Interesting article on this in Harvard Business Review suggests that social networks may create the most creativity if they oscillate between distributed and central processing. Click to read the article.
Here's a nice presentation about what makes Steve Jobs a great presenter.
Check it out, then read my comment below:
Here's my comment on this:
Okay, Steve Jobs is great at giving a product-sales presentation. No
doubt about that. But let's not generalize this too far. In my field,
the learning-and-performance field, many of the recommendations made
here are spot on (for example, keep slides simple and relatively
undecorated), BUT some are not relevant (for example, "and one more
thing") and some important things are not mentioned (for example,
provide people with practice opportunities, etc.).
Jobs also
has a big advantage that most of the rest of us don't have. He's a
celebrity. For some reason, deep in human evolution, this gives him our
loving attention.
Presentation characteristics depend on the
audience, purpose, etc. If you acted like Steve Jobs at a scientific
convention, you would not be trusted. If you acted like Steve Jobs in
training people, you would not create long-term remembering of key
learning points.
Again, I'm not criticizing Job's presentation
skills. He's perfect for his audience and purpose. I've even used him
as an example for some of my training-and-development clients. It's
just that we have to be a little discerning in deciding what we can use
of Jobs' repertoire for our particular purposes.
If you're about to dump your old computer, consider recycling it.
Remember, there are a lot of nasty materials in our computers.
Read this intriguing article in Slate.
It talks about how some people can elicit an emotional response in others that enables optimism and moral inspiration.
Quoted from the article:
University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation,
writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental
'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with
feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral
inspiration."
writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental
'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with
feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral
inspiration."
I don't think most training situations would benefit from such elevation, but some might. There's little likelihood that someone learning how to use a spreadsheet could be elevated, for example.
On the other hand, I can see particular opportunities for socially-responsible organizations or initiatives, especially those that are led by elevation-enabling leaders. Perhaps some soft-skill training may benefit, for example, where a management-training facilitator tells stories of others' efforts to help develop the people they work with.
There can be downsides to elevation as well, not least of which is that those who don't feel the elevation think that those who do feel it are either ridiculous or brainwashed. And, elevation by itself doesn't generate changes in behavior.
Haidt's research shows that elevation is good at provoking a desire to
make a difference but not so good at motivating real action.
make a difference but not so good at motivating real action.
Still, I think it's worth thinking about how to connect with our learners at a deeper level. It doesn't have to be super-deep, just a little bit deeper may help.
Let's remember that we as learning professionals have a responsibility not just to inform, prepare, and provide practice. We can also increase the likelihood that our learners will actually utilize what we teach by enabling their "motivation to apply" what they've learned. Sure, we can utilize our learners' management to promote application, but we can play a role in enabling the learners to want to apply what they've learned. Elevation may be another tool we can use in our work.
As a person whose career focuses so much on learning, I can't help but notice when learning plays a part in the larger world, and especially in the life of my family, community, and country.
My wife and I, and our daughter, live in the United States. Last night our country elected a new President, Barack Obama.
Right after Republican-party candidate John McCain conceded the election in a very gracious speech, with Democratic-party candidate Barack Obama due to speak to the nation to acknowledge his victory, my wife and I decided to wake up our 5-year-old daughter (she's almost six–a few months really matter at her age).
Both my wife and I have been strong Obama supporters in the general election. For weeks, our daughter has been asking about the election. "Who are you going to vote for?" "Is mommy going to vote for him too?" The questions are repeated and keep coming over time. You can feel her trying to learn how the world works, how we fit into the world. Last night at dinner she said, "I hope Iraq Obama wins." We're still working on getting her to say "Barack."
As we put her to bed, we asked her whether we should wake her up to tell her who won. She said yes.
A little after 11PM, I walked upstairs to her room. In her darkened room she was lying across the bed, her orange sheet covering her body, her bare feet sticking out past the side of the mattress. "Alena, Obama won. Do you want to come downstairs to see him speak?" She popped right up, which is unusual as she usually gets up in a slow series of sleepy disgruntlements. She zoomed downstairs and nudged her way inbetween her mommy and daddy.
We had to wait for Obama to appear. As we gloried in the moment last night, with our daughter between us,
my wife and I were happy parents, proud of our country. Our daughter got to hear the same pledge of allegiance that she
says in her kindergarten classroom every morning. "Do you know
what song that is Alena?" "No." "That's the national anthem. That's our
country's song."
During the wait for Obama, the announcers kept talking about the historic moment, how we were electing our first black President, how women and African Americans hadn't always had the right to vote. Tired, with her head laying on her mommy, then on daddy, then peeking over the sheets laying across us on the couch, she watched and listened and continued to shift back and forth.
"What color skin do you have to have to be President?", she asked. "Any color. You can have any color skin. In the past, a black person couldn't be President, but now they can." "What color skin did they have to have?" "They had to have white skin." "I have both colors (she has some of her mother's Colombian skin)." "Yes, you do, just like him." We point at the TV where Barack Obama is speaking. A moment of quiet reflection. "But a woman can't be President." "Oh yes, a woman can be President. You can be President if you want to." Another moment of quiet reflection, longer this time. Her quiet was surprising because usually when we tell her she can be anything she wants to be, she immediately interrupts and tells us she wants to be a veterinarian because she loves animals.
Alena was riveted to the two Obama girls as they took the stage. When they didn't come out later when the Obamas and Bidens took the stage, she asked where the girls were.
I'm going to bet that my daughter remembers this election. I remember President Kennedy getting shot and killed when I was a little younger than she is now. I remember my mom in tears and not being able to watch cartoons because adult shows preempted the cartoons on the TV. Alena did ask last night if there were any kid shows of the Obama speech. Alas, no…, perhaps a lost opportunity for learning.
Even as a learning expert, it's hard for me to fully fathom how tiny moments have profound learning effects for kids. Some of it is surely emotional and social. Seeing all the faces with tears of joy around the country must have had an impact. Seeing how one's parents cry, beam, and do uncharacteristic things (waking the kids in the middle of the night) must have an effect. Hearing the announcers glow with special rhetoric must make a difference. Seeing all the different types of faces on the stage, brown, white, and in between. Youngsters like the Obama girls. Elders like Biden's fragile steely mom. Hearing Obama's eloquence, his example of the 106 year-old woman voter born before women could vote, must have made a difference. And new research on learning tells us that learning something just before sleeping helps cement that learning. So many factors at play.
I can't help wondering what other wonderful teachable moments we have in store for us. How many teachable moments have already occurred. How this affects not only our children, but us; not only our country, but people around the world. How this has changed us forever.
I started Work-Learning Research 10 years ago in August. Since that time, I’ve been translating learning research into practical recommendations for learning professionals. Unfortunately, it’s not easy. It takes a major change initiative in most instructional-development shops. It takes time. It takes leadership. It often takes a helping hand. Why? Because we have to completely change our mindsets. For example, I’ve recently been using a model I’m calling Situation-Based Learning Design. It is research-based but because it is translated and crafted into a conceptually useful framework, my clients and audiences have found it eye-opening. More importantly, they have been able to see its applicability. BUT, even though the ideas in the model are easy, it is extremely difficult to move a whole work team to the new method. It takes time, perseverance, and guidance. We all fall back on our topic-based learning-design mental models. To develop new mental models aligned with the research is a worthwhile slog, but it is a slog nonetheless.
Recently I’ve been designing workshops around the Situation-Based Learning Design notion. My clients see me present the concept at a conference and want a workshop in their own company. Nothing I have done in my ten years as President of Work-Learning Research has been so satisfying. I’ve learned a few things over the years, correcting mistakes in my delivery. SMILE. One reason that the Situation-Based Learning Design is having such an impact now is that it’s a simple research-based model that immediately makes sense to people. The other reason for impact is that we’re able to build workshops that enable people to begin changing the way they do learning design. Finally, more and more learning professionals understand that for training (even their own training) to be effective, it has to be designed more like a change initiative than a course.
For almost a decade I’ve been building a model of how learning works to prompt performance. Each iteration gets better (in my unbiased opinion). Here’s the latest one–this one has the advantage of pointing out the responsibilities learning professionals have AND the responsibilities that learners’ managers and the workplace have in creating on-the-job results.
You can use this model for two purposes:
- As a visual metaphor for how learning works to drive on-the-job performance and results.
- As a job aid to assign responsibilities and tasks.
This graphic draws on many sources, many I’m probably unaware of. It draws from the wisdom of authors such as Wick, Pollock, Jefferson, and Flanagan of Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning fame, and Tim Mooney and Rob Brinkerhoff from the new book Courageous Training (which is great by the way, I’ll review it within the next month).
It also draws from countless researchers on learning, memory, instruction, and cognition who have helped me understand learning at a deep level, enabling me to add to models that don’t fully include wisdom on how learning and cognition really work to drive remembering.
Also, I’d like to thank my many clients who have enabled me a great real-world workshop in which to think deeply about how learning works in a practical reality. I’d particularly like to thank my friends at Walgreens, and especially Anne Laures who commented on an earlier version of this model.
You can download the diagram by clicking here…
As always, this is a work in progress, so let me know what you like and what I might be missing. Note, of course, that human learning and performance is too complicated to include every factor of relevance. My goal is to create a model simple enough to be easily understood and precise enough to be useful and provide practical learning-to-performance improvement.
Oh, if you have to give it a name, you might call it the Learning-to-Performance Landscape Model, but I’ll probably come up with a better name.
Latest Update (October 2019): Here is the newest version, which I use in my presentations.
Update: Check out The Learning Landscape Video by clicking here.
Original Post Is Below:
This is the first draft of a chapter from my forthcoming book (don’t ask when, it’s a labor of love), modified somewhat to avoid references to other parts of the book (to make it whole here). Your comments, criticisms, and good ideas will be gratefully explored.
The Genesis of the Model
It’s helpful to have an overall understanding of what we’re trying to do in the learning-and-performance profession. I offer the following model as a way to frame our discussion, as a way to provide a deep conceptual map of our world—at least the world to which we should be aspiring.
I’ve been in the learning-and-performance field for almost a quarter century. I’ve been an instructional designer, a trainer, a university adjunct, a simulation architect, a project manager, a project manager, a business leader, a researcher, and a consultant. And yet, even recently, I have found myself wanting to build a better model of what we do. In the book, I’m going to offer several models that provide a good starting place for deep understanding. The first of these models I call, The Learning Landscape. I’ve been gradually building this model for years, and I recently added some additional complexity that completes the picture of what we do—or what we should aim to do.
Of course, all models are simplifications in the interest of understanding and usability. Early versions of The Learning Landscape have resonated with my clients, and I think this latest version provides additional value.
I’m going to unveil the model a piece at a time, adding complexity as this blog post progresses.
The Model’s Phases
Look at the bottom of the following diagram. You’ll notice three labels there. The learning landscape I’m describing is one in which we build a learning intervention to help our learners perform in their future performance situations (for example on the job) in an attempt to create certain beneficial learning outcomes. So for example, if we build a course to teach creative-thinking skills, we do it to help learners be more creative in their jobs and produce more innovations for their organizations.
From Learning Intervention to Learning Outcomes
Look at the diagram below. It shows how a learning intervention creates performance that lead to results. In the learning intervention (box A), the learners learn—they build an understanding of the learning content. Later, in the performance situation (box C), the learner retrieves from memory the information that they learned. They also apply what they learned (box E). This successful retrieval and application enable the learner to get from the learning what they hoped to get (box F) and the organization gets the learning results it wanted to get (box G) from the investment it made.
The diagram above shows the minimum requirements for a successful learning intervention. The learners have to learn (box A), retrieve (box C), and apply (box E) what they’ve learned in order to create beneficial learning outcomes.
It would be pollyannaish for us to believe that this process always works as diagrammed above. When our learners fail to learn (box A), the whole process breaks down. You can’t retrieve what you never learned and you can’t apply what you can’t retrieve. Even when our learners fully learn a topic, at a later time they may fail to retrieve what they learned (box C). People forget information. They may forget something permanently or they may suffer temporary or contextually-induced forgetting. Learners can also learn and retrieve successfully, but not apply what they’ve learned (box E). There are many reasons that learners fail to apply what they are able to retrieve. The learning intervention might not have been sufficiently motivating to prompt the learners to apply what they learned. The incentives in the performance situation may discourage application. The learners may not have time, resources, or other competencies that enable them to be successful.
The diagram above is very helpful in understanding how our learning interventions create learning results. It highlights the obvious importance of the quality of the learning intervention itself. It also highlights the criticality of retrieval. Later we will explore in-depth how we can build learning interventions to specifically support retrieval. Finally, the diagram above highlights the importance of the performance context in supporting learners in applying what they learned. Later we will talk about how we can gain more influence in the performance situation. We’ll also discuss how to enroll learners’ managers to improve the likelihood of successful application.
Adding Other Working-Memory Processing (besides retrieval of what was learned)
The above diagram is missing a few key elements. While it nicely highlights the importance of creating retrieval, it doesn’t account for other working-memory triggers. In the diagram below, I’ve added another box (box D “Learner Responds”) to represent working-memory processing not directly related to what was previously learned in our original learning intervention.
While working-memory “retrieval” and “responding” are overlapping and often interdependent processes, I wanted to distinguish between the retrieval of information from the learning intervention and responding generated by other means, for example job aids, performance support, management prompting, and other guidance mechanisms.
While often box C and box D work in concert (as when a job aid provides guidance and also supports retrieval of what was previously learned), we need to remember that we can get our learners thinking productive thoughts without necessarily relying on course-like learning interventions.
To reiterate, there are two ways to trigger working-memory processing related to our learning efforts. First, retrieval cues can trigger our learners to remember what they’ve learned in the original learning intervention. Second, other triggers (i.e., performance-support tools) can also stimulate working-memory responding. As you probably know, sometimes it is more effective to rely on retrieval, while other times it is more effective to rely on performance support interventions. Sometimes it is better to utilize both in concert.
The Full Model
We also should recognize that learners can learn in their performance situations. The full model below adds this performance-situation learning, what some people call informal learning.
Performance-situation learning (box B) belongs in the model because it is a powerful force in real-world performance. Our learners do a large part of their learning on the job. Whether they receive formal training or not, learners learn through their experiences at work, at play, just living their lives.
Performance-situation learning (box B) can support the learning-intervention learning (box A) by reinforcing what was originally learned, taking the learning deeper, determining real-world contingencies, and creating fluency in retrieval, among other things. One thing we need to realize as learning professionals is that we don’t necessarily have to get learners up to speed completely in our formal learning interventions—in fact it is difficult to do so. Instead of trying to cram every bit of information into our training programs, we would be far better off to design our programs with an eye to what can be learned on the job and a plan for how to support that later on-the-job learning.
From the opposite direction, learning-intervention learning (box A) can be designed specifically to help learners learn in their performance situations. We’ll talk more about this later, but briefly, we can help our learners learn by helping them notice cues they might not readily notice, by providing them with relevant mental models of how the world works, and by influencing the performance-situation itself—for example by providing reminding mechanism and getting learners’ managers involved. To highlight this point again, box A learning can influence and support box B learning and box B learning can reinforce and extend box A learning.
The Learning Landscape Summary
All models and all metaphors have limitations, even if they are brilliantly clear in simplifying complex realities into workable conceptual maps (think e=mc2). I’ve been working on this learning landscape model for years and though it seems complete and potent to me now, I imagine that in the years to come I and others will find chinks in its armor or improvements that can be made.
I admit the possibility of the model’s limitation partly because it is true (that it is likely to have limitations) and partly to model useful thought processes in learning design. Too often, our instructional-design programs have taught models as gospel, unfortunately creating instructional designers who are only able to follow recipes—and who particularly (a) are unable to be creative when unusual situations confront them, (b) are unable to create new models of increasing or context-specific usefulness, and (c) are unable/unwilling to listen and learn from the wisdom of other people and other disciplines.
The learning landscape model is intended to make the following points:
- Our ultimate goal should be to create beneficial learning outcomes.
- There are two aspects of learning outcomes—the fulfillment the learner gets from undertaking a learning effort and the learning results the organization gets from investing in learning.
- For formal learning interventions to produce their benefits, they must ultimately produce appropriate behaviors in some future performance situation (often a workplace on-the-job situation).
- For formal learning interventions to produce their benefits, they must support the learners in being able to retrieve what they’ve learned. This means specifically, that our learning interventions have to be designed to minimize forgetting and elicit spontaneous remembering.
- There are two ways to generate appropriate behaviors, retrieval of previously learned information and triggering of appropriate responding. These working-memory processes can work in concert. Triggering appropriate working-memory responding is an underutilized tool. We need to more aggressively look to utilize performance support tools, reminding mechanisms, and management oversight.
- Formal learning interventions are not the only means to produce appropriate behaviors.
- Learners do a lot of their learning in their performance situations. We ought to leverage that learning to reinforce and extend any formal learning that was utilized. We ought to design our formal learning interventions to improve our learners’ informal-learning opportunities.
I recently completed one of the most comprehensive work-learning audits I’ve ever been asked to do for a major U. S. retailer. The goal of the audit was to find out how their learning programs AND work-learning environment were supporting the stores in being successful. The audit involved (1) structured and unstructured interviewing with all levels of the organization, especially with store personnel, (2) focus groups held across the country with specific groups of store personnel (e.g., clerk, store managers, assistant managers, etc.), (3) task force meetings with senior line managers and representatives throughout the company, (4) learning audits of e-learning courses, (5) learning audits of a mission-critical classroom course, (6) review of company artifacts (CEO messages, publications, databases, intranet, etc.), (7) interviews with learning-and-performance professionals, (8) discussions of business strategy, (9) discussions regarding corporate information and data-gathering capabilities, (10) job shadowing, (11) store observations, etc.
Who/What Do Workers Learn From?
One of the most intriguing results came out of a relatively simple exercise I did with focus-group participants. The following is a rough approximation of those results.
What I did was ask focus-group participants who they learned from. I would hold up a large 6 x 8 index card with a position label on it, for example, "District Manager," "Clerks," or "Corporate." The group would shout out where they thought that card should go on a large diagram I had created on the wall. I would place it on the wall in a particular category based on the verbal responses and then we would negotiate as a group to determine it’s final positioning. So for example, participants could say that they learned the following amounts from that person/position, and we often compromised using in-between placement:
- Learned Most
- Learned a Lot
- Learned Some
- Learned a Little
- Learned Least
- Had Little/No Contact with
See the diagram below for a rough example. This one is actually a composite based on several focus groups and more than one position. It gives a fair representation for how frontline retail clerks responded. Note that the orange boxes represent fellow employees, while the blue boxes represent other groups of people or things that they learned from.
There are several key insights from these results:
- People learn the most from those who they work closely with.
- People learn the most from their experience doing the job.
- People learn the most from their self-initiated efforts at learning.
- The more contact, the more learning (for the most part), however there are benefits from learning from experts (e.g., store managers, head clerks), though the worker has to have at least some signicant contact with them to create this benefit. You’ll notice that district staff have only a little impact and regional and corporate staff have none.
- E-learning is seen as somewhat facilitative but not a place where workers learn the most. This result may be organization specific as different e-learning designs and implementations might easily move this result higher or lower.
Frontline clerks didn’t get much from company magazines and the like, but managers (not represented in the results above) did find value in these. Store managers also reported that networking with other store managers was on of the "Learn Most" entries for them. For this company, this network was even more important than learning from their district managers (their direct bosses). This makes sense because their network is more accessible throughout the heat of the daily grind.
These results were eye-opening for my client, and they are still wrangling with the implications. For example, district managers and district training staff seemed to produce very little learning benefits. So, should their roles for learning be de-emphasized or re-emphasized?
These types of result have to be understood in the larger data-gathering effort of course. Analyzed alone, they suffer from the problem of de-contextualized self-report data. Combined with multiple other data sources, they paint a really robust picture of an organization’s learning environment.
Informal Learning, Social Networks, etc.
Vendors are out and about in our field now selling the benefits of complicated and expensive analysis tools for looking at how people learn through so-called informal on-the-job mechanisms. The example above shows that if you don’t have the big bucks, there are simpler ways to get good data as well.
Elliott Masie came up with a great and very insightful wish list for LMS’s. Click here to access it. He even added a few suggestions in the past few days, probably based on feedback from his loyal audience.
I really like the richness that Elliott’s suggestions might create for a typical LMS. Most LMS implementations are just a list of course offerings.
On the other hand, I worry about overly complicating options for users. Most workers just don’t have extra time to waste. Maybe the suggestion to let users rate the courses comes into play here.
I also worry about user-generated content. It can be great, could be better than what the training folks can create, could engender more engagement, could be bottom line more effective. But we should all recognize that it is a double-edge sword. User generated content could be incorrect, could be a huge waste of time, could cause the organization to leave itself vulnerable to legal liability.
Doesn’t Fix the Biggest Problem with the LMS Mentality
The biggest problem with LMS’s can’t be fixed with Elliott’s suggestions. The biggest problem is that the whole LMS face sends a powerful hidden message that "learning" is about taking courses or accessing other learning events. This "Learning Means Sitting" LMS mentality infiltrates whole organizations.
I’ve seen this recently with one of my clients, a huge retailer, where their LMS has encouraged store managers and other store leaders to focus learning time on taking courses, in lieu of coaching, learning from each other, trying things out and getting feedback, encouraging store employees to take responsibility for particular areas, etc. It’s not that they completely ignore these other learning opportunities; it’s that the LMS focuses everyones’ time and attention on courses, creating a lot of wasted effort.
To get the most from an LMS, you ought to throw away your LMS and start over. People can learn something—develop competencies/skills—from courses or from other means. A competency-management system that offers multiple means to develop oneself is ideal, where courses/events are just one option. I still haven’t seen a commercial system that does this though…Most are course first designs.
Maybe I’m too over-the-top recommending that we get rid of all LMS’s. I make the statement to highlight the humongous problems that the LMS mentality is causing.
You must be logged in to post a comment.