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Great list by Janet Clarey of some of the most notable women in the Learning Technology field.
The Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) is now famously known for making seriously contaminated products, killing 9 since September 2008 and sickening almost 700 others.
You all know that. What you may not know is that PCA was inspected by the leading certifying agency in the food industry on multiple occasions and was given glowing reviews.
Here is what the Washington Post reports:
David Mackay, Kellogg's chief executive, said his company trusted
audits performed by the American Institute of Baking International, the
biggest food-inspection firm in the country. The institute conducted
scheduled inspections of PCA's facilities and never flagged serious
problems. It issued a "certificate of achievement" and a "superior"
rating last August, when PCA was getting results from internal
laboratory tests that revealed a salmonella problem in its plant in
Blakely, Ga., congressional investigators said.
audits performed by the American Institute of Baking International, the
biggest food-inspection firm in the country. The institute conducted
scheduled inspections of PCA's facilities and never flagged serious
problems. It issued a "certificate of achievement" and a "superior"
rating last August, when PCA was getting results from internal
laboratory tests that revealed a salmonella problem in its plant in
Blakely, Ga., congressional investigators said.
Many well-known companies (including Kellogg) trusted outside food auditing firms to test the ingredients they were sourcing for their own products. Others, like Nestle, sent their own auditors and rejected PCA products after finding rat droppings, beetles, and other detritus in PCA's products.
Not surprisingly, PCA paid American Institute of Baking International to perform the audits (AND to certify PCA as in compliance).
Lessons Learned
- When a company pays an auditor, the auditor may have incentive to be lenient.
- When a company relies on outside inspectors to assess other entities, they may not get good information.
- When an industry fails to provide good oversight and regulation, bad things can happen.
- Just because something is certified, even by the largest or most prestigious certifying body in an industry, doesn't mean the certification can be trusted.
- It's not just about good people, it's also about good structures, oversight, and information.
Is this Relevant in the Training & Development, Learning & Performance Field?
Yes. You bet. We have:
- Awards that are biased toward those paying award application fees.
- Top 10 and Top 20 lists that represent the awarding entity's client list.
- Industry research based on surveys sent to the research entity's clients' client lists.
- Industry research that is biased toward the research entity's biggest clients.
- Conference sessions that are guaranteed for companies who pay for exhibit space.
- Webinars by sponsoring organizations.
- Etc.
Unfortunately, there is no trusted journalistic institution in our field. Our trade organizations are timid because commercial interests pay the bulk of their operating expenses. Most of our bloggers (me included) are timid because we earn our living in the field. Where the hell are the freelance bloggers who our social-media evangelists promised would rise up to fight corruption and injustice?
Best Advice in Current State
The best advice at this point in time is:
- Be skeptical.
- Do your own digging.
- Form groups of other skeptical diggers and share information.
- Don't just get angry about this. It's the way the world works. Find work arounds.
- If you can't point fingers, gently avoid the corrupters.
- If you're entangled with a corrupting entity, gently work to reform it, or leave it.
- If you are a corrupter, forgive yourself, reform yourself.
- Do good work.
The following photographs I took with my cell phone (Samsung Omnia) looking outside my windshield while double-parked in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can click to enlarge the pictures.
Here is a question for you to answer:
Why do the snowflakes in the picture look like needles (or needle-like structures)? To make this more difficult, more than one answer is correct.
1. They broke apart while falling to the earth.
2. They were originally formed as needle-like structures.
3. They shattered into pieces when they hit objects.
4. The temperature of the air dictated the shape.
5. They combined into needle-like structures while falling.
See if you can guess one of the correct answers. DON'T FORGET TO HIT THE "VOTE" BUTTON !!
How This is Relevant to the Workplace Learning-and-Performance Field.
Most people will probably get the answer to the snowflake question wrong, even with a 40% chance of getting a correct answer. Most of us have only learned about the prototypical snowflakes, those with beautiful six-sided symmetry. But as it turns out, snowflakes actually can take many forms, including the needle-like snowflakes in the pictures above. Snowflakes formed at different temperatures form into different patterns.
Here are a few articles on snowflakes.
Why do we think of snowflakes as hexagonal even though we must have encountered other snowflake types throughout our lives?
Yes, we were trained wrong. Indoctrinated in the six-sided mental model of snowflakes, we haven't always been able to see what is right in front of us.
Does this sort of mental-model obfuscation happen in our field? You bet. It happens in every field.
Here are some candidate mental models that we ought to watch out for:
- Kirkpatrick's four levels.
- Learning objectives.
- Immediate feedback is always best.
- More information is good.
- Telling is sufficient.
- Learners know how best to learn.
- Providing feedback is enough to correct mistakes (it's not).
- Training is sufficient.
- etc. etc.
This is just a quick list. I'm sure I have my own blind spots.
The key is to recognize that we might be blinded by our preconceptions, we need to be open, and we need to have a way to get valid feedback on what we're doing.
Sometimes hiring an outside learning guru can help. Sometimes reviewing the research can help. Still, we need better feedback loops. We need to measure better.
I'm available to help.
Yikes!! I did a quick search online for video release forms and found that they were poorly written, mired in legalese, and too one-sided. So, I did what any good instructional designer would do, I wrote my own.
I am NOT a lawyer, NOR do I assume that identity on my blog, SO YOU SHOULD check with a lawyer first before borrowing from my attempt (or using it as is).
Still, I'd like to know what you think. Especially if you're a lawyer who specializes in this sort of thing. If you're not a lawyer, but know one, send it to them to get their input.
Here's the document. Download BetterReleaseForm_w1
What do you think?
This Friday February 6th, Dr. Roy Pollock will join me for a Brown Bag Learning Webinosh (short webinar) to talk about How to Build Measurement into Our Training-Development Processes.
We'll talk about this by reviewing our newly released job aid. Click the link below to get the job aid:
Building Measurement Into Your Training-Development Plan
Roy is co-author of the groundbreaking book, Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning, and the just-released book, "Getting your Money's Worth from Training-and-Development," which is fantastic by the way (see my blog post on this tomorrow).
The American Psychological Association is holding a conference on healthy workplaces.
The conference is designed especially for human resource professionals, benefits managers, health and wellness professionals, business consultants, occupational health professionals, health plan executives, corporate medical directors, business owners, managers and psychologists who work with organizations.
Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, administered the oath of office for the Presidency of the United States to Barack Obama on Tuesday January 20th, but screwed it up big time while relying on memory, even though the oath is only 35 words long.
He's a very smart guy and thought he could easily recall the words to the oath.
Steven Pinker, linguist and cognitive scientist extraordinaire wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times trying to explain the cause of problem, but as is often the case with grand theorists, missed a much more practical and important point.
When in situations of high stress, people may be better off relying on external memory aids (performance support tools) than their fallible memories. Actually, this is true for periods of low-stress as well. Our memories are fallible.
Later in the evening of the 20th, Roberts and Obama got back together to perform the task again. Hmmm. Let's see, two of the most powerful people in the world wasting time due to a learning-and-performance failure. What's the ROI on that?
Today, Roy Pollock (CLO of the Fort Hill Company) and I release our job aid, "Building Measurement Into Your Training-Development Plan."
It's not rocket science, but it is our attempt to provide some guidance for how you might better utilize learning measurement.
Good learning measurement enables us to:
- Boost Learning Results
- Improve Our Learning Designs
- Prove Learning's Benefits
Unfortunately, in general we aren't very good at measuring learning. This is not only an embarrassment, but a big missed opportunity to improve our practices and our profession–and to grab a competitive advantage for our organizations.
Roy and I wanted to develop a job aid that would help (1) remind us to plan for measurement, (2) see where and how measurement should be integrated into our training-development plans, and (3) provide the reasoning behind the key steps.
There are two ways to use the job aid. You can use it "as is" to guide your training development. Or, you can utilize the wisdom from the job aid and add the key measurement steps to your own training-development process.
Roy and I will be teaching our learning-measurement workshop at the upcoming eLearning Guild conference in March. We'd be delighted if you would join us. Click to learn more…
Nice Blog Post about Power, both Political and Peopled.