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Research on the Future
of Learning and Business
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Internet
Time Group
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IMPORTANT POINTS
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How Individuals Will Learn in 2004This chapter discusses how individuals learn and how to make the most of it. The next looks at how organizations learn.
Science tells us that we use less than 10% of our brains’ capacity. Every one of us has the capacity to achieve great things.
eLearning posits that businesses usually tap less than 10% of their members’ capacity for learning. Recent discoveries have shed new light on how people learn. Technology is providing the tools to fully integrate working, learning, and teamwork.
Leaders who believe in the power of eLearning will reap huge rewards. On the other hand, training will live down to the expectations of corporate chieftains who don’t have the faith.
The Great Training Robbery
“Many managers have just about had it with what they think of as the “training scam.” They’re tired of having their people taken away from their jobs to attend “training,” only to have them return without any more useful skills than when they left.” “But many managers who feel dinged by the training game are victims by choice. They are people who wouldn’t dream of entering a high-stakes poker game without at least knowing the rules and something about the strategies, but who blithely buy training without knowing the territory.” Robert Mager, What Every Manager Should Know About Training
Every year, American corporations pour $60 billion dollars into training. Many are dissatisfied with the results. They have good reason. They should be getting a ten to one hundred-fold return on training investments. The results of most training programs are marginal. What are we going to do?
What gets measured gets done. Training is no more than a means to an end. The goal is improved performance. Rather than spending on training, businesses in 2002 will invest in improved performance. Executives will demand an attractive ROI. If they don’t receive it, they will wrest training from training departments and manage the function as a line activity. Measures of effectiveness –scales measuring customer satisfaction, skills and effectiveness at the individual and unit level, and cost-benefit analyses – will be commonplace.
Underestimate the power of learning and it will live down to your expectations. By 2002, business will have broken free of the obsolete vestiges of industrial training that are the rule today. Ironically, we already know many ways to revitalize training. Major advances in adult learning theory have lain dormant in professional journals, awaiting discovery and application by enlightened organizations. What’s holding them back? Underestimating the upside potential of change (it’s HUGE) and looking at training as if it were “school” (it’s nearly the opposite.) Senior executives are skeptical, as are learning gurus.[1] It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Learning is a never-ending journey, not a destination. By 2004, we’ll all recognize that learning is a process not an event. Instead of “courses,” corporations will build learning environments, developing competencies holistically rather than piecemeal. Information and knowledge are becoming so perishable that one author suggests they come with expiration dates, like cartons of milk. If the pace of the Internet keeps accelerating, technical certifications will only be good for a month or two. Take a long vacation, and you’ll never catch up with what’s happening on the job. An eighteen-year old will take your job. That’s why we’ll all be lifelong learners.
Types of Learning
“Real learning is not what most of us grew up thinking it was.” Charles Handy
1. “Cognitive learning” relates to understanding something better. It’s in your head. You learn from reading, computer-based training, stories, case studies, and looking for answers to questions. 2. “Affective learning” involves changing attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. It’s in your heart. You learn through self-discovery. Often you need other to confront a new view of how the world works. Affective learning is tough because it often challenges our egos. 3. “Behavioral learning” deals with things you can do. Unlike what’s in your head and your heart, you can directly observe behavior. You learn behaviors by seeing a model and trying it out. Mistakes are wonderful teachers.
The majority of adult learning is informal, in the coffee room, finding
things out from the help desk, experimenting, or asking the person in
the next cube.
“Hard” Skills
If you tell me I may listen, If you show me I may understand, If you involve me I
will learn.
The Soft StuffKnowledge comes in two forms. “Explicit knowledge” can be articulated. It’s concrete. Often you can find it in a book or report. “Tacit knowledge” is how things really work. It’s the processes and know-how you cannot write down. You learn tacit knowledge through absorption, interacting with and shaping it through conversation and apprenticeship. By 2004, most corporations will accept that tacit knowledge learned over the water cooler is more important than explicit knowledge. To increase tacit knowledge, you make it easy for people with things to learn from one another to get together.
Stunning new research finds that “emotional intelligence” is twice as important as traditional learning and IQ combined. By 2004, we’ll recognize that you get the bigger bang from your buck when by helping people learn empathy, innovation, and commitment than from additional helpings of product knowledge.
Super Payback
What works bestBefore addressing how technology will ramp up plain learning to eLearning, let’s look at some rules of thumb developed in pre-tech days but equally valid today. Adults learn better
when they: · Are highly motivated to learn · Know what’s in it for them and deem it relevant · Have mastered the prerequisites · Understand what’s expected of them · Can connect with other people · Are challenged to make choices · Feel safe about showing what they do and do not know · Control the pace, navigation, and delivery of learning · When the learning experience matches their style of learning · Receive information in small packets · Receive frequent progress reports · Know where they are in the learning cycle · Learn things close to the time they will need them · Don’t fear looking stupid · Can concentrate on learning without distractions · Know their individual style of learning · Receive encouragement from coaches or mentors · Receive positive reinforcement for small victories · Are self-directed and hungry to learn · Vary the style of delivery (say, discussion followed by a simulation) · Complete a cycle from experience through reflection to generalizing · Can go at a pace that’s neither over their heads nor beneath their capabilities ·
Are free of
worry or stress about external conditions Tired? You should be. This list summarizes the lessons of more than two hundred studies on adult learning and the theories of more than thirty-five learning gurus and management thought leaders.
Motivated LearningThree things moltivate people to learn:
eLearning will go beyond today’s norms by associating learning with personal emotional payoffs. We recall debriefing a regional banking manager whose institution had just conducted a training course for its personal bankers. Part of the workshop addressed conflict resolution particularly well. “Personal bankers began calling to thank us for making the training available,” said the regional manager. “It not only makes us better bankers. It also improves our lives.” This particular bank regional was soon breaking long-standing sales records.
eLearning will include lagniappes, too. Motivated learners not only learn better, they are also more loyal, committed, and happier on the job. An eLearning curriculum is likely to provide electives in self-empowerment, accomplishing personal goals, and enjoying life outside the work environment. Expanding corporate learning to include unexpected opportunities for personally gratifying learning is a small price to pay for gung-ho employees.
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People who need people…
Does eLearning require facilitators, trainers, and mentors? In person? Some activities require you to show up. In the flesh. For example, people rarely change deep-seated beliefs without sharing experience with people. Small groups are the only way for many alcoholics to sober up and drug addicts to stay clean. Rallies are a great way to whip a crowd into frenzy. Contrary to visions of 1984 and Big Brother, computers and networks do not isolate people; they bring them together. This is their most important role. Also, eLearning does not propose destroying all the classrooms. Traditional classroom learning will be with us long past 2004. Classes are fun. Classes teach powerful lessons. Some classes are perks. Nonetheless, eLearning will use technology to bring people together virtually rather than physically. Who will help you learn more, a coach who’s almost always available by videophone or a coach who will see you in person but only on Thursday afternoons? Which would you prefer, learning from the guy down the hall or from the world authority on the subject who’s on another continent? Face-to-face is expensive and time-consuming. More and more business relationships are mediated by phone calls, voicemail, conference calls, email, and other means. And the same will hold true for learning. Scores of vendors of synchronous training systems are betting that people will continue attending classes in cyberspace. The fidelity of electronically transmitted images is rapidly improving. By 2004, full-motion video will have replaced the jerky postage-stamp sized video of 1999. Looking at someone on screen will be much more akin to looking at them through a window. Gordon Bell, father of the minicomputer and entrepreneur extraordinaire, now researches telepresence for Microsoft. Bell is probably shorting airline stocks, for he predicts that we’re reaching the point where attending a meeting virtually will be as effective as being there for real. Stanford university researchers have found that our Neanderthal brains, formed long before the invention of media, can’t tell a cartoon from a live compadre.[2]
School’s Out
Teach (t..ch) v 1. To impart knowledge or skill to Learn (lûrn) v. 1. To gain knowledge, comprehension, or mastery of through experience or study
Most of what goes on in school is a terrible, ineffective way to learn. Think about your own schooling. Didn’t the teachers decide what you’d be taught, how the message would be delivered, and when you’d study what? Doesn’t this discourage creativity and extinguish the joy of learning?
Gordon MacKensie, the former “creative paradox” at Hallmark Cards and the most moving speaker Jay has ever heard, tells of visiting public schools to talk about art. When he asks kindergartners, “How many of you are artists?” all the children raise their hands. Among first graders, a third of the hands no longer go up. Half of the second graders raise their hands. By fifth grade, no hands go up. In six years, school has managed to beat the creativity out of its pupils.[3]
School punishes group effort (“cheating”) at a time when the world of work seeks more cooperation and teamwork. School focuses on content, not process; academics, not problem-solving. Subjects are watered down and taught out of context, poor preparation for living in an increasingly complex, interconnected world. Measurement systems (grades) are unrelated to meaningful achievement. Schools reward the completion of learning, not its continuation.
"The
method people naturally employ to acquire knowledge is largely unsupported
by traditional classroom practice. The human mind is better equipped
to gather information about the world by operating within it than by
reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or studying abstract models
of it." Roger Schank and John Cleave
Like battered children who grow up to victimize their own children, corporate managers and staff unwittingly perpetuate the mistakes of schooling by supporting classes, lectures, one-way meetings, pontification by experts, dumbed-down content, and other baggage from their childhoods.
40% of America’s high-school graduates cannot locate France on a map.
Real learning starts with the learner, not the teacher. People learn by solving problems, by making mistakes and correcting them, by hearing stories, by engaging multiple senses, and by following the call of their innate curiosity. They learn best when they understand why something’s important to learn and can put what’s being learned into the framework of their experience. People learn when they’re intrinsically motivated and psychologically up for it. People learn when they feel in control of their learning, can set their own pace, and feel free to discover things on their own. Unfortunately, executives often draw on the “school” concept when making major investments in learning, thereby perpetuating the inefficiencies of the past. Synchronous learning mimics the class; asynchronous learning is an automated library or lecture hall.
“No more classes, no more books No more teacher’s dirty looks.” Discovery Learning
Kolb tells us that learning begins when a people confront something that seems out of place. Learners cycle through a series of steps, seeking to incorporate the apparent anomaly can be incorporated into their worldview. Learning has taken place when a new level of understanding clears up the picture. For example, let’s look at how Sarah learned about fixing computer bugs. Sarah’s computer was freezing about once an hour, displaying a blue screen that said, “Processing halted. Error 4347440.” She experimented with a variety of solutions. Her Windows 98 manual made no mention of this. Nor did the Microsoft web site. She called Microsoft but hung up after waiting 25 minutes. She entered “4347440” into several search engines and came up empty. She asked her twelve-year old daughter is she knew anything about Error 4347440. Her daughter tells her Error 4347440 is usually the result of running version 1.6 soundcard drivers and a force-feed joystick under Windows 98. “Gee, Mom, everybody knows that.” Sarah observes that her daughter is the first source to come up with an answer. Sarah downloads and installs version 1.7 drivers and the problem disappears. She reflects that asking her daughter for advice was much more productive than searching for answers on her own in a giant, unorganized database. And she found out that marrying different vintages of software can make Windows balk. Abstracting on these reflections, Sarah resolves that next time her computer acts up, she’s going to ask other people if they’ve experienced the same problem. Also, she’s going to think back on what she most recently added to her computer that might be confusing its operating system. Two hours later, Sarah’s computer crashes, this time reporting “Msgsrcv32 not found,” aptly demonstrating that individual learning is a continuous cycle repeated over and over again, one step after another. Any looping process bogs down if one stays too long at one stage without moving ahead through the cycle. Businesses often overemphasize the physical steps of Experiment and Observe. “Just do it.” “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” “I don’t know why it works but it does.” “If ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Academia invests too much time on the mental steps of Reflection and Abstraction. Hence, new graduates lack “practical experience.” “It’s academic” translates as “It doesn’t make a difference in the real world.” People learn best, and are most satisfied, when learning completes the entire cycle. De-emphasize the mental components and the result is “mindless work.” Skirt the physical aspects and it’s “all talk and no action.” As the cornucopia of technology gushes out exciting new learning technologies, wise planners will use the four steps of the learning cycle as a checklist in constructing a balanced set of learning activities.
Kolb's intellectual decendents describe four modes of learning: watchers learn best by observation thinkers are logical problem solvers feelers get emotionally involved doers are impatient and want to dive right in
Automating Apprenticeship
In time, apprentice learns how the master thinks. The new twist in eLearning is that technology is continually changing the nature of the craft. Everyone’s an apprentice of one sort or another. The New Knowledge WorkerConsider, if you will, a Cadillac mechanic confronted with a faulty carburetor. Her job is more complicated than in the old days. Yesterday most Cadillac carburetors were essentially the same; today they come in hundreds of models and shapes. The mechanic once dealt with the same soft of carburetor every day, getting lots of practice. Among today’s great variety, she may see the same carburetor every couple of months – plenty of time to forget. As carburetors become more reliable, she also has to deal with carburetors from a greater span of time. There’s an overwhelming amount of information to learn. Mechanic work becomes knowledge work.
The Department of Defense and General Motors tackled this information glut before the challenges to their mechanics spiraled totally out of control. They interview and recorded pointers and guidance from the wisest old hands in the shop. At Cadillac, GM came up with a limited, problem-solving vocabulary that could be understood by inexpensive voice recognition software. They structured the knowledge gleaned from the old hands in a solution-oriented architecture.
The New Knowledge WorkWhen today’s Cadillac mechanic is wrestling with a misbehaving carburetor, she describes the symptoms to an inexpensive, voice-activated computer on her belt. Immediately, she receives expert information via a head-mounted display or portable LCD screen.
So, does the mechanic become a robot performing mindless tasks? No, and in fact, just the opposite occurs, for the mechanic/knowledge worker uses high-order skills for analysis, diagnosis, and decision-making to summon and apply the information the computer displays. There’s a consistency in working with systems of this nature, whether one is fixing machinery or performing brain surgery.
In the future, people who master knowledge-work skills will be able to perform many different functions without further “training.” People will hone their general skills at working with knowledge rather than studying, for example, the nuances of the X7Y4G four-barrel carb. Short Attention Span Theater
Recent example is the Monkey Wrench Conspiracy, a game developed to teach young engineers how to use a new and innovative software environment. The software maker will distribute copies of the game with the product. Looking for all the world like a commercial software game, the Monkey Wrench Conspiracy challenges the players to use the new software product in increasingly complex fashion. The game aspect keeps the learners motivated.
Gameware takes advantage of question-based learning. Learners answer the questions they can and get help on those they can’t. There’s no failure involved: everyone plays until they can answer all the questions. QBL focuses on what people need to learn (the questions they can’t answer). It requires active participation. It parallels the way kids learn about computers. In fact, it’s closer to question-based Socratic teaching than most instruction.
Gameware fits best when outcomes are clear and motivation is low.
Single users compete against the highest score. As in pinball or other arcade games. But the competition is worldwide.
Of course, not everyone enjoys the same game. Oldsters like card games, yuppies enjoy Jeopardy, thirty-somethings like PacMan, and younger people go for Quake. By 2002, gameware will enable the learner to pick a topic and to pick the game format in which to learn it.
Gameware is unlike simulations. Sims are traditionally complex, time-consuming to build, expensive, and often off-target; not a good cost/benefit ratio. Templates are the exact opposite – because content is poured into an existing structure, making them fast to build, flexible, and cost-effective.
Pace of learning for the new generation is wrong. Their learning style is shaped in the rapid-fire cauldron of Sesame Street, then MTV, twitch games, and action movies. After learning in these fast-paced environments, going to school makes everything seem like slow motion. Kids “power down” as they enter the schoolyard.
Emotional Intelligence
Stability in business has yielded to chaotic change in the last twenty years, transforming what were once mildly important traits into the very hallmarks of star performers. Goleman and his colleagues have delineated what’s required to become a super achiever. Among the winner’s repertoire:
(See Appendix for complete Emotional Competence Framework)
BRINGING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TO THE WORKPLACE “Emotional capacities like empathy or flexibility differ from cognitive abilities because they draw on different brain areas. Purely cognitive abilities are based in the neocortex. But with social and emotional competencies, additional brain areas are involved, mainly the circuitry that runs from the emotional centers – particularly the amygdala – deep in the center of the brain up to the prefrontal lobes, the brain’s executive center. Effective learning for emotional competence has to re-tune these circuits. Cognitive learning involves fitting new data and insights into existing frameworks of association and understanding, extending and enriching the corresponding neural circuitry. But emotional learning involves that and more – it requires that we also engage the neural circuitry where our social and emotional habit repertoire is stored. Changing habits such as learning to approach people positively instead of avoiding them, to listen better, or to give feedback skillfully, is a more challenging task than simply adding new information to old. Motivational factors also make social and emotional learning more difficult and complex than purely cognitive learning. Emotional learning often involves ways of thinking and acting that are more central to a person’s identity. A person who is told, for instance, that he should learn a new word processing program usually will become less upset and defensive than if he is told that he should learn how to better control his temper or become a better listener. The prospect of needing to develop greater emotional competence is a bitter pill for many of us to swallow. It thus is much more likely to generate resistance to change.” Optimal Process for Developing
Four basic phases make up the emotional learning process: · The first occurs even before the individual begins formal training. This initial phase, which is crucial for effective social and emotional learning, involves preparation for change. This preparation occurs at both the organizational and individual levels. · The second phase, training, covers the change process itself. It includes the processes that help people change the way in which they view the world and deal with its social and emotional demands. · The third phase, transfer and maintenance, addresses what happens following the formal training experience. · The final phase involves evaluation. Given the current state of knowledge about social and emotional learning, the complexity of programs designed to promote such learning and the great unevenness in the effectiveness of existing programs, evaluation always should be part of the process.” Information networks will support and reinforce each of the four phases. Consider the opportunities provided by: on-line assessment, unlimited practice opportunities, the ability to choose one’s path in a hyperspace, providing reinforcement and monitoring, and creating an apt organizational culture through shared stories, virtual teams, and buddy systems.
We’ll revisit the topic of emotional competence in the chapter on organizational learning that follows.
All Learning is SocialJohn Seely Brown, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of Xerox PARC, observed that copier repair staff learned more about how to deal with customers in bull sessions than in classrooms. When confronted with a problem, field technicians consulted dog-eared manuals festooned with scribbles, notes, and yellow highlighter, not the pristine “official” manuals. Think about how you learned to do your job, and we mean how you learned to really do your job, not to just go through the motions. Was it in a classroom? Or from the people around you? Most of us would not be successful without intuition and “street smarts,” the intangible things you learn from working with others. Brown and his colleagues concluded that “learning is about work, work is about learning, and both are social.” The Institute for Research on Learning carried these ideas forward, and we’ll come back to them in the next chapter. We bring them up here because they impact the design of individual learning. If people learn the good stuff over water coolers, organizations need to build more water coolers, not more courseware. Since people learn what works – especially what we can’t even articulate – by informal means, let’s not block out their calendars with structured exercises. Last year a controversial book presented evidence that children learn more from peers than from parents. The Institute for Learning Research makes a case that workers learn more from peers than from managers and supervisors. By 2002, eLearning won’t be a steady diet of structured learning. It will provide time (and respect) for non-scheduled time, for chance encounters, for cross-fertilization from other areas, and for letting important issues bubble up to the surface in the course of goofing off. Learners will chat over net-based water coolers. Parts of the 2002 learning net will be a web without a weaver.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
Academics and trainers engage in holy wars over the most meaningful way to look at learning styles. One research project or another has found strong support for each of these ways of assessing learning styles: · Personality (extrovert/introvert models) · Information-processing (linear thinking v. broader conceptualizing) · Social-interaction models (learning-oriented v. grade-oriented) · Instructional preference models (listening v. reading v experiential learning) Learners also differ by the phase of Kolb’s discovery learning cycle they choose to emphasize, giving us: · Convergers who prefer finding the one right answer to a problem · Divergers to prefer brainstorming and collaboration about multiple answers · Assimilators who prefer reflecting on their findings to create new plans or generalizations · Accommodators who enjoy taking a hands-on, trial-and-error approach Harvard professor Howard Gardner finds that people exhibit these “multiple intelligences:” · Visual-spatial · Bodily-kinesthetic · Musical |
