John Hagel at eLearning Forum
Telemarketers from the vendor with a push strategy call to sell you insurance as you sit down to dinner. The Hard Rock Café displays Bo Diddley’s guitar pick and plays throbbing music to pull you in. The itinerant Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman pushes; the Gilroy Garlic Festival is pull. Push is generally someone else’s idea; pull is what you think you want.
The Industrial Age was pushy. Owners predicted what would people would buy, built the factory, made large quantities to take advantage of economies of scale, and then tried to convince people to buy. Today change is so rampant and the future so unpredictable that Dell doesn’t build your computer until you order it. You cannot set up in advance when you don’t know what the future holds.
Friday morning, John Hagel told the eLeaning Forum why he and John Seely Brown think the world is shifting from push to pull, and what this means for us.
Where John was eloquent, I will be telegraphic.
|
PUSH |
PULL |
|---|---|
|
Assumes you can predict demand |
Assumes world is unpredictable |
|
Anticipate |
Respond |
|
Rigid, static |
Flexible, dynamic |
|
Conform, core |
Innovate, edge |
|
Monoliths, components glued together |
Small pieces, loosely joined |
|
Program |
Platform |
|
Get better at what you are currently doing |
Get better at whatever comes along |
|
Standard content |
Standard interfaces |
Where’s the value?
New management disciplines for the pull world all involve how organizations relate to one another (outsourcing, orchestration, productive friction). This, in turn, makes one think about where strategic advantage comes from. China is rapidly becoming the center for business management innovation, and this is the source of continuing advantage; copycats won’t catch you if you’re always ahead of them.
- All of this is nurtured by networks stitched together with responsive, modular IT. In Informal Learning, I call this “internet inside.” Those of you who were reading my blogs 18 months ago may remember my enthusiasm for the coming genre of IT. (See links to relevant posts.)
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Talent
- Value, i.e. what it takes to stay ahead, used to reside in killer products or shrewd finance. In the pull world, value results from talent. Talent, in turn, is the result of maintaining relationships. The leading organizations of the future will be those with the ability to create and retain talent. Developing talent will become the role of the firm – and the way people choose who they want to work for.
Instead of rehashing John’s presentation, I want to turn to what push and pull mean to corporate learning. (Altus Learning recorded John’s session; in a week, you can hear the original here)
Push Learning and Pull Learning
This is over-simplified, I know, but I think training is a vestige of the push world that’s being replaced by learning for our pull world.
Push aligns with formal learning; pull with informal learning. Consider:
|
PUSH |
PULL |
|---|---|
|
Formal learning |
Informal learning |
|
Training |
Learning |
|
Curriculum |
Performance support |
|
Training program |
Collaboration platform |
|
Mandated |
Self-service |
|
Just in case |
Just in time |
- This line-up of features of push and pull learning feels totally natural to me, but I’ve been marinating in informal learning for the last year. Does this ring true for you? Leave a comment.
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By the way, I think Workflow Learning lies somewhere between push and pull. Alerts are pushy, though not pre-planned. The learning they trigger is generally self-service performance support, a clearly pull activity.
- Group discussions surfaced questions.
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- eLearning Forum
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My hat is off to eLearning Forum’s new CEO, Del Langdon. When I stepped down after years as eLF CEO, I did not really expect Eilif and the Board to find anyone to fill my shoes very quickly. I told Del this meeting showed me how fat-headed that line of thinking was. Engaging a visionary thought leader like John Hagel is what the Forum should be about. Bravo to Del and the Board of eLF.
My Take on Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture, XML, and related matters
- 2004
Out of the Box by John Hagel (the best thing to read on web services)
Loose coupling/earthquake
Loose coupling
The Real-time Enterprise
Above All (Powers of Ten for the future of IT)
Business Process Management
2005
Workflow Learning & Web Services
The Transformation of IT
The Only Sustainable Edge
John Hagel, JSB & the Speed of Innovation
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8 comments ↓
Great post!
I’ve been reading Hagel and Brown’s latest paper and contemplating the various overlaps with learning strategy - they even cite Cisco’s elearning system as one example of pull in action.
At the bottom of the issue, though, isn’t push/pull really another just another name for another age old dichotomy - instructionist vs constructivist pedagogy?
Mark, I see part of your analogy, but I think there is more involved than instructionism and constructivism at work here. Hegel and JSB talk about a new worldview; the isms are merely learning philosophies. My research is looking at the impact of loose coupling, small chunks, interoperable networks, and other things from outside the training universe.
Whoops, I meant Hagel in the previous paragraph, not Hegel. I used to live in Heidelberg, where Hegel taught, so you’d think I’d know the difference.
It’s not constructivist vs behaviousist, I think it’s more “medium is the message”. When learners can connect with anyone, anywhere and the amount of information is doubling every few weeks, then PULL just makes sense. Unless the internet collapses, pull will be the norm.
I’m currently sitting in a traditional, government sanctioned training session and there is no doubt in my mind that any item in the right-hand column of the second table would be a quantum improvement in the “drill & fill, static knowledge, follow-the-curriculum” stuff that is being spoon-fed to the learners in this session. Yes, I’m peeved
I think Pull is great, and people who have discipline will become pull-masters. They’ll subscribe and review the incoming information. But isn’t this a little bit like losing weight, exercising more, or quitting smoking–easier said than done because the human system isn’t set up to make it easy.
Basic human thinking is mostly reactive, not proactive. So pushed globs have an advantage over pulled globs because they invade our consciousness. They get in our face and grab our attention. Pulled globs do have the advantage of being wanted–so they are more likely to engender attentional perseverence, but still, we have to be able to give them some face time. Aren’t most of us already at pull-overload?
Here’s a hypothesis: Workable pull systems will have to have voluntary push mechanisms if they’re going to work.
But push never goes away. Are you kidding me? If there’s a buck to be made, or a vote to get, or something to sell, someone’s going to try and grab some of our attentional real estate. They’ll keep trying to push stuff at us. I can’t really believe that entrepreneurs and marketing mavens will just give up.
In fact, what I see today is push with pull. Google Ads are pushed to me, but because they’re targeted based on my search, they seem like pull.
It’s all in the marketing mix. The push-pull mix.
What did I miss? (Pulling your comments, I hope).
Pull-overload, yes. I’m feeling the deluge. My strategy is to be familiar enough with the wide array of technologies so that I can recognize a potential solution–off in the fuzzy distance–any one of them offers to a problem. Then I’ll focus on that tech. E.g., I don’t have time to learn Actionscript exhaustively, but I need to know enough that I can recognize, ‘hey, Actionscript might help me here.’ Then I hit the manual. Keeping my attenae up, and up-to-date, is a lot of work. I am concerned about the time-efficiency of working on a one-off Actionscript, etc. solution when I’m not an Actionscript, etc. guru.
[...] Related: Push and Pull [...]
Funnily, I think there is something fundamental about the difference between push and pull.
* In engineering the strongest structures are those under tension, not compression, look at suspension bridges, those scale of structures are simply impossible building using compression, or push.
* Look at multiprocessing; C for example is a push language, you push instructions through the processor, the result is that trying to manage the complexity of multiple processors is basically impossibly difficult. Erlang on the other hand handles multiprocessing trivially, it is a pull language.
* Then you have command vs market economies for example. Try to predict and push commodities vs market analysis and sell what people ask you for.
I have a sneaking suspicion that in the future, companies who give both R&D and manufacturing budgets to the marketing departments will be substantially more successful than the others.
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