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?
