August 25th, 2008 — general
Join Dave Gray and me for a thirty-minute conversation about Un-books.
This is the second in a series of conversations on enterprise learning. We’ll begin by talking about opportunities to improve on the age-old model of the book. After that, we’ll let the conversation go where it wants. If we get carried away, we may run for a full hour. Heavy on the give & take. Sessions are recorded. Invite friends and colleagues to join us.
The Un-book
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
10:30 PDT, 1:30 EDT
Conference Dial-in Number: (712) 432-1601
Save phone charges by using Skype to call in.
Participant Access Code: 391096#
Have questions you want addressed? Leave a comment here. Or on the wiki.
Learning Conversations home page
Related: Dawn of the Un-book
Un-book
Jay: video on the un-book
August 24th, 2008 — general
Where did the dinosaurs go? The most respected scientific speculation today suggests that most dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago when a massive asteroid collided with earth. One group of dinosaurs did survive the asteroid crash: today we call them birds.
And what happened to performance support? In the 1990s, many people expected performance, to shove technical training into the shadows. Yet eLearning, blended learning, and virtual worlds seemed to have elbowed performance support into oblivion. Recent research finds that this is not the case. Performance support is stronger than ever; it simply hiding in plain sight, having taken on a new form.
The Birth of Electronic Performance Support Systems
Performance Support (PS) was founded on the premise that providing information to a worker when it’s needed is generally preferable to having the worker memorize it in advance. A respected professor of instructional design has written that “Information is not instruction.” A performance support enthusiast might reply that if information gets the job done, it doesn’t matter whether it’s instruction.
Thirty years ago, expedient mainframe programmers upgraded applications by slapping overlays atop original code rather than rewriting the user interface. Users had to jump back and forth between three or four screens to complete a transaction. No matter that applications were clunky and inefficient; that could be covered up with a training program.
Gloria Gery, a training manager at Aetna manager, saw the folly in this approach. Why should people have to learn something that could be designed into the system in the first place? Why not provide them with information when they needed it?
In her ground breaking 1991 book, Electronic Performance Support Systems, How and why to remake the workplace through the strategic application of technology, Gloria described an EPSS as:
…an integrated electronic environment that is available to and easily accessible by each employee and is structured to provide immediate, individualised on-line access to the full range of information, software, guidance, advice and assistance, data, images, tools, and assessment and monitoring systems to permit job performance with minimal support and intervention by others.
Performance Support empowered novice employees to get up to speed rapidly, to perform with a minimum of outside coaching or training, and to do the job as well or even better than experienced workers. Gloria’s goal for EPSS was to enable people who didn’t know what they were doing to function as if they did.
Some organizations heartily embraced EPSS, incorporating it into airline reservation systems, platform automation at financial institutions, and a variety of applications at AT&T. Many people were creating performance support systems without calling it that. The advent of packaged software for consumers required a PS approach since it would hardly be cost-effective to send tutors home with people using TurboTax and Will Maker.
Improved productivity at lower cost is a compelling proposition. Practitioners attended annual EPSS conferences. Large companies and government agencies implemented EPSS. Some traditional training firms feared that EPSS might put them out of business.
Then the cheering stopped. EPSS were not a cure-all. Unless it was tightly baked into an application from the get-go, EPSS required continual maintenance. Few people considered themselves EPSS designers. Modifying EPSS took scarce programming skills. EPSS did not have a home in the typical organization structure.
EPSS runs counter to the traditional goals of IT. IT is more concerned with technical performance: response time, hardware utilization, and throughput; EPSS focuses on the user. IT develops an application and is done with it; EPSS requires perpetual updating to stay abreast of changes in the job environment.
Marc Rosenberg, author of E-learning, former ISPI president, and an early proponent of performance support, describes EPSS as “an enormous opportunity overlooked by the training community.” EPSS is not training, isn’t developed with the ADDIE model, and has been eclipsed by the new kid on the block: eLearning.
EPSS became homeless and slipped off the corporate radar.
Enterprise Performance Support
Bob Mager was the guru of instructional design in the late seventies. His Designing Instructional Objectives and Analyzing Performance Problems were the gold standard of clear thinking, behaviorism, and the discipline required to get government contracts.
“Could he do it if you held a gun to his head?” If the answer is yes, you don’t have a training problem, you have a motivation problem.
Bob saw training as a last resort, chosen only after exhausting all the other possibilities. His thinking meshed with Gloria’s, but he didn’t confine his applications to technical training.
Gloria had started by training staff to use computers; designing performance support into the job was necessarily “e.” Bob built his models to cover any performance problem; his performance support often resided on a piece of paper.
In October 2004, Gloria and I jointly delivered the keynote at Training Fall in San Francisco. It was her last pubic presentation before going into retirement. Our topic was enterprise performance support. We noted that “Business issues around getting to performance are enormous. It takes too long, costs too much, is inconsistent and becoming increasingly difficult due to churn, complexity, and learner differences. We made the learner responsible for integrating and organizing information, and that focused effort on learning, not doing.” And since then, performance support has again fallen off the CLO’s watch list.
Judgment Support
Loretta Donovan, an expert in Appreciative Inquiry and similar group processes who coincidentally went to high school with Gloria, points to the shift of PS from rote tasks to decision-making. Maybe we should call it “Judgment Support”
Earlier generation performance support was most easily applied to non-creative, routine tasks. That meant the architect of the support system or tools could assess the challenges typically met and engineer the support aids, collect more data on where performance stumbled, add support aids, and so on. The user (an individual) was a passive participant in the process, albeit eventually benefiting from the help. That may still make a lot of sense if we are supporting the call center at LL Bean during the Holiday rush.
Learning, and now work, are increasingly collaborative. What’s the opportunity for collaborative performance support? Loretta Donovan again:
…collaborative performance support could be within a formal team or project, or a less structured work situation. What I am envisioning is real time communication, generated by the ‘performer’, using online tools. So a task is being performed, and in an effort to improve/enhance/problem solve, etc, a question is posed electronically: “who’s the expert on this? what should I watch out for? do you have a record of? can I borrow the template for?” This moves the issue from the individual performer being ‘watched for errors’ and suffering their consequences, to the performer as collaborator initiating the network of collective intelligence towards continuous improvement.
Learnscape Architecture
Today, the greatest leverage in corporate learning comes from building on-going, largely self-sustaining learning processes. This process orientation focuses on the organization’s architecture for learning, a platform a level above its training programs and regulated events. The learnscape is a foundation for learning that is self-service, spontaneous, serendipitous, drip-fed, and mentored as well as the formal training that will always be with us.
People who read my book on Informal Learning generally agreed that most learning at work is informal but that most corporate investment goes into formal learning. “But what can we do about it?” they asked. Learnscape Architecture is my answer to their question.
Knowledge workers are responsible for their own learning. Instead of taking whatever was pushed at them, they pull in what they need to know in the form that seems most appropriate. Knowledge workers are their own instructors. They are also their own instructional designers. And they are becoming their own PS consultants. The challenge presented to Learnscape Architects is making self-service learning simply, relevant, attractive, and cost-effective.
Performance Support Reborn
Performance support is blossoming in organizations today under the label of Web 2.0.
Remember the original premise of PS, making information available to workers instead of forcing them to memorize it? That’s how we use Google and corporate wikis and instant messenger.
Gloria sought easy, immediate, individualized on-line access to information, software, guidance, advice and assistance. Learnscape architects have implemented miniature versions of the internet behind corporate firewalls that provide all of these things, from peer-rated FAQs to wizards, on-line help desks, and best practices repositories.
We have given up the idea that competence must exist within the person. Competence exists within our collaborators and within the net. George Siemens and others have given up on the idea that knowledge resides within individuals’ heads; it’s collective intelligence.
The information, rules, and knowledge that used to be spread all over the place can often be found by the in-house Google Appliance. What used to be out of reach is now a keystroke away.
A powerful form of performance support is asking someone who knows. Expertise locators direct workers to the person most likely to have the answer they seek. Presence awareness software shows whether that person is online, mobile, in a meeting, or available by phone. Instant messaging facilitates swapping brief questions or asking if the person has time to deal with a more complex question.
Overall, what are corporate blogs, feeds, aggregators, wikis, mash-ups, locator systems, collaboration environments, and widgets, if not performance support?
Ten years ago, at the Online Learning Conference in Anaheim, Gloria declared that “Training will be strategic or training will be marginalized.” Most chief learning officers chose the second option and ceded PS to others.
It is high time for CLOs to start looking at the entire learnscape. We are overdue to be mindful that in terms of effectiveness, performance support often trumps training. As Gloria said,
Learning must be re-conceived to influence the primary purpose of organization: to perform effectively and efficiently. Good design puts what workers need to do their jobs within easy reach and shows how to use them to optimize performance.
References
Jay Cross and Tony O’Driscoll, Workflow Learning Gets Real, Training Magazine. February 2005.
Gloria Gery, Electronic Performance Support Systems: How and Why to Remake the Workplace Through the Strategic Application of Technology. 1991.
Acknowledgements
Conversations and correspondence with Gloria Gery, Marc Rosenberg, Allison Rossett, Jeathr Rutherford, Stan Malcolm, Gary Dickelman, Burt Huber, Hal Christensen, Frank Nguyen, Clark Quinn, Harold Jarche, Loretta Donovan, Buthaina Al-Othman, Allison Anderson, Jim Schuyler, Harvey Singh, and Karyn Romeis.
An excerpt from Learnscape Architecture
August 24th, 2008 — general
Introducing yourself to fifty diverse people forces you to boil down your elevator pitch. What I heard myself saying at the opening reception for Gnomedex 08 was…
My passion is enterprise learning.
Most of the businesses and governments live in the last century. They cling to industrial-age beliefs that the world is predictable, management has the answers, and workers are under their control. In the real world, no one has the answers, collective intelligence beats top-down decisions, and management’s task is to inspire people rather than tell them what to do.
Corporations need to replace traditional training, knowledge management, and in-house communications with something more informal, interactive, collaborative, self-service, impromptu, and flexible. Instead of pushing content, they need to be facilitating conversation. I try to help them get there.
So what do you do?
August 23rd, 2008 — general
Robert Scoble plopped down in the seat next to mine at Gnomedex this morning.
Several years ago, before his time with Microsoft, Robert was known for following 1,200 blogs. At a Geek Dinner in Berkeley, I asked him how he did it. He explained that he’d changed his modus operandi. He mainly monitored one blog, the consolidation site Memeorandum.
Times change. Memeorandum has been supplanted by ranked sites like Digg. So once again I asked Robert how he kept up.
FriendFeed is his primary source. FriendFeed? See What is this, a cult? Brian Saxton writes, “In short, Friend Feed pastes the pieces of conversations that Web 2.0 applications tear apart. It helps cut through the noise that applications that produce content can (and often times do) generate. It does it in a way that makes keeping the conversation convenient. And while it’s not the RSS feed to end all other RSS feeds (what about when you want to organize feeds by topics?), it’s darn convenient.”
I just opened a FriendFeed account; I’ll see if it makes it over the one-month hurdle. About one in 25 apps I try are still around a month later. FriendFeed looks cool for now: it’s fascinating to run my eyes over all these posts, pictures, Tweets, and bookmarks from a hundred friends all pasted together in one spot.
Scoble surfs for information four or five hours a day. This is interspersed with his other activities. Increasingly, it comes in on his iPhone. He does not obsess on seeing everything that floats by. If it’s important, it will come around again.
August 20th, 2008 — general
Unless you enjoy being inundated, you’ve got to pull what you want from the web rather than take everything the web pushes at you. That’s what RSS is for: it enables you to subscribe to content that interests you.
Google Reader is excellent for managing your subscriptions with RSS. Google Reader makes it easy to subscribe to a site, to see what’s new, and to read previously unread items. Sometimes that works for me; other times I might prefer picking through a list of titles for what I want or having articles flow by one-by-one.
The Flow page on my blog is my frequent jumping-off point for keeping up on the web.
Do you have a non-vanilla approach to reading your feeds? Any suggestions?
August 17th, 2008 — general
Jane Hart once again asked for my top ten learning tools. Jane’s Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies is probably the most visited learning site on the web.*
My current selections, compared to a years ago and half a year ago, may show that I’m set in my ways. Firefox remains on top. Wordpress, Skype, and Ning are perennial favorites.
It’s wild that the hundreds of people who responded to Jane’s request for their ten favorite tools come up web, web, web, web: Del.icio.us. Firefox, Google Reader, Skype, Google Search, Wordpress, PowerPoint, Blogger, Audacity, Google Docs. (I imagine PowerPoint is there in its role as the poor man’s authoring system for web-based content.)
Does anyone remember Authorware, ToolBook, Director, IconAuthor, Designer’s Edge, and ReadyGo? All gone.
Jane’s 25 Tools Community would be an interesting place for a user-created Consumer Reports of learning tools.
*Google “Jay Cross.” After my own sites, Jane’s list of my favorite tools is on top.
August 15th, 2008 — general
CLO Magazine, August 2008
Effectiveness, by Jay Cross
Last week it was hot (82 degrees) and rainy in the Southern Alps, so my family drove 110 kilometers south to eat lunch on the shore of Lake Como. Our meal was so fresh and artfully arranged, it could have made the cover of Gourmet magazine. The service also was impeccable, so I didn’t mind paying the bill — 154 euros — even though that was the most I’ve ever paid for lunch.
We have a photograph of our son at the same table 20 years earlier, a 3-year-old in a booster seat with the panorama of the Bellagio unfolding below. Same place, same fresh ingredients, same lavish service — but then, the tab for lunch was 30,000 lira, less than 20 euros.
1986
When I moved to Europe in the late ’60s, the most popular guidebook was Europe on $5 a Day; $5 today is not enough to buy a beer in Berlin. Similarly, organizations were once proud to offer two weeks of annual training; today, five times that much is hardly sufficient.
Thinking with outdated currency keeps most CLOs from reaching their potential. Their organizations believe meaningful projects are supposed to take months to plan, quarters to implement and years to pay for themselves.
Every CLO has heard this self-fulfilling prophecy: “You have a great concept there, but we don’t have time to tackle it now.”
History
This belief is a vestige of industrial-age thinking. When work is manual, time away from work is value down the drain. And for the most part, hours equal value, and value equals hours.
However, knowledge work does not suffer from these same limitations. Brains can generate valuable ideas in milliseconds. One minute may lead to an innovation that changes the world.
As a result, value is no longer proportional to hours worked, so saying there is not enough time is a statement of priorities, not of scarce resources.
While the individual is the old unit of human production, continued emphasis on the individual instead of the group chokes off today’s opportunities with yesterday’s limitations.
Groups of people, not individuals, are the key to producing value in the knowledge era; yet, corporations hire individuals, performance reviews assess a single person and career paths are solo.
Whenever we catch ourselves thinking of individual workers, let’s take a moment to consider whether we should be thinking of teams instead, as conversation is the wellspring of innovation, and innovation results from the creative friction of people with differing perspectives.
They co-create the concepts that bring them into harmony with their environment. They reinforce one another. That’s “they,” not “he” and not “she.”
I recently orchestrated a series of one-day meetings to help organizations understand how networks evolve and how network effects change in the way business is done. We talked about Internet tools, collaborative culture and what has worked in pioneering organizations. That’s just education: My goal is to light fires.
From calendars to stopwatches
Web 2.0 puts powerful network tools into the hands of the people who use them. The tools are by and large easy to understand and modify for one’s purposes. (If the going gets tough, ask anyone under the age of 25 for help.)
Web software enables people to experiment with new concepts in hours, not months. And in our sessions, we build blogs, wikis and communities as we talk about them.
In the past, organizations often sent a single individual to an outside meeting, believing that he or she would bring the message home to share. This rarely happens because the individual is the wrong unit of production for taking advantage of learning innovation.
Organizations that send teams are more likely to put things into practice. Colleagues reinforce one another; an individual is but a lone voice. A small team cannot only plant the seeds of innovation but also nurture them, so the optimal unit for an innovation-building session is a trio, not a single person.
August 15th, 2008 — general
August 14th, 2008 — general
Thoughts swimming around in my head as a result of yesterday’s dialog on unmeetings and learning:
BarCamps, Open Space, and other forms of unmeeting are another expression of the demand-driven, bottom-up rebellion against convention and hierarchy we see in collaborative decision-making, bossless workplaces, and self-service learning.
Participants need a feel for where a meeting or conference falls on a continuum from wide-open to tightly controlled. What’s the frame? What are the boundaries?
Participants need “air cover” for honest conversation, a safe space where they don’t fear that what they say may come back to haunt them.
Designers/conveners should choose how much structure is optimal for the situation at hand. Is the session for problem-solving, innovation, opening channels, what? Should we start with a single, powerful question or multiple topics and objectives?
An unmeeting that’s intended to invent the future should probably cast the net as far and wide as possible. Afterward, champions might continue the flow on a wiki or though other means.
Productive sessions require agile facilitation.
Tara Hunt’s Unmanaging, Unleashing the Creative Beast in Your Team deals with innovation, but her suggestions are appropriate for unmeetings: create a safe place to say dumb ideas, start with the simple stuff, move from the personal to the communal, celebrate risk-taking, be open and transparent, laugh and enjoy, and employ oodles of encouragement.
UBS is in terrible shape because it overreached its grasp and invited regulatory backlash. They are hurting in spite of the exemplary learning and talent management processes put in place by Michelle Blieberg.
Pencil in the next Learning Conversation:
Conversation about Un-books
Wednesday, August 22, 2008
10:30 PDT, 1:30 EDT
Dave Gray will co-host.
August 13th, 2008 — general
