Sometimes it might look from the outside as if the Learning Technologies Conference and Exhibition happens of its own accord, and that’s understandable. It has been running since 2000, it keeps growing steadily and it has established itself as a part of the calendar of the European learning profession. Last week’s event included some great speakers, with key notes from Edward de Bono, Ray Kurzweil and Jaron Lanier as well as case studies and in-depth how-to sessions.

But of course the conference doesn’t happen all by itself.

It’s a team effort and it involves a considerable amount of attention to detail. And there is one thing we come back to again and again when considering each year how to improve the conference: delegate feedback.

We’re often told that evaluation forms – or, less kindly, ‘happy sheets’ – are a waste of time. And that is true when it comes to assessing the business impact of a training intervention. Knowing that a learner liked the lunch or trainer is useless as a measure of their performance improvement.

However, if you’re trying to improve the actual running of an event, then knowing what delegates feel is essential. There are countless changes we have made over the years as a direct result of feedback – from the design of badges to the focus of content to the way lunch is served. Of course, frustratingly there are always good observations which we can do nothing about because of the physical constraints of the venue or economic reality. And then there are some suggestions that practical common sense rejects pretty quickly – the idea that we lay on a mini-bus service (with breakfast catering) from Earl’s Court underground station springs to mind.

It is, however, the reactions of delegates to the presentations themselves which are the most revealing and useful. Indeed, I cannot imagine being able to run the conference without them. Each year I read every one of the several hundred responses we receive, and each year I come away with a clutch of great ideas to help produce an even better conference the following January.

So, if you are one of the people who has filled out one of those feedback forms, this year or in the past, I thank you. In doing so you have made an invaluable contribution to designing next year’s conference.

I hope we can build something you’ll be proud of.

It’s a simple enough question, but for many L&D people, this is a question we dread. The reason? As soon as the person says it, you know how they will react to your answer:

“Oh, so you’re in training.”

To which the only possible response is a rather inadequate “Yes, sort of.” But by then it’s too late. They have already formed a picture, based on their 15 plus years of schooling, of what you do. You teach people. By standing in front of a classroom. Because that’s what training and skills are all about, isn’t it?

There is nothing wrong with training; it just isn’t what most of us do. We design e-learning courses or learning strategies or facilitate social learning. Even when we are doing something close to training – such as delivering workshops – there will be fundamental differences between our roles in reality and in the minds of our interlocutor.

Yet we ourselves are least partly to blame for this situation.

Why?

Because we give the wrong answer.

When asked “what do you do?” we reply in concrete terms. We take the question ‘What do you do?’ literally. We describe what we do do in our daily lives. And from there it is a short step to “Oh, so you’re in training.”

There is a different, better answer. It is a definition of our roles that focuses not on what we do, but on what we make possible. Let me restate that: Learning and Development should be defined not by what it does but by what it makes possible. And what do we make possible? We help organisations deliver on their promises.

In a world where tangible assets, the supply of capital and even specialist information no longer guarantee differentiation, people’s skills and knowledge are how our organisations deliver. And we make it possible for them to have those skills and that knowledge.

Each of us is like the mason in the Rule of St Benedict. Busily carving a block of stone, he is approached by a wise man. “What are you doing?” asks the wise man. Without looking up, the man replies. He does not say “I’m carving a block of stone.” He does not say “I’m earning money for my family.” He replies: “I am building a cathedral.”

And that must be how we express the level of our ambition.

So, the next time someone asks you what you do, you know what answer to give. “I make it possible for my organisation to deliver on its promises.” Whatever response you get, I can guarantee it will not be: “Oh, so you’re in training.”

Originally published in December, 2011, this is my introduction to Inside Learning Technologies Magazine, edition 36 – now available to read online.

I’ve known Bob for well over  decade and it’s great to have him talk on a subject that is very dear to his heart, and on which he has a slew of useful insight to impart.

And as well as delivering this talk, the Friday following the conference (27th Jan), Bob will be delivering a half-day workshop on Performance in the Workplace in west London.

Bob’s point on performance and learning is that there are 5 points when we need to learn things, and classical ‘push’ training (in the classroom or online) only really addresses two of these. His mission – along with his colleague Dr Conrad Gottfredson - is to move workplace learning from inputs to outputs, from the activity of training to the outcome of increased performance.

Bob’s workshop focuses on the performance support part of all this, in particular looking at moving learning into the workflow and accelerating  employee time to proficiency

The listed fee for the half-day workshop is £199 but Bob has kindly agreed an  admin-only fee of £49.99 for visitors to this blog. That includes VAT, refreshments, and lunch.

If you’d like to know more, just follow this link on Bob’s Performance Support Workshop.

Disclosure: I have no financial interest in this workshop of Bob’s, or in promoting his work, or that of Learning Guide. I just know that what Bob has to say is valuable to anyone working in organisational learning at the moment.

This is not a matter of adopting some new, hyped technology nor of championing the latest fad in training techniques. The shifts in how we work in the West are fundamental and long-lasting and are not susceptible to superficial solutions. We are now in a global economy where most organisations derive their value from their people’s knowledge, skills and attitudes.

This will demand fundamental changes in how people develop themselves at work.

You might think that would mean that learning and development (L&D) is more important than ever, but the truth is more complicated than that. The changing world of workplace learning is as much a threat to existing L&D as it is an opportunity.

I’ve written about this before on Training Zone in Learning at the Crossroads (click for parts 1, 2 and 3). Where I focused on the shifting perception of skills in the workplace: executives, managers and employees all see skills and learning differently now to only a few years ago. This trend will continue, creating profound effects for learning and development (L&D) practitioners. We must respond, or – and this is the threat – risk irrelevance.

The key change, which I outlined in Learning at the Crossroads, is that while executives know that skills are crucial, they do not regard the L&D department as able to provide those skills. Certainly, the higher you go in an organisation, the less likely L&D is to be involved in skills development. If the board needs refreshing in governance, for example, it is likely that task will be directly outsourced to specialist consultants by the managing director’s office without L&D even being consulted.

But the challenge to L&D goes well beyond a turf war about who is going to provide the next training course. For an organisation to function today, it has to be constantly developing and supporting its people’s knowledge, skills and attitudes because they are its source of value and differentiation. For L&D to remain relevant in this context, practitioners must help the organisation develop people in line with business aims by working in four areas:

1. Capability building – centrally-controlled ‘push’ learning that builds individual employees’ long-term knowledge and skills. This is what we’ve always done, and we do it well.

2. Performance support – personally-driven ‘pull’ learning that answers specific short-term performance issues. We’re familiar with this as what’s often called the ‘Googlization’ of learning. This term trivializes an increasingly significant part of L&D’s role.

3. Personal learning support – this has two parts. One is helping organisations select learning tools wisely and stimulate quality user-generated content. The second is supporting employees in their meta-cognitive development – their ability to learn through their careers.

4. Skills management – we need to provide both a long-term view of how we grow organisational skills for the 3-year executive vision and to meet managers’ needs for their projects in 3-12 months’ time.

This is not to suggest that everyone in L&D must perform each of these roles nor that L&D should do them alone, without any input from the rest of the organisation. However, these things do all need to be done, and the L&D department should be in the lead on each.

In my next four articles I will examine each of these four points in more detail and will conclude with a fifth aspect of workplace learning in which L&D is fundamentally involved, but which it cannot lead.

Expect these themes to be covered at the IITT conference in September: Learning Live.

This post was originally posted on TrainingZone on 13 June 2011.

(90 minutes later) We’ve just finished the webinar, and it was a cracker. I realised that I’d missed something from this blog post: to find out more about QR codes, I’d recommend starting at Paul’s blog entry on the subject.

(23 hours later) Two more reflections on this webinar, which had about 140 attendees, plenty of interaction and a slew of positive feedback.

First – Paul took it very seriously, and had lots of material to draw on. He kindly tweeted this at the end:

I learnt preparation, rehearsal and content are the keys to effective Webinars – thanks @DonaldHTaylor

This is very gracious. It’s also right. As with all LSG webinars, we put a lot of time into preparing this session. In particlar we considered:

• where to ask open questions to generate audience interaction
• slide layout and the text/graphics balance
• what Paul would say in his ‘loose script’
• ensuring flow and momentum throughout the presentation
• the balance of the general and the specific
• fail-safe procedures in case anything went wrong
• practicalities of handling Q&A at the end

The second point: this was a very successful webinar because of the time Paul into rehearsing it and – crucially – because of the content he had. More than any other kind of presentation, webinars need good content. Paul’s had plenty of that and as a result he has generated (at current count) over 70 requests for his free 22-page paper on QR Codes and mobile tagging.

You can find out how to request the free report, and read Paul’s reflections on his blog entry.

You can listen to a recording to the presentation here.

You can also read David Hopkins’ views and reflections here.

The sessions were on “What makes a good L&D department” and we focused on the delivery mechanisms and skills needed to do our job well now and into the future. Martin Couzins did a 4 minute interview in the lobby just before lunch. Click the picture to listen.

Despite this puff piece from Fast Company Magazine, there’s only one answer to that question.

It won’t.

Education – and workplace learning for that matter – will be revolutionized by people. By innovative learners, executives, managers, parents, peers, teachers and trainers. The technology – whatever is available at the time – just helps.

Plenty of people agree that a gap is there, that the conference discusses leading edge technology and practice, while the learning technologies on the exhibition floor seem only to change very slowly year-on-year. I agree the gap exists. But I would add this caveat: the gap is neither as large, nor its impact as profound, as might be imagined. And there is a very good reason why the gap is there.

The gap between conference and exhibition is perfectly natural.

While I have chaired the conference since 2000, I have also been over the same period a non-executive director of a talent management software company (sold to a US company in 2008), and in the vendor community before that, so I can see this from both sides.

At the conference, I decide, with input from a wide range of colleagues, what are the leading edge topics of interest that deserve an audience. Sometimes the presentations are theoretical, sometimes case-study based, but they should all, as far as possible, be new and different. That’s what people come to a conference for.

Looking at this in terms of Rogers’ work on the diffusion of technology, the conference always aims to be working with learning technology’s innovators and early adopters:

Graphic credit: Natebailey

In our field, we are familiar with this idea of different technology adopters not through Rogers, who did his original work on the adoption of hybrid corn among Iowan farmers, but through Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 book Crossing the Chasm which called this the technology adoption lifecycle.

Moore introduced the idea of a chasm between the early adopters and early majority. For any technology vendor this chasm is crucial, because it’s where most good ideas fail. This is where start ups crash and burn, when they can’t move their technology (and their company’s internal processes) from a niche to the mainstream. The reason could be poor marketing, a lack of supporting technologies, incremental changes by competing technologies or simply that the timing wasn’t quite right.

Whatever the reason, the cost of failure is real, and it is usually counted in years of work wasted and people laid off. I have spent most of my life working in companies where a poor decision on whether to go with a particular product development will result in not being able to meet the rent and pay roll at the end of the month. It’s a sobering thought that – even for the most gung-ho company – sharpens the mind and leads to intensive analysis of potential new developments.

So where are the vendors on the technology adoption lifecycle? They are almost all on the other side of the chasm from the conference, among the early majority and late majority. Not just because that’s where the money is, but also because that’s how they can sustain their business.

I can guarantee that right now in learning technology vendors across the world intensive conversations are taking place about the development of additional product lines involving the current game-changers in learning: social media and mobile learning. Passionate voices will be heard both for and against development, but the ultimate say will come down to one question, raised by the CFO: ‘Will it sell?’

Until the management team is convinced that the new technology has crossed the chasm to the early majority, where it will sell, development will be piecemeal, and you shouldn’t expect to see the new technologies appear on any exhibition floor.

This isn’t a blame game, though. I don’t want to suggest that if vendors aren’t at fault for not producing risky new technologies, the customers are for not demanding it. The customers need proof that this stuff works before they commit their budgets (and, often, their careers) to taking a chance on a new way of doing things.

And that’s where the conference comes in. It’s our job upstairs to demonstrate that there are new ways of doing things and to play our part in helping the learning and development community grow its understanding of what is possible.

Like I say, the gap between conference and exhibition is perfectly natural, and I expect it to continue.

All of this was brilliantly summarized in a single, anonymous comment at the bottom of one of the many blog entries after the conference:

Anonymous said…
A very quick reflection… it doesn’t pay to be a thought leader downstairs.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

That particular blog entry (which I recommend reading) was by official conference Twitter wrangler Karyn Romeis. In the final part of this trilogy of #LT11uk blog entries I draw on her work, and others, in the importance of reflecting on any event.

————————————–

A footnote on the title of this blog entry: the conference takes place on the third floor of Olympia 2. The exhibition is split over the first floor (technology) and ground floor (skills). As a result, this perceived gap between the conference and the exhibition has been dubbed the Upstairs, Downstairs divide, after the 1970s British TV series in which the aristocracy is upstairs and their servant workers downstairs.

January’s Learning Technologies 2011 Conference was a pleasure to chair and a great success.

We had a record number of visitors attending the four tracks over two days, with marvellous key notes from Roger Schank, Jonathan Margolis and Mike Campbell and great presentations from our wide range of other speakers.

It isn’t possible for anyone to visit all the sessions during the conference, so the video archive that we create on the Learning and Skills Group proves invaluable each year.

How does the archive work?

That picture at the top is Roger Schank lambasting the educational sector and sharing his thoughts on how people really learn. Click on it and you’ll be taken through to video of Roger speaking, synchronised with his slides.

Finding things in videos can be troublesome, so there’s a running thumbnail of slides at the bottom enabling you to jump to particular points. Also, it’s possible to search across the entire archive for particular key words, with the results taking you not just to presentations, but to specific points in those presentations.

And that archive is big: it reaches back to 2004 and covers some 300 presentations. Credit where it’s due for this huge task: the platform is provided by Datpresenter, while video was shot, and the AV provided by, Euro Presentations.

Well, that’s the easy part of the conference wrap up done – the conference resources. There are trickier pieces, however. As always the conference created plenty of debate, and now that a month has passed, it’s time for some reflection, so in my coming two posts I’ll be looking at:

Part 2 – How real is the upstairs/downstairs divide in learning technologies?
Part 3 – The importance of reflection

#LT11uk

But he has a message for us in the Institute, and in learning in general.

Check it out – it’s only 2’20″, and if you don’t agree with what Jay says, you can still enjoy the view….