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 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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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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As you may know, RSVP Design are great fans of the HBDI ‘metaphor’ of the 4 quadrants of the brain and the thinking styles we associate with them. We’re always interested in relevant and scientifically based validation of how we use our brains to receive and process information about the world around us and I was fascinated to watch this video clip from the RSA. in it, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist talks about how the ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. I found it fascinating – especially in relation to ‘attention’, ’simplified reality’ and the difference in right and left brain focus.

Have a look – the first few minutes are a little slow but then the pace picks up and it really stimulates some new insights.

http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/vision-videos/iain-mcgilchrist

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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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One of the key things I look for when I’m delivering learning events is whether the people around me appear to be having fun. It’s the same with designing new learning environments. Part of my “Is this good design?” checklist is whether it offers both facilitator and learner the opportunity to enjoy the learning process.

I don’t know where this “fun’s important” approach came from but perhaps it’s a reaction to the long, mind-numbingly boring classroom hours that characterise much of my own education. I never wanted a repeat of those experiences so why should I inflict them on anybody else? Wherever it came from, I can’t remember a time when “ People learn best when they’re having fun” wasn’t a part of my professional vocabulary.

Today I was browsing the subject of the Personalisation of Learning when I came across a fascinating chapter by Manfred Spitzer. The chapter is part of the OECD book Personalising Education (2006) and is called Brain Research and Learning Over the Life Cycle. As the title suggests the subject area is what we know about the function of the brain and how this should translate into educational practice aimed at different age groups.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this chapter, but the real “Eureka!” moment for me came when I read the part that deals with the way we attach emotions to what we learn, and how this affects our ability to remember it (always a pretty important feature of any learning design!).

In short, when something is learned in an environment that allows us to attach positive emotions to it, we store the memory in one part of our brain, the hippocampus: where the associated emotion is negative we store the memory in a different part of the brain, the amygdala. The learning in our hippocampus then transfers over time to the brain cortex where long-term memory happens. Conversely the amygdala is the part of our brain where fast learning and future avoidance of unpleasant events is controlled – learning what not to do. Thus our reaction to the associated memory is not about creatively applying it to our future lives – it’s about never getting into the situation of ever having to apply it!

Not at all what we want as learning designers.

So it seems that, intuitively, I was right all along – people do learn best when they are having fun: and I’d say that that’s a pretty big message for anyone setting out to design any kind of learning experience.

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