There’s no point in learning something if you forget it before you can put it to use. Yet research finds that people forget the majority of what they learn in workshops and classrooms. Typically, only 15% of what’s covered in a workshop ever shows up on the job!

Many L&D departments act as if their work is over once the learner walks out the door. I hold them accountable to the point that performance changes.

Here’s 37 minutes on remembering. Luckily, you can fast-forward over the parts that don’t interest you.

This is an excerpt from a webinar I presented on behalf of Raptivity on April 30, 2013.

Slides

The painting carries two messages. First of all, insubordination will not be tolerated. Second, decisions must be impartial.

Be glad you live in the 21st Century, not in the 1660s.

I just got home from two dozen days in Rome, (rent Vespa) Perugia, Passignano, Torre del Colle (Bevagna), (return Vespa) Foligno, Rome, London, Malvern, Winchester, Brighton, Amsterdam, Heerlen (Maastricht) in 24 days. Photos.

Two days of the trip were paid work: One day I keynoted the Learning Innovations and Quality Conference and participated in the launch of the International Council for Open Research and Education (ICORE) in Rome. On another day I led a masterclass in informal learning and 702010 for a high-tech company and its customers in Utrecht. More on this later.

I spent most of my time hanging out with five of the savviest people I know, on their home ground. These folks are also my best friends. When I started the trip, I planned to interview each of them in depth about today’s complex, dizzying world and make a book out of it.

My second day on the Continent, I rented a bright yellow Vespa scooter in Perugia and rode around Umbria for a week. No traffic, spectacular hill towns, the joy of buzzing by vineyards and olive trees in open air, amazing food. This was vacation and it felt great. I gave up the book interview idea. My goal for the trip was simply to have a great time and learn things with good friends.

VIVA DISORDER

At age 15, the Italy I visited seemed decrepit, peeling, disorderly, an unfinished construction job where everything was falling apart. Today that’s what I like.

Assisi

Assisi is spic-and-span. The interesting edges have been sanded down. (Has Disney been here?) Everything is orderly. Beautiful but unreal.

I prefer towns that don’t shy away from exposing patches on prior patches to a Roman or Etruscan tile, like some ancient tattoo. The more higgledy-piggeldy, the better. Decadence, decay, laissez-faire. Lack of conformity keeps you alert. (Thank heavens franchise retailers have not made it to Umbria. No WalMarts here.)

MIRACLES

Einstein: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Miracle

Everything is a miracle.

SCHOOL BRAIN WASH

All parents and students revile school. In the three countries I visited, parents advise their children on how to game the system instead of changing the institution,.

After twenty years apiece in school systems, we all suffer Stockholm syndrome. Where’s the teacher? I need some more mental punishment. We’ve got to break free on the wrong-headed notions that schooling has planted in our heads.

Freedom!

JOBS

In Rome, I gave a talk at the FAO Building about Push and Pull, matching learning and jobs, and the importance of staying happy.

I suggested that since universities cannot provide the experiential learning people must master to get meaningful jobs, they should relinquish the education on how to do jobs to corporations. A new apprenticeship. Corporations get to see and shape how people work; people decide if they’d like working with those corporations.

College and universities in Europe and America charge more and more for undergrad programs whose graduates can’t find jobs in their fields. This is crazy. Old joke: “I wouldn’t have majored in philosophy if I’d realized none of the big philosophy companies would be hiring when I graduated.” Hundreds of thousands of students earn degrees in psychology and economics, only to discover that business does not hire novice psychologists or economists. I have an alternative.

Start with Pre-college. The on- or off-campus program includes:

Jobs. Learn the job market and find your place in it. What’s out there? Demand? Prerequisites. Values, Characteristics, Hours, Rewards, Likes and dislikes. Watch interviews. Do interviews.

Personal Assessment. Strengths, values, calling, aspirations, personality, drivers, location preferences. Identify and specify authentic character traits. Life goals. Marry to Jobs component.

Exploration. Prereqs, build portfolio, join incubator. Builds into apprentice/co-practice plan, internship. When career direction is affirmed, education may continue at the university or depart for a corporate internship.

Basic literacies. Certify language, arithmetic, stats, reasoning, MOOCs. Bonehead courses.

A majority of creative knowledge workers will leave Pre-college for a new form of internship, where continuing education and experiential learning co-exist.

Colleges would not be awarding many bachelors degrees. I suggested that bachelors degrees be eliminated since everyone knows the learning never stops.

This lit up the following speaker’s panels, for he misunderstood me and thought I was in favor of abolishing all schools. Too bad we didn’t have time for Q&A.

FOOD

I’ve been in food heaven. The food in Umbria is simple, fresh, and delicious. Affordable, too. My diet was heavy on cheese, fish, and salads. After a few days in the countryside, choosing the spot to eat becomes the most important aspect of life. A shadow form of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs kicks in. The purpose of dining is less filling one’s belly and more enjoying a peak experience.

By following my rule that you need not eat everything on your plate, I actually managed to lose five pounds during my travels.

My favorite lunch was at the Trombone trattoria in the hill town of Spello. The food was good, the ambience magnificent. My table overlooked a panorama of valley and hillsides. I watched a storm system gather to the north and make its way south across the horizon. I slowly nibbled through a frittata and a plate of cheeses. I wrote in my journal. I was in no hurry, as there were only two other couples on the large terrace.

In the evenings, I was reading Extra Virginity, The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. Olive oil was the petroleum of the ancient world. Millions of liters of oil changed hands. Olive oil lit the lamps, cooked the food, heated the rooms, and anointed the body. On the Vespa, I was forever passing olive trees. Olives became a major eating focus.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

Riding around on the scooter, I revised and rewrote my upcoming talks in my head. In both Rome and Utrecht, I had planned to talk about informal learning. I decided that was the wrong wording. What I really wanted to explore and promote was a particular type of informal learning: learning from experience.

The day I visited the vineyard at the end of the long row of cypress trees above, Chief Learning Officer published an article I’d written on The Two Cultures. These are not the two cultures of science and humanities described by C.P. Snow fifty years ago. Rather, I wrote about the culture of the predictable (the subject of schooling) and the culture of the complex (the reality of our world.) Professors can and do teach the predictable. Experience is the only teacher of the complex.

Were I doing it over again, I’d write the book on Experiential Learning, not Informal Learning. I’d focus on the need to create the right environment to learn from and orchestrate the right blend of experiences to develop the street smarts to prosper in uncertain times.

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

I attended a fantastic dinner party hosted by my friend Jos, the founder of TULSER, in the Netherlands. Jos and I are working together to imbed experiential learning and the 70:20:10 philosophy in Dutch organizations.

A fantastic chef, Ron, prepared a sumptuous yet healthy feast of taste treasures. (I couldn’t sleep that evening until I’d revisited each course mentally.) Yum.

Chefs are my favorite example of organic communities of practice. Ron and I spoke throughout the evening. He was of course dedicated to the profession (“What better thing could one do in life than to make people happy by bringing them great food?”) He always hung out with other chefs, and they continually shared discoveries and sources. (We were drinking wines ordinary mortals cannot buy. Chefs have channels.) He felt the chef’s obligation to help new people grow into the profession. (His grandson was in the kitchen, apprenticing for the dinner.)

Communities of practice can be subtle. Unlike chefs, members of my communities can’t be identified by a uniform nor by the scars from having chopped too closely. While I was oblivious to thinking about it this way at the time, most of my days in Europe were spent in conversation with members of my community.

The practitioners in this community are dedicated to improving learning, working, schooling, and getting along in life. We break rules because we are dissatisfied with the status quo. We are comrades in arms.

MASTERCLASS

Opening: This is a masterclass on informal learning, but that’s not what I intend to focus on. My objective is to convince you to join the companies that are using informal learning to create resilient, prosperous, responsive organizations where aligned, engaged, enthusiastic employees work in self-motivated teams to delight customers. Managers become coaches, not controllers and workers are treated like people, not cogs in the machine.

This is a set of beliefs, not formulas. There aren’t any silver bullets. Informal learning is less expensive, more effective, and more natural than its formal counterpart, but it requires deep change and a new mindset. If you get the faith, you will see continuous improvement. If you don’t believe, you won’t be saved. There’s not much middle ground.

Let’s talk about what you want out of our time together.

AGRITURISMO

A government sponsored program makes grants to Italian farmers to open their houses to tourists. The money pays to update the infrastructure, build guest rooms, and build swimming pools.

The top floor of this farmhouse a few miles out of Bevagna was my home base in Umbria. Here’s the view from my window. Soooo much more relaxing than a hotel.

MORGAN MOTOR COMPANY

Visiting The Morgan Motor Company to see 160 craftsmen building cars from sheet aluminum and ash using hand tools was simply amazing. My photos.

You, the student, had just been appointed brand manager (we called it product manager back then) for the iconic red condiment. The case included the demographics of buyers, the geographic spread of the market, and all manner of information about packaging options. Sales were steady and growing. The case asked the classic question, “What would you do?”

The school solution was: Do nothing. Don’t mess with a winner. Leave things as they are. If you suggested changing anything, you failed the test. You don’t walk into an established company with no experience or credibility and suggest they mess with the cash cow.

The brand managers and UI designers at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other consumer web services need to learn this lesson. No change for change’s sake. Don’t confuse the customer. We don’t want New Coke.

I’ve been on the web since the beginning, when you had to log in to Sir Tim’s NeXT machine at CERN to access the World Wide Web. I have blogged for more than a dozen years. I’ve shown thousands of people how to join the collective consciousness that is today’s net. I once knew how to get things done expeditiously.

Now I’m confused about some basic functions. While I was on the road for the last 24 days, Google+ donned a new skin. I lost a long post (by pushing the wrong button?). Ironically, I find G+’s search function confusing. WIIFM? I haven’t found anything in the changed appearance for me.

Then there’s Yahoo’s Flickr. I have been unable to upload portrait-mode photographs since the new look came in. Sometimes I can only upload two or three photos at a time. The uploader apparently can’t recognize some of my photos–they show as black and won’t upload. I’m on the lookout for something that will work for my 30,000 photos.

Facebook locked me out because someone in Wilmington, North Carolina, tried to access my account. I didn’t bother setting up a new password until just now. The garish new timeline page that greeted me was cluttered with marketing crap, boxes trying to get me to divulge my taste in movies, books, and television shows. I’m cutting off every option I can.

Whenever I visit Facebook, which is rare, I tiptoe around, fearful that I’ll fail to click one innocuous-looking little box and give Zuckerberg & Co. the email addresses of real friends or the right to repeat anything I write or say. I treat Facebook like quicksand and it’s troubling when the hazards have all moved to new locations.

Worst of all, changes like these are needlessly disruptive. We all have too many balls in the air right now to waste time rewiring our brains and fingers to punch buttons that have moved.

Most columnists in CLO magazine advocate something they’re sure of. This column is different: it’s about an issue I’m not at all sure of but I think it important and would enjoy getting your opinion.  

In 1959, British scientist/novelist C.P. Snow wrote an essay describing the “two cultures,  whose thesis was that ‘the intellectual life of the whole of western society’ was split into two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities — and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems. Snow contended that scientists did not understand the humanities and humanists did not understand science. As the world grew more complex, the two groups grew further apart.” (Wikipedia)

Half a century later, the world grows more complex everyday and the two cultures have grow further apart. It’s worth a revisit because the growing divide will shake the training industry to its roots. I am going to use the concept to describe two different sorts of knowledge and the different way we learn them. #1 is intuitive knowledge and #2 is logical knowledge. They are different as night and day.

Intuitive knowledge

Intuitive knowledge is what Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman describes in Thinking Fast and Slow as System 1. It’s the province of the emotional brain. Intuitive knowledge works with patterns; it knows no words. In other words, it is tacit. Since the emotional brain is much older and works faster than the logical brain, intuitive knowledge is the first to come to mind; the rational brain uses logic to weigh whether or not an intuitive response is valid or must be tempered. Intuitive knowledge is also known as muscle memory.

Intuitive knowledge is complex and hence unpredictable, inductive, volatile, and emergent. It’s the realm of imagination. It deals with people’s interpretations. It lives in the minds of the people who pull it together.

Examples of intuitive knowledge: how to dance and to sell. Training departments can’t do much with the increasingly important Intuitive skills. Intuitive things are learned by doing: experientially. People “get” the skills of dealing with complexity: critical thinking, prioritizing, working with people, design thinking, and so forth — by doing them.

“I do things I do not know how to do by doing them.” Picasso

Experience can be supplemented with stories (someone else’s experience), simulations (fake experience), trial and error (the school of hard knocks), and mimicry (copied experience).

Rational knowledge

Rational knowledge is the opposite of Intuitive knowledge. It’s the province of the rational brain. It works with logic. It is explicit and can be explained with words.

Rational knowledge is straightforward (or complicated, which is several simples mushed together.) It’s Newtonian clockwork, an equal and opposite reaction for every action. It is formulaic, yes or no, and reductionist. It deals with facts. It’s true no matter who is looking. Training departments help people learn the Rational. Workshops, programmed instruction, and Kahn Academy can teach Rational Knowledge. Example of rational knowledge: programming PERL, the states and their capitals, multiplication.

The Explicit and the Tacit

As the world becomes more complex, people need to rely more on the interpretive power of Intuitive knowledge. So what does this have to do with a CLO? (The editor here gets on my case if I don’t relate topics to the needs of chief learning officers.) Well, here’s the punch line: people learn Rational knowledge and absorb Intuitive knowledge by different means.

The basic difference is that you get to know Rational Knowledge. Intuitive Knowledge, on the other hand, transforms your identity. For example, I can know a lot about plumbing but until I have Intuitive Knowledge, I can’t call myself a plumber. It’s learning to know vs. learning to be.

While different parts of the brain deal with Intuitive and Rational knowledge, these are not the old (and discredited) left/right brain theories. This is more about the conscious and subconscious minds.

Dave Snowden, a oracular figure in interpreting complexity for business ends, says the greatest danger is confusing a complex situation for a merely complicated one.

If you are concerned only with helping people learn rational knowledge, you’re abandoning a vital facet of learning. Facts are impotent until coupled with feelings. Feelings without facts are mute. A successful learning organization is bi-cultural; it melds the intuitive with the rational

Bi-culturalism melds two originally distinct cultures into a holistic co-existence.

Ask yourself: is your learning  bi-cultural?

There’s no point learning something in the first place if you forget it before you can put it to use. Here’s a recording of my recent webinar on making learning stick.

I’ll be in Italy the next two weeks, then in the UK for a week, and wrapping up with a week in the Netherlands. Anyone up for a rendezvous?

To encourage participation, I gave away my favorite books for making the most of learning. It’s a biased list. All but three are by friends and colleagues. I like what I know.

This baker’s dozen have influenced my thinking enormously, sometimes by the act of writing them.

1. Informal Learning by Jay Cross
2. A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown
3. Working Smarter Fieldbook by Jay Cross
4. Implementing eLearning by Jay Cross
5. Engaging Learners by Clark Quinn
6. Social Learning Handbook by Jane Hart
7. The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner
8. The Connected Company by Dave Gray
9. Now You See It by Cathy Davidson
10. Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
11. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
12. The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management by Stephen Denning
13. Designing mLearning by Clark Quinn

“Our study suggested that managers learn mostly from informal learning, that proficiency is the product of informal learning, and that metacognitive knowledge and self-regulation skills moderate informal learning and the transfer process. In the light of these findings, companies should harness and leverage informal learning and cultivate the metacognitive abilities of managers, as opposed to increasing spending on formal training programs. By applying these strategies, companies may save money, develop more proficient managers, and gain a competitive advantage.”

Michael D. Enos, Marijke Thamm Kehrhahn, Alexandra Bell

Read those lines again. Think about how you develop managers. Stirring, isn’t it?

Too bad the article appeared ten years ago and didn’t make waves. (HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY, vol. 14, no. 4, Winter 2003) 

Informal first!

Informal Learning – the other 80%

Execution is the goal

This paper addresses how organizations, particularly business organizations, can get more done. Workers who know more get more accomplished. People who are well connected make greater contributions than those who are not. Employees and partners with more capacity to learn are more versatile in adapting to future conditions. The people who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do.

It’s all a matter of learning, but it’s not the sort of learning that is the province of training departments, workshops, and classrooms. Most people in training programs learn only a little of the right stuff, are fuzzy about how to apply what they’ve learned, and never address who are the right people to know.

People learn to build the right network of associates and the right level of expertise through informal, sometimes even accidental, learning that flies beneath the corporate radar. Because organizations are oblivious to informal learning, they fail to invest in it. As a result, their execution is less than it might be.

Let’s look at what informal learning is and what to do to leverage it.

Learning is social

Most of what we learn, we learn from other people — parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, playmates, cousins, Little Leaguers, Scouts, school chums, roommates, teammates, classmates, study groups, coaches, bosses, mentors, colleagues, gossips, co-workers, neighbors, and, eventually, our children. Sometimes we even learn from teachers.

At work we learn more in the break room than in the classroom. We discover how to do our jobs throughinformal learning – observing others, asking the person in the next cubicle, calling the help desk, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning - classes and workshops and online events – is the source of only 10% to 20% of what we learn at work.

Informal learning is effective because it is personal. The individual calls the shots. The learner is responsible. It’s real. How different from formal learning, which is imposed by someone else. How many learners believe the subject matter of classes and workshops is “the right stuff?” How many feel the corporation really has their best interests at heart? Given today’s job mobility, workers who delegate responsibility for learning to their employers will become perpetual novices.

In spite of this, corporations, non-profits, and government invest most of their budgets in formal learning, when it’s apparent that most learning is informal. This stands common sense on its head. It’s the 20/80 rule: Invest your resources where they’ll do the least good.

When I’ve pointed this out in presentations at conferences, members of the audience ask what they can do to improve informal learning. After all, they already have discussion boards and virtual classrooms and videoconference gear. I tell them they need to go beyond dumb technology. Linking me to a chat session is the equivalent of showing me the way to the library. Everything I need is in there, but it’s up to me to find it.

Achieving the proper balance

Neither investing in only formal training and education nor placing all your bets on informal learning is a good strategy. Extremism is rarely the answer to questions of human development. What you are after is the best mix of formal and informal means.

Achieving balance requires a scale of measurement. The metrics of our scale are the organization’s core objectives:

• Reducing time-to-performance
• Keeping the promises made to our customers
• Improving service and processes
• Understanding the organization’s mission and values
• Innovating in the face of change
• Optimizing the human value chain [2]
• Knowing enough to work smarter, not harder
• Replenishing the organization’s intellectual capital
• Creating value for all stakeholders

In the past, corporate America relied on training and indoctrination to meet these objectives. This worked better in yesterday’s command-and-control hierarchies than in today’s laissez-faire organizations. Now it’s often more effective to take control by giving control, by letting “the invisible hand” self-organize worker learning. The organization establishes the goals and gives the workers flexibility in how to meet them.

An organization named CapitalWorks [3] surveyed hundreds of knowledge workers about how they really learned to do their jobs.

• Workers reported that informal learning was three times more important in becoming proficient on the job than company-provided training.

• Workers learn as much during breaks and lunch as during on- and off-site meetings.

• Most workers report that they often need to work around formal procedures and processes to get their jobs done.

• Most workers developed many of their skills by modeling the behavior of co-workers.

• Approximately 70% of respondents want more interactions with co-workers when their work changes.

Combining the results of CapitalWorks’ formal and informal learning surveys, here’s how people report becoming proficient in their work.

Tell me why

Isn’t this amazing? What on earth has led us to a situation where corporations overwhelmingly invest in formal training but workers overwhelmingly learn informally?

In his new book, Clusters of Creativity [4] , Rob Koepp writes “The dot-com craze was often seen in humanist terms — a force democratizing information, building online communities, increasing opportunities for entrepreneurs. Yet dot-com mania’s article of faith was that the technologies of the Internet essentially made human beings irrelevant. People became abstractions, recognized only as hits, clicks and eyeballs that propped up the preposterous market values of e-commerce plays.”

Real people are complex, integrated beings. Each is whole, unto him or herself. Body, mind, intention and emotion are inseparably bound. Situating our brains in our heads oversimplifies the situation; our brains are distributed throughout our bodies. Nerves, eyes, and receptors are all part of the way we think. And emotion? It’s inextricably linked to the other mental and bodily functions. The amygdala shapes the internal movie we call our time-delayed “reality” with emotion before we become aware.

Adapting to one’s environment involves much more than exposure to content. It is a whole-body experience. You cannot learn while someone is stomping your toes. You won’t pay attention unless other people are involved.

Other factors work to obscure the importance of informal learning:

• Learning implies school. School is chock full of formal learning  — courses, classes, and grades that obscure the fact that most learning at school is either self-directed or informal.
• Vendors don’t make money from informal learning. Hence, it’s not promoted at conferences, in magazines, and through sales calls.
• The rapid pace of technological innovation and economic change almost guarantees that formal learning will be dated.
• One aspect of informal learning that makes it so powerful also makes the informal process forgettable: it often comes in small pieces.
• Who’s in charge of informal learning? Most of the time, it’s the individual worker. Another reason informal falls off the corporate radar.
• Most informal learning takes place in the “shadow organization,” oft described as “the way things really work,” as opposed to the boxes on the organization chart and their clearly delineated budgets.

Ottersurf’s Clark Quinn [5] notes that corporations invest in formal learning because it’s the one means they know – and know how to handle. “They’re still in the industrial model. Corporate learning lags the knowledge age and its associated technology. Sadly, this is a low priority with most CEO’s.”

How workers learn now

Think about a go-getter knowledge worker learns something new. [6]   The Training Department has been downsized. Even if it were at full strength, it’s unlikely Training would have much to offer on a new topic. So the worker checks Google or SlashDot or other resources on the web to see who’s got books or articles or blogs or case studies on her topic. In my case, I’d probably check the O’Reilly site since I maintain a virtual bookshelf there that gives me access to scads of technical books.

After the worker gets a sketchy framework of what’s to be learned, it’s time to dive in. Try things. Build on knowledge of similar subjects. Ask people in the office who’ve been there. Check with the technical equivalent of the jailhouse lawyer. The goal is not to master a subject area or pass a test; it’s to find out enough to dive into trial-and-error or to get the immediate job done. The worker doesn’t take off for a weeklong workshop; more likely, he picks up bits and pieces day-by-day for months.

This is self-directed learning, and that’s yet another reason it escapes notice. No one is responsible for toting up the learning every worker is engaged in. I wouldn’t be surprised if informal learning always outweighs formal learning in impact. Wonderful book title: All Learning is Self-Directed. [7]

At the beginning of this section, I said we were looking over the shoulder of a go-getter learner. Today, we’re in transition. Many learners are not self-directed; they are waiting for directions. It’s time to tell them that the rules have changed. It’s in their self interest to convert from training pawns to proactive learning opportunists.

Informal Learning – the other 80%

Execution is the goal

This paper addresses how organizations, particularly business organizations, can get more done. Workers who know more get more accomplished. People who are well connected make greater contributions than those who are not. Employees and partners with more capacity to learn are more versatile in adapting to future conditions. The people who create the most value are those who know the right people, the right stuff, and the right things to do.

It’s all a matter of learning, but it’s not the sort of learning that is the province of training departments, workshops, and classrooms. Most people in training programs learn only a little of the right stuff, are fuzzy about how to apply what they’ve learned, and never address who are the right people to know.

People learn to build the right network of associates and the right level of expertise through informal, sometimes even accidental, learning that flies beneath the corporate radar. Because organizations are oblivious to informal learning, they fail to invest in it. As a result, their execution is less than it might be.

Let’s look at what informal learning is and what to do to leverage it.

Learning is social

Most of what we learn, we learn from other people — parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, playmates, cousins, Little Leaguers, Scouts, school chums, roommates, teammates, classmates, study groups, coaches, bosses, mentors, colleagues, gossips, co-workers, neighbors, and, eventually, our children. Sometimes we even learn from teachers.

At work we learn more in the break room than in the classroom. We discover how to do our jobs throughinformal learning – observing others, asking the person in the next cubicle, calling the help desk, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning - classes and workshops and online events – is the source of only 10% to 20% of what we learn at work.

Informal learning is effective because it is personal. The individual calls the shots. The learner is responsible. It’s real. How different from formal learning, which is imposed by someone else. How many learners believe the subject matter of classes and workshops is “the right stuff?” How many feel the corporation really has their best interests at heart? Given today’s job mobility, workers who delegate responsibility for learning to their employers will become perpetual novices.

In spite of this, corporations, non-profits, and government invest most of their budgets in formal learning, when it’s apparent that most learning is informal. This stands common sense on its head. It’s the 20/80 rule: Invest your resources where they’ll do the least good.

When I’ve pointed this out in presentations at conferences, members of the audience ask what they can do to improve informal learning. After all, they already have discussion boards and virtual classrooms and videoconference gear. I tell them they need to go beyond dumb technology. Linking me to a chat session is the equivalent of showing me the way to the library. Everything I need is in there, but it’s up to me to find it.

Achieving the proper balance

Neither investing in only formal training and education nor placing all your bets on informal learning is a good strategy. Extremism is rarely the answer to questions of human development. What you are after is the best mix of formal and informal means.

Achieving balance requires a scale of measurement. The metrics of our scale are the organization’s core objectives:

• Reducing time-to-performance
• Keeping the promises made to our customers
• Improving service and processes
• Understanding the organization’s mission and values
• Innovating in the face of change
• Optimizing the human value chain [2]
• Knowing enough to work smarter, not harder
• Replenishing the organization’s intellectual capital
• Creating value for all stakeholders

In the past, corporate America relied on training and indoctrination to meet these objectives. This worked better in yesterday’s command-and-control hierarchies than in today’s laissez-faire organizations. Now it’s often more effective to take control by giving control, by letting “the invisible hand” self-organize worker learning. The organization establishes the goals and gives the workers flexibility in how to meet them.

An organization named CapitalWorks [3] surveyed hundreds of knowledge workers about how they really learned to do their jobs.

• Workers reported that informal learning was three times more important in becoming proficient on the job than company-provided training.

• Workers learn as much during breaks and lunch as during on- and off-site meetings.

• Most workers report that they often need to work around formal procedures and processes to get their jobs done.

• Most workers developed many of their skills by modeling the behavior of co-workers.

• Approximately 70% of respondents want more interactions with co-workers when their work changes.

Combining the results of CapitalWorks’ formal and informal learning surveys, here’s how people report becoming proficient in their work.

Tell me why

Isn’t this amazing? What on earth has led us to a situation where corporations overwhelmingly invest in formal training but workers overwhelmingly learn informally?

In his new book, Clusters of Creativity [4] , Rob Koepp writes “The dot-com craze was often seen in humanist terms — a force democratizing information, building online communities, increasing opportunities for entrepreneurs. Yet dot-com mania’s article of faith was that the technologies of the Internet essentially made human beings irrelevant. People became abstractions, recognized only as hits, clicks and eyeballs that propped up the preposterous market values of e-commerce plays.”

Real people are complex, integrated beings. Each is whole, unto him or herself. Body, mind, intention and emotion are inseparably bound. Situating our brains in our heads oversimplifies the situation; our brains are distributed throughout our bodies. Nerves, eyes, and receptors are all part of the way we think. And emotion? It’s inextricably linked to the other mental and bodily functions. The amygdala shapes the internal movie we call our time-delayed “reality” with emotion before we become aware.

Adapting to one’s environment involves much more than exposure to content. It is a whole-body experience. You cannot learn while someone is stomping your toes. You won’t pay attention unless other people are involved.

Other factors work to obscure the importance of informal learning:

• Learning implies school. School is chock full of formal learning  — courses, classes, and grades that obscure the fact that most learning at school is either self-directed or informal.
• Vendors don’t make money from informal learning. Hence, it’s not promoted at conferences, in magazines, and through sales calls.
• The rapid pace of technological innovation and economic change almost guarantees that formal learning will be dated.
• One aspect of informal learning that makes it so powerful also makes the informal process forgettable: it often comes in small pieces.
• Who’s in charge of informal learning? Most of the time, it’s the individual worker. Another reason informal falls off the corporate radar.
• Most informal learning takes place in the “shadow organization,” oft described as “the way things really work,” as opposed to the boxes on the organization chart and their clearly delineated budgets.

Ottersurf’s Clark Quinn [5] notes that corporations invest in formal learning because it’s the one means they know – and know how to handle. “They’re still in the industrial model. Corporate learning lags the knowledge age and its associated technology. Sadly, this is a low priority with most CEO’s.”

How workers learn now

Think about a go-getter knowledge worker learns something new. [6]   The Training Department has been downsized. Even if it were at full strength, it’s unlikely Training would have much to offer on a new topic. So the worker checks Google or SlashDot or other resources on the web to see who’s got books or articles or blogs or case studies on her topic. In my case, I’d probably check the O’Reilly site since I maintain a virtual bookshelf there that gives me access to scads of technical books.

After the worker gets a sketchy framework of what’s to be learned, it’s time to dive in. Try things. Build on knowledge of similar subjects. Ask people in the office who’ve been there. Check with the technical equivalent of the jailhouse lawyer. The goal is not to master a subject area or pass a test; it’s to find out enough to dive into trial-and-error or to get the immediate job done. The worker doesn’t take off for a weeklong workshop; more likely, he picks up bits and pieces day-by-day for months.

This is self-directed learning, and that’s yet another reason it escapes notice. No one is responsible for toting up the learning every worker is engaged in. I wouldn’t be surprised if informal learning always outweighs formal learning in impact. Wonderful book title: All Learning is Self-Directed. [7]

At the beginning of this section, I said we were looking over the shoulder of a go-getter learner. Today, we’re in transition. Many learners are not self-directed; they are waiting for directions. It’s time to tell them that the rules have changed. It’s in their self interest to convert from training pawns to proactive learning opportunists.

Normally, I would not expect to get many chuckles from a 186-page report entitled Learning styles and pedagogy post-16 learning A systematic and critical review, 2004, by Frank Coffield, Institute of Education, University of London; David Moseley, University of Newcastle; Elaine Hall, University of Newcastle; Kathryn Ecclestone, University of Exeter. This is an exception.

This marvelously tongue-in-cheek report looks at 800 studies of learning styles and concludes that there are better uses for educational funding. “Learning style awareness is only a ‘cog in the wheel of the learning process’ and ‘it is not very likely that the self-concept of a student, once he or she has reached a certain age, will drastically develop by learning about his or her personal style’.”

The authors at the Learning and Skills Research Centre doubtless had a rollicking good time coming up with conclusions like “Research into learning styles can, in the main, be characterised as small-scale, non-cumulative, uncritical and inward-looking. It has been carried out largely by cognitive and educational psychologists, and by researchers in business schools and has not benefited from much interdisciplinary research.”

And how about this? “The sheer number of dichotomies in the literature conveys something of the current conceptual confusion. We have, in this review, for instance, referred to:

• convergers versus divergers
• verbalisers versus imagers
• holists versus serialists
• deep versus surface learning
• activists versus reflectors
• pragmatists versus theorists
• adaptors versus innovators
• assimilators versus explorers
• field dependent versus field independent
• globalists versus analysts
• assimilators versus accommodators
• imaginative versus analytic learners
• non-committers versus plungers
• common-sense versus dynamic learners
• concrete versus abstract learners
• random versus sequential learners
• initiators versus reasoners
• intuitionists versus analysts
• extroverts versus introverts
• sensing versus intuition
• thinking versus feeling
• judging versus perceiving
• left brainers versus right brainers
• meaning-directed versus undirected
• theorists versus humanitarians
• activists versus theorists
• pragmatists versus reflectors
• organisers versus innovators
• lefts/analytics/inductives/successive processors
• versus rights/globals/deductives/
• simultaneous processors
• executive, hierarchic, conservative versus legislative,
• anarchic, liberal.

“The sheer number of dichotomies betokens a serious failure of accumulated theoretical coherence and an absence of well-grounded findings, tested through replication. Or to put the point differently: there is some overlap among the concepts used, but no direct or easy comparability between approaches; there is no agreed ‘core’ technical vocabulary. The outcome – the constant generation of new approaches, each with its own language – is both bewildering and off-putting to practitioners and to other academics who do not specialise in this field.”

The question at the end of the 186-page report asks whether government doesn’t have better things to do with its money, “Finally, we want to ask: why should politicians, policy-makers, senior managers and practitioners in post-16 learning concern themselves with learning styles, when the really big issues concern the large percentages of students within the sector who either drop out or end up without any qualifications?”

Post 1   Post 2   Post 3   Post 4   Post 5

Post 1 People learn their jobs by doing their jobs. Effective managers make stretch
assignments and coach their team members. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape their teammembers’ experiences. Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn to do the job on the job. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The Coherent Organization. As standalone companies realize that they’re really extended enterprises, co-learning with customers and stakeholders becomes important as everyone faces the future together. Players throughout the corporate ecosystem need to be operating on the same wave-length. This can only happen when we’re adapting to the future, i.e. learning, at the same pace.Internally, everyone needs to stay current.

These posts offer guidance to managers who want to make learning from experience and conversation more effective. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management accelerates the development of future workers and gets the entireorganization working smarter. The potential is great.

Among the organizations that have adopted the 70:20:10 approach are Nike, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Mars, Maersk, Nokia, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, L’Oréal, Adecco, Banner Health, Bank of America, National Australia Bank, Boston Scientific, American Express, Wrigley, Diageo, BAE Systems, ANZ Bank, Irish Life, HP, Freehills, Caterpillar, Barwon Water, CGU, Coles, Sony Ericsson, Standard Chartered, British Telecom, Westfield, Wal-Mart, Parsons Brinkerhoff, and Coca-Cola.

Charles Jennings made 70:20:10 a guiding philosophy of learning during his eight-year tenure as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters, the world’s largest information company. (Disclosure: Charles and I are colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance. He is the world authority on 70:20:10 and these posts draw heavily on his work.)

Post 2 The 70 percent: learning from experience. People learn by doing. We learn from experience and achieve mastery through practice. Experience is a difficult task master. We learn more from making a mistake than from getting it right the first time. That’s why wise managers throw team members into stretch assignments. It accelerates learning. Being ejected from one’s comfort zone is why some say that the only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Matching the most appropriately challenging experience to the developmental stage of the worker is the most powerful lever in the manager’s toolbox.

Charles Jennings reports that performance inevitably improves when managers ask their team members these three simple reflective questions:

1. What are your reflections on what you’ve been doing since we last met.
2. What would you do differently next time?
3. What have you learned since we last met?

Post 3 The 20 percent: learning through others. Learning is social. People learn with and through others.

Conversations are the stem cells of learning. Effective managers encourage their team members to buddy up on projects, to shadow others and to participate in professional social networks. People learn more in an environment that encourages conversation, so make sure you’re fostering an environment where people talk to each other.

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a social network of people who identify with one another professionally (e.g. designers of logic chips) or have mutual interests (e.g. amateur photographers). Members of CoPs develop and share knowledge, values, recommendations and standards. An effective community of practice is like a beehive. It organizes itself, buzzes with activity and produces honey for the markets.

Post 4 Formal learning includes courses, workshops, seminars, online learning and certification training. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations aren’t using online learning to its full potential, and the results at those organizations reflect that. Learning expert Robert Brinkerhoff figures only about 15 percent of formal training lessons change behavior.¹² This is a reflection of both formal learning creation and of the lack of focus on experiential and exposure learning. If what we learn is not reinforced with reflection and application, the lessons never make it into long-term memory.

Formal learning is typically conducted by an instructor. So why do we address it in a paper on managers? Because managers can make or break the success of formal learning programs. Research has found that the most important factor in translating formal learning into improved performance is the expectation set by managers before the training takes place¹³. Understanding the needs of the learners and following up after the event are also essential for formal learning success.

Post 5 You will need to become a champion for the new approach to developing talent. You must convince your sponsor that managers and supervisors are the linchpins to developing new talent. Without them, the company could find itself with nobody on the bench to take on future challenges. For your career, this lead role is high risk/high reward.

Managers have to learn how to develop their people. It doesn’t always come naturally, and managers can get too busy to pay much attention to it. Let them know you don’t expect them to train their people. Rather, they will set examples for their team; they will foster experiential learning by leading their team to tackle new challenges (the 70), by helping them reflect on the lessons of experience and by coaching them at every step (the 20), and by showing them how to get formal learning on the subject (the 10).

The Learning and Development Roundtable of the Corporate Leadership Council pinpointed three management practices that significantly improve performance.

1. Setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.
2. Providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.
3. Taking time to reflect and help team members learn from experience.

Managers who set clear objectives and expectations and explain how they measure performance are much more likely to succeed. Their teams outperform their peers by 20%. That’s an extra day every week to get the job done (and engage in deep learning). Managers should make explicit why they’re assigning particular projects, what they expect people to learn and what sort of debrief will occur after the assignment.

The 70-20-10 model depends on L&D teaming up with managers to improve learning across the company, but often managers do not appreciate how vitally important they are in growing their people. This is the absolute, must-do secret to success to improving learning and development. Frontline managers must take this as the very definition of manager: someone who develops others by challenging them with assignments that stretch them to the point of flow¹⁷. This takes a can-do manager who knows how coaching creates mental models and habits, how motivation activates a chain of high-performance activities and what success habits their team members need to adopt.

Charles Jennings says that the role that managers play is far more important than that of Learning and Development or HR. Your role is to help managers learn that:

• People learn from experience.
• Managers shape the experience of the people on their team.
• Experience coupled with reflection sticks lessons in memory.
• Daily mid-course correction is much more powerful than after-the-fact reviews.
• Every project they assign is a potential learning experience for their team members.

#itashare

(Here are Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 4)

How to sell an executive on 70-20-10

Changing the role of managers is a wrenching organizational change. You will not be successful without the support of a senior management sponsor who can open doors to at all levels and help your make your case.

You will need to become a champion for the new approach to developing talent in the organization. You must convince your sponsor that managers and supervisors are the linchpin to developing new talent. Without them, the company could find itself with nobody on the bench to take on future challenges. For your career, this lead role is high risk/high reward.

Dan Pontefract, Head of Learning and Collaboration, TELUS, told us:

Leadership is for all, but front-line and middle managers hold the key to the actual development of individual contributors. The more we pay attention to this direct relationship, and the more senior leaders do everything they can to ensure the tools, resources and opportunities are at the fingertips of these managers to assist people who are at the heart of the customer experience, the
more likely we will be able to solve the rigidity of hierarchical management. Empower your people; let them help others learn how to learn. Let them be the sherpas of both employee and career development.

While every situation is different, we’ve found that it’s best to introduce 70-20-10 in a small department and use the successes and learnings from that department to spread the model to other areas

Your sponsor must help you convince managers of the importance of their role in growing people. Managers will need to make time to dedicate to developing their employees, but this doesn’t mean formal learning. You, the learning and development leader, must commit to helping managers get the know-how they need to take on a new, time-consuming — but ultimately fulfilling — responsibility.

Managers have to learn how to develop their people. It doesn’t always come naturally, and managers can get too busy to pay much attention to it.

Let them know you don’t expect them to train their people. Rather, they will set examples for their team; they will foster experiential learning by leading their team to tackle new challenges (the 70), by helping them reflect on the lessons of experience and by coaching them at every step (the 20), and by showing them how to get formal learning on the subject (the 10). This is how you make your learning program cohesive. This is a way for managers to delegate new assignments to strong team members and guide them to success, resulting in both a completed project and the development of the team. In the long run, the manager and the worker both perform more rewarding, higher-impact work and achieve more in less time.

The new management

You have to study, pass tests and be certified to be a plumber or accounting clerk. Management has no such barriers to entry. Few managers know the process for developing talent. Your job is to show them how.

Instead of designing programs to teach workers skills, you’ll be convincing managers to apply their experience and knowledge to coax workers to learn for themselves. No more coddling. Think of the “teach a man to fish” saying.

The Learning and Development Roundtable of the Corporate Leadership Council pinpointed three management practices that significantly improve performance.

1. Setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.
2. Providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.
3. Taking time to reflect and help team members learn from experience.

These three practices have more impact on performance than the L&D department’s traditional activity of teaching knowledge and skills!

Managers who set clear objectives and expectations and explain how they measure performance are much more likely to succeed. Their teams outperform their peers by 20%. That’s an extra day every week to get the job done (and engage in deep learning). Managers should make explicit why they’re assigning particular projects, what they expect people to learn and what sort of debrief will occur after the assignment.

If you’re going to make this happen, start developing and polishing a compelling elevator pitch. Give it a shot right now. Pick a few things from the following list and mash them up with your organization’s needs. Get it down to three minutes and commit it to memory.

• Our company’s demand for capable, can-do talent is insatiable.
• People learn to do complex jobs by doing them. Experience is the best teacher.
• Our front-line managers are the only people in a position to select and assign the stretch assignments that will challenge our people to become true professionals. Unfortunately, we’ve provided them scant guidance in how to carry out these responsibilities.
• We can put a new management practices in place that focus on working smarter, making people productive sooner, accelerating talent development and integrating learning and work.
• Instead of maximizing efficiency and avoiding irregularities, managers must create organizations that are more agile and human.
• The new role of management is to facilitate the discovery of solutions, not to dictate them.
• Training used to focus on requests to fill gaps. Now we will focus on building the workforce capability to support future organizational strategy.

In a survey of thousands of people at 51 global organizations, only 14 percent of executives said they would recommend working with L&D to a colleague. More than 50 percent said they’d advise colleagues not to waste their time talking with L&D¹⁴. Training has a bad reputation — better to suggest entrusting development to respected managers until that reputation has been repaired. If you lead the effort and succeed, you can help change this reputation.

Conclusion

The 70-20-10 model depends on L&D teaming up with managers to improve learning across the company, but often managers do not appreciate how vitally important they are in growing their people. This is the absolute, must-do secret to success to improving learning and development. Frontline managers must take this as the very definition of manager: someone who develops others by challenging them with assignments that stretch them to the point of flow¹⁷. This takes a can-do manager who knows how coaching creates mental models and habits, how motivation activates a chain of high-performance activities and what success habits their team members need to adopt.

Charles Jennings says that the role that managers play is far more important than that of Learning and Development or HR. Your role is to help managers learn that:

• People learn from experience.
• Managers shape the experience of the people on their team.
• Experience coupled with reflection sticks lessons in memory.
• Daily mid-course correction is much more powerful than after-the-fact reviews.
• Every project they assign is a potential learning experience for their team members.

Business managers ask if they should invest 70 percent in experiential learning, 20 percent in coaching and 10 percent in the classroom. The answer is no. 70-20-10 is a framework to kick-start thinking about where to focus your efforts. Depending on where you’re starting from, your needs will vary.

Understanding the 70-20-10 framework helps managers reflect on their own experience and provides a starting point for discussion with other managers.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws heavily on the work of Charles Jennings, a leading thinker and practitioner in human development, change management, performance improvement and learning. Charles is senior director of the Internet Time Alliance. He has deep experience in both the business and learning practitioner sides of learning and performance. He knows what works in the world of strategic talent and effective performance and productivity approaches.

Charles is the Founder of The 70:20:10 Forum, a global membership portal helping professionals implement the 70:20:10 framework to maximize performance and productivity. The Forum offers a vast repository of practical information and connects members with a vibrant global community of fellow practitioners. As part of its social responsibility, the Forum supports projects at Sreepur Village, a refuge in rural Bangladesh for destitute women as well as trafficked or abandoned children.

Another source of inspiration is Heather Rutherford, founder of Blended, an organizational learning solutions company. With a philosophy centered on the 70-20-10 framework, Blended supports clients in implementing a simple and powerful architecture supported by best-practice tools and resources to increase engagement, improve productivity, efficiency and performance.

About the Internet Time Alliance

The Internet Time Alliance helps clients understand and embrace complexity and adopt new ways of working and learning. We ask the tough questions and explore the underlying assumptions of how they do business. Then we work with them to develop strategies and plans for transformation and improvement. Email me for information on working with the Alliance.

About GoToTraining

Online Training Made Easy™

Citrix GoToTraining is an easy-to-use online training service that allows you to move your entire training program online for more efficient customer and employee training. To learn more, visit www.gototraining.com.

Citrix sponsored the research and writing of much of the material in this set of posts. Please visit CitrixOnline to see the original paper in its entirety.

About the author

Jay Cross is an author, advocate and raconteur who writes about workplace learning, leadership, organizational change, innovation, technology and the future. His educational white papers, articles and research reports persuade people to take action.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is currently researching the correlation of psychological well-being and performance on the job.

Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from UC Berkeley. People visit the Lab to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Does your company need substantive white papers and webinars like this? Get in touch.

(Here are Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3)

The 10: improving the outcomes of formal learning

Formal learning includes courses, workshops, seminars, online learning and certification training. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations aren’t using online learning to its full potential, and the results at those organizations reflect that. Learning expert Robert Brinkerhoff figures only about 15 percent of formal training lessons change behavior.¹² This is a reflection of both formal learning creation and of the lack of focus on experiential and exposure learning. If what we learn is not reinforced with reflection and application, the lessons never make it into long-term memory.

Only when all three learning components are implemented together will a learning and development department see superior results.

Formal learning is typically conducted by an instructor. So why do we address it in a paper on managers? Because managers can make or break the success of formal learning programs

Research has found that the most important factor in translating formal learning into improved performance is the expectation set by managers before the training takes place¹³. Understanding the needs of the learners and following up after the event are also essential for formal learning success.

Broad’s research highlights the fact that the manager’s expectations of the team’s performance and aptitude should closely align with the objectives and design of any formal learning course. Otherwise the course will be of little or no use.

Create an environment
that nurtures learning

Working through managers instead of through courses is a radical shift for learning and development.

Managers need to understand — and this is where senior management support is mandatory — that both L&D and the managers themselves are shifting responsibilities. Managers will be making 70-20-10 productive; L&D will be doing anything possible to increase performance and productivity.

Blended, a leading learning organization in Australia, has implemented 70-20-10 in many organizations. Blended asked companies “Which of the following is the main barrier to a leader-led learning culture in your organization?”

They responded:

1. Leaders do not have the time to perform a teaching/coaching role: 28 percent
2. Leaders lack teaching/coaching capabilities: 32 percent
3. The organization lacks formal performance expectations for leader-led learning: 28 percent

How would you rebut these responses? Like this:

1. This is not time away from the job. Rather, it’s ramping people up to do a better job. The time required for mentoring is offset by more delegation to subordinates and improvements in the way work is performed.
2. No one is asking managers to become teachers. Rather, the focus is on helping people perform better. This sort of coaching produces results.
3. If you don’t have performance expectations, this is a great time to set them. That’s one of the important areas in which we need senior executive support.

A word on motivating employees

People are naturally motivated to do things they find meaningful. The trick is that meaningful is subjective, so people have to find the work that they find personally meaningful — and often that changes over the course of a career. But when someone finds meaningful work, they take pride in accomplishment. They enjoy solving problems. They don’t shirk working for a cause they believe in.

Free workers to make their own decisions, give them a mission that’s greater than themselves and set high expectations. Establish targets and give workers the discretion to figure out how to reach them. Challenge them to learn how to be all they can be and get out of their way. Don’t take them by the hand unless they ask for it. Managers must challenge their people to be all they can be and give them the freedom to do it. Sell the managers on the 70-20-10 framework.

About the Internet Time Alliance

The Internet Time Alliance helps clients understand and embrace complexity and adopt new ways of working and learning. We ask the tough questions and explore the underlying assumptions of how they do business. Then we work with them to develop strategies and plans for transformation and improvement. Email me for information on working with the Alliance.

About GoToTraining

Online Training Made Easy™

Citrix GoToTraining is an easy-to-use online training service that allows you to move your entire training program online for more efficient customer and employee training. Hold unlimited online training sessions with up to 200 attendees from around the world right from your Mac or PC. Reach more trainees, collect real-time feedback, record and store your training sessions and more – all while slashing travel costs. To learn more, visit www.gototraining.com.

Citrix sponsored the research and writing of much of the material in this set of posts. Please visitCitrixOnline to see the original paper in its entirety.

About the author

Jay Cross is an author, advocate and raconteur who writes about workplace learning, leadership, organizational change, innovation, technology and the future. His educational white papers, articles and research reports persuade people to take action.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix. A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is currently researching the correlation of psychological well-being and performance on the job.

Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from UC Berkeley. People visit the Lab to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

Does your company need substantive white papers and webinars like this? Get in touch.

Brooks separates knowledge into technical knowledge and practical knowledge.

Technical Knowledge enables us to understand a field. These are basics like statistics or fundamentals of biology. You can find it in books. The faculty teaches it. In many cases, a MOOC or a robot could teach it. It’s the mainstay on campus.

Practical Knowledge is about being rather than knowing. It can’t be taught in the classrooms or books. You learn it through experience. You absorb it from your environment. You can pick it up from your communities of practice.

Examples of Practice Knowledge abound in Sheryl Sandberg’s recent book, “Lean In.” Says Brooks,

… tasks she describes as being important for anybody who wants to rise in this economy: the ability to be assertive in a meeting; to disagree pleasantly; to know when to interrupt and when not to; to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds; to attract mentors; to understand situations; to discern what can change and what can’t.

Brooks would have students master Practical Knowledge by leading the band or joining the debate club, something on campus. I think he’s off. Back to his “What is a university?” For most of us, the answer is “Not the best place to master Practical Knowledge for the workplace.”

What if we think of Technical Knowledge as explicit and Practical Knowledge as tacit?

• Technical Knowledge lays bare the intricacies of complicated concepts. It’s the facts. It’s clockwork models and the results they gin out time after time. Technical Knowledge deals with certainties and absolutes. In other words, it’s often theoretical and “not found in nature.”
• Practical Knowledge deals with complex, unpredictable, unruly patterns that emerge in real life. It is nature.

Caveat emptor. This next part is speculation on my part. I’m looking for corroboration.

The world is growing more complex. Outsourcing and automation have eliminated work that is merely complicated. The more interconnections in network, the greater the complexity, and the tendrils of networks everywhere are intertwining at a surreal pace.

Things kicked into high gear in the last twenty years of the twentieth century. Between 1980 and 2000, the value of the publicly traded companies flip-flopped from 80% tangible assets to 80% intangible assets.

This is an astounding change. Think about it. Most of a company’s worth had been in hard assets: plant, equipment, and cash. Two decades later, most of a company’s worth was in relationships, know-how, and secret sauce — things you can’t even see.

Many managers haven’t seen the light yet. Look at their allegiance to accounting measures that have less and less meaning in the real world. They righteously demand “hard numbers.” Those are the numbers that don’t mean to much any more.

As the world becomes more complex, are we not in the midst of another phase change? Might it be that the university heyday when explicit knowledge was king, is giving way to a new world where skills for navigating complexity rule?

If you can’t increase your social intelligence at college, isn’t it time to go somewhere else to get it?

The Times also reported that Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break. Seems that elite MOOC consortium EdX is experimenting with automated essay grading. Skeptics of course came out of the woodwork. Anant Agarwal, the EdX chief, points out that the grading software begins by learning how professors would grade; then it gives students instant grades and an opportunity to improve.

That latter bit — instant feedback and opportunity to resubmit a stronger essay — has lots of promise.

The skeptics are fighting a pitched battle. Traditional grades, having to do only with Technical Knowledge, are not correlated to any measure of success outside of schools. A system can’t do much worse than that.

There’s also the myth of the learnèd professor working away into the wee hours marking papers. I’m sure this happens some places but it wasn’t the way things worked at Harvard Business School when I went there. I have reason to know.

Several of my papers were rejected. These were WACs, Written Assessment of Cases. When I explained my logic to my professors, they said my arguments were brilliant and original. In fact, my ideas were so original that they didn’t appear on the grading checklists given to the Radcliffe students who actually graded the papers. I’m not saying every prof did this nor do I know how it works today, but an automated system might be an improvement. #justsayin

The User Illusion, Cutting Consciousness Down to Size

Key: We’re primarily nonconscious. Shorthand: conscious self = “I”; unconscious self = “me” Training and preparation are key to any performance. The most important thing about training is that the I comes to trust the Me. The I learns to believe that the Me can feel the emotion and carry out the movement. Training creates a quantity of automatic skills that can be applied without the need for awareness that they are being so used. The I’s beady eye is there during the training but not during the performance proper.

Consciousness is at once the most immediately present and the most inscrutably intangible entity in human existence. Consciousness lags what we call reality.

Consciousness is riddled with deceit and self-deception. The conscious I is happy to lie up hill and down dale to achieve a rational explanation for what the body is up to; sensual perception is the result of a devious relocation of sensory input in time; when the consciousness thinks it determines to act, the brain is already working on it; there appears to be more than one version of consciousness present in the brain; our conscious awareness contains almost no information but is perceived as if it were vastly rich in information.

This is a profound book, particularly for someone like me who spends too much time “in his head.” Most of what we consider learning, from ISD to multiple-choice, focuses almost exclusively on the oversimplified, civilized, linear constructs of consciousness.

Trust the force. (The unconscious.)Could the effects of a little nonsconsciousness creeping into the conscious realm help account for ADD and schizophrenia?

Computation

Information is very tedious. What is interesting is getting rid of it-—and that means discarding it.

• Gödel goes from the old paradox of “I’m lying” to “I cannot be proved.” Consistency and freedom from contradiction can never be proved from within a system. Unprovability and undecidability are fundamental features of our world. We can know that it is order when we see it. But we cannot know that it is not order just because we cannot see it—and no mathematics, logic, or computers can help us. Order is order. The rest is undecided.

• Information is associated with entropy, a measure of thermodynamic disorder.

• Information cannot be defined without knowing the context. Not because there is anything wrong with our notion of information, but because the notions of order and randomness necessarily include an element of subjectivity.

There is a terrain between order and chaos: a vast undiscovered continent—-the continent of complexity. Complexity appears midway between the predictable and the unpredictable, the stable and the unstable, the periodic and the random, the hierarchical and the flat, the closed and the open. Between what we can count on and what we cannot.

• Complexity is to be measured not by the length of the message but by the work carried out previously. The meaning does not arise from the information in the message but arises from the information discarded during the process of formulating the message, which has a specific information content. What matters is not saying as much as you can. It is thinking before you speak.

“Exformation” and the richness of information remind me of the operations of compression algorithms. The more information, the longer it takes to create a ZIP archive. Compression from nonconscious to conscious is extreme, much heavier than compressing an image to jpeg at 1%. Nonconscious compression sands down all the rough edges found in the original.

Communication

Talking & exformation

• From congé, Victor Hugo wired his publisher about the success of Les Miserables, “?” His publisher replied “!” The important part is what was explicitly discarded, the “exformation.” A message has depth if it contains a large quantity of exformation.
• Exformation is the history of the message, information the product of that history. Each is meaningless without the other; information without exformation is vacuous chatter; exformation without information is not exformation but merely discarded information.
• The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously during conversation in the heads and bodies of the conversers.

The Bandwidth of Consciousness

• What we perceive at any moment is limited to an extremely smart compartment in the stream of information about our surroundings flowing in from the sense organs. Our consciousness processes about a millionth of the information it receives. Metaphorically, consciousness is a spotlight that shows but a tiny fraction of what’s on stage.
• Consciousness consists of discarded information far more than information present.
• Consciousness possesses peerless agility, but at any given moment you are not conscious of much at all. To be aware of an experience means that it has passed.
• Human bandwidth is ±16 bits/second. The rate varies with age:

“All these numbers are approximations,” but there’s a giant mismatch of input to consciousness no matter how you slice it:

Impression à Consciousness à Expression

The Bomb of Psychology

In 1957, an enterprise named Precon Process and Equipment Corporate, in New Orleans, started offering the placement of subliminal messages in advertisements and movies—messages not perceived by consciousness but containing sufficient influence to get somebody to pay for their being there. Messages that work unconsciously or preconsciously, hence Precon. Backlash stunted pscyhological research for years.

Drink Coca-Cola

When the case reopened, scientists found that the unconscious is not merely a morass of repressed sexual desires and forbidden hatred. The unconscious is an active, vital part of the human mind. One canlearn form a stimulus that is so brief that one does not perceive it. A large number of social judgments and inferences, especially those guiding first impressions, appear to be mediated by such unconscious processes.

A person perceiving a familiar object is not aware that what is perceived is as much an expression of memory as it is of perception. Thinking itself is highly unconscious. In The Stream of Thought, William James noted that consciousness “is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.”

The View from Within

Computers find it easy to do what we learned at school. But computers have a very hard time learning what children learn before they start school: to recognize a cup that is upside down, recognizing a face,seeing.

Richard Gregory: “Our sight really consists of a hypothesis, an interpretation of the word. We do not see the data in front of our eyes; we see an interpretation.” And, “The senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence for the checking of hypotheses about what lies before us. Indeed, we may say that the perceptions of an object is an hypothesis.” We see a configuration (in German, gestalt). We do not see what we sense. We see what we think we sense.

Pablo Picasso was once asked why he did not pain people “the way they really are.” Picasso asked the questioner what he meant. The man pulled a snapshot of his wife out of his wallet and said, “That’s my wife.” Picasso responnded, “Isn’t she rather small and flat?”

Kant distinguished between things as they are, Das Ding an sich, and things as we know them, Das Ding für uns. A study of frogs showed that “the eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light on the receptors.” Visual input passes through the thalamus before getting to the cortex.

attention. The essence of consciousness of the outside world. When a number of nerve cells oscillate in synchrony at forty hertz, this is attention.

Consciousness

Our actions begin unconsciously! Consciousness of the will to carry out an act decided on by ourselves occurs almost half a second after the brain has started carrying out the decision. Consciousness portrays itself as the initiator but it is a fraud – which requires considerable cooking of the temporal books.

Free will operates through selection, not design (It can veto.)

Man is not primarily conscious. We are not conscious of very much of what we sense, what we think, or what we do. We’re primarily nonconscious.

Shorthand: conscious self = “I”; unconscious self = “me”

Training and preparation are key to any performance. The most important thing about training is that the I comes to trust the Me. The I learns to believe that the Me can feel the emotion and carry out the movement. Training creates a quantity of automatic skills that can be applied without the need for awareness that they are being so used. The I’s beady eye is there during the training but not during the performance proper.

(Ref: The Inner Game of Tennis. “When you short-circuit the mind by giving it an ‘overload’ of things to deal with, it has so many things to attend to that it no longer has time to worry. The “I” checks out and lets the “me” check in. Also, this is what Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is all about.)

The social field is established through agreements, social contracts, entered into verbally. So the cohesive force in our social life is something with a very low capacity or bandwidth.

Spirituality merely involves taking your own life seriously by getting to know yourself and your potential. This is no trivial matter, for there are quite a few unpleasant surprises in most of us. The dominant psychological problem of modern culture is that its members do not want to accept that there is a Me beyond the I. The Me is everything the I cannot accept: It is unpredictable, disorderly, willful, quick, and powerful.

“placebo” = “I want to please”

The User Illusion

Studies of split-brain patients show that the I lies like crazy to create a coherent picture of something it does not understand in the slightest. We lie our way to the coherence and consistency we perceive in our behavior. (It’s like making up logical explanations for a dream or filling in the missing portions of a fuzzy picture.)

What we experience directly is an illusion, which presents interpreted data as if they were raw. It is this illusion that is the core of consciousness: the world experienced in a meaningful, interpreted way. If there were not half a second in which to synchronize the inputs, we might experience a jitter in our perception of reality. I am my user illusion of myself.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, Princeton, 1976. >3,000 years ago, consciousness did not exist. All the nonlinguistic activity in the right brain was passed on to the left brain in the form of voices talking inside people’s heads. There was no independent reflective activity in people’s heads.

The body is in a state of interaction with the world. We eat, drink, and dispatch matter back into the cycle of nature. In no more than five years, practically every atom in the organiism gets replaced. The vast majority of atoms are replaced far more often. Identity, body structure, appearance, and consciousness are preserved—but the atoms have gone. The feeling of individual continuity is real enough, but it has no material foundation.

Composure

The dominant theme of our times is consciousness regaining composure through the recognition of the nonconscious; computer formalism regaining composure through the recognition of unpredictability; descriptions regaining composure through the recognition of what is being described; the low bandwidth regaining composure through the recognition of the high bandwidths.

Interesting things happen when and where order meets chaos. People live on coasts, rivers, mountain chains, mountain passes, near boundaries. Neat the transition from one element to another.

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. But that is what we are consciously trying to do with the artificial lives we live in our technological civilization.

Most of the world has to be described through nonlinear mathematics—i.e., formulae and forms that are not regular and smooth but marked by the fact that the tiniest change can lead to a huge difference, because things bend and break everywhere. Our civilization is completely different from nature. Civilization is about attaining predictability; and predictability is the opposite of information, because information is a measure of the surprise value of a message: the astoundment it unleashes.

Zeno’s paradoxes. An arrow flying through the air. At any given instant, where is it? Stopped or moving? The impossibility of the question is the result of trying to split time and space into an infinitely divisible continuum.

The balance between the linear and the nonlinear is a major challenge for civilization. In the final analysis, it is closely related to the challenge of finding the balance between the conscious and the nonconscious. After all the difference between consciousness and nonconsciousness is precisely that there is very little information in consciousness. It can therefore apprehend only straight lines, having trouble with crooked ones, which contain far too much information.

The tendency of civilization toward linearity is therefore precisely the power of consciousness over nonconsciousness; the power of projection over spontaneity; the power of the gutter over the raindrop. The straight line is the medium of planning, will, and decision. The crooked line is the medium of sensory perception, improvisation, and abandon.

The I is linear; the Me is nonlinear. The social domain, the conversational domain, tends to be linear, unalloyed chatter. The personal domain, the domain of sensory perception, is more able to preserve the nonlinear.

Art seeks out the nonlinear; science the linear. The computer demolishes the difference, because it gives consciousness the ability to convert large quantities of information by machine.

Information society presents a lack of information. For just as there is far too little information in a linear city, there is far too little information in information society—a society where more people’s jobs are performed body, mind, and soul via the low bandwidth of language. Where artisans in the past used to possess vast tacit knowledge of materials and processes and crops, they now have to relate to consciously designed technical solutions presented via computer interface. Sensory poverty is on its way to becoming a major problem in society, provoking a cry for meaning amidst the flow of information. Man has moved down to a lower bandwidth, and he is getting bored. Consciousness is taking man over: The straight line is vanquishing the crooked one, and the amount of information in life is getting too small.

I used to filter many concepts and value judgments through the left brain/right brain metaphor. The more important distinction is what’s conscious and what’s not. CBT, PI, ID, and the like all embody the reductionism and oversimplification of consciousness. “Objective” tests are 100% reductio ad absurdum.

The Sublime

Information is a measure of unpredictability, disorder, mess, chaos, amazement, indescribabilty, surprise, otherness. Order is a measure of the opposite.

Consciousness does not consist of very much information and regards itself as order. It is proud that by discarding information it can reduce all the disorder and confusion around it to simple, predictable laws for the origin of phenomena.

Civilization consists of social and technological organization that rids our lives of information. As civilization has progressed, it has enabled the withdrawal of consciousness from the world.

It has enabled a worldview in which the acknowledged picture of the world is identified with the world; where the map is identified with the terrain; where the I denies the existence of the Me; where all otherness is disclaimed, except in the form of a divine principle; where man can live only if he believes that the otherness is also good.

But consciousness has also reached the age of composure. Through conscious studies of man and his consciousness, it has become clear that man is much more than his consciousness. It has become clear that people perceive far more than consciousness knows; that people do far more than consciousness knows. The simulation of the world about us, which we experience and believe is the world itself, is made possible only through systematic illusions and reductions that result from discarding most of the unpredictable otherness that imbued the world outside us.

Inside us, in the person who carries consciousness around, cognitive and mental processes take place that are far richer than consciousness can know or describe. Our bodies contain a fellowship with a surrounding world that passes right through us, in through our mouths and out the other end, but is hidden from our consciousness.

Consciousness is a wonderful creation, brought about by biological evolution on earth. An eternal awareness, a bold interpretation, a life-giving measure. But consciousness is about to retain composure by appreciating that it does not master the world; that an understanding of simple rules and principles of predictability in the world does not provide the possibility of guessing what the world is like.

Reposted from review in 2002.

Join me for an hour on the last day of April to explore how to make learning stick. Register. I’ve unearthed some exciting material about how people convert learning to action in the workplace — how to make it stick.

You folks know so much about how to increase the productivity of learning. Something old, something new, something small, something larger… for the most part, you have recipes that make learning more profitable and pleasant. I don’t want to overlook stuff that’s easy to do and particularly effective. Help me out; win a prize.

Share your secret sauce in a comment below (or email me if you must).

Prizes

On April 30, I’ll award a copy of a book I really liked (or wrote) to a baker’s dozen of participants:

1. Informal Learning by Jay Cross
2. A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown
3. Working Smarter Fieldbook by Jay Cross
4. Implementing eLearning by Jay Cross
5. Engaging Learners by Clark Quinn
6. Social Learning Handbook by Jane Hart
7. The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner
8. The Connected Company by Dave Gray
9. Now You See It by Cathy Davidson
10. Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
11. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
12. The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management by Stephen Denning
13. Designing mLearning by Clark Quinn

Harbinger will also give away software. Raptivity

He wanted to be able to read messages and make emergency phone calls. Wednesday morning Uta went online to look at AT&T international calling plans. The three phones on our plan had worked in the UK, Switzerland, and Italy last year. AT&T’s services had changed since our trips abroad.

Uta called AT&T for further information. An AT&T rep in International Calling told her Austin would not be able to make calls on his phone. “But he has the latest Galaxy,” she explained. Again and again, the rep said international service was not available on that line. My wife said she did not understand. The rep repeatedly said my son would not be able to make international calls from his phone. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?” she asked repeatedly. Finally, when the International Calling representative could not explain further, she hung up and went to the local AT&T store.

A representative at the store looked up our accounts and mentioned international calling plans. Uta said she didn’t want a new plan. austin’s problem is that he was not even receiving calls on his phone. He wanted reception and a way to make pay-per-use calls.

All Austin needed was reception and an option of making pay-per-call calls. Besides, he was on a short trip and that was half over.

The rep advised that Austin remove the battery and put it back in to reboot the phone. Go to settings, check for local providers. Uta emailed Austin, who had already rebooted the phone. Settings showed eight providers. Nonetheless, he was getting no reception.

Thursday morning Uta called the rep at the store. She admitted that this sounded like an AT&T issue, not something wrong with the hardware. She checked with her manager and called back to say Austin’s phone needed expanded international roaming allowance.

All Uta needed to do was call Customer Care and request this free option.

An hour later, Uta received an automated email asking her to call an 800 number. The number was an automated voice telling her how to activate her Go-Phone, requesting her confirmation, and requesting she replace her SIM card. She called the store to ask what was going on. The rep confirmed this was an authentic AT&T mail but had no idea why we’d received it. (Go Phones do not require outside activation.) The rep could not identify who sent the superfluous email.

Uta called Customer Care about the mysterious email. They couldn’t explain it either, but as long as we’re talking could Customer Care help us expand Austin’s international roaming alliance?

Certainly, she was told three times, Customer Care could sell us an international calling plan. No, that’s not what we’re after. By this time, Uta could recite the international calling plan specs better than the AT&T reps. They could not even say whether international calling applied to Hong Kong and Seoul. Some said yes; others said maybe. Customer Care only offered the option of for-fee international calling plans.

Friday, the next day, Uta called Customer Care again. She reached a helpful fellow named Evan. As with every new contact at AT&T, she had to recount the entire story from scratch. AT&T apparently does not document customer calls.

Evan said he would call International Calling and request the “expanded international roaming allowance.” the right person to deal with this while Uta was on the line. Evan turned us over to Kershe Rumph in International Calling. Kershe understood what we were asking for: Expanded international roaming, free, not a new plan. He added the feature to Austin’s line. He said Austin would only need to recycle his phone.

Uta asked if Kershe could switch her line to international roaming, too. Kershe said he would do that and confirm by email. His email the next day mentioned only Austin’s line.

During the call with Kershe Rumph, Uta pointed out that we’d gotten reception overseas last fall. Why did we no longer have international roaming? “Because it has to be added,” she was told. Uta pointed out that we had international service last year. Kershe told her that they only add the service during sweeps of many accounts.

Why did Jay’s iPhone have international roaming but the others not? Uta was told my phone had been automatically updated in a sweep in November 2012.

This is balderdash. In November, I had purchased a new iPhone from Apple. Were our other lines deactivated for international calling at this time? Was neutering our phone retaliation for buying from Apple instead of AT&T? I’ll probably never know.

On Friday afternoon, Austin emailed Uta that his phone was working.

Uta had invested three days learning AT&T’s confusing terminology and retelling the same story over and over.

How does she feel about the experience?

She became very angry when the International Calling guy told her over and over that Austin’s line could not work internationally. What? Why? How is this possible? Again and again, the rep could provide no information.

Here’s a formula for stress: Feeling helpless when encountering stories that are at odds with one another. The feature might cost something or then again it might not. International might include Korea and Hong Kong or then again it might not. Receiving a spurious email without a way to contact the sender and with clearly inappropriate content. Frustration with dealing with an illogical, dysfunctional system.

I did my best to provide an explanation for what might be going on. Half of America’s workforce is disengaged. They don’t care whether they serve the customer or not. Judging from their service level, I suspect AT&T hires more than its share of the disengaged workforce. Also, AT&T either lacks or doesn’t use any form of Customer Relationship Management system.

AT&T people don’t know their products. Their knee-jerk response to service outages is to try to sell another product. How many people do they dupe into buying international calling plans by cutting off the free international call-per-call option and offering a recurring “plan” instead? I will forward a copy of this paper to the FCC to make sure they’re aware of the practice.

Clearly something is off when only one AT&T rep out of half a dozen can fulfill a simple request. This is a failure of leadership. By chance, I happen to have met the head of leadership training for AT&T; we spoke on a panel together. I’ll forward this to him, too. Perhaps leadership training could use this as a case study. AT&T has my permission to use this for those purposes.

My mantra for management is “Delight the customer.” This is not how.

Start here and then go back to the beginning.

I’d been trying to reconcile Dan Pink’s bi-cameralism and other’s put-downs. The Divided Mind clarifies it.