The point of preference

I often miss webinars.

That might be because it was delivered at 3:00am local time, or during a manic working day, or after hours when frankly I’m not in the mood.

So I’m grateful when the event is recorded and I can play it back later. But, more often than not, I don’t do that either.

There’s just something about a 1-hour recording that turns me off. Unless the topic is irresistible, it’s too easy to move on to more pressing matters.

I’d rather read a summary of the key points – and according to the likes received by my recent tweet and the results of a poll I ran on LinkedIn, I’m not alone. In this era of time poverty and relentless distractions, it’s no surprise.

Yet there are good reasons to watch the footage. As Anna Sabramowicz points out, “Taking notes makes me remember the key points more, plus there’s so much nuance in the language people use, a summary might just diminish that. Context matters of course!” Indeed it does.

Of course there are no wrong answers here. Your preference is your prerogative, after all. And it is this point of preference that I maintain is missed in the discourse about learning styles.

As any L&D professional worth their salt will know, there is no weight of evidence to support the widely disseminated notion that some people learn more effectively visually, while others learn more effectively verbally. Case in point, whether I read a text or watch a video about a certain topic, I’d be confident to nail a quiz about it, so the mode of delivery doesn’t really matter.

However, empirical research in the educational domain is usually based on what L&D pro’s with a dark sense of humour would call a “captive audience”. Whether it’s a high school exam, a university assessment, or perhaps a mandatory online module, the participants are compelled to participate.

But as the 70:20:10 model attests, this does not represent the real world most of the time – especially in the corporate sector. In this largely informal learning environment, the mode of delivery does matter because the decision to participate rests with the individual.

In other words, regardless of some people’s preference to read text over watching a video, they’ll learn just fine by watching the video. It’s just that they’ll probably choose not to. So in the absence of the text, they’ll end up not learning anything.

The upshot is that if you’re a webinar producer, you could be failing to meet the needs of the majority of your target audience. Use the results of my research (as unscientific as it is) as an incentive to write up summaries for those who want them. As Donald Clark points out, “AI can do it all in seconds… and will.” So there’ll be no excuse.

And if you’re smart about it, the information you share in the summary will compel us to play the video.

Crazy Eight

Is it just me or is every year a “big year”…?

Well 2018 marked a decade of blogging by yours truly, and that alone is something that I’m proud of.

Throughout the highs and lows that life gifted me this year, I was able to share another 8 thought bubbles in addition to my annual list of conferences.

I call them my Crazy Eight and I recall them here for your enjoyment and critique…

1. Battle scars – We can’t fight an “ism” with yet more ism.

2. 25 more real-world examples of Virtual Reality – Yes, VR is being used in the real world.

3. My decade of provocation – 10 years ago I made one of the best decisions of my professional life.

4. The foundations of innovation in L&D – The 70:20:10 model informs the building blocks of long-term efficiency, flexibility and creativity.

5. The best of both worlds – I love Design Thinking because it’s evidence based and it delivers.

6. Gift horses – Let’s empower the experts whom we have hired to practise their expertise.

7. Back to the future – Add these museums to your bucket list.

8. Figure it out – Instead of being the expert who knows the solution, be the one who solves the problem.

I’d be delighted if you were to add a comment to one or two of the above, either in support or offering a constructive alternative point of view.

In the meantime, I wish you joy and safety over the Christmas season, and here’s to a big 2019!

The foundations of innovation in L&D

There are two sides of the innovation coin in corporate learning & development: technology and pedagogy.

The former is rather obvious and is often conflated with the term innovation. Futuristic hardware and magical software that educates everyone at the press of a button are tempting “solutions”. Some folks call this mindset Shiny New Toy Syndrome, and by golly, it’s a pandemic.

The latter is less obvious because it involves thinking, and I’m not being facetious when I say that thinking is hard. Traditional ways of learning in the workplace are, by definition, ingrained in the psyche of the vast majority of the workforce. Changing the concept of how we learn and redefining how we can help people do it better involve shifting the organisation’s culture, and that is a challenge greater than any IT implementation.

I see technology as an enabler of the pedagogical outcome, rather than it being the outcome per se. And just as we must learn to walk before we can run, so too must an organisation lay the foundations of innovation before it can reach for the stars. Though not as sexy as their more tweeted-about alternatives, these foundations are the building blocks of long-term efficiency, flexibility and creativity.

So what are the foundations of innovation in L&D?

I will hereby attempt to answer this question by looking through the lens of the 70:20:10 model. Whereas previously I have advocated this approach when designing a solution for a specific learning objective, this time I’m elevating the approach to the strategic level, with a view to designing a future-proofed solution for all the organisation’s learning objectives.

The 70

From the get-go, a false idol that must fall is the belief that the role of the L&D department is to create all the training to meet the organisation’s learning needs. These needs are so diverse within and across all the different job roles that the task is an almost comical impossibility.

Moreover, a large proportion of these needs is generic; despite what many organisations think, they’re not that special. Analytics is analytics. Decision making is decision making. Difficult conversations are difficult conversations. The nature of such content is universal.

So my first building block is a third-party content library. There are many players in this space, and sure it makes sense to pick one that matches your organisation’s profile, but their pedagogical purpose is the same: to provide your people with immediate access to an extensive suite of learning assets, covering a broad range of topics, on demand. Such a resource empowers self-directed learning which, in the language of 70:20:10, can be done on the job, just in time.

Another false idol to fall is the myth that all the information we need is at our fingertips. Clearly, not all our needs are generic. The organisation is special in the sense that has its own products, processes, systems, policies, etc, which a third party will never cover.

So my second building block is an in-house knowledge base. Whether the underlying technology is an intranet, CMS or wiki, again the pedagogical purpose is the same: to provide your people with on-demand access to bespoke content that improves performance.

The 20

Despite the best intentions of a content library and a knowledge base, they will never meet every conceivable learning need. An enterprise social network covers the “in-betweens”, principally by empowering everyone to ask their own questions to the crowd, and to keep abreast of emergent knowledge in the moment.

The 10

The building blocks in the 70 and the 20 spearhead an informal first approach to learning and development which lifts a mountain of weight off the shoulders of the L&D team. Freed from the burden of training everything, we can now focus our attention on what should be trained.

Furthermore, these building blocks enable change in the nature of the training. With the bulk of the content hosted elsewhere, it doesn’t need to be shovelled into the course. The class can be flipped, the narrative pared back to its key messages, and a scenario-based design adopted to train not the content, but its application.

In this way, the training becomes performance oriented.

By no means do these building blocks exhaust the 70:20:10 model, nor do they represent the extent of innovation in L&D. Rather, they form the bedrock of further innovation.

For example:

• User-generated content has a home, not only where it can be housed, but also where it can be governed.
• Blended learning goes beyond pre-work online modules by integrating social activity and ongoing performance support.
• Corporate MOOCs have a delivery vehicle.
• Micro-learning and micro-assessments have a rich source of reference content to which remedial feedback can link.
• If the content library, knowledge base and ESN are mobile accessible, they support mobile learning.
• Any reduction in training volume creates more space to explore emerging technologies such as AI, VR and AR.
• An orderly, structured L&D service offering provides the basis for a proper consideration of the value that a next-generation learning management system may add (or not).

So while I remain an advocate of ad hoc innovation, I see it as a necessity in the absence of a plan. My preference is a much more strategic approach, bedding down what matters most to meet the immediate needs of the business, prior to building additional innovative initiatives that stand firmly on that foundation.

In this way, not only do we innovate now, but we have a platform for innovating into the future.

Cognitive Reality

Yet another year has come and gone at the speed of light!

For me, 2016 has been the year in which the Virtual Reality rubber finally met the road, while Augmented Reality made a surprise splash into the mainstream via those pesky Pikachu.

As a consequence, VR & AR dominated much of my blogging attention this year. But they weren’t the be-all-and-end-all of the e-learning universe. Plenty of other topics occupied my mind, from 70:20:10 and 3D printing to the extended enterprise and our universally despised compliance training regime.

I hope you found something useful among my musings, and I invite you to catch up on any that you may have missed…

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

• Paper cuts

• 20 real-world examples of Virtual Reality

• Educate everyone

• Good gear

• The future of entertainment

• 3 uses of Virtual Reality in workplace education

• Pokémon whoa!

Other stuff

• 70:20:10 for trainers

• The 70:20:10 lens

• Clarifying the extension

• A use for 3D Printing in the corporate sector

• Our secret world of learning

• How to fix our senseless compliance training

• Psst…! 10 more tips for sales reps

• Constructive criticism of Coursera

To those who celebrate Christmas, I wish you a merry one, and I look forward to reconnecting with everyone in 2017.

The 70:20:10 lens

In 70:20:10 for trainers I advocated the use of the 70:20:10 model by L&D professionals as a lens through which to view their instructional design.

The excellent comments on my post, and insightful blog posts by others – notably Mark Britz, Clark Quinn and Arun Pradhan – have prompted me to think deeper about my premise.

I continue to reject the notion that 70:20:10 is a formula or a goal, because it is not a model of what “should be”. For example, we needn’t assign 70% of our time, effort and money on OTJ interventions, 20% on social learning, and 10% on formal training. Similarly, we shouldn’t mandate that our target audience aligns its learning activity according to these proportions. Both of these approaches miss the point.

The point is that 70:20:10 is a model of what “is”. Our target audience does undertake 70% of its learning on the job, 20% via interacting with others, and 10% off the job (or thereabouts). Mark Britz calls it a principle. It’s not right and it’s not wrong. It just is.

Our role then as L&D professionals is to support and facilitate this learning as best we can. One of the ways I propose we do this is by using 70:20:10 as a lens. By this I mean using it as a framework to structure our thinking and prompt us on what to consider. Less a recipe citing specific ingredients and amounts, more a shopping basket containing various ingredients that we can use in different combinations depending on the meal.

For this purpose I have created the following diagram. To avoid the formula trap, I decided against labelling each segment 70, 20 and 10, and instead chose their 3E equivalents of Experience, Exposure and Education. For the same reason, I sized each segment evenly rather than to scale.

Using the framework at face value is straight-forward. Given a learning objective, we consider whether a course or a resource may be suitable; whether a social forum might be of use; if matching mentees with mentors would be worthwhile. Perhaps it would be helpful to develop some reference content, or provide a job aid. When looking through the lens, we see alternatives and complements beyond the usual event-based intervention.

Yet we can see more. Consider not only the elements in the framework, but also the interactions between them. For example, in our course we could assign an on-the-job task to the learners, and ask them to share their experiences with it on the ESN. In the language of the framework, we are connecting education to experience, which in turn we connect to exposure. Conversely we can ask workshop attendees to share their experiences in class (connecting experience to education) or encourage them to call out for project opportunities (connecting exposure to experience). The possibilities for integrating the elements are endless.

Those who see L&D as the arbiter of all learning in the workplace may find all this overwhelming. But I see L&D as a support function. To me, 70:20:10 is not about engineering the perfect solution. It’s about adding value to what already happens in our absence.