated low-grade short form video of everything from dance-moves to cake-baking, from computer skills to people skills. Created Wikipedia. Once again the people who contribute are the ones who really care, with content typically consumed at point of need. Ever wonder why nobody is spontaneously creating elearning courses? (the closest is probably slideshare). A familiar theme I grant you, but designing in this space is very different. Last year we created infographics, short video stories, animations, portals for content sharing, decision-support tools, scenarios and simulations. Each asset needs to be a good fit for the audience and the need. They may need them on laptops, phones or paper. Sometimes production values are critical, sometimes they are not.

Development: I've had some very weird meetings over the course of last year - new conversations with old development partners, and new conversations with new development partners. The elearning industry as a whole is at risk, even as online learning grows. what happens to the fax companies when people stop buying fax machines? Would you buy your email system from them if they persuade you that they are 'branching out'? Can they really do infographics, portal build and film for example? Some suppliers are already repositioning around the world of resources, some are not. From my perspective, it's hard to know who to talk to anymore - I used to think I knew, now I'm not so sure. For those companies not content to retreat into the low cost compliance space, this repositioning will be vital.

Implementation: For a long time, success of an elearning course was predicated on implementation: implement well and it would succeed, implement poorly and it would fail. In practice this often meant a big launch, plenty of marketing - and most importantly an aggressive stance on chasing completions. Why? Because we were telling people things they didn't want to know, maybe didn't need to know.

Resources are different: if you have properly mapped the needs and the audience and positioned correctly they will be used. If not, they won't. 'The learners will tell you if your learning is any good' is how Cathy Moore put it, I think. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of resources. As a result there is often no 'big launch', no chasing of completions. Instead the awareness level of the target audience needs to be raised as the resources begin to appear. Remember the old world of blended learning and pre-work? Resources allow us to work in three new areas: embedding and sustaining classroom learning, performance support and peer-to-peer sharing.

Evaluation: the big question. Most of your resources won't even be tracking into your LMS? Why? because they are used not completed. Videos are viewed, checklists are printed off, simulations are played repeatedly. They are not the sort of things that one 'completes' - we are not doing level 2 analysis here. Instead we are genuinely hoping to support and develop people's performance in a more direct way - i.e. we are doing informal learning. One answer might be to actually ask people if the resources are useful and to monitor their usage. If no-one's using them, either they don't know they are there or they are not useful. Is Google a useful learning tool, in your experience? Is Twitter? Is YouTube? There aren't any fruitful Kirkpatrick/ROI type conversations to be had here. This may feel like a step backwards in conventional terms, but the things that most strongly impact performance are rarely knowledge, so it somewhat pointless evaluating learning in those terms.

The future focus will be on resources and peers - that's where the action always was, only now the mechanism is visible, tractable. Peer evaluation, peer learning are increasingly at the core of our new projects.

Elearning will continue to linger on in the corners of our offices for many years to come, no doubt. But for me I think perhaps now is the time to bid it a fond farewell.

Learning: the science won't help you, if you don't know how it works.

2012-04-20T01:28:00.003-07:00

There's a common misconception of science, namely that scientific experiments are used to figure out how the world works. Actually, scientific experiments are used to reject theories about how the world works. Where do the theories come from? That's an interesting question.

Today, in learning, I often wonder which is worse: the science or the crackpots. Often the two go hand in hand.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about: imagine I put together an experiment in which some people lick an object and some don't. It turns out that if you spend ten minutes licking a BMW 3-series you remember much more about it than if you merely spent an equivalent period in the same garage. Perfectly true. Hey presto the 'licking theory of learning' is born: ‘The basic mechanism of learning is Licking, according to research.’ I can't wait to get stuck into the instructional design.

Bizarre as this may sound this is precisely what routinely happens in learning: take Atkinson & Schiffrin's multi-store model for example. They found that people who repeated words were more likely to remember them that people who didn't and based on this they proposed that the basic mechanism for memory (a prerequisite for learning) is repetition. Repeating things transfers them from short to long-term memory. Utter tosh. Never mind that most things people learn they learn from single experiences, never mind that many things (such as school hymns and pesky phone numbers) prove near immune to repetition. The list is long. Learning styles - really? Odd how most people seem to cope just fine with Google or YouTube (or university), and that the vast majority of learning is 'on the job'. Learning styles are no more real than 'digestion styles': sure, I prefer chocolate ice-cream over strawberry, but we both digest it in pretty much the same way. And it’s not just stuff from the 70s – I read something equally ridiculous about ‘multi-modal learning’ published recently, based on some perfectly respectable science around Working Memory.

Today there are otherwise capable people mired in approaches with experimental support but no basis in reality. Learning: if you don't figure it out, the science may simply mislead you.

Judith Harris's book 'The Nurture Assumption' is a good example. At the heart of her book is the argument that there is no shortage of research into child rearing – which has all been used to support the wrong theory. Turns out people learn from peers, not parents according to Judith. But for years the research was used to support the contrary view.

In defense of science, there's some better stuff around now that there was way back when our learning theories were first being developed. Now, we have the likes of Damasio, Kahneman and the beginnings of an understanding of how the brain works. But the people responsible for developing theories of learning are us - the community of learning professionals.

Theory is a product of deep engagement; working with a thing, working with people who are working with a thing, thinking about it, discussing it, reading relevant material – some of which will be research - and most of all noticing when things aren't working rather than convincing oneself that they are. This kind of messy, ‘system1’ expertise then builds to the point where we have a good intuition as to how something works – an intuition that we can then put to the test scientifically. That is how science works.

Otherwise we are just pouring coffee-grounds into a diesel engine and declaring it to be a cappuccino-maker.

Culture

2012-03-27T10:09:00.000-07:00

What determines how people in your organisation behave? It’s not leadership, it’s not training, it’s not strategy or policy or process. It’s culture.

Of course all of the above contribute to culture – and certainly they are significant factors – but it’s a mistake to think they together they add up to culture. Culture is much bigger than all of them put together.

So what is culture? I have noticed the word is cropping up more regularly, but that there is a worrying lack of clarity and research on the topic. Ed Schein’s book ‘Organisational Culture and Leadership’ is a good read, but makes a basic mistake – beginning with the assumption that it is leaders that define culture. The mistake arises because it is easy ascribe significance to the things that are most visible: at times of uncertainty, when there are no norms for behaviour or when an organisation is first forming those people prepared to step into the light and set a direction are most visible. But for the most part organisations do not function like this – they are not ‘gardens of Eden’ instead they are complex, evolving ecosystems, so the simple fable of leadership and culture is just that.

It is also a telling mistake: for many years psychologists assumed that a big part of the answer to the question ‘why do children behave as they do?’ was ‘parents’ – the other part of the answer being ‘genetics’, leaving only an argument about the relative significance of each. But, as Judith Harris argues in ‘The Nurture Assumption’, we have overestimated the significance of parents. Parents don’t determine behaviour, peers do. Leaders don’t determine behaviour, peers do. The same mechanisms in play as we learn and develop stay with us into adulthood: the greatest influence on our behaviour and attitudes is our peers.

So how important is culture? I’m guessing about 80%. About 80% of our behaviour is attributable to culture (as opposed to, say, policy, strategy, process, leadership etc.). I haven’t been able to find any research which addresses this directly (please let me know if you have) – but there’s plenty that addresses it indirectly: informal learning accounts for around 85% of learning within a typical organisation – a research finding which has been widely replicated.

Since informal learning is the process by which people acquire culture (by observing, copying, and receiving feedback from peers) it’s fair to assume that informal learning takes care of culture, and formal learning takes care of policy, process and the rest.

One curious phenomenon is the degree to which these often seem to be misaligned: culture proscribing one set of behaviours and formal learning another. Most learning professionals frequently aware that they are somehow working against culture.

I think that we – learning people - need to talk more about culture, and to understand it better. The bridge to this conversation has been informal learning: as we have begun to appreciate the extent to which learning already goes on all around us, we have become dimly aware of the ‘dark matter’ which is transmitted thereby: culture is water and informal learning the plumbing, if you like. Once you notice the pipes, you begin to wonder what they are carrying.

The most striking thing about culture is the extent to which it is a peer-to-peer phenomenon. Small groups of people – sometimes big groups or people – create their own subcultures in a way which is ultimately non-linear and emergent, but with some familiar mechanics: social referencing, for example. Standing on a train station in Bracknell I notice that despite the yellow line painted a metre behind the edge of the platform and automated safety announcement, around 75% of commuters are ahead of the line. But would the same be true in Germany? If one wants to change employee behaviour, one needs to change culture – but how does one set about changing culture?

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” (P. Drucker) Much of what I am saying will seem vaguely familiar and agreeable – as someone merely stating the obvious. There is a tacit acceptance that culture is important, influential. And yet to be overlooked. Perhaps because it is an inherently ‘grass roots’ or ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon, and in a cultural paradigm used to tackling things ‘top-down’ the answer can only be: leadership, strategy, policy. We know it’s there but we don’t know how to tackle it directly.

The world is changing, though: technological change is enabling cultural change. Traditional top-down, one-to-many command & control structures are yielding to varying degrees to many-to-many, peer-to-peer networks – and in this environment there is an opportunity to access culture directly.

There are many ways in which access to culture is being opened up by technocultural change. I would like to give one example: story-telling. Throughout human history stories have been shared amongst small groups as ways of preserving, shaping and transmitting culture. Today, stories are still the vehicles for cultural transmission – stories of leadership behaviour, stories of critical incidents, stories of lessons hard learned. ‘I remember this one time…’ says the old hand to the new hire. Today a story can be shared to an unprecedented extent, and at a rate which approaches the immediacy of the small group – among a group of people who, although widely dispersed, still identify themselves as peers. Those of us who are party to some of these extended networks are now buffeted by cultural change on a regular basis: the shift from blogging to microblogging, from firewalled to cloud-based working, for example. Today people are talking about the ‘flipped classroom’ – ten years ago all we talked about was Kolb, Kirkpatrick and learning styles. In truth the culture of learning itself is changing faster than the learning profession.

In summary, the conversations I am hoping to have are around culture and the role that we can play in culture change. That way we might actually start to influence behaviour.

Once more with feeling

2012-02-08T17:47:00.000-08:00

I wonder if you are afraid of public speaking? Most people are. And for this reason, people who have to speak publicly prepare what they have to say very carefully – because the thought of standing in front of a group and not knowing what to say, or losing their train of thought terrifies them. And that’s usually why they are bad at it: the one thing they really need to do – to share how they feel about their topic – is the last thing that crosses their mind.

I started my career as a college lecturer, and like the countless extraordinary people who work in teaching roles, stood in front of groups of people - sometimes for several hours a day – not knowing what I was going to say. I would invite you to imagine what that is like if you haven’t experienced it at first hand: ushered into a room, rows of expectant faces, knowing only that it is your role to be their teacher for the next 80 minutes and that there is a curriculum to follow.

What do you do? As a young teacher it didn’t take me long to realise that teaching calls for much more than summarising and explaining the textbook - that this would be akin to an actor reading their lines from a script, pausing only to take questions from the audience, rather than playing their role. You know in your gut that you are on the spot, that something extraordinary is required. If you are a good teacher you will find yourself doing this extraordinary thing - and it has taken me around twenty years to figure out precisely what this is. And though there are many people who can surely do it better than I ever could, I don’t know anyone else who can explain it.

In the beginning, I thought I would find the answer in the research – in the accumulated wisdom of psychologists and cognitive scientists. I can save you the trouble – it’s not there. I left teaching after five years attempting to apply learning theory to classrooms for the chance to apply learning theory to organisations, and to earn more money. The advantage of this kind of ‘in vivo’ experimentation is that whilst it usually lacks the rigor of the laboratory, it at least has a chance to get at the truth because it looks at learning under normal conditions, without stripping away those things that – it turns out – give it its essential character. Such as ‘care’ for example.

But there were occasions when I had the chance to test theories more rigorously - and the results would usually surprise me: back in the 90s ‘learning styles’ was a watchword for hip educationalists. I was with them – talking about something I called the ‘Hear-See-Do’ model based on Honey & Mumford & Bruner’s modes of representation. Turns out it was bunkum. We took the same information and rendered it into a range of formats – from text, through audio and images all the way to flash interaction and variations in between, then tested recall after 30 mins. Your prediction?

And the result? Text won. Students remembered slightly more from the plain text (though they found the richer formats more entertaining).

Why?

It shouldn’t surprise us really: most of us will have done plenty of learning from textbooks. Few of us struggle with a textual answer to some medical condition we have googled. Wikipedia is mostly text. It turns out that learners are flexible, and that whilst there may well be slight variations in preferences this doesn’t matter in the real world – what matters is whether we want to learn. Teachers know this intuitively, but learning theory completely missed the point.

This is your cue to think ‘motivation matters’. Nope. Motivation is important, but it’s just a side-effect of the mechanism used by humans to learn. If you witness a fight on your journey home (as I did once on the BBC bus, watching a pinstriped banker brawl with a tramp, shoving him into the street) then this will stay with you for a long time. What was my motivation?

And I take the point that this is memory not learning, but learning is merely the name we give to a cultural practice in which we memorise with a view to doing something with it at a future date. It’s a semantic distinction, in other words. If I hear a catchy tune, but don’t sing it until a year later did I learn it or not? (Though it's fair comment to point out that here I am talking about episodic and semantic memory rather than procedural (muscle) memory).

So how does learning work? It turns out that we don't yet have a name for the mechanism; I have called it 'affective context' other people have called it gut instinct or 'the primitive brain' or something like that. The problem all along has been that we looked at learning through a Cartesian lens - from a rational perspective. From that angle it looked something like a computational process - like information transfer, or data storage and retrieval. But rather like archaeologists unearthing a buried city, neuroscientists have uncovered the tip of a vast system that lies beneath the superficialities of the cortex - and it looks very different. It has an operating system all of its own.

An example: the discovery of the 'mirror neuron' system means that in laymans' terms you and I are connected emotionally (unless you are a psychopath) to the people you see around you. Our systems literally mirror the feelings of others by reading their expressions and behaviours and duplicating their emotional state. When people cry we may also cry - certainly it makes us feel sad. Laughter is contagious. But consider for a minute what this means for teaching: the enthusiasm of a teacher - for their subject, for their students - is literally transferred to their students. Let me guess which teachers you remember from school: the enthusiastic ones, the ones who cared, the exciting and excitable ones (and the horrible ones - predictably). And, as Maya Angelou once pointed out, you are more likely to remember how they made you feel than what they had to say.

This simple but fundamental aspect of teaching comes as a surprise to some teachers, but I suspect is unsurprising to others: there are teachers who labour under the illusion that students require the expertise or knowledge locked away in their academic skulls. Not so. In an age where information was hard to come by this misinterpretation was easier to understand: what students really require is their teachers' enthusiasm, their zeal, their care for their subject-matter and for those that they teach. This and only this is genuinely transferred: the learning is something students do - if they too care. Today, most students learn because of exams – something they are drilled to care about.

The 'mechanics of care' are vastly more complex than we imagine. As Nietzsche once pointed out 'thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.' Mirror neurons are just one small part of an integrated system designed to process information in this seemingly alien fashion: we codify our experiences according to their affective context, and use this affective metadata to make decisions and to process comparisons - whether we are playing chess or throwing footballs (as Jonah Lehrer points out), the basic mechanism is the same. When Wordsworth pens 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' it is loneliness that allows him to bridge the semantic divide. This has little if anything to do with emotional intelligence.

When I ask people about learning their responses do not follow the pattern predicted by any of the classical learning theories. They remember the highs and lows. Learning - real learning - is usually expressed in overtly emotional terms. People tell stories. They say 'I remember this one time when...' and a story is simply information wrapped in affective metadata. In Bartlett's classic 'War of the ghosts' experiment, the finding was that the emotive feature of the tale remained whilst all else slipped away in the retelling. Human cognition is all about codifying experiences in affective terms, then using those features to make comparisons and establish schema. If I think about the train journey I used to make, I remember standing on the platform in the early morning darkness as the cold rain soaked huddled commuters. This was a low point, now it is all that remains of those countless experiences. As Milan Kundera points out, we do not remember everything - just a handful of snapshots. All of them emotionally charged.

Good teachers are enthusiastic, good teachers care about their students, good teachers tell stories and use examples, good teachers challenge students, good teachers relate learning to the lives of their students. We all know this. But all these features are predicted by affective context theory, whilst no other approach begins to explain them.

A sound approach to instructional design begins by codifying care: by mapping out those thing that concern the learner and those that do not, so that resources can be provided where the degree of concern is high, and impactful experiences constructed where it is low: flight simulators and reference manuals.

Learning. It turns out this is something I care about.

Disruption

2012-01-01T05:40:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-12T09:06:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-29T06:30:00.000-08:00

"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.

2011-11-15T06:24:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-25T10:09:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-29T05:34:00.000-07:00

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):

Staff Trek: The Next Generation

2011-06-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I find myself in conversations about what the future generation will mean for businesses, and more specifically the ways in which HR may need to respond to the impending subsidence of the baby boomers in preparation for the tsunami of GenY+-ers. There’s some generalised anxiety about it, but very little in the way of specifics. But from what I’ve read* and observed there are real trends – some good, some bad – that would be worth thinking about. The biggest single trend is that GenY+ are active participants entering a world largely structured around assumptions that they will be passive recipients. By way of disclaimer, I think it is sometimes hard to distinguish the kind of commentary on ‘turbulent youth’ that has been commonplace since Plato from GenY+ characteristics – but I still think the following are worth consideration:

Baby boomer boo-boos:

Hierarchy: GenY+ doesn’t get hierarchy. They distrust it. They are networked, they trust their peers, they respect people for what they know more than how old they are. This makes increasingly good sense in a world where things change fast and expertise and experience are fleeting. So trust is hemorrhaging from top-down structures such as internal comms, traditional advertising and broadcast media and conventional management models as peer-to-peer recommendation and interaction gain ground. From a genY+ perspective a hierarchical organisation is not a meritocracy – almost by definition. A meritocracy is flat (if a little bumpy) and fluid.

Non-participative events: organisations thrive on them – classroom-style events, often called meetings or presentations, in which one person talks for most of the time, then allows a few minutes for questions. Compare this format to the forum, blogs or tweets. Stephen Fry gets 140 characters – same as the rest of us. It is up to us to decide whether to follow him or not; ultimately ownership of the space rests with us. In a forum no-one’s voice (except the moderators) carries inherent weight, instead respect must always be earned. The GenY+ attitude strikes previous generations as arrogance – but really it is a purist model of meritocracy and inclusion: ‘we will listen to everyone, but space in our attention has to be earned’. GenY+ are distinguished most clearly from GenX and earlier by their need to share what they experience online – as they experience it.

Life/work balance: this is some weird notion cooked up by GenX people who still think there is some way of distinguishing between life and work. This is surely some terrible form of bad faith: as if your work wasn’t part of your life. Ask a GenY+ ‘are you working right now?’ and they will struggle to answer a significant part of the time. And by inference inflexible working environments which simultaneously fail to acknowledge the contributions made outside working hours and the potential for sloth within them seem relics of a Victorian age. The office, a workhouse.

Unwritten rules (and to some extent rules): GenY+ expect more transparency about the rules, and have a low tolerance for task environments where the rules are not clear. In games what you can and can’t do is generally made explicit from the outset – moves permitted only f you happen to be on good terms with a certain player are not features of any game environment I know. More generally, rules are there to be explored and pushed to their limit: often the best rewards are to be found in the most inaccessible places. GenY+ are results-driven, rule averse. ‘tell me what you want done and I’ll figure out the rest’.

Being told how to do things: the wild-west of online breeds entrepreneurial, problem-solving attitudes. Typically there are many way to achieve the same outcome, and in technology anything is possible. Games are much the same, often every task can be accomplished differently, depending on your character. Organisations which set GenY+s a task, then prescribe a way to do it may leave employees feeling frustrated and undervalued.

Dis-connectivity: being in any situation where one is required to focus on a single task or disconnect from the online network which one inhabits. The problem is partly one of attention-span but principally an experiential issue: if the way that you experience the world is in terms of its currency in your networks, switching off your networks disconnects you from the event ‘If I can’t tweet, what am I listening for?’

GenY shortcomings:

Thorough consideration: GenY+ struggle to think things through carefully. Their world is awash with superficiality and instant reactions. They suffer from adult attention-deficit disorder. They tend to allocate too little time to weighing up pros and cons or considering all perspectives. Their strategic vision may be poor and they may miss the bigger picture or the long game in the pursuit of immediate achievements.

Loyalty and care: in the online world people flit in and out as the situation requires: acquaintances tagged in the same picture, brief encounters in the heat of battle, fleeting wifi-allegiances. GenY+ increasingly inhabit a world where organisations pay them by the day and they, in return, owe no debt of allegiance. Their media is organised in a bubble around them, wrapping them in a blanket of traffic which relates only to their own personal needs and desires.

Old fashioned communication skills: spend enough time exchanging text-speak chat online and the ability to put together a carefully argued white paper, or build a relationship face-to-face is going to suffer. Substantiation of this widely-shared view will have to await the longitudinal research, but a combination of factors ranging from shorter, more reflexive patterns of communication together with the egocentricity of online environments seems to me to make this highly likely.

In summary, I suspect there are significant implications for organisations looking to attract and assess good staff, for the onboarding and training process, for policy, and for the way that an organisation is structured in order to achieve short and long-term objectives.

*For example the CIPD conducted some solid research into this (http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-resources/survey-reports/organisations-generation-y-employees-web-2.0-technologies.aspx ), and the book ‘The Kids are Alright’ (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kids-Are-Alright-Generation-Workplace/dp/1422104354/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308062035&sr=1-1) draws some more general conclusions based on a variety of research findings.

Learning and Identity

2011-04-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

I think I finally made sense today of something that I have been wondering about for some years: a woman on the radio said that she was attending the Royal Wedding because, as a child, her parents had taken her to the wedding of Charles and Diana.

The thing that I had been struggling to explain for a while was the observation that my daughters’ development seemed to advance noticeably as a result of new experiences; it was as if taking them on a camping trip would unlock new cognitive capacities. This might seem like common sense – but conventional development theory has it that cognitive capacities advance in stages that are more or less preset.

It struck me as odd that a person would attend a royal wedding – at considerable inconvenience – simply because they had attended it as a child. Then it occurred to me just how common this experience is: people who follow football teams because their parents took them to matches when they were younger, people whose love of theatre or fishing is rooted in their experiences as a child. It seems that people are drawn to recreate these defining experiences as moths drawn to the light; in a way similar to the Freudian notion of fixation, but more subtle and prevalent.

What I am saying is that there are experiences which really do, literally, define us. Which acts as catalysts for our development and which are thereby burned into our identity – as the fixed anchor points of who we are. These are the ‘attractors’ of our self-development; experiences whose affective context gathers our lives to them with ever increasing gravity – as we, in turn go fishing and take our own children and grandchildren fishing.

This ties together two questions for me: questions of identity and questions of learning. It seems to me that the two share the same mechanism, albeit at different scales. The experiences to which you and I will return – moth-like – and which in turn define us; are those which acted as stepping stones for our personal development. In adulthood our learning and development continues to be shaped by new experiences to the degree that our identity remains flexible. Eventually, aged and ossified, we reject new experience and cease learning. Our personality is set in stone. Our fixations with the cornerstones of our identity – be they fishing or Royalty or football – consume our personality in its entirety. The common mechanism is the affective nature of experiences – which may be so strong that in a child it draws the entire personality around it, or in an adult strong enough that these become key learning experiences. Finally, our ability to learn waning, we become creatures completely defined simply by those strong echoes, those experiences to which we can only return.

Diversity & Inclusion

2011-04-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

I wanted to write about Diversity & Inclusion, because it has been a very real question for me since my early teens, and because in recent years I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the leading experts in the field, and on what I hope will prove to be innovative online approaches in this area (both at the BBC and with the team here at BP).

And yet this 2008 Washington Post article cites a study of 830 US organisations implementing diversity training which broadly concludes that they harm diversity. Levels of minority group representation actually fell as a consequence of mandatory diversity training. I don’t find this surprising.

Whilst the reasons for this are unclear, I would speculate that it is because diversity training (and especially the online course) has tended in the past to fall into one of two categories:

1) The reprimand: the white male majority (of which I am a part) may easily feel that the subtext of diversity training runs something like ‘you have been treating these groups badly in the past, you must do better’. In reality guilt is generally only shouldered for so long before it is rationalised: several psychological experiments over the last few decades have demonstrated that far from feeling sympathy with victims, people tend to denigrate them. Somehow (we reason) they deserved it. Our feeling that we are, in some nonspecific way, being accused of prejudice becomes misdirected resentment.

2) The charity appeal: a related but equally damaging possibility is that training courses send the message ‘these groups need our help’. Whilst superficially well-intended, there is a real chance that this kind of approach unintentionally reinforces a stereotype of minority groups in which they are seen as in need of assistance and – by inference – less capable.

Whilst I now find it fairly easy to spot these kinds of flaws, it is less easy to know what to do about them. One interesting alternative is to ‘argue the business case’ – which is normally something along the lines ‘our customers are becoming more diverse, we must therefore become more diverse as a business’. There are a couple of problems here: firstly, if the argument is to stand up then much more needs to be said about the specifics – since at face value there are many non-diverse organisations who seem to be doing quite well. Secondly, and as Binna Kandola points out, if diversity is the right thing to do why do we need a business case at all? Would we put together a business case for behaving ethically? Have you ever seen a business case for safety?

A more recent trend, and one which I have been happy to follow, is the shift in terms of reference from diversity to inclusivity. Emerging views of diversity have noted a shift away from the conventional ‘strand-based’ conception (black, gay, female, jewish, disabled, single etc.) to a less category-oriented approach. This is helpful since it tracks the increasing complexity of the ways in which people choose to categorise or not categorise themselves. It is harder, for example, to say who is and is not middle-class – and this may not be a helpful approach in any case. In addition, there is a growing awareness of the rich psychological and cultural diversity which underlies superficial similarities. I know first-hand that some of the most pernicious forms of discrimination relate not to traditional distinctions but ones which relate to means of expression – for example male/female or working/middle class differences in language use. Speak confidently and you are heard. Speak quietly and you are dismissed. Use the right words.

Inclusivity is a much better discussion to have: not least because it is clear that a lack of inclusivity in key areas – such as decision-making – can have serious implications for the quality of decisions and associated areas, such as creativity and problem-solving. These are things which do matter deeply to businesses. A business that makes good decisions is an inclusive business. In addition, none of us likes to be left out – and this in turn is a strong argument for inclusivity, namely ‘we are all different, we all want to be respected and heard’. Though fundamentally sound there is still a problem with this approach – it can be used to rationalise the status quo: a group of middle-ages white men can sit round the table and persuade themselves that they are marvelously diverse based on their technicolor spread of MBTI ratings.

Another trend is to focus on areas such as unconscious bias and subtle exclusion. Again, I think this is a good thing: if you can get everyone to acknowledge that they possess biases, that what differentiates us is the degree to which we engage in critical self-examination, and if you can somehow embed this into everyday behavior – then I believe it is possible to make some progress. Having said this, addressing unconscious bias can also turn out to be the soft option for organisations reluctant to tackle the issues head-on: so what are people actually supposed to do differently? What is the change we expect to see as a consequence? We want to avoid merely opening the door to a new class of self-congratulatory behavior.

And this brings us to the heart of the issue: training programmes which are not coupled with specific diversity policies and programmes are unlikely to bring about change, even where they affect attitudes. Oona King, for example, has put in place a ‘Diversity Toolkit’ which spells out the specific recruiting behaviors expected of staff at Channel 4, coupled with supplier selection criteria which set out requirements around supplier diversity. If you don’t make the grade, we can’t work with you.

This point also exposes a question common to much elearning content creation: is it possible to bring about behavior change within an elearning module? My contention (in previous blogs) is that attitudes generally follow behaviors (not vice-versa), so anything aimed at attitude change alone will be largely ineffective. But what alternative is there? What I have tried to do in more recent work is to place audiences in a realistic context - one in which they are given the opportunity to decide a course of action supportive of diversity - in the hope that these virtual decisions will then provide a baseline for workplace attitudes.

But at the heart of the diversity debate there is anxiety – and this is not entirely misplaced. When I was conducting interviews with senior managers in preparation for the creation of the BBC’s diversity online programme I noticed that they would often talk about diversity in terms of ‘bravery’. ‘Managers should be more courageous in recruiting new talent.’ Why? Because for many people – people who are used to working in a familiar way with familiar people, people who best understand other people who are most similar to them - diversity represents a risk. Hiring a staff member who is a wheelchair-user or requires flexible working arrangements will present challenges – challenges which they may not have encountered before and which may require them to change or to be more flexible. They may not know what to say or how to react. And at the core of human nature is a resistance to change. Merely inclining people to be brave may not be enough. What about those organisations which are profoundly risk-averse?

But the flip-side should be encouraging: programmes such as the BBC’s Extend which facilitate placements of disabled staff across the business can help to advance the cause of diversity greatly – by breaking down preconceptions and overcoming anxieties. Diversity training should be accompanied by real opportunities to work with people different from ourselves and by policies which bring about measurable change.

The injunction ‘know thyself’ has haunted me since my days as a philosophy student. It is only now, many years later, that I have any confidence in my response – and that has only come as a result of my experience of other, very diverse, people. I cannot say that this makes for a business case – but it is one of the few things that one can really accomplish in one’s lifetime, I think.

Top ten e-learning mistakes

2011-03-09T05:04:00.000-08:00

I was looking for a summary of the top 10 mistakes people make in designing e-learning solutions. I couldn't find one (no doubt there is one, somewhere) but thought I would list my own. I am sure there are more - maybe you can help me make it a top 20!

Overlooking the implementation: there’s an important distinction between completion rates and learning. Be that as it may, completion rates are still likely to feature in an evaluation of the success of your programme – especially when it comes to compliance training. Completion rates are almost entirely determined by how you have implemented your course; more specifically the degree to which you used a combination of elements such as: marketing, reporting, administration, hard prerequisites, senior sponsors and the appraisal process. It is perfectly possible to create a mediocre course and achieve 100% completion, or a fantastic course and achieve 5% completion rates. It’s all in the implementation.
Building courses: it’s usually an illusion to think that providing information or changing attitudes will result in behavioural changes. Generally the only thing that changes behaviour is changing behaviour. As a result we often find ourselves trying to mitigate a problem instead of tackling the process that gives rise to it, and for that reason it would be better if we were more squarely engaged in performance consulting than learning consultancy. But within the area of learning there’s also a healthy shift away from the course format sweeping our profession - and which I would like to reflect here. It’s great that the conventional model of bolting a 30 minute ppt-style course onto the front of a face-to-face experience is giving way to something more sophisticated. Instead of courses we are building resources: interviews, conceptual animations, scenarios, drama, best-practice case-studies – in short a kit of parts that can be recombined as required. They may be used in advance of an event, as part of a comms or awareness-raising exercise, in classroom sessions, or by the line managers in discussion with their teams. The advantage of this format is not just flexibility (including mobile) but the ‘tone of voice’ – courses which use presenters or voice-overs or scripting to say ‘I am the teacher and this is what I want you to learn’. In this model you can still build an assessment (better still a challenge) – but as an independent asset, to be used in combination with a range of resources.
Dumping information: there’s this curious script for what happens with learning: someone important says ‘people need to know this stuff – go talk to Bob’, Bob pushes a document across the table, we employ the dark arts of Instructional Design in producing something whose effectiveness is never measured. My response to this tendency has been ‘Story-Scenario-Simulation’: our job is not merely to summarise information, but to construct experiences which make it clear why anyone should care enough to invest their precious time in learning. Forget learning styles – anyone who thinks people can’t learn from a pdf if they are of a mind to do so is living in cloud-cuckoo land. It’s the why of learning that people are struggling with, not the how.
Ignoring the audience: I still do this sometimes – time pressure and the insistence of subject-matter expert can lead us to overlook the central importance of our ultimate customers in the equation, and instead produce something that merely satisfies the expectations of our proximal stakeholders. Often this ends up being ‘on message’ but ineffective – a course which says all the right things but fails to tackle the real problems. I don’t think is simply a call for more Training Needs Analysis – there is something about understanding a particular organisational sub-culture; what calls them to learn, what challenges they face, what they like and who they respect that isn’t captured by TNA alone.
Not making use of informal learning: so by now we all realise that around 80% of the learning is happening around us, in the informal/natural learning space. Whilst this doesn’t necessarily mean there is no role for formal learning (Andrew Joly points out this may make the formal stuff even more important), it is possible to build learning programmes that blend formal and informal elements to greater effect: in the BBC’s production safety programme members of the ERastenders production team are interviewed in situ then embedded into a 3D panorama – the BBC Colleges of Journalism and Production are also good examples of learning that is more about sharing expertise amongst peers, or engagement with a community of practice. It is still easy to create isolated and isolating learning interventions which neither incorporate informal elements nor link to established informal activities. And it is not enough merely to try to create and control an informal learning space: most attempts at social media for learning fail through insufficient consideration of content-generation-strategies. Here, again learning professionals used to more formal roles have an invaluable part to play in creating an informal experience.
Failure to challenge: sometime I simply repeat the Cognitive Arts matra: ‘GOAL-FAIL-FIX’. Find out how people fail (i.e. the reason why people are doing the training), build these into a scenario/simulation (Cathy Moore has probably done the best job of expanding on this) and allow people to fail. You might even say our job is to ‘engineer failure’. Learning happens as a result of failing at these challenges, and not because we say ‘FAIL!’ but because we demonstrate the consequences of decisions that the learner takes and provide additional feedback. The Learning Design Toolkit research we undertook confirmed that learners want us to provide them with situations in which it is safe to fail, whether these be role-plays or online scenarios. One last point on this: it is the challenge element that is the distinction between ‘just-in-case’ and ‘just-in-time’ learning – we don’t always have to engineer a challenge ourselves, ideally learning is supplied to enable people to tackle a real and pressing challenge that is not one we’ve cooked up ourselves.
Not considering the emotional landscape: what is an ‘emotional landscape’? It’s what you’re describing when someone asks you ‘How was the movie?’ and you say ‘It took a long time to get started’ or ‘it dragged a bit in the middle’. In my experience 90% of courses open with something moderately entertaining (e.g. a video) then flatline for the remaining 30 minutes. There are any number of ways of avoiding this so I won’t spell them out here – but rather just say: if you had to draw a line representing the emotional landscape of your course, what would this look like? Why does this matter? I have tried to set this out in the ‘affective context’ stuff elsewhere in this blog, but broadly speaking it matters because learning is almost entirely governed by subtle emotional cues. No cues, no learning.
Outsourcing it: bit of a contentious one, this. I do believe that a well-formed online strategy is a three-tiered triangle. At the top are online resources best built by highly capable elearning suppliers. At the bottom are resources generated by learning staff and employees and shared between peers. But the middle tier should be a healthy chunk of learning content created by the organisation itself, using rapid development tools and techniques. For smaller audiences, tighter budgets or quicker turnarounds outsourcing activity is costly and inefficient and runs the risk of distancing key stakeholders from the creative process. True, quality is an issue – but relevance, timeliness, cost and client involvement are important too. I see plenty of poorly-worded emails, but am left in no doubt that we are more productive in a world without typing pools. The future of learning professionals should be a sound grasp of the techniques and tools that can be used in creating learning content – such as video skills, for example.
Shoddy visual design: users will get a sense of the quality of an online course in much the same way as they get a sense of the quality of a face-to-face course from the venue. True, this can be grossly misleading, but if you underestimate the impact of good typography, layout and design in your screens then you do so at your peril. It’s not enough to know a bit of flash, powerpoint and a smattering of instructional design principles: I often find myself wondering whether or not to use a supplier based on the standard of their graphical design expertise – because the rest can be taken care of.
Poor content management techniques: this is more of a technical shortcoming. Put simply ‘Don’t build some inscrutable tangle of flash files that we have no way of editing when the text changes or updating when our branding moves on’. There’s also a point around accessibility here, where good content-management (such as the use of XML for content) can really make a difference to users of assistive technology.

Disentanglement

2011-01-28T07:59:00.000-08:00

In learning and development there is always this curious conflation between what we are doing and what we are trying to do. Take 'performance' for example: imagine that you go to see a movie, and on the way out you are stopped by a researcher: 'how was it?' they ask 'what made it good?'

'Great' you reply 'the story was good, the characters believable - it was pacy...'

'Anything else?'

'well - I suppose I enjoyed the popcorn, the seats were comfy...'

'and will it affect your performance in future?'
'What...!?'

The face-to-face training format is generally geared towards delivering an experience - the kind about which it is entirely legitimate to ask 'did you enjoy it?' but odd to ask 'will it affect your performance?'

And this is what lies at the heart of the problems with online learning: learning professionals know how to deliver a good experience in a room (an entertaining presenter, a good venue, food, variety, enthusiasm, activities, networking etc.) but we have not yet figured out how to deliver a good experience online (at least not in a learning context). That's why elearning people keep saying 'but look at games!'. The fact that most successful games are not effective learning experiences is neither here nor there - they are engaging experiences, period. So we covet them.

Why should this matter to us? Because asked what they think about elearning most learners will, indeed say that it compares poorly to classroom learning, i.e. it is not as good an experience. (it is generally more effective learning, though - according to this US Dept for Ed. study). But the conflation here is rarely made explicit: 'was it a good learning experience?' we ask.

There are times when it really matters to training organisations that they deliver a good experience. Of course if we were really serious about performance - about changing behaviour - we have known how to do this for some time. We see it in action every time we watch 'Supernanny' (or something similar). The answer is reinforcement. Positively reinforce desired behaviours, negatively reinforce undesirable ones. By and large behaviours influence attitudes, not the other way round, so trying to address attitudes in order to bring about behavior change is largely fruitless. The best courses change behaviors by changing behaviors.

But if we're serious about performance, the format for effecting behaviour change would likely not be an event at all - online or otherwise (typically behaviors regress when Supernanny exits). It would more likely be a little widget that sits in the corner of your screen - let's call it an XP bar - that reliably and methodically rewards you for doing the right thing; or regular, timely and specific feedback from your line manager.

Finally, a parting thought: the addictive nature of many games depends not on them being 'fun' or 'engaging' in any normal sense of these words - but on carefully constructed reinforcement schedules. You do mindless, repetitive stuff and get points (it's called 'grinding'). When we get together to talk about learning, about what we are doing, about what we should be doing and how we evaluate it, often these strands swirl about without ever being disentangled.

Asking for Directions: learning a new job.

2011-01-13T03:14:00.000-08:00

Photo reproduced with permission and thanks to Pedro Cardigo

I’ve been a little quiet recently, due principally to the transition that I am making from working at the BBC to working at BP. I’ve always believed that learning – real learning – is driven by challenges, and changing jobs is one of those big challenges that most of us go through some time and subsequently highlight as a period of intense learning. So it’s been good to be reminded first-hand of how learning really works in vivo. I wanted to share a few of my own reflections about a month in:

- it’s a process not an event: it’s going to take a while for me to adapt. Possibly forever. It seems to me that I am spending quite a bit of time trying to map the new environment to familiar landmarks and ways of navigating around. Alongside this, I am trying to adapt my own thinking to quite new challenges. It seems that the Piagetian concepts of assimilation and accommodation hold true.

- It’s primarily an emotional thing: (though I admit there is room for confirmation bias here): what I mean is that all learning is oriented around meaningful, pressing goals which may not be easy to quantify – for example establishing credibility, building relationships, developing enthusiasm and trust. Also, you don’t want to look like an idiot.

- Almost all the learning is from people, about people: it seems pretty clear to me that the relative percentage of learning which is about operational stuff will vary by role; for a management role the operational environment (technology, systems etc) represents a lower level of problem-solving activity (in a bucket along with how to get to work etc.) beneath a strata of richer interpersonal learning around relationships, ambitions, personal styles. Get these wrong and you are going nowhere fast.

- Expectations are central to orientation: there is almost certainly a large amount of learning ‘beneath the water line’ in terms of tacitly absorbing norms and expectations for behaviour. But is can also help to areas where these surface and are made explicit: the emphasis placed on Safety in the BP Induction programme (reverse park, lids on hot drinks, hold handrails on stairs) can seem over-the-top, but what it really seems to communicate is a deeper, implicit norm: a zero-tolerance policy towards risk-taking. I have often felt that being able to set and identify expectations clearly plays a critical role in ‘time to competence’.

- It’s like learning to dance: this is the best analogy I can think of. It’s much more about getting into the swing of things - knowing when to take the lead and when to follow. Relaxing. You can’t learn much from a book, and there’s always the temptation to look at your feet when really you should be maintaining good eye contact. Push the paperwork to one side and listen to the person in front of you.

- It’s mainly an informal process: often, when one looks at learning events there are things that work and things that don’t – but no-one can separate them out: lectures. Are they a good thing? Donald Clark says no, but I found the lecture where he makes this point very good. But there is really no paradox here: an engaging person is good on stage, on TED, in writing. An uninspiring person poor whatever. The same is true of onboarding – for most organisations the process is largely organic, and should probably stay this way. What is generally much more difficult is identifying the bits that would be better formalised and those that wouldn’t.

- Formal learning is largely business risk management: from an on-boarding perspective (at least) this is predominantly the most valuable role played by formal learning interventions. That is not to say that a formal event might not be a worthwhile opportunity for informal learning (e.g. networking) but that this is the most easily identifiable role.

- Maybe 80 percent of learning is from the people within a 5 meter radius: I have been fortunate to have a great deal of support from the people immediately around me (you know who you are) who have politely answered the same question as if I wasn’t asking it for the 15^th time and helped me find my way around like some ageing, bewildered family member. Many of us learning professionals are acutely aware that this mechanism is the bedrock of the learning organisation: we ought to be able to do something to better quantify, support and enhance this process.

- Learning styles, hierarchy of needs – mumbo jumbo: Usually you don’t get a choice about how you are going to learn something; instead you need to be flexible. And people generally are (imagine saying – ‘it’s ok, I don’t need to meet you – just accept my linkedIn invite and I’ll go through your cv’). Secondly, everything feels very insecure at first – this doesn’t stop a person from learning, instead it provides a basic motivation for learning. I never want to see that damn triangle again.

Apologies in advance for mixing my metaphors; but I do recall advice given to me by a driving instructor: “When you find yourself in an unfamiliar place, just slow up and pay close attention to the signs. You won’t go too far wrong.”

I had better shut up now – I need to go and check BP's policy on blogging!

Things we can do differently

2010-11-04T09:32:00.000-07:00

A great deal of what I write has to do with thinking about learning – about different kinds of learning and how they work. But if I had to point to one thing about which I am confident it would be this: nobody knows what they are doing. Certainly there are people doing good things; but this is generally a matter of instinct and conviction rather than science. There are many people calling for radical change in the way we learn – Donald Clark and Sir Ken Robinson for example both point to the ineffectiveness and anachronistic nature of learning methods today. Both dream of a world where things will be done very differently.

But whilst I applaud their instincts, I cannot believe we can truly progress without a better understanding of learning itself. I have tried (elsewhere in this blog) to make my own contribution, but would like to summarise a couple of the practical implications – things that we can (and which I intend to) do differently:

1) Build Resources not Courses: there are profound distinctions between the role of courses and that of resources. Resources – be they individuals or media – have always borne the brunt of learning - today to an ever-increasing degree. Courses typically serve an entirely different function, namely proof to an authority that a test has been passed and time invested. True, the two are often intermingled, but this should not obscure a very real distinction. Both may be required, but each has very different requirements: as a rule of thumb resources satisfy a learning need and the format scarcely matters – if that were not true, Google would not be the success that it is.

2) Story, scenario, simulation: as we creep along the spectrum from resource to course it is worth remembering that as the immediate relevance to the learner fades away, the onus is increasingly placed on us to provide it. A flight simulator works well because it feels real. If it is not immediately clear to the learner why this matters then we have to adopt a format that make this abundantly clear. Three formats that work (of increasing complexity): stories, scenarios, simulation. Definitely not powerpoint.

3) Connect peers: there is an important distinction between an expert and someone who merely adopts the role of expert. The traditions of teaching – whether face-to-face or online – have led us to depend heavily on the situational norms surrounding learning. But sitting and listening is not the same as learning – and when you ask people about life’s lessons (as we have done) they rarely identify formal learning experiences. The ‘trusted peer’ or ‘respected expert’ relationships alter the nature of the learning itself, and unless we can provide these, we should question our dependence on forced learning contexts.

4) Work with the affective context: we must abandon the ‘information transfer’ paradigm. Learning never worked in that way, and learning experiences which merely recite the information to the accompaniment of illustrative media do nothing to aid the specific processing capacities of creatures who feel their way though life to a far greater extent than even they themselves are aware. Learning is generally a response to a challenging situation - one which is genuinely challenging rather than superficially challenging. Whilst our understanding of these mechanisms is in its infancy, there is already a great deal we can do.

The Value of Social Media to Learning

2010-10-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

Last week I was speaking at the World of Learning Debate ‘To what extent does social media have a place in learning?’ Clive Shepherd and I were defending social media (as if it needed defending) and Robin Hoyle was questioning the value of social media.

Some weeks prior to the event I had asked whether there would be much of a debate: ‘who would argue against the value of social media?’ I asked. Robin, apparently. So, the night before the debate I googled Robin – and was somewhat surprised to discover that he has a blog. Not only that, his most recent post was an attack on the kind of ‘evangelist’ who would ask whether or not anyone would seriously question the value of social media. Presumably the irony had escaped Robin, so I opened the debate by saying that I had read Robin’s blog, thought it was good, but definitely hadn’t learned anything from it.

But the debate wasn’t quite as lively as I would have hoped – and that’s what I really wanted to talk about:

Like it or not, I think it’s self-evident that social media can and is being used for learning. Sure, you can waste time with social media – you can waste time on the internet, but no-one would seriously argue that the internet isn’t a useful tool for learning.

Robin’s opening argument was against the ‘social’ component of ‘social media’. He put it bluntly ‘we go to work to work, not to socialise’. I have two concerns with this: firstly, we know that the vast majority of learning that takes place in organisations is informal and that much of this is social in nature. Workplaces are by their very nature social environments – the principal reason why people go to work is relationships with colleagues (not money, according to a recent HRDM survey). The social environment is to organisations what water is to fish. I recall a telecoms company that, having installed GPS locators in its field-based engineers’ vehicles, found they were all getting together for breakfast. They put a stop to this and the first-time-fix rates dropped significantly. Social is how we learn, how we work.

The second problem is that I think the attack relies on an outdated model of work. ‘Social media is a threat’ so the argument goes ‘because it distracts people from their work’. How do you know people are working? If your answer to that question is basically ‘because they are in their seat from 9 – 5’ then you were probably missing what was really going on all along. The correct answer is that you know they are working because they get the job done – how they get it done should concern us less than our ability to define and monitor performance.

Social media is not the issue; but how people use it, and we should adapt and communicate the relevant policies clearly. Clive made the point that many of our concerns about social media could equally be said of the mobile phone: people might be calling their friends, they might be sharing company information outside the firewall etc, etc. The fact that people do sometimes do these sorts of things does not make social networking an intrinsically bad thing: if I am spending work time blogging about my weekend, then maybe that’s bad. But what if I blog about work during the weekend? What if I have a large network and blog about my enthusiasm for the projects I am working on – will I be paid for any resulting sales? Have I improved the reputation of the business? If all our employees use social media do we suddenly have a vast, voluntary sales and customer service department? Certainly there is an issue of ‘employee engagement’ going on here. And how about organisations using social media to find out how their employees actually feel about the company, or what is really going wrong with the business? Isn’t that better than a once-yearly ‘employee engagement’ survey or the ‘undercover boss’ approach? As one delegate pointed out, ‘if the MOD can overcome obstacles to using social media, then we ought to be able to’.

But there is a difference between arguments which focus on social media’s inevitability and actually persuading people of the business value. I suggested two approaches we might take in the debate: we could look at case studies where organisations have successfully applied social media to learning (I was thinking of our work and BT’s Dare2Share, amongst others), or I could simply say ‘It works for me’.

It does work for me. Twitter is my no.1 learning tool these days. Not only do I learn a lot more, I am a better learner: sitting in a lecture thinking ‘what key messages would I want to pass on?’ or ‘How could I summarise this in 140 characters?’ helps greatly in processing the information. As Clive pointed out, the discipline of blogging is an excellent piece of self-development. To someone who imagines that Twitter is all about trivia, it can be hard to explain the merits. But I put the argument like this: imagine a supplier approached you with a fantastic new service. They explain that they have persuaded some of the most respected figures in your industry – visionaries, practitioners, researchers and consultants – to provide a constant daily feed of the projects they are working on, things that work, research they are doing or have found, new ideas they are exploring so that you have the latest and best information at your fingertips. How much would you pay for a service like that? How about nothing? My point is this: whatever you may feel about ‘social media’, try it out – sign up for twitter, follow someone whose views you respect, and decide for yourself if it has value. I think this is probably the best way to begin to explore the benefits of social media – but if you are reading this I am no doubt preaching to the converted.

Robin’s second argument was that social media was primarily a referencing tool rather than a learning tool. I am not going to spend any time on this, as I think it’s just semantics – learning is clearly much more than formal learning, and referencing is at the core of how we learn and perform today.

Having said all this I began to feel that Robin had been put in a difficult position: the ‘value of social media’ question is something of a straw man. The more interesting question – and I suspect the question Robin really wanted to debate – is 'can learning & development can realise the value of social media?' I think this is much less clear.

I began to feel so concerned that people might take our defense of social media as an unqualified endorsement, that at one point I actually found myself saying ‘if you implement social media within your organisation, it will almost certainly fail’. And I think this is true: there are some successful projects, but outside of the glossy presentations many of my colleagues will admit that it hasn’t worked as well as they hoped. In essence, I think this is mainly because companies think ‘we’ll introduce a social network to do x, and encourage people to use it’ rather than ‘let’s look at how our staff and customers are using social media, and then consider roles we can play’. In short, as Scott Stratten has pointed out in relation to marketing – social media approaches fail because organisations begin by assuming it is something they can somehow control. What happens is some well-intentioned person creates a wiki or blog site and says ‘come on everybody, post your stuff here’. And people think ‘why should I? I already post my stuff to facebook/twitter/blogger.’

Social media is in this regard a lot like elearning – many organisations simply introduce it on a ‘build it and they will come’ basis without thinking very carefully about the audience, the application and the implementation itself. The case studies where social media have worked well typically involve a very specific problem with measurable outcomes (such as first-time fix), the right target audience, and a cast-iron system for ensuring that staff use it.

I have often been asked how we will evaluate the success of social media. I have two answers to this – firstly, do we evaluate email? Social media is happening around us, what we are evaluating is our success as learning professionals. Secondly, evaluation may not be easy, but it will be easier than evaluating training. Most social media applications (marketing, brand awareness, customer service) are aimed directly at performance areas that are already carefully tracked. It’s a bit ridiculous of L&D to ask ‘how do we evaluate this?’ when for the most part they have yet to answer the same question for classroom training. Don’t transfer the problems with have with justifying formal learning to social media. We won’t be doing Kirkpatrick.

In conclusion, it is not so much that I am an evangelist, but an optimist: I feel that learning and development are at a crossroads: We either embrace new technologies and try to make them work for the betterment of the learning organisation - however tough that may be (and it is tough, it’s tough to make elearning work, and it’s tough to make social learning work). Or we retreat, we say we do formal training, classrooms – maybe the occasional online course. Compliance mainly. Personally I wouldn’t want to see learning & development take even more of a back seat.

Learning is Cookery

2010-09-21T04:05:00.000-07:00

For hundreds of years cooking didn't really change much.

What qualities do you have to possess in order to be a good cook? Is it something you can learn, or do you have to have certain talents to start with? If you were designing a qualification for a 'master of cookery' would you put chemistry in there? Do you know of many great cooks who know anything about chemistry? Would you trust that someone is a good cook based on a certificate? Is the best way to learn about cookery to work as an apprentice to a great cook? Actually, if you think about cooks you know, do they have certain qualifications in common?

Do great cooks really understand what is going on when they cook? Is it possible to practice something for centuries without ever understanding how it works? Does it matter if we understand how it works?

What is good food? What's the difference between food which tastes good and food which is good for you? How do you know when food is good for you - do you just taste it? Is a great cook simply someone who creates great-tasting food?

Imagine you think that you are a good cook, and someone disagrees - how do you resolve that? Maybe you sit people down, cook them something and see what they think. If everyone says 'I really enjoyed that meal' is the argument over? What if your detractor then says 'sure they liked it - but was it good for them?' Is it possible for good food to taste bad - and vice-versa? What happens to food which is indigestible?

What is the difference between a nutritionist and a great cook? Which would you want to serve up your dinner? Do you trust the pronouncements of nutritionists - and how confident are you that you know which foods are good for you?

If you were building a restaurant, which would you go for: a few dishes cooked really well or a wide variety of dishes that are pre-prepared? Would you devise set menus or let people choose freely? Do you cook to order? What about take-away food - or does that somehow detract from the 'experience'? What exactly are they missing out on?

Is it better to let people eat when they are hungry, or force them into set meal-times? Should we allow them to eat what they want, or should we be more prescriptive? How would you encourage children to really enjoy food?

What is the difference between cooking for someone and preparing a diet for them? To what extent should they be involved in the process in each case? Can you imagine what it is like cooking for the army?

I can't imagine a future without good cooks; but I do imagine that what we mean by 'good cook' and how we cook will change.

Understanding Learning: The Affective Context Model

2010-08-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

I thought I would try using video to explain the Affective Context Model and what it means for learning. It lasts just under 10 minutes. Apologies in advance for my laughably childish drawing ability... oh, and the soporific voice-over.

The Trainer of the Future

2010-07-19T00:51:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was part of a project to define ‘The Trainer of the Future’. Together with Jonathan Stoneman and Peter Wallich we tried to sketch the profile of a learning professional some years from now, based on our experience of learning and development and the trends we could see unfolding around us.

In retrospect, I think we only began to answer the question; but the question has continued to occupy me and I think I now have a clearer picture. It’s a topic on which I have written, spoken and often seen raised elsewhere so – for what it is worth – I would like to summarise my own contribution to the debate:

1)    From Experts to Honeybees: trainers too often cast themselves in the role of expert. This was always problematic; businesses are sceptical of the idea that the trainers are the real experts – at best they are the ex-experts – and in a world where expertise is ever more volatile, trainers risk looking like dinosaurs. The very best trainers are indeed experts – experts at training. Today this means being able identify, analyse and share best practice – a very different aspiration from that of the subject-matter-expert. The expression ‘curation’ is being used a lot – but in truth this falls short of the real ambition: curation is far too passive, training professionals need to be actively hunting down the good stuff, refining it, and bringing it to the areas of the business where it is needed most.

2)    Performance consulting: in the past few years few people have impressed me as much as Nigel Harrison and Dennis Reid. Nigel Harrison’s model of performance consulting is an excellent framework for understanding what is wrong with today’s training. Too often I find myself in meetings which start ‘we need a training course on….’ Instead of ‘we need a solution to…’. Too often the questions are about what ‘learning objectives’ are to be delivered instead of what behaviours we are trying to influence. Dennis’s model is equally elegant: instead of offering training courses, he asks retailers to identify their best-performing stores. Dennis’s team analyse the stores’ performance, then introduce it (forcefully if need be) elsewhere. But whilst performance consulting is undoubtedly a better model, I am troubled by two things: do businesses really know who is performing well (outside of areas like sales)? and: if the focus was squarely on performance would there really be any need for a learning specialist?

3)    A new model of learning: the heart of learning & development’s problem is that traditional learning approaches don’t deliver. There really is no point in banging on about improving evaluation if you have no means of delivering results – it will just highlight failure. Be that as it may, learning & development will eventually have to concede that the value of ‘push-type’/’just in case’ interventions is at most that they protect the board of directors when things go wrong. What is needed is a stark and honest appraisal of the things that really effect change within a workforce. When we researched our own audience, the results were revealing: staff wanted experiences which would build their confidence and they wanted sources of inspiration. They wanted line managers who would take a genuine interest in their development, or people who would act as mentors. Learning itself was something they themselves carried out – because it mattered.

4)    Awareness and resource: it is increasingly ridiculous to think of learning as knowledge-transfer in a world where information is ubiquitous. In such a world it makes sense to refer rather than learn wherever possible. Users will ‘pull’ learning if they are genuinely motivated to do so; our role is to make them aware to the need to do so, and make the right resources accessible. Our own development model has shifted significantly towards a ‘3S’ approach – storytelling, scenario, simulation. We impress, we inspire, we make people think and sometimes we shock. Our job is not primarily to get the information across but to make people care enough to change their behaviour. In short, what matters is making it matter.

5)    Rapid development: 30 years ago managers would have someone to sort their correspondence, to take dictation and type up letters – someone to organise their diaries. Presumably it would have been asking too much of managers to expect them to learn to type.
Rapid development tools are beginning to emerge, removing technical obstacles in the way of learning professionals creating their own content. Sadly, when given this opportunity some resort to uploading deadly powerpoint presentations, which presumably exposes shortcomings in our understanding of what learning is (see 3 above). Rapid development shouldn’t be ‘more crap, quicker’ (thanks to the PWC team for this summary), rather it should be an opportunity for learning professionals to extend their repertoire, take control of the process and make their delivery more accessible.

6)    Video: learning professionals need to master the basics of directing, shooting, editing and distributing video. I have said this many times, run workshops on it – and I’m sure many people think it’s a BBC-thing. It’s not: video is a very effective and cheap way of inspiring people to learn when done well. Websites like YouTube, VideoJug, LifeHacker demonstrate how effective video can be in delivering learning. This is principally because, unlike most online courseware, video has the power to convey individual enthusiasm or personal conviction – precisely what makes a face-to-face session worthwhile. Video is ideal for capturing and sharing success stories within organisations - and learning professionals are the right people to do this.

7)    Passionate about learners and learning: you will doubtless remember the best teachers from school – we all know who they are: they were the ones brimming with enthusiasm, who were passionate about learning, who really cared about the people in their class and their development. These teachers inspired students to learn, by mastering the motivational context. I find it hard to imagine the ‘trainer of the future’ without picturing someone like this. It might seem like I am describing the ideal trainer rather than the trainer of the future – but so-called subject-matter experts can afford to be self-centered; whilst people who are trying to inspire or motivate others cannot.

8)    Connectivity: learning professionals should be well-connected, making use of networks to seek out, evaluate and spread learning (not information, but those things that inspire people to learn). This is really just a corollary of the first point.

If you are not a regular reader of this blog, then my scepticism regarding conventional training approaches will be apparent from this post alone – and it may well be that these days the ‘conventional training approach’ is a bit of a straw man. I genuinely believe that learning professionals have a central role to play in the organisations of the future. The effectiveness of such organisations will depend to an ever-increasing degree on their connectivity: being able to adapt, being able to spot good ideas and share them, being able to identify talent. There is an important role for the learning professional, if only we can demonstrate that we are ready to take it on.

Learning is a misunderstood thing.

2010-06-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

Learning is a misunderstood thing. I am regularly reminded of how much we overlook it, because of what we want to believe about it.

My two elder daughters, Anya and Nadia are 8 and 15 respectively and on Sunday mornings I pick them up from their mum’s so that we can spend the day together. As I drive, I try to make conversation - in the annoying way that parents do – and receive the kind of answers that suggest I should give up:

Me: “So – how was school last week?”

Chorus: “Fine.”

Me: “Did you do anything interesting?”

Chorus: “No”

Me: “Anything bad happen?”

Chorus: “No”

Usually I stop at this point, for fear of breaching some kind of EU legislation. But on this occasion the sheer insanity of what was being said overwhelmed me and I threw caution to the wind:

Me: “So – you’re saying you spent a whole week at school and nothing – nothing interesting happened. All week. You don’t remember anything at all that was interesting?”

Nadia: “No – it’s just boring”

Me: “Why is it boring?”

Nadia: “You just sit in a classroom and teachers write things on the board. It’s really boring.”

Me: “Don’t you have any good teachers?”

Nadia: “Our maths teacher is ok”

Me: “Why is that?”

Nadia: “She actually cares about what she’s teaching. And us. She spends time with us individually.”

Me: “Anya – how about you? Do you have any good teachers?”

Anya: “No.”

Me: “Have you ever had any good teachers?”

Anya: “Mmmm – yes. Mrs X was good.”

Me: “Why was she good?”

Anya: “She was really kind.”

Me: “How would you make your lessons better?”

Anya: “Have sweets and cake”

Nadia: “Do more stuff – like, practicals”.

Me: “So when you look back on your lessons – are there things you particularly remember?”

Anya: “When it was our teacher’s birthday.”

Nadia: “The school trip to Switzerland. Also, when we had to go out and cut up daisies with plastic scissors.”

Now this may seem like quite a mundane conversation – I’m sure similar conversations are to be had across the country – but it is its familiarity that is so shocking: our children are perfectly capable of analysing and describing what is wrong with learning, and we have learned to routinely ignore it. Personally I am staggered that my children can spend an entire week in a place of learning and not find anything interesting. Surely, it should all be interesting – or am I missing something?

Now I take the point that learning and fun are not the same thing (despite the fact that, in a curious inversion of school practice, most organisations use ‘happy sheets’ to measure the success of their learning programmes). Just because a child is bored by their classes, it doesn’t mean they haven’t learned anything (and I suspect that ‘adding sweets and cake’ is not the last word in education policy). What is clear, though, is that children best remember episodes – and that as far as they are concerned sitting in a classroom writing stuff down is just one big homogenous episode. It is not so much that people ‘learn by doing’ as that people learn stuff with ‘colour’ (Affective Context), which is why going to Switzerland with friends is more memorable than sitting in class 6B with friends. And yet – we do the opposite of making learning episodic; we try to make the conditions as confusing as possible: the same person in the same room doing the same thing…

Even more importantly, children seem to say that the teachers who were good were the ones who cared – cared about the subject, cared about the students. And here’s a question: which learning theory makes this a central feature of learning? None of them. In fact a PGCE requires teachers to endure all manner of outdated and discredited theorising (presumably in an effort to subject them to the same treatment that their students will have to suffer) without ever mentioning the most important feature of learning of all: namely that you care about your subject and your students. Perhaps this alone should entitle people to teach.

Yes, I know that this seems an alien and wishy-washy concept – but that is only because we have a completely distorted model of what learning is and how it works. If you ask children and grown-ups about teaching they remember you will find it is invariably associated with teachers who care, or with distinctive episodes. There is a complex mechanics behind this, but we have been ignoring it since Plato.

Now you might be thinking that I am confusing attitudes to learning with learning itself – that a good teacher might create positive attitudes but a bad teacher might equally get students through exams. But let’s be clear here: students pass exams because they cram. A poor teacher may put the fear of God into students, but in the long run all that stuff is lost and all that remains is a bad aftertaste. This is not learning – this is some bizarre ritual. Learning is what remains, influencing attitudes and behaviours in the long-term. This is the gift of the good teacher. And who is a good teacher? Someone who cares about their subject and students, and someone who can construct colourful learning experiences.

Anyway, I have described the Affective Context Model (below) in the hope that we will begin to understand learning, and I’m going to keep on banging on about it until then.

Ten Secrets of Successful Speaking

2010-06-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

I have heard that Sesame Street tunes are used by the CIA to torture suspected terrorists. These people are clearly amateurs; if they knew what they were doing they would be sending detainees to learning conferences. A few hours spent listening to back-to-back accounts of how learning strategy has been aligned to business objectives and they would be pulling out their own fingernails.

Superficially it might seem ironic that the vast majority of learning professionals seem unable to stand up in front of a small group of like-minded adults and hold their attention for forty minutes or so – but to be fair, most speakers are involved in management rather than delivery of learning, and in this context eliciting the response “whatever – just please God let me out of this room!” is a core skill.

I attend a lot of conferences, and have spoken at many. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of presenters that I actually enjoy listening to. This is a shame, because many of my peers have done great work and have valuable experiences to share – they just haven’t figured out how to do it without making their audience feel as if they have been chained to a wall and subjected to the psychological equivalent of hand-to-hand combat. You know what I mean: they open with three slides of staggeringly tedious detail on the corporate structure and while the audience are still reeling from this body-blow follow up with a flurry of facts on the learning infrastructure - simultaneously delivering a jargon-filled monologue that leaves listeners dipping in and out of consciousness. It’s brilliant, really. By the time you get to the completion rate histograms and the ROI calculations the audience have eaten all the mints in a five yard radius in an effort to stave off psychosomatic blindness.

I read ‘Confessions of a Public Speaker’ by Scott Berkun recently – and it’s a pretty good read. A central theme is the insight that if you’re a speaker most of your audience are just hoping that you finish on time and say something funny along the way. But I don’t think you need buy the book, or that Scott covers all the important points. I do think it’s quite easy to be a good presenter by following a few simple rules:

1) Have something interesting to say: Sounds obvious, but it’s clear that most presenters haven’t really considered their audience – they have just thought about what they want to say. So what you get is their whole story – whether or not any of it is especially interesting to you – when really what you want is someone to skip the boring bits and say “We discovered three really interesting things while doing this.” I imagine that speakers assume that since they have been asked to speak, that their stuff is of interest. Not so – conference organisers and attendees have very different motivations. If you can, figure out or find out what your audience would like to get out of your presentation before you build it.

2) Give people enjoyable things to do: yes, I know we’re all serious hard-working professionals but on the basis that we’re all trapped in this airless room for the next two days enduring back-to-back powerpoint GIVE US A BREAK! – Unless you are fantastically entertaining then almost anything is better than listening to you talk continuously: watching an illustrative video clip, talking to other people, drawing pictures, checking your blackberry, exchanging amusing anecdotes. Personally, if I am speaking for forty minutes I reckon on having at least four things that I know the audience will enjoy doing and have at least some relevance to what I am saying. And here’s the important bit: this is not the same as giving people thing to do for the sake of it. Many speakers seem to think it’s fine to break after 30 minutes and say ‘Ok, I want you all to brainstorm this on your tables’, followed shortly by ‘Ok everyone – stop what you are doing – sorry we don’t have time for feedback’ which is the conference equivalent of crumpling into a ball your student’s work as soon as they have finished it. For this reason, most of us have learned to ignore the instructions and chat with people we have just met instead.

3) Remember that your feelings are transmitted directly to the audience: an odd thing about human beings is that they are hard-wired to mirror the emotions of the people around us (mirror neurons). When we look back at our school days, we often remember fondly the teachers who had real enthusiasm. Can you remember a teacher who seemed bored by their own lessons? I bet you can. What was it like for you? When you get up to present, you are performing. You need to be brimming with enthusiasm and life, passionate about the work you are doing, overflowing with energy and inquisitiveness. If you are, you might be able to hold people’s attention for ten minutes at a stretch. If you don’t believe me go and look at Sir Ken Robinson’s videos on the TED site. His videos are amongst the most popular – and his competitors are no less than the greatest minds in the world. Why is he so good? He only has a couple of interesting points to make – but it is his delivery that makes him so effective. And it’s not just ‘showmanship’ – it’s the passion and humour that carries the information and makes it memorable and convincing. How would you characterise most speakers you have seen? Anxious? Tired? Dispassionate?

4) Challenge People: constantly challenge people – right from the outset “What do you think about…?”, “Which of you has…?” – and actually listen to what people have to say, rather than just the tokenistic ‘show of hands’ technique (although this is better than nothing). Keep people on their toes, and make it clear that they are participants – that they may be required to contribute at any point. It’s not just a technique: when you get up in front of people your head swells and you can find yourself forgetting that many of the people in the audience may have something important to contribute.

5) Tell Stories: I hear a lot of people talking about the value of ‘storytelling’ but I suspect that for many it’s just a buzzword. Why? Why tell stories? The answer is simple: stories give factual information episodic and affective context. Instead of saying ‘If you press this button X will happen’ we can say ‘I remember this one time when my friend Bob pressed this button…’ and immediately we build the suspense. Human beings encode information with Affective Context (see post below) – unlike computers which encode facts. So presentations which are stuffed full of facts are like a protein diet: most of it just goes straight through. And it’s not pretty.

6) Get the text off the screen: ok - for starters if people are reading then they are not listening to you (this is explained by Baddeley’s Working Memory Model). You would have thought that by now people would have learned not to put loads of text on powerpoint slides. Not so. They seem only to have learned how to say ‘I know you can’t read this at the back’. Stop it. We’re probably only going to remember two things at best from your presentation – so if you’ve got a load of stuff on your slides then the chances are that you are only trying to impress us in some way. Again – look at the TED site. Most of the speakers have no slides whatsoever. Where they do (such as Hans Rosling’s Gapminder) it’s because the thing they are talking about is actually the thing on the screen. It’s worth asking yourself the question ‘If all my slides were taken away, could I still deliver a good presentation?’

7) Show it to us: don’t just tell us how wonderful your thing is; we’re cynical, we’ve been there, done that. Show us the thing itself – or as close as you can. Which would you rather do: go for a test drive or sit for an hour listening to the salesman go through the technical specifications? Some of the best sessions I have been to are ones where I got to play with the thing (such as Jane Hart’s – ‘top tools’ session or Sudhir Giri’s Google sessions) They actually spoke very little. But even presentations where you just get to see the work (such as Peter Butler’s Dare2Share system) are infinitely better than just hearing about the rollout and ROI data.

8) Practice: it takes time to get good, and maybe practice makes perfect – but we don’t want you to be perfect. I don’t want to listen to an automaton reciting a script, just someone who knows what they are doing, cares about what they are doing and has the confidence to share it with us. Many people new to speaking don’t realise that anxiety changes the brain and makes you forget stuff you know inside out. Those who do know this over-react and script their sessions verbatim – putting in too much content. My advice would be: know exactly what you are going to say to start, know exactly how you want to wrap up and then have bullet-points for the stuff in between. Practice your presentation – pace up and down in your hotel room and go over what you will say at each point. Once you have settled into your stride, so long as you know your stuff, you will be fine.

9) Smile and be confident: just smile. When you feel anxious, forcing yourself to smile reduces that anxiety and puts the audience at ease. Confident speakers are almost always good speakers – they are not just confident because they are good; it works the other way too. For this reason, many speakers will plan to open with an amusing anecdote. It helps us all. If you really want to be good, watch yourself on film – you will be amazed you different you seem from the audience’s perspective. Make sure you do a technical run-through before you present. I have lost count of the times a capable and well-prepared speaker has gone to pieces because the technology let them down. Have working versions of your presentation on your laptop, on a flash drive, and on Google docs. That way you are bomb-proof.

10) Have a structure, make it clear: your presentation structure will, of course, be obvious to you. But to many of your audience it may simply feel like ‘one damn slide after another’. You’re looking to avoid the following reactions “Sweet Jesus – how much more of this stuff is there?” or “What is he/she blabbering on about now?”. You may blabber on, you may have 57 slides – but at least people will know how much more they have to endure and what topic it is that you are boring them about. This will make you better than the other nine speakers. Set out a clear, simple structure at the outset and make it obvious where you are as you talk. No more than five things (headings, key points etc.) is always a good rule of thumb since short term memory is about seven items – leaving your audience room for thinking about coffee and the person they would really like to be talking to.

Well, that's it. I can't think of any more right now, but I'm hoping that you will let me know of any that I have missed. Not everyone has it in them to be great speakers, but I'm sure that most of us are capable of being better speakers. Hope this helps.

Ebbinghaus: the Parrot Sketch

2010-06-02T01:09:00.000-07:00

One of the most dispiriting things about working in learning is the lack of decent theoretical underpinnings. In such an environment it’s understandable that people will try and make use of whatever theories are available to justify a particular practice. I still attend conferences where people are using Kolb’s learning cycle, Honey & Mumford’s Learning Styles or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to explain what they are doing. These approaches, whilst seductive, are now decades old and have been almost entirely discredited since their creation. They were all well-intentioned, but it is as if we forget that they were the first unsteady steps in a relatively new discipline.

There are some other notable additions to the usual suspects: Atkinson & Shiffrin’s ‘Stage Theory of Memory’ (1968) and Craik & Lockhart’s (1972) ‘Levels of Processing’ model. Both have intuitive appeal: the first suggests that we transfer items into long-term memory by repeating them (like we would a telephone number), the latter that processing something semantically is better than just looking at it or hearing it. But the first model predicts that if you gag a person they would be unable to remember anything, whilst the latter predicts that even a boring lecture is more memorable than being in a car accident. Both are misleading.

The study I would like to look at here, though, is that by Ebbinghaus (1885) – a study that I have been using over the last year to illustrate an important distinction between formal and informal learning (even though it’s actually completely unscientific by modern standards). Most commonly I use this work to illustrate the pattern of forgetting common to many formal learning contexts. Specifically, Ebbinghaus tried to learn completely meaningless lists of letters, then noticed that almost all of the information was forgotten very quickly.

The diagrams above illustrate two outcomes of Ebbinghaus’ experiments. The first is the well-known forgetting curve.

The second shows how many repetitions he needed to relearn the list over time. It is possible to interpret this last study to mean that regular repetition of information – or even learning by rote - is the key to effective learning. This is not merely wrong, but a dangerous interpretation, supporting the case for ‘drilling’ students or encouraging them to learn ‘parrot fashion’. I’d like to explain why this is a misleading reading:

Ebbinghaus’ study is illustrative of something interesting, but not what one might expect. For the purposes of his study he tried to memorise ‘trigrams’ – random sequences of three letters (such as DYV). Since these were deliberately meaningless the results say almost nothing about natural/normal learning, since almost everything we learn is meaningful – indeed that is how we are designed (I can guess what he would find if one of the trigrams were FBI, for example – and if he actually experimented on participants). What Ebbinghaus demonstrated is that we are cognitive misers, i.e. that the mind rejects – or spits out - anything that is not useful/meaningful much as the human digestive tract would reject something indigestible. His experiment is roughly equivalent to feeding people glass beads. It does, of course, throw a critical light on formal learning, where people are indeed routinely force-fed large amounts of stuff which is not obviously significant to them – but, as I have argued elsewhere, conventional formal learning is a strange cultural practice that has little to do with learning – and basically we should stop doing it. I heard a similar point being made by Sir Ken Robinson on the TED site.

What is interesting about his work is that he begins to touch on the way that you can add meaning to information, namely by testing people. To put it crudely: the information before you may be meaningless but if I have you at gunpoint and you have to score 60% or more to live, then it is surprising how much you can memorise. People respond well to challenges – their self-esteem may be at stake, and sometimes their standing within a group. The mere act of being threatened with a test is what keeps much formal learning afloat. Since he was testing himself, there is little doubt he knew what was coming – and given that it was he was both experimenter and subject it is hard to imagine that the results lacked any personal significance.

So I think one should be careful about a reading of Ebbinghaus. It doesn’t really demonstrate that regular repetition is the golden path to learning – but rather that tests can give even meaningless stuff a kind of significance. I do think that if organisations want their employees to remember meaningless stuff then ‘apprentice’ style challenges would be a good way to do it. But then I think they shouldn’t really be getting employees to learn meaningless stuff in the first place (that’s why informal learning is 85% of the cake, after all). Or, to put it another way, if I want to eat fish then I will learn how to fish.

It is certainly possible that going over material in some way will improve memory, but not simply through the power of repetition – if this were the case I would remember the hymns I sang at school, or my railcard ID. Some forms of repetition – especially elaboration - will almost certainly improve learning but only because they build the Affective Context of the information, not simply because one is ‘going over’ the information. Good teachers know that getting students to debate how they feel about topics is a far more effective approach than simply getting them to write it down. Most students learn most in the run-up to their exams – when they are really anxious – but effective teachers can get students to care about the subject-matter way in advance. Good learning is inspired by great teachers – and great teachers aren’t using rote learning.

There are practical reasons for making this point; with most of our training we don’t have the opportunity to force employees to rehearse it at regular intervals. I’m not sure I’d want to – imagine having to repeat the same Safety Training every month. What we try to do is make the information stick first time round, and this can be done in a whole host of ways, all of which have affective context in common (such as making it relevant, using memorable examples, delivering it in context, encouraging people to think about it and delivering it passionately and authentically). When we conducted our own research we found that the vast majority of the things BBC staff remembered were one-off experiences. One colleague will never forget the teacher who told him ‘you will never succeed at anything’. Look back at your own memories, if you don’t believe me. For my part I confess that I can no longer recall my times’ tables – despite rehearsing them thousands of times. I do recall quite vividly the time when we kept a pet crow in a school desk.

In conclusion, there is a familiar pattern at work here: if you focus only on what happens to information, instead of what learners are actually learning, then you will never understand the process. Learning is no more the transfer of information than cookery is the transfer of calories.

This parrot is definitely dead.