DevLearn 2009 - The Changing Learning Function: Rethinking how your organization works

The last session from DevLearn 2009 that I sat through was the one by David Mallon from Bersin & Associates, called "The Changing Learning Function: Rethinking how your organization works". David was presenting empirical evidence from 798 Organisations and 40,000 training and HR business leaders and using Bersin's analysis about what the new face of the learning organisation should be like.

What I learnt

• Why are we talking about all of these new technologies? Its because business is changing and that's forcing businesses to rethink what we do in each of our departments and that includes learning and development, knowledge management, and the like. Are all the thinks we knew about our job really as good and are we using ourselves in the best way for our organisation?
• The problem is context, not content. Its everyone's responsibility to deal with information and act on it. Everyone is a knowledge worker and the overwhelming amount of information floating around. Its tough to find the most useful information.
• We need to reuse and have some set of standards to be successful. Frequent change of information makes it difficult to find the most current information. Inconsistency of information formats or sources makes it difficult to use and comprehend new info.
• Learning professionals have the ability to create the context and the standards that organisations really need.
• The ongoing role of a modern enterprise L&D function is two fold:
  • Deep Specialisation:Focus on your company's niche. What's your competitive advantage?
  • Learning Agility: At an organisational level, how quickly can you add new skillsets, learn from your mistakes and create new capabilities.
• A change is needed: Large and midsized organisations are still spending most of their learning time in their classrooms. Technology enabled learning is gaining strength each year, but very slowly. Having said this, most leaders believe that on the job experience, mentoring, projects, job rotation, and coaching are the most valuable learning approaches. 72% companies believe that the most valuable learning approaches are informal, yet only 30% of resources are focussed in that area! So, we need to optimise the informal learning in organisation and not just the classroom.
• The modern learning organisation should be structured in the following framwework:
  • Your Learning Programs addressing your Audiences and Problems
  • Your Approaches and Architecture:
    • Formal Learning: 20%
    • Informal Learning: 80%. This includes
      • On-demand Learning: Elearning, help, search, books, etc
      • Social Learning: Blogs, wikis, forums, communities, social networks, etc.
      • Embedded Learning: All the ways that we learn inside work. eg: Performance Support, Feedback, Rotational Assignments, Course Corrections, Retrospectives, etc.
  • The Disciplines that people need to master to adopt these approaches
  • The tools and technology that support these disciplines
  • But most importantly, beyond all of this, under the hood -- there's the culture of the organisation.
• The Modern Enterprise Learning Index (MELI) is a set of 10 indicators to determine readiness/ capacity to support learning agility and thrive in the face of informative change. (Internal Indicators: Capacity Building, Business Analysis, Content Efficiency, Adaptation, Versatile) (External Indicators: Business Driven, Talent Linked, Timely, Targetted, Proximal)
• Retention after training events is high, but it drops over time and so does expertise. Learning is a process and not an event, so informal learning create a series of events that helps people learn over time. How about blending informality into formal learning by leveraging online communities, and by using tools such as Job Aids (Standard Work), Forums, EPSS, etc. David showed a case study from Nationwide insurance in how they blended informal learning around a large formal program to help a major capabilities shift for the company. IBM Blue Pages was another example that David showed as an enterprise wide collaboration system.
• Coaching is a highly underestimated way of creating learning over time.
• I loved the case study of BT that he showed where they were looking at Formal Learning supported by Social Learning, developed by anyone, using segments lasting minutes, delivered by anyone, given just in time, pulled and in real time and was dynamic and adhoc (long sentence, I know!) This apparently built reputation and people wanted to contribute to be known as "the guy". The community flags inappropriate content and there's hardly ever been anything that they had to pull out.
• David lastly looked at the Disciplines we need to engage in as Learning professionals to make our organisations successful. He had culled this using data from the 10% of the most successful companies he had surveyed
  • Knowledge Management: Develop overall strategies for capturing and harnessing the collective knowledge of an organisation.
  • Business Intelligence/ Analytics
  • Information Architecture: Structuring information to make it easy to find. Stop paying attention to a single course, but pay more attention to the learning experience. This involves thinking spatially across contexts.
  • Performance Consulting
  • Development of Rich Media (information, visualisation, etc)
• The role of a Training team: "Center of Excellence for Learning in the organisation". Focus on capabilities (preparing for tomorrow) as against skills (preparing for today).
• New Roles in the learning organisation:
  • Performance Consultants
  • Instructional Designers
    • Work out in the biz, teaching others to structure knowledge;
    • Supervise SMEs.
    • Add additional disciplines to create environments
    • Be masters of the business
    • Measure approaches in business terms
    • View fast/ efficient business performance/ improvement as ultimate expression of their ablities.
  • Content Developers
  • Multimedia Specialists
  • Information Architects
  • Editors/ Production Support
  • Community Management
  • Content Stewards
  • Moderators
  • Program Managers
  • SME's