Learning: Roman roads or woodpaths?

    

If you read the FT Weekend edition you will be familiar with the 'Slow Lane' column by Harry Eyres, on the back page of the Life and Arts section. 

His column on 2nd January 2010, 'When straight is a bit narrow', was a great piece about his experiences as a university teacher where he found that students wanted to be presented with the shortest and quickest ways of acquiring grades and, therefore, sidelining anything that wasn't relevant to their primary goal.  He made a useful analogy between Roman roads - designed to be straight to get from city centre to city centre by the fastest means and woodpaths - that wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impenetrable thicket.  Apparently, there is a conversational German expression 'to be on a woodpath' that means to be on the wrong track; a way that goes nowhere. But as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger observed nowhere might turn out to be somewhere.

 I'm not going to argue that we should adopt the latter in favour of the former when thinking about learning practice as it seems clear to me that we need both.  There is no virtue in leaving people to wander aimlessly in the hope that they will, eventually, pick up what they need to do and know by solely experiential means.  Enterprises need people to do things and perform in certain ways and so expectations should be explained.  Equally, to attempt to produce learning solutions that are narrowly focused on instrumental approaches cuts out the opportunities for reflection and critical thinking that are essential to learning how to learn.  People want to make sense of what they are doing and need to have the opportunity to be able to explore ideas, ask questions, place them into context and reshape them, 

But the language of efficiency and directness is seductive; why not take a direct approach if this will save time and money.  It seems hard to argue with this to some extent.  But maybe it is not just the learners who are calling for Roman roads but also the teachers, consultants, facilitators of all sorts and their paymasters?  

I notice from my practice that when you give people the chance to reflect, they take it.  But, I also notice a tension that is hard to reconcile: the client's need for the learning process to be like a Roman road - efficient, to have a clear structure and objectives (and my pragmatic desire to respond to the brief) and a learning process that needs to be more like a woodpath.

For this to happen successfully several things need to in place:

A strategy for learning: 70:20:10

The 70:20:10 model of learning is an excellent way of envisioning all that is having an impact on how knowledge and skills are being developed:  experiential (70%), informal/collaborative (20%), formal (10%).  It's multi-faceted, real-time, short term and long term.  It's the basis from which it is possible to create an understanding of what learning is and how both its practices and its purposes can emerge. 

An observation about workplace practice: 'Learning in the Wild'

I'd like to see more attention given to the body of anthropological and ethnographical work that has looked in detail at how work gets done.  It is good at showing the seen but taken-for-granted customs and practices that shape the work.  

I like the title 'Learning in the Wild' that James Conklin from Concordia University, Montreal gave to his 2010 paper about how a group of care workers in a nursing home were learning in real time. Perhaps the most famous and accessible study is Julian Orr's work at Xerox with copier engineers: Talking About Machines.  Doing studies like this takes a lot of time and probably isn't suitable for everyday workplace learning practice but we can teach observational and research skills as the basis for inquiry and action. 

A conversation about learning

Tools like Moodle and Yammer are showing the way in how to open up networks in organisations to create a dialogue about learning.  I was talking recently to somebody who works in one of the big consultancies where Yammer is being used.  The sign-up and usage is impressive.  It is encouraging conversations to take place across the enterprise and I am impressed in the way senior managers, executives/partners are taking part very actively.  The consultancies maybe natural places for this to start as they share knowledge as a way of business but the principle would work elsewhere too.  

A reflection on what is being learned

We should encourage reflection practices.  Harold Jarche challenged learning professionals to develop their own practices through the idea of: connect, exchange and contribute - part of the reason why I've started blogging.  The same must apply more widely too.  At the moment, in my own practice I do quite a bit in the classroom to encourage verbal reflection but almost nothing in writing.  I have recently started to encourage a management trainee group that I'm working with to use tools like Evernote to capture their learning.  The learners have been receptive and it is encouraging me to do more on this.

Conclusion

We need Roman roads and woodpaths for learning to work well.  But there is a lot of work to do to support and challenge business leaders, line managers, learners and learning professionals to trust and expect learners to follow their interests and to find their own pathways.  

As if to make the point, in the time that I have been putting together this blog  my TweetDeck application has been chirping away alerting me to yet more pathways through the wood.  

How do managers learn?

I’m interested in the nature of managerial work; of how managerial things get done and to understand how critical knowledge, skills and behaviours are developed; in other words how is it that we learn to do these things, in practice.  

One of the most useful live research inquiries that I did during my masters studies was to interview some managers at a financial services company to find out how they had been learning up to that point.  I used the Critical Incident method to find out how managers felt they had learned to become competent in the critical aspects of their jobs.  I was following up on some similar work done in 1976 by John Burgoyne and Roger Stuart.  Their study addressed the question of how managers acquire their skills - see Burgoyne, J., and Stuart, R. (1976) The nature, use and acquisition of managerial skills and other attributes.  Personnel Review 5 (4) pp19-29 for the full details. A summarised version is available in 'The Manager's Guide to Self Development', chapter 4, by M Pedler, J Burgoyne,T Boydell.  

What was helpful about their analysis was the way in which they created a hierarchy of 11 skills and attributes (10 in the original study): from basic knowledge to higher order cognitive functioning.  These were grouped into three learning categories, based on the work of Gregory Bateson, to try to differentiate between simple and complex issues:

1.  Taking in a fact or piece of data, equivalent to an act of sensing or perceiving, or taking in a stimulus. 

2.  Learning different kinds of responses appropriate for different situations.  This covers a wide range of social, emotional and problem solving skills

 

3.  Meta-learning skills that makes an individual better at achieving learning of the (2) type.  This could be expressed as meta-cognition, i.e. knowing what you know and knowing what you do not know and covers things like creativity, mental agility and balanced learning habits and skills.

Qualities of a successful manager (Burgoyne and Stuart)
Basic knowledge & information	Command of basic facts Relevant professional knowledge
Skills & attributes	Continuing sensitivity to events Analytical, problem solving, decision making skills Social skills Emotional resilience Proactivity
Meta-qualities	Creativity Mental agility Balanced learning habits Self knowledge

  

This provides the context of what I want to comment on: 

First, sources of learning most frequently mentioned by the managers

Second, which theories are most helpful when thinking about management learning

Third, how should management learning practice respond?

Sources of learning

What did the managers cite as their most important sources of learning to become a manager?  The top three in Burgoyne and Stuart's work were: 

• doing the job (42% of all mentions) 
• non-company education (21%) 
• living (12%) - this category is about a broad range of life experiences that take place outside of work.

What's interesting is that in-company education only came fourth in order of importance; in my own research sample, which admittedly was much smaller, it didn't feature at all.  

No real surprises?  Overall, maybe not, although I was quite surprised how infrequently in-company education was mentioned. The findings also raise a critical inquiry:  if the greater part of learning managerial skills comes from natural experiential sources and not events where the learning purposes are deliberately planned, then how should learning practice evolve?

Theories that inform practice

I've summarised in the table below those theories that might help to inform practice.  I've selected a mix of cognitive, experiential and social learning theories. My approach is deliberately multi-disciplinary since this reflects how we learn things.  It also helps to point towards a process of learning and the design of practices that can amplify what's taking place naturally.  By implication, I'm giving less attention to content. Content is important to some extent, but less so than we might think. In fact, if we follow the 70:20:10 model of learning, the 10 = 10% of learning coming from formal learning like courses whilst the other 90% is experiential from doing the job and conversations/interactions/observations with/of the boss and peers. 

Theory	Comment
To maximise potential we should consider the workings of the human cognitive system.	This is on the basis that it is the cognitive system that acquires, stores and retrieves information for later use.  Itiel Dror 's work in this field is interesting and relevant
Improving higher order cognitive learning will help learners tackle complex problems	This means raising awareness of meta-cognition or deutero learning that pays attention to knowing what we know and knowing what we do not know.
Knowing how best to learn opens up choices and encourages commitment	This means explicitly teaching learners how to do this. Charles Jenning's blog posting provides a good list of 'core continuous learning skills' that support meta-learning
Learning is experiential and needs to be reinforced through practice	This point was made as far back as Aristotle and in more recent times by Dewey, Kolb and Marsick & Watkins
Learning is socially constructed through observation and conversation	Social Learning Theory (legitimate peripheral participation, communities of practice - Lave and Wenger) or as a complex responsive process through conversation - Ralph Stacey. Donald Clark's  posting on peer learning and another from  Harold Jarche pick up the collaborative learning themes
Learning is a reflective process and can be enhanced through facilitation	See the work of Argyris, Argyris and Schon, Boud and Miller about the animation of learning by facilitators: external or line managers. Donald Clark's  piece on note taking and reflective writing gives another perspective on self-managed reflection

  

How should management learning respond?...by placing workplace practice centre-stage

Based on what I have researched, it seems clear to me that managers have learned to do what they do through trial and error and through conversation and observation.  Therefore, as learning professionals, I feel that it's critical that we respect how people learn and adapt our practices to facilitate, support and challenge that which learners are already doing.  

If we look at the traditional problems of philosophy such as how is knowledge created and what is there to be learned about we can see that in much of our traditional management learning practice preference is given to theory and the formal knowledge of the teacher.  The problem that this sets up is that, by our actions, we value more highly abstract theory over the knowledge that can be found in actual practice.  As a result a lot gets taken for granted about the role of the teacher as knowledge provider and the learner as knowledge receiver.   This could be to the extent that it might even separate learning from working which, if so, seems a curious, if unintended, outcome. An alternative perspective on this same issue is that teachers (or senior managers/executives who set priorities for learning) may adopt a kind of superior moralizing or 'knowing what's good for them' that, however well intentioned, has the effect of taking away responsibility.

My position is that we have to change our management learning practices to really help learners look at their workplace practices.  This means reversing the traditional teacher-learner model to something like a workplace practice-facilitator model.  This places what is being done everyday right at the centre of knowledge production and learning.  In terms of learning practice this is likely to include the methods of live workplace observation, facilitated and self managed reflection, collaborative learning practices with others and 'just-in-time' knowledge inputs.  I think the pay-off of so doing is three-fold.  

First, it will help managers to look closely at the situation specific facts as the basis for action and performance improvement. 

Second, it will provide context-specific knowledge about how things get done: in this place, at this time, by these people, in these specific circumstances. 

Third, the development of meta-learning skills will be emancipatory and a boost to self confidence.  I have found through my practice that by encouraging learners to reflect deeply upon what it is that they already know helps to affirm and provides a platform from which they can then develop and follow their learning interests. 

The development of these threads is at the heart of my own practice development and continuing critical inquiry.  I will write more about this in future posts.