Language is important to me, both personally and professionally. I received my early education within a UK system that placed little value on any language other than functional English, a fact that has had a serious and negative effect on my career, as it has on the outlook and ambitions of many of my generation. My embarrassment about my linguistic limitations has, however, led to an increasingly awareness of the way people use language. In particular I’ve become much more sensitive to the fact that way in which a person thinks about a situation is revealed in the way that they describe it. Very often my challenge as a designer of learning interventions is simply about changing the way a problem is perceived, and changing the way that it is described offers a key point of leverage.

When I speak to clients about a problem situation there is a very common pattern in the language that many of them use when they describe the problem as they perceive it. Terms like problem space, field of influence, territories, operational area, overlapping interests and lines of sight tell me straight away that the speaker envisions the problem spatially. Thus the whole problem definition and problem solving processes become firmly rooted in ideas about movement in problem-space. This is perfectly good as a basis for designing solutions to problems that are static and fixed – the landscape stays still enough for long enough for the solution to be mapped out and navigated. The problem is that most organisations, particularly in modern business environments, are highly dynamic and can’t be relied on to stand still and wait for formal learning to be organised and implemented.

This is where an early attempt at ‘reframing’ the way that the problem is perceived by those concerned will often pay dividends. In doing this, we have a number of options available, but perhaps the most frequently used, and potentially successful, is to attempt to have those concerned think of the problem in temporal terms i.e. as a dynamic, time-dependent issue. Using this frame we define the past, present and future of the problem in terms of how it has emerged and how it might potentially unfold in time to come. The idea is to work to develop a narrative (or series of narratives) that describe the evolution and possible futures of the problem.

Now this might sound complicated, but inside every human being is a storyteller waiting to get out, and the role of the facilitator in these situations is to assist those concerned in allowing their stories to emerge. Over the years I’ve developed several tools to support this process e.g. RSVP’s toolbox product “Voyage Mapping”, which can add a focus for the reframing exercise. Presenting the problem solving initiative through the use of a professional tool is often reassuring to those involved as it overcomes much of the resistance that might be attached to an enjoyable approach to dealing with serious issues. Additionally there may be significant value in assembling in one place the interested parties to compare and contrast the timelines they develop around the problem, and a tangible focus for this group based activity has obvious advantages.

However, simply having people developing their own narratives around the problem can have a significant effect on their perceptions around its solidity and solubility. The problem defined as a spatial landscape has hard edges and clear boundaries, the same problem defined as a narrative sequence is fluid and dynamic. The spatial frame suffers from a sense of fixedness and inertia that can never attach to the unceasing flow of time. So getting people to talk about the problem as a narrative will immediately make the achievement of a satisfactory solution more likely. A word of warning here: be careful that what you’re achieving is a true narrative, it’s very easy to design a process that results in a series of time-defined landscapes (this is how it looked at this time, a year later it looked like this….etc).

I’m always keen to explore and share tools and techniques around this type of reframing exercise, so if you are interested in a discussion around how, when and why you might try to move towards a temporal approach to organisational problem-solving, please get in touch via our website.

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The past 20 years have seen a persistent move towards the segmentation of learning along lines of user-group (Y12, Executive,Team etc. ) or medium (optical disk, web-based, face-to-face etc.)

The positive side of this segmentation is that it has stimulated much more innovation in specialist areas of education delivery, and it’s also made conversations about learning solutions easier to frame. However, on the negative side, it has generated a pervasive sense of competing bandwagons and “the next must-have methodology” often driven by a desire to future-proof an investment against rapid obsolescence. Blended learning, in it’s many manifestations, has offered some relief from single sourcing, but, too often, procurement decisions still seem to be driven by the needs of contractual simplicity rather than the needs of target learners.

The landscape that has resulted from this legacy of learning decisions means that I often speak to clients who are unable to make a large investment in new learning materials and processes. This may be because they have little new budget, and/or because there is a strong pressure on them to extract more value out of previous major investments in learning.

“We’d like to use System X because we spent a packet of cash on it and

we’ve not really seen the results we were promised.”

Now I don’t like “System X’s”: one-size-fits-all solutions to the complex and diverse learning needs that exist within every organisation. RSVP/MLD doesn’t advocate this kind of approach and we’ve spent years developing small-scale, versatile tools that can be integrated into custom approaches that are very responsive to the needs of defined target learners. But nor do I like telling clients that they have made poor decisions in the past and that there’s little to be done other than to move on and trust that the next decision is a better one.

So lately there have been a number of occasions that I’ve been in the position of recycling learning investments: finding new ways of using tools, materials and approaches that otherwise would be consigned to a (actual or metaphorical) cupboard in somebody’s office. In a lot of ways this is an interesting challenge, because we’re not just talking about the materials themselves, but a population whose learning has been impacted by the materials. Let me give you a couple of examples:

I had a conversation with a major utility company who had put a significant proportion of their employees through a work-related profiling tool. The initiative had been successful and the vocabulary of that tool could be heard being widely used across the company. People knew their profile and there was considerable evidence of this affecting behaviours and career choices in positive ways. However, new strategy needed employees to think outside of the comfortable boxes that they had defined and adopted using the language of the profile, and this was proving very difficult to do due to the lack of any progressive way of building on the existing learning. The profile had become a barrier to development in that people were challenging what they were being asked to do differently, a frequently experienced response was:

“I can see what you need but I can’t do that because my profile says that I’m

best at doing what I already do”

The senior manager to whom I spoke reflected on perceived mistakes in how the adoption and interpretation of the profile had been managed, and the difficulties that she anticipated in moving beyond it. My response was to ‘reframe’ the situation to suggest that this wasn’t about challenging the wisdom of the profile as it’s widespread adoption was indicative of a major success. The new strategy needed to be implemented in a way that acknowledged and exploited this success i.e. much more of a bottom-up approach utilising the self awareness that the profile had developed, rather than a pre-profile, top-down approach. The learning environment that would support implementation was about extending the personal learning of employees to encompass the collective learning of organisation – not “what replaces the profile?” but “what works with it to renewed effect?”

The second example is very different, a business school that had made a major investment in creating an on-campus outdoor facility, but was recognising that a younger generation of business leaders were finding it hard to translate the learning that they undoubtedly took from the team-focused, challenge-course experience, to their workplace experience in globally located virtual teams. The business school were struggling to sell the dynamic and meaningful opportunity offered by the outdoor facility as a component on all but their most junior programmes.

In this case the solution wasn’t about changing the facility, or even changing the way they were using it. The solution was to create some new activities that added mobile devices to the experience: building an effective requirement to use the devices as core components in the solution of the problems posed by the challenge-course. The additional requirements for research, remote communication, information management and leadership translated as familiar features into the unfamiliar and pressured environment offered by the facility. The result is a massive extension to the range of learning outcomes that can effectively be tackled using the outdoor facility, and elevating it from an investment in individual and team development, to one which can equally well be applied to develop 21st Century business skills.

So if you are faced with a learning challenge that seems to indicate “moving-on” from previous investment in learning, try thinking about your challenge as “building-on” instead. I’ve enjoyed my recent challenges of helping people to think in this way, so please get in touch if a conversation about recycling learning would be helpful.

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A warm welcome to 2012 to all our customers, (and potential customers!). As this is the season for resolutions, I can share with you that ours is to widen our circle of contacts by asking our customers to recommend their colleagues and associates to register on our website. In return we will reward our new contacts with some free resources and regular information which we hope they will find useful, and our existing clients with several incentives on purchasing our products. If you are visiting this site or blog for the first time, we hope you’ll consider registering by clicking HERE. We are fortunate to have a large number of customers who have been very positive about our products and our support for their work; and we are grateful that they are responding so well to help us achieve our 2012 goals.

We also plan a number of new product launches in 2012 both in the ‘physical world’ with RSVP Design and in the ‘App world’ via our sister organisation Mobile Learning Design. If there is a tool, activity or mobile device application you’d like to see developed for a training need, then please email your suggestions to graham@rsvpdesign.co.uk and we’ll consider it as part of our product development planning process.

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