Innovation and book publishing: about as far apart as anything you can find.
In these videos, shot in early June at Internet Time Studios, Dave Gray and Jay talk about unbooks.
Unbooks are never finished (because there’s always room for improvement). Unbooks make room for readers as well as authors. Unbooks put the author back in control.
Last week the Learning Irregulars joined three dozen talent managers from top Silicon Valley companies at Cisco for a meeting of the Future of Talent Institute.
Kevin Wheeler founded the Institute to provide a place for senior talent managers to converse and explore emerging issues in talent management, staffing, recruiting, employee development, retention and leadership development.
True to our belief that innovation is the child a mash-ups of parents from different backgrounds, we mixed recruiting, development, OD, HR, KM, and more into our vision of the future state.
The participants are expanding their focus from initial recruiting and on-boarding to a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach to developing people. Professional development is a piece of that action; I’m glad to have served on the faculty of our past four annual retreats.
This is not your father’s HR. Listen to the two-and-a-half minute recording of what’s on the minds of talent managers.
Our Flickr photostream is online. (Slideshow)
Our tag for photos of Learning Irregulars on Flickr is irregs. Please use it when you upload photos.
Here we are last Saturday at Internet Time Studios.
This past Saturday afternoon, the Learning Irregulars talked with Curt Bonk about his forthcoming book, The World is Open, which does for education what Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat did for economics.
You saw it here first.
On Saturday, April 4, Curt Bonk will join Learning Irregulars in Berkeley to celebrate the publication of his forthcoming book, The World is Open.
From the publisher’s PR department:
Web‐based technology has opened up education around the globe to the point where anyone can learn anything from anyone else at any time. You see it every time you Google something, find information in Wikipedia, read the results of an online survey, or watch a YouTube video. To help explain this highly complex situation, Curt Bonk employs his ground‐breaking model, “WE‐ALL‐LEARN,” to outline ten key technology and learning trends and shows how technology has transformed educational opportunities for learners of every age and from around the world. The book and its free companion web site are filled with the stories of ordinary learners, as well as of well known technology and education leaders, that reveal the power of opening up the world of learning.
From Jay:
Curt Bonk is most energetic person I’ve ever met. I’ve seen him suit up to run in Abu Dhabi in the middle of the summer when it was 110 Fahrenheit outside. His thinking matches his physical energy. This time around, Curt has mashed up Tom Friedman’s eye-opening The World is Flat with transformational educational technology he summarizes as “WE-ALL-LEARN:”
We’ll webcast an interview and a small F2F gathering at Internet Time Studios around 2:30 pm on Saturday the 4th. More information to follow.
As one of the activities at Tuesday’s meeting, we asked members of the audience in learning and development to tell us 2 minute anecdotes that captured their take on the state of organizational learning. I led off by talking about the situation I mentioned in my recent Learnlets post, about the organization that had been doing online learning, but taking a step to rethink and improve what they were doing, just to model the type of response we were looking for. Some of these were broad, and some very specific, but all were interesting and relevant.
Jeff led off, telling us about how government employees in the UK, upon retiring, tend to live on average another 18 months. His concern was for scaffolding the retirement to help people survive the adjustment. (Jack mentioned that it’s true of airline pilots as well, at least those that are forced to retire compared to those who choose to!) We’re losing the wisdom out the door of organizations, as Richard Sheehy just noted, and then it’s expiring too quickly.
Sandeep told a story about how his personal assistant booked him a trip to Newark, and then to a client in NJ with Phoenix in the name. The (overseas) assistant arranged instructions to drive from NJ to Phoenix AZ! The point Sandeep made was that context plays a huge part in our understanding and performance, and we neglect it at our peril.
Terry talked about how so many people’s bandwidth was limited, not just due to work, but that they tended to stay focused in what they perceive as relevant areas rather than exploring more laterally. She believed that this was an area that needed development, which I naturally lump under meta-learning.
Barbara talked about ‘positive deviance’, which I took as the notion of deliberately exploring areas not necessarily considered germane to the task. She took modeling behavior of those successful as a path to explore. (Positive deviance is one of several great phrases that emerged; one other that came out from a meeting earlier included ‘connective intelligence’ instead of collected intelligence, which resonates with George Siemens connectivism).
Carol talked about how she sees that too many organizations have seen bad elearning, and this colors their view of the possibilities. She has trouble getting them to look at different approaches just because of the label. Such is the power of first impressions.
John mentioned investigations across vastly different areas of interest (extreme wave surfing, World of Warcraft, and Toyota) showing a commonality among community members in a ‘questing disposition’, a bent towards curiosity. I was curious whether it is malleable (for which I was denounced as a ‘cognitivist’ 
, because I’m hoping that it’s not just that the 10% that seem to succeed despite what we do to them isn’t innate and something we can’t develop in others.
Kevin mentioned the power of apprenticeship that he’s seen, and how that’s a model we aren’t tapping into enough. Obviously I agree, as cognitive apprenticeship is my favorite model to think about designing learning experiences.
Del talked about how too many organizations will develop organizational change initiatives, but not have the learning folks as part of the team until after the approach has been determined, expecting them to implement appropriate training without having had an input about how to make it work. This is a problem, and reminds me of the situation Don Norman points out in the Invisible Computer where marketing & engineering design solutions that are unusable, and expect the interface folks to fix it when they haven’t been able to provide input upfront.
Sherrin talked about how in a medical meeting, there were too many languages, and one person opined that they weren’t listening to the language of the cells. She took away a lesson that resonance was a language that needed to be heard, and that we should all listen for that language.
Finally, Bob talked about how he’s seeing that organizations are only just becoming aware of complex systems they deal with and the coming massive change. His warning is apt. He reckoned that informal learning was going to be key in dealing with this.
The subsequent discussion was powerful in terms of looking at what organizations need to do, what we could learn from other areas, and what we should do next. There was some consistency about needing to be more open and flatter, less hierarchical, that we could learn much from other areas in many ways (I’m reminded of the work I did with Eileen Clegg on Extremophiles in the Creating a Learning Culture book), and that we need to provide tools, models, ideas, and examples.
We’re collecting them, and intending to continue ‘learning out loud’: trying to have interesting conversations and connect outwards with artifacts and reflections. Got any models, tools, ideas, examples, thoughts, etc?
At last night’s meeting, we asked everyone to draw a response to three questions. Here are some of the resulting drawings:
What should organizations do differently and how? Pictures
What lessons can we take from other disciplines? Pictures
What might Learning Irregulars do? Pictures
A few photos from Kevin Wheeler’s camera:
More to come. In the meanwhile, if you have ah-ha’s or afterthoughts about the session, please comment below.
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Several people have asked to be on our mail list. Well, we’re too lightweight for that. Besides, I detest bureaucracy in all its forms. We’ll announce future sessions right here; subscribe to the RSS feed. Or, if you’re too fast for that, follow irregs on Twitter. All meeting announcements will appear in those locations.
We will broadcast a feed from the session in Berkeley about the Future of Organizational Learning.
Online: via UStream. Tweet #irregs.
Live 7:10 – 9:30 pm Pacific time Tuesday, March 24.
Warning: we don’t have much in the way of participation set-up. This may be dull as dishwater. You’ll see a fuzzy image of the meeting room and hear okay sound. You can chat or tweet. Somebody will be monitoring what’s going on to pitch your ideas into the discussion.
Join us in Berkeley this Tuesday evening for a free session with the Learning Irregulars on the future of learning in organizations. We’ll discuss the marvels that networks have wrought and how organizations can improve the way they approach learning. Details.
Diversity is the mother of innovation.
Bring someone different.
If you come, please bring a guest who is not a learning professional. Diverse viewpoints are the source of innovation. Invite your neighbor who’s a labor leader, CFO, anthropologist, psychologist, professor, historian, executive, butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, so long as they, like us, are out to make the world a better place. Major innovations result from mashing up concepts from diverse silos, and accelerating innovation is our goal.
People make a meeting like this work. I hope you will join us in Berkeley 7-10 pm on Tuesday, March 24th. RSVP
Door prizes: copies of Informal Learning
Image: Shirtwoof.com
