Communities of practice are dynamic social structures that require both initial design and ongoing cultivation so they can emerge and grow.  However, through a series of steps, learning professionals and community members can design a community environment, foster the formalization of the community, and plan activities to help grow and sustain the community. But ultimately, the members of the community will define and sustain it over time.

Here are most of the activities listed from the session.  Some are slightly edited for consistency or to merge with similar items to create a single list.

Please visit my new blog Performance X Design to see the list.

Note:  The Gram Consulting blog has been discontinued…I post blog introductions here  to encourage Gram Consulting readers to subscribe to the new blog.   Please come on over…

Leadership Development in a Learning 2.0 World

• Contrast current leadership development practices with learning 2.0 driven practices
• Describe benefits of learning 2.0 for transforming leadership and management development
• Describe a model of leadership development driven by learning 2.0 principles
• Envision a future Leadership Development program for your organization on a by a learning 2.0 foundation
• Define strategies for integrating learning 2.0 concepts into current leadership development programs

To read the full post and view the conference presentation please visit Performance X Design.

It’s been a challenge to get back to the blog as I have been finishing Gram Consulting work,  closing out the business and transitioning into a new full time position. Things are starting to settle down and I now hope to get back to posting more regularly. Thanks for the well wishes and inquiries from regular readers since I started the blog.   Onward…

e-Learning: What’s hot, what’s not

I received a request from a colleague last week who is helping a company put together a learning strategy, part of which will focus on e-learning. Her question was this:

what’s hot and what’s not in e-learning these days ?

I gave it a bit of thought and came up with the following lists. I would love to hear your additions or deletions from the list (as would my colleague).

Please visit Performance X Design to read the full article….

Tuesday (Oct 19) is dedicated to “Research into Practice”, a topic near and dear to me. All presentations  on Tuesday are based on the theme.   Allison Rosset will discuss the importance of research in guiding instructional practice,  Harold Stolovich on performance improvement research,  Traci Sitzmann on e-learning research and Christine Wihak on what we research tells us about informal learning.

I will be presenting a Trading Post session on Tuesday at 2:00 pm titled Getting Informal: Merging learning and Work through Informal Learning. It will be based on many of the concepts I have presented in this blog, particularly Leveraging the full Learning Continuum and the 10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work series.

A Thought Leaders series begins on Wednesday which will include sessions by Marc Rosenberg (on Learning 2.0), Patti Shank (on common errors in learning design) and Bob Morton (on change management).  My new employer (Nexient Learning) is also presenting a case study with Deliotte on Managerial Effectiveness that I’m looking forward to.

I will be presenting on a Learning Technology Thought Leaders panel session on Thursday (20th) titled: Enterprise Solutions, Managing the Training Function.   I’ll be on the panel with Harold Jarche, Sheryl Herle, Sheri Philips and Gary Woodill (from the Brandon Hall team) We will thrash around the pros and cons of Learning Management Systems. The session is moderated by Saul Carliner from Concordia University.  No lack of opinion in that group!  Should be interesting.

Thursday also includes a keynote by Peter Senge whose work I admire and have posted on in the past.

If you happen to be there please stop by one of my sessions and say hello.

CSTD and IFTDO World Conference from CSTD and IFTDO on Vimeo.

The research is based an an annual survey of 1700 companies from across the globe in a range of industries and functional areas and has been ongoing now for about three years running.  The Mckinsey Quarterly recently summarized results in an interactive visual chart and as a full article in the McKinsey Quarterly titled How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0: McKinsey Global Survey Results (The article is free but you have to join the free membership to see it in full).

The following chart from the interactive feature summarizes how web 2.0 technologies are being used for some internal purposes including managing knowledge and training.   Internal blogs and wikis are being used significantly for Managing Knowledge. For Training uses the highest categories are Podcasts and Video Sharing (unfortunately the most  presentation oriented technologies of the bunch).   Social Networking is being used extensively for fostering collaboration and identifying and recruiting talent.

Click to access the McKinsey interactive chart

If you go to the interactive feature be sure to listen to the “about this research” audio snippet.  It provides a brief summary of the research and findings across three years.   Some conclusions McKinsey draws:

• an increasing number companies are adopting web 2.0 technologies
• more companies will start to use them for wider purposes including customers, internal employees and suppliers
• uses will continue to evolve and get better at deriving business value

the striking result is that 2/3 of the companies are deriving measurable business value.

McKinsey summarizes:

“This year’s survey turned up strong evidence that these advantages are translating into measurable business gains.  When we asked respondents about the business benefits their companies have gained as a result of using Web 2.0 technologies, they most often report greater ability to share ideas; improved access to knowledge experts; and reduced costs of communications, travel, and operations.  Many respondents also say Web 2.0 tools have decreased the time to market for products and have had the effect of improving employee satisfaction”.

Ellen’s post focused on how Learning Designers on a twitter discussion got  “cranky” at the first mention of the ADDIE process (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation).  On the Twitter #Lrnchat session  participants had a gag response to the to the mere mention of ADDIE (sound familiar?).  Don responded with some great comments on how ISD (ADDIE) has evolved and adapted.

Much of my career has been involved in applying ADDIE in some form or other and I’ve landed on a conflicted LOVE/HATE relationship with it that that you, lucky reader, will now be subjected to .

HATE (Phase A, Step 3.2.6)

Throughout the 90’s many Instructional Designers and e-Learning Developers (me included) grew disgruntled with ADDIE (and its mother process Instructional Systems Design—ISD) as training struggled to keep up with business demands for speed and quality and as we  observed process innovations in software and product development field (Rapid Application Development, Iterative prototyping etc).

In 2001 that frustration was given voice in the seminal article “The Attack on ISD” by Jack Gordon and Ron Zemke in Training Magazine.

The article cited four main concerns:

• ISD is too slow and clumsy to meet today’s training challenges
• There’s no “there” there. (It aspires to be a science but fails on many fronts)
• Used as directed, it produces bad solutions
• It clings to the wrong world view

I have memories of early projects, driven by mindless adherence to ISD, where I learned the hard way, the truth in each of these assertions.  As an example of what not to do and a guard against blowing my brains out in future projects,  for years I have kept an old Gagne style “instructional objective” from an early military project that would make your eyes burn.

Early ISD/ADDIE aspired to be an engineering model.  Follow it precisely and you would produce repeatable outcomes.  The engineering model assumes a “one best way” and the one best way of the time was grounded in the science of behavioral psychology and general systems theory.  The “one best way” thinking appealed to the bureaucratic style of the times but it couldn’t be more of an anathema to the current crop of learning designers, especially those focused on more social and constructivist approaches to learning.  And they are right.

Another criticism of ADDIE I have parallels Ellen’s comments.  Adherents and crankites alike view ADDIE as an “instructional design” methodology when in fact it should be viewed more as a project management process for learning projects.  Viewing  Instructional Design as synonymous with ADDIE does both a disservice.  There is loads of ID going on inside ADDIE but it is primarily in the Design phase of the process, and it can be much more creative than the original model prescribes.

In the end, the Achilles heel of formal ISD/ADDIE rests in its prescriptive posture and foundation in behavioural psychology.  Behavioural psychology and performance technology–its extension in the workplace–have added greatly to our understanding how to improve human learning at work, but we have learned much since then, and technology has provided tools to both designers and learners that profoundly change the need for a process like ADDIE.

Of course the ADDIE process was (and is) not unique to the learning design profession.  For many years the five broad phases of ADDIE were the foundation for the design of most systems.  Software engineering, product development, interactive/multimedia development are all based on some variation of the model.   Most however have evolved from the linear “waterfall” approach of early models (can’t start the next phase until the previous has been done and approved) to iterative design cycles based on rapid prototyping, customer participation in the process and loads of feedback loops built into the process.  And learning/e-learning is no different.  It has evolved and continues to evolve to meet the needs of the marketplace. Much of the current gag reaction to ADDIE, like that experienced by Ellen, is based on the old waterfall-linear approach and the assumed instructivist nature of the model.  And again the gag is entirely valid.

However, if you can break free from the history, preconceptions and robotic application of ADDIE, you may find room for something approaching…

LOVE (Phase B, Step 2.3.7)

I can’t say I ever use ADDIE in its purest form any longer.  For e-learning and performance applications, I prefer processes with iterative design and development cycles that are usually a variation of rapid application development process like this one from DSDM.

Or for an example specific to e-learning,  this process from Cyber Media Creations nicely visualizes the iterative approach:

Source: http://myonlineelearning.blogspot.com/

Or for the Michael Allen fans out there, his Rapid Development approach described in Creating Successful e-Learning is very good.  There is a respectful chapter in the book on the ADDIE limitations and how his system evolved from it.

But at the heart of all these processes are the familiar phases of analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation,  albeit cycling through them many times along the way.

For me ADDIE has become a useful heuristic,  not even a process really, but a framework for thinking,  coaching instructional designers,  and managing learning and e-learning projects.  Many e-learning designers these days are not formally trained in Instructional Design and initially think of it as instructional “writing” more than the holistic and systemic approach at the heart of ADDIE.   Likewise customers and subject matter experts are much easier to work with once they understand the broad project process that ADDIE represents.  For these two purposes alone I am thankful for ADDIE as a framework .  ADDIE has staying power because of it’s simplicity.  Purists will say it has been watered down too much but in many ways that’s what keeps it alive.

ADDIE phases are also a useful way to think about organization design and structure of a learning function.  They are the major processes that need to be managed and measured by most learning functions.  Just think of the functionality of most LMS systems have added since their inception.

In the end ADDIE (and its more current modifications) is probably most valuable because it makes the work of learning design visible. This is an essential feature of productive knowledge work of all kinds.   Almost every learning/training group uses a ADDIE as a start point to design a customized process that can be communicated,  executed,  measured and repeated with some level of consistency.  Equally important in knowledge work is the discipline of continually improving processes and breaking through to better ways of working.  This has resulted in the many innovations and improvement to the ADDIE process since its inception.

SUMMATIVE EVALUATION (Phase E, Step 5.2.3)

I’ve come to believe that the power of ADDIE/ISD lies in the mind and artful hands of the user.  In my experience Rapid Application Development processes can become just as rigid and prescriptive under the watch of inflexible and bureaucratic leaders as ADDIE did.

There’s an intellectual fashion and political correctness at work in some of the outright rejection of ADDIE.  It’s just not cool to associate with the stodgy old process.  Add Web 2.0, informal and social learning to the mix and some will argue we shouldn’t be designing anything.

For the organizations I work with, there is no end on the horizon to formal learning (adjustments in volume and quality would be nice!).  Formal learning will always require intelligent authentic learning design, and a process to make it happen as quickly and effectively as possible. If instead of  the irrelevant old geezer in the corner waving a disapproving finger,  we think of ADDIE more like a character from Mad Men, maybe we can refresh the image a bit.

Are you ready for Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge (B.O.O.K)?  Apparently “thousands of content creators have committed to the platform and investors are reported flocking to the medium”

I learned about the new device through this B.O.O.K MARK while browsing a local supplier of B.O.O.K on the weekend.

In a Learning 2.0 world, where learning and performance solutions take on a wider variety of forms and where churn happens at a much more rapid pace, what new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?” ASTD Learning Circuits big question for July

The Learning Circuits big question this month is an important one, but there seems to be a few questions embedded in it.  Does it ask what new skills are needed by learning professionals due to a wider variety of learning solutions?…or due to more rapid churn?…or due to the implied technology knowledge of the “learning 2.0 world”?  They are related of course, but they do each point to different skill requirements.  As a result answers to the question so far have been enjoyable but a bit a bit helter-skelter.

Harold Jarche nails the “learning 2.0″ aspects of the question with his update of last year’s excellent Skills 2.0 article–especially from a personal learning perspective.  Nancy White highlights general competencies that would be of value to any knowledge worker in today’s workplace.  Mohamed Amine Chatti identifies knowledge networking and double loop learning as critical. I like those.  But again not necessarily specific to the learning professional.  Natalie Laderas-Kilkenny gets closer to skills that are important for the learning professional and says that a learning culture is an important precursor for successful learning 2.0. Right on!

Michael Hanley layers a business view on the question (thank you!) and charts some necessary skills.  I also like Clive Sheppard’s view that we don’t need to tear up the rule book and start again–that our mission remains (organizational performance) but we need to ramp up more quickly on current technology and methods.  Couldn’t agree more.

What Learning Professional?

The question also lumps “learning professionals” into a single group.  Most large training functions have many specialized roles and their skill requirements vary.  So here’s another layer to the big question discussion based on different slices of the “learning professional” roles that are out there.

Generally, most learning professionals will need a combination of these three skills to thrive in the learning 2.0 world.

• User level knowledge of web 2.0 tools and their applications

• Open attitude towards sharing, collaborating, contributing, and personal knowledge management that underlie their effective use.

• Facilitating non-formal and informal learning solutions (technology assisted or otherwise)

How these skills take shape in various learning roles will vary by responsibility.    Here are a few:

Instructors

With over 60% of corporate learning still delivered in the classroom (ASTD 2008 State of the Industry report) there are a lot of instructors out there.  They need to develop sophisticated skills in the facilitating, coaching and mentoring using on-line and web 2.0 tools.  As classroom programs are extended or moved into on-line communities and action learning programs (see couching ourselves for a good example) coaching and facilitating skills will be essential.  Since these communities will focus as much on work as on learning, facilitators will also need a serious understanding of their organizations to maintain credibility in these contexts.

New skills:

• Online facilitation and coaching using web 2.0 and other collaborative tools
• Action learning coaching
• Organizational knowledge and experience

Analysts and Performance Consultants

The long and ponderous needs assessment is dead.  Speed is essential.  Web 2.0 tools can help the analyst. First, the social media environments that communities now operate in can be a rich source of performance data to mine for skill and knowledge gaps and to signal when a team needs to bring more focus to capturing learning and knowledge. There are also many useful web 2.0 orientated tools for data gathering and internal “crowdsourcing” that can be used to collect employee feedback, replace old flipchart voting methods and set priorities.  See UserVoice for example.

Also performance consultants will need to breakdown the traditional “training vs. non-training” solution duo into more nuanced solutions that integrate learning and work. There are powerful levers on the non-training side of that equation than need to be part of the future solution set rather than a casual handoff to another department.

Evaluation takes a different shape in the web 2.0 world as well.  It’s easy to determine performance impact for hard skill programs but the softer learning and knowledge sharing associated with communities and natural learning methods is a bit of a measurement bugaboo.  New ways of measuring learning need to be developed and incorporated into the toolkit.  I think Binkerhoff’s success case method has great promise here.

New skills:

• Web 2.0 tools for data collection and analysis
• Broader understanding of non-formal and informal learning solutions when recommending “non-training solutions”
• Building learning roadmaps and curriculum design efforts to include social learning activities
• Success case method for measuring informal learning programs

Relationship Managers

Most large training functions have generalists that maintain relationships with internal client groups to assess high level needs and assemble teams to meet those needs.   I see opportunities for this role to use web 2.0 tools to both maintain their internal client relationships and to share knowledge with the solution end of their training organization (The matrix model I suggest is here). Possibly one happy community? They will often be the initial discussion regarding learning 2.0 and social networking related solutions.

New skills:

• awareness of the benefits and appropriate use of new web 2.0 tools
• recognize genuine opportunities for learning communities and social media
• educate internal clients on the learning advantages of web 2.0 (and shift mindsets away from traditional learning)

Instructional Designers and e-Learning Developers

I’m not a member of the instructional design is dead clan.  But ID pros certainly need to evolve and incorporate more discovery oriented and natural learning benefits of Learning 2.0.  There is no prescription for learning 2.0 designs as there is for e-learning 1.0 which makes some ID’s uncomfortable, but there are certainly principles and best practices that need to be learned by any ID that wants to stay relevant.

Not all are e-learning developers are instructional designers (and visa versa).  With their stronger technical skills, developers need to up their game in the integration of 2.0 and 1.0 technologies to enable more creative solutions.   Rather than defaulting to a rapid development tool for example, e-learning developers need the skill to develop an effective performance support environment, or to use simple tools to create realistic simulations.  Mobile learning is also growing and is an essential developer skill.

New skills:

• building learning environments vs. courses
• design communities of practice (Can communities of practice be designed?)
• build collaboration into formal programs using web 2.0 tools.
• design formal learning that supports communities of practice
• improved simulation design in order to better integrate learning and work.
• design support for non-formal and informal learning solutions
• build interactive elements into collaborative learning 2.0 designs
• simple but creative simulation technologies
• designs for mobile learning

Learning and Organizational Effectiveness Consultants

More than the technology of web 2.0 it’s the methods of informal and social learning that they support that have the most potential to change organizations.  Learning consultants and OD specialist are at the heart of this.  They need to work together more under a common umbrella. My idea of a learning consultant is more akin to the OD or Organizational Learning professional that get inside the organization and facilitate change and learning through workflow re-design, change management efforts and action learning.

New skills:

• action learning
• systems thinking and improvement tools
• building communities of practice
• Senge styled organizational learning
• social media tools to support the above

Learning Unit Directors and Leaders

Learning department leaders need to provide the resources to develop their team in line with the above.  The learning unit is a team of knowledge workers that must model the solutions they are recommending to their internal clients.  Learning unit leaders need the skills to make this happen.  More than providing web 2.0 tools they need to encourage and participate in their own learning communities.  They also need to manage their unit as a system.  Since their team (like most knowledge workers) will know more than they do about learning and performance, they need to learn how to manage the “system” and provide vision and direction more than the manage the “people”.  That means building workflow, measures and structures with their team that produces real results from the unit.

New skills:

• manage the learning organization as a system
• leadership (not micromanagement)
• resources to model, experiment and innovate new learning approaches with in the learning unit.
• web 2.0 tools

e-Learning Suppliers and Vendors

e-Learning vendors (authoring tools, LMS/LCMS, consulting services) have started to add social media tools as wrappers for their web 1.0 offerings but there are few native web 2.0 applications and solutions.   Whether we like it or not, the vendor world plays a big role in shaping technology based learning solutions.

Vendors, suppliers and consultants need new skills in recognizing market opportunities and provide solutions that push the envelop.  Where is the content designed for use within learning communities for example, or a community platform for leadership team development?  People are throwing them together using standard open source or proprietary social media tools but it would be nice to see some platforms/service that offer unique service by skill type the way we see traditional training program offerings.

New skills:

• recognizing new learning 2.0 market opportunities
• solutions and offerings built on web 2.0 values and platforms
• external cross-industry learning communities
• flexible content for role or discipline based communities (ex. Management communities, consulting communities, technical communities etc)

Summary

As Clive Sheppard said, our mission is still improving performance.  Web 2.0 focused discussions like this tend to put technology out front, which is a mistake we’ve made before. Web 2.0 and social media (more importantly the collaboration and sharing they enable) offers us genuine new opportunities for improving performance but they are just one of many important skills needed by learning professionals today.

4. Build a Community of Practice

I’m a fan of Communities of Practice (CoP).  They are environments (usually supported by technology) for groups of people with a common mission or interest to communicate, share learn and build knowledge needed to more effectively solve problems and accomplish work.  Like Performance Support Systems, Communities of Practice are more a concept than a specific tool and they can take many unique configurations. Unlike performance support tools, they are grounded in the communication and interaction between people as they solve shared problems. The primary interaction is between people rather than between people and a structured information system. As a result CoP’s create knowledge as much as they transfer it–an essential feature in effective knowledge work-and they foster informal learning focused on specific problem domains.

CoP’s have been around for as long as human beings have learned and worked together. Communication technologies have simply allowed us to invent environments to structure and enable the knowledge exchange at the heart of the community.  Etienne Wenger identifies some of the benefits of workplace CoPs:

• Communities among practitioners create a direct link between learning and performance, because the same people participate in communities of practice and in teams and business units.

• Communities of practice enable practitioners to take collective responsibility for managing the knowledge they need, recognizing that, given the proper structure, they are in the best position to do this.

• Practitioners can address the tacit and dynamic aspects of knowledge creation and sharing, as well as the more explicit aspects.

• Communities are not limited by formal structures: they create connections among people across organizational and geographic boundaries.

“Designing” Communities of Practice

Can CoPs be “designed” or do they simply “emerge” from participants as they work together?   Certainly, they self-organize and develop their own conventions and culture of interaction, knowledge creation and sharing and in this way they emerge from the hearts and minds of the people participating.  A successful community will not require much management, but their success can be influenced by a well structured community environment and guidance on the behaviours of productive community participation.

Learning consultants cannot “design” the learning outcomes of a CoP; but conversely no CoP can fully design its own learning.  They will self-organize, but they flourish when their learning fits with their organizational objectives.  The art is to help such communities find resources and connections without burdening them with “consulting guidance”.   In these ways Cop’s are both designed and emergent.

Here is a CoP Design Guide I’ve found useful. It’s from the education sector but the pricnicples and process they use are virtually identical to the business context.

Keeping Communities of Practice Alive

Communities of Practice have been around long enough now that we’ve learned how to get them up and running but we’re less adept at keeping them going.  They are notoriously hard to keep active.   CoPs have a natural life-cycle when they are built around time limited projects and they should be free to disassemble when they have served their purpose.  Other CoPs have longer term value and motivation can sometimes wane midcourse.  Here is an article by Richard McDermott with some good ideas for keeping a valuable CoP alive: How to Avoid a Midlife crises in your CoPs.

What Can You Do?

Etienne Wenger, a leading thinker and innovator in the Communities of Practice  provides these actions that various roles in an organization can take to support and optimize the benefits of Communities of Practice:

• Line managers must make sure that people are able to participate in the right communities of practice so they sustain the expertise they need to contribute to projects.

• Knowledge managers must go beyond creating informational repositories that take knowledge to be a “thing,” toward supporting the whole social and technical ecology in which knowledge is retained and created.

• Training departments must move the focus from training initiatives that extract knowledge out of practice to learning initiatives that leverage the learning potential inherent in practice.

• Strategists must find ways to create two-way connections between communities of practice and organizational strategies.

• Change managers must help build new practices and communities to bring about changes that will make a constructive difference.

• Accountants must learn to recognize the capital generated when communities of practice increase an organization’s learning potential.

• Work process designers must devise process improvement systems that thrive on, rather than substitute for, engaged communities of practice.

5. Use Social Media to Facilitate Informal Learning

Ah, social media.  So much has been written about the impact on learning of the tools we now collectively refer to as Web 2.0  that you hardly need more here.  In an earlier post I listed some ways to support organizational learning with Social Media.

However, from the perspective of integrating learning and work, social media is a technical platform (like none before it) for sharing, collaborating and communicating while work is being accomplished.  Social media has been enormously popular in the public sphere but has met with resistance inside organizations so far.  Organizations are still worried that social media is a little too…well…social.  However, what we’ve learned somewhere between learning 1.0 and learning 2.0 is that learning is also well…social…and that the informal networked organization is as important as the formal structure for accomplishing valuable work.

While there are advocates for simply making social media available in organizations to “let the learning happen”,  I prefer a slightly more interventionist approach that uses social media to help project teams, centres of excellence, action learning projects, management teams and other focused networks.  Advocates that focus on the technology are missing the point that the learning lies in the collaboration, discussion, sharing and innovating around a task or problem domain, not in the technology itself.  It lies in the formation and nurturing of communities. I think this is why enterprise software supporting Communities of Practice are moving to more social media oriented technical platforms (Tomoye for example) and social media platforms market themselves as “community” software (Igloo for example).   I think the convergence is good for further integration of learning and working.

Not to put too obvious a point on it, but learning happens while working and social media, more that the one way knowledge management platforms of the recent past, engage employees in the creation, capture and sharing of knowledge in ways that formal learning just can’t match.

Communities of Practice and Social Media at IBM

Here’s a good presentation from IBM that demonstrates the use of social media for Communities of Practice in that company.

Best quote from the video. “Blogging is huge.  Our executives hate it”

Posts in the “10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work” series:

Part 1:

• Strategy 1:  Understand the job
• Strategy 2:  Link Learning to business process
• Strategy 3:  Build a performance support system

Part 2:

• Strategy 4:  Build a community of practice
• Strategy 5:  Use social media to facilitate informal learning

Part 3:

• Strategy 6:  Implement a continuous improvement framework
• Strategy 7:  Use action learning

Part 4:

• Strategy 8:  Use Organizational Learning practices

Part 5:

• Strategy 9:  Design jobs for natural learning
• Strategy 10:  Bring the job to the learning

In a series of following posts I’ll share some practices and approaches that have worked for me.  There is incredible variety in the business settings where we work, the jobs we support and the latitude we have to build our solutions.  Hopefully some of the following suggestions will be relevant in your situation.

Each of the 10 strategies on the list in the highlight box on the right, have helped me to improve performance through learning without pulling people way from the job for formal (classroom or e-learning) training.  I’d love to hear some of your suggestions and experiences.

In this post I’ll discuss practices 1 through 3.

1. Understand the job

If your going to integrate learning with work you had better understand the work.  Watch people, talk to people, use appropriate analysis tools, and think like the performer.  Understand their world, day to day pressures, tools they use (or could use) and how they use them.  Understand the job inputs, processes and feedback mechanisms for job incumbents.

Learn and use the many analysis tools appropriate for different kinds of performance–task analysis for visible work, Cognitive walk-through for knowledge work and output focused performance analysis for both.  Process analysis and value stream analysis are useful for seeing work in the context of the broader system. These and other analysis methods are critical tools if you are to find ways to build learning into a job without burdening the learner (employee) with irrelevant or unwieldy tools and programs that don’t fit in the flow of their day to day work.

It’s unfortunate that some job/role analysis efforts have been overly cumbersome or time consuming (analysis paralysis!).  They don’t need to be.  Often they can simply be a good mental model or filter through which to rapidly examine a job or process for learning and improvement opportunities.  A good analysis is part of the solution not a barrier to it.

2. Link information and learning to business process

We often talk about linking training to business strategy and of course that’s critical, but a key link to strategy is cross functional business process.  Well designed business processes are structured to accomplish business objectives.  Every job is driven by a process, implicit or explicit.   If it so implicit as to be almost imperceptible (as if often the case with knowledge and creative work) there is some improvement you can offer before you even start to think about learning.

Once business processes have been identified (or made visible), process phases can be used to effectively embed relevant learning resources. All business processes contain “knowledge leverage points”-those points in the process where key information is needed for optimal performance. These could be key decision points, data collection points requirements, planning requirements etc. and will vary by type of job and process. And knowledge generation is as important in modern knowledge work as knowledge delivery so it’s also important to examine how knowledge can be accumulated through practice and made available to the wider group at those same knowledge leverage points. Here’s a sample cross functional process (sales) with knowledge leverage points identified.

With knowledge leverage points identified, learning and knowledge can be made available at it’s most relevant place, and most relevant form in the work flow.

3. Build a Performance Support System

A Performance Support System is a concept more that a specific solution.   Whatever configuration it takes, the core idea is to reduce the need for training (or eliminate it, altogether) by proving information, decision tools, performance aids and learning on-demand, using tools available at the moment they are needed.  An excellent performance system becomes part of the task and complements human abilities (compensate for weaknesses and enhance strengths).

They can be as simple as a job aid or reference and as complex as the panel of airplane cockpit.  It can include decision tools, searchable information resources, e-learning objects, simple software apps, help systems, advisory systems, video and media based reference material, procedural guidance, job aids, demonstration animations, simulations and anything else that supports performance.  They can be as useful for management and professional work as they are for procedural and administrative work.

Research support for performance support can be found in the area of “distributed cognition” which argues that tasks (mental and otherwise) can be dramatically improved through the aid of external tools that intimately aid thinking and performance.  It is embodied in Don Norman’s distinction between the personal and system point of view regarding performance support tools (”cognitive artifacts” as he labels them in Things that Make us Smart):

“there are two views of a cognitive artifact. The personal point of view (the impact the artifact has for the individual person and the system point of view (how the artifact + the person, as a system are different than the abilities of the person alone).

The personal point of view:
Artifacts (performance tools) change the task

The system point of view:
The person + artifact is smarter than either alone

The point is that a well designed performance support system becomes an integral part of the task.  Performance support systems can include small amounts of structured e-learning if the task requires some conceptual understanding or routine practice before application but generally performance support tools are designed to replace reliance on memory.

Business Process Guidance is an emerging term for performance support more directly linked to business processes.  Panviva and Tata Interactive Systems have adopted the term for their tools.

Posts in the “10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work” series:

Part 1:

• Strategy 1:  Understand the job
• Strategy 2:  Link Learning to business process
• Strategy 3:  Build a performance support system

Part 2:

• Strategy 4:  Build a community of practice
• Strategy 5:  Use social media to facilitate informal learning

Part 3:

• Strategy 6:  Implement a continuous improvement framework
• Strategy 7:  Use action learning

Part 4:

• Strategy 8:  Use Organizational Learning practices

Part 5:

• Strategy 9:  Design jobs for natural learning
• Strategy 10:  Bring the job to the learning