Lessons of Experience

How do people learn? Well, like so many things... that depends! and it depends on who you ask and how you ask it. When I ask people how they learned do do their jobs so well, I almost never get the answer "I took a class." It almost always is about experience... particularly experiences involving either working in difficult times, or starting something from scratch. And it often involves working with someone that the learnee admires (mentor or coach).

The book Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job by Morgan W. McCall, Michael M. Lombardom, and Ann M. Morrison, gives an in-depth study on the role that experience plays in the on-the-job development of executives.

Executives get development from a variety of experiences:


Setting and Implementing Agendas
Technical/professional skills
All about the business one is in
Strategic thinking
Shouldering full responsibility
Building and using structure and control systems
Innovative problem-solving methods

Handing Relationships
Handling political situations
Getting people to implement solutions
What executives are like
How to work with executives
Strategies of negotiation
Dealing with people over whom you have no authority
Understanding other people’s perspectives
Dealing with conflict
Directing and motivating subordinates
Developing other people
Confronting subordinate performance problems
Managing former bosses and peers

Basic Values
You can’t manage everything all alone
Sensitivity to the human side of management
Basic management values
Executive Temperament
Being tough when necessary
Self-confidence
Coping with situations beyond your control
Persevering through adversity
Coping with ambiguous situations
Use (and abuse) of power

Personal Awareness
The balance between work and personal life
Knowing what really excites you about work
Personal limits and blind spots
Taking charge of your career
Recognizing and seizing opportunities

In coursework, classes that provide "experience" are the best for developing executives:

• a) Courses deal with issues relevant to the business, but are not restricted to newer technical aspects.
• b) Some courses provide opportunity for careful self-analysis and feedback.
• c) Attention is paid to timing – people attend when it fits with things on the job.
• d) Attention is paid to credibility and competence of colleagues and instructors.
• e) Courses are considered only one of many developmental tools and are used in conjunction with on-the-job experience.

This book works well combined with the Job Challenge Profile from the Center for Creative Leadership. With this tool the developing manager/executive looks at their current role and discovers ways to develop on-the-job through experiences that the current job presents, or through expanding their job.

What is your experience with this? Please comment

Opening Gambits for Presentations

In the book "Presenting to Win" the author gives some great ways to open any presentation:

1. The Question... "how may of you know that...?"
2. The Factoid...a very striking fact.
3. Retroactive/Perspective.... "We used to do it that way, now we do it this way."
4. The Anecdote... a very short story.
5. The Quotation
6. The Aphorism (familiar saying)
7. The Analogy ... compare two seemingly unrelated items... "this project is like a house..."

Link: Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition

Try-Storming? Action-Oriented Brain-Storming!

In a meeting today, one of the "lean process gurus" used the term "TRY-STORMING" which he explained is a action oriented way to do Brain Storming. Instead of just talking about things, in Try Storming you try doing them (through simulations, etc.) Sounds like a great way to learn about things, not just talk about them!

Organization Development Information?... check out odportal.com

Nice to see that my organization development portal http://www.odportal.com/ is cited as a "recommended website" in the book "Managing and Organizations: An Introduction to Theory and Practice " as "a useful site with many links" (page 354.)

Check out www.odportal.com

Sustainability in Learning - The Tortoise and the Hare

Fast start + Sustainable = Winning. Let me explain.

Do you remember the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare? I was just reading a blog post on the Experiential Learning Blog about how that fable is still as meaningful today as it was in Easop's time ("Leadership Consistency - The Story Of The Hare And The Tortoise")

I am not so sure these days. Sure the hare falls asleep and lets the sluggish turtle win the race, and the message is clear: "Slow but sure wins the race." And in the forementioned blog, the theme is "consistency" is valued. Sure sure sure, that is all good, but in the real world the turtle is a bit too slow and the rabbit is just plain lazy.

I am starting to think more about what we call "sustainability" in learning... asking myself if what I am doing is just the "program of the month" or if it has sustainability. Are the things that we are doing in learning leading to long term results, and long term sustained learning. Am I building in some follow up? Am I building a multi-year approach? Is there an advanced level of this learning so people feel continually challenged?

The hare did not lose the race because he was slow. He lost the race because his excellent start to the race did not have sustainability! (Fast start + Sustainable = Winning).

I can think of a lot of training we have done (some of it I delivered) that were really exciting at the time but looking back didn't really get any follow up.

What are some ways to ensure training sustainability? Your thoughts?

Flashcard Learning - why does it work so well?

It seems that one of the easiest ways to learn some very complicated things, such as chemistry, vocabulary, and such, is through flashcards. Isn't it great when a low cost, low tech solution is so effective? Why do flashcards work so well?

First, flashcards are super-chunky. You learn only one chunk of knowledge at a time. That might be one word of vocabulary, one acronym, one element on the periodic table.

Second, flashcards are repetition repetition repetition. And we all know that repetition is a great way to learn. Only surpassed by learning through songs, which is just another way of repetition.

Third, flashcards are totally customizable. For example, if you go through a stack of cards with Spanish vocabulary, and discard those that you already know, you have created your own deck of cards with only those ones you need to focus on. Totally customized for you, by you.

Four, you own the learning. You are your own teacher, set your own pace. And if you get it wrong, you make a decision what to do next.

Five, it is challenging. If you challenge yourself to learn everything on 50 flashcards, approach it as a game or as a test of your mental capabilities.

Six, it is portable. You can take it with you, learn whereever you are.


So how can flashcard learning be optimized?

1. Create a set of flashcards with the the chunk to be learned on one side, and the answer on the other. Variations include a picture on one side, a mathmatical formula on one side, a sentence with a blank on one side, etc. On the reverse side put the desired response.
2. Go through the cards and sort out those that you know off the top of your head. Create two stacks of cards: "What I Got Right" and "What I Got Wrong"
3. From the "What I Got Wrong" stack, go through it as many times as needed to learn them. Some of this will be "today memory" (you will forget it by tomorrow) and some of it will be "flash memory" (you will forget it in a flash). As you memorize/learn the cards, place them in the "What I got Right" stack. Eventually your "What I Got Wrong" stack will disappear or at least get pretty small.
4. Shuffle all the cards from "What I Got Right" and "What I Got Wrong" and now sort them into three stacks: "What I am 100% SURE is right", and "What I guessed Right", and "What I Got Wrong". Get the idea? Now start going through the stacks, shuffling often.


FLASHCARD SOFTWARE

Online Flashcards takes out the cool, low tech, portable aspects of regular old 5 by 7 cards, but who doesn't like elegant technology?

There are many companies that make software for flashcards, the coolest looking one (best looking interface and graphics) being FlashMyBrain www.flashmybrain.com . Very web2.0 looking with nice features. $29.95, with no free test period. There are also a lot of other options.

For learning languages, there's a new Flashcard online option called BYKI and BYKI Deluxe. I downloaded their free demo version. Very very cool way to do flashcards online with spoken phrases, pictures, vocabulary, etc. It is from Transparent Language. The deluxe version allows you to customize your own flashcards. There's a link with coupons and right here: Transparent Language.

Learning Chunks - The History of Chunkiness in Learning

Do you think that I just came up with the term Chunky Learning? of course not! Learning Chunkitude has a long history, which began with the study "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," a paper written in 1956 by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller (Princeton University's Department of Psychology). You can enjoy his article at http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/, (originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97).

In the summary of this landmark study in chunkification of data, human cognitive chunkability, and perceptually chunkiness of tasks, he states in uncharacteristically clear language that:

"First, the span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember. By organizing the stimulus input simultaneously into several dimensions and successively into a sequence or chunks, we manage to break (or at least stretch) this informational bottleneck."

What Miller observed is that people's "channel capacity" is between 5 and 9 choices, and that people can recall between 5 and 9 things.

How to Evaluate eLearning

When evaluating e-learning or online courses, I look for:

content It is said that in e-learning "content is king." You cannot base an e-learning platform on anything else. Content should be new, targeted to specific audiences, and interesting.
training design How is the content presented? Do adult learners really learn that way? It should have interactivity and let people know how what they learn applies to their job.
translation Is the training translated into the languages you need? If not, what are the costs of translation?
technology Does the training work on the computers of the target learners? This is particularly a problem if the training has a lot of video content, which may not work on slower computers.
blending Does the training lend itself to blending instructor led training with the online content?
look-and-feel Does it look and feel interesting? Does it use the proper amount of white space, good design? Is it easy to navigate?
interaction Does it give the appropriate amount of interactivity for your target audience? You don't want to slow people down with too much interactivity, but you also don't want to have just reading from the screen. Look for a balance.
applicability Is it applicable to your needs? Do you need full courses, or just job aids with "chunks" of knowledge that can be quickly accessed?
tracking Does the elearning have a way to track who has taken it, how many hours they spent, and if they passed the test(s)? What kind of reporting/analytics is available?
LMS Does the eLearning work with the LMS you have? If you don't have an LMS, does the program have an LMS built-in that you like?
Cost Of course cost is a factor. In calculating the cost, the best way is to calculate the total cost per learning completed, and compare Instructor Led Training (ILT) and eLearning. Be sure to include travel costs, etc.
Pilots The best way to evaluate an elearning program is to conduct a pilot. I find that many eLearning vendors are willing to provide a couple of free licenses so that I can test out their products. I am very sceptical of companies that want me to buy their elearning without a pilot.

Strengths-Based Development - the theory of developing your strengths, not your weaknesses

Over the past 10 years or so I have become familiar with the work done by the Gallup Organization around employee engagement, and on the related work by Marcus Buckingham. These have been important for me to develop an organization development, and learning, strategy, based on sound research.

A seriously landmark book for me, was "First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently ." I heard Kirk Coffman, one of the authors, speak in San Jose Costa Rica (I lived and did OD work there for a few years). This book is full of great suggestions and guidance on how to change things in your company to be more successful. The study that this book (and the books that followed) are researched to an extent that only Gallup could have done: millions of interviews with managers and employees, extensive correlation with business success metrics, and meta-analysis prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is something there in the numbers:
a) there are certain traits that make some managers more successful
b) some employees are more engaged than others, and that engagement can be tested/predicted(?) reliably using 12 questions (the "Gallup 12"). (I have practical experience with the Q12 and engagement surveys and can tell you it works.)

One of the management practices that are proposed by the series of books is "building your strengths." In a nutshell, this is what it says:
1) It is a waste of time and money to try to turn a weakness into a strength.
2) The best use of time and resources is to turn strengths into super-strengths (my words).
3) If there are weaknesses, there are work-arounds that can be found by using your natural strenths (TALENTS).

For learning and OD professionals, who have been focusing on detecting gaps (weaknesses) and then finding solutions for those gaps (training, etc), this is pretty revolutionary stuff!

While it makes sense on a philosphical level, on a day to day basis it sure seems logical to develop in our weak areas (that makes the pain go away)(and there's some real motivation there).

In my experience, there's a middle-ground and it's this:
1) Identify weaknesses that keep you from being as productive as you would like to be (and that are easily trainable/developable). Get better at those until they are no longer a barrier to your productivity.
2) Identify strengths that you naturally seem to be good at. These are those things that make you engaged and excited and full of energy. Become as good at those things as you possibly can (become the expert or the "guru").
3) Don't get stressed out if you aren't perfect at everything (nobody is perfect). You don't need to win at everything. If you try to develop areas that you are weak in, and that you really don't want to develop, you will really frustrate yourself. If those are important for your job, then gee! maybe you are in the wrong job.

Marcus Buckingham and Gallup have published several books in this vein. I recommend reading them in this order (the first book First, Break All the Rules is a great overview of the whole thing. The other books just expand on the chapters of First, Break All the Rules and give more tools and details.)

1. First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

2. Now, Discover Your Strengths

3. Go Put Your Strengths to Work

4. The One Thing You Need to Know

5. StrengthsFinder 2.0: Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths (the Strengthsfinder test is included free when you buy Now, Discover Your Strengths).





strethgsfinder, galup Q12, gallupq12, now discover your strengts, discover your strengs

"A Whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink

This week I read a new book, "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" by Daniel Pink (Free Agent Nation). This tome gives the reader a new way to see the world, and a new way to use your brain!

A Whole New Mind kicks off with the history of "ages":

1. Agricultural Age (farmers)
2. Industrial Age (factory workers)
3. Information Age (knowledge workers)
4. Conceptual Age (creators and empathizers)

It is the fourth stage (Conceptual Age) where Pink explains how people and businesses are successful. The author points to three current trends that are guiding the business and the economy.
1. Abundance (consumers have too many choices, nothing is scarce)
2. Asia (outsourcing)
3. Automation (computerization, robots, technology, and processes).

Based on these trends and there are three questions that business-people should ask themselve in order to improve their results:

1. Can a computer do it faster?
2. Is what I'm offering in demand in an age of abundance?
3. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?

If you can answer any of these affirmatively, then creativity becomes a competative advantage, differentiating you and your company/products from comoditities. (By the way, you, the business person, are a comodity unless you diferentiate yourself, too. Ouch).

So how what do you need to know and "sense" to stand out? :

1. Design: This is beyond function. Engaging the sense.
2. Story: Stories are added through narrative to your business offerings, products, service. Not just the benefits, features, arguments.
3. Symphony: Invention and big picture thinking (compliment to a detail focus).
4. Empathy: Engaging emotions and intuition, not just logic and calculation.
5. Play: Humer and light-heartedness have a place in business and in products.
6. Meaning: A life with more empathy and play, more feelings and values, is needed to help us relax, enjoy life. This helps us fully use the capacity of our intellect. There are many approaches to life, and you should enjoy it!

"A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" has many ideas that can help in business or many aspects of life/work.