stickylearning

70:20:10 through a beginner's mind

One of the lovely things about life is seeing your children grow up and show interest in the world around them.

A few days ago my 10 year old son looked over my shoulder as I was reading a blog post by Charles Jennings titled From Courses to Campaigns : using the 70:20:10 approach. Tom is becoming interested in the work that I do, so he asked the obvious question, 'Dad, what does 70:20:10 mean?"

A quick explanation from me went a bit like this, "well, many people think that learning at work means that you have to go to a classroom for a workshop. But the idea behind 70:20:10 is that really, only some of what we learn at work happens in a classroom and that's the 10 in 70:20:10. The 20 represents learning from other people, your boss, or a coach and the 70 is a guesstimate of the percentage of how much you learn from being at work and doing your job. But the idea of 70:20:10 is new for many people who think of learning as separate from work".

To which Tom replied "but really, work is learning and learning is work, isn't it." (and I'm not making this up Harold Jarche),

Some things are obvious to a 10 year old!

Performing through design

Jane Hart raises an excellent point with her post, Learning without Design. It's a really interesting question as I think a lot of the focus on design (in the L&D world) comes from traditional 'instructional design' approaches where the formal instruction is 'designed' to be delivered to a learner – almost as if the learning is the missing piece of a puzzle in the learner’s mind and correct design will (somehow) allow this piece to be placed in the proper spot…so that voila, we have successful learning design…...but of course the real world isn’t about manufacturing missing pieces of a ‘knowable’ puzzle made up of knowledge/skills & behaviours.

The way I see my work is that it’s not so much about helping people learn things, but instead it is about helping people do things (their work) ‘better’…….and I do this through design.

So, this is how I approach designing for performance.

• I design with and for the people who would like/need to work more effectively;
• I seek to understand where people work and design opportunities to learn within and from experiences;
• I attempt to design to make the implicit more explicit; and
• It’s about performance, not learning.

Jane concludes by asking, "Shouldn’t we be spending more time and effort in organizations helping people to “connect the dots” and “extract the learning” that comes from everyday work?"

And, the answer is yes, most definitely. ‘Learning without Design’… but ‘Performing through design’.

Learning Evaluation - good or good good

There's always a lot of talk in the L&D community and in businesses about how to meaningfully evaluate learning. For years the evaluation of learning in workplaces has been driven by the Kirkpatrick model and it's 4 levels.

Let's all agree (for a moment) and call this 'good'.

But, the world of learning at work has changed. The rise of collaborative, networked learning doesn't fit so well with Kirkpatrick-style evaluation.

This morning I read Seth Godin's blog and this post "Marketing good...." and as often happens I found a link between the world of Marketing and Learning. Here are a few lines from the post (with my suggested markups included):

"As you've guessed, marketing learning evaluation good isn't actually marketing learning evaluation good, not any more. It's just junk.

Second and third order recommendations and word of mouth and the way we talk about the things that are "good good" is the new marketing learning evaluation."

So, Kirkpatrick may still be good(ish), it's just that it's not good good. There are other, new, better ways of evaluating learning effectiveness and many of these are about evaluating how learning is shared between learners.

So we must look beyond Kirkpatrick to determine learning effectiveness and one way that will be to evaluate the 'recommendations and word of mouth' between learners that point to what really is good good learning.

Thoughts on informal learning

It doesn't matter if you are old/young, experienced/inexperienced. Performing well in your career is never a static knowledge/skills position. To continue to perform well requires continuing skills and knowledge growth, we are always beginners. The way we grow IS mostly through informal channels, whether we are 18 or 58. Perhaps the curse of knowledge is that as we grow older we only remember the formal learning of our younger years. I think that the truth is that the mass of knowledge we acquired informally doesn't sit in a memory box that's clearly labelled 'Informal Learning' so we don't actually remember acquiring most of the knowledge/skills we now have - but it did get there - somehow.

Learning & Design Thinking

This post and the later part(s) (I'll post later) are designed to accompany the visuals (below) from my session at the AITD 2012 conference. The posts are more or less the words that went along with my presentation, adding depth and detail to the quick succession of images in the presentation. My advice though is to begin by going through the presentation visuals, then after having a look through, come back to the following text to help you get a broader picture of the overall messages and ideas.

Learning & Design Thinking on Prezi

Too often L&D seems to be stuck in a box labelled 'Formal Learning'. As participants for my session entered the room they were met with the short video/images of the man breaking out of the box and seeing a whole world of new idas flying by and towards the future!

 

No prizes for guessing that the man in the box is a typical L&D professional (in fact it used to be me!). At the conference I then introduced myself, outlining a bit of my L&D background and how I'd moved past being the 'man in the box'. I explained that this presentation is really two things,

• a summary of my own journey as my eyes were opened to the benefits of the design thinking process for learning
• an introduction to Design Thinking and benefits for L&D and organisational performance

Design

What does Design mean to you? Spend a moment or two considering this question. I asked the audience to do just that and then canvassed the audience for some of their ideas - a good mix of traditional ideas of design as being about objects and others who focussed on design for learning. But let's be clear here, to define design is really pretty simple and I like the quote from Marty Neumeier's book, The Designful Company.

I really wanted to encourage the audience to see learning design as just a subset of design generally and doing do provides us with an opportunity to borrow tools from the design profession and then mix them with traditional L&D tools.

Design Thinking

Let's not complicate things here, Design Thinking is really just thinking lke a designer. (but first we need to understand how designers think and work!)

I used a part of Tim Brown's TED talk urging Designers to Think Big to link my presentation to a recurring theme throughout the conference, the changing landscape of workplace learning and changing roles for L&D professionals. (I also referenced Tim's book Change by Design, a great starting point in learning more about Design Thinking) I emphasised that in changing workplaces the flexibility and creativity underpinning Design Thinking provides an approach that allows Learning Designers to be more creative and adaptable to changes in workplaces or learning needs.

Above are three tenets of Design Thinking. I'll focus on two of these, Human Centred and Co-creative; and let's replace 'Human' with 'Learner'. Design Thinking for learning puts learners' needs at the front, that's what we design for, helping workers to do their jobs more effectively today and into the future. So, in order to become to be Learner Centred we are now able to borrow some of design's research tools to learn more about our learners, to collect their stories. For without an in depth understanding of actual learners, their environment and work habits how can we expect learning tools to meet actual needs? (I will go into more detail on these research tools and approaches in a later post)

This sounds pretty logical really, we must undestand the learner in order to design learning. But what about co-creative? Well, now let's go a step further! Where possible the best learning solutions will be designed when the creative process has included ideas and input from future learners. So, Learning Designers do not sit in an office, they go out into the real world to see learners and understand their needs....and then they work with future learners to begin the creative process of designing learning solutions...the work is collaborative. Co-creation also moves L&D away from being a 'pusher' or fountain of knowledge and instead gives learners a voice so that they can 'pull' the knowledge and skills they need to perform more effectively.

This picture of the design process above is one reason why the beginning of the design process may seem a bit messy, because by including more voices early in the design process there is a less direct, more messy, pathto a solution. But it is this very messiness that allows us to end up with learning solutions that are more likely to meet real performance needs in real workplaces. The lesson I emphasised here was to hold back from solution mode..... I know, we all like to be seen to solve problems quickly..... however we should spend time in the messy zone, looking at problems from different perspectives.

Where to from here?

I hope you're getting interested by now. It can be a little hard to get across in writing the energy levels from the presentation and even the full range of information covered. I will end this post here, about half way through the presentation, but I will continue later on. From here we move on to looking at why learning designers must remember that it's all about the delivery, later I'll look at design tools and design frameworks before linking Design Thinking more specifically to L&D, to the formal/informal learning debate and finally to making a case for creativity, innovative thinking and a stronger design mentality generally within the L&D profession.

 

 

Learning and Design Thinking - an introduction

Just over a month ago I was given the opportunity to present a session on 'Learning and Design Thinking' at the Australian Institute of Training and Development's 2012 conference in Sydney, Australia. I structured the session by following my own introduction to Design Thinking over the last 5 or so years, whilst at the same time providing attendees with a background to Design Thinking ideas and methods that can support innovative Learning Design. In the session I covered broad ground however the content was specifically designed for the audience and the occasion - the real aim being to encourage innovative thinking in learning design.

The image above is part of a small animation that played as people entered the room, as it ran I explained that many L&D live in a world of formal training and workshops and that this session was about encouraging us all to look up out of the formal box to consider alternative learning design tools and approaches. The words streaming up the page were small 'tasters' representing some of the ideas and influences that would be covered in the session. These ideas floating past also encourage us to look up from how we do things today and be more open to the different ideas and approaches that are all around us. In this month's 'Training and Development' magazine you can find a brief article that touches on some of the ideas from my presentation. I will post the full conference Prezi presentation on this blog next week along with accompanying notes.

So, what's next on the Learning and Design Thinking agenda? For me Design Thinking is an ever evolving interest. I have already integrated many design tools into my own learning design methods and expect that over the next 12 months I will further refine this. As I discover new ideas and approaches I will continue to post articles that highlight these and outline their benefits to the learning design process.

We are Learning Designers

Let me explain why I don't call myself an Instructional Designer - I do a lot more than design instruction! To me the word instructional brings forth notions of teacher led instruction in formal education settings. Chalk and Talk, Tell and Do, information being 'pushed' from the facilitator to the student.

OK, I know that this is not what the majority of today's Instructional Designers actually do (they could even be offended by my description). However the problem is that the title Instructional Designer feeds into the notion that learning happens in formal settings and that knowledge is something that can be transferred through instruction. I think that the title has seen it's day and that it's time for all 'Instructional Designers' to rebrand themselves - Learning Designers, because that is what you we do.

We design so that people can do what they need and/or want to do more effectively.

 

The step-wise evolution of Social Learning

For a few months now this post has been bouncing around my head. It's been through a number of diferent forms until earlier today I read a science article that brought it all together for me. The article I read was titled, "Step-wise evolution of stable sociality in primates", I'll provide the link at the end of this post for those inclined to dig a little more deeply.

There was one particular finding that resonated with me, and it was represented nice and simply by the following diagram:

Put very simply, the study found that primates went through a series of steps in forming the social groups that are found across all species of primates today. That is from living as solitary animals, through stages of loose connections until stable social groups are formed. As I read the study, and this point in particular, this blog post idea came back in focus in my mind.

So, with this little introduction in your mind I'll now go back into my original thinking for this post - and I'll tell it in three parts.

1. Learning when flying solo
2. Lurking in an open plan office
3. Part of the furniture

OK, let's get into it!

Part 1 – Learning when flying solo

I work as a freelance learning designer with assignments typically lasting from just days through to weeks and occasionally months. Mostly I work alone in the relative calm of my home office.

I enjoy what I do but working solo is by definition solitary. This means that it's more difficult to keep my own learning going – I need to actively seek out learning, and social contact.

The internet is my window to the world of knowledge and learning, I surf the internet, its blogs and communities, finding some content interesting, some less so. Without a doubt the internet helps me to learn, you can’t help reading something that’s interesting. I surf the internet to learn whatever I need to, whether it’s how to build a website and upload it, writing blogs, presentation design ideas, cooking, gardening and on and on and on and on................

So, while on one hand I’m busy working away on the other hand I’m learning by reading...and participate, but not always because sometimes I lurk. I’ll jump into an online conversation when it really interests me and I might ask a question or put forward my thoughts. A good deal of the time however, because I'm working and seeing heaps of stuff, I filter what I read and decide if and when to participate.

So, I work solo, I participate in online conversations and I also lurk.

Part 2 - Lurking in an open plan office

At the moment I’m doing a fair bit of work embedded in the offices of a large Australian company designing a range of business leadership programs. So whilst I normally work from my office at home my current environment is a change from this.

The office itself is very large and open plan; you hear people talking .... you learn things. I’ve got work to do so I don’t always jump in when I hear something interesting....and to be honest when I first sat at my desk I didn’t really know people very well anyway. But I’ve got ears and some things you hear are either relevant to what you’re working on or just interesting.

So, while on one hand I’m busy working away, on the other hand I’m learning by listening...and not (always) participating, I still do some lurking. Of course I’ll jump into a conversation every now and then to ask a question or put forward my thoughts but mostly I work away, hearing heaps of stuff, filtering and deciding if and when to participate.

So, I’m a visitor working in an office. I do some socialising and some lurking.

Part 3 – Part of the furniture

Now let’s look into the crystal ball, at least a year into one possible future. In this future I’ve become more a ‘part’ of this office environment (this must mean i've done some very good work!). I’ve got to know many more people and they know me too. I still hear heaps of stuff and choose when to participate, but I do more participating and probably a bit less lurking, I’m more comfortable in the environment - I’m becoming part of the furniture.

I’ve made quite a few connections now; I’m included in the social goings-on. People drop by my desk to ask questions and I drop by theirs too. I’m socially comfortable and this changes how I learn - I participate more and lurk less.

What does this all show?

Let's go back to the diagram from the primate study. In it there are three steps in the evolution of sociality. I like this stepped approach as a way of describing how people build sociality on the internet. 

What it tells me is that we should expect that learners themselves will be at different steps in the evolution of their own internet sociality. It is probably also helpful to imagine that people move through these social steps at different speeds - what is fast for some seems recalcitrant to others.

It is here where undersatanding needs to kick in, you cannot expect all people to interact in online social communities just like you do. Some people jump right in confidently expressing their views and questioning the ideas of others. There are other people who will choose to lurk in the internet shadows, listening, dipping their toes in occasionally and building confidence in the whole thing. 

If you examine the actions of the lurker through the stepped evolution model it becomes clear that they have moved from the solitary world to the unstable social. They may decide to take the next step to the world of stable social if they see a reason for doing so, it can be OK to 'just show up'. What others in communities can do to help lurkers participate more is to accept that participation styles vary - there is no 'one size fits all'.

Links:

I came to the Stepped Evolution article via the BBC website that ran a report summarising key findings, then followed the internal link to purchase the full article in the Nature Journal of Science.

I've also read a number of other blog posts on lurking, particularly these three articles:

Lurking is Learning by Dan Pontefract

Lurking and Loafing by Steve Wheeler

Lurking or Peripheral Participation by Christy Wheeler

Where to from here?

Let me know what you think, that is if you're not lurking!

Touching the Earth Lightly - 10 thoughts for learning design

As someone who makes his livelihood by designing and facilitating learning experiences for businesses I should encourage all businesses to design bigger. Bigger, longer workshops, more complex online learning, more post-workshop mentoring and more assessments of all sorts - in all ways possible I should encourage business to design learning that works best for me. Bigger, bigger, bigger....

Mmmm! Well that's what seems to be happen a fair bit of the time! Big, complex learning interventions! Even within businesses there seems to be a desire to impress others with the size and complexity of programs. If it doesn't look impressively large it mustn't be much good - seems to be the message.

But, who is learning designed for? Really?

OK, it's obvious, learning should be designed to increase learning effectiveness. What does effective learning look like? Well, I'll make it simple, effective learning helps the learner perform more effectively in their work environment. (More effective learning = mastery of skills/knowledge + more control over their work + a clear purpose - which all in turn leads to better workplace productivity)

So, let's now look at the title of this post. 'Touching the Earth Lightly' is the architectural design philosophy of renowned Australian Architect Glenn Murcutt. (Here is a link and here is another that fill you in on who Glenn Murcutt is and you might also see why I'd love a house in the Australian bush designed by him!)

Here's my reading of the term, 'Touching the Ground Lightly'. It is about being less obtrusive in the landscape, making a building sit comfortably in it's place without having to rebuild the landscape to fit the building. It is about designing a building to fit the place, not the place to fit the building.

How did this make me think of learning? Simple. Here's 10 thoughts that come to mind.

1. Design learning that is unobtrusive
2. Design learning that is embedded in practice
3. Design learning that doesn't look like learning
4. Design learning where the learner is in control
5. Design learning that encourages sharing
6. Design learning for 'in the moment' needs
7. Design learning that fosters creativity
8. Design learning that is evolutionary nor revolutionary
9. Design learning for learners
10. Design learning that touches the ground lightly!

 

Design with, not for.

I've had a short phrase stuck in my head now for a few weeks, in fact it is stuck so well that I have found myself using it numerous times when speaking with clients.

The phrase is:

Design with, not for.

 

A simple philosophy, however so often it is the straightforward things that cut right to the heart of the matter! When designing learning we have a choice, to push our approach, emphases, content, style etc onto our learners and clients. In other words we can 'design for'.

There is another (better) way of approaching design that instead seeks to understand in detail the unique needs of learners and clients, their cultures, unique outlooks and anything else that may have an impact upon learning. The result, design is pulled towards learners' needs. It isn't an off the shelf 'solution' but rather a solution for their learning need. 

Put the idea in your head, you might find it popping up just at the right time to help you improve your learning design.