Training Smarter, Working Smarter

Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11 AM PST/ 2 PM EST

FREE

Considering the fast pace and super-connectedness of today’s business environment, is the old static classroom really the best place for achieving modern training objectives?

Hear Jay Cross, a leading expert on informal learning, for a far-ranging conversation about how organizations are working – and training – smarter in the network era.

Find out how smart businesses today are reaping the benefits of continuous, peer-to-peer learning and collaboration.

I prefer conversations to presentations. Bring your questions. After the introduction, I’ll be happy to let you hi-jack the session to talk about what’s on your mind.

Attend this webinar to learn how:

• Work and learning are converging.
• Informal learning often costs less and delivers more than formal class time.
• An elevator pitch will help you overcome management objections.
• Social learning can help you reach training goals faster.

Register

Three people will win copies of the new Working Smarter Fieldbook.

This short video is simply awesome.

New book: What Would Andrew Do? by Jay Cross & friends
How to sell senior management on the value of learning.

Preview and Table of Contents

189 pages, $19.99 hard copy or download, $14.99 read-only

Blurb: Chief Learning Officers and training directors are struggling to convince executives they are making a difference. To be successful, they must think and act like business people. This takes more than jargon and metrics. This un-book explains what a training director must do to get budget, keep her job, and make solid contributions to the bottom line. What Would Andrew Do? will challenge you to convince a hard-nosed, self-made Scot that your proposed learning project is a worthwhile use of his money. If you can do that, convincing your organization shouldn’t be a problem.

This is version 4.5 of What Would Andrew Do? It is a work in progress. It’s incomplete. Don’t buy this book unless you’re willing to put up with messiness in order to get its message.

A few quotes from the text you give you the flavor:

A manager for a major pharmaceutical firm in
Canada told his sales trainers that henceforth
their bonuses would be tied to the sales of the
people they trained. “Hold on,” they said. “We
don’t have anything to do with that.”

Andrew Carnegie is the quintessential hardnosed
businessman. Your objective will often
be to do convince Andrew what you say/do is
worthy of investment. When in doubt about
ROI, just ask yourself “What would Andrew
Carnegie do?”

Business is about making sound decisions.
Every business decision is a trade-off. (If
there’s no trade-off, it’s a no-brainer.) An
important corollary: There is no free lunch.
List the pro’s of doing something and the con’s
of doing something else. Be aware of what
you’re trading off when making a decision.
Every trade-off is a risk. That doesn’t mean
you should shy away from risk. Quite the
contrary, for no risk means no reward. A
decision-maker who disregards risk is a fool, a
pauper, or both. Fortune favors the bold. An
astute business person seeks the most
lucrative balance of risk and reward.

People see what they focus on; they don’t see
what’s really there. An alcoholic sees the
liquor stores other people breeze by. A foodie
always remembers whether or not she has
eaten at a particular restaurant. A top
executive sees long-term trends; a factory
laborer sees the clock. (Training directors see
learners; everyone else sees workers or
employees.)

Leaders have shifted their focus from static to
dynamic, from physical to virtual, from
financial results to financial expectations, from
machines to people, from goods to service
from analytical to intuitive, and from
institutions to individuals.

Knowledgeable, can-do people are the heart of
competitive advantage. Keeping them
informed and inspired is vital. More than ever,
people matter, for human ingenuity is today’s
scarce resource.

The success of a learning initiative should not
require third decimal point accuracy. You
should be able to describe the logic in an
elevator pitch. If you can’t illustrate the results
on the back of a napkin, you should probably
be looking for more productive projects.
In the words of Fritz Perls, “Learning is
discovering that something is possible.”

The false precision of ROI comes from looking
backwards. Results are counted up after the
horse is out of the barn. The past is a sunk
cost. It’s over. Decision-making involves
placing bets on the future. Decisions are most
often guided by intuition, judgment, and gut
feel than by numbers. As the investment
prospectus reminds us, “Past success is no
guarantee of future performance.”

How can you say that training caused the
result? Maybe it was a new bonus system that
went into effect at the same time. Maybe our
products were better than the competition’s.
Maybe it was sun spots. Once again, it’s a
judgment call, most likely the judgment of the
person with authority to write checks to fund
training. Or not.

Speed matters. Getting a quick solution is
more important than finding the perfect
solution. The key is to get a solution that
works. Now. Weigh the trade-off of time vs.
cost toward time by considering the cost of
lost opportunity by not acting sooner.

Pull learning is more cost-effective. It doesn’t
require as much in the way of control
mechanisms, structure, and outside
assistance. Furthermore, lessons learned
through pull are more likely to stick because
they’re relevant to perceived need, delivered
when required, and usually reinforced with
immediate application. Pull learning delivers
more bang for the buck.

Have a beer

You may have heard my story about the brewer who was told to cut his costs 16%. “Not a problem,” he told his CFO. “We’ll simply put five bottles in each six-pack instead of six.”

The CFO protested that people would notice. Why not just cut the training budget?

“And they won’t notice if we stop investing in the know-how of our people???

The 2 1/2 minute video recap on YouTube

Outcomes matter

Odd as it seems, budget decisions about corporate learning rarely take the quality of the outcomes into account. Bean counters treat learning as if it were binary, present or not, when in fact learning outcomes are highly variable.

You know in your gut that some learning experiences are exhilarating; they impart lessons that will be with you for decades; they’re challenging but fun. You also know that some learning is deadly dull, mindless, in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, and eminently worthless.

On the organization’s income statement, however, the good, the bad, and the ugly learning experiences all look the same: they are costs. The benefits of the learning are not entered into the ledger. If you follow generally accepted accounting principles instead of common sense, you’ll always select the low-ball solution. The consequences can be scary,  like astronauts contemplating the fact that their spacecraft was contracted out to the lowest bidder.

Benefit analysis

Take a new training initiative, for example, a new product rollout. Picture the training in your mind’s eye. Got it?

Okay, now think about how you could improve the learning taking place. You could post videos of a few winning sales pitches. Create a space online for asking questions and sharing advice. Perhaps add a 24-hour help desk or product hot-line for answering questions. Capture and share customer testimonials. You can easily come up with another dozen ways to improve learning outcomes. But when do you stop? How much is enough?

The hand-wringing discussions about the ROI of learning rarely lay out the range of R’s you can achieve with different levels of I. This is naive. We need a new calculus for evaluating investments in learning.  We should be optimizing our cost:benefit ratios, and this entails getting specific about the benefits received from different levels of costs.

Help me think about how to do this. I expect learning metrics to pop up on the agenda of the Learning Irregulars soon.

• Making the Business Case for Informal Learning
• High Time for ROI
• It’s More than ROI
• Internet Time on Metrics
• Out of sight, out of mind

The Soundbites of Training 2007
(second attempt)

Nanocasts are mini-podcasts are one to four minutes in length impromptui, not reheased cut to the chase These are from Training 2007.	My recorder is a Casio Exilim camera. It’s an amazing gizmo. Tiny. Thin. And can record an hour of video.
Nanocast with Frank Russell, GEO Learning	GeoLearning picked up the tab for Roger McGuinn.
Nanocast with Bjorn Brillhardt, Enspire Learning	Bjorn’s on the right. I’ve watched him grow Enspire from five guys working out of a house to a 50+ employee simulation powerhouse.
Nanocast with Howard Siebel, Veotag
Nanocast with Tony O’Driscoll, IBM Altus Learning Systems ProtonMedia	O’Driscoll Castle. I couldn’t find a good photo of Tony.
Nanocast with Harvey Singh, Instancy Training Growth Strategies, April 24-25, Cary, North Carolina	He looks better in person.

Do you think there’s a future for Nanocasting? Leave a comment.

Review of Informal Learning in this month’s T+D magazine. (pdf)

As someone who makes a living out of designing formal learning systems for large corporations, I was an unlikely candidate to buy into Jay Cross’s theory that formal learning is largely ineffective. But my curiosity got the better of me, and I found myself totally engrossed in his out-of-the-ordinary thinking on learning.

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At ASTD TechKnowledge, people either loved our message or hated it. They were as firm in their position as they are on abortion or the O.J. verdict. Informal learning is a devisive issue!

How can people be so opposed to something that, if added to the status quo, results in better performance?

Upon reflection, I realized that this parallels the introduction of eLearning. Many people had oversimplified what eLearning meant; they defined it as replacing instructors with computers. This appealed to greedy venture capitalists and bottom-line-fixated executives, even if it was dead wrong from the start. Geez. (All learning occurs through a combination of different activites. Why should eLearning be different?)

The formal-versus-informal debate shouldn’t be happening at all. Extremists on both sides miss the point that this is not either/or. It’s shades of gray. Few human issues are binary, or, as I kid people, “bi-polar.” The world doesn’t work like this:

Permit me to borrow an analogy from a recording studio. You never hear what the musicians play. Someone at an audio mixer ups the volume of the Bono feed and downplays the drums. The result is much more pleasing to the ear. Making recordings is akin to taking photographs: a combination of what’s there and how one manipulates it.

Imagine, if you will, a learning mixer. You could slide the switches to give the learners a little more control here while shaving development time there. And so on. Here’s a hypothetical learning mixer.

You don’t achieve the best mix by moving all of the sliders to the top or all to the bottom.

The Delivery slider moves from courses and push (formal) to conversations and pull (informal). The Duration slider goes from hours (formal) to minutes (informal). The Subject matter ranges from curriculum (what the organization says, formal) to discovery (what the individual needs, informal) Timing goes from outside of work to during work. Development time ranges from months (events, formal) to minutes (connections, informal).

Learning professionals who are in favor of using any methodology exclusively deny themselves the opportunity to create the best mix. What’s not to like?

In preparation for 2007, I’m digging through old backups and obsolete documentation. On a CD of 2002, I came upon the contents of the Meta-Learning Lab site (which disappeared in a change of ISPs and a lapse in paying for the domain name.) Here ’tis, an oldie but a goodie.

Online Educa is over for most of its 2,000 participants, but I’m only about half way through. In the context of unbounded, informal learning, events are but a component of a broader learning process. At Online Educa I was gathering input and finding new nodes to follow up. Now my mind is sorting through what’s memorable and what’s mental clutter. New neural connections are forming. I awoke today with fresh insights.
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