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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This question was asked in a discussion group on Linkedin this week, along with another similar one about your favourite team-building activity.

It was great to see that without any input from RSVP Design, two of our activities were mentioned: Challenging Assumptions was described as a ‘go-to’ activity by a training consultant from Australia and a number of people in the USA cited Colorblind (even if they didn’t spell it correctly!) as their favourite (or favorite) ever tool.

It is great to know that these products are now being used and recommended around the world and it made me think of my favourites from our portfolio, apart from the obvious pair mentioned above.

I guess there would be three more that I’ve used more than any others and that still give me a buzz every time I see people learning from  them.

1. The first has to be Images of Organisations. These cleverly designed and produced cartoon images of the feelings people experience in a range of organisational situations are so versatile and open discussion on everything from teamworking and leadership to change management and training itself.

2. My second choice would be Webmaster – a challenging exercise that brings large groups together in a problem-solving and process improvement activity that represents a wide range of organisational challenges. It offers masses of opportunities to learn about teamwork, planning, supervisory leadership – and appeals to all those learners who like a real ‘hands-on job’ to get stuck into!

3. My third choice would be a less well-known product: the T-trade toolbox that combines two great inter-group activities – the tough negotiation exercise that is T-Trade itself and the fantastic accompanying exercise, PosT-iT. Despite seeing this activity hundreds of times, I never cease to be amazed at the patterns of human behaviour it illustrates and the potential for conflict, competition and collaboration that it raises….

If my favourite activities have triggered your interest, read more about them through the following links.

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/colourblind%C2%AE-p-13.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/challenging-assumptions%C2%99-p-27.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/images-of-organisations%C2%99-p-70.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/webmaster%C2%AE-p-26.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/ttrade%C2%99-p-12.html

Please let us know your favourites and how and where you use them!

Best wishes,

Ann

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After a period of denial I’ve reluctantly acknowledged that 2011 marks 20 years since I created the learning exercise that has been the cornerstone of our success. It was 1991 when I filled a learning need in the work that we were doing with trainee Air Traffic Controllers in the UK by developing Colourblind. Since then this simple tool has become a valued and trusted element in the repertoire of thousands of trainers, transcending any application barriers created by subject, sector or language. There’s rarely a month goes by when we are not amused and impressed by a message from our customers that relates a ‘new way’ of using Colourblind.

To celebrate this anniversary (Colourblind’s 21st birthday in 2012) I’ve been working on the development of a tool that extends the methodology and learning potential that have made the original exercise such a success. As you might guess, this is a ‘legacy project’, after all I’m working with the jewel in RSVP’s product crown, and that brings with it a whole series of pressures that, I have to admit, are pretty unfamiliar. Building on success requires an approach that is very different from the remedial, problem-responsive mindset which we need to adopt in our engagement with corporate clients. So how do you go about building on the obvious success of a learning tool or initiative?

My thinking over the past couple of months has been around a series of balance points that I think will lead to a successful follow-up:

An obvious affiliation and link to the character of the original

+

A retention of features that made the original a success

+

A protection of the values that underpin the original design

VS

The novelty and innovation of a new process or tool

+

New features and applications that extend the offering

+

A recognition that the success of the original has altered the product value landscape.

Trying to hit the ‘sweet-spot’ that lies at the heart of these balance equations has led to a rejection of many easy-fix solutions e.g.

“the same exercise with a harder solution”

“the same exercise but bigger and/or more complex”

“the same exercise but with the engagement of more faculties and senses”

In any other product-development field these may be perfectly legitimate responses to the need for a follow-up to a successful original. However, in the realm of learning design, a successful product is, by definition, one that changes its consumers, so the follow-up product cannot be designed to meet the same set of learning needs. What is required is a learning tool that acknowledges and accommodates the learning that has already taken place through its predecessor.

This means that we must begin with an understanding of what learning was provoked by the first tool.

But when we have a tool that has been adopted and adapted by thousands of educators to achieve a bewildering array of learning outcomes this is never going to be an easy task!

The approach that I’ve taken is to engage in some pretty deep dialogue with colleagues who I know use Colourblind in ways that I don’t. Ann Alder, for instance, is an expert in facilitation and trainer training, and she frequently uses Colourblind as a way of illustrating patterns of conversation within a working group. This isn’t something that I would tackle so it’s been good to discuss with Ann the learning she achieves and how this could be developed through a new extension activity.  Multiply this conversation many times, with experts in very different areas of human development, and you can see how I have created a checklist of what kind of learning experience the new tool needs to deliver.

So watch the RSVP space for details of when ‘Daughter of Colourblind’ transitions from the cardboard prototypes we’re playing with now, to hit the shelves in all of it’s ‘Anniversary Edition’ glory. We have great hopes that it will win as many friends as the original did.

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Through the whole of my professional career in people development I’ve held a deep and immoveable belief that people learn best when they are face-to-face. Our unique capacity to read meaning in faces has been one of the key drivers of human evolution, and to attempt to structure interpersonal learning without using this gift seems a bit like trying to appreciate art without looking at it. We can utilise other senses but, without that immediate and authentic visual feedback, it’s difficult to know the effect that our behaviour is having. So up close and personal is my preferred way of working, but just recently I’ve been led to question what face-to-face really means.

The basis for my recent questions around how much physical proximity we actually need to work effectively in developing interpersonal skills has been my growing understanding of the power and potential of mobile communications devices. This understanding has grown through our early design work on an iPad App that will support the Center for Creative Leadership’s excellent SBI feedback methodology (link) As ever my approach to a job like this is to ask myself how I would design the learning if I was given an ideal environment, unrestricted access, and any support I needed. Once I can define this ideal I can work towards a design that is as close as possible to the ideal by designing around the constraints and restrictions that circumstances present. So what components did I want in my learning environment that would support people in learning to structure and offer feedback across a broad range of interpersonal encounters?

In this situation I would say that learners need:

1.         to understand what feedback is, how it works, what makes it effective or ineffective, what reactions it might provoke.

2.         the reassurance of a system or method that will allow them to be confident in how they structure and present their own feedback.

3.         to build the security that will allow them, individually and collectively, to experiment with the learning content.

4.         an appropriate and suitable feedback system to allow them, and others, to monitor their skills development (feedback about feedback)

5.         to understand how to take their personal learning out of the learning environment and apply it safely and competently in their lives.

If these are the ‘must have’ components then I need to ask which ones need learners to be face to face to be truly effective? It’s the answer to this question that, for me, has been rapidly changing over the past few months.

The face to face requirement is about allowing individuals full access to not only the more obvious and deliberate facial gestures, but also the unconscious ‘micro-gestures’ that offer so much information about what another person is thinking and feeling. Combine this information stream with the verbal content and most of what we need to make sense of an interaction is available.

Until recently, attempts at facilitating group work and team development, using technology to link people in remote locations, were subject to the limitations of the hardware available. Systems originally developed for video-conferencing proved, even in their most sophisticated form, inadequate for the demands of developmental groupwork. It was just impossible to pick up the nuances of human interaction from a single, whole-group picture. The revelation that has come to me through our work with CCL is the extent to which working in a structured way, with individuals who each hold their own iPad, can take us very close to the immediacy of true face-to-face groupwork. What makes this insight all the more impressive is that it can be achieved when working with geographically remote groups.

I’m not getting carried away with the novelty of this new tool, it’s far from perfect (although the pace of technological development means that it’s moving in that direction very quickly). I’ve also come to realise that it requires two distinct skill sets to maximise it’s value in groupwork, and that these two skill sets need to be carefully integrated to create the learning environment. Firstly the introduction of mobile technology should in no way be at the expense of good learning design, we still need to be clear about what learning we want to achieve, our methodology for achieving it, and the measures that will tell us how successful we’re being. Secondly we need the understanding of the features and limitations of the technology we intend to use to support this learning, and here a huge advantage is the additional facility that allows us to change the way that the device(s) perform the role that we create for them.

As educators we are faced with the challenge of mobile learning. Our choice is to adapt our skills to rise to this challenge, or to dismiss it as an inferior way of working with people and currently not worth our consideration. The question that enters my mind at this point is what would our clients expect of us when we are faced with this choice?

interpersonal skills, learners, learning environment, mobile learning, people development Hide

This month I accepted an invitation to speak at a PhD Research Seminar hosted by a London educational institution, my subject being “Action Research as a PhD Research Methodology”. It was an extremely interesting event attended by potential and already-engaged Doctoral students from across the globe. I received a warm welcome and an attentive audience listened to what I had to say, many of them staying behind to ask questions and pick up on points I’d made in the presentation. Later that afternoon, nursing a cup of coffee while waiting for my train, I contemplated the expectations that guide so many students to come to the UK to study.

It struck me that a great number of the students whom I’d met came from countries where the education systems had either been established during the days of the British Empire, or had used the English school system as a template for excellence. Their national systems hark back to a day when an English Public School education was the benchmark against which all other standards were measured. India is an example of a nation who have this as part of their history, benefitting, or suffering depending on your viewpoint, from the value patterns in education that were established during colonial rule. My mind immediately recalled a conversation at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in North Carolina only two weeks earlier, one which offered a very contemporary insight into the Indian education system.

I was speaking to Lyndon Rego, Director of Leadership Across Boundaries at CCL. “The education system in India is broken,” he told me, “it serves a very narrow section of the population, and big business in India is telling us that the education system is not producing people with the skills that they need for the nation to grow.” We went on to discuss the work of the Leadership Across Boundaries team in creating cost-effective supplementary educational responses and the potential for RSVP / MLD to get involved in the design of materials to support these initiatives. Our discussion was about India, but I’m sure that there are many countries who work within the legacy of empire and a set of expectations about how an effective education looks and feels.

Putting my two experiences together I reflected on how many of the students who are produced by these systems gravitate towards the West, often the UK and USA, to seek higher qualifications, and whether they are being well served by what they receive? A century and more ago Britain’s educationalists were hailed as what we would now call thought-leaders, cutting edge innovators who were forging methods and systems to make education as effective and efficient as possible. Is this still the case, or have we somehow failed to keep pace in applying what is known about how people learn?

It won’t come as any surprise to anybody who follows my musings on learning design in this newsletter to hear that I would answer both of these questions in the negative. I don’t think we serve our students well, whether they are national or international in origin, and I vehemently contend that we have somehow lost our innovative edge in translating theory into practice in education. Our research into learning and education is second to none, but somehow there has arisen a disconnect between this theory and the practice that is evident in classrooms and lecture theatres in both the UK and USA.

To go into the reasons for this situation would take me into the realms of politics, and well away from the purpose of this newsletter. At RSVP, and more recently through MLD, I have been trying to challenge this inherent conservatism in education by providing the materials and processes that will allow educators access to materials that are better attuned to the complexity of how people learn. I’m not alone. I meet many people who recognise a need for change, people who have the bravery to work inside of our educational structures, and those, like me, who are outside looking in. Each of us is, in our small way, trying to make a difference because we believe that the consumers of education deserve better.

I think that the UK has the talent, the potential and the track record to once again become a thought leader in educational practice. Across the world, rightly or wrongly, a great many people still look to these shores to offer an example of best practice in education, and many make the commitment to come here to benefit from that expertise. Surely we need to take this role and responsibility seriously and move to a system where we are sure that what we offer is the best we can make it? I don’t know how this can happen, but I do know that if there is sufficient will to change the system we have the tools to make the change work. Change always involves learning and we’ve proved that we know how to learn – perhaps what’s lacking is leadership?

If that’s the case then being a thought leader in leadership education suddenly takes on a whole new importance.

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My colleague Graham Cook often takes the opportunity to make jokes about the length of time that I’ve been in the people-development profession, and some of the practices that, though seemingly humorous now, were cutting-edge at the time. Our MLD visit to the Center for Creative Leadership this month offered a whole new audience for those jokes, although it has to be said that many of the approaches that these days seem crazy to us in Europe have actually persisted much longer in the US. These insights led me to reflect on how we organise learning space, and how this has evolved.

Back in the heady days of the 70’s, when Transactional Analysis and sensitivity were our dominant grouproom influences, my working space had beanbags on the floor instead of seats, and a mattress in the corner in case anybody wanted to shed a few tears or act out their anger! There was no apparent front of the room, the flipchart was pushed to one side and was open to anybody to write on, the lack of focus reflecting the ideal of an equal sharing of power between the person facilitating the group and the group members themselves.

Then came the OHP, and with it the requirement for everybody to be able to see a screen. The beanbags became seats, the U-shaped table appeared, and the power shifted to the person at the front who controlled what was shown on the screen. Group dynamics and communication development couldn’t survive this change and we entered the era of development training and leadership courses. Soon the OHP gave way to the laptop and projector, and “death by Powerpoint” became an international plague, further increasing the extent to which the development of the working group depended on the skills of the presenter as entertainer. It’s interesting to reflect on the way that control over the technology has dictated how we approach people-development, and how both the experience of consumers, and the skills of trainers, have been detrimentally affected by this shift.

But just as we blame technology for this retrograde trend, developments in this very field may offer us an opportunity to re-balance the grouproom power balance. A large and exciting part of our design efforts have been focused on using iPads in the grouproom. What makes this different from much of the technology that has appeared in the preceding decades is the way that this individually controlled, but universally linked, technology can be used to facilitate a renegotiation of the power balance in the grouproom. Individual learners can take charge of what they see, share, contribute and record in a way that puts the emphasis back on them rather than the trainer.

I have to admit that this vision of the future, perhaps virtual, grouproom wasn’t one that I immediately related to – the spirit of the 70’s still runs deep in my professional psyche.

•The emphasis will surely be all about the interaction of people and tablets, rather than the true sharing that makes it worthwhile getting people into the same space?

•It’s obvious that the brilliance of the technology will distract people from the difficult issues that need to be addressed.

•How can we expect the facilitator to control the group when everybody has so much control over how and where they are working?

All perfectly legitimate concerns, but none of them create circumstances that can’t be addressed through good learning design that recognises the technology as a tool to support good pedagogical practice. And moving away from physically shared space might offer unprecedented opportunities for real and meaningful learning.

Let’s take as an example of a familiar pattern of learning interaction:

1.Information input

2. Individual reflection/Small groupwork

3. Share

4. Discuss

The Information Input stage can happen ‘anytime anywhere’, before or during the learning interaction. It can be centralised, high production value or pretty much home-made by the facilitator.It can be as content-inert or dynamic as required, and uniquely tailored to the needs of individual learners of groups.

The Individual reflection/Small groupwork stage can happen in the same physical space around a shared device, or remotely on different devices using shared screens. It can be synchronous or asynchronous, extended or time-bounded, elaborate or simple, structured or unstructured. The facilitator can observe the content and/or process, constantly or periodically, or allow it to happen independently.

The Sharing stage can allow individuals/small groups full creative control, or be tightly defined. It can be synchronous or asynchronous. Inputs can be amended in real-time to build on other inputs, they can be dedicated to one individual or sub-group or can be automatically incorporated to create a multi-group ‘collage’. They can also be attributed to an individual or group, or be anonymised by the devices.

Discussion can be a straightforward circulate and comment process, or an incremental building of content and understanding. It can be focused on the tablet or simply use the tablet to provide stimulus for traditional face-to-face interaction. The content can use rich media to generate stronger reactions across synchronous or asynchronous discussions.

In short, the mobile device has the potential to return the power in the grouproom to the more equal distribution that we experienced in the 70’s. It remains to be seen whether there still exists in the profession of trainer/facilitators the skills, or appetite, to capture and utilise this potential.

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Next week RSVP Design (or at least the bespoke learning-design part of the company) moves into Pilot Programme mode. We’ll be phones off, mail off and 100% focused on delivering a new programme and simultaneously examining the potential effectiveness of that programme against the agreed learning outcomes. It’s always a fraught and exhausting time, not least when you consider that we’re our own worst critics and any perceived design flaws will always be spotted and noted for later attention.

And there will be flaws….

There are always flaws…..

That’s why we try very hard to manage client expectations around piloting processes, in particular explaining how we think of piloting and what its place in a design process is: and very often this comes as quite a challenge to client preconceptions.

We like to pilot early, and pilot dirty.

That is to say we try out the programme content and approach long before the learning materials are polished and ready for general release to groups of consumers. That way we can spot any problems with the major determinants of success e.g. programme structure, cultural compatibility with the client organisation, intellectual/practical pitch and mix, distribution of content against allotted time etc. This allows us to be absolutely safe in the knowledge that the learning design is right, so that the subsequent layers of instructional design and materials production are applied to a firm foundation.

OK we know that this doesn’t always make us look too good.

And we recognise that it places some strain on the trust that our clients have in us.

But our approach is based on one very clear, but often contentious principle:

The most important learning that comes out of a piloting process is the learning that is derived by the design/delivery team.

Of course we’re experienced enough to recognise the fundamental issue that this creates for clients and we try our utmost to work with them to manage this issue: but the fact remains that we have to negotiate what can be a sensitive area for many learning and development professionals:

How do we assemble a representative group of learners to experience new materials, and to offer us their constructive feedback, when what they will experience is unashamedly a ‘work-in-progress’?

And obviously this dilemma will be that much the greater as we climb higher up the corporate ladder – the more senior the population the less tolerant they will be of the draft materials they are asked to experience.

Well no…. that isn’t my experience.

I’ve found that if a piece of learning is strategically and tactically important to a company it should be relatively easy to identify an executive sponsor, (and if it’s not why are they doing it?). Once you have that sponsor onboard, and they invite the attendees to pilot that learning, there’s a much greater sense that the investment of time and energy in the pilot is for the good of the company, and therefore much easier to gain buy-in. Any difficulties I can recall from my many years in this business are situations where I’ve tried to pilot materials with groups of status-conscious middle managers who see the process as a great opportunity to further their political ambitions in front of their peers. But if they have been invited by a senior executive, who recognises the pilot as sufficiently important to warrant their personal participation, then it usually produces a much more constructive climate around the piloting process.

So next time you’re involved, in any capacity, in the process of piloting a new piece of learning, ask the questions that will allow you, and others, to understand exactly what the purpose of this pilot is, and what you are expected to contribute. After all, pilots come in a range of uniforms!

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I have a colleague, Ann Alder, who has developed a very practical, and stunningly effective, approach to ensuring that meetings work for the people who attend. I think that Ann’s guidelines must have saved thousands of wasted hours in organisations around the world: they are not easy to implement but if everybody concerned is prepared to buy-in, then meetings need never be the same again.

Central to these guidelines are those that work during the pre-meeting phase, i.e. everybody concerned should be very clear about the purpose of the meeting, and only those who need to be at the meeting should be at the meeting. This is the area that repeatedly gives me problems in my learning-design role. I’ve already spoken in an earlier newsletter about the importance of the first meeting I have with a design client, and central to this importance is ensuring that both parties have a deep and shared understanding of what the meeting is for. We’re taking the whole of the MLD organisation out to the US later this month for a series of meetings, and I’ve been trying hard to ensure that everybody concerned is very clear about the purpose of each one of those meetings. Now I’m reflecting on why this apparently simple piece of communication has proved to be quite so difficult.

Take for example the meeting we’re privileged to have with one of the major East Coast Business Schools. This was originally conceived as a way of defining and progressing a number of development projects relating to different learning materials. Each project has its ‘owner‘ in the Business School and they are all going to be there, together with individuals who have commercial or accountability interest across some or all of the projects. Even at this level of detail I’m sure that you can see that we’re in danger of contravening Ann’s guidelines in that our agenda creates the situation where for much of the meeting there will be people in the room who have no direct interest in what is being discussed.

The obvious action at this point in time is to move from one all-encompassing meeting, to a series of project-specific meetings. However, this would mean a great deal of repetition as there are agenda items that have relevance to all projects (the extensive, though not always obvious, functionality of an iPad is one such area). OK so why not cover the shared  agenda in one ‘all-invited’ meeting, then move to a series of project specific meetings? It’s a possibility, but this approach makes each project into an island, isolating the available learning and reducing the extent to which there can be a cross-fertilization of ideas. Ultimately it seems difficult to find a good way to arrange these meetings to fit with the “clearly defined purpose” and “only people who need to be involved, are involved” criteria.

Our solution is to try a different way of defining the differences in these meeting(s), one that is based not on content, but on how we want people to be when they attend. Our first meeting is a highly creative, free-format exchange of aspirations and ideas about what is possible across a suite of learning materials, driven by questions about beliefs about how people learn and what support we can create that will help them in those learning processes. The second meeting takes these principles and applies them across the suite of projects in a way that creates a design brief for each product. This increases the involvement of all attendees by asking them to monitor the meeting for any deviation from the principles, and also to listen for dimensions of other projects being discussed that could add value to their projects.

So next time you’re struggling with a dilemma about organising a series of meetings in a way that responds to multiple interest groups and agendas, try thinking less about what gets covered at what meeting and instead focusing on what you want the climate of each meeting to be. (Remember to publish this clearly so that all attendees know what to expect!) Then sequence the meetings so that the big-picture, blue sky thinking, creative (What?) meeting happens first, and make sure that everybody concerned is there.

Once people have been part of that first high-energy meeting you’ll find it a whole lot easier to keep their enthusiasm and involvement through the potentially more difficult (How?) phase of agreeing how to proceed.

business schools, creative, design client, ideas, managing meetings Hide