Do you suffer from SoMeBO?

Photo: Nesster

If you’re British and old enough you’ll remember the TV adverts from the 70s. Three people are out and about. Two of them are in some discomfort, but it’s not clear why. The third is all smiles. Then the two catch each other’s eye behind the back of the third and the advert delivers its killer blow as one of them mouths the letters “B.O.”.

Body Odour was the silent social killer. Nobody would tell you that you had it, but it was your ticket to pariah status. The only solution: buy some deodorant and rejoin the human race odour-free.

Move forward 40 years and we have a similar problem – Social Media BO, and yes, you may suffer from it.

You won’t know you suffer from SoMeBO because – in the words of the advert – even your best friends won’t tell you. But the numbers will. Probably the most telling symptom of SoMeBO: you regularly gain followers, but just as regularly seem to lose them.

What’s going on?

Probably they are unfollowing because they’re not getting what they thought they would when they followed you – and that will be because of your tweeting habits. Here are some typical tweeting habits that will give you SoMeBO:

1. Tweeting too much in clumps, not spaced out
2. Whining and complaining – so desperately unattractive
3. Sighing at the world’s inadequacies – probably worse than 2)
4. Providing too many vacuous uplifting quotes
5. Always asking questions, but never volunteering answers
6. Tweeting mostly a series of 1-to-1 conversations, excluding all your other followers

I’ve done some of these from time to time, and have seen the consequences or, luckily, I’ve had friends honest enough to point out my failings to me. I’m sure I continue to fail in my tweets, but perhaps slightly less often than in the past.

In truth, we all suffer from SoMeBO some of the time, because we’re bound to upset others sometime. But do you want to consistently, unknowingly, alienate those who have chosen to read your tweets? [Deep 70s TV voice] Ask yourself the question today:

Do you suffer from SoMeBO?

MOOCs and Higher Education’s Napster moment

Are MOOCs Higher Education’s Napster moment?

Today I attended Universities UK’s conference (#openandonline) on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in London, which included excellent high-level talks from Martin Bean and Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts as well as some very good practical talks.

One question that came up several times during the day was this: “Are MOOCs HE’s Napster Moment?” A ‘Napster moment’ is when a new, online and often free technology enters a marketplace and disrupts it, as file-sharing service Napster did to music at the turn of the century. It revolutionised the way we think about, buy and share music and paved the way for – among others – iTunes. 

Are MOOCs really HE’s Napster moment?

I don’t think so.

It makes much more sense to describe them as HE’s Amazon moment. Here’s how the Amazon platform has changed the book market, and the effect it has had on publishers (for which read universities):

1) One platform is dominant globally. Users know they can find almost whatever product they like there. They seldom visit publishers to buy direct. Will most university courses be bought this way in 10 years’ time? I think it likely.

2) There is an explosion in product breadth. In 2003, 300k books were registered for an ISBN. In 2012 there were over 15m. These books are now in many types of format, and of course there is a wide range of quality. For HE think of this as an explosion in types of offering, from a free MOOC, through a short certified course to 3-year residential degree (see November’s blog for more)

3) Margins are driven down. In publishing this has been caused by a combination of factors, not least Amazon’s sharp negotiating. Many publishers and books shops have gone bust as a result. Others, with different models, have entered the market. The analogy for HE is pretty clear, but I believe universities can avoid bankruptcy by working together and choosing their platforms carefully.

4) Others set the rules. From being the dominant force in the book world, publishers have in a few years found themselves forced to deal with a dominant platform which commands the market, distribution and pricing on a global scale.

5) Things take time to settle. They have not yet settled in the book world. There is disruption still to come. We can only be sure that things have changed forever.

Not all MOOC platforms are bad, but the similarity of universities now (dominant for centuries, with an efficient model of production) to publishers 10 to 15 years ago, is difficult to ignore. The reason the VC funders of Silicon Valley poured $22m into Coursera last year, and £20m into Udacity is precisely because they see this. They are looking for the next big bet, the next platform to dominate a lucrative market on a global scale.

And, as I have observed elsewhere, these numbers are tiny in comparison with the amount of funding sloshing around in the education technology world at the moment. We can only expect the pace of change to quicken and the stakes to increase.

Which blogs to read in learning and development?

Yesterday in a phone call with a developing member of the L&D profession, I was asked which blogs I would recommend following. Following what I did last March to write What books to read in learning and development? and rather than simply produce a list from my own RSS feed, I put the question to my Twitter network:

Learning folks -which blogs should you follow to develop yourself in L&D? Was recently asked and would value your opinion

I kept this to 122 characters to enable retweeting to spread the word as widely as possible and was immediately rewarded with an RT from Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth). This started the ball rolling.

By the end of the day there were 14 suggested blogs. By the end of day two, it had more than doubled to these 29 (in alphabetical order):

Ben Betts
Bianca Woods
Cammy Bean
Cathy Moore
Charles Jennings
Clark Quinn
Clive Shepherd
Connie Malamed
Craig Taylor
David Kelly
Donald Clark
Donald H Taylor
Harold Jarche
Jane Bozarth
Jane Hart
Jason Silberman
Jay Cross
Josh Bersin
Julie Dirksen
Julie Drybrough
Mark Aberdour
Mark Berthelemy
Mark Oehlert
Nick Shackleton-Jones
Nigel Paine
Ryan Tracey
Steve Flowers
Steve Wheeler
Tom Kuhlmann

I can think of many names missing from this list, but as of today – 30th April 2013, I’m going to draw a line under it. However, if you feel that a great blogger is missing from this list, please feel free to add their name and blog URL in the comments section below.

Why am I stopping adding to this list? For the following reasons, which occurred  to me as the comments and suggestions came in:

First, another, very comprehensive list of 86 Workplace Learning Professionals who blog and/or tweet already exists, compiled by the redoubtable Jane Hart. I always tell other people not to re-invent the wheel on the internet, and am rather embarrassed to have done so myself.

Second, although this list is fine, if I allow it to grow by suggestion, it will soon get spammed by self-promoters. It’s certainly good enough now as a starter for someone beginning in L&D. (And once they’ve looked at these, they go to the super set of Jane’s list – see above.)

Third, and importantly, Stephanie Dedhar and others pointed out that ones’s area of interest changes as one’s role in L&D changes and one’s experience grows. While this is a good enough list for someone starting out, it certainly has biases. There a fair deal about strategy and design, for example, and not so much about performance improvement. My hope is that this short list will act as a jumping off point to other blogs.

My thanks to all those who contributed; my apologies to those whose blogs are not on this list (but who almost certainly are on Jane’s list) and my best wishes to all those in L&D who use this as a leaping off point to stretch themselves and keep learning about learning.

Are you in the Training Ghetto?

We talk about change a great deal in our profession of Learning and Development (L&D) – and rightly. There is plenty of change going on at the moment, technological, economic and societal, and we have to adapt to it.

I’m not sure, though, that we think about change in L&D in the right way.

We tend to consider it one-dimensionally, as a straight line – your rate of change is somewhere on a continuum ranging from fast to slow. While this is true, I think it masks the real question: how fast is your L&D team changing in relation to the rate of change of your organisation? This is the question that determines how much impact your work has on your organisation. It may even determine your chances of future professional survival. Here’s what a two-dimensional view of change looks like:

There are two axes. The vertical one shows the rate of change of your L&D department, the horizontal one reflects how fast your organisation is changing. I’ve been talking a fair amount this year about change in L&D and whatever country I’ve been in, in whatever sector, this idea of the importance of relative change has struck a chord with the audience. People seem to recognise instantly where they belong.

The top right quadrant is Risky Leadership. If both the department and the organisation are changing fast, this is a great opportunity. We can invest in new procedures and systems, build our skills and experiment with different ways of working with the business, and the business – because it is also changing fast and open to new ideas – will respond. It’s in this quadrant that we find really progressive L&D teams that are making an impact.

While they are undoubtedly leaders, this quadrant is also risky, because that’s the nature of change. The implementation of new technology may not go as planned, a new approach may not find favour with mid-level managers, an unexpected change in the business may mean we have to re-work our learning content immediately. In this quadrant the L&D team has to be open to change and risk, but also willing to tackle any resulting issues fast, and stay in constant touch with the business.

Of course no part of this diagram is free of risk. Diametrically opposed to Risky Leadership is Comfortable Extinction. Here things are pretty much as they’ve always been. The training department produces the same courses, with minor modifications, year after year, and the business accepts them. The department regularly conducts Training Needs Analyses which are no more than asking learners or managers which course they’d like to attend. Level 1 evaluations are conducted after every course, but there is no further analysis of impact, and there is no demand for it from the business. Training is conducted according to what David Wilson calls the ‘conspiracy of convenience’. Everything is quite comfortable until an external change requires the business to change rapidly, it fails to, and the entire organisation, blindsided, goes bust.

The top right corner is home to Instagram, the 12-person company bought for $1bn by Facebook in June 2012. The bottom left is where you’d find Kodak, the inventor of affordable, personal photography, which filed for bankruptcy in January 2012 because it hadn’t changed fast enough.

Sometimes, though, the L&D department is ahead of the organisation it finds itself in. This is where you find those people who rail against their employers’ backwardness, what I call the Unacknowledged Prophets. These departments are often capable of great things, but while their organisations are usually frustrating, they almost always contain a niche where L&D can flourish. Most organisations have at least one manager or executive who gets it, who has a performance need that can be met by learning. Rather than berating the organisation as a whole, find and work with that manager and build a case study of success and a band of positive learners who will spread the word about your work.

If that niche isn’t there, or is too hard to find, there is an alternative: quit and find and employer that does appreciate you.

Most L&D departments that I’ve talked to, however, rightly fear being in the bottom right quadrant, the Training Ghetto. Here, we are unable to service the needs of a rapidly changing organisation. The result: it’s the business, not L&D, that adopts today’s innovative approaches to learning and information sharing. I’ve seen plenty of examples of the sales, operations or marketing departments doing things with wikis, online communities and mobile devices that are fundamentally about learning, but without the L&D department being involved. Why? Sometimes L&D didn’t make their case well enough, but usually it’s just because they were overlooked. In this quadrant L&D is seen as being about training delivery, in the classroom or online, and nothing else. The Training Ghetto is where good information goes to die. It’s the training department that’s in the basement or the Portakabin across the car park. It’s the cost centre that gets cut when times are hard, and which is reluctantly retained for compliance and induction training. It isn’t seen as contributing to the business and the good people there are usually promoted out. Nobody wants to stay in the ghetto.

The question is this: how do we get all L&D departments above that horizontal line and into the top right corner? There are answers, and they are pretty much what I spend my days thinking about. Expect more from me on this subject over the rest of this year, because I don’t believe there’s a more important subject on the L&D agenda.

For now, though, I’d invite you to consider this question: where does your L&D team belong?

What does ‘LMS’ mean today?

This is a follow-up to my recent blog Does the LMS have a future?. That blog – and this one – were stimulated by a trip to the Saba user conference where I had simulating conversations with Josh Bersin, Stacey Harris, Ian Baxter of Saba and Andy Wooler of Hitachi and others, leaving me plenty to think about. Much of the conversation there – and here – has boiled down to this one key question:

What does ‘LMS’ mean?

Yes, I know that the three letters literally stand for ‘Learning Management System’, but actually we all know that’s nonsense. You can’t create a system to manage learning. Learning happens inside people’s heads, and it’s a process that can be supported and stimulated, but not managed. As Mark Britz said in a Twitter exchange just after I posted part 1 of this double-entry blog:

RT @DonaldHTaylor: Does the LMS have a future? wp.me/p2n5B-kj / ppl are what learning is all abt. The risk is leaving to a system

He’s absolutely right – you can’t leave learning to a system, or rather you shouldn’t. Despite a projected 2013 global market value of $1.9bn, Learning Management Systems have only a middling reputation at best among L&D professionals. This is partly because when initially launched in the late 1990s they were not Learning Management Systems, but Training Administration Systems, and too often the training materials delivered over them were dull, ‘click next’ materials that were all about compliance, completion rates and not about learning.

That reputation has stuck. And although LMSs have grown in functionality, and materials in potential (although not always in the realisation of that potential), they have repeatedly been over-sold and under-implemented. In fact, as Andy Wooler, Academy Technology Manager at Hitachi Data Systems Academy, put it when we spoke:

“LMS too often stands for Litigation Mitigation Service.”

Andy, a long time user of a variety of LMSs, is no knocker of the systems. In fact, his work in the financial sector has lead him to believe that the ability to track whether people have undergone training to meet the requirements of Sarbanes Oxley and other regulations – the most basic function of an LMS – is itself essential. “Try running an insurance company without those reports and see how far you get,” he says.

But, says Andy, there are others things we naturally want to do beyond compliance. They usually involve making things (learning content, conversations, networks) available to people, along with a way of engaging with these things, and a database of some sort to support this activity. “A web server, an application and a database – you can call that bundle what you want,” says Andy, “but I’d call that a Learning Management System.”

It’s difficult not to agree. You’re in an enterprise, and you want to support widespread learning. You’re going to need systems to help you – co-ordinated, possibly integrated systems that help the social networking and micro blogging make sense of the videos and User Generated Content, as well as the high-quality training materials that you have produced yourself or outsourced, accessible to managers and including prompts and suggestions for stretch assignments as well as ways of managing coaching and mentoring.

As Andy says, you can give those systems any name you want. You can create them yourself or buy them off the shelf, but together they make up a modern LMS, the sort of system which many of today’s more advanced LMS vendors actually sell. Not a Training Management System, but something that actually supports learning when used properly.

In which case, if this is not a Training Management System, what should the letters LMS stand for?

I asked Andy this. What did he think the letters LMS stood for in this richer, more complex set of tools? He thought for a moment and replied “We provide the systems, and add some context. People use this to make sense of the issues they face and then do their work better.” He paused, then he came up with his definition.

“How about ‘Learning to Make Sense’?”

I think he’s right. We need technologies to support learning at work today. We can buy them packaged in a single, centralized system, or we can assemble them ourselves and integrate them as much or as little as we wish. They can be our learning management system, our personal learning environment, our knowledge network or whatever. Whatever we call these tools and systems, the key thing is what they do. Properly implemented, they help us make sense of the issues we face, and work a better as a result.