The Learning Guys

A recent membership survey from the Canadian Society for Training and Development listed the following as the top priority for workplace learning and performance practitioners:

Leadership and Development 70.7%

This is consistent with research findings from Bersin & Associates. A recent Bersin report listed leadership development as one of the top trends for 2007. From the report:

“Leadership development takes center stage – Research in 2006 showed leadership development and management training to be the highest area of program spending. Spending will likely be higher in 2007 as companies scramble to fill the leadership pipeline.”

For my clients, leadership development is now front and centre. The stakes are high, and results are demanded. The question now becomes: What will work in corporate leadership development?

Those of you that have been following my learning experiment with ChinesePod have seen that I have made some observations about what works for me as an adult learner. I think we can apply some of these principles to corporate leadership development programs:

1. Tailored program: I see a shift away from the one size fits all business school style courses towards more customized, personalized and contextualized learning.
Leadership development programs will increasingly blend best practices in instructor led training with leading edge action learning, e-learning, and virtual collaboration techniques. Leaders are looking for “Just What I Want” learning.

2. Learning at my own pace: Leaders need to be in control of when and how they learn. The design of a good leadership development program should provide flexibility for learners to determine their own pace.

3. Self Service: Leaders should be provided with a menu of learning options that they can access on a self service basis. This menu could include courseware, learning activities, job aids, archived audio and video presentations, manuals, PDF articles, self assessment tools and more.

4. One to one coaching and mentoring: I often hear from leaders I work with that they feel isolated. They find it difficult to discuss personal development issues with colleagues and co-workers. Working with a coach or a mentor will accelerate the leadership development process by providing access to positive and constructive dialogue about workplace leadership issues.

5. Community: A community of practice (CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations. An innovative leadership development program will finds ways to promote social networking amongst a cohort of leaders, and implement strategies that promote community building and collaboration.

I am a few weeks into my study of Mandarin with ChinesePod. I feel like I am making progress, and am quite motivated to carry on. Here is what is working for me:

1. Tailored program: With the help of my ChinesePod counselor, Aggie, I have developed a personalized program of study. This is very important to me as I am not a newbie. I have studied Mandarin before so I am at an elementary level. There are hundreds of lessons to choose from at both the newbie and elementary levels, so I have put together a program that combines lessons from both levels.

2. Learning at my own pace: I work full time (more than full time!) and I am also a full time husband and father of 2 boys. I need to squeeze my study of Mandarin into the little spaces I find during the day. So I squeeze in my daily podcast when I am on the subway, having my lunch or cooking dinner. I have made a point to do it each day, and I am finding the time.

3. Self Service: The ChinesePod site has a number of features (dialogues, expansion activities, vocabulary builders etc) that I can access whenever I have the time. I can spend time doing the things that help me learn.

4. Telepractice: I receive a daily 10 minute phone call from Aggie, my ChinesePod counselor. I get the call at 10:00 pm Toronto time. Knowing that I will be talking to Aggie each evening is a real incentive to listen to the daily podcast and to prepare myself for the lesson. The one-to-one practice and feedback is becoming essential to the development of my oral skills.

5. Community: I am just beginning to explore the ChinesePod community. It is a real motivator to be connected to so many people with similar learning goals. Community members share experiences, tips, stories, and best practices.

So far so good. I will continue to update everyone as I move forward.

Many of my clients are interested in moving away from isolated learning events (classroom training, conferences etc.) and moving towards an integrated blended learning program. When strategizing about a workable solution, the question often arises as to what constitutes a good “blend”.

There is no simple answer to this question. Each organization is unique, and what works in one organization will not necessarily work in another. To begin developing a customized blended learning program, I ask clients to work with the following “Blended Learning Recipe”

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Blended Learning Recipe

Step 1: Examine each of the menu items below.

Menu #1 Live In-Person
Instructor Led Classroom; Coaching and Mentoring; Conference; Presentation; Workshop; Lunch and Learn

Menu #2 Live Virtual
Instructor Led Classroom Web; Webcast; Conference Call; Skype Session; Video Conference; Web Chat

Menu #3 Virtual Collaboration
Web Discussion Forum; E-mail; Blogs; Wiki

Menu #4 Self-Paced
Courseware; Podcasts; Self Assessment Tools; Archived Webcasts; Job Aids; Referenceware; Books; Articles

Step 2: Select one learning activity from each of the 4 menus. Choose learning activities that work best with your people.

Step 3: Sequence the 4 learning activities in a way that makes good learning sense.

When the activity is completed you will have a customized blended learning program for your organization!

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Now, of course, it is not as simple as this. A lot of time and effort has to be out into linking learning activities to performace competencies, and to aligning learning goals with business objectives.

I use the “blended learning recipe” as a starting point towards developing a customized blended learning program for clients. It provokes a lot of discussion, and it helps to establish a framework for some of the decisions we will make.

The Learning Guys believe that people learn best when they learn from each other. It is through meaningful exchanges with colleagues, partners and customers that people learn how to do their jobs better. Real value is created when people share tips, solutions and best practices. To this end we design learning events where people connect and share knowledge.

We emphasize a learning theory whereby people actively “PULL” learning rather than passively receive “PUSH” learning. The “PUSH” perspective represents a traditional learning model which has an education expert assess learner needs, design instruction, and “PUSH” a uniform body of learning at a defined group of learners. In this case the education expert defines what learners need to know. Let’s call this Learning 1.0

The “PULL” perspective, on the other hand, represents an evolving learning model that is characterized by collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst a cohort of learners. Let’s call this Learning 2.0. The learners themselves define what they need to know. In terms of instructional design this means that learning infrastructure and events must be constructed in such a way as to allow the learners themselves to “PULL” the knowledge most relevant to their real world needs (an archive of webinars or podcasts for example). It also means that communication channels must be developed to enable learners to form organic, self organized communities of practice (a corporate wiki or community discussion forum for example).

Many of the corporate clients I deal with understandably feel challenged by the transition from Learning 1.0 to Learning 2.0, or from “Push” to “Pull” learning. “Push” training programs are easier to design and implement. They are easier to quantify (xx number of learners completed the program in xx months), and to measure (xx number of learners achieved xx results).

Learning 2.0 or “Pull” learning programs, on the other hand, are seemingly more complex to design, implement, quantify,and measure. Allowing each learner to “Pull” and to tailor their own learning experience means that each and every learner in the organization is learning differently. Each learner will have different learning needs, will define different learning goals and objectives, and will travel a unique and individual learning path. And learners will share what they know with each other (tips, suggestions, lessons learned, how to…). As a result, knowlege within the organization becomes networked as opposed to hierachical.

This is very challenging stuff indeed! Those of us in the Enterprise Learning and Development field will have our work cut out for us as we wrap our minds around how to implement Learning 2.0 within our organizations.

If you are interested in other views on Learning 2.0, pay a visit to Ken Carroll’s very excellent Praxis Language blog Ken’s recent post on Connectivism highlights the centrality of the network in learning, and notes how this marks an evolution in learning theory.

Amber MacArthur has created a Video Podcast using a cellphone. The quality is quite acceptable for the current state of internet video a la YouTube. One of the neat things is that she used a standard CityTV microphone and taped a cheap earbud/mic combo inside! Very cool… It shows that it isn’t about the equipment!

Check it out here.

While doing the post for Cluetrain, I did some Googling and found this post from Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid.com. You may know Hugh as the guy that draws cartoons on the back of business cards. However, his main gig is a Marketing Strategist with a specialty in Web 2.0. There are some really good posts in his blog, and I love his cartoons.

Anyway, his post reflects what we are trying to do with our own blogs, and what we advise our clients to consider. Read a lot, think a lot, and write regularly with passion and focus.

Also, Hugh is also one of the people that doesn’t think that blogging is about “monetizing” the effort even though it may pay back indirectly. “Love, respect, trust and goodwill are the main currencies. Cash will only get you so far.”

Without further ado…

[Today I'm speaking at the Online Traffic Optimisation conference in London. Here are my notes:]

So you want to use blogs to boost your bottom line. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order:

1. The First Rule of Blogging: “Blogs don’t write themselves.” Be prepared to fail. Blogging is a work in progress. Blogging is experimentation. Blogging is more about “The Porous Membrane” than direct selling.

2. Read Robert Scoble’s “Corporate Weblog Manifesto”. Most of it is dead on. Also worth a read is the book, “Naked Conversations”, which Robert wrote with Shel Israel.

3. Read Seth Godin’s blog. Every day. Just shut up and do it.

4. Ditto for Jeff Jarvis.

5. Ditto for Kathy Sierra.

6. Ditto for Guy Kawasaki.

7. Ditto for Doc Searls.

8. Ditto for The Cluetrain.

9. Ditto for Steve Rubel.

10. Blogs are a good way to make something happen indirectly. I proved this to myself once and for all with the work I did with Stormhoek, a small vineyard in South Africa.

11. Passion. Authority. Continuity. Without those three, you have nothing.

12. English Cut, a blog I started with Savile Row tailor, Thomas Mahon is often cited as my first big blog marketing breakthrough. A couple of months ago I gave a list of eight reasons why it had worked so well. Here are three of them:

Continuity. He kept at it. He didn’t expect the blog to transform his fortunes overnight. As I’m fond of saying, “Blogs don’t write themselves”. Based on our experience, if you want blogs to transform your business, I’d say give yourself at least a year.

Focus. It was always about the suits. It was never about what he had for breakfast, Technorati rank or frothy gossip about other bloggers.

Thomas spoke in his own voice. Thomas is a straightforward, affable fellow, and the voice on the blog is the same as the voice you meet in real life. He never tried to misrepresent himself on his blog, nor try to create some over-glamorized image of his profession. He just told it like it is. And people responded well to that. As he once put it, “We’re so lucky we don’t have to create the brand out of thin air. We just tell the truth and the brand builds itself.”

13. Love, respect, trust and goodwill are the main currencies. Cash will only get you so far.

14. A lot of marketing people seem to be hoping for a proven blogging method that is (A) invented by somebody else, (B) easy to replicate, (C) easy to implement, and (D) easy to sell to their boss. Good luck.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was created in 1999 by
Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger as a statement of in your face ideas about doing business on the internet.

I re-read this recently and a lot of it is still right on the money. In particular, I was thinking that this section is very applicable to companies trying to use new media to drive down their ideas in a hierarchical manner. Bad idea…

42. As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.

43. Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right.

44. Companies typically install intranets top-down to distribute HR policies and other corporate information that workers are doing their best to ignore.

45. Intranets naturally tend to route around boredom. The best are built bottom-up by engaged individuals cooperating to construct something far more valuable: an intranetworked corporate conversation.

46. A healthy intranet organizes workers in many meanings of the word. Its effect is more radical than the agenda of any union.

47. While this scares companies witless, they also depend heavily on open intranets to generate and share critical knowledge. They need to resist the urge to “improve” or control these networked conversations.

48. When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the conversation of the networked marketplace.

If you are interested using the internet and new media to help your business, spend the time and read the book. It is available for download FREE!

I’ve had a few emails from folk that don’t know where to find the resources and media file from PodCamp Toronto 2007.

Here are the links to the:
Google Group
Blog
Media Files — This is great for catching up where you missed a session because you were at another equally interesting one.

Enjoy!

I started learning Mandarin (again!) 4 weeks ago. The question you ask, is why? A couple of reasons:

The first reason is purely utilitarian. I’ve worked on a couple of projects in Shanghai recently, and have been to China a few times over the past 3 years. The enterprise learning and communications market in China continues to boom, so learning Mandarin is a good business decision.

The second and more important reason is this: As a Learning Guy I spend most of my days recommending blended learning solutions to my clients. Recently, the learning solutions I have recommended have included the use of  cutting edge social media and collaboration tools (podcasts, blogging, webinars, wikis and others to name a few).

My clients are always wowed when I show them something like a corporate video presentation delivered via iPod. Or when I show how to set up a blog as a companion to a classroom based training session. Once clients get over the “cool” factor, they always ask a valid question- “Are people going to learn anything? ”

My answer is- “They are!” I am a walking and Mandarin talking example of a guy who is achieving measureable results through blended learning. A few weeks back I stumbled upon a podcast on iTunes called ChinesePod (www.ChinesePod.com). I subscribed to the podcast a now receive a daily Mandarin lesson.

The daily lesson is approximately 10 to 14 minutes in length, and consists of vocabulary building and dialogue practice combined with language and cultural insights. This is the real stuff! Not classroom based language, but practical everyday language that you can use on the streets of China. 

Here’s where the blended learning part comes in: When you visit the website (and sign up as a premium user) you have access to companion learning activities, a community forum, blogs, a wiki, flashcards that you can download to your mobile phone, and other seriously cool learning stuff.

But here is the best part: I receive a daily 10 minute phone call (via Skype) from my teacher in Shanghai! I have a chance to practice speaking each day. And this is the missing link in many learning programs isn’t it. You need to take what you have learned and put it into action.

And the results: I am speaking Mandarin, and am progessing very quickly. I have tried to learn Mandarin in a classroom based setting on a couple of occasions, but with only limited success. The ChinesePod approach to blended learning is working for me.

And I am certain it will work with my clients. So I have promised each and every one of them that I will continue to use myself as a guinea pig for blended learning. Over the next few months I will document my progress in this blog. I am interested is discovering what works and what doesn’t work, and then applying the lessons I have learned to the unique needs of my clients.

As always, the Learning Guy keeps on learning!

It occurred to me that the connotation of the “learning guys” could mean “being a newbies.” Well, it happens that describes us too!

There are a lot of things that we’re trying for the first time. But that’s OK…in life you have to take some chances and try new things. Through this blog, you can see how different things have worked out for us. If we screw up, you’ll benefit from what we learned in the process as well.

So stay tuned…