HR Executive's Guide to Web 2.0

I've been taking a look at some interesting research published in June by the Aberdeen Group. The report is impressively titled The HR Executives Guide to Web 2.0: Cracking the Code for Talent Management, and describes the results of research with over 500 companies.

Three criteria were used to determine best-in-class companies (the top 20%) from those surveyed: improvement in time to productivity, improvement in employee retention and turnover, and the percentage of employees indicating they were highly engaged.

The survey showed that the best-in-class companies shared several characteristics: 55% utilised Web 2.0 tools to facilitate knowledge capture and/or transfer; 36% utilised Web 2.0 tools to connect employees with colleagues across the organisation; and 32% utilised web 2.0 tools to provide visibility into work / project progress by dispersed teams.

They recommend three actions: establish metrics to measure the impact of Web 2.0 and review them regularly; get buy-in from all stakeholders; and articulate the purpose of the Web 2.0 tools being used and provide training on how to use them.

You can obtain a complimentary copy of the report if you download before the end of August.

New thoughts on getting started in e-learning

As you can see, I'm really having to rough it at the ITU Regional Human Capacity Development Forum for Africa here in Kampala. However, this abundance is not representative of the situations many of the delegates here are facing when trying to implement e-learning. And given that practically everyone here at the conference wants to attend the e-learning strategy workshop I am running here tomorrow with Kineo's Mark Harrison, there are many institutions looking to do just that.

It follows that we've been having a lot of discussions about where to start and how to get quick results. The conclusion, ironically, seems to be that you wouldn't start with e-learning - at least not classic e-learning in the CBT tradition, i.e. interactive tutorials that you page through. It's not that interactive, self-paced materials wouldn't be helpful, it's just that they're really hard to do well. It will take time for this expertise to be developed and the money is unlikely to be available to employ professionals. In the meantime, we need some quick wins.

The quick wins, in my mind, come through other, much simpler, forms of digital content:

• podcasts
• videos
• screen capture movies
• narrated presentations
• textual material (blogs, wikis, articles, papers)

True you still need some communication skills to use these media well, but the technical requirements are modest and the formats are familiar. That means plenty of people can help to prepare the content, not just l&d specialists. What's more, these media can be deployed relatively easily on mobile devices, which are in abundance here.

If the requirement is for formal learning interventions, i.e. courses, then it's clear that the digital content described above will not stand alone. That need not be a problem, however, as long as the content is integrated into a blend that includes other, more interactive, ingredients, such as discussions, collaborative assignments, quizzes and so on. It's a mistake, in my mind, to believe that all the elements in a successful online solution need to be wired together in a single package - combinations are simpler to put together and allow you to use the best tool for each job.

Above all, digital content is versatile: not only can it form part of a formal curriculum, it can also be accessed on demand and used by trainers in the classroom. It's a much more realistic starting point than a major effort to develop a library of stand-alone, interactive lessons.

Technology is not the major obstacle

Today I have been attending the ITU Regional Human Capacity Development Forum for Africa in Kampala. Before I got to make my presentation, I listened with fascination to Brian Neilson from BMI-TechKnowledge in South Africa as he painted a picture of the telecomms landscape here. I must confess to being shocked as to the low Internet penetration and even lower broadband usage. The only bright spot was the very high take-up of mobile phones and the extensive and productive uses to which they are being put. I began to question whether my presentation, which positioned the current pressures facing the l&d community in the context of a proliferation of new media options and bandwidth, really made any sense to this audience when most of those opportunities were some years away.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that the greatest obstacles in the way of new l&d practices are not so much technological (although this is obviously still a significant issue in Africa) but psychological. If Africa had all the computers and bandwidth it could possibly need right now, would that mean a huge upsurge in the use of technology to make learning more accessible and efficient? No, because l&d is a conservative profession and it would still take time for the community to overcome their fears, engage with technology, re-skill and commit. And if the Western World is anything to go by, that process will take quite a few years. If Africa starts now to prepare its l&d community, by the time it is fully engaged the technology will have arrived.

Internet access is, of course, not an end in itself; what you access has to be worth the effort. As Dorothy Gordon, from the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Exellence in ICT in Ghana pointed out, when Africa finally goes online, it will find very little digital content of quality that has been created by Africans for Africans. It's one thing to provide knowledge of ICT; it's another to foster the design and communication skills needed to generate great content. Again, the problem is not purely an African one. Design and communication skills are not yet in abundance in the Western l&d community.

Riding the change curve

Yesterday I was presenting at an organisation's internal HR conference. I gave the same presentation I've been doing all year, on the theme of 'change and opportunity'. I explain the enormous pressures for change currently facing learning and development, and the opportunities we have at our disposal to respond to these changes using new media. I also take the chance to debunk a whole load of the pop psychology which has held back l&d for decades.

While waiting for my slot, I attended another presentation on change - actually rather a good one - given by an internal specialist. Part of this presentation was a discussion of the 'change curve' which is often used to describe the change process. You've probably seen it, it goes something like this:

I say 'something like this' because I explored it on Google and there were so many variations, mostly unaccredited, that I gave up counting. It seems that the originator of the change curve is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, back in 1975. Kübler-Ross used it to explain the reaction of individuals to major losses, such as bereavement, although it seems to have been adapted as a way to explain, even to manage, changes in organisations.

The model is attractive, because it's easy to relate to your own experience. I immediately began to wonder where l&d professionals were on the change curve when it comes to engaging with new media. I thought about the audience for my presentation: Did new media still have the capability to shock? How many would still be in denial? Would I attract an angry response? At what point in the future would my work become redundant as the whole profession emerges into a state of total and happy commitment?

Anyway, that was where I saw this post going. Until I started to look a little more into the model. I wanted to know whether it really held water. The answer came in The Change Curve Debunked in the Performance Psychology blog, which I’m going to quote liberally:

One of the concepts that is misunderstood and misapplied frequently, even by major players in change, is that of the Change Curve.

The Change Curve is an adaptation of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five-stage theory that seeks to explain how people deal with catastrophic personal loss (e.g. loss of a job, freedom, finances, status, identity) or grief (loss of a loved one). The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

It has also been observed that personal change can be somewhat like personal loss and, therefore, the model has been applied to change. Indeed, I have seen it stated, more or less as fact, that when people change they need to be helped along this curve. I’ve also seen it reduced to four (that way it fits nicely in a matrix) and three stages.

But wait a minute. Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a nice model. On the other hand, let’s debunk this baby right now.

(Let’s overlook the fact that the five-stage model has had little empirical testing in its own right, and particularly in relation to organisational change.)

First of all, Kübler-Ross herself stated that people do not necessarily go through all of the stages, and if they do, it can be in any order. Indeed, people can experience a whole range of emotions at different times during grief.

Second, and for me the real point, is that change is not always experienced as loss. Some people love it. It’s exciting. It’s new. It’s a break with the crappy old way of doing things. It’s liberating. Why have we given change which, let’s face it, people do all the time, such a bad press that it is considered synonymous with grief?

By all means, keep the five-stage model in our armoury, but let’s not get carried away with it. Let’s not present it as an unequivocal truth. And let’s not let it get in the way of attempting to truly understand how people really experience change.

Phew. See how easy it is to fall into that old pop psychology trap. Just escaped this time.

Big Question: What new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?

This month's Big Question on the Learning Circuits Blog asks 'What new skills and knowledge are required for learning professionals?' Well,contrary to many commentators, I am not so sure that l&d professionals need to tear up the rule book and start again. True, we do need to adjust the balance of our activities quite significantly, away from formal courses to more responsive, work-embedded approaches, at the same time taking much better advantage of new media. We still have the same primary goal, i.e. to enhance organisational performance through employee learning and development, and we're still working in the same four primary skill areas, i.e. strategic l&d management, the design of interventions, sourcing and developing learning materials, and facilitating learning and development on a person-to-person basis. The problem for me is that a great many l&d professionals have fallen behind in their continuing professional development - the world has changed much faster around them than they have managed to change themselves.

Let's take an example. Twenty-five years ago, every l&d professional (or training officer as they were called then) would have been familiar with every medium then available, i.e. overhead projectors, flip charts, black/whiteboards, 35mm slide projectors, VCRs, etc. At some point since then, as new learning media began to proliferate, they backed out and started leaving the job to specialists. Big mistake. Now they have a hell of a lot of catching up to do. The same is true of educational and training methods: the options may be essentially timeless, but the thinking has shifted substantially towards new models such as connectivism, and the brain science means we know so much more than we once did about how people learn. Taking into account the unprecedented financial, time and environmental pressures we are facing, and a new generation of learners that's less content to go with the status quo, and there's plenty of momentum to change.

I can't see a future for those l&d professionals currently in denial and just hoping all this will blow over. I can't imagine who will want to employ them. New thinking and new media are no longer the province of pioneers and geeks - it's time for the whole community to come on board. They will be welcomed warmly.

CommentCatcher

I’ve been having a play with this little tool from i3Logic. It acts as an Articulate plug-in, allowing customers, reviewers and subject-experts to make comments on Articulate projects that are in development or early stages of implementation. The comments are stored in a simple database on the server of your choice.

By allowing collaboration in testing, CommentCatcher does a good job of bridging the gap between desktop and online authoring tools. It doesn’t allow authors to share resources or work together on the actual development, but it’s a start.

It's not enough to be a professional, you also have to act like one

You wouldn't hire an interior designer only to inform them that you've already chosen all the colour schemes and furnishings; you wouldn't engage an accountant and then explain to them the way you wanted them to process your figures (unless of course you worked at Enron); you wouldn't employ a fitness trainer and then tell them what to include in your workout; you wouldn't buy a dog and then insist on doing all the barking.

So why, then, do we continue to encounter situations in which line managers tell the guys from l&d exactly what they want in terms of learning interventions, with the expectation that the they'll simply take those instructions and run. You'd like a 6-hour e-learning package to train customer service staff to sell over the telephone? A 2-day workshop to teach every detail of a new company system to all employees, regardless of whether or not they will be using it? A one-hour podcast to teach manual handling skills? No problem. That's what we're here for, to meet your requirements.

Hang on a minute, you’re probably thinking. This isn't an encounter between a professional and a client, it's simply order taking.

When asked to jump, a professional doesn't say "how high?” They say, "Let's talk about this a little, because jumping may not be the best solution in this situation." If this tactic doesn't work and the professional is told in no uncertain terms that jumping is the only acceptable option, he or she has two choices: either they resign and get another job where their role as a professional is valued; or, because resigning is not such a good option in the current job market, they agree to go ahead, but only after having expressed quite clearly in writing that jumping is against their best advice.

Learning and development isn't common sense; it isn't intuitive. If it was then experts wouldn't lecture at novices for hours on end; they wouldn't insist on passing on everything they know, however relevant, however comprehensible. That's why we have l&d professionals, so they can explain, in terms that the lay person can clearly understand, how people acquire knowledge and develop skills, and how best to support this process. If the customer doesn't hear this advice, they will assume that the people in l&d are just the builders, not the architects; and, if no-one seems to be offering architectural services, they'll do it themselves.

I've heard far too many feeble excuses from l&d people about the reasons why their courses are so dull and unengaging. "Don't blame me", they say, "it's what the management wanted." OK, but you've taken the courses in order to obtain the qualifications that enable you to put those magic letters after your name. You've obtained professional status, with the associated salary and status. But, I'm sorry but that's not enough. To be a professional, you also have to behave like one.