Continuous Learning | David Grebow KnowledgeStar

Corporate Training’s $70+ Billion Dirty Secret

Posted on July 16, 2015 by David Grebow

According to analyst Josh Bersin, US companies spent well over $70 Billion for employee training in 2013. Analysts predict that amount is will be significantly greater in 2015.

These are the kinds of statistics one might expect C-suite executives to pay attention to. So it’s odd that they seem not to be paying much attention to the ROI for corporate training.

It’s abysmal.

Leading experts have studied the subject at length; the statistics they provide differ. Some say there are too many variables to allow for “one-size-fits-all” statements about how much training is retained, and how quickly it is forgotten. They note the variety of training goals and audiences receiving the training, as well as differences in training delivery methods.

Having said this, there is general agreement among experts in the field that that corporate training’s success rate is, shall I say, “poor.”

One of these experts is Dr. Art Kohn, who has done a great deal of work on “the forgetting curve” and its effect on training retention. He’s also the recipient of not one but two Fulbright Fellowships for work in Cognitive Psychology and Educational Technology. In a recent article in Learning Solutions, he wrote the following:

It is the dirty secret of corporate training: no matter how much you invest into training and development, nearly everything you teach to your employees will be forgotten…this investment is like pumping gas into a car that has a hole in the tank. All of your hard work simply drains away.

The fact is that this “dirty secret” is really not secret at all.

The research and resulting articles about this have been out there for years. Yet there’s not much evidence that corporae executives are acting upon it, despite its its obvious and critical importance to the bottom line.

Bersin’s research also shows an explosive growth in technology-driven training, including self-authored video, online communication channels, virtual learning, and MOOCs. Worldwide, formal classroom education, now accounts for less than half the total training “hours.”

According to Bersin, mobile devices are now used to deliver as much as 18% of all training among what he calls “highly advanced companies.”

Does this mean that employees are using their iPads to access Udemy courses? If so, is there a significant difference in retention rate for employees who have information presented by a live trainer while sitting in a room with 20 fellow workers… versus those who receive it on mobile phone the subway on the way home at night… compared to someone being trained via iPad while sitting in the living room after the kids have been put to bed?

We won’t have statistics to provide answers to those questions for some time.

But corporations should be watching closely to see if new methods of delivering training result in a dramatic increase in retention among employees once they’re on the job — because if Kohn is right, even achieving a whopping 400% increase in retention will mean that after just one week, the average employee will still be retaining only about half of what is needed on-the-job.

That’s hardly a stunning success rate.

Research has made it abundantly clear that the basic premise that drives corporate training is fatally flawed.

It’s abundantly clear that the training corporations are currently providing to their employees is not succeeding in providing them with the information they need to do their jobs properly the first time. So why does corporate America keep throwing good money after bad, trying to find a “patch” or download an “updated version”?

It’s as if a purple elephant with pink toenails is standing next to the coffee table and corporations are only willing to acknowledge that there’s an “unusual scent in the air.”

My next blog will give more compelling facts to show why a major change in corporate training is needed.

Managing Failure In Your Organization: When Is Failure “Intelligent”?

Posted on March 25, 2015 by David Grebow

This blog has frequently stated that a successful learning culture must accept that failures are an important component of learning.

So what, exactly, does that mean?

Does this mean that managers are to overlook mistakes and praise and reward those who’ve screwed up?

Wouldn’t the end result of such behavior be an organization whose members were sloppy, inaccurate and imprecise in their work?

What, specifically, would an organization interested in making a shift from the “push” training culture to a “pull” learning culture do if it wanted to make failure an opportunity to learn about problems before it grew too expensive –or too late — to address and correct them?

These are all important questions — and I’ll talk about them in this and a series of blogs to follow. But let me start by quoting Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School who states, “All failures are not created equal.”

In her highly engaging and readable article, Strategies for Learning from Failure published in the Harvard Business Review, Edmondson illustrates how some failures can provide highly valuable information, while others are inherently less helpful.

Edmondson has divided failure into the following three categories for which I have provided abbreviated descriptions, which are based largely on hers:

Preventable failures in predictable operations

These are failures most of us would consider “bad.” As Edmondson states, “They usually involve deviations from spec in the closely defined processes of high-volume or routine operations in manufacturing and services. With proper training and support, employees can follow those processes consistently. When they don’t, deviance, inattention, or lack of ability is usually the reason. But in such cases, the causes can be readily identified and solutions developed.”

Think of the famous Toyota Production System, which instills in all employees the importance of pulling a rope to stop the assembly line immediately upon spotting — or even suspecting –there is a problem. Diagnostics and problem-solving process kick in, and there is no “punishment” for initiating this process, which over the years, has helped the company identify real and potential problems early, before they became serious, system-wide, and costly to the company and its reputation.

Unavoidable failures in complex systems

This relates to work involving “a particular combination of needs, people, and problems may have never occurred before,” as Edmondson puts it. Some examples of this type of work includes healthcare professionals in hospital emergency rooms, soldiers in battle, people working in nuclear power plants

Even if workers follow best practices for safety and risk management, small process failures will occur. Often, true disaster is caused by a series of small failures that occurred within a short period of time, or occurred in a particular sequence. To prevent this, workers need to feel they will be supported — not stigmatized — when they report small failures with equipment, systems or procedures while it is possible to address and correct them, rather than waiting until a true crisis — or disaster –occurs.

Intelligent failures at the frontier

The term “intelligent failures” was coined by Duke University professor of management, Sim Sitkin. Dr. Edmondson defines these as “good” failures that “occur in environments where answers are not knowable in advance because this exact situation hasn’t been encountered before and perhaps never will be again.”

Intelligent failures are to be expected in companies working to create a new vaccine, build a new type of aircraft or vehicle. In these situations, good work involves good experimentation– and it is always hoped that the failures good experimentation will produce will be quick and decisive. If they are, they will prevent the organization from sinking further time, money and other resources into unproductive work.

There you have it: the hierarchy of organizational failure as laid out by one of the finest minds at Harvard Business School.

My next blog will consider the reasons why organizations are so resistant to the idea of “destigmatizing failure.”

KnowledgeStar is a corporation that consults with large and small organizations to transform themselves into learning cultures. Contact us at David(at)KnowledgeStar.(com)

Posted in Advancement, Continuous Learning, corporate training, Education, Formal Learning, Learning, Training & Development | Tagged Amy C. Edmondson, failure,Harvard, intelligent failure, Learning, Learning Culture, Organizational psychology, Prof. Edmondson, training, training & Development | Leave a Comment »

Equal Opportunity Corporate Learning

March 19, 2015 by Sue Fry & David Grebow | Edit

5 Votes

This post written by Susan Fry and David Grebow

“Push” learning has gone the way of the cassette tape, tube television and electric typewriter.

Leading educators and trainers now regard push learning as inefficient, suboptimal and outdated. Even many schools, often the slowest institutions to change, are rapidly making the transition away from that model.

Yet, despite the fact that “push learning” is clearly not suited for today’s “economy of ideas,” corporations have been surprisingly reluctant to make the necessary change.

Why?

The reason may well lie in the fact that a “pull” learning culture is truly democratic. It’s a culture that encourages and supports everyone to explore and demonstrate their initiative and abilities, allowing the best to rise to the top based on merit.

That sounds like a great benefit to any organization. But when put into practice, the concept can prove to be quite revolutionary.

Throughout history, providing access to knowledge has been a way to control who gained power, wealth and status.

Learning and training are often hoarded and carefully doled out to people upon whom top management wish to confer success. Often, they are golden keys to elite private club that are given to friends’ children, colleagues, and clients, alumni from the same university, people of the same culture, class or color.

There can be no doubt that in the last 50 years, countries with the world’s leading economies have worked to erode discrimination and provide greater employment opportunities to people regardless of their race or gender.

It’s time organizations make another much-needed cultural shift, and “tear down the wall” by replacing the old, “push” learning culture with a “pull” culture that ensures equal opportunity learning.

KnowledgeStar is a corporation that consults with large and small organizations to transform themselves into learning cultures. Contact us at David(at)KnowledgeStar.(com)

Equal Opportunity Corporate Learning

March 19, 2015 by Sue Fry & David Grebow | Edit

5 Votes

This post written by Susan Fry and David Grebow

“Push” learning has gone the way of the cassette tape, tube television and electric typewriter.

Yet, despite the fact that “push learning” is clearly not suited for today’s “economy of ideas,” corporations have been surprisingly reluctant to make the necessary change.

Why?

That sounds like a great benefit to any organization. But when put into practice, the concept can prove to be quite revolutionary.

Throughout history, providing access to knowledge has been a way to control who gained power, wealth and status.

KnowledgeStar is a corporation that consults with large and small organizations to transform themselves into learning cultures. Contact us at David(at)KnowledgeStar.(com)

Equal Opportunity Corporate Learning

March 19, 2015 by Sue Fry & David Grebow | Edit

5 Votes

This post written by Susan Fry and David Grebow

“Push” learning has gone the way of the cassette tape, tube television and electric typewriter.

Yet, despite the fact that “push learning” is clearly not suited for today’s “economy of ideas,” corporations have been surprisingly reluctant to make the necessary change.

Why?

That sounds like a great benefit to any organization. But when put into practice, the concept can prove to be quite revolutionary.

Throughout history, providing access to knowledge has been a way to control who gained power, wealth and status.

KnowledgeStar is a corporation that consults with large and small organizations to transform themselves into learning cultures. Contact us at David(at)KnowledgeStar.(com)

Equal Opportunity Corporate Learning

Posted on March 19, 2015 by David Grebow

This post written by Susan Fry and David Grebow

“Push” learning has gone the way of the cassette tape, tube television and electric typewriter.

Yet, despite the fact that “push learning” is clearly not suited for today’s “economy of ideas,” corporations have been surprisingly reluctant to make the necessary change.

Why?

That sounds like a great benefit to any organization. But when put into practice, the concept can prove to be quite revolutionary.

Throughout history, providing access to knowledge has been a way to control who gained power, wealth and status.

KnowledgeStar is a corporation that consults with large and small organizations to transform themselves into learning cultures. Contact us at David(at)KnowledgeStar.(com)

Carmel, California: The new epicenter of educational consulting

Posted on March 17, 2015 by David Grebow

Move over, Cambridge, Palo Alto, Madison, Ann Arbor, New York and Nashville — Carmel, California may soon become the hotbed for innovation in education!

We at KnowledgeStar thank our clients — McGraw-Hill, the United Nations, Brandon-Hall Group, Bersin by Deloitte, and the Navajo Nation — for giving us the privilege of working on such exciting projects this last year. Without them, we wouldn’t have received the nice honor pictured below.

Learning, art & science — and golf

Posted on March 16, 2015 by David Grebow

This post was written by David Grebow and Susan Fry

When we talk about creating a learning culture, we’re defining learning as “the ability to adapt what you know and what you know how to do to an ever-changing variety of circumstances.”

To become a learning culture, an organization must understand that learning is not a discrete training event or even a series of them. Rather, learning is an ongoing process, one that occurs over time. Sharing and expanding knowledge in a culture is very different from the “rote learning” or classroom learning model that prevails in most organizations, and which rewards short-term memory.

By “rote learning,” we mean any brief, highly structured learning event that employs quizzes to provide a score intended to gauge how much the participant “learned.” The problem is that the goal of these “learning events” is to ensure that, to be considered “successful” requires only that the attendees retain information long enough to get a passing score on a quiz or test (or multiple ones, scattered throughout the session.)

Ask yourself what the scores would be if the quiz was taken again, a few days after the “learning event” was over. A huge percentage of what was supposedly “learned” would already have been forgotten. (I’ll leave the cost-effectivemess of such training for another discussion.)

Interestingly, art and science have proved to be two areas where what we’ve just stated above do not apply.

This is because art and science require an evolving degree of knowledge from basic to advanced. Think about learning to play the tuba or conducting a chemistry experiment. This is subject matter that was always learned by apprenticing with or being tutored by a master, someone with a great deal more experience.

Would anyone consider handing a Bach score and a cello to someone who played a little guitar and expect him to master it after two hour-long seminars and a demonstration video?

Real learning is somewhat like sleeping. You do not go to sleep; rather, you go through the process of sleeping, which is completed in a number of stages. If you’re constantly interrupted, you wake up the next morning feeling like you had a bad nights’ sleep. Real learning requires stages as well and you cannot skip over any of them.

What neuroscience researchers have learned by studying golfers helps shed light on this.

They describe how learners reach a point during the adoption phase where they peak at the physical learning part of the game. After enough time has been spent “on the job” practicing the required physical movements, a point comes when it stops being necessary to consciously think about the movements. When that happens, the brain is freed to focus on the parts of the game that require active mental thought and calculation. When you hear coaches use the phrase “muscle memory,” or tell athletes “get out of your mind” or “you’re over-thinking it,” this is what they mean.

When a golfer has mastered the essentials of the physical game, the mind becomes is table to focus on more complex issues. And that focus is truly the key to transforming a good player into a great one. But it takes a very long time, and a lot of practice to get to this stage.

An analysis of the eye patterns of novice golfers on a green, lining up a putt, translated the players’ eye movements into graphics. What it showed looked like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti on the green: there were lines and loops going every which way.When they graphed the eye movement of top golfers, the patterns were a few lines most of them moving directly towards the cup.

The reason why most classes offered by organizations are essentially a waste of time is because they do not include enough time to complete the learning process. The material presented is not reinforced and internalized through experience. No time is allowed for the learner to practice the concepts or methods that have been presented and try them out in the “real world” or workplace, repeatedly, over time, until they become like “muscle memory.” Because of this, little is retained.

Now imagine what would happen if the organization provided continuous opportunities for learning, actively encouraged its members to be learning continuously, built in time for them to practice, and measured progress not by pop quiz scores, but increased productivity.

Now imagine that the organization is your organization.

Online assessment: Find out if you’re already a learning culture

Posted on March 12, 2015 by David Grebow

This post written by Susan Fry

The question I’m asked most frequently these days (besides, “ATM or credit card?”) is “How do I start to create a learning culture in my organization?”

I’d actually prefer to start with a different question, which is “How close is the current culture in my organization to a learning culture?”

Many organizational cultures–and maybe yours–already have some of the key characteristics of a learning culture in place. Finding out where you stand is the logical first step.

We employ a variety of tools to help organizations understand their culture because it helps makes for a smoother, faster transition from an obsolete “push/training” mode into the “pull/learning” culture.

Below, you can view a sample from one of the assessment tools we use. In the left column , you’ll see brief descriptions of key characteristics that encourage learning; on the right, you’ll see descriptions of those that block it. Beneath the sample you’ll find instructions for taking and evaluating the assessment. Take a moment to answer the questions yourself. Some of your answers are likely to be surprising.

You can view the full, printable Learning Culture Assessment here.

How to use this assessment

The assessment asks respondents to rank you organization on each characteristic by writing a number in the square at the bottom of each section.

The number “1” indicates strong disagreement with the statement, while “5” indicates the strong agreement. Adding all the numbers in each column will show whether your organization is currently perceived to be a learning culture. Questions that received the lowest scores indicate areas that need the most attention.

After you’ve taken it yourself, I suggest that you distribute this assessment to a group of people within your organization. Choosing as many audit participants as possible from diverse areas and levels of responsibility will provide you with more accurate information.

The survey has an additional benefit: it will communicate that you are starting to take a hard look at how good your organization is at providing learning opportunities that enable employees to do the best job possible.

This assessment was first published in Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Technology and Practice (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 2004). I’m grateful to Marcia Conner, my colleague from my Peoplesoft days and friend of many years, for recently bringing it to my attention. (Check out her blog at http://marciaconner.com/

In case you didn’t note the publication info above, let me point out that this assessment was published more than ten years ago. In Silicon Valley terms, that makes it almost ancient — and yet I constantly meet people who think the “learning culture” is a radical new concept!

The Dangers of “Push” Training: A True Story

Posted on February 25, 2015 by David Grebow

This post was written by Susan Fry, Vice President, Creative Strategy, KnowledgeStar.

A recent experience proved how dangerous adhering to the old “push” model can be. In consulting with one of the world’s best-known NGOs, I conducted an exhaustive series of interviews with Managers and Directors at different levels, located in countries around the globe.

This NGO is funded to do work throughout the world improving health — which also means working to eradicate deadly diseases or control outbreaks. The interviews quickly revealed that members of the NGO in one country were not sharing information that could be extremely beneficial to coworkers in other countries, even though doing so surely could have eliminated suffering and saved lives.

Deeper investigation revealed that the NGO had a long-established culture of “hoarding” learning and training and doling it out to those that the top management had decided they wanted to bring into “the fold.” When a favored few rose to the top in their own country, they were invited to the world headquarters located in a vibrant, wealthy city, where they were wined, dined and welcomed into the elite “inner circle.”

They then moved to the headquarters city to take their new positions, where they communicated information to the other “elites,” occasionally returning to their home countries. The pattern had been in place for years and there was little desire to change it — even though changing to a learning culture could clearly make them much more agile, effective and successful in meeting the stated goals of their organization.

This exposes one of the dangers of a “pull” learning culture as well, where inputting knowledge is power. If I go to my PC, it is KIKO (Knowledge In, Knowledge Out). The technology systems that enable the learners are only as good as the information they contain. If the underlying culture is still embedded in the old command-and-control hierarchy in which knowledge is power, then selectively sharing knowledge will become power.

The culture is the bedrock upon which leaders, learners and the enabling technology is built. In a true learning culture people instinctively believe that sharing knowledge is empowering and automatically act on that belief.

This is yet one more reason to build a real learning culture and not just erect a facade that might be able to pass for one.

Continuous Learning, future of learning, Learning

Learning at the Speed of Now

Aside | Posted on October 15, 2013 by David Grebow

I originally posted this as a Brandon Hall Group blog and kept thinking about it. If you have ever had an idea that seems to take seed in your synapses, and then germinate and sprouts, you’ll know what I mean. I came to a conclusion that startled me. Here it is …

The Speed Limit of Now

I used this graphic recently in a Brandon Hall Group webinar. The idea was to show the underlying drivers of learning in organizations. It pointed out that in the 20^th century there was time to learn. We measured the shelf life of knowledge in years. We had time to go to a course to learn something that you might need someday.

In Digital Economy of the 21^st century, we quickly realized that everything was changing more rapidly, even the pace of change. The idea of learning something someday no longer worked. We based the new model on the idea of now, as in “I need to learn it now”, “Tell me how to do it now” and “I want that information now”. Now was also part of the learning DNA of the Millennials, raised with digital technology from the time they could walk, Googling replacing dictionaries, Facebook and Twitter replacing … well there was nothing to replace, it was all new.

The question that came up during the webinar was what is next, what does “???” mean for L&D professionals? How do we increase the speed of now? I thought about it and here is the answer to my answer.

Learning faster and faster has a top speed limit of now. Even ‘jacking in’ to their headjack for Neo and the others in The Matrix was all about now, only as direct and fast as you could imagine. So if now is the redline on the learning speedometer, what’s next?

The Slow Now and the Fast Now

The only thing gating the speed is connecting the person who needs to know with the person who has the answer. Taking the time to find the person who knows slows down the transfer. We already have the ability to jack in, only we rarely use it.

It’s called a Community of Practice (CoP). First, let me start with a new idea called the Community of Learners (CoL). You can connect every class, or any learning event, where there are more than two people, into a Community of Learners. That community enables the learners to network, start working together, get used to the idea of a technology-mediated community in which learning something is the focus. They learn to learn as a community.

When that Community of Learners graduates, they become part of a growing, active, worldwide, and always- on Community of Practice. Learning continues. Continuously. Get enough people connected in that CoP, and you will find that the community has encountered almost every problem, resolved almost any imaginable issue, asked all the questions and most likely answered them. It not exactly the headjack but it’s as close as today’s technology enables.

I can connect to the CoP with any device, anytime and anywhere. I can read the answer in an email, listen to the answer on the smartphone, watch a video of the answer someone recently shot, or share a schematic as I get my answer. I can follow an answer step-by-step if I have a process or procedure question. I can even snap a pic and show the work I did to the person who is telling me what to do, so they can look at my work in real time and make sure that the red wire goes where the red wire needs to go. Learning, getting the answer now, is an extension of the experience of learning taken away from the Community of Learners. You want to learn about something. You learn how to ask the right question, you learn where to find the right person, and you learn to use the right community.

Some companies are getting it right. It was apparent in the winners of the Brandon Hall Group “The Award Winning Collection: Best Use of Blended Learning”. These companies are finding out how to extend learning past an event, make it continuous and move the needle past the top speed of ‘now’, into the even faster speed of ‘community’. As I was thinking more about this answer, I wondered why an EPS (electronic performance system) is not faster than a CoP. The answer was, it may be faster, but it’s canned, formal. It cannot answer my now questions in the moment unless they are pre-programmed into the support system. You really need people to make now go faster. That was the startling revelation, especially since I tend to focus on educational technology. There is nothing faster than quickly being able to formulate the right question and find the right person who has the right answer. It no longer needs to be face-to-face, just brain-to-brain.

The blended programs I reviewed shortened the distance and increased the speed between the person with the right question and the person or persons with the right answer. Not all of the programs use the Community of Learners that graduate into the all-knowing, all-powerful Community of Practice. They will, because the faster now will always try to push past the speed limit of a slower now. Connecting the right question to the right person equals the fastest way to learn. And in a hyper-competitive world marketplace, to the fastest go the sales, services, innovations, collaborations and everything else.

Learning at the Water Cooler and Everyplace Else

Posted on January 25, 2013 by David Grebow

I cannot believe how duped we’ve been to think of learning as an event. That idea is artifact of the Industrial Revolution and a terrible conceit on the part of the educational institutions we developed. Learning starts BEFORE we are born and (for all we actually know) continues AFTER we are dead. We are in a very real sense Continuous Learning Organisms.

Here’s a piece from Annie Murphy Paul’s The Brilliant Blog which is aptly named and , and if you’ve missed, it I recommend putting it on your weekly ‘must read’ list.

“Bersin by Deloitte, a human resources firm, has an interesting report out on the future of learning in organizations. The language in which it’s written is turgid, to put it kindly (“Our new High-Impact Learning Organization Framework® shows organizations have moved from ‘talent-driven learning’ to a focus on ‘continuous capability development’ . . . “), but there are some good insights to be had. Here, translated from corporate-speak, are its main findings and predictions:

“Continuous Learning” and “Capability Development” will likely replace the buzz around “Informal Learning.” Our new High-Impact Learning Organization Framework® shows organizations have moved from “talent-driven learning” to a focus on “continuous capability development.” Driven by these changes, the L&D market grew 12 percent last year, the highest growth rate in more than eight years. The buzzword of “informal learning” is giving way to a whole architecture of L&D programs that are social, mobile, continuous and highly integrated with talent management strategies.”

Cognitive scientist Allan Collins and his coauthors John Seely Brown and Susan Newman in Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, notes that digital tools are creating a transformation as profound as the one that swept the apprenticeship model of learning into the Industrial Revolution. It is a transformation that is causing many people to rethink the idea of education. “In the apprenticeship era, most of what people learned occurred outside of school,” they note. “Universal schooling led people to identify learning with school, but now the identification of the two is unraveling.”

Finally we are starting to get to the bottom of learning things! I must admit, I’ve been as culpable as anyone feeding the maw of the formal vs. informal learning debate. My head was stuck in an academic box and stayed there even as I moved into a corporate environment. It was the same problem that corporate learners inherited. As we developed formal learning in our workplaces, we simply grabbed what we knew and were comfortable with from the schoolplace. Learning as an event. Formal, scheduled, instructed. We often went so far as to copy the old physical layout of the classroom – seats facing forward, instructor on the stage, quiet until called upon (yikes!) or recognized by a single hand held waving in the air .

What has been called ‘informal’ learning was really nothing more than a way of naming all the interstices, the spaces in between the formal learning events. Well, time to move on. There is no “formal” or “informal” learning. There is only, and always has been, continuous learning. And accepting that changes everything.

It means that the definition, design, development and delivery of learning changes. It alters the way learning is managed and measured. The endless conversation about formal versus informal stops. Naming conventions like “courses” and “programs” and “corporate universities” goes away. We start to see learners in a new way – as individuals moving through a world in which they – we – are always learning something new because there is always something new to learn.

We tried to formalize this natural process, and managed to do a really good job disabling it. We took learning out of any real context, gave the onus of the experience to the instructor who provided a predigested often canned helping of facts, heaped upon a PowerPoint slide, removed any chance for serendipity, social interaction or creativity. Rewarded remembering instead of discovering. Punished failure And we expected people to sit through these massive knowledge dumps and actually learn something.

In a funny way, I was correct years ago when I wrote “At the Water Cooler of Learning“. I think the definition of real learning – the ability to adopt and adapt what we’re taught – is still valid. And I still believe we really do learn most of what we need in between the events that we are told to attend. Yet I was guilty of the same bifurcation of learning into “formal” and “informal” as everyone else. There is no versus, just a flow through the day, learning as you go, remembering what you need to know and know how to do, and forgetting what you knew and knew how to do. It all adds up – from scheduled events to chance water cooler moments – to continuous learning.

So what will this mean to the way you approach learning? As a student? As an instructor or teacher? What will you do differently?

The Inconvenient Truth About Continuous Learning

Posted on January 14, 2013 by David Grebow

“In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer

Here are the facts:

The vast majority of learning programs still rely on event-driven formal learning models. Formal and informal together are only a small part of the continuous learning experience. LMS and LCMS systems favor events which account for only a small amount of continuous learning.

The conclusion? Continuous Learning is the way we learn and grow, and because of the way we have learned to teach, it is still the least accepted and included way of learning in our schoolplace (primary and secondary) or workplace.

If it is truly the primary way we learn then it is incumbent upon us to begin to incorporate continuous learning into our programs starting in pre-school. How you ask? No longer difficult I answer. I recently wrote about Eddie Obeng who understands that all the rules have changed and that most of the world was “…asleep at midnight when all the rules changed.” We are still operating as if nothing has changed. So as to how we can easily create classrooms that have an online Community of Learners forum for sharing, exploring, discovering, asking and answering. Peer-to-peer and peer-to-mentor. as we move from one grade level to the next we can ‘graduate’ the Community of Learners to become a Community of Practice. Worldwide.

All schools worldwide have parallel ‘grades’ or ‘tranches’ for learning in the K-12 space. The fact is that we live in a digitally-connected global society. For starters there is no longer any reason to put learning into an small event-driven box (aka classroom). Students are already learning continuously and are also forming global Communities of Learners (CoL) and Communities of Practice (CoP). It’s time for the educational systems to get in sync with the students and support what they are doing.

Continuous Learning in the Corporation

The same is true for corporate learning only more so. Many of us have been talking about “informal Learning” for years (feels like forever actually). Well the continuous learner is all about informal learning. Perhaps if we shift the focus from the learning to the learner we can make some progress. Continuous learning in the corporate environment is critical to the increase of the Corporate IQ. And only the smartest companies will win in this new rapidly changing hypercompetitve flatworld. So companies MUST support continuous learning by creating the following:

Communities of Learners (CoL) that are networked together as they take a flipped course (assume companies and L&D organizations will be smart enough to learn that the flipped classroom enables learning far better than the disabling traditional classroom)

Communities of Practice (CoP) that the learners ‘graduate’ into to continue learning on a worldwide basis adding real world experiences into what they know and know how to do as a result of adopting and adapting the learning.

Rewards, certificates, some software that tracks the continuous learners – a Continuous Learning System (CLS)- so the company can see (custom or standard reports) how much learning is going on that today of which they are, for the most part, completely unaware.

What a waste of all that talent and learning! Here’s my experience. I once worked in a big blue-colored company and every year I was told what courses I needed to take. Well it depended on whether I had the time. If I was off being a good little billable employee, the course was a nice to take. Seems like I was always off being billable, and at the end of the year, the list of courses was replaced with another list that again went the way of “I’m too busy making money for the company”. In the meantime I managed to take a number of online seminars, webinars, courses and go to a few conferences where I grabbed a workshop or two. I learned enough to realize I wanted to work in another company with more cutting edge technology and left my former company feeling blue. The company not me since I was all happy. The moral of the story is that the motivated interested curious continuous learner in me trumped the too-busy-being-billable proscribed learner and moved on. And no one in the old company had a clue.

Now here’s another scenario. The old company tracked my continuous learning as much as what they were telling me to learn. And lo and behold they found a new position for me that fit with what I was interested in to take all the learning I had pursued on my own. They benefited and I helped them and me grow in a new area.

So let’s stop all the chatter about “informal learning” since it has no more meaning or relevance. We’ve talked about enough and nothing has happened. Let’s instead focus on the Continuous Learner as the Hero of the story and continuous learning as one of the the Great Differentiators between the individuals who are so motivated that they use their own time to learn and grow, and those that are just taking up office space. Between companies that have a lively and growing corporate brain and an increasing corporate IQ, and the ones that will soon be forgotten.

And you know who you are …

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