I’ve was reading some Henry Mintzberg over the holidays.  His recent books–Managing and Managers Not MBA’s–both question prevailing thinking on management and leadership and present alternatives for effective management practice and development.  Both books include a model of management as a balancing act between science, art and craft. His argument is that effective management requires all three and an overemphasis on any one results in dysfunction.

I think it also offers some insight to effective Instructional Design.  Much of the recent debate regarding Instructional Design models and practice (see my own view here) seem to revolve around the prescriptive, process based models of ADDIE (and like models) versus  more open constructivist approaches, presumably more relevant for our networked and collaborative work environments.   The arguments tend to get unnecessarily polarized.  The following table is adapted from a similar one Mintzberg created for defined management styles.  I believe it works equally well for for Instructional Design practice.

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

Even if you haven’t read Outliers yet you probably know that it sets out to dispel myths that intelligence or innate ability are the primary predictors of success.  Instead,  Gladwell summarizes research and provides examples to show that it is hours and hours of practice (10,000 to be exact) and a “practical intelligence” (similar in concept to emotional intelligence) acquired through experience that are the real determinants of success.

Gladwell covers similar territory (and draws on the same research) as Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates world Class Performers from Everybody Else, another excellent book that elaborates on an article Colvin wrote for Fortune magazine a few years ago: “What it Takes To Be Great”.

Both books debunk the assumption that “gifted” skill and great performance comes from innate talent, personal traits or hard wired competencies and ability.  The research Galdwell and Colvin draw on is impressive.  Both point to the extensive work of K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University.  Ericsson has conducted years of rock solid research on the role of “deliberate practice” in the acquisition of expert performance.  If you like to seek out source research as I do, then you’ll enjoy Ericsson’s (and others) impressive work that has been collected in the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Here is an earlier (and less hefty) review on some of the same research: “Deliberate practice” in the acquisition of expert performance.

At the core of these works is the concept of “deliberate practice” over longs periods of time (up to ten years).  While impossible to boil down the theory into a few points, here it is…uh…boiled down into a few points.   Highly skilled performance in all aspects of life and work can be developed by the rough equivalent of 10,000  hours (10 years or so) of increasing specific, targeted and mindful practice in a domain of expertise. The practice must be:

• Specific & technique-oriented
• Self regulated
• Involve high-repetition
• Paired with immediate feedback on results
• Isn’t necessarily “fun”, (in fact can be grueling hard work)

“Deliberate practice is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.
From: Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else .

Where Gladwell and Colvin focus on how an individual (you!) can use deliberate practice to improve and achieve the success you want,  Learning Professionals should be thinking about how to use the ideas to help others develop and grow the expertise needed by the organizations we support.  Ericsson has something to say here as well, having recently published a new book on how to design learning environments to develop and measure expertise– Development of Professional Expertise: Toward Measurement of Expert Performance and Design of Optimal Learning Environments.  In a time when learning/instructional design has become generalized and de-professionalized to the point of non-existence, it’s refreshing to see a serious treatment that moves the profession forward.

Using “Deliberate Practice” to Improve Workplace Performance

Here are 10 ideas that just scratch the surface on how Learning Professionals can use “deliberate practice” to improve workplace skill and performance.

1. Move from “mastery learning” to designing practice with feedback over longer periods of time (from learning events to a learning process). Deliberate Practice differs from the concept of ‘Mastery Learning” at the heart of much instructional design.  Mastery learning assumes a skill is perfected (or at least brought to a defined standard) in a fairly short period of time often within the scope of a single course. The complex professional skills of modern knowledge workers and managers demand a stronger focus on long term practice and feedback and building learning around long term objectives.
2. Develop the person. Time, practice and individualized feedback imply a long term focus on individuals rather than on jobs or roles.
3. Informal learning efforts like action learning, coaching and are cognitive apprenticeships are critical but they must be focused on practice and immediate feedback and extend over long periods of time.
4. Relevant, frequent and varied practice must be the dominant and most important element in all formal training programs.
5. Practice opportunities must extend far beyond initial training programs, to allow people to hone their skills through experimentation with immediate feedback.
6. Create practice sandboxes and simulation centres for key organizational skills where people can practice their skills and experience immediate feedback in safe environment.
7. Design visual feedback directly into jobs so professional can immediately see the results of their work.  In this way working IS deliberate practice.
8. Turn training events into the first step of a learning journey that will continue to provide opportunities to practice and refine skills throughout a career.
9. Identify the interests and strengths of people nurture them through opportunities for deliberate practice. Provide resources and support that encourage early effort and achievement.
10. Ensure social media environments provide opportunities for coaching and mindful reflection on performance.

9. Design jobs for natural learning

Most of us accept that we learn through experience,  whether that experience is structured into a training program or simply the “experience” of working.   But what is it about experience that results in learning?  There are a number of factors,  but most powerful among them is the feedback we receive (or don’t receive) on the results of our actions.  We intuitively use that feedback to adjust our actions, decisions, methods etc. to try to get it right the next time…in other words we use feedback to learn…to get better at what we do and accomplish.

Left to our own devices we seek out feedback to determine how well our actions worked at accomplishing our goal.   Jobs with effective feedback mechanisms available result in much more rapid learning, improved results and higher levels of motivation.  Designing a job with an effective feedback system is the equivalent of designing a job as an effective learning system.

A useful performance feedback system need the following elements to produce the kind of information needed for an employee to learn and perform:

• A clear understanding of the requirements both in terms of the outputs they are expected to produce and the standards of quality, cost and time they are expected to meet.

• An accurate and objective measurement system. Job outputs must be easily measured and compared to the standard.   It can include both qualitative and quantitative data.

• A visual display of the performance data against the standard. Charting and graphing performance data is much more effective than text, tables and spreadsheets.  It adds a level of interpretation and visual comparison that people readily accept.  There are many visual performance charting tools available, most of them automated.  They include line graphs, control charts, bar charts, pie charts and many others.

A sample line graph

• It must be timely, relevant and specific to the employee of team.

System thinking has also taught us that feedback is also important for identifying the downstream consequences of our actions. This feedback will typically be delayed, especially in knowledge work contexts when our output is part of a larger solution that can take months or even years before results are fully realized.  Sometimes unintended or undesired consequences can be the result.

immediate and delayed feedback

Other learning uses of performance feedback systems

Once an effective feedback system is in place it can be the basis for other learning interventions like coaching, performance appraisal, team development, and process improvement.  It should also be used to provide data to evaluate the effectiveness for formal training.  In many ways formal training is meant to compress and accelerate the learning that an individual might naturally get on the job.  Training should result in improvements that register on the performance feedback tool.   Formal training is our last an final strategy for integrating learning and work.

10. Bring the job to learning

Integrating learning and working implies building learning into jobs and processes–and that has certainly been the focus of the first nine strategies.  But greater integration can also be achieved by bringing jobs and processes into formal learning design.

Broadly speaking the goal formal training is to compress on the job experience to bring people to competency as quickly as possible.  Somehow over the years that goal been reduced to lots of telling and very little “doing”.   So my last strategy is an appeal to bring structured experience back to formal learning.  I don’t mean generic structured experience (like a management outdoor education or abstract team building exercises for example) but experiences based on authentic learning tasks.

We know how to do it.  The formal learning strategies that result in superior learning include business and process simulations, decision case learning, anchored instruction and the whole task learning design methods found in Jeroen van Merrienboer’s  4C/ID work.   Here are some links to design approaches that are based on real world learning tasks:

• Situated Learning
• Anchored Instruction
• Cognitive Apprenticeship
• Goal Based Scenarios
• First Principles Method
• 4C/ID

Some organizations are starting to turn their training functions into simulation centres and learning “studios” that use a combination of physical and knowledge based simulations of actual work processes and tasks.  For example Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto has developed a simulation centre.

For a very interesting academic experiment in a studio based approach to learning that I think would translate well to business settings see MIT’s Technology Enabled Active Learning Project.  It is based on a studio approach to learning that moves seamlessly between lecture, experimentation and discussion and individual design projects in one large technology enabled room.  Remote technologies could easily be used for dispersed employees.

This takes us full circle back to strategy #1.   If you use appropriate analysis tools to understand the job for which training is being developed, the quality of that training will be dramatically improved and the skills employees learn will be immediately useful.   Performance-based learning and Learning-based performance.  Two worthy and achievable goals for the learning professional.

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

8. Organizational Learning Practices

Organizational Learning (OL) means different things to different people.  These days, it is often used as a catch-all label for traditional (formal) training which it most certainly is not.  OL is broader than that label implies.  It is usually focused on individual and team transformation through participating in tangible activities that change the way people conduct their work.   It builds new capacities in individuals and teams that collectively begin to shape the culture and performance of an organization.

Peter Senge in his groundbreaking book The Fifth Discipline defined his view of what those new capacities should be and in doing so launched the Organizational Learning movement.   The Fifth Discipline contains a collection of practices from system dynamics, organizational development and psychology that Senge organized into a cohesive whole structured around “five disciplines of organization learning”.

OL practices have grown and evolved beyond Senge’s framework but his still remains the most cohesive.  This post lists his five “disciplines” along with some guidelines for the learning professional to help their clients achieve them.  It’s important to remember that each of the five disciplines listed are considered a “lifelong body of study and practice” so none are meant to produce immediate impact,  but rather continuously move towards understanding and behaviour change that collectively shapes the organization.   Also, the sample exercises I list below are not self explanatory.  They are mostly drawn from “The Fifth Discipline FieldBook”, a great source for activities that ground the often esoteric ideas in the Fifth Discipline.  See that source for further details.

Personal Mastery

Personal Mastery, the first of the five disciplines is effectively the skills of personal effectiveness–defining and accomplishing personal vision.

Learning professionals and facilitators can guide individuals through the process of identifying and clarifying a personal vision, realistically assessing it against the current state, and help individuals to understand and manage the creative tension between the two.  The goal is to help people make better choices, and to achieve more of the results that they have chosen.

Sample exercises:

• Drawing Forth Personal Vision: An exercise to surface, define and clarify individual purpose and goals.

• Cycling Back: Current Reality and Revisions: An exercise to continuously define, monitor and act on barriers to achieving the vision.

Mental Models

Mental Models are ingrained assumptions and ways of thinking held by individuals and organizations.  Adjusting mental models can lead to breakthroughs in personal and organizational performance.  Learning professionals can help their clients improve how they govern their actions and decisions through the skills of reflection and inquiry and develop an heightened awareness of the attitudes and perceptions that influence thought and interaction.

Sample exercises:

• The Left Hand Column: An exercise developed by Chris Argyris in which individuals record “what they were thinking” vs. “what was said” during important conversations.  Analysis of the result helps to surface and confront existing attitudes and assumptions (mental models).

• The Wheel of Multiple Perspectives: Rotating roles to widen a team’s perspective and see issues from as many vantage points as possible.

Shared Vision

This is the practice of collective vision and mutual purpose vs. the individual vision of personal mastery. Management and professional networks can be guided through activities to create a common vision of the future they wish to create and the methods and means they that will most effectively get them there. In doing so meaning is created and relationships strengthened.

Sample exercises:

• What Do We Want to Create?: Guide your team through a series of structured questions that bring pertinent issues to the forefront and results results phrases, ideas and governing ideas around which a vision can be built.

• Backing Into a Vision: A great exercise for surfacing common goals without taking on a full fledged visioning process.

Team Learning

The skilled practice of group interaction and collaboration.  Through techniques like dialogue and skillful discussion, teams modify their problem solving, collaboration and interaction to produce results that are greater than the sum of individual members.  Team Learning is not team building although a more cohesive team is usually a result.  Instead as a facilitator you want to focus on improved dialogue and team discussion skills.

Sample exercises:

• Fishbowl: To get immediate feedback on communication styles. Half the team discusses and issue while the other half watches and provides constructive feedback.

• Undiscussables: A card game in which people can anonymously raise questions that never get raised.

Systems Thinking

System Thinking is “the fifth discipline” and it is my personal favorite.  Over the years I have found many ways to use systems thinking to help clients and understand my own work practices.   The systems perspective is a powerful conceptual framework that allows teams to understand deep inter-dependencies and forces that shape the consequences of actions. Tools and techniques such as systems archetypes, feedback loops, and various types of learning simulations help people see how to change systems more effectively.

Senge’s view of systems is more about surfacing predictable patterns and outcomes of human behaviour and decisions as contrasted with the (equally powerful) view of organizations as systems that process inputs to valued customer outputs.   Senges “systems archetypes” help teams understand their problems in system dynamics terms and “see” the underlying patterns that are causing their problems.

Sample Activities:

Shifting the Burden Archetype: click to view

• Organization and Process Mapping: Documenting and analyzing an organization as a system to identify disconnects and problems and to re-design for improved effectiveness

• Problems as System Archetypes: Help clients examine problem situation in terms of typical combinations of feedback (reinforcing and balancing).

• Breaking Through Organizational Gridlock: A seven step systems exercise based on Senge’s “shifting the burden” archetype

Organizational Learning Technology

Some learning technology solutions have emerged that support the Organizational Learning methods described above.  The most interesting are the use of the system archetypes to develop management simulations.

• Decision Support Systems based on system archetypes

• Generic management learning simulators to help managers understand the underlying system archetypes.  For example the beer game is a role-play supply chain simulation that lets learners experience typical supply chain problems based on systems theory principles.

• Software to support system modeling of organizational behaviour and dynamics.  For example STELLA, iThink and Powersim

• See this example for how simulations based on organizational system dynamics can be used for management training

There is room for much more work in the use of system modeling for training and learning purposes.

Summary

Organization Learning (like organizational development) has been considered a sister profession to Learning and Performance.   I’ve seen some situations where the units compete and as a result sub-optimize their services to the organization.  As Learning and Performance begins to adopt more informal and non-formal learning solutions there is much to learn from organizational learning and development and the potential for overlap increases.   I think it makes sense to consider a combined business unit that provides service in the full range performance improvement solutions.

Learn more:

Society for Organizational Learning

Peter Senge and the Learning Organization

Learning for a Change: Fast Company Magazine interview with Peter Senge

The Learning Organization

Peter Senge will be a Keynote presenter at the Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) annual conference this year in October (in Toronto).  See here for conference details

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 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.

6. Implement a Continuous Improvement Framework

Continuous Improvement Frameworks seem to come and go in waves  (TQM, Six-Sigma, Lean, process re-design and others).  There are many reasons why these programs endure or fail that are beyond discussion in this post but when they succeed natural learning is a key outcome and success factor.

Continuous Improvement methods (at least those originating in Japan…and most do) are based on the concept of Kaizen.   Kaizen is essentially the discipline of making planned changes to work methods, observing the results, making adjustments and standardizing on the improvements–repeated continuously in a pursuit minimizing errors and improving quality.   When applied to the improvement of work methods it mixes personal learning, productivity and innovation.

Kaizen methodology includes making changes, observing results, then adjusting and standardizing the improvements.  Changing, reflecting on feedback, adjusting behaviour…this is the stuff of personal learning.  When applied to work methods it mixes personal and work based learning to the benefit of both.

Brian Joiner in Fourth Generation Management (an excellent resource on management practices grounded in continuous improvement) identifies learning as both a foundation and important outcome of continuous improvement methods.  He states:

” Together with an understanding of the links between quality and productivity and of systems thinking, rapid learning [through continuous improvement] helps to create a foundation for translating theory into effective action.  Rapid Learning is the best survival skill we can grow in our organizations”

Kaizen is essentially the Scientific Method  built into jobs and workflow.  W. Edwards Deming translated the method to the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle that is at the heart of the Toyota system and most Quality approaches since the 1950’s .

The PDCA cycle is as much a natural learning cycle as it is a work improvement methodology.  But it is the “check” step that is the real driver of learning.  It requires a meaningful measurement and feedback system.  Without it improvement is nearly impossible.

Joiner again:

“Performing a check is something few organizations do regularly or well. Instead they execute the plan and do…with an emphasis on DO!…what many people think of as decision making.  By getting conscientious about check, by treating decisions as experiments from which we must learn, we get all the components of PDCA to fall into place.”

Here is a video which I’ve posted before that nicely summarizes the natural learning driven by Kaizen methods.   The presenter Matthew May was a senior consultant to the university of Toyota and his this presentation is based on his book The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation.

7. Use Action Learning for management and professional development

Action Learning is essentially the PDCA cycle applied to personal effectiveness.   Personal Kaizen if you will.  It involves teams or individuals learning from experience.   Again the emphasis is on observing results from action and making adjustments.  Action learning is very popular in the UK and is growing in North America for management and professional teams that want to use real work as vehicles to learn more effective practcies.

The method has many variations but the general process as described by the World Institute for Action Learning is based on six important components. They are:

1. A Problem (project, challenge, opportunity, issue or task)
The problem should be urgent and significant and should be the responsibility of the team to resolve

2. An Action Learning group or team.
Ideally composed of 4-8 people who examine an organizational problem that has no easily identifiable solution.

3. A process of insightful questioning and reflection
Action Learning tackles problems through a process of first asking questions to clarify the exact nature of the problem, reflecting and identifying possible solutions, and only then taking action. Questions build group dialogue and cohesiveness, generate innovative and systems thinking, and enhance learning results.

4. An action taken on the problem
There is no real meaningful or practical learning until action is taken and reflected on. Action Learning requires that the group be able to take action on the problem it is addressing. If the group makes recommendations only, it loses its energy, creativity and commitment.

5. A commitment to learning
Solving an organizational problem provides immediate, short-term benefits to the company. The greater, longer-term multiplier benefits, however, are the learnings gained by each group member and the group as a whole, as well as how those learnings are applied on a systems-wide basis throughout the organization.

6. An Action Learning coach
The Action Learning coach helps the team members reflect on both what they are learning and how they are solving problems. The coach enables group members to reflect on how they listen, how they may have reframed the problem, how they give each other feedback, how they are planning and working, and what assumptions may be shaping their beliefs and actions. The Action Leaning coach also helps the team focus on what they are achieving, what they are finding difficult, what processes they are employing, and the implications of these processes.

You can see the how the process builds on the natural cycle of taking action on a problem, observing and monitoring the consequences and impact of the actions, making adjustments and trying again.  Action learning works because it integrates learning and work.  It brings immediate meaning and context learning while improving real time performance.

• Solve Complex Urgent Problems
• Develop Skilled Leaders
• Quickly build high performance teams
• Transform Corporate Culture
• Create Learning Organizations

This video provides an overview and some examples of Action Learning at work.

Summary

The strategies of Continuous Improvement and Action learning are two sides of the same coin.  Both are based on the natural cycle of acting, observing and reflecting on feedback and adjusting behaviour based on results.  Continuous improvement is focused on improving process and work methods with learning as a byproduct and Action learning is focused on personal learning with business improvement as a byproduct.

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

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

..we advocated for merging knowledge management with some other function – most likely the human resources/organizational learning/talent management constellation. We felt that knowledge management groups don’t often have the critical mass to stand alone, and knowledge and learning are very similar concepts anyway.

He continues:

... if you’re going to be merging things, you might as well go a bit further… if you want to align knowledge and learning with work, you need to know something about business processes and how to improve them. And if you’re going to align processes with the content needed to perform them effectively, you need to know something about the technology that would deliver the content in accordance with job tasks.

In the end, he suggests a merged unit with a Chief Performance Officer at the helm.

Many organizations have separate departments in these (and other) disciplines, all sharing the mission of impacting organizational performance.

• Learning and Development
• Organizational Development
• Process Improvement (Quality)
• Human Resources/Talent management
• Knowledge Management

Sometimes there are sub-departments within these (for example a performance technology group within Learning and Development).

I’ve had the chance to work with many of these groups and use their methods to improve performance (sometimes on the same performance issue!).  While the approaches of each group are very effective in the right situation, each group tends to see their solutions as “best” or are blindly unaware of the methods developed in sister disciplines.  This competitive and silo thinking rarely results in optimal solutions and can confuse line managers with the array of “performance improvement” solutions to their issues.

Even though learning professionals are trained to analyze performance issues to identify “learning or “non-learning” solutions,  the “non-learning” catch-all is usually the less comfortable road than the learning solution.  Likewise, for a time, everything in the organizational development arsenal seemed to involve team building, and for the Quality department every process required “re-engineering” without regard to the people working in those processes.  In recent years, most performance improvement groups have learned that their solutions are much richer and more effective when enhanced by the perspective of others.

Bringing these organizations all under one roof could accelerate this cross fertilization of ideas, result in innovative new approaches and reduce the redundancy and confusion that exists for line managers. A reasonably neutral label for this organization might be “Organization Effectivness”.  Performance Improvement, Performance Effectiveness, Performance Development are also candidates I’ve heard tossed around.  Of course, the label is less important than how the organization is designed and the services it provides.

Designing the Organization Effectiveness Function

There are potential models for designing such an organization.   For example, an article (Redesigning the HR organization) by organizational design specialist Amy Kates describes a matrix organization structure that could support the complexity of a merged performance improvement unit.   Her award winning model targets HR but I see many useful features for supporting an even broader organization.  The model includes:

Customer Relationship Managers

• front end customer facing team)

Centres of Excellence

• back end expert teams or networks that cross performance improvement disciplines

Solutions Teams

• Multidisciplinary teams that are configured to mirror the complexity of the work rather than the business hierarchy

Here is Amy Kates HR orientated Model from her article:

Here is the model re-illustrated from the broader Organizational Effectiveness view:

Organizational Effectiveness as Internal Management Consulting

Another possible organizational model is the professional services firm or management consulting company.   It would be possible to organize the unit as an internal consultancy of sorts modeled on the multidisciplinary focus of many of the large consulting companies.  Toyota for example has modeled their internal learning and lean process improvement services using a management consulting model.  This article (Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System) describes how Toyota’s Operations Management Consulting Division (OMCD) provides learning and lean process improvement services inside and outside the organization through a management consulting model.

Benefits and Risks

Creating and managing and organizational effectiveness department is not without risks.  The centralization required could result in bureaucratization (although the solution teams and dedicated business partners of the matrix model guards against that),  bringing together professional groups that have operated independently for many years could result in internal conflict and of course deciding who’s in and whose out could be interesting.  But the potential benefits make the idea worth exploring.  Among the benefits I would include:

• Performance improvement solution innovations
• Resource efficiencies
• Improved service and single point of contact to line management
• Cross-fertilization of approaches and methods
• More strategic performance improvement efforts
• Avoid political dominance of single groups
• Professionalization of performance improvement services
• More innovative uses of technology for performance improvement.

Learning methods that are embedded in authentic situations are not merely useful; they are essential Brown, Collins & Duguid. 1989

While this approach can be effective for learning discreet tasks, it struggles when trying to teach more complex skills which almost always contain elements from all domains.   Modern approaches are based more on designing learning in it’s the full social, cognitive and skilled based context.  This implies a more holistic approach rather than the deconstruction approaches of the past (although, the vast majority of instructional design continues to use traditional approaches).

This new wave of learning design models come in a many variations and each has slightly differing methods, philosophies and approaches.   Here are a few:

• Situated Learning
• Anchored Instruction
• Cognitive Apprenticeship
• Goal Based Scenarios
• First Principles Method
• 4C/ID

How to design authentic learning tasks

Authentic learning tasks are whole-task experiences based on real life (work) tasks that integrate skills, knowledge attitude and social context.  Instruction is organized around the whole task, usually in an easy to difficult progression, which “scaffolds” learning support from “lots to little” as learners progress.

Identifying what an authentic learning task can be challenging.  The term is often used without any real guidance on how to identify whole tasks and then transfer them to a training context.  I stumbled on the following framework from Authentic Task Design, a research project of the University of Wollongong in Australia.  They suggest 10 research based elements for the design of authentic tasks in web-based learning environments. I thought it was a useful guide.  Hope you do to.

1. Authentic tasks have real-world relevance

Activities match as nearly as possible the real-world tasks of professionals in practice rather than decontextualised or classroom-based tasks.

2. Authentic tasks are ill-defined, requiring students to define the tasks and sub-tasks needed to complete the activity

Problems inherent in the tasks are ill-defined and open to multiple interpretations rather than easily solved by the application of existing algorithms. Learners must identify their own unique tasks and sub-tasks in order to complete the major task.

3. Authentic tasks comprise complex tasks to be investigated by students over a sustained period of time
Tasks are completed in days, weeks and months rather than minutes or hours, requiring significant investment of time and intellectual resources.

4. Authentic tasks provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different perspectives, using a variety of resources
The task affords learners the opportunity to examine the problem from a variety of theoretical and practical perspectives, rather than a single perspective that learners must imitate to be successful. The use of a variety of resources rather than a limited number of preselected references requires students to detect relevant from irrelevant information.

5. Authentic tasks provide the opportunity to collaborate
Collaboration is integral to the task, both within the course and the real world, rather than achievable by an individual learner.

6. Authentic tasks provide the opportunity to reflect
Tasks need to enable learners to make choices and reflect on their learning both individually and socially.

7. Authentic tasks can be integrated and applied across different subject areas and lead beyond domain-specific outcomes
Tasks encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and enable diverse roles and expertise rather than a single well-defined field or domain.

8. Authentic tasks are seamlessly integrated with assessment
Assessment of tasks is seamlessly integrated with the major task in a manner that reflects real world assessment, rather than separate artificial assessment removed from the nature of the task.

9. Authentic tasks create polished products valuable in their own right rather than as preparation for something else
Tasks culminate in the creation of a whole product rather than an exercise or sub-step in preparation for something else.

10. Authentic tasks allow competing solutions and diversity of outcome
Tasks allow a range and diversity of outcomes open to multiple solutions of an original nature, rather than a single correct response obtained by the application of rules and procedures.

Originally created by Geary Rummler as tool to envision an organization as a flow of inputs and valued outputs across functional groups, it was designed for use as a precursor to organizational and process improvement efforts.  The best overview is available from his book “Improving Performance”.  I have also found it to be an indispensable tool for understanding, modeling and communicating organizations.

Most organization re-design efforts typically start with an organization chart, a data flow (for IT related change management) or dive immediately into detailed processes documentation as they analyze the current situation.   The Rummler mapping method created a way to visually represent an organization as a system of inputs and valued outputs that was meant to guide detailed improvement efforts.  He called it a Relationship Map and later, Super-System Map.   I like to call them OAS Maps (Organization-as-System).

Three Examples

Here’s an example of an OAS Map I did a while ago for the sales and service arm arm of a global manufacturer (click to enlarge):

Preparing a map like this requires an interview process to identify key inputs, outputs, measures and business units.  In the process you learn how work flows through an organization, often better than your client (or at least more holistically).

During this project I realized that this high level system view of the company would be very useful way to introduce new employees to the company and their role in it.   I built an on-boarding program with animated workflows that followed a customer order though the entire company with stops at each function to learn what that function does and how they add value.   It was a rudimentary simulation of the organization written and visually designed for a new employee to understand their place in the organization and how their job contributes to the whole.  It was a very successful program based on an unintended use of the OAS Map.  Many Business Process Modeling tools (like ProVision and others) allow you to fully simulate an organization starting from an good OAS map.  We should be taking greater advantage of the ability to simulate organizations for training and informal learning purposes.

Here’s another example, this time mapping a training function.  It was prepared as the first stage of a consolidation and improvement effort for the training group.  We were trying to integrate planning and analysis methods that were bubbling up from learning professionals in the group (click to enlarge).

This last example example was used as part of a “training needs assessment” (performance consulting in disguise) to locate subpar performance in a systems engineering group at an aerospace company.  The map allowed me to raise the level of the conversation from training to department performance and move away from the “communications training” initially requested to more substantial process re-design and performance management system implementation (click to enlarge).

How to Prepare an OAS Map

Developing an OAS Map requires good interviewing skills, systems thinking, a visual sensibility and a solid understanding of the system dynamics of a company. The processes will typically follow this pattern:

1. Think of the organization you are analyzing as a black box and identify the outputs (tangible products and services)
2. Identify the customers for those products and services
3. Identify the inputs (resources, information and upstream products and services) that the organization processes into valued outputs
4. Identify who provides those inputs (internal organizations and external suppliers)
5. Identify the internal units, department and groups and the internal workflow

Some Current and Future Uses of the OAS Map

Probably the most powerful “ah ha” OAS maps have allowed me to achieve with clients is the understanding that since all units (sub-systems) of an organization are interconnected, tinkering with independent parts of an (training, sales methods, engineering methods) can have the effect of sub-optimizing the whole.  To manage a company more effectively, or to re-design we need to visualize it more as a cross functional network of interrelated, not independent, components.  This viewpoint is a great staring point for many types of organization effectiveness efforts.

Here are some ways that I have used OAS maps.  I’d love to hear about others.

• Understand and communicate your clients business better than they do themselves
• Identify functional disconnects and variances at a system level
• Put training and skills issues in the context of the larger organization system
• Identify organizational level performance problems and opportunities
• Make knowledge work visible
• Design a process based measurement system (vs. functional measures)
• Design an improved feedback system
• Analyze the current state of an organization issues and opportunities
• Design a future state workflow and organization
• Defining boundaries for a process improvement or redesign effort
• Establish alternative ways to group functions and establish new reporting relationships
• Employee on-boarding programs
• Create organizational workflow simulations for both training and organization improvement purposes

Sadly, Geary Rummler passed away late last year.  I blogged on this in an earlier post. Will Thalheimer recently posted some thoughts from a Geary Rummler Tribute at the recent ISPI conference.   His works continues through the Performance Design Lab, the consulting and training company he had established.