Guest Post from Robert O. Brinkerhoff: 70-20-10: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This is a guest post by Robert O. Brinkerhoff (www.BrinkerhoffEvaluationInstitute.com).

Rob is a renowned expert on learning evaluation and performance improvement. His books, Telling Training’s Story and Courageous Training, are classics.

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70-20-10: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The 70-20-10 framework may not have much if any research basis, but it is still a good reminder to all of us in in the L&D and performance improvement professions that the work-space is a powerful teacher and poses many opportunities for practice, feedback, and improvement.

But we must also recognize that a lot of the learning that is taking place on the job may not be for the good. I have held jobs in agencies, corporations and the military where I learned many things that were counter to what the organization wanted me to learn: how to fudge records, how to take unfair advantage of reimbursement policies, how to extend coffee breaks well beyond their prescribed limits, how to stretch sick leave, and so forth.

These were relatively benign instances. Consider this: Where did VW engineers learn how to falsify engine emission results? Where did Well Fargo staff learn how to create and sell fake accounts to their unwitting customers?

Besides these egregiously ugly examples, we have to also recognize that in the case of L&D programming that is intended to support new strategic and other change initiatives, the last thing the organization needs is more people learning how to do their jobs in the old way. AT&T, for example, worked very hard to drive new beliefs and actions to enable the business to shift from landline technologies to wireless; on-the-job learning dragged them backwards, and creates problems still today. As AllState Insurance tries to shift sales focus away from casualty policies to financial planning services, the old guard teaches the opposite actions, as they continue to harvest the financial benefits of policy renewals. Any organization that has to make wholesale and fundamental shifts to execute new strategies will have to cope with the negative effects of years of on-the-job learning.

When strategy is new, there are few if any on-the-job pockets of expertise and role models. Training new employees for existing jobs is a different story. Here, obviously, the on-job space is an entirely appropriate learning resource.

In short, we have to recognize that not all on-the-job learning is learning that we want. Yet on the job learning remains an inexorable force that we in L&D must learn how to understand, leverage, guide and manage.