Doing something different

And now for something completely different...

2011-05-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

The time has come to say goodbye to this blog (after three years) and to Reed Learning (after seven years).

As the blog belongs to Reed Learning and I no longer do, it would be inappropriate for me to continue at this address.

Fortunately, I have another address which I set up when I began blogging. It goes under the title, "What doesn't kills you..." and you can find it here. I initially set that one up for reflections about cancer but it never really got going, so I have copied my posts across to that address and I will carry on from there.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at Reed Learning. I think we achieved some pretty amazing things and I certainly learned a thing or two.

Curiosity killed the cat...

2011-04-21T01:13:00.000-07:00

...were a band in the 1980s that are among the many crimes of Simon Cowell. In fact, just checking this and looking him up on Wikepedia I notice that his crimes against music are legion as well as a few other interesting points about how he first became successful (go look it up)

...equally the proverb dates back to the time of Ben Jonson although is generally attributed to Eugene O'Neil.

I haven't blogged for a while having been doing jury service. And one thing that a random cross section of society (for that is what a jury is supposed to be) gives you is a chance to reflect on the differences between people. I have also been gently percolating on some models of personality together with a few business books I've read recently (Drive, The Laws of Simplicity, Naked, Different) which seek to identify the quintessence of success.

With a brief nod to one of the best books I read last year, "The Black Swan" acknowledging the the very nature of this reflection may just be an urge on my part to make sense of randomness, the thing that makes people stand out in my eyes is curiosity.

People who are interested become interesting.

It almost doesn't matter what you are interested in, in fact the more diverse the better in my eyes. Curious people are more often on the front foot looking for things. They may make more mistakes because they stick their noses into things that they don't understand. But on the whole they are more fun, more challenging, more diverting, just "more" really.

So, be curious. I doubt it will kill you and you might learn something on the way

Public service announcement: who's the sucker?

2011-03-16T06:24:00.000-07:00

Well it was nearly me. And I always thought I was safely skeptical. Earlier today I got an email from an old friend with the subject line,

"VACATION MESS !!! HELP NEEDED !!!!!!"

What followed was a fairly plausible tale of being on holiday in the West Midlands (should have been my first clue as my friend lives in Kansas city... with apologies to the Black Country why would she holiday there?) and having been mugged. She had a flight to catch having fortunately left the passports at the hotel but the hotel wouldn't let her leave without paying the bill. There were a number of grammatical errors in the email but my friend is not a native English speaker and I made allowances for stress.

I replied immediately asking for a phone number. She said the muggers had taken the mobile phones and could I wire transfer $2,150 to a Western Union Branch. I asked for the number of the hotel.

Finally my suspicious nature woke up to the fact she was asking for dollars whilst being on holiday in the UK and the fact that the number given for the hotel demanding the money was a mobile. But not before I had checked the balance on my current account.

So I sent another email in which I said, "Forgive my cynicism but this looks like a scam. Can you tell me where and how you and I first met? Then I will ring the hotel."

True to classic con form the scammer raised the ante with this reply,

"Omg, What a million questions!!! why you asking me this as at moment ?? Is
this just because i asked you of help.. why have you decided to treat me
like this, i want you to know that we're meant to help each other. I knew
this is unusual but are the only person i could reach at this point and
i'm doing everything i can so we can work our way out of here peacefully
but there is nothing really working out, most important is that my flight
leaves in hours from now and I really need your help to sort out the hotel
bills. Kindly let me know if you're willing to help us out of this mess ok
tired of your cunning...

I'll be hanging on here to read from you soon."

Well they'll be hanging on for some time. Unfortunately the Met Police doesn't seem to have a cyber crime division any more and as I didn't actually become a victim of crime, according to the nice chap on the police switchboard, there wasn't much point pursuing it.

I thought I'd share..

Convincing but unfounded conclusion seeks hypothesis with GSOH

2011-01-24T04:19:00.000-08:00

First up, I never said I wasn't a hypocrite. But Google Ngrams have shown me how much of a hypocrite I can be at times.

I found Ngrams from Dan Pink's marvellous blog. In short, they are a lovely and distracting tool which enable you to search a significant proportion of all the publications in English and some other languages since 1800 and produce scientific looking charts. You type in a word or a couple of words you wish to compare and NGram delivers you a graph mapping their incidence as a percentage of all the words published over time.

One of my first experiments was to compare the incidence of the words 'Training vs Learning' since1800. Looking at this graph it is almost impossible not to to speculate on the non existence of the word 'training' before the industrial revolution, its steady rise with the advent of Taylorian workflow management at the beginning of the 20th century and then its comparative decline with the advent of the knowledge economy approaching the turn of the 21st century.

But there is next to no real science supporting these sweeping assertions. The trouble is I start off with an idea I think will throw something up and then match my story to what I think I see in the data.

Let's try another one, the incidence of "faith, hope and charity" (or the three theological virtues) could be argued to clearly show the constant decline of religiosity in the English speaking world over the last two centuries barring a slight rally after each world war. Again this sounds plausible and might be readily accepted.

But I have done no real work to interrogate this claim or to test anything substantive. The ease with which anyone can now create superficially compelling data groupings to support their claims can only be a bad thing for self directed learners. It is now even easier to create passable nonsense. And it is not as if we weren't gullible enough already...

But I still really like them...

So Google Ngrams, a marvellous but dangerous toy.

Un-resolutions

2011-01-17T08:49:00.000-08:00

January is properly underway now. Sometime in the next couple of days if it hasn't happened already there will be a rash of discussions about the most depressing day of the year. This will be today, tomorrow or the day after depending on which PR driven piece of non-research is driving it. I'm not going to bother to look for it or link to it because it is the same story every year.

As are resolutions. Every year we promise ourselves to be thinner, happier, richer, less single, healthier. Then a year goes by and we do it again.

But I am not mocking new year's resolutions. Although many of them fail to survive until February, it is not the failures that matter. It is the starts. The beginnings. Whether purposeful or accidental.

You must at least do something...

Don't wait for another big milestone, new year or another birthday to begin something. Find small milestones.

So today, which is the day after my daughter's birthday (she is six now if you're interested) I am going to start a few more things:

1. I shall be more positive - 2011 has been pretty good thus far

2. I am going to look into Sharepoint (I am hearing more and more about it and I am completely ignorant of it's capability)

3. I shall unplug myself a little more often and read a few more books (you know the things with pages)

4. I shall finish the decorating in my house by the February half term

5. I shall start Lent early (not in the religious sense but in the eating and drinking slightly less sense)

That's enough for one day. I think.

That's all well and good but who's picking up the tab...

2010-12-20T06:42:00.000-08:00

We hosted the Internet Time Alliance in London on Thursday last at an event which focused on the practicalities of using informal learning/social learning/smarter working in the workplace.

There was quite a lot of back and forth in the day. I would say that everyone in the room was enthusiastic about the idea that rather than pay people to train your employees it is a good thing that there are internet tools and internet enabled networks that will enable employees to develop themselves for free (or significantly less).

However, for many employers this does not lead irrefutably to switching off the controls of the company firewall and letting all staff use Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc etc. For more on this see Jane Hart's post on Top 10 reasons not to ban social media in your workplace)

As with many things, when we got into the detail it was a little more complicated than expected. There is definitely an element on the part of employers that the elephant can't see it's just a twig (learned helplessness). Equally, it's all very well for Jay Cross to criticise the European Commission for not seeing any value in Twitter but then a day later this happens...

On Friday, I heard that Yahoo is puling the plug on Delicious. (Michele Martin writes a very good obituary here). Now Delicious is possibly my favourite web 2.0 tool. I think it is brilliant. Over the last two years that I have been singing its praises, I have often soothed the doubters who question all things free and web 2.0 by explaining that Delicious was a different proposition to all the other start ups as it was backed by Yahoo and so wouldn't fold just as you were getting used to it. (Oops!)

At our event with the ITA last Thursday I had a brief chat with Clark Quinn explaining that I had been an e-learning sceptic in the first generation bubble that burst so spectacularly in 2001. I had persistently resisted jumping on the bandwagon of e-learning as I saw it as a more expensive way of doing something worse (as the poorly animated PowerPoints of early e-learning seemed to me). Eventually the lower price point and less than infinite target audience would catch up with the hugely inflated development costs. Hmmm, parallels?

Now the point for me about social learning is that you are not paying inflated costs for development indeed often the user is generating their own content. And yet Delicious, however useful, did not have a revenue stream and has been consigned to the dustbin.

This leads me back to my underlying issue in social learning. Where is the value added, to whom, how much and how can you charge for it? If you cannot answer these questions, you do not have a business. You might have a movement but is it sustainable in the longer term?

Same infrastructure different application...

2010-10-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

I know that anyone who really knows what they are talking about in the internet arena will tut in a slightly annoyed manner with me and say, 'do try and keep up Greenway...' But I can only go as fast as my ageing brain allows, which is increasingly not very fast.

Two fascinating conversations I had recently are fermenting slowly in my head.

The first was with Chris Locke the MD of the GSMA Development Fund (and a lovely man to boot) who was telling me about how mobile phones are being used as a leapfrogging technology in parts of the world that lack a traditional infrastructure. The concept of delivering lessons to paying users for less than the price of a cup of tea is a destructive innovation that anyone in workplace learning should be worrying about now.

The actual learning is often deliberately low tech (it can be as simple as an SMS telling you to turn your TV to a particular channel) because of the pressures on cost. But the point is employing a network for a different use rather than coming up with expensive bells and whistles. Fortunately for those of us in the lazy and complacent developed world, they are focusing their attention on the parts of the world living on less than $2 a day. But it wont take long before they look at other targets.

The other conversation was with an old Serbian friend (and also a lovely man) who was telling me about a mayors' environmental conference he had attended recently where a chap (I forget the name) had come up with a solution for the infrastructure problems facing electric cars (to whit it takes hours to charge the battery and there are not many places where you can do it). The solution is genius. Owners buy the car but rent the battery. So when you go to a petrol station or other outlet, you don't have to plug your car in and leave it for five hours, you swap your flat battery for a fully charged one. One in classic Blue Peter form which 'has been prepared earlier' which allows the electricity grid to balance the demands of battery charging (which is the other problem with electric cars being charged overnight at home - everyone plugs them in at the same time whereas petrol stations can charge batteries at a steady rate throughout the day).

Again this employs an existing network for a different use.

I need to think about networks some more...

Simples!

2010-10-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

I'm rather fond of the meerkat adverts. And simplification has been a theme of this week. It is interesting how when a particular idea resonates with you, you find it cropping up with alarming regularity.

My thought this week has been. If you're not getting through, make it simpler. Don't blame the other person for not understanding - although heaven knows there are people you would like to slap round the face with a wet haddock - take it upon yourself to articulate better.

But making things simple is really difficult! Hence the desire to blame the other person for being stupid, lazy or both.

Making things simple takes time, which we often have not got. It takes effort, which we often have not got.

More words, more data and more opinions do not help. They hinder. If all you do is compile reports and discuss their contents at meetings, you may think you are a strategic manager where, in fact, you are merely an administrator with a pie chart. I would argue that there is one thing that defines a manager. It is making decisions and accepting responsibility for them.

Have a lovely weekend!

Pushing water uphill with a rake?

2010-09-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

Further to a thought I had earlier this year, I have been wondering about how to raise issues about workplace learning with clients. I think it is fairly clearly established that employers have cut their spend significantly on L&D over the last 18 months. Yesterday at a networking event I was interested to see significant anecdotal evidence that one of the more common responses from L&D departments is to cut or cease spend with external suppliers but to do very little analysis of internal training teams.

Now first up I am bound to moan about this as I am an outsourced training supplier and training service provider (so please add you pinch of salt now). Equally, I know that turkeys don't tend to vote for Christmas. But I am fascinated that people still fail to consider the total cost of learning. Cutting tens of thousands of pounds from external spend whilst keeping internal trainers delivering less than 75 training days a year is absurd.

I am quite happy to get beaten up on price and quality we should all strive to be making learning happen faster, cheaper and more effectively but it galls when others are not held to the same measure.

I worry that too often in learning and development:

Those who understand and care don't have the authority and those who have the authority don't understand or care...

But this is not reason for despair. I just have to find a better way to articulate the problem...

Two wheels good, more wheels bad

2010-09-07T09:42:00.001-07:00

Today was an excellent day for being on two wheels. I imagine that the unions will be quite content with the fuming blockage they managed to provoke on most of London's roads. It's interesting to note that much of France is on strike today so maybe there is something in the air.

Returning from a nice long holiday - so generally in a good mood already - my good mood was further enhanced by tootling past the miles of traffic on my Vespa. If you commute between five and fifteen miles in London, I seriously recommend you consider a scooter or motorbike. It just makes you happier.

It doesn't matter what you say...

2010-08-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

it's what you do that counts...

Jane Hart is trying to get a little campaign going for why social media should be allowed in the workplace.

I am a fan of informal (social) learning.

BUT. Today I agreed that we would shut off access to Facebook at our firewall! What a hypocrite I am

We have been looking into a number of system issues this week and our event management suite has been running very slowly.

It turns out that a number of my staff had been using the thin client application on which our system is presented to get round the group wide restrictions on the Internet. Essentially although Facebook is blocked at the firewall for the whole group, they had cleverly found a back door.

This showed up on the traffic reports which spiked at lunchtime.

Having found the problem our IT people deleted over 7GB of temporary Internet cookies from the server allocated a little more virtual memory and suddenly it's like we have a whole new application.

So maybe I shouldn't be allowed to lend my support to Jane's campaign. But in my defence people can still see LinkedIn, Twitter, Slideshare, Flikr, Google Docs, Google Reader, Ning, Blogs etc. So it's not all bad.

The 10 reasons not to use social media that Jane is responding to are:

Social media is a fad.
It's about controlling the message.
Employees will goof off.
Social Media is a time waster.
Social media has no business purpose.
Employees can't be trusted.
Don't cave into the demands of the millennials.
Your teams already share knowledge effectively.
You'll get viruses.
Your competition isn't using it, so why should you?

Someone else can take up cudgels on number one and provide stats for the companies who use it. Number two is the job of the IT department. Number three is so absurd is hardly bears repeating. Numbers 4,5,6, 7 & 8 are all the same point poorly reformulated. If your employees goof off it's your fault as a manager; either give them something more interesting to do, motivate them, accept an element of goofing as part of life or find people who don't goof off. Number 9 is naive in the extreme, anyone who thinks they can control information has no job in management. And as for number 10, well that can't be answered just yet, only time will tell.

Field of dreams...

2010-08-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

"If you build it, they will come", is the death knell of many a self obsessed business model.

I have been wondering this week why so many people persist in paying significant amounts for something pretty, polished but ultimately irrelevant when it comes to workplace learning when they could have somethings (but admittedly not all) much more relevant for free or close to free.

Why do fully grown adults still fall for, "LOOOK! Shiny!!"?

Is the issue with social learning and open source solutions that we don't place enough emphasis on the cost of engagement? The cost of getting the horse to the water. Ultimately if you can get a horse into a classroom or onto an e-learning course you can shut the door either literally or figuratively and leave it at that. A tick goes into a box on the LMS and that's that.

We get so enthusiastic about all the things that the horse can do (I know I'm wringing the life out of this analogy) that we fail to get it there in the first place.

Would it be better to start by requiring a budget of £30k pa to cover staff time to prompt, provoke, post and other things beginning with p? Rather than focusing on the open source and free nature.

Or do we take the first law of Russian economics in the 1990's, "If you can't sell something, quadruple the price". Because what people don't pay for, they don't value...

Nascent thought about roles in learning

2010-07-19T09:11:00.001-07:00

I went to my daughter's sports day last week - a classic of the reception class "involved-not-competitive and yet just a little competitive anyway" model. I was interested by the differing attitudes of the parents from the uber-coaching (some of whom had been out on the common with stop watches the previous evening I am told) to the completely laid back.

The following day I met with Teodora's reception class teacher, who is an absolute delight, for the end of year parents' evening chat. I was immediately taken back to something that she said to me earlier in the year... When I talked about how defensive my daughter can occasionally get when I correct her reading or writing or even gently model the correct form without even correcting, her teacher just laughed and said, "What on earth are you doing trying to teach your own child? I gave up on that long ago!"

I have recently been reading Martyn Sloman's ebook soon to be published at the Training Journal website and in amongst his nine principles, number three is "disregard anything that was written in the last century". Now he is being deliberately provocative and I am sure he is not getting rid of the whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" theme. But he does have a pop at the structured approach to learning. His suggestions for replacements are dependent on the context.

Which brings me to my thought. Is the future of learner creation - since that is what I think we should be about - dependent on surrounding learners with people or networks which perform a set of appropriate roles? I don't know what these roles will be but they might include (trust, productive communication, challenge and question, etc etc) In the same way that a child builds their own model of the world from the relationships of their family and immediate environment (father, mother, lover, friend) and the healthier the role models and the environment the healthier the eventual adult.

Hmm

Size of UK market for employer L&D

2010-07-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

I have been asked a lot recently by a number of clients for benchmarking data on the trends in learning and development. And I have to say the one trend that shows no sign of abating is the exponential growth of assertions unsupported by data...

So I thought I would share some thoughts, where possible supported by data. If anyone has better sources I'd love to hear about them.

Size of the UK market for employer L&D

There is a range of valuations here from IFLL's 2009 figure £2.95bn (which I think is a bit silly) through the CIPD's figure of £6.3bn, UKCES at £19bn to the CBI at £39bn.

Now some of the above are hard costs (cash) and some include soft costs (time off work) but non of them are particularly clear or consistent.

According to the ONS the UK's working population is currently just shy of 29 million. If you take a reasonable average spend per employee of £250 per annum you get £7.25bn.

Insource/outsourced

What percentage of employer spend on L&D is outsourced or insourced? Well it's difficult to get any figures here for the UK but in the USA there are two sources: Bersin's Corporate Learning Factbook and the ASTD's Annual Industry Report. Interesting the the former thinks there is a trend towards insourcing where the latter thinks the opposite.

In the UK one figure I am fairly comfortable (as it comes from NIACE via HMRC) with is that the number of UK companies registered for VAT that describe themselves as training providers has doubled since 2000 to almost 13,000 . This does not necessarily mean that people have left employer L&D departments to set up on their own but it would correlate.

I think that this one is actually a revolving door as L&D departments grow and then are cut back when they get too big and flabby or the economic cycle turns against them.

One source that crops up constantly is the Keynote Industry Report which I gather was set up by some former Reed employees but I happen to find the Merlin Scott report more useful in that it casts its net a bit wider and has better financial analysis. That said you can find most of the information for free if you are prepared to look and it only costs £1 to download accounts from companies house.

That'll do for today. On another day we'll look at KPIs for training delivery.

"Learnings" from football

2010-06-28T02:28:00.000-07:00

First up, I think that those who talk about "key learnings" should be given multiple paper cuts and rolled in salt. It is a an awful neologism that seems to be gaining ground despite there being a perfectly good noun in existence (Lessons) . I only added it to the title so I could vent about it.

More importantly, yesterday's England performance...?! Wow, that was abject. I've lived through some dreadful England performances but that was properly excruciating.

The xenophobic hacks in the tabloids will, no doubt, try to hang this one round the Italian coach's neck and it is true that as leader he must shoulder his fair share of the blame. Others will trot out the, "paid too much to care" argument which is equally fatuous. We are all complicit in their salaries by watching the game and paying our Sky Sports subscriptions; in the same way that by buying Heat or other seminal weekly publications, we have made millionaires out of Peter Andre and his ilk.

Talking to my FD (a former semi-professional footballer) the other week about football in general, I learned that in Germany you are not allowed to sign a professional contract until you are 18 and there is strong encouragement to complete your education, which is largely absent in the UK. I wondered if there is a learning element to our recent failure.

I have nothing to substantiate the following assertion but from the level of punditry from former German and French international players I get the impression that the average level of education is significantly higher in continental European players. Jurgen Klinsmann, Marcel Desailly appear to have a more profound understanding of the tactics, systems and psychology of the game than their English counterparts. This is quite probable given the comparative levels of general education revealed by the latest OECD figures

I wondered if you make it manditory for every premier league team (and possibly championship depending on the finance) to get all of its players to a level three qualification at a minimum before they can sign a contract, would it make an impact over the long term?

You can't blame the footballers choosing sport over school. Football is a route out of poverty and many of them will have had awful experiences of formal schooling and can't wait to get out. But there is more than enough money at the top of the sport to pay for specialist tutors and more than enough subject areas to interest even the most jaded learning palate.

Getting more of these people to a level three qualification might engender more former footballers able to pass the FA coaching certificates and perhaps more home grown managers. But it might also develop a team of England players whose conceptual understanding of the game is a little more developed than, blood and thunder, thud and blunder.

Or maybe I should just take to following England at darts...

Spare the rod, spoil the child?

2010-06-18T04:46:00.000-07:00

Indirectly, I stumbled across a piece in my RSS feeds this morning by David D. Friedman (son of Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman) on children and make believe. In it, Friedman one of the leading figures of anarcho-capitalism (no, I'd never heard of it before either) makes the case for bursting the bubbles of four year old children.

To paraphrase, he believes that you should play to win with you children otherwise they will never learn to deal with life, which to be fair is a view that dates back to the ancient Spartans at least.

But I think it misses the point on one of the most important lessons of life. It is not the competition which is important. Any idiot can learn to be competitive. The thing that we need to help our children learn is how to deal with defeat.

Too many people have unpleasant learning experiences early in life which put them off learning for good.

Whilst I entirely concur that it is pointless to wrap children in cotton wool, if you set out to scarify them, all you will create is insensitive scar tissue.

New learning, old learning

2010-06-02T07:51:00.001-07:00

Reading Charles Jennings's excellent post (which of course links in with the LCB Big question of the month) about which skills we should be teaching the workforce of tomorrow, made me think about an ongoing conversation I have been having with a number of people.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to follow this blog since it's inception will know that I am a huge fan of Randy Pausch (the link goes to a video that lasts an hour but it is an hour well spent). The last lecture is a conceit, we should apply to the question at hand.

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow what skills, knowledge would you pass on today?

It rather sharpens the mind doesn't it? But it helps significantly with filtering out all the extraneous noise and superfluous rubbish with which we clutter our lives and our workplaces.

Charles's taxonomy is very good (and I reproduce it in full below)

Search and 'find' skills	To find the right information when it's needed
Critical thinking skills	To extract meaning and significance
Creative thinking skills	To generate new ideas about, and ways of, using the information
Analytical skills	To visualise, articulate and solve complex problems and concepts, and make decisions that make sense based on the available information
Networking skills	To identify and build relationships with others who are potential sources of knowledge and expertise, within and outside the organisation
People skills	To build trust and productive relationships that are mutually beneficial for information sharing
Logic	To apply reason and argument to extract meaning and significance
A solid understanding of research methodology	To validate data and the underlying assumptions on which information and knowledge is based

But I wonder if it can be refined even further?

One of the oldest university curricula in the world, which could be argued to predate Christianity but has definitely been around for over a millennium is the Trivium (logic, rhetoric and grammar). It was followed by the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy). These two programmes were the core of an early mediaeval liberal arts education which was preparation for life and seem to overlap significantly with Charles's suggestions above.

Now, I haven't got time to teach my daughter or my staff all of the above in my self imposed final day... So what would I settle for?

Probably to encourage confidence and curiosity, tempered with reason. If you have these then you can pick everything else up.

Hmmm.

Am I the dinosaur or the meteorite salesman

2010-05-26T03:41:00.000-07:00

A lovely serendipitous collision of ideas yesterday.

Firstly, sitting next to Charles Jennings at Training Zone Live listening to Jim Kirkpatrick reprise his father's model. The new Kirkpatrick model includes the introduction of a protected term ROE (for Return on Expectation) which is preferred to ROI. I could be cynical suggest that this is because Jack Phillips's model was an addition to the original model and not owned by them (but there is nothing wrong with trying to earn a crust). However, as Charles tweeted during the session, the fact that session focused on the 10% (or thereabouts) that is classroom training, the whole argument was effectively putting lipstick on a pig.

We carried on our discussion after the session about how it is so widespread in our industry to conveniently ignore the whole cost of learning. Jim (citing Rob Brinkerhoff's research) claimed that 10% of the spend on formal L&D is wasted on incidentals and only 90% goes into actual value in the classroom.

But this figure ignores cost of sale (to outsourced providers), procurement costs, finance costs, management costs, development waste and duplication, admin costs, travel costs, cancellation fees etc. I have long been suggesting that the actual spend on intellectual property or actual learning content as a percentage of total is probably less than 5%. But to accept this you must first accept that there is a large amount of waste and duplication in our industry.

And turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

Then Jane Hart send me a delightful tweet, asking me if I had drawn this picture.

I told her that I wished that I had as it summed up some of the conversations of the day perfectly but it was another Hugh who deserved the credit (the extremely talented author is Hugh MacLeod add him to your RSS feeds). Then I laughed as the incisiveness of Jane's wit finally dawned on me...

Too busy to think

2010-05-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

I notice that I have not been blogging much this month, which does not herald an awful self-referential blog on blogging. Euurk!

I always used to use reading as a barometer of a balanced approach to life. If I was reading books at a reasonable rate, then I was OK. If I wasn't reading at all, then something was out of kilter. Of course the solution was not to pick up a book but to address, where possible, what was going wrong elsewhere in life that was denying me the time, strength or inclination to read.

In any case I am now wondering whether frequency of blogging is a good indicator of balance too?

Over the last month (which of course contained the milestone of the first anniversary of my wife's death) I have managed to look after my daughter, work, sleep and precious little else. I still read my RSS feeds but I have been hitting the "Mark all read" button more often than usual. Fortunately, Twitter allows me to be as superficial or as profound as I like so I haven't completely missed out on the month.

Reflection requires effort... maybe that's why so many people can't be bothered?

Dangerous territory... politics

2010-04-30T04:07:00.000-07:00

This is and has always been a learning blog. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that a general election is less than a week away, so I suppose it had to crop up at some point.

The Chairman of the Reed Group and my boss, James Reed has done some interesting little interviews of the three potential Secretaries of State for Work and Pension, which are posted on our jobsite. In them he asks each of the candidates the same five questions so you can compare their answers.

How on earth am I going to make this relevant to learning...?

Well, the thing that has been making my blood boil over the length of this campaign is the degree to which we are all complicit in allowing the three major parties to get away with adversarial positioning rather than actually testing their assertions.

A couple of quick examples:

Not safe in our beds: overall crime and nearly every individual type of crime has never been lower since records began. It has been falling consistently since 1996 (if you don't believe me go look at the British Crime Survey data). But you wouldn't know this from any of the major parties... Broken society? Words fail me!

This is going to hurt... but I'm not going to tell you how much. As Greeks are on the edge of open revolt against the further cuts in public sector pay and increases in taxes that are being placed on them as conditions of support from the EU, we in the UK blunder on naively assuming that our economy is much sounder than Greece's. Do you know how big the UK's structural deficit is? (If not click here). All the three main parties seem to be trading insults around the £6bn that Labour is accusing the Tories of threatening to cut straight after the election. Yet the Institute for Fiscal Studies has criticised all three of failing to disclose their real plans. (It's well worth reading Stephanie Flanders on the difference between British and Greek debt if the above worries you too much)

They are all behaving like embarrassed parents, who when confronted by a child who asks an awkward question they don't want to answer point into the distance and say, "Woo! Look at that! Shiny!"

My point is, if you are ever going to learn anything of value, don't accept what you are told. Go and check for yourself...

And stay awake because it will all change tomorrow...

2010-04-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

With some sense of satisfaction and potentially equal concern, I think I am starting to understand the value of twitter (I have a tendency to be a little late to parties).

Having blogged before about the fact that I couldn't really see the value of it and admitted to worrying about those who have the time to fritter their lives away in twitter, this is mildly embarrassing.

I am an evangelical fan of RSS feeds and Delicious and love what I have learned through them over the past two years. But I have been immensely busy at work over the last couple of months and have not had the time to work methodically through the unread items in Google reader that are starting to pile up.

This was what I liked about RSS. Emails are generally chores and obligations, rarely ideas or motivators. RSS by contrast was stuff that I was interested in. But if it got on top of me I could always hit the "mark all read" button. However this always felt like a bit of a betrayal (the tyranny of the unread) and I've been doing it more often recently.

And so I got the joy in twitter. It doesn't mind if you go off and earn a living for most of the day. It will be there when you get back and will not pointedly remind you how much you have been avoiding it. And most of the good and interesting ideas get retweeted if you follow enough people with shared interests.

Learning without guilt. How marvellous!

Motivation...

2010-03-29T05:06:00.000-07:00

I'm a fan of Dan Pink or rather I am a potential fan of Dan Pink, having thoroughly enjoyed his presentation on Ted talks about the science of motivation. I have bought but not yet read his latest book, "Drive".

So naturally I am following him on Twitter as it is easier to read 140 characters than a whole book... Which lead me to his blog post today... Which cited some interesting research conducted at a university fund raising operation.

University call-centre fundraisers were split into three groups. Group one were given information on the benefits of being a good fundraiser [personal benefit] ; group two were given information on the benefits their fundraising provided to those who received the scholarships [task significance] and group three were given no information [control].

"What happened?
The results were “amazing,” says Goldstein. Employees in the Personal Benefit and Control groups secured the same number of pledges and raised the same amount of money as they had before the intervention.
But people in the Task Significance Group, the ones who read about what their work accomplished and how it affected the world, “earned more than twice the number of weekly pledges (from an average of 9 to an average of 23) and more than twice the amount of weekly donation money (from an average of $1,288 to an average of $3,130).”

Is it really that amazing?

Or just further evidence that people sell better when they understand the benefits derived by purchasers from the product or service they are selling. In this case those donating money are more likely to give it to someone who can tell them specific stories of how donations change people's lives; rather than to someone who wants to make the commission on the donation or is building his/her CV for employment after university.

FAB?!

Moore of the same... or something else entirely

2010-03-25T06:09:00.000-07:00

Sorry. I'm a sucker for pun.

I was at a think tank/discussion forum yesterday where I learned that Intel are currently claiming a 2% advance per month in processing speed. To those who are interested, if you compound this rate you get a doubling of processing speed every 36 months or so.

Moore's law originally said 24 months but it is still pretty impressive that close to exponential growth has been maintained since he introduced the concept in 1965.

The gentleman who shared the information with me also claimed that this will lead to better decision making as more data can be processed more quickly. But I wonder whether more data actually means "better decisions" or rather bigger decisions which in turn means more risk.

Which suggests that the next crash will be even bigger the last....!

When you're ready...

2010-03-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

A number of things over the last few weeks have caused me to reflect further on the nature of change in people.

Two of my friends, less than 24 hours apart, said to me more or less verbatim,

"Of course, I've heard it said hundreds of times, people have told me again and again over the years but it wasn't until I experienced [insert perspective changing experience] that I finally understood"

Like the old joke about how many therapists it takes to change a light bulb... "One, but does the light bulb really want to be changed?"

In the current revolution that is social learning, maybe we should put the word, "training" quietly to sleep.

"perspective changing", "experience facilitating", "reflection forcing"... too convoluted?

Or just stick with, helping learning happen.

Maths from scratch

2010-02-25T01:42:00.001-08:00

I was recommended a blog on Maths by a colleague that I am thoroughly enjoying. The author Steven Strogatz is taking his readers through mathematics from 1 + 1 = 2 to as far as he can go. It is engaging, charming and stimulating. Here are the first three articles:

From fish to infinity

Rock groups

The enemy of my enemy

Enjoy!

While I'm at it, an interviewee recommended a wonderful blog about teaching in an inner London comprehensive, To Miss With Love. Equally brilliant

Relativity

2010-02-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

Last week, it being half-term, I took my daughter and her best friend and family to well known amusement park near Paris.

I feel like I ought to pause to allow the magnitude of this fact to sink in. I am not someone who ever thought they would allow themselves to be mugged by a grinning rodent and I have caved in before my daughter is even six.

Needless to say the experience was an unpleasant one. While standing in a queue for over an hour for a roller coaster ride that lasted less than five minutes, I found myself calculating how much it was costing us to wait. The answer was about £50 an hour, which gets even more interesting if you add that to the cost of the (and I hesitate to call it this) "food" that they served.

Much as I would love to continue moaning about the experience, the point is that my daughter and a large number of people in the park loved it. And I mean really loved it. They didn't notice the queues, weren't worried about the absence of nutrients, they were just having fun.

I am forced to wonder if my obvious prejudice against the place created my reality. And this leads on to wondering about whether the same is true for other areas of my life. Am I really a sceptic?

Still haven't got it

2010-01-31T15:35:00.000-08:00

I am beginning to feel a little left out. I still haven't managed to "get" Twitter. I know I ought to throw myself into it to be able to really benefit. But I can't. It just seems to demand too much time. And I can't just leave it on in the background as it starts to annoy me like a television left on in a room when you are having an interesting conversation.

I like RSS. I like the fact that I can make time to read things that I am interested in without extraneous noise.

Occasionally I'll spot something go by on the Twitter Gadget on my iGoogle home page and follow the link. But generally I go to Reader first. I like the more considered pieces rather than the instantaneous.

I will accept that Twitter is good for asking questions that are not answered by search engines.

Maybe it's me. But Twitter just strikes me as too needy...

How not to run a bank

2010-01-29T05:55:00.000-08:00

Today we launched a new learning programme for Bankers called SMART CB. Together with the Chartered Institute of Bankers in Scotland, we are offering a fast track route for senior managers to obtain Chartered Banker status. Below is an excerpt from my speech at the launch event.

"I should like to tell you a little story to underline the importance of professional standards in banking that is a little closer to home than you might expect.

I want to tell you about my great-great-grandfather, George.

From the early 19th century the Greenways were bankers in Warwick. Although initially very successful, the bank was taken over by my great-great-great-uncle Kelynge Greenway after the death of his father. Under the terms of his father's will, £25,000 in capital was removed from the bank leaving just seven pounds to the remaining partners. That the bank survived the withdrawal of £25k at all, is a testament to its strength up to this point. What happened next is an object lesson in how NOT to run a bank.

Kelynge asked his brothers, Thomas (a Colonel in the army), George (a solicitor and my great-great- grandfather) and Charles (an architect) to join him in the bank. Now, you would have thought that with only seven pounds to their name, they would take the opportunity to recapitalise the bank.

But no, they decided instead to run the bank with NO CAPITAL WHATSOEVER! According to the British Banking History Society in December 1886 of the banks £278,000 of assets, £210,000 were the partners' overdrawn accounts and this included extensive tramway speculation (grandpa George was also the Chairman of the Magdeburg Tramway Company).

The bank failed on September 6th 1887 after their agents in London, Glynns, refused to honour their cheques and the trial of the partners began on October 27th. George was sentenced to five years' penal servitude and Kelynge to 12 months' hard labour, Thomas escaped sentence due to his "almost complete ignorance of banking" and Charles had died five years previously.

My grandfather Walter told me that his father Cate (who had been 11 at the time of the crash) never spoke of the affair. One can only speculate on the impact it would have had on a young boy but he overcame it, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the army, serving in India and China ultimately winning the DSO at Gallipoli. Indeed you will be glad to hear, my family has steered clear of banking since; sticking almost exclusively to the things it knows about namely teaching and the military.

I think it is safe to say that neither George, Thomas or Charles knew of the canons of lending; still less of how to properly assess credit risk. It is clear they knew absolutely nothing of best practice in capital ratios.

I think it is also safe to say that my family knows the fundamental importance of professional standards in banking.

Mark Twain once said, "History never repeats itself but it often rhymes". I don't think you need me to point out the parallels between my ancestors' short-comings as bankers and the factors which contributed to our current economic situation.

There is a wealth of knowledge in the path to Chartered Banker and knowledge is, I believe, the only long term way to profit. I hope it is a path that you join us on."

I thought I'd share this here as it was only through working with CIOBS that I found out about this element of my family history.

Objectives

2010-01-18T03:03:00.000-08:00

Janaury blog posts are often about resolutions. Big, sweeping, ambitious pieces. But I haven't made any resolutions this year. I shall simply state two objectives:

1. To simplify wherever possible
2. To have fun. Or more specifically, since I don't think one can simply will happiness to exist, to try not to miss opportunities for enjoyment

That latter one sent me on an enjoyable five minute diversion. I was sure that there is a Samuel Johnson quote about happiness along the lines of, "Any plan for merriment seems doomed by its own nature". I eventually found it as:

"Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme for merriment."

But not before I had throughly enjoyed his wit and 'resolved' (eek) to try and read more of him.

Compression ratios and spinning plates

2009-12-17T04:41:00.000-08:00

I wrote a piece for the Training Journal last month on appraisals (if you're interested back issues of my articles can be found here). In short, I suggested that one of the reasons that appraisals are such unproductive affairs is the compression ratio - trying to squeeze a year's feedback into one hour or sometimes one word. A very interesting conversation yesterday further refined the thought.

I made two suggestions in my article. First, rather than provide feedback once a year for sixty minutes, try to provide the opportunity for feedback sixty times a year for one minute. Second rather than focusing on the reducing the negatives, look to grow the positives.

So a frequent, positive and light touch...

Anyone see the parallels with plate spinning?

E'en such is time...

2009-12-14T02:07:00.000-08:00

Scooting into work this morning reflecting on the reasons that stop people engaging in self-teaching through social learning - and inwardly screaming at bus drivers who completely ignore the rules of the road - a penny dropped.

Learning should be fun.

I know. Duh! We've all known this for years. But if you look at the difference between e-mail and RSS feeds there is something here. We have no control over our email. Once someone or indeed something (spamming engines for example) has got hold of your email address they can send you emails whenever they like about whatever they like.

Many is the time that I have returned from holiday to confront the hundreds of unread email and my mouse has hovered over the 'Delete all' button as I silently wished to myself, "If only". I say to myself that if something is really that important, someone will pick up the phone. But then I never do. I scan and delete as efficiently as I can; I file and forget resenting every second.

I have long postulated a theory of business tasks:

The importance of a task is inversely proportional to the time you need to ignore it to render it moot. For example something bone-crushingly urgent can be ignored for five minutes and is no longer a problem but some trivial tasks can be ignored for months and still need to be done.

But with RSS feeds (or tweets for that matter) it is completely different. Of course, at first it felt the same. I would come back from holiday to confront hundreds of unread feeds and feel as oppressed by Google reader as I do by Lotus Notes. But then I deleted all for the first time and everything was OK. The world didn't stop spinning on its axis. Because I asked for these feeds, I control them. They don't get upset if I don't read them because I'm a little busy today. Consequently, I probably pay more attention to them than a lot of my emails.

I think it is essential to get this across to those daunted by the sheer volume and scale of information on the net.

1. Read what you want to read when you want to read
2. It's OK to delete everything and start again
3. If you miss a meme another one will be along in a minute

Then when you get past this you can start to reflect on what you chose to read... But that is for another post.

It's all in the name

2009-11-30T09:56:00.001-08:00

Further reflection on my post earlier this month on learning and risk suggests that by using the word, "risk" I might be missing the point. This reflection was prompted by Peter's comment on my post and some interesting conversations with other learning professionals. The best of these yielded this gem of a quote attributed to a brigadier in the British army,

"Often the wrong idea executed with extreme violence turns out to be the right idea"

The trouble with the term "risk" is that it means too many different things to too many people. Moreover, it is perhaps against the zeitgeist of the credit crunch to exhort people to take more risks so that they can learn more. That was, of course, not what I was trying to say but I can see how it might be understood this way.

I proffer "attitude to uncertainty" as an alternative. Less pithy, I know, but perhaps a tighter definition.

Is our attitude to uncertainty the thing which best defines our ability to learn? You can have fun with the word uncertainty. The future is uncertain but when you come to think of it so is the past. We only think we know things.

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so. " Artemus Ward [found on Peter Edstrom's blog for which thanks]

Wild Friday Thought

2009-11-27T07:57:00.000-08:00

I have just finished reading The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin, which was a birthday present from a friend that I highly recommend.

[note to self: is the fact that all of my birthday presents were either books or malt whiskey something I should be concerned by or proud of?]

In it Levitin examines the evolution of music alongside the evolution of human consciousness. This sounds terribly dry but is in fact compelling and fun in his hands he marries it to a dissection of the music of The Beatles, Paul Simon, Neil Young to Arcade Fire, Sting and Johnny Cash.

In any case towards the end of the book he talks about systems displaying evidence of consciousness. An individual ant in an any colony is no more aware of the actions of the whole than an individual neuron in the brain is aware of taste or thought or dreams.

This made me think about Michael Wesch's YouTube film "The Machine is Us" from a year of so back. Millions of people sorting, sifting the web, creating and collaborating...

I am sure I am very late to have this thought. We are the ants or the neurons. And it has only just occurred to me that the next big step is when the web attains consciousness!

Monday musings on risk

2009-11-16T04:46:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking for a while about risk. My summarised view on learning is that without risk very little learning happens. So rather than focus on the learning content we should focus on the attitude to risk. Encourage people to challenge themselves and others a bit more, step outside of their comfort zones more often and reflect and they will learn more.

Thus I am disappointed to read Lucy Kellaway's piece this morning on managerial bone-headedness as it suggests that the window of humility is closing.

The idea that the recent "unprecedented" shock to our global economy might precipitate a reflection on the whole model seems to have been naive. Maybe like macro and micro economics or classical Newtonian and quantum physics, my little theory of learning doesn't apply across all realities.

A small girl stops peddling and falls off her bike or a little boy shakes a Coke bottle violently and covers the kitchen in stickiness. It is reasonable for them to reflect, adapt and maybe learn. But we drive the entire world's financial system into the buffers and one year on pretty much nothing has changed.

I'll be the first to accept that the reasons for "the perfect financial storm" are far from clear. There are a multitude of variables which will keep economists in decent arguments for years. But to file it under, "Too difficult to understand. Carry on as before" seems a little like a cop out.

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) is also good today on choice. Which makes me think a bit more about the above. Does too much choice mean the same as no choice in terms of a reduction in quality? You could think in terms of market and planned economies both being routes to failure.

But this also applies to learning. If you have no choice you won't reflect and learn. If you have too much choice you can't reflect and learn. New model of politcal and economic thought anyone??

Interesting to note that today my thoughts are entirely provoked by the FT...

Making it happen

2009-10-22T04:34:00.000-07:00

I have been reflecting on how to make individuals take responsibility for their own learning. A number of conversations with people over the last few weeks have hammered home the difficulties of getting an informal learning programme off the ground.

e.g. our firewall shuts off access to anything of value, our risk department would never let us delegate responsibility that far down the line, imagine if someone said something really stupid on twitter...

Within the informal learning blogosphere the response seems to be, "Quit moaning and just accept that the change has already happened. Traditional learning and development is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet"

And yet I don't hear of many major employers who have jumped the early adopter chasm yet (I would love examples to prove me wrong)

Which prompts two thoughts:

1. Start really really small. Teach two or three small groups how to use RSS feeds and social bookmarking and maybe just maybe blogging about their experiences
2. Start huge. Approach major employers and say, "You currently spend £50 million or £590 per head on training each year. Appoint us to run your L&D function and we'll save you 20% in the first year and improve the quality. We'll make ourselves redundant in two years leaving you with the capability to teach yourselves.

Hmmm.

Data swimming

2009-10-01T04:30:00.000-07:00

George Siemens wrote an interesting post yesterday on the narrowing gap between virtual reality and reality. Starting from the changing behaviour of conference audiences who no longer sit patiently and listen but tweet, blog, tag, chat and fact check, George explains his desire to have an "overlaying data layer on the physical world... such as walking through a historical district and being able to see buildings on your mobile device as they looked 100 years ago"

He concludes that the integration of the physical self and the online self is the greatest challenge facing technologists, arguing that total convergence is the likely outcome.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that a Terminator like Head Up Display which offers us the constant seamless ability to access data on our multiple realities would be very cool. Moreover, I am sure that they will be available, if indeed there are not already some working prototypes. But I wonder whether it would necessarily be a good thing...

Moreover would it be put to good use? More (data) does not necessarily mean better it just means more.

I'm tying myself in mental knots here because by nature I am a liberal - throw open the doors see what happens type, treat 'em like grown ups. As appear to be many in the informal learning community and associated networks. But at the same time it remains true that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it think... Many people, I would even go so far as to say, the majority, want to be told what to do.

When I wax lyrical about the opportunities for learning in this brave new world even some of my own staff say, "Yeah, it's OK for you to say that. You're educated, curious, enthusiastic... I can't see the relevance."

Now I am really heading into dangerous territory.

Might it be the case that people without the skills to sift, sort, weigh and assess the wealth of available information will marginalised; left at the side of the pool afraid to jump in. Those with confidence to jump in, who lack these metaphorical data swimming skills or who don't learn them fast will drown. Think of how many people cross the road or drive while texting. This figure will rise exponentially with the increase of available distractions. "Surfing related death" will become a whole new category in our national statistics

Previously knowledge was power because most people couldn't be trusted to deal with the information. Where data is ubiquitous, does "data swimming" become power because most people simply can't handle the information.

Old fogey status confirmed...

2009-09-28T02:26:00.000-07:00

Today, I am forty... (pause for gnashing of teeth). A delightful vignette in the office this morning confirms just how out of touch I am. In a brief office conversation about YouTube, I mentioned the current Internet meme of mash-ups involving Kanye West.

I had read in the traditional print media about West interrupting the recent MTV event and then noticed references to it becoming a meme (like Star Wars Kid, Rick Astley and many others before) in some of my RSS feeds this morning.

Unfortunately, I pronounced his name as Kayne as is "Cane" not Kanye as in "Cahn-yay". This was enough to send one of my young colleagues into red faced paroxysms of delight at just how out of touch I am.

The thing is, I have never knowingly heard Mr. West's name spoken out loud. I have simply read it. My mind decided not to recognise the reversal of the "Y" and the "N" in his name in favour of a more plausible (in my head at least) mispelling of Abel's brother's name.

I could complain at this stage that life would be a whole lot easier if people learned to spell and stopped making up words. But it has been ever thus and it is one of the functions of language to separate the wheat from the chaffe, the "in" from the "out" and the young from the old. Many pronunciations of English names and places (Featherstonehaugh: pronounced Fanshaw; Cholmondeley: pronounced Chumly except where it is pronounced Cholmondeley; Loughborough pronounced Luffbra) are deliberate traps for the unwary to highlight the fact that you are either foreign, uneducated or worse "middle class"; depending on your prejudice.

Anyway Kanye's name did its job. It identified me as one of the uninitiated.

This made me think about my learning. Much of my receptive processes are written. I read more than I watch or listen. But when trying out new ideas I will discuss them or write about them as in this blog. This practice, to become useful, must feel safe and indeed the creation of a safe learning environment is one of the cornerstones of a good teacher's art.

Fortunately, I have developed a fairly thick skin in my four decades on this earth and I am happy to be laughed at occasionally. I will not forget Mr West's name in a hurry nor yet will the shame of my mistake prevent me from talking or wrtiting about things that I don't entirely understand.

But it does offer me an insight into why this might be difficult for other people. For people who are still sensitive to the opinions of others the internet and the world of informal learning might resemble less a quasi-infinite candy sore of ideas and opportunity and more a place of almost infinite opportunities for self-embarassment

The information foxtrot

2009-09-14T04:18:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I managed to lose my blackberry. In the past this would have been cause for something akin to panic. OMG there goes my life.!! Not just the address book which I have built up over the years but also the photographs of my daughter I took whilst we were on holiday.

This time no such thing. Most of my contacts are in linkedin or Facebook, my photographs are mostly uploaded to Picasa, my emails are all still waiting for me at work and the phone itself is being replaced by the insurance I didn't know I had (nice to know you can insure yourself against stupidity...)

All of this is lovely and so far so web 2.0...

But the thing that struck me most was the joy of being inaccessible and the things I didn't do whilst deprived of my technological worry bead substitute.

Over the weekend and this morning I didn't read any news I wasn't interested in on the BBC website whilst I was ostensibly doing something else; I didn't absent mindedly check for emails or texts at least 30 times in the day; I didn't play WordMole or FreeRice whilst waiting for something else; I didn't zone out in the middle of a conversation to check a fact on Google; I didn't visit Facebook; I didn't send any text messages when I could have talked to someone.

What did I do?

I took my daughter out on her bicycle and then to the cinema. I watched the last night of the proms on TV when my daughter was in bed. I read a book. I talked to family and friends. I painted with my daughter (her grandmother has bought her oil paints so help me!). I cooked dinner for a neighbour. I thought about stuff.

Then I came to work this morning (reading a book on the way) and checked my RSS feeds and then my emails and the world hadn't ended. I didn't have the courage to leave my phone behind when I went on holiday and yet when it was removed from me I loved it.

I think there is something in this alternation of pace of information (a bit like the slow food movement). Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow (for those of you who wondered about the title)

Summer musings

2009-09-02T08:19:00.000-07:00

The new term is upon us and over the next few days another generation of children will be asked to write about what they did on their summer holidays. I thought I'd reflect upon some of the things I thought about on my summer holidays.

I devoured Naseem Nicholas Taleb's book, "The Black Swan" which really made me think. He takes a prolonged pop at historians, much of which is justified, given that it is easy to find patterns retrospectively if you are looking for them. Indeed the subtitle of his book could be, "post hoc ergo propter hoc", which as well as being the title of an excellent episode of the West Wing highlights the popular misconception that when one event follows another the latter is caused by the former (a new CEO is hired and the company stock price goes up = excellent CEO). More often than not there is no link and the latter event is mere accident.

I don't share his contempt for history because I don't think the purpose of history is one of finding causation or explaining why something happened. Although students who had to explain the origins of the first world war in their exams this year may be surprised at this. I think the discipline of history is in weighing evidence, trying to understand humans and deciding how much credibility to give to any particular account. The value is in asking why someone took this or that particular view of any event and this sits quite well with the empirical skepticism that Taleb encourages.

History is in a constant state of refurbishment. Note the contrasting comments by the Polish President and Russian Prime Minister at the recent events to commemorate the outbreak of the second world war also the disclosure of documents pertaining to the release of the Lockerbie bomber by the British and Libyan governments both appear to be attempts to rewrite history on the fly and then ask yourself is it possible that they are all correct? Although the content of what is said is interesting, it is often more interesting to ask why they might be saying this or that.

I enjoyed Christopher Brookmyre's latest book Pandaemonium which manages to contain the best explanantion of string theory that my simple mind has ever managed to hold, an examination of the role of faith and an understanding of teenage angst all within a comic thriller (who would have thought that possible?)

Thank you to those who commented on my blog about the lessons I learned from my late wife, Jelena. As I continue to reflect upon the time we spent together, I am sure I will learn more. I am learning the hard way but talking about the pain and loss clearly leads, albeit slowly, to healing.

And once again I was staggered by the capacity to learn of the young as I watched my daughter learn to swim in two weeks.

Percolating

2009-07-13T02:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen a coffee percolator for years. They seem to have been replaced by alternative forms of coffee making. Indeed there is now a generation for whom the sound, "plerrrp, plerrrp, ffttt..... aahhhh" means nothing. But there is much to be said for the process of percolation, going round and round on something and letting it filter and change into something else.

You may have noticed I have not been posting for while. I have had other things on my mind (see below May 22nd) but I have also been lurking and percolating on a few things.

The changes in the learning industry precipitated by the current recession and alternative methods made possible through networks are being amply covered by Tony and Jay at their upcoming event on the Future of Learning as a Business. But they also make me think about the increasing virtualisation of life and relationships and individualisation of life. Margaret Thatcher said back in 1987 that "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families". But this was largely in rejection to the "large state" idea. It is possible that her remark was prescient as well as political.

I am not sure where this percolation of ideas is taking me but the future looks quite lonely.

Ego and learning II

2009-06-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

Reflecting quietly on the events of the weekend as I scooted in to work this morning, I returned to the idea of ego and learning. When typing the title into blogger it transpired I had written on the subject before, which only goes to show that I probably only have about seven ideas in total. Scanning my RSS Feeds once at work, I came across a nice piece by Lucy Kellaway on work at school vs work at work which added to the thought.

Yesterday I was helping my niece with her revision whilst she bounced on the trampoline with my daughter. Inadvertently we may have stumbled upon a nice way to reinforce learning. She was having fun, as was my daughter and the revision didn't seem to hurt too much. She was suitably distracted but not preoccupied.

My niece is spectacularly intelligent but also spectacularly and perversely lazy . She will devote superhuman effort into avoiding having to exert herself or actually think. This is always amusing to me as I resolutely resist telling her the answer until I believe she has really searched hard for it.

Her first approach to any homework task will always be ask you to tell her the answer, which she then immediately forgets as in her head the task is finished (the converse to the Zeigarnik effect). If you don't tell her, she will guess rather than think and try to read your reaction to see if she is right (in the interests of fairness my four year old daughter does this too as do most children). Again if you concur she will immediately forget. It is interesting that when she guesses she is quite happy to be wrong and will simply guess again.

I often deploy the Chris Tarrant defence to this strategy and ask for her "final answer". She will then vacillate and beg for the answer. Then and only then will she think. When she has given an answer to the question and it transpires that she was wrong, she will immediately say, "I knew that" when she clearly didn't.

I find it interesting that multiple guessing and being wrong doesn't affect her self image or ego at all. She doesn't feel at all bad about it or try to justify when wrong because it cost her nothing. But when she has put some effort into the task and still gets it wrong she feels the need to reshape and justify.

All this makes me think more about testing and how children acquire their reactions to tests which are often set for a lifetime thereby inhibiting future learning. I would like to know more about this...

Taking another risk...

2009-05-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

I have long believed that being happy and healthy at work is dependant upon being in the right job. I also believe, and here I am at odds with a large number of people, that your mental health at work also depends on your job allowing you to be as close to your REAL SELF for as much of the time as possible.

Unfortunately much of work is immensely dysfunctional and does not reward this type of behaviour. Indeed it tends to reward those who can dissemble the most. Fortunately, I have a job that I love most of the time. Moreover, I have long since accepted that I would rather be myself or something close to it than pretend to be someone else in order to achieve global domination.

With this in mind, I thought I would further blur the boudaries between life and work (remember that Freud said, "Love and work") by reflecting on the biggest thing to happen in my life for some time.

Last week my wife died after 11 years fighting cancer.

I am not looking for sympathy, I already have more than enough. This is a learning blog. But this is, I think, a good time to reflect on what I have learned from Jelena in the 13 years that I was lucky to have known her.

Persistance tends to trump talent.
The English have got their attitudes to friendship completely arse about face - we are nicest to strangers and rudest to our closest friends. As a result we often doubt that we are loved and therefore lack sufficient confidence to take risks in life.
Whatever you do, take some risks. They don't have to be big ones but if you don't take any, you won't learn anything new.
Passion is a good thing. I remember Jelena jumping up and down with glee and clapping the first time she provoked me to red faced rage. That was the point where she believed there was hope for me.
Anger is not a bad thing. Particularly if you recognise it and deal with it.
Curiosity is perhaps the most underrated virtue in the world. People who ask questions, learn things and are remembered by those of whom they ask.
Cultivate those who love you. Ignore those who don't. Otherwise you'll waste your time on people who are not going to help you much.
Don't accept being taken for granted. Challenge if you think you have been short changed.
Make sure that those you love know you love them. It is the best chance you can give them in life.

In memory of Jelena, my biggest fan.

Retail therapy - history teaches us nothing

2009-04-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who runs his own training business and we were comparing notes/moans about the current state of the economy. He then told me that he was in the process of doing due dilligence on a small company he was buying.

"What fun", I replied

"Yes", he said, "Retail therapy always works"

Then a penny dropped. What if the captains of industry were no different from the rest of us? When they are feeling low, instead of going out and buying a new handbag or a nice suit or a trolley load of chocolate, they go and buy a company?

Economists have long known that companies making acquisitions often overpay because the people making the acquisition want the kudos that goes with it.

Fred Goodwin's acquisition of ABN AMRO for the Royal Bank of Scotland last year or any of the other recent over leveraged mergers are just a larger equivalent of you taking your credit card and going mad in Selfridges.

When we will ever learn?

Note to self - RSS feeds are a healthy mental breakfast

2009-04-17T02:21:00.000-07:00

I learned quite a few things yesterday. My RSS feeds have been piling up in Google reader and I haven't quite had the strength to deal with them. But I gave myself 10 minutes or so to tackle a few of them and found energy in doing them.

I particularly enjoyed Tim Harford's piece in the FT on the collapse of macroeconomics. When I was living in Russia in the 1990's there was a marvellous quote that I am afraid I cannot attribute that, "History was closed for refurbishment". I think the same is true of economics at the moment. Tim's piece immediately took me on a tour of Wikipedia to look up "non linear stochastic general equilibrium" which in turn lead me to the "Lucas critique" which essentially states that you cant use theories drawn from historical data to make policy recommendations to government. It's no use looking at how the game has been played in the past to suggest how changing the rules might affect it as the players will adjust depending on the interpretation of the new rules.

That seems likes a very elegant way to put a large number of civil servants and academics out of a job.

Anyway my point is that this 10 minutes lead me to some interesting things which enthused me. I was subsequently more energised for an interesting meeting I had with some guys from Google which in turn lead to a number of interesting ideas.

All from 10 minutes spent on RSS feeds in the morning.

Treasure Hunt Learning

2009-03-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

Prompted by George's response to my post last week, it occurred to me that I have never blogged about how we can and should be shaping the learners of the future.

Whilst the philosophical shift in many governments' attitudes to education which moved in the 1990s towards a more interventionist and "evidence based" approach was needed (in the UK at least the average quality of teaching had declined), I am hoping that Ed Balls's recent scrapping of SATs for 14 year olds is recognition that the pendulum has swung too far towards a culture of measurement.

As business has known for years and governments should have learned by now, people respond to the figures that they know that management are looking at. If Doctors can earn more for giving flu jabs to asthma sufferers, they will; if teachers are rewarded for delivering students with 5 A-C grade GCSEs including English and Maths, that is what they will do.

The trouble is that so much time is taken preparing students for the tests that young people are no longer taught to learn. By spoonfeeding our children we risk making them mentally obese.

But it is not as simple as returning to a false memory of the halcyon days of education where all learning was a joyful treasure hunt without end. Whilst is is true that, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" it is equally true that there are "Lies, damned lies and statistics" and you will get the answer to the question you ask, not the question that you think you have asked.

"In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad." Friedrich Nietzsche

Whilst I agree with Nietzsche that too many cooks often spoil the broth, I don't share his miserablist sentiment entirely. I still believe that it is still possible to retain the joyful spirit of discovery in learning present in a treasure hunt but at the same time have accountability through assessment that is both light in touch but also useful and relevant.

I Tweet Therefore I Am

2009-03-12T07:44:00.001-07:00

Apologies to Descartes for the title of this post but I was chastised by a colleague for not Tweeting the other day despite having set up an account last June. My trouble with Twitter is that I have been unable to see the benefit of it. It strikes me as narcissistic (an interesting post on the Guido Fawkes political blog on the subject made reference to a Times article, which underlined my feelings). I explained this to my critic and suggested that he might be better off doing his job than having a pop at me for my lack of tweets. His response was that Tweeting is very narcissistic (implying that there might be little wrong with narcissism) but a lot of companies, celebrities and politicians found it a marvellous tool.

But Narcissus starved to death while looking at his own reflection...

Can Twitter be a tool which enhances productivity as opposed to a distraction which destroys it? I'm not sure.

By restricting tweets to 140 characters or less, Twitter encourages brevity, and probably clarity. It also appears to generate fast and constructive discussions in communities that form around certain threads. So I feel that it should be a great learning tool I just can't see it yet.

There can only be one way to find out and that is to try it. So we have set up a Reed Learning Twitter Account and I have set up a personal one. From the Reed Learning one we will try to produce learning tweets on how to improve aspects of your life at work. From my own account I will try and distill some of the things that we are thinking about.

No more learners

2009-03-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

Jay Cross posted an interesting video blog the other day about changing the way we look at learning. He used the analogy of a preacher guiding a congregation, given them direction but talking down to them from a pulpit as representative of the old forms of learning. He then introduced the story of Hans Mondermann a Dutch Traffic Management expert who removed road signs to improve road safety as an indication of the new.

Mondermann's idea on traffic management is simple. To make roads safer, you must first make them more dangerous. Road users have become lazy and overdependent on signs and signals to tell them what to do. By removing most of the road signs and markings you make the road users uncertain. Result, they pay more attention to their surroundings, other road users and pedestrians.

As usual, I agree with Jay on the need to reduce our dependency on overly directed spoon feeding in education and training in favour of teaching people to think and learn for themselves. But I don't think it is as easy as just removing the signs or preachers.

I risk upsetting a lot of people here but Jay introduced the religious analogy. The reason the directed form of learning persists is the same reason that organised religion continues to flourish. Many people like to be told what to do and in some cases how to think. It provides security and certainty.

Removing the road signs only works if people have already developed the expertise to evaluate what is presented to them (be it whilst driving their car, whilst doing their job or living their lives). Hence the reasons that Mondermann's ideas have only been implemented in a few areas of the more civilized countries in Europe .

I have written before about George Siemens's insightful comment earlier in the year about information now being, "validated at the point of consumption, not creation". The trouble is I don't think it is yet. We are still too credulous and if we simply remove the prophets and the road signs, nature abhoring a vacuum as she does, they will simply be replace by other agents who will tell us what to do.

However it may be simply that Jay is in sunny Berkeley, California and I am in rain and wind lashed London so my outlook is not so bright. Perhaps I should just watch Sugata Mitra's life affirming video of how slum children in India taught themselves to use a computer without any outside help and not be so negative.

Half formed ideas...

2009-02-24T01:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I admitted to being pathetic and not blogging because I didn't have anything I felt worth saying.

Today is a new day and I thought I would relish the fact that I am not a politcian. One of the things that frustrates me most about politics is that it tends towards the mean. Unless you can keep the idea hidden or secret, anything that you want to do has to survive the polarising glare of the red top media. As a result many politicians develop the ability to avoid saying anything in case it is held against them.

The reason I celebrate not being a politician is that I am happy to admit that I am wrong. And coming up with half formed ideas and having them knocked down by people who know better is a brilliant way of learning (and this form of informal rapid prototyping should be at the heart of new approaches to learning design). It is better to take lots of small risks than to take a few very big ones.

Last week I had a fascinating conversation in the pub about our current economic gloom. It started off with the obvious and general, "Dear me, isn't it dreadful... Government doesn't seem to have a clue... Bloody bankers..." your everyday superficial and shallow comments.

Until someone said,

"OK, it's alright criticising Gordon Brown for putting our children's future in hock but what would you do?! Would you have let Northern Rock go down? Or HBOS?"

This was followed by a pause in which everyone actually thought about it (good start!). Then we ventured ideas, everyone contributed and things were batted about. And I learned a couple of new things.

My thesis was I would reinvent FDR for the 21st century and spend on major public works that were in the long term benefit of the country, major rail network, renewable energy sources to make the country energy independent, etc. Until it was pointed out to me that most renewable energy sources still cost too much: wave power doesn't work yet (see great article in the Economist), nobody in the country wants wind turbines in their gardens (an example of my favourite new acronym BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) and solar power takes 15 years to break even.

This being a conversation in a pub I immediately and shamelessly shifted my investment plan to nuclear power. I'm not one of those who thinks the way to save our planet is a return to pre-industrial society although it was interesting to hear James Lovelock (father of the Gaia hypothesis and exponent of using nuclear power) on the radio yesterday saying that it was all OK, the earth would survive and so would humans provided that about 6 billion of us die...

Interestingly, for the £12.5 the goverment gave away in the VAT reduction before Christmas, one could have built about 8 nuclear power stations.

So what would you do if you were Gordon Brown?

Why blog?

2009-02-23T06:43:00.000-08:00

I have not been blogging much recently for a number of reasons but perhaps the biggest reason is that I have not felt like I have anything interesting to say. On reflection this runs against my whole rationale for this experiment as I laid out in my first post, that blogging for me is a way of ensuring reflective practice, which is at the the heart of learning.

So not blogging because I didn't have any completely formed ideas is a bit of a cop out. The point being that this is precisely where I should put my half formed ideas in the hope that by writing them down I may develop them and that people who agree or disagree may comment and thus add to the process. (for more reasons to blog please see Tony Karrer's excellent collection)

Many of the things I have learned in the last 9 months have come from this. Having the courage to put thoughts up in public and risk being laughed at (which doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as you might think) means you come across new ideas or developments faster than you would imagine.

I may have written about this before but finding people who change the way you think on certain subjects is one of the joys of life. Many years ago when I was still at university I went on holiday to America to stay with one of my new friends. Because American universities start earlier than British ones I was able to spend a couple of weeks in Washington DC experiencing life as an American student. My friend lived in a very poor neighbourhood in the north of the city which had a large number of homeless people congregating near the metro exit.

As a middle-class left-wing (ish) student I felt very guilty about just being there on holiday spending money on my credit card whilst these people begged for food. One day I bumped into a friend from home who was just returning from a year in Nicaragua with a Quaker peace mission. He came back with me to the apartment in Mount Pleasant and as we walked from the underground I told him about my guilt and how I always gave some of the change in my pocket to the homeless.

"All apart from this one up here", I said to him as we approached a particularly bedraggled old man, "He just sticks his hand out and grunts aggressively" I explained.

"Oh, so you're not giving him money because he isn't begging correctly?!" said Allan without missing a step.

Eurgh!

It hadn't occurred to me to even consider the effect that having to beg for food might have upon a man's dignity. And in less than 3 yards my opinion on something had been completely changed. I turned round and gave the man all the money I had in my pocket - which admittedly wasn't much.

I still cherish this moment 20 years later. There have been moments like it since but this is the easiest one to tell in a blog.

So I guess the message is this; not putting yourself in a position where people can challenge or disagree with you is only doing a disservice to yourself. As I have said before, what's the worst that can happen?

Making the change easier...

2009-02-06T06:35:00.001-08:00

As an unabashed convert to the virtual world of informal and social learning, I have to keep reminding myself that we are still very much in the early adoption stage. The vast majority of people are unaware or uninterested in what networked change can do for them.

I spent about 20 minutes this morning recording some screen casts on Jing for a client (a marvellous tool for rapid deployment of information which is really easy to use) and thought I would share them here to help others get involved.

They deal with how to set up and start using a delicious account and how to set up and start using iGoogle and Google reader, which are all pretty near the top of Jane's list of e-learning tools. I have interspersed them with some short clips from Common Craft explaining each of the applications. All fairly basic stuff but for those of you lurking in the background it might show you just how easy it is.

[Note to any of my staff erading this: these links will be meaningless in thin client as you dont have sound so try them at home]

Social bookmarking in plain English (Common Craft)
Setting up a delicious account
Tagging web pages in delicious
Networking and sharing in delicious
RSS in plain English (Common Craft)
Personalising iGoogle with RSS feeds

If this prompts you to get involved, why dont you look me up on Delicious and add me to you network?

Even older learning...

2009-01-21T04:20:00.000-08:00

Watching Barack Obama's inauguration speech yesterday, I have to admit that I have slightly fallen under the spell. On the today programme this morning one of the reporters, I forget whom, said that although Obama had resolutely avoided campaigning on a race basis his election was one of the watershed moments of our generation. Things that we didn't think would happen in our lifetimes; the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of apartheid, 9/11 and a black US president.

Amongst many other things that I found interesting (but do not feel qualified to comment upon here) I was awed by his mastery of rhetoric. Indeed rhetoric is one of the oldest elements of study in the world. Forming part of the trivium, rhetoric along with grammar and logic was the core of liberal arts education from the Roman period through to the establishment of the first universities in Europe in the middle ages on to the enlightenment, which of course links nicely to the founding fathers to whom Obama alluded.

Given that one of the most popular forms of business training of the last 30 years has been presentation skills, maybe it is time to revisit what we have known for centuries of the art of getting a message across?

If you want to think about this further, click on the link to rhetorical terms and see how many you think Obama used yesterday.

Old learning, newly relevant

2009-01-13T09:01:00.000-08:00

A short thought for today.

I was having an intersting conversation at the weekend with an old friend about interest and inflation rates and was suprised that he did not know the "Rule of 72". I tested this on return to work on Monday and thought I would share.

The Rule of 72 is a very good way of working out how long it will take for inflation or compound interest to double or halve the value of an asset or investment. And it's REALLY simple!

Just take your assumed interest rate and divide it into 72. The result will be the number of periods (or years) it will take for your investment to double in value. Likewise if you assume an inflation rate over a period of time (heads up folks for next year!) and divide it into 72 the result will be the length of time it takes for your £1 to be worth 50p in today's money. For advanced versions and a delightfully geeky explanation of why it works click on the link

While we're on the subject another lovely old maths shortcut is the Rule of 9. Again really simple. If you have a spreadsheet which is not balancing, ie you have two columns of number which should add up to the same number and don't. Take the remainder see if it is divisible by 9.

If it is, then the likelihood is that you have made a transposition error, ie you typed "21" in one column when you meant to type "12" or, "731" when you meant "713".

Isn't maths fun?

How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?

2009-01-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

Answer (delivered in cod Austrian accent): Vun, but does ze lightbulb, really, vont to be changed?

Reading Lucy Kellaway's piece in the FT today, "Twaddle thrives among the turmoil", I had conflicting thoughts. Firstly, thank heavens for Lucy Kellaway. Without her to puncture the bubble of brain-blisteringly bad business communication the world would be a worse place to live. I relish her scathing attacks on nouns used as verbs or companies exhorting their staff to download the corporate ringtone to their mobile phones.

But I am saddened at the same time as her article, although it makes me laugh, does not bode well for our future. If we still cannot do business without the accompanying oxymoronic, tautologous or just downright stupid verbiage attached. If we fail to spot and arrest the intelligence-insulting garbage that is peddled as strategy, are we doomed to follow forever an emperor with no clothes.? And that does not suggest an early end to the recession...

Yet, I am not immune from the habit myself (indeed I freely admit my hypocricy). My communication is often lazy, sometimes pretentious, regularly fuzzy and inconsistent at best. So rather than moan about everyone else, perhaps the best way to start the year is to begin at home. So I invite those who work with me to list the most extreme forms of my crimes against communication. Tell me about the phrases I use that really wind you up and I will try to stop using them.

The heart of learning... is the question

2009-01-02T04:43:00.000-08:00

George Siemens's post before Christmas about the Pirate Hoax really got me thinking about how the world is changing. It concluded with the line:

"Information is now validated at the point of consumption, not creation"

I prefer a statement of need:

"Information should now be validated at the point of consumption, not creation"

The problem being that it isn't and it really needs to be. The world is becoming increasingly credulous. To be fair we were pretty credulous before; most people believing what they were told or read in the newspapers or saw on television. Now with a proliferation of information facilitated by Internet tools, it is actually easier to support just about any belief with any number of "facts".

But learning isn't about facts, despite what you may think. Ask any decent PhD supervisor and they will tell you that the heart of learning is in the question. In fact I would maintain that to question is to learn.

As a linguist and an historian I suppose I have two main causes to push, "meaning comes from context" and "validate your sources". I think we need to put these ideas front and centre in any evolution of learning.

I am a British man and I have a love/hate relationship with France and the French (love the former, hate the latter - only joking). But one of the things that I respect most about them is that they have maintained the spirit of the enlightenment in their education system. They encourage the Cartesian ethic of questioning everything from an early age. It is why they are so difficult to manage.

But for the rest of the world here are some top tips for learning in 2009:

1. Look at the atheist ten recommendations, in my opinion a very good way to approach lifelong learning.

2. Seek discussion and dissent. If you surround yourself with people who agree with you, you will achieve little. By finding new sources of opinions you are more likely to find the holes in your own beliefs and ideas.

3. Embrace the idea of "Good enough". You are already, "Good enough". Yes, you can do better. We all can and we should aim to do so. But there is no point in beating yourself up for not being perfect. Nobody is. It is much easier to improve yourself when you already think you are OK.

4. Find time to think.

5. Find time to act.

Have a wonderful 2009!

As good a time as any for reflection...

2008-12-22T08:32:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago I had a conversation with the Academic Director of my business over what our secret ambitions were and we agreed that we would both like to teach the world reflective practice. If we could only get more people to get over the initial fear of change and the "other" and reflect upon how they could do things better, then much much more could be achieved in this world.

As my first year (OK six months) as a blogger draws to a close I think I should expand upon why I believe this to be important.

In my first ever post I stated that my intentions behind blogging were to "think out loud" and although I didn't realise it at the time, I had already started on a path towards creating a framework for my own reflective practice. I refined my ideas with the commitments I had gleaned from other bloggers in another early post to be 1. Brief 2. Honest 3. Interesting 4. and to connect things where possible. Later in the year I listed the things that I should like to be better at as a person and in this spirit I should like to look at 2008.

1. I have found blogging immensely beneficial as a way to knock the corners off my ideas and build upon those of others. Although I dont think I have many readers, I find the practice of writing for an audience who could call me to account if they so wished, a very good discipline for refining my thoughts.

2. I have been introduced to people and ideas through blogging that I would otherwise never have met, which is a very good thing.

3. I have achieved a number of goals that I had the courage to share, which I might not have done had I kept them to myself.

4. I have engaged with a number of my employees in a more direct fashion than would have been possible in traditional work based communication

5. I have admitted my own shortcomings and taken a number of steps to improve myself.

6. And all the above has probably consumed about 90 minutes a week which is a fairly good return on the investment

In short, I think the experiment so far has been benficial and I aim to continue.

Sawing through the branch I'm sitting on

2008-12-19T05:42:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged much in the last couple of weeks partly because I have been turning over a question in my mind that I couldn't quite grasp.

I attended a meeting at Canary Wharf with Jay Cross and other luminaries last week which gave me a lot to think about. One comment from the Head of Learning at a major UK employer in particular gave me pause, "Training providers will become obsolete over the next few years".
This is a shame as my company has just been voted Learning Provider of the Year and Learning Organisation of the Year at the World of Learning Awards in Birmingham. It's bit like being the most highly evolved dinosaur seeing the meteorite coming.

I am inclined to agree with the gentleman in question that emerging free and close to free technologies combined with the pressure of a global recession do not bode well for training providers. I do add the caveats that learning functions of large employers should be included in this set as they are simply in-house versions of their outsourced brothers and sisters and I cannot see an immediate end for professional qualification providers.

But couple this with Tony Karrer's recent post on new models for learning and I begin to see the area that I think we should focus on.

The diagram above shows one way of looking at the total cost of learning and is drawn from a presentation I made a year ago to a client on what the UK learning industry would look like in 2012 (click here for full presentation). Historically I have focused on the inefficiency in the delivery management area under the premise that if we could build greater trust through greater quality, we could spend more time and money diagnosing the actual problem to be addressed. Rather than haggling over the cost of the medicine which may prove to be unnecessary.

Whilst I still hold to this belief, I can now see that collaborative learning also enables efficiencies in the delivery requirement area. In the past this has been the domain of consultants and ISD professionals with the emphasis on the word "design". Social learning allows for solutions to "emerge" from the end users without necessarily needing an expensive architect. Or at the very least significantly reducing the fees that the architects charge. There are also a number of tools emerging that would appear to facilitate this (debategraph being a very interesting example of a meld of mind map and wiki that should enable change consultants to extract information much more efficiently)

One of the other key themes from our discussions in docklands was, "25% more for 25% less" it is interesting to note that I was more ambitious in my presentation a year ago...

Learning in Africa

2008-12-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of teaching a group of academics from Addis Ababa University who were in the UK on a programme sponsored by Ethiopiaid (a charity set up by the Reed group's founder).

It was a last minute thing as they had some time free before their return flight so I shamelessly pillaged Jane's list of e-learning tools to introduce them to new ways of finding information and learning.

We hung the session on the question, "Where is knowledge?" and I adapted a challenge that Tony Karrer used earlier in the year in that they had been invited to brief the Ethiopian President the following day on the Guatamalan Coffee industry (something I know nothing about and I hoped they would know nothing about).

We had time to work through:

1. Advanced search terms on Google

2. Free learning on YouTube

3. Using Linked In to find information

4. Sharing and building knowledge with Delicious

5. Using RSS feeds and Google Reader to make the information you want find you

6. And blogging as reflective practice

Which was not bad in an hour and a half. As we explored these issues the penny finally dropped for me on the importance of the laptop for under $100 project and web coverage for Africa. I have a feeling that parts of Africa may skip the industrial age altogether.

Acquistion vs learning

2008-12-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

Good to see George Siemens giving space to Mark Bullen's blog More NetGen Nonsense in which he debunks the hyperbole around web 2.0 changing the way people learn as having little hard facts to support it. In particular with reference to a recent study at Glasgow Caledonian and Stratchclyde Universities,

"Two British researchers have just completed a study of undergraduate students that found "many young students are far from being the epitomic global, connected, socially-networked technologically-fluent digital native who has little patience for passive and linear forms of learning." Instead, the study found that students use a limited range of technologies for both formal and informal learning and that there is a "very low level of use and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools such as wikis, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies.""

This reminds me of a conversation I had earlier this year with Martyn Sloman of the CIPD about the creeping generational facism surrounding learning 2.0. We agreed that neither of us was aware of any evidence to support the claim that NetGen people learned any differently to their predecessors (please feel free to provide me with evidence to the contrary).

What has demonstratively changed is the ease of access to information (see The Machine is Us for a quick demonstration of how). I dont think I will provoke too many people if I say that human beings "acquire" while they are young (Chomsky et al) until they we have taught them how to learn at which point they become less efficient at aquisition.

The elements I believe are still missing from Learning 2.0 are evolved teaching methods to take advantage of the comparative ease of access to data. If we can teach the world reflective practice (Do - Review - Apply) we might get this ball rolling.

Testing and learning

2008-11-26T08:42:00.000-08:00

Reading Harold Jarche's blog on testing today:

"As Clark mentions in his article, if you can demonstrate mastery then training is not necessary. For learning professionals, it is important to design tests that can validate competency. This is an overlooked area of instructional design as too much effort is spent on delivering content, in my opinion. Another rule that we had in military training, though not always followed, was to design the proficiency test before developing any training. The proficiency test had to correlate with the job performance area that was being addressed. In this way, the direct link between training and job performance was obvious. Considering my last post, this could be a good thing for the training department."

This post and your previous one bring to mind a thought I had whilst attending the ASTD Conference in San Diego earlier in the year (where my eyes were opened to P2P learning).
The proliferation of web learning devices, gadgets and tools coupled with the tendency towards open source knowledge may herald the demise or at least modification of a long extant distinction between formative and summative testing.

In short, if you publish a summative test - designed to demonstrate mastery of the learning objectives of any particular intervention it will become de facto a formative test for those equiped with the tools and the motivation to find out the relevant stuff for themselves.

All organisations need to do is be clear about the skills and behaviours they seek to encourage and reward and let the employees do the rest. In a large number of areas (although not all) if they designed and published the assessments and then paid a bonus to employees who passed them, they could probably cut a large section out of their budgets. It would even leave them money to support those who do not have the tools or the inclination to teach themselves and still be better off. Mind you the likelihood of this happening in the near future is small.

Life has become or is becoming an open book test.

Ego and learning

2008-11-21T08:20:00.000-08:00

I have been watching my three year old daughter a lot recently. Not as the apple of my eye, which she of course remains, but as a learning being. I am constantly amazed by how quickly she learns new things (or to those for whom preciseness is important, how she learns and acquires new things).

I have often felt that if I learn one or two new things a day, then it is a good day. But she demonstratively learns 50+ new things a day. And it is her ability to test and experiment with new words, ideas or actions without fear that helps her do this. Her ability to exist in the moment is a joy to behold. She can be howling with misery at having been denied the opportunity to wear her skimpy summer "blootiful princess dress" when it is 5 degrees outside and the next second giggling at the squirrel that just fell off the fence. Even as the tears still roll down her face she has moved on to the next idea/emotion without its predecessor getting in the way.

Like a computer fresh out of the box that boots up in seconds only to be worn down into a state of quasi permanent nothingness once we have loaded all the unnecessary software to slow it down. It is one thing to read Chomsky's and others' work on the way children acquire knowledge. It is another thing to see it happening.

I look to her for my lessons in learning at the moment. I know I cannot completely recover the childlike enthusiasm for life but trying not to let fears and emotion get in the way of new things can only be helpful. The trick will be as a parent trying not to load her with unnecessary worries, prejudices and rubbish so that she can continue to be much better than me. And so on and so on...

Without pain there is no change...

2008-11-11T01:03:00.000-08:00

A number of my recent posts have been about how to translate thought into action. It is all very well knowing something (like eating less fatty foods and going to the gym will make you healthier) the point is doing something about it.

The learning industry is I believe a bit like an overwight couch potato that needs to get off its backside and go to the gym. Our average profitablity is poor, our business models are often predicated on lifestyle choices and the quality of product and service varies appallingly.

I have a feeling the new economic outlook may well be good for us in the long run.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

2008-11-05T01:44:00.001-08:00

No prizes for spotting the Shakespeare quote but I notice that I have not been blogging much lately. Indeed I only blogged once in October. Whilst I have personal reasons for being otherwise preoccupied in the last few weeks, my lack of posting in itself have given me cause to reflect on the passing of time and how we chose (and we do chose) to spend each day.

Over the same period my RSS feeds have started to stack up and I currently have over 150 unread items lurking in my inbox. At the time of writing this I also have 114 unread emails in my work in-box and I haven't checked my hotmail account for over a week (I dont really need a Russian bride, cheap Viagra or new garden tools).

So given this piling up of work to be done why am I blogging at 9.56 on a Wednesday morning when I should be running a company?

Well, I just took 10 minutes to scan, skim and read through about 30 items in RSS and already feel energised, enthused and I have learned a couple of things. They had been building up and the temptation to click on the button "Mark all read" and make them disappear was huge.

This is distinct from my email because anyone can send me an email and working through them does feel like a chore sometimes. But RSS feeds are stuff on subjects that I am interested in and have asked to be sent updates on.

One of the most successful training courses we offer is on time management. I have been on many and have even read books on the subject (the irony is delightful). And yet I constantly forget the lessons therein or fail to apply them. The point is it is now 9.59 am and I am in a better frame of mind having read some interesting stuff and reflected on it.

I think my lesson from the last month is spend some time every day doing something that makes you feel good. And reading stuff I am interested in, thinking about it and talking to people whom I respect and enjoy makes me feel good.

So gather ye rosebuds while ye may...

To learn lists, blogs and reflective practice

2008-10-18T03:48:00.001-07:00

Returning to a thought provoked by Tony Karrer's Big Question last month on to learn lists, there is a huge distance between understanding and action. A point which Marshall Goldsmith (see earlier posts) addressed in his book and I didn't make the connection.

A list only works for certain people because you can excuse your commitment to a list. Making a commitment in a blog is one step up from this because you are publishing the list. But this depends on whether anyone is reading.

Marshall suggests that you get a personal coach to ring you up at the end of each day and ask you a list of pre-agreed questions. His examples are, "Are you Happy?", "How many push ups and sits ups did you do today?", "Did you eat any high fat foods?" etc etc.

The simple fact of having a person remind you of your commitment significantly increases your likelihood of change.

In the meantime I have managed to cross one more off my list for the year, having passed my motorbike test on Thursday. One thing is clear, once you get out of the habit of taking tests your ability goes down hill fast. I havent been that nervous in years!

What happened to good old fashioned skepticism?

2008-09-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

So, I'm another year older and, therefore, entitled to be grumpy. And today I'm grumpy with a capital GRR!

It seems that more and more people, particularly in the media, are prepared to accept things at face value without question.

1. "Fish Oil makes children smarter, study claims" is the headline in the Telegraph (I wouldn't mind if it was the Sun, the Sport or the Mail) despite the fact that if you read article you see the significance of the lurking comma. If you want to dig behind this story go to Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad science page.

2. I'm getting stupider as I get older. My elder niece got 10 A's in her GCSE's this year, of which, five had stars attached. I am very proud of her and would not suggest for a moment that she did not deserve these grades nor that the exams have got easier (I think I got one or two A's in my "O" levels. However, helping with her "A" level history at the weekend, I realised that she does not even have a cursory understanding of the difference between left and right wing politics. This despite the fact that she was being invited to address the reasons for the Labour government's loss of the 1951 election and the conservatives staying in power for over a decade.

Cut a long story short, why argue every year about standards falling, when demonstratively they have not. Ask about the standards themselves. If your yardstick is the percentage of pupils attaining 5 GCSE's graded A-C including English and Maths, then a growth in that is what you will get. Not a growth in the numbers of people who can think for themselves.

3. Blame the spivvy short sellers for the credit crunch. Even the Church denounced short sellers last week despite being happy to profit from it. I got into quite an entertaining discussion with my father at the weekend on this. I suggested that him blaming the hedge funds for the financial crisis is a bit like blaming the little boy in the story for pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. It couldn't be our fault for spending money that we don't have and perpetuating a myth of ever rising property prices, could it!?

He countered that his problem was really the "obscene" amounts of money earned by bankers and that at heart he was really a socialist. I suggested, fresh from my conversation with my niece, that the problem was the dialectic between equality (or if you wish to be British, fairness) and freedom and that you couldn't have both. The crime of the right is disproportionate wealth the crime of the left is disproportionate waste. (come on Andy K you know you want to argue that one...)

Ask more questions, argue and more interesting things come up. Don't believe everything you read in the papers or on the web.

To learn lists - the thought is father to the deed

2008-09-22T08:10:00.000-07:00

In response to Tony Karrer's "Big Question" this month:

"Jim Collins, in an essay in Learning Journeys, wrote, “A true learning person also has a “to-learn” list, and the items on that list carry at least as much weight in how one organizes his or her time as the to-do list.”...

...Are to-learn lists really important to have? Are they as important as Jim Collins tells us?"

I don't think a "To learn" list is important in and of itself, other than as an indication that its author places sufficient importance on self-development to actually have one. It would be very easy to formulate a list but it is worthless without action. Most organisations could argue that a reasonable personal development plan (PDP) is a "To learn list". Yet every year when appraisals come round how much of the list from the previous year has actually been addressed?

Equally PDPs are generally created in consultation with a line manager or a mentor. A "To learn" list, however, sounds like a more solitary pursuit and risks failure for the same reasons that personal "to do lists" slip soundlessly into oblivion.

Unless it is published and, by this, I mean beyond the employee and his/her manager being able to see it on an LMS. If a "To learn list" is published in a blog it advertises the behaviour that its author seeks to have and by its nature invites support and advice. It takes unstructured, accidental learning and gives it a degree of intent or at the least opens the door for measurement. How many people lie about whether they have kept their new year's resolutions or even made them when they already lie broken and crumpled in the waste bin.

Much earlier in my blogging life (about eight weeks ago) I committed to change certain aspects of my working behaviour (What to stop). I would call this a "To learn" list and would reflect that I am making some progress particularly on points 1,2 & 6. Potentially this is because I drew attention to it. It may be the case that publishing a "To learn list" in a blog might help individuals get over the initial motivational hump of actually doing something. (see also "Who will drive us "and "A journey of a thousand miles")

At the beginning of the year I wrote my new year's resolutions against which I have had much poorer progress quite possibly because I didn't advertise them. The ones I am prepared to share here are:

1. Get my Day Skipper's ticket so I can take the family sailing in the Med
2. Pass my part 2 motorcycle test
3. Improve my Serbian (my wife is Serb and it is my weakest language)
4. Put together a more structured plan for retirement (PPP's and property are probably not enough)
5. Take all my holiday
6. Complete the outline of my book
7. Work on my work/wife balance

Let's see if I make any better progress now I have shared them. Anyone else prepared to share?

A journey of a thousand miles..

2008-09-22T02:17:00.000-07:00

... starts with a single step (or something like that). A couple of ideas collided in my head this morning on my ride into work (yes I have bought myself a new scooter as the insurance money came through and I just couldn't stand public transport into London any longer). Both are related to the question, "How do you get someone to take a step that they perceive as too large?". How do you make change seem less painful in advance?

I met Stefan Gatt on Thursday last week. Stefan apart from being the first man to climb Everest and then snowboard down it is an infuriatingly nice guy. In general, I find I want my high achievers served with some serious personality defect. This makes it much easier for me to forgive myself for not being as good/successful as them. I say to myself, "I wouldn't want to: be a multi-millionaire/swim the English channel/be an award winning novelist/represent my country at sport if it made me that rude/humourless/self-obsessed/insert personality defect of your liking.

Stefan is none of these indeed he is a charming man (I wont embarrass the member of my staff who told me just HOW charming) who appears to spend nearly all of his time doing things that he loves (I think that the answer might be lurking in this sentence somewhere). He leads expeditions, runs leadership and team building programmes and builds challenge courses (the rope ladders, wire bridges, death slides between trees that are now becoming increasing popular throughout Europe).

We have developed a programme with Stefan called the Alpine Leadership Challenge which takes managers and aspiring leaders into the Austrian Alps for five days and, through a variety of exercises, reframes their understanding of themselves and their attitudes to leadership and teamwork. In short it helps them understand that they are capable of much more than they thought and that the only thing holding them back is themselves. It is a truly amazing course!

But that is just words. The essence of the programme is the experience. Actually knowing that you have just done something that you didn't think you could.

Stefan and I met to discuss how to make it more successful. We discussed the fact that the marketing material might be seen as hyperbole or it might just be too big a step to go from a comfortable desk to flying to Austria and tackling the Klettersteig. So I asked him whether he could think of something we could do in London in a morning or afternoon that would give people a facsimile of the experience.

His immediate response was, "Why don't we put a zip line between two buildings? No that's too easy can why don't we walk round the outside of a skyscraper?"

You gotta love this guy. I responded telling him that I knew a company who had two floors near the top of the Gherkin and near the top of Canary Wharf. Minutes later we were in a cab to St Mary Axe to see if we could set up a wire traverse at either of the buildings. The idea is to get people entirely safe but over 100m up walking along a wire on the outside of a building. Conquering fear.

Well it's early days and we may well be defeated by health and safety but this is what we are going to try to arrange.

Then I thought this morning how can we devise a baby step for all those who have not yet embraced collaborative tools in their work because it's just too hard or it takes too long? It is exactly the same problem. Any ideas on how to tackle this or any help on setting up a high wire stunt in London will be gratefully received.

Not with a bang but a whimper..

2008-09-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

The world didn't end last Wednesday when they switched on the large Hadron collider...

Just a thought but how would we know if it did? In any event I got up the following morning and went to work. It would upset me horribly if it turns out that the world has ended and I have failed to notice...

Then the world ended on again on Monday this week with the disappearance of two of the world's largest financial institutions (Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers) and further evidence was provided, were it needed, that we are heading for a spot of turbulence.

The collaborative learning community have been talking for some time about what it will take for the emerging opportunities for learning and development facilitated by the Internet to start to become mainstream. One of the driving forces may just have been handed to us.

Our industry has waffley tendencies at the best of times. Now is an excellent time to show our clients that there are multiple concrete ways to change behaviour and become more efficient. Why commission an expensive manual when you can build a wiki or record a jing file? Why drown slowly in emails when you can collaborate and chat in real time in a Google doc? Why cram for a test when blogging and sharing ideas embed learning more efficiently Why attend a training course either virtually or in person?

Because it will make you more efficient.

Who will drive us?

2008-09-10T02:10:00.000-07:00

Pulling together a few strands of thought on the bus this morning (my beloved Vespa having been stolen 10 days ago my commute is longer) I was wondering where the motivation element of learning will come from in the future. If collaborative learning and P2P learning really do put the learner in control. How will the learner deal with those days when he/she just can't be bothered?

I think there is a parallel with gym memberships. Gyms dont actually want you to get fit. They want you to pay membership and not use the facilities. That way they can make more profit. People who can afford them, use personal trainers but lots of people cant.

I wonder if there is a model for a personal learning trainer? I think this will be distinct from life coaches or executive coaches as there is a different skill set.

Will greater choice and freedom to learn actually inhibit action? A learning equivalent of slacker culture. Are we becoming mentally as well as physically obese? Do we actually need the harridan teachers and psychotic PE teachers in our lives to push us over the wall?

Customer servile

2008-09-05T01:18:00.000-07:00

As my last post earlier this week provoked a repsonse, I thought I would return to it. Clearly my suggestion that the American way of service is to be aspired to was too much for Kevin who,

"couldn't think of anything worse than an american telling me the value of service"

Interestingly, Lucy Kellaway whose article originally prompted my thoughts had a follow up in which she experienced some great service (The pen is mightier than high-tech gadgets). So as Zine and Zein highlighted in their comments, I was generalising and my suggested course would probably not sell to them.

I had the additional thought that the internet might be responsbile for an overall decline in customer service, in the same way that text messaging has destroyed conversation. In that it has moved human beings further apart and therefore further away from an immediate reaction to what thay say or think. Being face to face with someone tends to temper most extremes of communication (think about how often you shout expletives after you have hung up the phone or walked out the door).

But then I immediately challenge myself that this could just be further evidence of myself getting older and heading towards the inevitable day when I moan in exasperation about, "The youth of today!!" (Incidentally you can shoot me when I start doing this). The Internet is not bad in and of itself. The point is what is facilitates (see Michael Wesch's original film "The Machine is Us" for more on this) and it should facilitate even better service.

Maybe it is the fact that 25% of us are unhappy in our jobs and a third of us do not feel engaged. The people from whom I have had the best customer service are the people who seem to care or show an interest, whether in the UK, the USA or elsewhere. Those who feel they are wage slaves are unlikely ever to serve the customer genuinely.

As to whether this is the responsibility of the employee to move to a job that they enjoy and fell valued in or the employer to make the employee feel valued and content, I fear the debate will never end.

Is it really that difficult to smile?

2008-09-01T04:04:00.001-07:00

I have been thinking about Lucy Kellaway's article last Monday, "Turning customer delight into disgust" and I have finally conceded to my wife that the British just don't know how to do customer service. My wife, a Serb who has lived in Russia and America and thus experienced the extremes of the customer experience, has long been baffled about how badly we, the British, treat our clients.

I have generally curled my toes in embarrassment and tried to shuffle away from my wife as she berates the latest unfortunate for failing to provide even an adequate response (I don't think what we receive on the whole in this country even qualifies as "a service"). But the point is I am at fault not her. I think the root of it may be generational and lurks within the phrase, "Mustn't grumble".

This spirit was admirable when the Blitz was on and was indeed admired throughout the world as being evidence of our tenacity and spirit. It seems however to have evolved into never complaining to the people at fault and developing a sarcastic streak a mile wide to moan about our unfortunate lives with our friends. It is perhaps why comedy flourishes in the UK. We are not prepared to get off our behinds and confront poor service we would rather create jokes about it.

Lucy's experience at the hands of a low cost airline I have had with other low costs airlines and with flag carriers. I cant remember the last time I had a retail experience that could be classed as enjoyable - indeed my wife and I stormed out of a major electrical supplier at the weekend after wasting half and hour on the completely unreasonable expectation that there would be someone employed there who knew something about anything... I have had to threaten legal action against the company that sold me my scooter before I got what could be called service. And hotels and restaurants leave me cold. I went to a pizza restaurant in Balham with my family and next door neighbours on Saturday and there was a nail in one of the pizzas.

Had the nail been in my pizza or that of my wife or daughter we would have addressed it. However, it was in my my neighbours' elder daughter's pizza and they would not make a fuss. In fact she apologised to the waiter, after I had drawn attention to it and the waiter was already grovelling. My neighbour paid the bill, possibly to stop me from extracting a significant discount and causing further embarrassment.

Now I don't say this to ridicule my neighbour or their daughters, they are amongst the nicest people in the world. But this behaviour in the face of dreadful service goes to show that in the end we get the customer service we deserve.

I have been thinking of developing a training course, "Customer service: the American way" for some time but have held back for fear of offending people and it not selling. But now I think maybe that was just another way of avoiding embarrassment. What do you think?

As a service lead economy should we sort out our act to have a future or am I becoming just another grumpy old man?

Are you sitting comfortably?

2008-08-27T01:24:00.000-07:00

Reading George Siemens' blog, "Story telling: Why we love a good yarn" yesterday my thinking about the future of the learning and development industry moved on a notch.

It is difficult to know how far to deconstruct the idea as am I far from expert in any of the areas I am about to pillage and generalise (cognitive psychology, post structuralism, politics and psephology, anthropology and the list goes on). But I think that the reason that we humans like stories is that they make life easier. Our brains are essentially pattern finding systems (I told you I wasn't an expert! If you want to know more read Stephen Pinker) they even find patterns where there are none - think of seeing animal shapes in cloud formations or dreams which are you mind trying to make sense of unconnected impulses, thoughts and emotions.

I stumbled across a remarkable programme on BBC radio 4 earlier this year called Jackonory Politics (there is even a link for the full transcript on the page if you're keen). The programme showed how politicians who spin a good yarn win because they are doing the electorate's thinking for them. It explained quite succinctly why politicians don't talk about issues. Because the electorate don't understand issues and don't want to hear about them. I often accuse one of my friends of never letting the facts come between him and a good story or opinion but it seems the same is true for all of us. Never mind the fact that crime rates have fallen consistently in the UK for years and we live in a society that is safer than ever, every single political party jumps on the "hoodies are going to stab us in our beds" bandwagon. Why because fear gets the vote our more than statistics.

We like stories because they tell us what to think. They have structure (which is annoyingly absent from life) which make it easier for us to understand them. They appeal to the emotions which make it easier for us to remember them. They let us sit back and switch off.

So what does all this have to do with the future of the learning industry?

Well, I think we are the storytellers of change. Behavioural change is what we are about; or at least it should be. Helping people do new stuff. But change is painful, complex, seemingly irrational. Facilitating learning (any good instructional systems design) is about putting the required behaviour in a context, helping students practice the new stuff in a supportive environment and then giving them the confidence and motivation to go out and use it in their lives. Making it comprehensible, digestible, less scary.

The traditional classroom methods of teaching may evolve or even fall by the wayside but the process of helping people deal with difficulty in their lives will never end. It is after all why we tell bedtime stories to our children (and if you don't tell stories to your children, start now!). It helps them make sense of the world.

But we must also teach them to question the storyteller and that is where life starts to get difficult. Maybe I'll go back to reading the Daily Mail and have my thinking done for me.

Old dogs and new tricks

2008-08-24T02:02:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I took my management team out of the office to rural Wiltshire for an "away day". The subject under dicussion was our course portfolio; which courses do well, which one not so well, what new products should we develop, what new partnerships... You get the gist.

I have done this many times in my life but never before with such a sense of the sheer vastness of possibilities for learning and personal development (see my previous post for more on this). However, this feeling of awe is coupled with enthusiasm. I have also rediscovered Mind Maps. I've been aware of mind maps for years and have met a number of advocates but have never really got on with them.

But while I was waiting for the meeting to start I was looking through some of Jane's recent posts and decided to download "FreeMind". Interestingly this is one of the things you find yourself doing more of when you get into web 2.0. The dead seconds while you are waiting for meetings to start get used catching up on your RSS feed or following the latest trail of virtual breadcrumbs through the internet. As a learning professional and a man I decided to work out how to use the software by getting on with it rather than reading any instructions and set about using it to create notes for our meeting.

Interestingly, I quickly found that FreeMind was a much better way than standard taking of notes. It forced me to use some kind of structure when considering what to write and more ideas were generated when I showed the other members of the group my notes thus far.

For those who work for me you can go and look at our strategy mind map in our Google group (if you dont know where it is ask Alex). I'm afraid everyone else will have to take it on trust.

On reflection the process of re-examining old ideas in a new context and uncovering previously unimagined success could be a metaphor for all connectivist business models.

How do you eat an elephant?

2008-08-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

The old answer is, "Piece by piece" but I think I will add to that, "You've got to really want to eat it". You have to be motivated!

Today, amongst other things, I had an excellent one-to-one training session and all-round discussion on web & learning 2.0 with Jane Hart (click on the link to find her blog). At the end of it I felt that there was more in the world that I was ignorant of, not less. If you want a quick visual summary of social media applications out there, simply look at Harold Jarche's recent post. I have been introduced to Twitter, Ning, Moodle, PollDaddy and Jing... (Spike Milligan, "Ning nang nong" anyone?).

The "elephant" of social media is ever-expanding (although fortunately not infinite). This, I think, is the problem for those who have remained on the sidelines, those who say, "It's just too big" or "Yeah fascinating, but how are we going to make any money out of it?".

Many of the discussions on Tony's page recently have turned around whether people are developing new forms of learning; a brain 2.0 to accommodate all these new tools. I think that the bigger issue is motivation and fear of failure. Strangely, I find that my increased ignorance is motivating rather than demotivating. But perhaps that is because I am less concerned about making a fool of myself than when I was younger.

Perhaps the future for learning professionals is more one of cheerleader and performance coach than fount of all wisdom. To go back to one of my all time favourite quotes about learning from the 19th century polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt, "We cannot teach language, we can only create an environment in which language may be learnt"

Anyway, at Jane's suggestion I have lifted posting restrictions on my blog so you can post anonymously (makes it easier) and for those "lurkers" who would rather not, why don't you click on the poll?

Time for reflection

2008-08-11T03:59:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from holiday in the mountains of Serbia with my family where I successfully avoided the information age for a week, read books, went for walks, played with my daughter and had time to think.

On my way to Serbia I stopped in Germany to go to a friend's 50th birthday party which was a delightful affair at a schloss on the Rhine. This made me wonder about what are the measures or values that matter in life. How can you say you have lived a good life? The only obvious measure left in today's post nationalist world is money. Yes I know there is a nationalist war going on in South Ossetia and the Olympics are on (which might give the lie to this thought). But I think that nationalism is on the wane and the rising religiosity and conflict in the world is partly driven by a lack of identity. Unfortunately, business and large supra-national organisations have not in the past been very good at filling this vacuum as values are things that companies tend only to pay lip service to. But I wonder if the rise in interest in CSR and Environmental issues may herald and end to this?

So what does matter? I think positive choice and responsibility. I suppose that is what the existentialists meant by acting in "good fath". Which is annoying because I've never liked Nietzsche and find Keirkegaard depressing. Why aren't there any decent philosphers anymore? Is it because there is too much reality television?

On micro-economic level, during my holiday, I rediscovered the pleasure of reading. Like the slow food movement, there is much to be said for slow information. I am a relative newcomer to cloud computing but am already needing new strategies to stop my RSS feeds from getting on top of me.

So if you haven't had your holiday yet (and inspired by Kevin who liked my last post [incidentally Kevin you can call me Hugh]) here are a couple of recommended reads:

Dan Ariely, "Predicatably Irrational" - similiar to "Freakonomics "and the "Undercover Economist" this a a wonderfully readable book for those interested in how people actually make decisions

Louis de Bernieres, "The Partisan's Daughter" - a great tale from the author of Captain Corellis Mandolin that examines story telling and truth, read it in a day it was that good

Wilf Self, "The Book of Dave" - hard work to begin with but brilliant and dark reflection on society set up by the conceit of a mad London cabbie accidentally founding a religion

Irvin Yalom, "The Schopenhauer Cure" - a dying therapist re-examines his life and tries to help his biggest failure

And for those of you who think this looks like a politician's summer reading list compiled by his/her publicist

Ian Rankin - any Inspector Rebus novel
Janet Evanonvic - any Stephanie Plum novel, v funny
and for cry laughing cynicism anything by Christopher Brookmyre

Time to think is good... Maybe I'll switch off the Crackberry more often.

Only the good die young...

2008-07-29T01:58:00.000-07:00

Randy Pausch died on Friday at the age of 47 (click on his name for more). A colleague, who is also a fan, told me this morning and we shared a moment of sadness. However, if ever there was a person whose life deserved to be celebrated, then it is Randy. Go find out about him!

When I was at university I remember having a conversation about the lyrics of the above named Billy Joel song (that should give you an opportunity to date me or pigeon hole me should you so wish). I remember being immensely proud of continuing the line with, "Only the good die young because they haven't lived" My immediate (inebriated) friends were almost equally impressed and I was convinced this was the first of many aphorisms I would coin that would eventually form a little book of wisdom which would make me famous.

Reflecting on this, once one has got over the shudder of disappointment that I was deconstructing MOR music at university (why weren't we talking about The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Undertones or anything with an edge?) and the hilarious naivety of youth, I have to concede to my younger self that I had a point. A point I didn't understand and couldn't explain at the time. A point expressed by many greater thinkers than myself before and since. But a point nonetheless.

What Randy helped me understand is that my life is in my hands, if I don't enjoy it that that can only be my own fault. A good life is measured in experiences and friends not in years. I have known this for a long time. But as any decent learning professional will tell you, there is a difference between knowing something and actually doing something with it.

I found an echo reading Lucy Kellaway's article in the FT on Monday debunking the "sentimental pap" that no-one ever says on their death bed, "I wish I'd spent more time in the office". Now I am a huge fan of hers, indeed she is the only columnist I have actually written fan mail to (and received a response which surprised me). But it is easy to stand on the side and chuck rocks and I think there are more people with a dysfunctional relationship with work that hurts their life than there are rounded, complete individuals who just happen to get their completeness from work.

As Freud said, "Love AND work" (my caps), not one or the other.

Perhaps that is why I continue to write this blog. It is only by forcing myself to do something that I cannot control or completely understand that I stand a chance of learning something new.

Or as the Doctor Pepper ad says, "What's the worst that could happen?"

You can lead a horse to water...

2008-07-23T07:37:00.000-07:00

I have been going around my business over the last few days talking about the impact that collaborative working in a knowledge economy will have. I have have tried to enthuse other people without simply being enthusiastic. And as a result I have been reflecting a lot on how to help people embrace change.

I think a lot of the reticence to explore new ways of working, communicating and collaborating stems from the age old problems of learning. That is our attitude to failure and the embarrassment that comes with it. "I can't learn a foreign language" or "I don't do technology" generally means, "I've had a bad experience trying to learn". Of course this is often masked by the standard excuses, "I don't have time", "How are we going to make money out of it?" etc.

And this in turn makes me think about how, as parents, we are bringing up and educating our children. Please notice that I am not amongst the group who think that this is the responsibility of teachers and schools.

I believe that to learn is to fail and vice versa. If you are not prepared to fail then you will learn little. And yet we have contributed, certainly in the UK and the USA, to the creation of a society that is predicated upon measurement, high stakes tests and school performance leagues rather than one in which people are taught to learn.

It is a long accepted business rule that staff will pay attention to the numbers that they know management are looking at. What if society's management is looking at the wrong numbers? When the rate of change of organisational skill catches up with us, we will have a generation of people who know longer know how to learn as all they have been taught is how to pass tests.

I suppose this brings me back to my central belief of parenthood. I cannot protect my child from pain nor should I. I can only convince her that I will be there to pick her up when she falls over. Such that when I am no longer there to pick her up and kiss it better she is not afraid to try and to learn herself for fear of failing.

Trust...?

2008-07-15T02:20:00.000-07:00

Reading a recent post by gsiemens in elearnspace,

"Trust is tied to reliability and consistency. The "big institutions" - government, religious, corporate - that were the object of trust in the past have, in the last century in particular, been revealed as flawed. While people still pursue religious activities and subject themselves to government, the authority of these institutions is being replaced (is augmented a better word) by personal networks of trust" click here for full post

It occurs to me that lack of trust in "big institutions", whether secular or religious, is hardly a new thing. I would point to Martin Luther, George Washington or Robespierre (it is always fun to remind the French that the American revoltion preceded theirs by thirteen years and if you want to be really annoying that the British one preceded that by a century). In any case, my point is that mistrust is hardly a new thing.

What I would suggest is changing is the access to alternative viewpoints without obvious vested interests. It is widely held that adding user ratings to internet shopping sites was the thing which finally unlocked people's wallets to shop online. With hindsight it is easy to grasp that your average internet shopper was more prepared to accept the view of a complete stranger often from another part of the world than s/he was to believe the vendor or the manufacturer.

We believe "joe1890" or whomever, when he says, "I bought this and it's great, one small problem is changing batteries" because he has absolutely nothing to gain from me buying the same item.

It is the issue of vested interest web 2.0 turns upon. Perhaps large sites that wish to be trusted should declare a register of interests...

Randy Pausch - time management

2008-07-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

Those who work for me will recgonise the name. At least those who read my emails.

Incidentally, a word of advice on emails, "The number of people to whom an email is sent is inversely proportional to the percentage of total recipients that will read and comprehend it".

But this post is about Randy Pausch, for those of you who haven't heard of him find a spare hour in your life and click on his name link and watch the You Tube video. I know that Europeans might find the first 10-15 minutes a little American but trust me it is worth sticking to the end.

For those who already know him, find a spare 80 minutes to listen to his lecture on Time Management. Brilliant stuff. I found this at the weekend and watched it with my wife. I am already working on two screens and may go for a third soon.

For advanced Randyphiles see his recent charge to the graduates of Carnegie Mellon University or his home page on which he blogs on his fight against pancreatic cancer.

It is rare that you meet people in your life who change the way you think.

Seek them out!

Does blogging need a narrative

2008-07-14T02:07:00.000-07:00

In the interests of narrative congruency, I should tell you that my daughter is now much better. For other paranoid parents out there it is worth noting that Mesenteric Adenitis is much less worrying than it sounds and much better to know this than to see your little mite misdiagnosed with Apendicitis and go under the knife.

But why I am concerned with narrative? Life doesn't have a narrative. Unless you happen to have your own personal voiceover giving sense and structure to the many random things that occur each day. Or are one of those deeply annoying people who talk about themselves in the third person. If you are the former, I suggest you seek help; if you are the latter I am afraid you are beyond it.

But why do I feel the need to maintain a narrative in my blog? I think it is because I feel that I am writing for a reader, rather than myself, and need to help him/her along the way.

It is possible, in this, that I am missing the point of blogging... As a tool for reflection. Thinking out loud with feedback.

But having already confessed to making this up as I go along, I shant worry about this and will continue to meander along my learning path.

Not waving but drowing

2008-07-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

I have managed to be quite successful in my first few days of trying to stop my bad management habits. The principle reason for this being that I haven't been at work. My daughter has a rather nasty flu type virus and has been runing a fever of between 37.5 and 39.1 degrees for the last four days.

This really makes you think about what is important. Now I am not talking in the trite and obvious fashion about how much my family means to me and how no-one says on their death bed that they wish they'd spent more time at work. That goes, almost, without saying. I have done my panicky parent bit, done the sleepless parent bit and done the trip to A&E. But I do not believe I am different from the norm in this.

The point I have been reflecting on is the inefficiency of communication as a whole.

I have made a number of mistakes in the last few days by trying to cut corners in my communication at home and at work. But I have also had some successes where by filtering out the unnecessary I have got to the point sooner.

It's something that Marshall Goldsmith (see below post) talks about in his book, that I have yet to finish for the reasons above. If you have any doubt about saying something, keep schtum.

Will social media, the exponential growth of information bring with it an overall improvement in communication skills? Or new skills entirely?

Can we surf or will we drown in an overload of information?

What to stop

2008-07-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

I recently saw Marshall Goldsmith (coaching guru) present and was struck by a number of things that he said. To the extent that I bought his book, "What Got You Here, Won't Get You There"

In fact if you click on the link for the book you will find a wonderful example of how web 2.0 keeps you on your toes. I was trying to insert a link with a summary of Marshall's book and I find a post that says pretty much everything I was thinking. So rather than list his idea that as you progress as a manager, the important thing is to think about what to stop doing rather than start doing you can just click on it to see the list.

Another of his key concepts is that if you want to change your behaviour you have to advertise what you are trying to change. Otherwise people will not notice. So for the benefit of people who work with me who haven't posted reponses yet, here is your chance. From his list of 20 are the things that I think I am bad at:

1. Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations - when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point. - I'm very bad at this. Always competing even when it doesn't matter

2. Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion - I am often guilty of destroying people's enthusiasm by telling them, in detail, the small and picky points they have missed in their idea (see below #6)

3. Passing judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them - not immune to this either

4. Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty - I still can't seem to detach myself from the notion that sarcasm is a display of intelligence

5. Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.”

6. Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are - This is probably my biggest failing

8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”: The need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked. - I do this on occasions but not all the time

14. Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly - I didn't think that I did this but I know a number of my staff think I do, so I accept that I need to work on this

16. Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues - On the whole I think I'm OK at this but always need to improve as some people still don't feel listened to...

20. An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are - I'm sure I'm guilty of this as well

These are the things that I am committing to try and improve. I will try and map my progress through this blog.

Out of 20 bad habits, I'm admitting to 10. This is pretty poor since they're the ones I prepared to admit to. This is an open invitation, without fear of criticism or reprisal, to anyone who works for me, or knows me for that matter, to add to the list. Tell me what I need to get better at.

Go on. Take a swing at the boss!

Reality comes crashing in

2008-06-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

One of the perils of pseudo-corporate blogging, as I see it, is the damage you can do to your company. Blogging seems to me to be a personal thing.

When a company or organisation comes along and tries to blog it often jars. Possibly because, however much our marketing and branding departments try to anthropomorphise, a company isn't a human and you can't empathise with it.

There is also a social experiment going on here which we, the lab rats (or beagles if you are that way inclined), don't understand or grasp. Whether the altruistic spirit of collaboration in web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) will continue or whether it will be exploited remains unclear. Although as a cynic I know which side my money is on...

The advice on blogging I have garnered so far appears to be:
1. Be honest
2. Be brief
3. Be interesting
4. Connect things (either ideas, people or content)

For a nice summary from a more experienced blogger than I click here - thanks to Tony Karrer

I am blogging for the reasons listed below. But also, as the managing director of a major UK outsourced training provider (click here if you're interested) I should like this to be beneficial to my company, my clients and my staff. I hope that wasn't too overt a plug.

One of the things I am struggling with at the moment is how to introduce web 2.0 in a beneficial way to my company. We have created forums for our instructors which are open to everyone but they were only launched last week so I'd wait a bit before going to look. I will be running training courses for all my staff on how to use Google properly, how to set up RSS feeds, how to use Linked In etc etc once I have found someone to deliver it.

At the moment I am not sure I know which way web 2.0 and learning 2.0 are going to go. Only that I am fairly sure that it will have a major impact on our industry. Which is precisely the opposite to what I felt in the first wave of Internet hype.

Two steps backwards

2008-06-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

It is quite difficult to deal with the fact that while you were otherwise engaged the world has run off and left you behind.

But it is quite staggering to me how much is now out there. I have been feeling my way like a drunken man in the dark trying not to trip over the cat or bring the wardrobe crashing down on me.

In the last few days I have developed a number of new skills. Tony Karrer suggested in his presentation (referenced above) that the audience's Google skills might not be as strong as they thought. Now I had always thought that I was a fairly competent searcher of things...

Then I typed "How to use Google" into the search bar and found out how wrong I was. Then I set myself up a Google account and shared a document with a couple of co-workers. Much more efficient collaboration than the traditional emailing files backwards and forwards.

Now I have set up Google Reader to pick up some RSS feeds but I think I'm still in the shallow end on this one. As I have only really gone about 6 clicks or so beyond the initial blogs I was reading.

I am saving de.licio.us for later in the week as I think my brain might explode. Although I did read this item by Michele Martin: Using Del.icio.us to Create an Easy, Always Updated Online Portfolio, which, if I'm honest probably added rather than lessened my apprehension.

Come on in, the water's lovely...

2008-06-19T01:44:00.000-07:00

I don't know the first thing about blogging. But I suppose an admission of ignorance is a good thing in the learning world. Nonetheless I am still worried about making a complete fool of myself or more importantly the company that I run.

So, why am I doing this?

Well, I recently went to the ASTD Conference in San Diego at which the conversations about Learning 2.0 made me feel firmly dinosaur-like (to view handouts from the conference click here). I have an innate reaction against blogging as it strikes me as egocentric and attention seeking - why would anyone actually want to read what I have to say? But I was struck by a number of people at the event who appear to use blogging as part of their cognitive thought process (I should nod to Tony Karrer who is the metaphorical midwife to my idea). Essentially think out loud and in public and deal with the reaction. Take risks and be prepared to change.

The process is recognisable to any learning professional. Try, fail, think, test, learn, apply. It is just that the boundaries or the context have changed. Other people can hear you think. If I try to think about this too hard, my head starts to hurt and I wonder how long before we start to inhabit a Philip K Dick novel.

This is SO different from the learning world I was brought up in that I thought the only way to understand this great social experiment is to take part. So I will do my best to post my thoughts about learning, organisational management and occasionally life.