March Madness and the Learning Professional

March Madness has hit my home like a tornado. We are staunch supporters of Villanova basketball so you can imagine the ups and downs we've been going through.

My wife and I had friends over for the very exciting Elite Eight match-up with Pitt. After the game, we got into a discussion of scholar-athletes and how focused they should be on education. We spoke of athletes who leave school early for the draft and those that finish. We spoke of college tutors and how many athletes slip through the system (sorry NCAA) and have tutors do the work for them. Probably not the typical conversation in your house, but my wife is an Advanced Placement English teacher and her friend is an English teacher.

I think we all agreed that it's a shame that so many college athletes leave college early lured by big professional paychecks and miss out on a quality education and becoming "well-rounded." It's almost as if the system is failing them. As a former high school teacher, I completely related to this. What about the importance of a degree? What about the value in the entire education that gives you the experience and background to understand and relate to current events?

The problem lies in the expectation of results. For many college athletes, who have spent a lifetime training to be "best in field" the measure of success is the pro contract. Likewise, in corporate learning cultures, personal development needs to be tied to business results. Organizations want to develop the whole person; the financial ledger demands accountability to the bottom line. So how do we as learning professionals walk the fine line between developing the whole person and meeting the needs of the business?

1. Be a Performance Consultant. Don't develop training for the sake of training. Be a partner with the business and make recommendations for better accountability, enforced compliance, and motivational perks if those are the true problems. The problem may not be in knowledge or skill, it may be because the process is broken or it creates obstacles further down the line. The role of the learning professional is to point those out. It may simply be that people need the right incentive or better feedback systems, rather than more training.

2. Keep the training specific to the task at hand. Sometimes all that is required is a performance support tool that shows workers how and when to do a particular task. Don't muddy the water with extra information that only confuses the worker. Adult learners certainly need context and want to know why the task is important. I'm not arguing against this. I am saying that for some learners, the answer may be as simple as, "Because this will help you do the job the right way and you will be more successful."

3. Provide content formally and informally. Make sure that the training that drives performance is formal, tracked, measured and impacts productivity. Development for the "whole person" can be provided formally, through classes and workshops, or informally through social media. I recently viewed a video from a leadership series at Google featuring Marshall Goldsmith, renowned author and executive coach. I admit to catching it pretty late, but this served as a great opportunity for both the people in the room at Google and the thousands who viewed it later and took something away from his presentation. In fact, I recommend his library as a great place to start with leadership development. Tools like this and other shared media like Wikis, blogs, and discussion boards can be powerful and inexpensive learning solutions.

When you act in the best interest of the business, you gain credibility with the leadership team for being honest about performance and being fiscally prudent. When you provide targeted, quality learning interventions that address true training needs, your training organization will gain credibility for results. Finally, when you provide learning opportunities for your corporate citizens to develop themselves personally and professionally, you provide the whole package as a learning and development organization.

What my son taught me about modern learning interventions.

This past weekend I rented Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo for my kids. There is no way they would have picked it, but I was feeling nostaligic for old Disney movies (brought on by the release of Race to Witch Mountain which looks like a fun movie). I mean, who doesn't like Don Knotts?

The beginning of Herbie goes to Monte Carlo sets the stage and foreshadows the rest of the movie. It alludes to the race team's arrival in Monte Carlo by showing passports being stamped. It then uses a sweeping panoramic style showing the car driving across the French countryside on the way to Paris. This sequence takes maybe three minutes, four at the most.

My son interrupted my nostalgic moment with a comment that inspired this blog. About a minute into the opening sequence my son said, "When is the movie going to start?" I found myself having to explain that this scene set up the movie and might be important later.

It occurred to me then that the modern learner has very little stomach for lots of context setting up front. They are used to jumping right into the topic and figuring it out as they go. The younger generation (Gen Y and the Millenials) do it when they learn to play video games and figure out new technology. Most of the "action" cartoons I let my son watch start the same way. It's an exciting action sequence that may or may not have anything to do with the story being told in that episode.


We all know as learning professionals that one of the first steps in a good design is an attention grabber. It seems to me that we often rely on the WIIFM (What's in it for me) to be our hook. Instead, we have an opportunity to use the moment to build on learning.


1. Give people a problem to solve. Here's a great way to make the learning practical and utilize pre-work. Send out work-related puzzles/questions to potential learner groups to drive interest and enthusiasm about the learning.

2. Illustrate real life examples. Have learners see or be exposed to real life examples of situations in which the content will make a difference. This will help them relate personally to the content.

3. Create conditions that help people unfreeze behavior. I mentioned this in an earlier post (Learning, Innovation and...Soccer). If you embed an activity that illustrates how useful the future learning can be, your participants will line up for development.

4. Use collaborative tools to create a shared desire for change. Try using discussion groups, wikis, blogs and forums to have user groups build enthusiasm for learning interventions. They will not only share the best practices; they may also help you set the direction of your training team.


When you get learners engaged in productive work right away, you won't have to deal with, "When does the movie start?" Instead, you'll have them engaged from the start and ready to absorb and use the learning you have to offer.

Quality, Cost, Time. Pick two.

I stumbled into my next topic while listening to Fresh Air on National Public Radio. In this episode, Terry Gross, the host, interviewed Economist Uwe Reinhardt to discuss the hidden costs and economics of health care. During the interview, Reinhardt relates an interesting story that summarizes the difference between European and American views on health care. Specifically, it illustrated a mindset that everyone knows they will get health care, and yet also realizes it won't be immediate. It reminded me of a rule I live by when advising my clients in the development of learning solutions. The rule is known as Triple Constraint. It's a project management concept introduced to me early in my career. You can Google Triple Constraint and get almost 700,000 hits.

For those of you for whom this is new info, Triple Constraint refers to the relationship between Quality (Scope), Cost (Resources) and Time (Schedule). I'm no Project Manager, and I cherish the PMs I know and get to work with, so I'll oversimplify this rule for purposes of this message. According to the rule, you can't have it all. I've been on plenty of projects during which time the needs of the business, or the requirements of the tools had to change to respond to external or internal factors. In these cases there was a change in scope (quality) of the deliverable. As a good partner to the operations, I was tasked with explaining that it would either take longer to make the change or cost extra. Never a fun conversation. Regardless of the cause of the change, my Ops partners needed to know that change costs, in either time, money, or both.

Organizational culture impacts design and development as well. Some organizations have a "get it done now" mentality, so that every project is urgent. Others have long, convoluted approval processes in which every VP needs to throw in two or more cents. Still others very strictly control spending and resources budgeted (plan on seeing this more often in these tough times). In every case, most organizations want the same thing: the best learning tools, for little or no money, right away.

So how do you get ahead of the problem? How can we, as learning professionals, manage our projects to quickly create inexpensive, high quality learning solutions ?

1. Define behavioral outcomes. The behavior change drives the design and allows the training team to pick only the activities and content that will affect changes in the learners.

2. Good enough is good enough. Everybody loves a fancy product. Fancy takes time and probably costs extra. If it doesn't, I'd question the quality of the product. Pick the very best activities and then do a great job packaging those items.

3. Know your end user. The deliverable has to fit within the world of the end user, not yours. Keep that in mind in the early stages and it'll save you time later. If end users can't use the tools, behavior won't change and you'll spend extra cycles fixing your tools.

4. Collaborate with business owners to set clear expectations. Get with the business owners, the front line operators, and make sure they have a say in what the final outcome looks like. They will appreciate being involved in the solution and will be ready when the tools are handed off.

5. Provide choices. My favorite strategy is to provide a menu, with pictures, of what proposed solutions might look like. This strategy allows me to offer "good, better, best" choices and allows the business to choose how much it wants to spend on the solution.

Making clients see that they can't have it all takes patience (easier said than done, trust me). Keeping them involved every step of the way will certainly alleviate tension when changes to the budget or timeline are required. In the end, your clients will respect your professionalism, business sense, forthright partnership and quality products.

Innovation, Learning and...Soccer?

I spent a good portion of this past Saturday coaching my kids’ soccer teams. I try not to be that dad, reliving my better days through my kids. I coach like crazy in practice and then in games I sit in my chair and watch. I was proud to see my teams do some great stuff on the field and it reminded me of how we learn to play games like soccer. Sure, as a coach I provide skill practice and drills to hone soccer ability. But true soccer knowledge is gained from playing the game, through trial and error. Kids learn what works (what helps them score goals, or stop the other team from doing the same) when they try the things I’ve been telling them and it pays off. The thrill of scoring or stopping that attack brings its own sense of fulfillment that I can’t create on the practice field.

As I watched my kids play, it reminded me of a webinar I viewed recently featuring Scott Anthony of Innosight. In his presentation, he emphasized the need for organizations to practice the art of innovation. He provided some great guidelines and some memorable facts and figures. His position is that for companies to be successful in these tough times they must be innovative all the time. He gave many examples of companies that rose out of tough times by doing exactly that. In every case, companies that rigorously practice and encourage innovation, ultimately succeed.

Innovation, like learning, demands that we try new ideas and often fail. Okay, I said it. It means we fail. Scott shared a great quote by Ted Williams, one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

"Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer."

Scott does a great job showing how companies invest wisely in innovation because they know that many ideas won’t pan out. They plan for it. They invest a little, to learn a lot.

In a learning culture, failure has to be an option. We often learn the most when we fail. Failure, and the introspection that follows, guides us to new directions that we may not have tried before. I love the quote from Batman Begins (2005), in which Alfred Pennyworth, the faithful butler to the Dark Knight, asks a young Bruce Wayne, “Why do we fall, sir?” The answer, though it seems trite, is packed with meaning. “So that we might learn to pick ourselves up.” I admit to being a comic book fan, which makes the quote more memorable. Regardless this is still a great lesson. For learning to actually work, participants need the chance to get all the information and practice it in a safe setting in which failure is an option.
Back on the job, our clients will have the opportunity to try the new skills. If our design was solid and the course a success, our learners should have some success at the new skills. When they do fail, and they will, the learning organization should be there to quickly assess the conditions that caused failure, provide the introspection required, and be ready to meet the need in a timely and cost-efficient manner. I’m not condoning failure as a standard. My belief is that in failing, we learn what not to do and sometimes that’s a good piece of information to have.

Soccer coaching may not be the best model for how to run a learning organization but there are some good parallels:

1. Give learners a safe environment to practice the skills and use the relevant information.
2. Provide lots of feedback and generate dialogue about what’s working and what isn’t.
3. Motivate participants with praise and positive reinforcement.
4. Unfreeze counterproductive behaviors and refreeze productive ones.
5. Prepare learners as best we can for “game time”.
6. Document the successes and failures and build new training experiences to address the shortcomings.
7. Repeat and have fun.

I'm constantly telling my assistant coaches, a group of helpful dads, to relax. If we teach our kids the basic soccer skills and make it fun, the kids will start to experiment and have success. That's how we can support innovation on the soccer field.
How is your learning department supporting innovation in your business?

Early education and the modern learner

In the last seven years as a learning professional, I've encountered many obstacles to training implementation. Early on, lack of technology hampered the distribution of the cooler stuff we wanted to produce. More recently, time challenges the learning organization. Who has time? Nearly every strategic communication contains the message "do more with less". Oh sure, very few are jumping up and down on the podium saying, "Work harder, faster and longer for the same pay and benefits!" Or are they? Yet when trainers and learning managers try to address the skill or knowledge gap with a training solution, the organization gives a collective groan and replies, "There isn't enough time."

I blame this on our formative years of schooling. We spend 12 years slogging through classes, day in and day out. That experience created a deep-seated stereotype of all education experiences. We immediately form a mental image of being whipped by bad slides, being lectured at, and playing silly trainer games. As adult learners, sitting in a class being subjected to content without context creates a sense of dread.

In this economic recession, much of the talent management literature focuses on developing the people you have. We read about the importance of:

• Preparing your people to take advantage of the market when things improve
• Developing your people to outperform the competition
• Retaining and developing your top performers to ensure they can deliver on your long term strategies

Blended learning solutions, when properly created and marketed to the organization, answer these needs. What does properly created and marketed look like?

Generate buzz by setting context and creating WIIFMs. In a blended learning design, take the opportunity to show participants the road map of where the instruction will go. More importantly, show them how the content builds and how each piece will have an impact on their own performance. Illustrate the connections between what will be learned and the organizational objectives. Early touchpoints in a design also provide opportunities to create shared buy-in between participants and their managers.

Make learning chunks small enough to be consumed in short periods of time. Most of us learn like this already. We scan news online, or read an article, and then continue with our daily work. Make learning fit into the work process the same way. Avoid linear paths when possible so learners can pick up the pieces of interest as needed. Some learners may want to sit and learn from "start to finish." Small chunks of learning don't eliminate this learning style, in fact, it gives them even more control over how much to consume in a single sitting.

Provide consistent reinforcement of the learning. Skill and knowledge application only occur if we give participants the chance to try out the learning and receive feedback. Let the learners come together to share success and, dare we say it, failures. This kind of sharing continues to shape the application of skills and make them concrete. Groups can be formed in many ways: classrooms, virtual meetings, blogs, forums, etc. Learning managers facilitate sharing, gather success stories, document best practices and share the results with the organization via newsletters, email, company meetings and many other vehicles.

Celebrate learning. I viewed a webinar recently called Best Practice Blended Learning Designs, presented by Dr. Vicki Halsey of the Ken Blanchard Company (available here). The presentation was full of great ideas. The idea that resonated with me the most was that of celebrating learning. On the surface, it sounds simplistic and maybe too "warm and fuzzy." In this case, and this is the part I love, celebration equals assessment. By assessing what participants have learned we are celebrating the knowledge and skills gained! I have to say, as a true-believer in the importance of managing the learner's experience, positioning assessments as celebrations deeply alters the perception of what assessing learning is all about.

Okay, so maybe high school wasn't all bad. We certainly had some great teachers, many of whom inspired us to become educators and gave us a passion for learning. High school prepared us (hopefully) to problem solve and analyze information. Our early schooling gave us a shared experience and the ability to apply past learning to new problems. Our courses were spread out over time and we learned progressively, applying old information to new problems which created new learning. Our best teachers helped us understand how the content was relevant to our lives.

The bottom line? To create powerful, blended, learning interventions we need to build shared experiences, show relevance to performance, make the content available as needed, reinforce it regularly and celebrate how much the learner has gained from the experience.

Getting Started in a Collaborative World

Today I embark on my own adventure in learning - blogging. Web 2.0, a topic all the rage for some time now, has huge impact on learning. Many learning professionals, myself included, are guilty of attending webinars and conferences to gather information on this phenomenon only to return to our "real lives" and continue our normal routines. Sometimes we become inspired, and we write business cases and story boards for the way our organizations could start using this technology. We become very excited at the prospect of blogs and wikis and forums (oh my!). Finally, proposal in hand we are asked by the business owner, "How will this increase profits? How will you know they've learned anything? Will they be certified in anything? What's the ROI on all this technology?" Deflated we return to our work spaces and wonder, how do you convince the business that informal learning is a sound investment, especially in times like these?


For those interested, I have a few thoughts on the way you begin to convince your clients, the business owners, that the collaborative tools of this generation are more effective, more cost-efficient, and easier to use and implement.


1. People already have the knowledge you need. There are already people in the organization performing at a high level. Learning Managers must document how high performers create success and develop ways to package them into consumable/deliverable chunks. Whenever possible, involve the experts: it lends credibility to the outcome. Find out what they know and, more important, what they need to know to be successful. Often there is a large gap between what they know and what they need to know to be successful. Help the experts hone down the knowledge and required skills to reach maximum performance. The icing on the cake: once the experts are identified you have a learning advisory board, the beginnings of a succession plan and a collection of mentors for new people in the organization.


2. You probably already have the resources in-house. Most organizations have some type of intranet that supports document sharing and communication. Everyone these days has a network and at least one or two "IT guys" keeping the wheels on the tech of the organization. For a bit of web server space you can set up a wiki or a blog (like this one). Chances are, your tech people can even build a web page that you can edit yourself to create learning news of the week and keep track of discussion threads on various business topics. If you've never heard of a wiki, check out wikipedia.org. The idea is simple, everyone who views the page can add content or edit it. Blogs can be powerful tools to have leaders in the organization communicate with the lines of business. Not only that, the lines of business can communicate back up the chain and provide feedback.


3. You have to get over the idea that you have all the answers. In short, see #1. Wikis, blogs, discussion threads and all the other ways to post user generated content, are designed to be iterative. Will bad info make its way onto your boards? Probably. The role of the Learning Manager becomes even more critical in filtering out the distracting information and educating people on how to use the tools to greatest advantage. The Learning Manager should partner with the business experts to validate the best practices shared in the wiki. She should make sure that forum topics are appropriately placed and screened. She should make sure that blog posts are well archived and searcheable. She must communicate to the organization the wealth of information that exists and how users obtain it.


In our current economy, we need the best people, doing the best work, with the best information, and the best tools. We have to set aside our fear that "someone else may know how to do the job better than me" and start sharing information and making it available, all the time. Competition is too fierce to wait for a class, online or instructor-led. By providing the information in easy to use chunks, easily read from a computer, or better yet, a mobile device, users can access learning all the time. And once they get a taste of learning in that way, they'll want it more and more.