Dave Grebow sees a danger in meddling with the processes of informal learning, and I have to agree. But I contend that it’s also possible to be pro-active without meddling. The aim in all cases is to respect informality but because the efficacy of the means employed doesn’t depend on elaborate control systems, those means should be theoretically less difficult to implement. The real and very formal challenge is to “teach” decision-makers what to do because everything revolves around a gradual but radical transformation of corporate culture.
If we're going to "teach" (whether through training or publishing), we need some ideas. I have a few of my own and have borrowed others from various places. To kick off the brainstorming, here are a some suggestions (remembering that no one idea will get us very far; to succeed you need to commit to the full monty):
- Begin modifying the physical (and virtual) working environment with the idea of moving away from a functional individual productivity model to a social model (this is sometimes done for other reasons and the two objectives can be made to merge).
- Encourage collaboration through the widest variety of means.
- Don’t conduct any formal training without envisaging some form of mentoring, including peer mentoring.
- For the mentoring provide a permanent collaborative learning environment that can be used for purely personal purposes as well as official or unofficial collaboration (storage of documents, data, links with other communication tools such as audio or video conferencing).
- Do some formal training, especially at the managerial level, on the complementarity of formal and informal goals.
- Define what I would call “evolutionary learning themes” that can be informally monitored over time by line managers, but without fixing pre-determined objectives (and devise ways of accounting for their evolution). No reporting… other than collaborative!
- Start talking about long-term learning projects without any specific constraints attached to them.
- Refer all formal training events or activities to long-term projects (a variation of the e-portfolio concept).
- Appoint not a “CLO” (as intimidating as a CEO or CFO), but rather a Learning Culture Coordinator (and Communicator).
- Start thinking about performance support systems.
Finally, don’t go looking for vendors of the latest ILMS (Informal Learning Management Systems)! You can bet they'll be lining up for sales appointments as soon as they see decision-makers committed to the concept. They'll be far worse than the "formal learning developers" Dave has warned us about.
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2 comments:
David,
I give you an A for understanding and summing up and an A+ for broadening and deepening the discussion with the right dose of humor. But of course grades aren't everything, so let's call it recess and move on, maybe to the sandbox!
I'm not sure I've covered any ground Peter Senge hasn't already covered, but I do believe that opportunities now exist to push things forward. After all, at bottom it really is a question of ROI, if we only knew what we were investing in. The challenge lies in making any of this fit with the current financial priorities and reflexes of executive management. The predictable problem of a new generation of aggressive ILMS vendors will follow only if we get to the stage of clearly recognizing the potential savings informal learning represents -- savings that will, I suppose, conveniently define the pricing of the new ILMS vendors ("now that you've saved it, spend it on us")!
The opportunities I mentioned above are related to a new culture of technology-enhanced (and integrated) communication both inside and outside the organization. This nascent culture may move in various directions, towards purely personal interests (entertainment, hobbies, games, sport, pornography), towards formally structured systems controlled by an imposed hierarchy (official curricula… or simply the party line), or towards informal but highly usable and useful environments that provide support in a way that has never existed before.
Most of us are hoping for the third orientation, but there are a lot of commercial interests that would profit from the two others. I fear that one of the conditions of their success is the marginalizing of the third.
This is a good discussion. Let me simply add something that has so far not been stated clearly enough, namely that from the perspective of a learning professional (and I say that as a former CLO), a key requirement for getting it right is communicating with your clients (there is never too much of it!). I still observe the prevalence of too much of a push thinking rather than creating a pull environment, where learners take informed action in a self-directed fashion. I call this strengthening intentionality, especially regarding informal learning.
Also, I have always thought very highly of the idea of a decentralized, loosely managed network of learning champions through whom a central learning function can do its work. Anybody with an interest in fostering a better learning culture should be allowed to become part of this network. The culture changes to the extent that those learning champions manage to create a tipping point.
All the best...Gunnar Brückner
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