Once upon a time, we were rewarded for the clarity and depth of our thought. I do not wish to reminisce about the past, but the value of thought seems to have diminished or disappeared.

In meetings, we spend most of our time discussing personal and professional objectives, constructing agenda, devising action items, and congratulating each other for a job well done. We take care to limit discussion and maintain focus. There simply is no time to question, no time to explore. Just keep moving.

I recognize that speed is the order of the day and that success requires the coordinated efforts of large numbers of people from a variety of disciplines. Does this mean that we no longer have the luxury of thinking things through?

What about the value of spirited discussion, sharing ideas, playing with thoughts, and generating new and better approaches? Do our structured processes allow for these? Can we still engage in creative disagreement, or are we too fearful of saying something negative or questioning closely held values?

Instead, we have become champions of hot trends and breakthrough concepts. We construct Big, Hairy, and Audacious Goals (BHAG), organize Tiger teams, and when all fails, organize and store our thoughts in electronic databases.

Times change and hopefully we can learn to better balance our doing with productive thinking.

No one wakes up in the middle of the night with a burning desire to use a decision support system, but they sure as heck would like to make better business decisions.

We use computers to get things done.

When you simply teach someone how to use a software application divorced from the job itself, you are relying upon the users to transform that knowledge into better job performance and it usually doesn’t work.

Here’s why.

• Most people don’t do their job all that well in the first place.
• Few can agree upon the best ways to perform their duties.
• Even fewer possess the mental magic to determine how to redesign their jobs when their tools change.
• Chances are also that none of them has a crystal ball to determine what management had in mind in the first place.

I recommend observing a few “experts.” Watch them closely. Take good notes and ask lots of questions. Don’t be afraid to slow them down and ask them what they are doing and why they are doing it. Be sure to determine if they always do it the same way, how and when they do it differently, and how they know when it’s done well.

If you are training people to use a new computer application, your job is a little tougher. You probably need to team an expert in the application with an expert in the job and allow them plenty of time to work together.

Good luck and I hope this helps!

Think back on how you learned how to walk and talk. You did something, experienced the consequences, and choose to either continue, or try something new. What allows us to master new skills is getting involved in our own learning and then reflecting on how that went. Experience and reflection teaches us more than any manual or lecture ever could.

In the book Experiential Learning, David Kolb describes learning as a four-step process. He identified the steps as watching, thinking, feeling, and doing.  Kolb drew primarily on the works of John Dewey (who emphasized the need for learning to be grounded in experience), Kurt Lewin (who stressed the importance of being active in our own learning), and Jean Piaget (who described intelligence as the result of our interaction our environment).

For instruction to be effective, we need to perceive information, reflect on how the information will influence some aspect of our life, compare how it fits into our own experiences, and then think about how this information offers new ways for us to act.

Most educators understand the important role experience plays in the learning process. A fun learning environment, with plenty of laughter and respect for our individual abilities, also fosters an effective experiential learning environment. In order for us to retain what we have learned, we need to be encouraged to get directly involved in our own education. According to the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius, “tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand.”

We are effective experiential facilitators when we are passionate about our work and are able to totally immerse participants in the learning experience, allowing them to gain new knowledge from their peers and their environment. As facilitators, our job is to stimulate their imagination and keep participants hooked on the experience.

“Effective Learning is something to be experienced, not taught.”

Relying upon the fear factor: “If you think training is expensive, try not training. ”

Justifying projects solely upon benchmarking data: “Our competition provides 40 hours of training for all new hires.”

Counting on management’s benevolence: “employees rate professional development as a key indicator of job satisfaction. ”

Employing worn out phrases. These include stakeholders, value to the enterprise, organizational alignment, process development, and dialoging. You may also wish to limit some HR terms such as human capital, employee retention, and talent management unless you plan to explain their value.

Taking the technical route and reciting the specifics of LMS data warehousing capabilities, Learning and Development portals, knowledge sharing, podcasts, wikis, blended learning, and Web 2. 0.

Peppering your conversation with impactful words, such as “in a big way, raving, skyrocket, and amazing.”

You did not spend all this time climbing the ladder of success just to stand naked in the town square.

You are all about results.

Those days are gone. Just as our natural resources have diminished faster than we expected, so has our cash. We need to do more with less.

During the last recession, a client asked Future Technologies to analyze their most costly curricula. They felt there was significant duplication, they were paying too much in licensing fees, and they were not sure that the curricula was doing what they needed it to do.

Specifically, they wanted to know:

• How many courses do we have?
• What behaviors do they support?
• Are there any duplicate courses?
• Is anything missing?

Future Technologies devised a methodology that we later called “Reverse Instructional Design” to determine how well the curricula aligned with their business needs. This effort provided management with the ability to significantly reduce costs and enhance results.

This engagement saved the company approximately $4,000,000 over four years. That was a 20,000% return on their investment.

Contact us for a free set of worksheets that will help you save some green.

• Future Technologies Reverse Instructional Design Process
• Curriculum Alignment Map (Job Tasks and Performance Objectives)
• Sample Curriculum Alignment Report
• Course Content Alignment Map
• Sample Course Alignment Report

Our premise was that it was not the medium that created compelling and richly interactive instruction; it was the instructional methods utilized. We recognized that electronic meetings had some inherent drawbacks (e.g., lack of visual feedback, more difficult social interaction). We also acknowledged the strengths of the media (e.g., the ability to collaborate over great distances unbounded by time). Here are just a few of the strategies that Future Technologies constructed.

• Frequently switch between different content delivery types: teacher-learner, learner-to-learner, and learner-to-expert interactions
• Schedule virtual office-hours.
• Assign participants to groups and ask them to collaborate on a specific assignment.
• Build suspense by creating activities where the results are not predictable. Use chats, selective emails, and different shared folders to provide teams with different rules or instructions.
• Foster collaboration and team learning by creating group learning activities using instructions in different shared folders. Enable groups to communicate using chat areas or emails.
• Employ discovery learning techniques by encouraging participants to search for resources (e.g., websites). Request that participants use chats to construct their own questions. Ask participants to work in groups or individually to teach back using the features of the virtual classroom.

I wrote this article many years ago. My son Laurence, was a year old at the time.

About a year ago my wife and I had a healthy baby boy and I have been observing him with fascination ever since. This first year, he matured from a completely dependent infant into a walking and babbling Destructo machine.

It is not just the speed of his learning that thrills me, but his dedication and excitement. There is nothing we have to do to get him to learn. We did not have to bribe him with cookies, say “good boy” or “bad boy,” or promise him the latest toy advertised on Cable TV. He learned to hold his own bottle, crawl, and eventually walk, just because he wanted to.

Sometimes when I see Laurence practicing something he could not do before, he breaks into the biggest smile a father would ever wish to see.

Where Did We Lose this Excitement for Learning?

We probably lost it somewhere between the:

• Race for grades
• Seeming lack of relevance of most of our education
• Fear and punishment associated with making a mistake
• Lack of opportunity to practice and fine-tune our skills at our own time and on our own terms

How Do We Get It Back?

We can help preserve and enhance the sense of wonder and excitement that we all once had toward learning new things by:

• Fostering a fear free learning environment — a place where the only dumb questions are the ones you did not ask and where everyone is regarded as equal, regardless of their corporate rank, subject-matter knowledge, or intellectual agility.
• Making sure that the behaviors taught and the examples used are relevant to the participants. It is also important to continually tie in this relevance by highlighting how they will use what they are learning back on the job. And, of course, why that will make things better.
• Creating nonthreatening individual or group competition, where the winners earn no more respect than the losers.
• Providing participants with many opportunities to practice without fear of making a mistake or being wrong. It is okay to make a mistake. We learn from our mistakes. Sometimes doing it right is just the product of doing it wrong enough times and receiving good feedback.

I have found that these strategies work well with most people.

I hope that Laurence never loses this magical sense of wonder, called learning.

Footnote:

Laurence is currently a freshman in college. His love of learning has been tarnished, but not destroyed.

1. Imagine that you will be first in line. Think for a moment, if you had a small business and saw the economy recovering, where would you invest your money? You would probably invest your dwindling bankroll in creating new products and hiring more commissioned sales people. You might spend limited funds on training those new sales people. It will be a long winter before you spend your hard-earned cash on a new hire training course or an updated leadership and management curriculum.
2. Confuse activity with success. You think that you would have learned this by now. People buzzing around like chickens, bragging about how many hours they worked, and moaning about not having a life outside of the office is very passé. Some managers may initially be impressed, but the illusion of this activity creating more money for the organization quickly fades.
3. Measure your success by butts in seats. Oh please! This is very similar to confusing activity with success. Who cares about how many training hours your organization delivered or how much it cost to put that physical or virtual butt in a seat. No one!
4. Impress management with trendy buzzwords such as stakeholder value, organizational alignment, and human capital. Use words that people understand, don’t try to impress them with ambiguity. It doesn’t work.
5. “Wow” executives with the newest technology. LMS data warehousing, portals, podcast, wikis, and even Web 2.0 will not help grow your organization. All of us have had enough wow and right now are looking for good Walmart value.
6. Good business partners always agree. You must be talking about a battered housewife, not a partner. Good partners openly disagree. They discuss, listen, negotiate, and sometimes even argue. Get real! If agreement is the only value that you are adding to a meeting, nix it, eat a sandwich at your desk, and get some real work done.
7. Store nuts away for the winter. When I had a few extra dollars in college, I bought canned goods. They made sure that I did not starve when times got tough. It was a good idea and worked then. However, our economy is still shaky and the goal is to make it to winter.

by Joel Gendelman

High-performing organizations and performance improvement professionals frequently speak about the alignment of their instructional curricula with the needs of the business. However, they often lack a systematic methodology for performing that alignment. This article presents such a method. The process provides the ability to better support current business initiatives, increase organizational responsiveness, and reduce curriculum acquisition and development costs.

Click here to download full article PDF.

Reprinted here with permission from the publisher.

by Joel Gendelman

Let’s say you’ve finally arrived in the C-suite as a chief learning officer or vice president. Now you are sitting at the big table, and your fellow organizational leaders will take you seriously. You are officially a part of the heart and soul of your corporation.

Not so fast. To be viewed as an effective business partner, here are a few things that you may wish to avoid:

1. Relying on the fear factor: “If you think training is expensive, try not training.”
2. Justifying projects with possibly irrelevant data: “Our competition provides 40 hours of training for all new hires.”
3. Counting on management’s benevolence: “Employees rate professional development as a key indicator of job satisfaction.”
4. Employing tired phrases to provide you with the allure of being a critical business function: These include “stakeholders,” “organizational alignment,” “process development” and “dialoguing.” You also should limit use of HR terms such as “human capital” and “talent management” unless you plan to explain them thoroughly.
5. Taking the technical route and reciting the specifics of LMS data-warehousing capabilities, learning portals, knowledge-sharing systems, podcasts, wikis, blended learning and Web 2. 0.
6. Peppering your conversation with overly “impactful” terms, such as “in a big way,” “skyrocket” and “amazing.”

You did not spend all this time climbing the ladder of success just to stand naked in the town square. Now that you have arrived, you should start asking hard questions about the learning function and the business it resides in. Here are a few:

1. What does the corporation value? How is that measured?
2. How will you know that you have been successful? What yardstick will executives employ to measure your success?
3. What are your corporate goals and the roadblocks to achieving those goals?
4. What strategies will the corporation use to cope in difficult economic times? Do they expect to get along with less, or are they looking to do something different (e.g., expand higher-margin products and services)?
5. In 30 words or less, what is the corporate strategy or “big idea?” What can learning do specifically to move it forward?
6. Where does the company’s leadership expect learning to be in six months, one year and three years? What will you need to get there?

Also, to win friends and influence people, you’ll need to develop and refine a new set of skills. Below is a partial list:

• Don’t oversell or overpromote yourself or the learning function: People in the C-suite know the difference between sizzle and steak, and they have little time to waste listening to you blow your own horn.
• Continually practice and refine clear communication: Speak their language — that is, the language of business and finance. Senior executives typically are not interested in the technologies you use to do what you do. They simply want to make sure it gets done.
• Know their world: Learning is what you do best, so immerse yourself in your fellow executives’ thoughts, ideas, values and approaches. Morph yourself into one of them.

To operate as an effective CLO, you’ll also need to shift your attitude in several areas, including the following:

• Adjust your focus: Now that you are in the C-suite, your focus should be squarely on the business, not learning.
• Know your boss better than your resources: Since you have risen to the rank of CLO, you must have done a great job being intimately aware of the courses your department offers, as well as the tasks, resources and tools necessary to create and deliver those courses. Now is the time to leave that to someone else and spend more time and energy understanding and interacting with the other members of the C-suite than with your own people.
• Never confuse selling with installing: This is a tough one. It means you need to pledge to do what needs to be done without knowing the details of how you are going to do it. You will need to commit in order to maintain your seat at the big table. It is a leap of faith you simply must take. Don’t worry, they invited you to the table because they knew you could do the job — and you can. One way or another.