Stories

Tag: Training

  • Accountability in learning

    Accountability in learning

    What if you were the key internal resource person with learning expertise?

    What if you advocated, recommended, and prescribed low-volume, high-cost face-to-face training?

    What if your advocacy was so successful that global partners invested hundreds of millions of dollars in what you prescribed – even in the absence of any standard to determine the return on that investment?

    What if your recommended approach resulted in zero measurable impact?

    What if partners nevertheless kept spending on training, entrenching perverse incentives like per diem to substitute for motivation, evidence, and results?

    What if you ignored and then dismissed, for as long as you possibly could, the relevance and potential of digital networks to support learning?

    What if you then managed to replicate the worst, least effective kinds of training through sterile digital formats of slides with voiceovers and a quiz at the end?

    What if you kept badgering managers to get their people to stop work in order to learn?

    What if you responded to the disconnect between learning and work with convoluted competency frameworks and elaborate performance management “solutions” that changed nothing?

    What if you used your internal position as gatekeeper to stifle innovation, to ridicule and undermine those advocating new approaches?

    What if you then felt threatened when these new approaches began to show results that you have never been able to achieve?

    What if you were held accountable for any or all of the above?

    Image: Defoe in the Pillory (Wikipedia Commons).

  • 3 critical questions for the new Humanitarian Leadership Academy

    3 critical questions for the new Humanitarian Leadership Academy

    This morning, I’m looking forward to the London launch event for Save The Children’s Humanitarian Leadership Academy, touted by the Guardian as the “world’s first academy for humanitarian relief” that “may revolutionize” the sector. I ask the following three questions as a sympathetic observer: the Academy’s focus on the learning need for improved and scaled capacity in the face of growing humanitarian challenges is spot on. Now comes the execution.

    1. Is the Academy a platform or a hub? There are two possible roles for the Academy: as a connector, hub or platform for others and as a platform of its own (developing and delivering its own content). They certainly can overlap, but then how will the Academy both collaborate and compete for limited resources with already-established specialized training organizations? Is it a knowledge broker, catalyst, and connector – or an implementer? How will Save The Children – which has invested so much in the launch – step back to allow the multi-stakeholder governance model to succeed and recognize that the thought leadership this calls for may reside outside the confines of its established organizations and networks?
    2. What is the Academy’s learning strategy – and how is it different from failed attempts of the past to build capacity through training? What will be the relationship between those who know, those who do, and those who teach? What new learning models will foster cross-cutting leadership, collaboration, and analytical competencies needed – not just technical skills already taught elsewhere? How will it impact the trajectories of humanitarians at different stages of their professional lives? How will the Academy resolve the applicability problem? So far, the Academy’s approach appears to be based on formal learning through training. Can its organizational model foster the kind of informal and incidental learning that is responsible for much of getting things done in humanitarian work – as well as for innovation? Last but not least, how will educational technology be mobilized to help divest of the legacy of face-to-face training that is inefficient, ineffective, and cannot scale to meet the coming humanitarian challenges?
    3. Is it sustainable? DFID’s initial commitment covers 40% of the very ambitious business plan of £50m, and, more recently, the Academy’s touted partnerships with the private sector. This question, from my vantage point, is closely related to the learning strategy question. This can’t be only about more resources for training – even after rebranding as capacity-building – without first rethinking the why, who, and how and, second, reimagining learning beyond training. And that will require the Academy’s new governance to focus first and foremost on the “transformational” aspects of the project.

    Photo: Sunrise Over Cape Yamu Phuket Thailand Panorama (Kim Seng Suivre/flickr.com)

  • LSi.io interviews Plan B’s Donald Clark: Universities and humanitarian organizations in the Age of Disruption

    LSi.io interviews Plan B’s Donald Clark: Universities and humanitarian organizations in the Age of Disruption

    Donald Clark is an education innovator with no institutional ties to refrain him from telling it like it is. He answers three questions from LSi.io‘s Reda Sadki:

    • Zach Sims at Davos referred to university brick-and-mortar structures as the “detritus” of a bygone area. Agree or disagree?
    • We all remember Sebastian Thrun’s predictions about the impending concentration of higher education. Why does it feel like it’s just not happening?
    • A key insight about MOOCs is the significance of suddenly connecting millions of adult learners to faculty previously bunkered down at the top of their ivory towers. Can you tell us more about your analysis on the significance of MOOCs?
    • The humanitarian sector faces growing challenges, yet we continue to train like it’s 1899. How would you approach such a ‘wicked’ learning problem?

    Interview recorded at the Second European MOOC Summit at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland on 11 February 2014.