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  • Workshop culture

    Workshop culture

    We live in a “workshop culture”. On the one hand, it is costly and exclusionary. Few can afford to travel, and the organization finds it more difficult to afford and justify the expense of moving bodies and materials to meet. Its outcomes are difficult to clearly identify, much less measure. They often contribute to communication overhead. Their format and content may be superficial or stiffen participants through overly formal approaches, thereby stifling creativity.

    On the other hand, occasions to physically meet with colleagues in the network are increasingly rare. “I meet everybody not even once a year,” bemoans a senior manager.

    In between, we have learned to blend online and face-to-face communication. Yet, we strongly feel that there is high value to those face-to-face exchanges, even if some of that value may not be immediately tangible. The formal work of a conference may itself be productive because of its process (including reflective practice) and outputs but also because of the informal learning (shared experience) and opportunity to connect and socialize with others.

    Workshops, conferences, and other types of formal meetings provide an occasion for “closer chatting”, especially during social activities outside the formal event.

    When we organize meetings, we pay attention to the coffee breaks, lunches, social outings, and other “in-between spaces”, recognizing their value to build trust in relationships, pursue individual negotiations, and even agree on what decisions will be made when we return to a formal setting. We may even feel that “when you want to solve something, it’s probably outside the meetings” or that “the most important things are decided outside meetings”.

    Yet what we recognize as important in such processes is usually not related to the knowledge acquisition or transmission of formal presentations or training, which are often the explicit purpose of the events and correspond to formal learning. Therefore, we need to rethink now only how we organize workshops and meetings to support and foster the informal and incidental learning that matters, but also why we organize them.

  • Emergencies kill learning habits

    Emergencies kill learning habits

    We recognize that large-scale, complex emergencies have a dramatic impact on many aspects of our work, including what and how we learn.

    Some may feel, based on experience, that emergencies kill learning habits. We put everything on hold – including the things we do to stay current – to focus on the emergency response.

    However, the disruptive power of emergencies and their intensity fosters new, informal learning and provokes incidental learning indispensable to solve new problems in new ways. That is real-time innovation.

    Therefore, because emergencies and the change they bring are a constant in our work, we need to harness their disruption and intensity to ensure that lessons are learned and applied – before, during, and after. This requires new approaches, tools, and a change in mindset. We need to retain not only what we learned, but also how we learned it.

    Photo: Rusting away along the river Congo (Julien Harneis/flickr.com)

  • Applicability

    Applicability

    Applicability is the brick wall of formal training approaches. Not only do we first have to stop work to attend a training, but once the training is completed, the challenge is then to figure out how to apply what we learned to daily work. It is estimated that, on the average, applicability of a well-designed workshop using the best participatory methods (such as simulations, dialogue, problem-solving, etc.) is around ten percent.

    Nevertheless, we apply new knowledge and skills from formal training, especially on managing teams or administration-related tasks such as finance or procurement, not directly related to our core technical skills.

    Yet, many of us have fond memories of formal training – irrespective of whether or not we were able to apply any of our learning to our work. Despite difficulty in recalling both the content of formal training and how we were able to apply, we remain willfully optimistic about its relevance. In some cases, we even express satisfaction upon training for a skill we already have.

    We recall days spent in training as enjoyable experiences, perhaps because they release stress related to task delivery, provide space for reflection, and facilitate new relationships and network formation. Most formal events may not be designed as social spaces, but contain them nonetheless. Implicitly, we are referring to benefits of formal training other than applicability to our work – those whose legitimacy may not be recognized by the organization.

    Individual expectations around formal training are not necessarily around applicability, even though this is ostensibly its purpose and justification. Despite formal training’s intrinsic flaws, its social spaces give us room for specific kinds of continuous learning that is precious – and difficult to obtain in other ways.

    Photo: Nails (Adam Rosenberg/flickr.com)

  • Formal learning of the past

    Formal learning of the past

    Formal learning in the past includes formal education and qualifications obtained. They serve as credentials of value to establish that we know – part of building relationships of trust – and provide frameworks of reference (“shelves”) to make sense of new knowledge. From the past, we also draw on personal experience, attitudes, and values acquired or developed in formal education but also from personal life, family and community.

    As working professionals, we may think of higher education as a “thing of the past”. Nevertheless, formal qualifications matter for our personal brand and remain the prevailing currency in hiring practices. We draw on frameworks, tools and methods we learned in formal study. Foundational elements obtained through formal qualifications may be mobilized as fall-back or to drawn on an “overarching discipline of thought and the rigor of thinking” to help “navigate informal learning”. “We learn foundational elements through courses,” explains George Siemens, “but we innovate through our own learning” (Siemens 2006:131).

    Photo: The Longest Carpet Fringe (Theen Moy/flickr.com)

  • Faster

    Faster

    We need to learn faster, to deliver results faster. We find ways to accelerate knowledge development.

    And yet, although we acknowledge the need to focus on task completion, we accept that our shared learning takes time to build trust and deepen understanding before it can be turned into action.

    In many cases, we know that the most powerful forms of learning come from surviving stretch assignments – where we tackle new tasks or problems that appear unsolvable that appear to be beyond our capacity and experience. Stretch assignments – not explicitly named or recognized as such – are common in our resource-scarce environment, despite our risk-adverse culture.

  • Trust

    Trust

    The strategies we use to anchor and filter rely on building trust in our working relationships. Learning together is grounded in a shared culture of openness and trust. For example, we trust each other to keep communication to the point. We mobilize different networks of trust, internal and external, based on need. This mutual trust is important as it provides for fast updates, problem-solving, and other forms of dialogue and inquiry – while limiting exploration and avoiding excessive detail.

    Photo: Ahu Tongariki, Easter Island, the Navel of the World (Yulin Lu/flickr.com).

  • Focus

    Focus

    “Our challenge lies in focusing our insights. Distraction from what is important is a continual obstacle.” George Siemens (2006:136)

    How do we stay focused? How do we extract important knowledge? Anchoring is the act of staying focused on important tasks while undergoing a deluge of distractions. We anchor to pay attention even when we are overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of work. Filtering is how we extract important information.

    We face an abundance of information that is part of what makes us “busy”, our workload “stressful”, and means we have “no time”. We still spend much time to find what we need. We rely on a number of strategies to find and focus in order to complete the tasks, sometimes at the expense of the bigger picture. We expect technology to help. For example, we want not just a newsletter, but a newsletter on the specific keywords or topics that are relevant to us. Otherwise we lose time. We search for better tools to save time, but often come up short or, instead, find myriad options with no effective way to differentiate which one is right for us.

    We prioritize in ways that are consistent with our learning culture. When we are overwhelmed, we work harder, triage, and iterate to step up to the challenge. Last but not least, we leverage networks of trust, both with our colleagues and with external partners, to update our knowledge while avoiding excessive detail and limiting exploration. We learn (in order) to deliver.

    Our ethic of task completion may lead us to attend to tasks that distract us from more strategic priorities. We may also use mundane or routine tasks to reduce stress or fatigue associated with “the really tough stuff” that may be “top priority”. At times, we deliberately shut out distractions to focus. Time scarcity means that the schedule becomes the strait jacket of 15-minute increments.

    Sometimes our emotions can lead us to find what we need.

    We prioritize incoming knowledge in ways consistent with our learning culture. Prioritization is based on urgency (in emergencies we “drop everything” else), origin (our bosses come first), the imperative of task completion, resources, and clarity (what’s in the subject header). This may happen at the expense of continual learning when knowledge that matters (later, or from a source other than a hierarchical superior) is ignored.

    Authentic, emotional connections to people we care about often trump all other factors in prioritization.

    We try to keep current, but what happens when we fail? “I try to be on time to answer,” we explain, “because I don’t like to have hundreds of emails unread on my computer.” Triage, iterative prioritization, scope reduction, and increased effort are three behaviors described by team members

    How do we determine the value of knowledge and ensure authenticity? How do we make sense of implications, comprehending meaning and impact? We deploy a diverse set of individual strategies that include using data to check for internal consistency, triangulation, and questioning assumptions (including their own). These individual approaches, may be shared and become team practices.

    Again, the point is that we know how to do this. What we don’t know – and what learning strategy seeks to answer – is how we learned, and how we can improve.

  • Currency

    Currency

    Knowledge skills are increasingly important due to the pace of change in knowledge.

    We know that staying current cannot rely solely on formal training. This is both because we seldom have the time and resources to stop our work in order to learn and because the pace of change is faster than our ability to capture and codify it as formal knowledge.

    The notion that I can know in myself what I need to know is no longer an ideal. Instead, we develop networks and activities to ensure we can access and contribute to the most-current knowledge. We look for knowledge sources that provide currency, authority, and speed of access.

    Some of us remain frustrated with abundance. Yet, we have learned to accept that abundance is not dysfunctional. It means one won’t read or know everything. The many available depersonalized, electronic channels (such as the keyword-based newsletters and searchable online databases that some of us depend on) are necessary but not sufficient to achieve currency. The most immediately useful and timely information often arrives through our network of trusted peers, prescribed by no one.

    Photo: Ebb & Flow (Alistair Nicol/flickr.com)

  • Anchoring

    Anchoring

     “Hitting a stationary target requires different skills of a marksman than hitting a target in motion.” – George Siemens (2006:93)

    We are all knowledge workers who struggle with knowledge abundance – too much information.

    Percent of knowledge stored in your brain needed to do your job
    Percent of knowledge stored in your brain needed to do your job

     

    Our ability to learn is heavily dependent on our ability to connect with others. How well are we able to collect, process, and use information? Individually, we have learned the behaviors that enable us to anchor (stay focused on important tasks while undergoing a deluge of distractions), filter (extracting important elements), recognize patterns and trends, think creatively, and feel the balance between what is known with the unknown.

    These behaviors “to prioritize and to decipher what is important” are “a bit of an art”, we say. How do we learn them? These knowledge competencies – and the learning processes that foster them – are central to our everyday work, and require explicit reward and recognition (for example, in job descriptions and performance evaluation), support, and improvement. Yet they remain tacit. The aim of learning strategy is to uncover them, demonstrate their value, and determine ways of actioning them as levers to improve continual learning.

    Figure based on Robert Kelley’s How to Be a Star at Work: Nine Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed, Times Books/Random  House: New York, 1998. Ideas on 21st Century knowledge skills are grounded in George Siemen’s Knowing Knowledge (2006). Photo: Old rusted anchor chains at Falmouth Harbour (StooMathiesen/flickr.com).

  • Dinosaur

    Dinosaur

    “You’ll become a dinosaur if you don’t learn.”

    People in the organization recognize the need for change, see its value, see their own roles in the process, are willing to adopt new approaches, and possess the competence to move forward with change: At the individual level, we strive to consider each task, however mundane, as an opportunity to learn. Continual learning requires cooperation and collaboration with both internal (dialogue and inquiry) and external (connect to external systems) interlocutors. It is not “not knowing” that is the problem. It is often the lack of doing – a form of knowing. Meaningful connections are made explicitly based on need, rather than prescription, often to solve the problems at hand. Feedback is the key element in how we continually learn. We use feedback to adjust, acclimate, and adapt. We strive to leverage the tension between the learning we do to deliver results and the learning we do to explore and innovate. We acknowledge that this is difficult, but recognize that it is indispensable in order to keep up with the pace of change and to improve our preparedness for the unknown.

    Photo: Triceratops skeleton on display in the Galeries d’Anatomie comparée et de Paléontologie at the Jardin des plantes in Paris, France (personal collection).