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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Here at RSVP we’ve recently had a lot of contact with the Center for Creative Leadership. We’re developing, via our Mobile Learning Design (MLD) persona, Apps that allow CCL’s famous body of research and practice to be accessed via mobile communication devices.
As part of my research I’ve been doing some archeology in the past-papers and other written materials that have come out of CCL over the past 20 years – and I’ve turned up a gem that, I think, is well worth revisiting.

The piece in question is an essay that was first published in 1997 and revived as a blog in 2008 entitled Leadership in Permanent Whitewater: Playing with the Metaphor
http://lmeccl.blogspot.com/2008/07/leadership-in-permanent-whitewater.html
I can’t stress enough just how much I relate to the messages that are embedded in this essay, but it’s the powerful metaphor of organisations as whitewater rivers and leaders as intrepid kayakers that has a particular attraction for me. Not just because I’ve run a few rivers in my time – but because the metaphor is, if anything, more appropriate here in 2011 than it was back in 1997.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1997 but just listen to three of the ideas forwarded by the author Chuck J. Palus in the essay:

a) Chaos in organizations is not random.
b) Play is essential within organizations if people are to develop an eye for patterns within chaos.
c) Fundamental innovation can come from serious play at the fringes of organizations.

These ideas are totally aligned with my beliefs about the learning that organisations need if they are to survive and thrive in waters that are infinitely more challenging than they were 14 years ago. But I have to ask why, if these ideas are so valuable, is it so hard to access them? Why do they gather dust in archives and collections of past-papers? I think that the answer lies in the possibilities offered by the increasing range of new media through which ideas can now be brought to the world.

The original essay was published in a 1997 journal, the essay was revived in a 2008 blog, I’m linking back to it in a 2011 blog – I wonder which has been read by (and hopefully influenced) the most people?

I’d be interested in your thoughts – you’re obviously reading this blog, but did you see the essay first time round? Did you read the 2008 blog? Was it worth me bringing it to current attention? What other gems have you found in the archives and how did you try to breathe new life into them?

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Everything that I am reading at the moment from the ‘movers and shakers’ in the world of organisational, management and leadership learning convinces me that there are some exciting new insights that are going to bring about a real revolution in our understanding of training and learning in the workplace.  Here are a few , probably contentious suggestions I’d like to make, based upon the trends that I’m hearing and reading everywhere, that might help us to move this revolution along!

1. Recognise that informal learning is significantly more powerful, and more highly valued than formal learning. Therefore, shift the investment (both time and finance) away from the design and delivery of formal programmes (face-to-face or online) and transfer it to creating and supporting informal learning.

2.Remove the word ‘training’ from your corporate vocabulary. If the concept of ‘training’ goes, so does the idea of learners being controlled and  ‘processed’. We train animals for obedience: we engage human beings by helping them to learn.

3. Embrace new technology but don’t impose it: create multiple ways in which people can easily access and use a variety of media to gather the information, knowledge and expertise they need, when they need it. Divert your training budget to create multiple informal spaces and learning environments. Create resource centres, both physically and on-line, filled with versatile materials that are freely available to individual learners for use whenever they need them. (cf. Apple’s introduction of itunes university). And believe that anyone using these is ‘at work ‘….not playing truant or abdicating their responsibilities!

4. Ensure that Performance Management is a developmental, learning process: link learning and performance by setting goals that use the framework,   “I need to learn X in order to be able to do Y”.

5. Only appoint managers who understand and use effective developmental coaching. No matter how good their technical skills are, if they don’t have great people development skills, don’t promote them into managerial positions.

6. Replace formal conferences with open space, cross functional gatherings, with specific outcomes, and facilitate groups as they  they tackle issues of real organisational importance in an innovative atmosphere.

7.  Measure project success against performance and learning criteria. Build learning reviews into every process. Ask, “What do we need to learn to be successful in achieving this project? How do we incorporate that into our plan?”

8. Scrap any meeting that is a presentation or exchange of information available through other media. Replace these  with ‘learning exchanges’: group reviews of learning, how to share and apply it and how to impact anyone who would benefit from it.

9. In a market place in which more and more potential employees are well-qualified and ‘certified’, start to focus on learning with new employees before they join. Interview and recruit with a focus on what candidates have learned, how they learned it and how they will continue to learn throughout their employment. Select those who understand and are motivated by learning. Take every new employee through a personal coaching session around their own Learning Power: create a personal learning record that stays with the learner for life and replaces the CV.

10. Remove any responsibility for L&D from HR. The functions are fundamentally different. Create a ‘learning support’ function staffed entirely by skilled facilitators and coaches and give them free rein to create personalised learning programmes. Integrate personal learning goals into daily work.

OK – there are a few details to work out, I concede……

What do you think?

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It is 25 years this month since I began to work in the ‘development training’ business and recognised the power of using experiential learning activities. Since then, much has changed in our knowledge and understanding about why and how we use experiential learning and in the organisational landscape in which we offer our services. Here are a few of the things that have changed since I began my chequered career through learning and development!

1. My first programme in 1986 was a twenty-one day residential programme for young, high potential graduates on a management development programme for a major retailer. In three weeks of personal development we could change lives! I can’t see many employers releasing their staff for a continuous period of twenty-one days in 2011. We have become skilled in achieving powerful results from short, relevant activities and targeted interventions that really focus the learning on specific outcomes established in advance. Examples are our ‘bite-size’ workshops that can be delivered in 2 hour modules: have a look at this example around the theme of ‘Breakthrough Thinking’

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/breakthrough-thinking-workshop-p-31.html

2. Almost all structured experiential learning was done in the outdoors. We offered a full range of adventure and outdoor activities and it was an essential requirement of every programme that participants found multiple ways of getting wet! Since then, we’ve been able to use the power of experiential learning by creating smaller scale but carefully designed activities that can be offered in classrooms, seminar rooms and offices as well as an outdoor environment. The RSVP design website gives you a broad choice of activities we’ve developed over this time!

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk

3. We had to type, Tippex and photocopy all of our paperwork: we thought twice about making a change to a programme! Who would have imagined the potential of modern technology to offer learning through electronic and mobile media and to bring together learnign groups from around the world? Contact us to check out RSVP Design’s work in the field of mobile learning and our connections with Dynamically Loaded – breaking new ground in learning using mobile technologies.

4. We were learner focused: everything we did was designed to meet the needs of our learners. Over 25 years I’ve experienced a move away from the needs of the learner to delivering ’sheep-dip’ training to meet organisational targets. However, more recently, as organisations have been forced to recognise the need for flexibility, adaptability and resilience in the face of change we are starting to focus on the learner again. We’ve recently had the honour of being selected to bring a new model of ‘Learning Power’ to the business world: it is an exciting initiative for 2011 and one we are convinced will make a genuine contribution to organisational learning.

See our new work on ELLI: the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/trainer-training/

I could list many more changes – I’d be really interested in hearing how you feel our profession has changed and developed, what we do better now than 25 years ago – and what we may have lost in the process of change!

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This was the question I was asked this morning by an interviewer who telephoned me and wanted to include my response in an article for a training journal.It was 1130 and she wanted to go to press by lunchtime, so I was asked to think on my feet!

She modified her question and said, “What are the five most important things Learning and Development specialists can do to ensure that the training they offer is really learner-centred?”

In the 10 minutes I was allowed, I came up with the following five. I wonder what yours would have been?

1. Understand how learners really learn. The work the University of Bristol has been doing on ELLI seems to have defined the key dimensions of learning: everything effective learners do. Tim Small of ViTaL Partnerships said of the lead researcher Ruth Deakin-Crick, “If there was anything else that effective learners do, Ruth would have found it. We believe this really is the ‘DNA’ of Learning”.

2. Make learning problem-based and purposeful. Adult learning needs to be relevant and useful to the learner, helping them to solve problems, generate innovations and make their lives more rewarding. Tap into the desire to solve relevant problems and use these as the basis for your learning design.

3. Identify and use past and current experience. Link new learning to what is already in place. Identify if and when it conflicts with what is already ‘known’: explore how to integrate new pieces into old patterns.

4. Use simulation. Simulations allow us to explore and rehearse in a safe environment, encouraging experiment and risk-taking. What we learn in the ’synthetic’ world we can transfer to the ‘concrete’ world. In relation to this, there are some interesting figures related to computer based simulation in the report below. Dr. Geoff Cox’s doctoral thesis suggests this is also true of behavioural and ‘physical’ simulation, although the figures given here only apply to computer simulations.

Overall, declarative knowledge was 11% higher for trainees taught with simulation games than a comparison group; procedural knowledge was 14% higher; retention was 9% higher; and self-efficacy was 20% higher.

For anyone wanting to review the whole paper you can find it here: A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Effectiveness of Computer-Based Simulation Games

5. Attach emotion to learning. Emotion drives behaviour. If we attempt to learn in an emotionally ’sterile’ environment we are unlikely to become engaged and motivated enough to press for real behavioural change. This is why experiential learning – with its associated frustrations, anxieties, challenges, satisfactions and passion – remains such a powerful technology.

I’d be interested in your additions to my top five!

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It isn’t often that a TV programme inspires me to write a blog but I found myself watching ‘Gareth Malone’s Extraordinary School for Boys’ on BBC with an increasing mix of frustration and envy. If you haven’t seen this programme, it shows Gareth Malone, an engaging young musician and choirmaster who has had great success in inspiring young people to achieve success in the performing arts, attempting to improve the literacy of primary school boys by offering them a different type of school curriculum. He is clearly onto something: he recognises that many boys strugggle with traditional classroom based lessons and wants to offer them outdoor, energetic, competitive, high risk activity to enhance their motivation and engagement. He works with a class of boys, with the somewhat reluctant support of the headteacher, over a term and has permission to create his own learning environment and activity design.

That’s where my envy came from – what an amazing opportunity in this age of highly regulated education! I’m with him so far – then my frustration kicks in because as far as I’m concerned there is a blindingly obvious missing link in what he’s doing. And it’s a gap I recognise because I’ve seen it so often in learning and development in adult learning too. It is the gap between activity and learning purpose.

Let me give you some examples. The boys run competitive races and charge around in the local woods. They chop trees and have fights. They then take part in a formal debate, supposedly to improve their confidence at speaking aloud. Where is the connection between the outdoor activity and the debate? It’s not there. In another example, the boys are given swords, shields and freedom to act out a Roman battle. They have a wild and chaotic time. They are then taken into the classroom and asked to read and complete worksheets about Roman battles – presumably because their interest has been fired by their re-enacted battle. Do they read? Not really. Well, of course not. There is no connection between the need to read and the activity they’ve just taken part in.

So how could it be different? Let’s suppose we want to inspire the boys to speak and read and also allow them to be outdoors and re-enact a battle. So, let’s design it differently. Let’s make them need to read and speak, in order to achieve the the fun and thrill of the search and the battle. Here are some possibilities. They divide into two teams. Each team needs to read out written clues that will lead them round a pre-defined trail in the woods. They need to pass the instructions between sub-groups (in secret, so the enemy doesn’t hear them) so they need to set up a communication system. To do that they need to read the map to find the components and instructions to build and operate a field telephone. They need to crack a code to transmit secret messages. The written clues lead to their stash of weapons and the ‘battle plan’. To win the battle they have to follow the general’s orders – which arrive in writing, of course…..

I hope by now you see where I’m going. Good learning design, whether in a school for boys or a corporate environment, has to have a clear and strong connection between learning purpose, desired outcomes, learning process and learning activity.

At RSVP Design we are experts in how to link learning purpose and learning design. We create powerful learning environments in which the connections are clear and obvious. We may not be working with school children but we could certainly point Gareth Malone in the right direction!

If you are interested in creating rich, powerful , purposeful learning environments for your adult learners, let us know and we’ll send you an invitation to our Creating REALS workshop, specifically designed for L+D professionals who want to improve their learning design skills. We look forward to inspiring you!

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In a press release to promote their upcoming Content and Collaboration Summit 2010 (London, UK, September 15-16) Gartner Research forecast 10 key changes in the nature of work through to 2020:  “Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, ’swarming’ and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”

We agree with the predictions, and see it as a continuation of change we are already seeing in organisations; and with it will come some major challenges for L&D/OD departments. Here are the ten key changes Gartner forecast, and where we think L&D professionals should be considering a response.

1. De-routinization of Work – the obvious response here is the de-routinization and individual personalisation of training. We look forward to when “Here is the list of available training courses” is accepted as an outdated and wasteful use of trainer and delegate time & resources. I suspect the public sector in the UK has some way to go on this …
2. Work Swarms – workers need more insight into how they might work effectively with others who think differently or have different problem-solving approaches etc. Tools like HBDI or Effective Life-long Learning Inventory will be useful in being able to quickly work effectively in ’swarms’ of people you don’t know well.
3. Weak Links – formal and informal networking will become an even more important skill in the future, and not just for salespeople! Consider how and where social and business networking sites can and should be used during worktime. Is time spent networking on Facebook helping to build weak links, or just chatting with friends? Will updating my blog be considered as vanity or essential to developing these weak links?
4. Working With the Collective – Perhaps ‘influencing’ will become the most desirable skill of any business leader as we move to a position where ‘the collective’ replaces any internal hierarchy? This suggests more  prefered ‘right-side’ thinking style in the HBDI model than the traditonal ‘left-side’ found in many management positions today.
5. Work Sketch-Ups – ‘Designing-in-flight’ or ‘managing in ambiguity’ requires a very different set of skills and behaviours than that typically suggested by teaching through a ‘case-study’ method. How will our Business Schools and academics respond? Will we move to more activity-based learning facilitation than ‘teaching’?
6. Spontaneous Work – This suggests creating the type of corporate culture where this is not only desired but encouraged. How do you build this culture? Contrast this with today where most ‘leaders’ set the work agenda – how do you lead/manage people who develop their own work activities and priorities?
7. Simulation and Experimentation – of course we believe that activity-based learning provides the ideal ’synthetic’ environment to experiment and simulate behaviours. That’s why we create tools to help organisations build their learning environments!
8. Pattern Sensitivity – See Ann’s forthcoming book:  Pattern Making,  Pattern Breaking
9. Hyperconnected – in a hyperconnected world there is probably no time for formal contracts and agreements. Does this suggest an increase in the importance of ‘Trust’ and a requirement to better understand how to build and maintain it? Is it hopefully the end of long-winded tender processes?
10. My Place – how do we deliver training at ‘My Place’  (the workplace may be virtual, may physically be at home, or indeed may change on a daily basis)? Will it be more ‘edutainment apps’, delivered outside of the normal working hours, paid for by discerning individuals (who want to build their learning power) out of their own pocket (or personal learning account)?

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I read the recent Chartered Management Institute Review which stated some interesting and disturbing statistics for UK managers:

CMI recently questioned UK managers to find out which aspects of management they thought they were best at. Of the 2,158 managers polled, almost half (44 per cent) said they excelled at managing people. Twenty-one per cent were target-busters, 19 per cent believed they were strongest at managing themselves and just 14 per cent felt they were born to lead.

CMI has since put those perceptions to the test by inviting UK workers to use a specially-developed self-diagnostic tool to work out where their strengths and weaknesses lie. The results strongly contradict managers’ perceptions, revealing that, in practice, UK managers are best at getting results (41 per cent) and strong leadership (37 per cent). Just 14 per cent of the 6,056 people who used the tool excelled at people management and a paltry eight per cent proved to be best at managing themselves.

See http://www.hrreview.co.uk/articles/hrreview-articles/hr-strategy-practice/half-of-managers-misjudge-their-workplace-performance/10058

I wondered when I read that where do:

1. Most managers go to find out more about their own learning strengths/preferences and personality/thinking preferences? As little of this is taught to most undergraduates where else can ‘ managers’ get this insight, except through their organisation’s L&D team-building or other activities? Should this be mandatory on all undergraduate courses?

and

2. Managers (new or experienced) go to ‘practise’ their management skills? So much of what we see in corporate/organisational L&D is about presenting theories, models, competency frameworks, performance monitoring etc and less about offering these delegates the chance to practise new skills or behaviours. Group learning through experiential activities is a great way to offer people a non-contentious and safe ‘practice field’ for a wide rnage of management and ’soft skills’ rehearsal – but how do we get employers to provide more of it?

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I recently came across this interesting article that suggests that creativity is in crisis!

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

Creativity involves both divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking opens up new options, ideas and possibilities, disregarding barriers and resource limitations. Convergent thinking then takes these multiple options and works with them, refining them until a useful outcome is produced. Many organisations emphasise convergent thinking but limit divergent thinking. My suspicion is that this is a response to the fear and risk aversion that has developed as a result of a culture of blame and litigation: divergent thinking inherently has risk and failure built in. Standardisation, measurement and control serve a purpose – but the downside is that they diminish creative thought.

If it is true that creativity is in crisis (and according to a recent IBM survey, creativity is an absolutely vital leadership skill) we really need to focus on strategies for re-building creative thinking as a core part of our education system and professional development. Fortunately, the evidence cited in the article also suggests that creativity can be learned. So, what can we, as facilitators of learning, do to enhance the creative abilities of our learners?

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. First re-engage people with the belief that they can be creative. Creativity isn’t just for artists and musicians – it’s the lifeblood of engineers, scientists and researchers too.

2. Help people to understand that creativity is not just about getting flashes of inspiration – it’s about making meaning from connecting ideas together, seeing new patterns in things and viewing existing things from new perspectives.

3. Encourage people to challenge their assumptions.  Help them to see how they can block creativity by holding on to past experience that limits them: “This won’t work because it didn’t before…” or “Stick with this because we know it works”.

At RSVP Design we have a number of tools and workshops that focus on building creativity: we love the activities in our Breakthrough Thinking workshop that aim to do just this. Have a look at the workshop materials you can buy for your own use and enjoy getting creative!

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/breakthrough-thinking-workshop-p-31.html

creative leadership, Experiential Learning, learning challenges, learning tools, thinking styles Hide

I travelled to Vienna last week, and met with a number of trainers from Central & Eastern Europe. I enjoyed our discussions about varying levels of use and application of experiential and activity based learning techniques in various locations. One particular discussion however rather disturbed me – I met a Polish trainer and showed her some of our metaphor-based tools such as Images of Organisations and problem-based activities such as Seeing the Point. She maintained that she did not like any of them and questioned how useful such tools could be in training. My concern was not that she disliked RSVP Design activites but that she seemed to hold such strong personal feelings about what is ‘right’ without even considering what her ‘trainees’ might need or want. How often do trainers let their personal likes and dislikes colour the training material they design and use? Is there a particular cultural reason why experiential or activity-based learning would not be popular in Poland?

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