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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We are looking for some help in having some consultants/trainers/facilitators trial some new products that we are close to launching. If anyone is interested in joining such a group, and would be willing to provide some feedback ( in exchange for getting access to some new materials, and a good deal on purchasing a commercial copy ) please email graham@rsvpdesign.co.uk

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RSVP Design was delighted to establish a new distribution relationship in 2011 with Experience Corner, based in Warsaw, Poland. Experience Corner is the first on-line store in Poland offering interactive training tools from globally known brands, and following an invitation from colleagues at Experience Corner, last month I made my first visits to and Krakow and Warsaw to introduce some of our products to their customers. It is always exciting to travel to a new city and although I had just returned from a visit to the USA, I was looking forward to seeing Krakow and watching the reactions of the Polish audience to our products. Alicja and Joanna from Experience Corner met me on the first evening I arrived, but by then I had already had the chance to wander around the main square in Krakow and begin to sample what was clearly a popular and vibrant city!

Experience Corner have translated all the facilitator manuals as well as the delegate briefs for several of our learning tools, so I although I would have an interpreter with me during the events, her main role would simply be to help me understand what was being said in Polish as the groups worked with their own language version materials. The Krakow event was held on a large converted Dutch barge on the river, and I was pleased to see that Experience Corner, like RSVP Design, believes that the learning environment is important in making events memorable for participants! It was a wonderful old vessel, and I could have happily sailed along the river on what was a beautiful sunny day! The delegates were a mixture of internal training specialists and other training consultants, and were extremely enthusiastic in their participation. I used our Images of Organisations™ metaphor cards to open the session and to get pairs and triads discussing what their training challenges were, and I was delighted to see that Polish people have no problems in working with metaphor in this way. We then had a group play Colourblind® with a number of observers and again, not only were they enthusiastic, but very disciplined in their problem solving approaches, which helped them reach a successful conclusion fairly quickly. To show how RSVP Design would sequence activities we then introduced Simbols™ (using the Team Version) to show how we might build on similar behaviours using a different activity, and finished with Challenging Assumptions™ – again it was comforting to see Polish people make exactly the same assumptions in this exercise as other Nationalities we have tried it with around the world!

The following day (well, very early in the morning!) we took the train to Warsaw where I presented to a larger group (some 45 people) in probably my most unusual training venue ever – the deep end of an old swimming pool (thankfully undergoing a conversion to an arts venue!). I was interested to see if our dinner discussion the night before about Polish stereotypical group behaviour suggested by my hosts as being  ‘a lot of heated discussion, but when agreement is reached there will be a uniform acceptance of the new direction – perhaps to the detriment of thinking about alternative strategies’. During this larger session I decided to use Webmaster® to see if these behavioural stereotypes would play out. Whether by coincidence or as a reflection of these stereotypes I did indeed witness a lot of heated discussion after the initial problem-solving portion of Webmaster® (creating the first construction). I observed lots of discussion with many overlapping conversations, and several people taking a lead as to how they though they could best achieve the team performance increase required (i.e. complete the whole construction in under 2 minutes, from an original build time of 25 minutes). None of the available exercise time was used for further practice or rehearsal purposes – it was all used for ‘discussion’. Eventually as the time limit began to expire (somehow!) the group agreed on a strategy and every one of the 30 strong group delivered on that strategy and managed to achieve the objective! There was a lot of discussion following this activity (most of which I was unable to understand!), and I get the sense that Webmaster® could become a popular activity in Poland!

Although this was a very short trip I saw enough to know that I want to go back and experience more Polish cooking, Polish beer, Polish socialising and Polish customers, and I look forward to a successful partnership between Experience Corner and RSVP Design.

Graham Cook

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Corporate Universities are, almost exclusively, found as appendages of big corporations. In the USA the HR-driven corporate university has represented to a very high degree the choice of large organisations that need to process a large number of employees through diverse learning experiences. Over the past 20 years I’ve worked with many of these institutions, developing new learning content, introducing experiential methods and working alongside faculty to better target specific learning outcomes. I’m currently mid-way through an extended project with the CU of a major food and beverage multinational, creating experiential practice-fields for the leadership models they are introducing.

A brief down-time in this project recently led me to consider what characterises the way that CU’s approach the business of learning, the “What’s good and what’s not?” of Corporate Universities.

Top of the “what’s good?” list is the way that CU’s live and breathe their corporate culture. Learning happens in an environment which always feels like the concentrated essence of their corporate culture, an immersive learning environment that lives and breathes company ways of working. As an outsider it’s always a little daunting to first step into these unique environments, a state that I can describe in this way:

I’ve been invited here because of what I know i.e. I’m an expert, but this whole experience places an emphasis on what I don’t know i.e. I’m an alien in this place.

At this point I know I’m going to have to bring my ‘A-game’ to this job.

The result of this situation is that the learning that happens in a CU needs little translation or adaptation to be applicable in the operational part of the business. It was conceived, developed, delivered and evaluated in an environment that is totally geared towards the business of the parent company. People leave knowing what they have to do to deliver what their company wants them to deliver.

What this means for my work is that I will be given very clear design direction – I’ll be told very clearly what learning outcomes are needed, and given very strong feedback around whether my designs are a good fit with ‘how we do business’. As a designer I enjoy the challenge of very quickly assimilating the corporate culture and language, and producing seamlessly compatible designs – “going chameleon” I call it.

The flip side of this is that the walls (physical and metaphorical) around many Corporate Universities are pretty high and not easily breached by new thinking and new ideas. Let me say up-front that this is a generalisation, I work with some institutions that are extremely innovative and open to best-practice thinking. Indeed I can cite instances where particular CU’s actually lead the field in innovative learning practice: but for many their approach to corporate education demonstrates all the negative effects of “limited gene-pool learning”.

At RSVP Design we specialise in learning innovation, and that is, in most cases, why clients buy our services. We bring new ideas, new approaches, new thinking. And that makes it pretty disappointing when we can see where our approaches would breathe fresh life into some dated and tired situation, only to be told “that won’t work here” or “that’s not how we do things”. These situations, (and work with CU’s often produce them), are typified by a strange paradox:

“We’ve asked you to use your unique expertise to design something that we can’t, but we can’t accept your design because it’s different to what we do.”

I’m happy to say that my current work hasn’t encountered this paradox, it’s going well and the pilot programmes suggest we’re ready to deliver something special. The culture in the CU is strong, but open to well-informed, well-presented influence, just about the ideal situation.

Now if all Corporate Universities could hit that happy medium………

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As part of our commitment to bringing the concept of Learning Power to businesses, public and third sector adult learning groups, we worked in partnership with NHS Dumfries and Galloway to offer a two-day programme for L+D professionals on July 13 and 14 2011.

Day 1 was an introduction to ELLI and the 7 Dimensions of Learning and was attended by seven participants, from within the NHS, the Scottish Police and Brathay: organisations with a commitment to developing people through the provision of high quality learning.

Day 2 was an optional ‘ELLI Champions’ training day, designed to ensure that those who wish to use the profiling tool within their own programmes have achieved the required level of understanding and competence to represent and administer the tool correctly and in line with the intentions of ViTaL Partnerships, who retain the ownership of the profile and associated research material.

As we have experienced in previous workshops, there was a very positive response from all the participants about the potential value of ELLI across a broad range of applications: in personal coaching and development, in career coaching and in performance management and goal setting.

Participants felt strongly that the ELLI profile is, as it has always been described, of particular value when it forms part of a supportive yet challenging coaching or mentoring relationship. Particularly during Day 2 there was a focus on the principles of effective coaching and the need to use the profile as a trigger for high quality developmental conversations with individual learners.

However, there was also strong agreement that simply understanding the 7 Dimensions, and their implications for the design and delivery of learning experiences, was of enormous value to those professionals who are responsible for the selection or creation of learning activities, programmes and events, as well as the ‘curriculum’ around formal training inputs and mandatory training.

Ann introduced a number of short, example activities on Day 1 to illustrate how, once a need to develop one or more dimensions had been identified, experiential learning methodology can support skills development. Specific example of this included short exercises in connecting apparently random images (Meaning Making), a group puzzle that could only be solved by generating multiple questions (Critical Curiosity) and the use of a visual mapping tool to review past learning and plan for the future (Strategic Awareness).

On Day 2, participants rehearsed their own coaching skills, observing each other and offering and receiving feedback. This process helped them to explore the ‘layers’ that ELLI unlocks: learners’ thoughts and feelings about learning in general, themselves as learners, their motivation and learning needs. Following this, they began to explore how and where ELLI could be integrated into their own work. Examples included an organisational induction process (with recommendations about how to make this much more learner-centred and participative), working with operational managers to help to ensure that appraisal and performance management discussions were more focused on learning and the value of integrating the Learning Power principles into Action Learning sets.

Whilst we recognise that there is still work to do in creating materials and ’seamless’ access to ELLI profiles, the programme re-confirmed RSVP Design’s belief that this is a simple and powerful model that should become core knowledge for every L+D professional.

Specific thanks go to Sandie Wilkie and Louise Hughes of NHS Dumfries and Galloway for their support in setting up the programme and providing the venue and logistical arrangements.

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I read a really interesting BBC article describing how there is strong evidence that universally praising children can de detrimental to their growth, and encourages a ‘fixed mindset’ rather than believing they have the capacity to grow and learn (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13128701 ) . Of course the ELLI research ( see http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/trainer-training/ ) supports this article (both for children and adults) and we are heartened by the almost universal interest in ELLI from any organisation we speak to. There is also good research from other areas that children who value the idea of ‘I am someone who can learn’, and that ‘I can learn from mistakes’, are motivated to ‘grow and learn’ and ‘resilient’ when it comes to challenging learning situations. These type of children grow into valuable employees. I know some educational colleagues who wish they had praised their own children more for effort when they were younger, and now choose to celebrate ‘failure’ as a learning opportunity, even as their children have grown up.

It has prompted me to continue to think about how organisations can generate the same motivation to learn as the people who have all the successful and well researched characteristics of effective learners. I’m convinced that this motivation has to come from an organisational culture that respects individuals as capable of learning and change, and that their leaders should behave in a way that is consistent with that. This would mean abolishing ‘lists of approved training courses’, educating managers and individuals about the science behind effective learning, paying more attention to informal learning than formal learning, re-writing the charter for L&D & OD (or even seeking to phase them out, and give their responsibilites to line managers), and using ‘learning language’ in business contexts so it is seen as being fundamentally critical to achieving any organisational mission or goal. In fact research seems to suggest that’s what organisations who ‘thrive’ actually do – now we just need some good tools to help organisations achieve this …

RSVP Design has created a new joint venture – Mobile Learning Design – and we hope to create some tools that take advantage of the personal nature of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets etc.) to provide formal and informal learning support when people need it, rather than when it is offered. Please get in touch with us if this subject is of interest!

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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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I am delighted to announce that Interel Inc. from San Francisco and RSVP Design Ltd. are forming a new partnership that will see their respective product portfolios merge and both organisations work together to continue to support customers around the world with the most effective activity-based learning tools and learning design support. Although RSVP Design and Interel have worked together informally for several years this is a new development in formally providing all shipping and logistical support for both sets of products. Interel in the US will support all US customers and RSVP Design in the UK will support all non-US customers – both sets of products will be available for purchase from either location.

Key product designers Boyd Watkins, Geoff Cox and Ann Alder have worked together before but this announcement signals an intention to provide a truly global and probably unparalleled level of experience in designing effective learning environments.

You can download the official press release here: RSVP Design & Interel Press Release

Please visit the RSVP Design online store to see the additional Interel experiential learning devices now added. Larger scale devices like Pyramid, Network and Mosaic provide some fantastic new tools for large group meetings and for use in outdoor environments.

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Here is a fascinating presentation on an alternative way to teach! It certainly support the move from teaching to facilitating!

Click here

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