RavingLEARNatics

Behold The Learning Democracy

As learning responsibility shifts to the audience in the Learning Democracy, providing an environment for them to learn and share knowledge becomes a central focus of the organization. Trust between audience and the organization grows, eliminating the need for the same level of management, control, and tracking that the Training Monarchy’s secret police, otherwise known as an LMS, was most often used. It allows the organization to use the LMS as a support tool and not a control tool. The Training Monarchy style of deciding what the audience needs to learn, building it in the castle, and then pushing it out to the villages is being overthrown. 

The constitution of the Learning Democracy establishes that the focus of learning in an organization should shift from content to audience. Its tenets include:

• The audience has control of the learning process.
• Learning is personalized to ensure that the right content is available.
• The audience determines how, where and when they receive content, as well as in what style and form they will receive the content.
• Content is presented in a learning style that fits each individual, and in a content style that each audience member finds most comfortable. 
• The new learning framework is nimble, less content heavy, and more context focused.
• The learning framework allows the audience to dig deeper by choice and is driven by community and collaboration.
• The audience helps determine what content they need and can create and add to it. 
• The end result is a living learning experience that gets better as more collective knowledge is added.

The Learning Democracy focuses less on full blown “courses” and embraces the real-time, short bursts of in-context learning that Conceptual Age workforce needs in a workplace that is fast-paced and requires quick decision-making at the edge of the organization.

Unlike the “pushy” Monarchy, in the Democracy, the audience pulls these small bits of learning. This transition from pushing training to the audience to having the audience pull a majority of the learning to them is highlighted in the comparison below by author Jay Cross.

The audience accesses these small bits or individual “learning elements” where they find it most convenient, when it’s needed, in a medium they find most appealing, on the device of their choice, and in context. It’s the Audience Comfort Zone.

Technology has made customization and personalization of information increasingly common. Each person has different preferences for how they access, receive content and consume information/content. We all process, learn, retain, and share information differently. Google found that while sales people liked learning websites, engineers liked wikis. So they built their learning experiences around those elements for each specific audience. 

Amy Jo Kim, an internationally recognized expert in online social architecture, author of Community Building on the Web, says we can learn from game designers, “change the user experience over time. There are three key stages of a player’s life cycle: novice, regular, and enthusiast. They won’t experience a web site, game or other experience in a static way. They need different content to be satisfied.”

Then why do most companies build one course for hundreds or thousands of people? Because the Monarchy develops and delivers content the way that it thinks the audience should receive it. It’s the Monarchy’s Comfort Zone. The Audience’s Comfort Zone is not important in the Monarchy, but it is the bedrock of the Learning Democracy. In the Audience Comfort Zone, the audience makes the learning choices. The organization helps ensure that choices are there for them.

Conceptual Age learners want more context …the Monarchy gives them more content . The Democracy gives more context . . . and more control. The Monarchy likes to dump everything into a course, but with facts, information, and data all easily accessed via the Internet and intranets, Dan Pink says, "What begins to matter more [than mere data] is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact." Emotional impact is where the power of storytelling comes in, but that’s a story for another time. 

The right learning style. Myers-Briggs personality typing tells us that we all fall into 16 personality types that can be categorized into 4 temperaments. There are different ways to communicate with each. In the Learning Democracy, content is developed in a way that ensures each audience member, regardless of their personality type or temperament receives the information he or she needs in the style that is most comfortable for them, so they can process it easily, maximizing retention and engagement. For example, Intuitive personality types will not retain the details if they don’t see the big picture first and have the “hook” to hang the details on. The Sensors need the specifics and facts. For those with the Thinking personality type, logical analysis of the facts is critical, and for Feelers values and interpersonal harmony impacts the learning experience. Different personality types, different styles of accessing, processing, and sharing information. 

The right device. Consumers are connecting to the internet more than ever through multiple platforms, and accessing information in a variety of mediums. In the entertainment world, "Transmedia is a fancy word for a simple concept: telling stories across multiple platforms . . . I would venture to say that we're almost never offline," says Tim Kring, creator of the TV show Heroes, a pioneer in using a variety of media to tell the show’s stories. 

In the Learning Democracy, transmedia is using stories, games, and tasks, delivered via a variety of mediums, while giving the audience control over how, when, and in what style they access content.

In the Audience Comfort Zone of the Learning Democracy, transmedia is akin to the various modes of transportation available to people in a city . . . walking, auto, bus, train, or subway. People select the mode that is most convenient, efficient, and comfortable for them. 

In the Learning Democracy, the audience also bears responsibility: formal responsibility to help in the original creation of the content and informal responsibility to actively maintain it and ensure that it continues to evolve and improve. They also shoulder responsibility for sharing knowledge with other audience members. 

Successful organizations can’t continue to bear the learning responsibility and still be nimble and successful in the dynamic, new Conceptual Age. As decision-making gets pushed to the edges of the organization, it’s critical that learning occurs on the edges, too. Organizations must tap into the collective knowledge and experience that each employee brings to the table. Smart companies are figuring out how they can easily extract quality knowledge from their employees and disseminate it to the organization. According to Clay Shirky an expert on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and author of the book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, “The classic clash of the last 25 years has been between Toyota and General Motors in terms of how much you learn from your shop floor. And the answer from Toyota was a little bit all the time, and the answer from GM was almost never by design. The continual improvement model from Toyota said yes this feedback loop assumes that employees know things that the management doesn’t, and that not only is that not a problem, that is an asset.” 

With the focus on the audience, the Learning Democracy is structured so employees can learn from one another by actively participating in determining important content. They co-create it and extend it after launch. They share knowledge and experience from the shop floor, office, field, etc. This takes us back to the concept that if our trusted colleague or friend tells us information is important, we’ll pay attention.

So how can the monarchy transition to a democracy? Give up some control, shift the weight of responsibility, and zero in on the audience comfort zone.

But wait a minute. When is the Learning Democracy not the right fit?

New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman recently posed the following important question regarding the brewing revolutions in the Arab world, in his article Tribes With Flags: “Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?” 

This is an important question for the Learning Democracy as well. According to Friedman, “there are two kinds of states in the Middle East: “real countries” with long histories in their territory and strong national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and those that might be called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states with boundaries drawn in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that have trapped inside their borders myriad tribes and sects who not only never volunteered to live together but have never fully melded into a unified family of citizens.”  

Companies can be similarly categorized, and some simply aren’t ready for the Learning Democracy revolution. If a company is made up of a bunch of learning “tribes” that are all fighting for turf and control, the iron fist of a central learning dictator may be needed. As Friedman says in his article, “as these revolutions have spread to the more tribal/sectarian societies, it becomes difficult to discern where the quest for democracy stops and the desire that ‘my tribe take over from your tribe’ begins.” 
Or perhaps a company is stuck in the Information Age, not yet open to or ready for the transition to the Conceptual Age. Maybe Asia, Abundance, and Automation have no impact on this company. Maybe the company has a death grip on central decision-making and has no intention of pushing decision-making to its edges. Maybe a workforce with R-Directed Thinking ability is not critical to the company’s success or the  company has few or no GenY-ers (and doesn’t plan to hire anyone under the age of 30 . . . ever). Or maybe the Training Monarchy doesn’t feel that its workforce can handle the responsibility. 

In any case, the Conceptual Age and its workforce is here. It may not impact the Training Monarchy that you know…yet, but it will. The revolution is growing. The Learning Democracy is no longer a hushed back-room conversation. It’s ready to take on the Monarchy. It’s ready to win.

 click the image above to see a zoomable version

 

 

 

 

Battles rage between Learning Democracy and the Training Monarchy

What Drives and Motivates the Conceptual Age Workforce? In Drive, Pink’s book on motivation, we learn that external carrot and stick motivators that worked for the Industrial Age workforce aren’t effective for the current workforce and certainly won’t meet the needs of the Conceptual Age workforce. 

“Type X behavior” in workers was a good match for the Industrial Age. Characteristics of “Type X behavior” includes being driven by extrinsic rather than intrinsic rewards and being less concerned with the satisfaction of the work and more influenced by external rewards. Alternatively, the Conceptual Age workforce is brimming with “Type I behavior.” This behavior is characterized by being driven by intrinsic desires rather than extrinsic ones and being less concerned with the external rewards of an activity and more motivated by the satisfaction that the  activity itself brings.

Pink describes three essential elements of Type I behavior:

• Autonomy. This is the desire to direct our own lives. There is a need for autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with) and technique (how they do it).
• Mastery. There is an urge to get better and better at something that matters. Mastery requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable. This demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice. Even then it’s impossible to fully realize, making it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.
• Purpose. There is a yearning to do what we do in the service of a greater cause. People who exhibit Type I behavior seek something larger than themselves.

For the Conceptual Age workforce, their work has to matter. They must make an impact on their workplace and in their world. Tom Davenport, author of Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results and President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, adds that knowledge workers like these “don’t like to be told what to do, they work best when working with other people in social networks, and are better led by example than by explicit management.” 

Wait, there’s one more thing . . . The new workforce faces a common enemy of the information age: time constraints. Multitasking, dynamic, high velocity work environments leave little time for training and guarantee distracted learners. Putting work on hold for a training course is a luxury most workers can’t afford. 

Time constraints have been a workplace constant for many years, and too often they haven’t been addressed adequately by the Training Monarchy. Lisa Pedrogo, Director of Training, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. elaborates in the book Learning Perspectives: “People are more productive than ever because of technology; yet, they have less time than ever because of technology. If ever a clock ticked on training, now is the time to embrace short, blitz, educational sprints. Customers simply cannot step away from their work for extended periods of time unless they are focusing on soft skills improvements.” 

We all know the takeaway from this . . . we must keep it brief and relevant. “Content must shrink and look more like Nano or Micro Learning — 99% of our effort is focused on the macrolearning (typical e-learning engagement of an hour or two hours, a day, etc). We have smaller 1-, 2-, and 5-minute learning opportunities throughout the day . . . In the future, learning will be smaller and more project based,” explains Elliott Masie, learning futurist, anaylst, researcher.

With those forces impacting and shaping today’s workers, it’s time to break free from monarchy . . . 

 

NEXT . . . Behold The Learning Democracy

Workforce declares learning independence. Learning Democracy is formed!

The Conceptual Age is here, but who makes up this new workforce that is about to overthrow the organizational Training Monarchy? 

The Industrial and Information Ages required focus and specialization. Dan Pink makes a compelling case that The Conceptual Age workforce must have the ability to tap into their right brain skills. This means a greater reliance on the creative, artistic right brain aptitudes:

• Big picture vision. Rather than delivering specific answers, it is now more important to see the big picture. Workers must have the ability to put various pieces together, see how they fit, combine elements never previously combined, and detect broad patterns. 
• Context. Facts are so widely available and easily accessible, so developing a compelling story by putting them into context and delivering them with emotional impact becomes a differentiator. 
• Human interaction. The work remaining in the US will require a workforce able to understand people. What makes them tick, how to empathize with others and build relationships.

“L- Directed Thinking remains necessary but is no longer sufficient. We must become proficient in R-Directed Thinking and master aptitudes that are high concept and high touch,” he explains. “We must perform work that overseas knowledge workers can’t do cheaper, that computers can’t do faster, and that satisfies the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands of a prosperous time.” 

Another key component of the Conceptual Age workforce is Generation Y or the Millennial Generation (Americans born between 1977-2002). Their presence in the workforce is already being felt. They are successful multitaskers, and are well suited for employers who expect employees to balance a variety of tasks and a professional and personal life. Members of Generation Y consider work a social element in their lives, reports Marie Puybaraud, director of Global WorkPlace Innovation at Johnson Controls and the author of the OXYGENz project report. For this generation, being engaged emotionally in their work and feeling a sense of community is critical. They pursue opportunities to learn and seek work that’s meaningful. Quality of life is also particularly important to them and they understand the relationship between a balanced life and productivity. They are extremely comfortable with modern tools and technologies, have a continuing thirst for learning and personal growth, and want to be creative and have new experiences. They search for jobs that match their passions and talents and don't just stay in jobs for comfort and security.

Because Gen Y-ers are self-starters who value career development, there is an opportunity — and a growing need — for organizations to provide the kind of training that quenches their thirst for growth. "Gen Y-ers … want the autonomy to shape their own careers, and that means providing the tools to allow them to develop personally and professionally, so they have options around where they want to go," Professor Ellen Miller, author of a study on the impact and effects of Generation Y in the workplace (The Reflexive Generation: Young Professionals’ Perspectives on Work, Career and Gender).

Here’s some insight from one Gen Y-er that reflects the mindset of the generation:

• "I want to learn. Learning is at the top of the list. I always want to be in a position where I feel overwhelmed by the potential to learn. I like to surround myself with smart people."
• "I don't necessarily need to know everything, just where to find it." 

For this generation, building courses that pile as much information as possible into a tidy package is a bad idea. We need to develop courses that recognize and play to the way this generation  learns, which is significantly different from that of previous generations.

 

 NEXT . . . Battles rage between Learning Democracy and the Training Monarchy 

 

Training Monarchy says, “Learning Democracy - a crazy idea created by nutcases, subversives, and hooligans!”

Now let’s add Decentralized Decision-making and The Influence of Gaming to the mix that is driving the shift to the Conceptual Age. 

Professor Thomas Malone, founding director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the MIT Sloan School of Business and the author of The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, makes a case that low cost communications has boosted worker autonomy and decentralized decision making. 

“The impact of low-cost communications technologies, including e-mail and the Internet, have increased opportunities for innovation, work satisfaction and work-flow flexibility in organizational processes,” Malone  explains. And, he argues, it has made decentralized decision-making more possible. Large numbers of people are now well enough informed to make critical decisions for themselves — decisions that previously had to be made in a central office.

By pushing decision making to the edges, an organization can reap the scale and knowledge efficiencies of large companies, along with the freedom, flexibility, and human values that drive smaller companies. 

“I think we are in the early stages of a change toward much more human freedom in business,” Malone says, equating it to the early stages of democracy around the early 1800s. “Most people said democracy was a strange aberration, and it wouldn't work well as a large-scale solution for governments in most places. We're in a similar place now with respect to the change toward much more human freedom and much more decentralization in business. Most people in most companies think these changes are unusual and will never be widespread.” 

But he goes on to say that ”the critical factors for business success are often precisely the same things as the benefits of decentralized decision-making — things like freedom, flexibility, creativity, (and) motivation. When people are making more decisions for themselves, they're often more highly motivated, more creative, able to be more flexible. Finally, they often just plain like it better.” 

Decentralized decision-making requires an agile, motivated, and creative workforce capable of solving problems.

John Seely Brown and John Hagel, authors of the book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, agree that decision-making in the work world is passing from manager to worker, and argue that because of this, the business world is shifting from push to pull. 

In their white paper From Push to Pull-Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources, they tell us that “the edge is where the action is — in terms of growth, innovation and value creation…Over the past century, we have been perfecting highly efficient approaches to mobilizing resources. These approaches may vary in their details, but they share a common foundation. They are all designed to “push” resources in advance to areas of highest anticipated need. In education, we design standard curricula to expose students to codified information in a pre- determined sequence of experiences.”

But now, we’re starting to see a new “pull” approach that focuses on creating platforms to help people to access appropriate resources when the need arises. This new approach has been driven by a time of business uncertainty. Brown and Hagel explain that instead of shifting toward tighter control, pull models do the opposite by “expanding the opportunity for creativity by local participants dealing with immediate needs.” They allow organizations to exploit opportunities, people to easily connect, and innovation to flourish in the face of unanticipated events. Push models allow people to access “highly specialized and distributed resources.”

Training Monarchy tightens training grip — more content, more courses, more requirements   

Looking from a perspective of learning, it’s easy to see why the centralized “push” strategy of the Training Monarchy won’t meet the needs of the evolving workforce. Brown and Hagel explain: “Rather than seeking to constrain the resources available to people, pull models strive to continually expand the choices available while at the same time helping people to find the resources that are most relevant to them. Rather than seeking to dictate the actions that people must take, pull models seek to provide people on the periphery with the tools and resources (including connections to other people) required to take initiative and creatively address opportunities as they arise. Push models treat people as passive consumers (even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line) whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers. Pull models treat people as networked creators (even when they are customers purchasing goods and services) who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem into an opportunity. Pull models are ultimately designed to accelerate capability building by participants, helping them to learn as well as innovate, by pursuing trajectories of learning that are tailored to their specific needs.”

Thus it makes sense that learning will follow the same path from push to pull — with more autonomy for the audience, and a shift from organization to audience in decision-making and responsibility. 

Does this mean the end of pushing information to people? Absolutely not. With services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter becoming focal points for our online experience, we are seeing that the audience is open to pushed content when it comes from our social network. From people we trust. If our colleague or friend that we trust tells us information “xyz” is important, we’ll pay more attention.

The Influence of Gaming
The video gaming industry is the fastest growing form of media . . . $10 billion in 1990, $50 billion in 2010, and its projected to be $80 billion by 2014. That’s three times the revenue of the recording industry. Video gaming is making a huge impact on our world, and will continue to do so. According to Tom Chatfield, a gaming theorist, in his TED talk titled 7 ways games reward the brain, video gaming offers intense emotional, individual, and collective rewards. Two processes occur when people are engaged in gaming:

• Wanting (ambition/drive) — I have to do that
• Liking — Fun, affection, delight

Combined they form an intense emotional engagement. Here are some of the rewards of gaming, according to Chatfield:

• Games gives people lots of tasks, (e.g., hitting a target, answering questions, or collaborating). 
• Users choose which tasks to do or does them in parallel.Users get credits for every action they perform. Reinforcement is ongoing, rewarding every bit of effort. 
• Doing things with our peers and collaborating is the biggest neurological turn on for people. It excites us and can be more rewarding than money. 
• Bravery and risk-taking is encouraged and rewarded. 

Asia + Automation + Abundance + Decentralized decision-making + Gaming = Conceptual Age

 

NEXT . . . Workforce declares learning independence!

New workforce rebels against the Training Monarchy

Workforce tells Training Monarchy, “No education without representation! We want a learning democracy!” 

 

Before we talk about Knowledge Workers, the Information Age, and L-Directed thinking, first a definition of Knowledge Workers from the late Peter Drucker, writer, professor, world renowned management consultant, “People who get paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical strength or manual skill….[What separates this group from the rest of the workforce is] the ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge.” 

Knowledge workers have shaped the character of the Information age. But the world is changing quickly, and knowledge workers must adapt quickly too. 

Dan Pink, author of the books A Whole New Mind, and Drive spells it out for us: In the Information Age, success was often driven by the ability to reason logically, sequentially, and quickly. Joining the Information Age workforce meant successfully navigating knowledge assessment tools like PSAT, SAT, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT. All require logic and analysis, the ability to focus on sequentially answering one question at a time with a single correct answer in an allotted time, placing a priority on L-Directed thinking (right side of the brain - simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic). While L-Directed thinking is still important, Pink argues that we’re “moving into an era in which R-Directed Thinking (right side of the brain, which is simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual, and synthetic) will increasingly determine who gets ahead.” 

Why? During the Industrial and Information ages of the 20th century most work was algorithmic. It followed a script, spec sheet, formula, or series of steps that produced the right answer. That has changed thanks to three primary influences. 

Asia, Automation, Abundance
According to Pink, three forces are driving the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age:

• Asia — Large amounts of routine white-collar work is being outsourced, “forcing knowledge workers in the advanced world to master abilities that can’t be shipped overseas.”
• Automation — Computerization, robots, technology, and processes “have begun to affect this generation’s white-collar workers in much the same way [as] it did last generation’s blue collar workers,” forcing them to develop aptitudes that computers can’t do better, faster, or cheaper.
• Abundance — Consumers have too many choices. Nothing is scarce. The material needs of millions has been over-satisfied, boosting the importance of aesthetics, emotion, and the individual’s search for meaning.

Algorithmic or routine work can be easily outsourced or automated and is now moving offshore to wherever it can be done cheapest.

These three forces are transforming goods and services into commodities so quickly that constant innovation, the invention of new categories, and the ability to differentiate their products/services are mandatory for survival of organizations. 

Fareed Zakaria, Editor at Large of Time magazine, a Washington Post columnist, and a New York Times
bestselling author, paints a sobering picture:  “There will be a class of Americans — the globalized, “knowledge workers”, if you want to call them that — who will do very well. But the average American
will face very, very significant pressures, because the work he or she does is not going to be competitive in this new world, and we are not making the investments we need to help make it competitive. We’re not upgrading the educational system. We’re not upgrading the infrastructure. We’re not upgrading all the areas where you can take that American worker and make him or her super-competitive and super-productive,” he writes in How to get America's groove back – Q&A with Zakaria on cnn.com.   

NEXT . . . Training Monarchy says, “Learning Democracy - a crazy idea created by nutcases, subversives, and hooligans!”   

Training Monarchy pushes back, “we know what’s right for our workers!”

The workforce “needs a steady, firm hand to ensure that they are trained.”

The monarchy chugged along in the Industrial Age, and the Information Age, but times they are a- changin’. Specifically, the workforce is changing with the dawning of the Conceptual Age, an age requiring a different way of thinking and working, driven by a more competitive international workforce, automation, GenY, and decentralized decision-making. These changes require a different strategy for knowledge sharing. The audience, after years of subjugation, is raising some difficult questions:

• Why teach everyone the same way? 
• Why are we subjected to training that often teaches us things we already know or isn’t really relevant for us? 
• Why don’t we ever get the opportunity to influence the content being presented? 
• Why is the content often too long and not very engaging?  
• Why is it such a formal experience?
• Why aren’t we allowed to pull the content when we need it and in the style we want to receive it
• Why is training mainly the responsibility of the organization? Can’t we share responsibility and control so we can transform training into learning? 
• Where are the choices?

One thing is clear: It’s time that we focus on the audience! And as Wayne Hodgins, former strategic futurist at Autodesk Inc. explained in his Learning 2009 presentation, to be truly effective training must recognize individual differences and preferences: “Our best learning experiences, and our best teaching experiences are those magical "teachable moments" when it all fits, it is just right, just for me, just then. And yet the vast majority of the practices, content, teaching, training, technology, etc. are ignorant of the individual, of context and worse, are designed for sameness, consistency, standardization, commonality. If we agree we are all snowflakes, unique individuals, and that each situation and "teachable moment" is unique, then why do we seem to insist on continuing to design and demand education, training and learning that is the opposite?”

But this revolution-leading audience is changing that. Motivated by a desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose, they seek more control and accept more responsibility. With packed days they have more to do in less time.They have access to vast amounts of information and only want the information they need. What they need is less content and more context.

Their world is becoming more and more customized and personalized — music playlists, book recommendations, control over what they watch on television or their computer and when. They can choose not only what information they get, but when they get it, how they get it, and in what format they prefer (mobile, television, internet, print, audio, etc). 

This audience accesses information differently, process information differently, and learn and retain information differently. They all need different information. They have knowledge to share — from the factory floor worker to the CEO. They want to collaborate, to influence their world and their learning content.

The rebellion has started . . . a training tea party. Courses are being dumped overboard. 

The time is right for a Learning Democracy, in which the central government determines the overarching rules that all must follow, but pushes decision-making on a majority of topics to the states. In this system, the audience has more autonomy, more control over choices, and more responsibility over their on-the-job learning decisions, pulling knowledge that fits their needs and has been created centrally with heavy influence from the organization's  edges. 

Before we can truly understand the inner workings of the Learning Democracy, we must first understand the external influences that have fanned this revolutionary fire. What are the outside forces impacting our economy and business strategies, and changing our workforce? 

 

NEXT . . . New workforce rebels against the Training Monarchy

Angry workforce demonstrates against Training Monarchy

“Its time for change, we want more control over learning!”

It’s the duty of the people to rebel against tyranny. So a change is coming. A rebellion is rising, and wisely the monarchy that is organizational learning is hearing the cries of its citizens: “Give us liberty!” Revolutionary organizations are rethinking their training strategy as they find the old way of doing things — the “Training Monarchy” strategy, if you  will — is not effective or productive in developing the kind of workforce that’s necessary for success in an evolving “Conceptual Age” economy that is increasingly knowledge-based and innovation driven. 

How the Training Monarchy Works
In the Training Monarchy, responsibility is shouldered by the monarchy. The audience waits for direction. They are told which content to take and how to take it. The monarchy looks after its vassals. They may call it organizational learning, but more often it looks like organizational training. 

[click the graphic above to see a larger version]

As author Jay Cross says in his book Informal Learning: “Training is something that’s pushed on you. Someone else is in charge. Learning is something you choose to do, whether you’re being trained or not.”

In the monarchy, content is created centrally. It’s determined by the monarchy, and designed and developed well within the walls of the castle by content experts. The organization’s focus is on the content, which is then developed as self-contained courses ranging from 20 minutes to 2 hours long. Often the scope is a vast kingdom of information. The course may be “blended” — a combination of some classroom, some e-learning, and some job aids. Most often it is pushed to the audience, when the monarchy chooses, in the style the monarchy deems best for the audience, and delivered in the manner the monarchy feels is most appropriate. 

Often, the audience gets all of the content in the kingdom whether or not they need it. Everyone in a select group gets essentially the same content. A lesson or two or a few modules might be different for different groups within the audience, but basically it’s the same course for everyone, presented in the same way for everyone. 

The funny thing is, everyone is different. 

 

 

 

 

NEXT . . . Training Monarchy pushes back, “we know what’s right for our workers!” 

 

Freerice

If you want to learn, play a game and help feed hungry people around the world check out Freerice.com. It's a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Programme that offers free education while helping to end world hunger at the same time. You can play educational games on various topics on the website and for every question you answers correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated to the hungry. It may not seem like much, but it adds up quickly. Check it out. Learn something. Help someone. 

 

mobile learning website

If you want to stay up on the latest news regarding mobile learning you have to check out Judy Brown's new website http://www.scoop.it/t/mobile-learning