Performance development - moving away from the garage refit model

Some of my work includes programmes for managers in which I introduce them to the 70:20:10 model and its implications for how to think about development.  What interests me is that whilst managers have no difficulty in accepting the premise of the model - in fact there is almost a sense in which I might be stating something rather obvious - when I dig deeper their practices are somewhat wide of the mark.

I'm blogging about this because it feels really important to me to challenge what's being taken-for-granted.  To be straightforward, based on what I hear people talk about, development planning feels half-hearted, an after-thought, individualistic, transactional, about formal interventions, for self-starters or the career-minded only, and, rather crucially, separate from performance. 

If it is true that most of what we know, or can do, derives from 'learning by doing'  it follows that most development activities, which are linked to performance, should be about the work and done in the workplace setting.

Why is this not so?  Here are some of the things that I notice when I talk to managers:

Performance Development Plan = appraisal, not development. 

Notwithstanding the efforts by HR departments to emphasise the dual purpose of the PDP process to both review and rate historical performance and to plan development, I notice that managers see this process as being solely about  giving the performance rating.  The machinations of the rating process, with its levelling discussions and forced distributions, tip the balance towards appraisal and away from development.

   

Development = formal development

Discussions about development usually mean discussions about course nominations.  This taken-for-granted is deeply embedded and hard to shift.  The analogy of development being like a garage workshop fits well with how many managers talk about this topic – “remove a group of managers/team members from the workplace, repair or fit higher performance parts as instructed, lubricate if necessary and return to service.”

Development  = for special occasions only

Not only is development seen as a formal activity, it's also for special occasions only, related to a change in responsibilities, or the implementation of a new system or legislation.  If this is right, then I suspect that part of the issue is that workplace development just happens naturally within the normal course of everyday work.  As such, it's not being noted as development activity and therefore it's existence and purpose is being glossed over in the workflow.   

Development = '95% pull'

I notice that the narrative about development in organisations is that managers should 'pull' not 'push'.  I think this comes from the notion that development is an individualistic endeavour.  Clearly, individuals do have a responsibility here, especially when it comes to following their learning interests, but managers are responsible for driving performance and this must include setting development plans linked to the work itself. 

'They aren't career minded so there's very little that we can plan for' 

Many managers talk about only being able to have conversations about development with those who are self-starters or career minded.  They talk quite disparagingly about members of their teams, often younger or older workers, who just want to do the job, don't want to progress and who show little interest in being developed.  This distinction isn't helpful either for the organisation or the individual.  

Conclusion

I am finding that talking to managers about how we learn and stimulating their thinking about the practical things that can be done to plan work-based development is helping to change perspectives.

However, my reflection is that the taken-for-granteds are deeply embedded, especially by the ways in which the performance development process works in practice. 

Much more work needs to be done to help managers shift their thinking and their practice.  If there is an answer, it lies somewhere in making the connection to the work itself.  And as I have written about before - see observing practice - the root of this in learning to observe the work and to place it centre-stage.    

 


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HOW are people learning?

 HOW!?

In his address to the Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco in March 2012, John Seely Brown (JSB) said a number of interesting things about the changes required in learning to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.  For the transcript follow this link.  For an animated video summary of the presentation follow this link.

Here are some key points on which I want to comment, which I see as fundamental to the debate about change:

• 'Just being able to learn as individuals is not enough'
• 'How do we invest in new types of social practices and new institutional forms and new skills?'
• 'What are the social practices?'
• 'How do you participate in the ever moving flow of activities?'

Learning as an 'everyday' participation in ever moving activities

The question 'how do we participate in the ever moving flow of activities' is the right one to be asking.  The emphasis that I want to make in this post is about the 'how'.  And not just how do we participate but also how we learn.

Right now in the workplace, people are participating with each other and learning collaboratively.  This is being done through a process of meaning making that's accomplished through talk: day-to-day, everyday talk about work; done under pressing conditions of time and space to achieve some kind of understanding to enable something to be done; by people who are uniquely skilled to understand the context in that place, at that time.

When we look at work in this way it is irreducible from learning.  People are learning continually and ongoingly through a constant web of interacting elements.  

This web is now being extended by the effect of social media.  I think what we are seeing is the same  process of meaning making in action but amplified on a bigger stage with the opportunities to make new connections over and above what would have been possible in more cellular places of learning, e.g. a meeting, a schoolroom (JSB's reference), a 1:1 conversation across the desk, a phone call.  This process is also generating new institutional forms and skills.

Learning as a social practice

Whilst John Seely Brown's encouragement to, say, do more 'playing' and 'tinkering' might be pointing us in the right direction, these are glosses that miss out on lots of details and therefore we don't have an understanding of exactly how these practices work.

As a social practice learning is constantly variable.  However, this variability also creates complexity, which is a problem for the field and hence why we use abstracted notions as a shorthand to create a sense of structure and certainty when, in reality each learning accomplishment is rather specific to the context and circumstances of the setting.  Harold Garfinkel, the father of ethnomethodolgy, described this as 'just-this-ness' as a way of explaining his attention to the 'work' being done in everyday settings and of their resistance to generalisation.

An example of a social practice in learning that has widespread acceptance and appeal is coaching.  As a practice people who take part in it say that it helps, which is evidence of something, but what?   The question I am exploring is exactly how does it work.  If it helps learning, what are the methods in use that enable this?  In fact, coaching is a composite of multiple practices like questioning, listening, sensing, probing and so on which are themselves glosses.  To be able to explicate them would require detailed analysis in situ and in vivo, i.e. in the place and with the people involved and taking into account the social context.  

My point is that if this is true of coaching, or of other accepted practices like action learning, or neuro linguistic programming, then it is also true for the social practices that are now evolving, which might also include playing and tinkering. i.e. exactly how these things work is important but they remain unstudied. 

How is this relevant to learning in the 21C?

The premis of JSB, and many other commentators besides, is that the world is changing rapidly, e.g. the half-life of skills being 5 years and so on, and therefore that learning and approaches to it need to change, be that social practices, new institutional forms or new skills.   

My position is that to understand what and how to change we should treat our current social practices as interesting in their own right and to avoid taking them for granted. This means spending time following the action of learning, especially the everyday always-occuring learning in the workplace, to find out what is being done and how.  This will inform and explicate the deeply social nature of our learning practices and enable clearer prescriptions for change.  

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Do we need management courses?

To what extent do we still need courses to teach managers?

I've been thinking about this question for a while now and then the other day I read an interesting blog post by Clive Shepherd 'Bundle resources and you may not need courses' that talked about this topic.

In Clive's work he says he is increasingly being asked to assemble bundles of resources that might include all of the following:

• Web articles, written in an engaging, journalistic manner, rather like blogs.
• More formal reference material, in HTML or PDF format.
• Decision aids, perhaps coded in Flash or JavaScript, but sometimes more simply provided as spreadsheets.
• Self-analysis questionnaires and perhaps quizzes.
• Short, simple videos and screencasts.
• Mini-scenarios that allow the user to check whether they can put what they have learned into practice.

My interest is whether the idea of bundling resources like this represents a prima facie case of a shift from the course (f2f or virtual) to resources?  My hunch is that this might be beginning to happen and, if this is so, then I think it's a really important turn towards what John Seely Brown calls cultivating the entrepreneurial learner.

In Clive's posting he makes the point, accurately in my view, that we still need something like courses, or at least spaces where people can meet, be that f2f or virtually to share ideas, get feedback or meet experts.  Even so, I still find myself challenging the continuing assumption of the need for courses, especially in management development. 

My own research on how managers learn showed that managers don't rely on courses to any great extent.  In fact, in my sample, they made no reference to courses at all when asked about how they had learnt to do the things that they did well..  This finding was supported by a more thorough piece of analysis done over 30 years ago by John Burgoyne and Roger Stuart at Lancaster University in 1976.  This research has been written up in the Manager's Guide to Self Development by Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell.

Notwithstanding Clive's observation, my own experience is that f2f courses remain a central part of the formal provision in many organisations.  And if this is still the case, then why is this?  Some of my questions are these:

• Does it, for example, reflect a tacit distrust in the assumptions of the 70:20:10 model?  In other words, although we do learn most of what we know from experience and our peers, is it that this type learning is too random to be sufficient to be an explicit element of the learning strategy to meet the needs of an organisation?
• Is it that the taken-for-granted role of managers to control and direct then leads to approaches that 'push' learning through courses rather than relying on learners 'pulling' on a bundle of resources?  
• Is it a coded way of saying 'we aren't yet brave enough' to cut loose and drop courses altogether, or at least to reduce their dominance? 

If courses do have a part to play, how clear are we about their purpose, what's expected from learners and the degree of control that we are prepared to release to the learner to follow their interests?

Since I have already hinted at the continuing requirement for courses, I need to help you, the reader, to make sense of where I am coming from by saying something about my interests.

How do we master our learning interests?

I consider myself a mature learner with lots of experience of many types of learning.  Notwithstanding this, I still have a continuing and emergent sense of my learning.  And as an aside, this sense of emergence has been heightened dramatically by accessing the types of resources that Clive has mentioned.  This means that my learning never feels fixed or final.  I cannot know how the connections I have made and will continue to make, will influence my practice; and therefore, how am I becoming a master of management learning (or whatever topic you might choose to insert for yourself)?  

Learning as a movement of continuing and emergent change 

Learning as a process of change is itself a movement that is continuous and emerging rather than fixed.  This shifts the focus away from two periods of stasis - as in from point A to point B - towards a continuous process of becoming.  The key learning principle that emerges, if you accept my point, is that the question 'what is there to be learned about?' shifts from one which is dictated by the course designer and sponsor to the learners themselves.

Leadership is a process that emerges from social interaction

Learning and especially leadership learning is a process that emerges from social interactions.  Therefore, it seems rather obvious to me that leadership learning should be concerned with where, how and why leadership work is organised and accomplised in situ and in vivo and not in the classroom.  This constrasts with leadership learning that is about an individualistic endeavour where individual managers are acting as if they are separate from rather than as part of the system that they are influencing.  Leadership is taught with this individualistic perspective in mind and, as a result, is 'other focused'.  This approach in unhelpful, in my view, because it works on the basis that leaders learn to learn about things that can be applied, unproblematically, to fix other people's performance problems.  In reality, it is the dynamics of the social setting that need to be examined and understood, including their part in this process.   

Conclusion

In my way of seeing things, f2f courses might actually be doing more harm than good because they privilege, in taken-for-granted ways, abstracted knowledge over actual practice. They also affirm, again in ways that are taken-for- granted, the trainer's responsibility to define what is learnt and how and not the learners themselves.

It comes down to this: which came first 'the chicken or the egg'? Do we assume that change happens by placing the responsibility for that change in the hands of 'change agents': teachers/trainers in learning-speak, to teach abstracted knowledge to those who must apply it to actual practice, or do we trust learners to decide what it is they need to know based on what's important to them?

My position is that we do need courses to support management development but that they should be about helping managers to, first, develop the skills of observation, analysis and sense making about what it is that they are doing everyday and, second, to meet either f2f or virtually, to share what they are learning, to get feedback and challenge from their colleagues and external experts.  The acquisition of management theory will form part of this but this would be better placed if it were to follow the learning derived from everday social interaction and not the other way round.

And this is where I see great merit and need for the bundling of resources described by Clive.  It would allow and expect learners to pull on resources that are of interest to their work rather than being directed, in an instrumental way, by senior managers or trainers.

 


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Videos,digital reflection and learning

I've posted before about digital reflection and it's value to the learning.

My thanks again to Steve Wheeler from University of Plymouth for a recent post on Learning by Making which affirms the value of asking learners to go through a process of producing something tangible related to their learning interests.  In Steve's example, his students were given a whole day to create a 5 minute video on a subject related directly to their course of study. 

He makes a number of interesting points:

1. The process of producing the video required the students to come up with a creative concept, produce a storyboard and script, allocate roles, find props, scout out shooting locations, record and edit.
2. Learning in this way generated spin-offs that have the potential to transfer into other areas of practice like problem solving, making judgements and trade-offs, co-operating with others, delivering to a deadline and working with finite resources.
3. That theoretical ideas and concepts, normally abstracted from day-to-day practice when taught in traditional ways, can become concrete and situated in the real-life context of the learners.
4. That the skills demonstrated through this process are those that are essential for 21C working.   

What was equally interesting was the sceptism of many of his colleagues who argued that the time could have been better spent studying text books, writing essays or undertaking practical exercises.

As ever, the debate about learning practice rumbles on and, perhaps, the sceptics have a point.  When organisations are facing a range of very challenging economic and regulatory conditions alongside pressures being exerted by customers, suppliers and politics, whether from inside or outside the organisation, the urge to stick with traditional methods is extremely powerful.

However, in 21C working practice we are seeing a shift away from hierarchies and towards networks, collaboration and the democratisation of power.  All of these have big implications for working and learning. 


Digital technologies  - audio podcats, video, blogs and wikis - provide the means by which learners can make their own learning and then amplify this by sharing it with others through the social media.

My current interest is in the production of user generated content.  Here are some links that I've found from my fellow members of the Social Learning Centre of organisations that are using user generated video content to share knowledge:

• Dixons 

• Black and Decker 

• Telus

• BT

 I think we will see more examples of this type of content because it is engaging, democratic and a valuable source of deep learning.

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Collaboration: links and resources

I've put together a selection of the links about networks, collaboration and learning that I have found helpful

You Tube video RSA Power of Networks

I like these RSA animations.  This one is packed with lots of information about the ways in which our understanding of how knowledge has evolved from simple and structured ways of understanding to the interconnectedness all things - species, eco-systems, ideas and so on, - is helpful in underlining the power of networks and networked thinking.

Research report Social Media Garden

(Thanks to Tracy Gravesande, member of the Social Collaboration Community for sharing this).

• It's a research study into social media at work
• The research approach is as interesting as the study's findings
• I liked the idea of reverse mentoring of senior leaders by younger people to help immerse them into social media practice and to experience its benefits
• Or of senior managers not needing to be active users themselves but just needing to 'get it' and support the development of social media practice in their organisations 

Slideshare  Social Internet

Lots of useful insights about the social internet by Oscar Berg

Case study article

How Nokia achieved organisational dialogue via social media (thanks to Tony Reeves, member of Social Collaboration Community for sharing this)

It's an interesting case example of social media in practice. The job title of Human Resource Director, Community and Social Media is also of interest. It's useful to note that Nokia has recognised a need for such a role and to have placed the responsibility in HR. 

Book: The Collaborative Organization: A Strategic Guide to Solving Your Internal Business Challenges Using Emerging Social and Collabroative Tools  

 

Oscar Berg has interviewed the author Jacob Morgan in his blog 

 

Blog: Social media and learning: note taking on steriods

A useful reminder by Donald Clark of the importance of note taking to enhance learning and the role of social media to share and amplify what's been learnt.

 

 

Blog: Do's and don'ts of your works social platforms 

A nice list of do's and don'ts when connecting with others at work via social media by Andrew McAfee.  The comments section is as rich and helpful as the blog itself

Teams and collaboration

I facilitated an event for 50 people from an organisation last week, the theme of which was about improving collaborative working across the functional team.  What's interesting about team awaydays like this is the tacit assumption that the participants are in fact members of a team at all.  To illustrate, the group I was working with was made up of two interconnected but separate technical disciplines, two distinct product lines and delivery channels and four geographical locations.  This means that although they might be a team in a hierarchical sense, in terms of the day-to-day each individual is focused more narrowly on smaller work units with whom they share strong links and goals.  In this context, improving collaborative working feels more abstract than concrete.  It also creates some conflicting priorities given that time is a limiting factor, i.e. is improving collaboration a choice between getting my work done and helping others?

But if work in the 21st century is about developing ourselves as a node in a network rather than as a position in a hierarchy, then this demands a significant shift in how we think about organisations and about how individuals share knowledge, connect and contribute.  On reflection, it occurs to me that the notions of teams, teamwork and team development might be reinforcing the taken-for-grantedness of the traditional view of what it means to participate with others. 

I shared Oscar Berg's collaboration pyramid because I like the distinction that Oscar has made between traditional, team-based collaboration and social collaboration.

What did I notice? 

I have made a few notes of the things that I noticed as the participants worked through the exercises I had designed for them: network analysis of intra and inter team relationships, speed-dating to share work interests and expertise, brainstorming to generate ideas to improve collaboration and a couple of experiential team games.

• Most of the current work networks are task focused and reactive rather than proactive.
• For some, more time spent networking meant a binary choice between meeting or not meeting a work-based goal.
• Even within a group that calls itself a team, many people didn't know each others names or knew names but couldn't put faces to them.
• When forced to do so through the 'speed-dating' process, people enjoyed finding out about each other and making connections to both shared interests and new ideas.
• To complete the task in one of the team exercises, participants could either speak but not see or see but not speak.  During the debrief, participants highlighted the assumptions that were being made: that everybody was feeling or seeing things exactly the same way and therefore that there was no need to share.  However, it was clear that when individuals shared their knowledge, ideas or feelings there was always somebody who could benefit from and make sense of that experience; in the lingo of the social internet we would call this narration. 
• Recognition from one of the senior managers that things need to change and that collaboration will require a different way of working relative to current ideas of hierarchy, e.g. in sharing power and ways of communicating, e.g. email and team meetings
• Concern that age is a factor in terms of whether you 'get it' or not
• Realisation that the new ways of working need to be given 'air' to develop.  This means enabling lots of ideas to flourish by letting people follow their interests and participating with like-minded others regardless of where they sit in the hierarchy.
• Frustration that 'we have been here before' and therefore what is it that's going to be different this time?
• The tendency to reinforce traditional ways of working when it comes to taking action, post-event.  I saw an interesting exchange between one of the participants and a senior manager in open forum with the former pressing the latter as to when the follow up meeting would be held to progress the ideas discussed.  This struck me as being both reinforcing of traditional hierarchies and 'other-focused'.
• Some pockets of great ideas, for example as in an action that is already being taken to develop a wiki to enable shared development of cross-team resources, e.g. documentation.
• Realisation that collaboration is more than team-working
• Encouragement from an individual who came to talk to me during a break.  He was new to the organisation and had worked in a couple of other large companies were the social internet was being used actively.  His comments were along the lines of this: "The social internet makes everything transparent.  I've seen this work in an organisation with a tough-minded high performance culture; how much more could be achieved in one where the culture is already more collaborative?"

Concluding comments

Teams and collaboration are not mutually exclusive ideas but the latter extends and challenges a traditional view of teamwork.  It also shifts our understanding of what it means to participate and contribute as an individual.

The social internet is the enabler for collaboration and in many ways this is probably the easiest thing to solve albeit that it doesn't always feel this way when it means competing for IT development time and budgets .  The tough part is in changing current working practices, loosening the ties to hierarchy and encouraging, recognising and rewarding the behaviours of sharing knowledge, connecting and contributing.  I saw plenty to encourage me: of bosses willing to give air to new ideas and to allow new ways of working to emerge, as well as a few reminders that awaydays and their action points are not ends in themselves. 

   

   

Digital reflection - an aid to developing meta-cognition

Blogging literacies

This blog from Steve Wheeler makes some interesting observations about blogging literacies.  He makes the point that blogging isn't just an extension of more traditional literacies.  An extract from his blog states:

...one of the new digital literacies bloggers need is the ability to encapsulate ideas succinctly and in a form that is accessible and engaging. Another literacy is the ability to be able to devise posts that draw an audience and provoke responses. One of the most powerful aspects of blogging is its social dimension which include open discussion. Still another is the skill of managing those responses and replying in a way that promotes further discussion and sustains the discourse. Knowledge about tagging, RSS feeds, trackback and other blogging features will enhance the presence of the blogger online.

Digital reflection

Earlier this year I met the people running a Leeds University funded project on digital reflection. They are using camera, video and audio as a form of reflection to provide a mirror image to reflect upon - a kind of distancing mechanism putting the maker into the shoes of the viewer.

Meta learning skills

In my blog post on how managers learn I commented on meta-learning skills that helps an individual develop meta-cognition, i.e. knowing what you know and knowing what you do not know.  Meta cognition includes things like creativity, mental agility and balanced learning habits and skills.
 
Implications for management learning practice


My position is that we have to reverse how we approach management learning to really help learners look at their workplace practices ahead of, if not in place of, traditional methods that favour abstracted theory.  Everyday workplace practice contains a great deal of context-specific information about how things get done and I believe it should be placed at the centre of knowledge production and learning.  

The tools to do this are emerging all the time - Swivl is a video tool using an iPhone on a rotating tripod.  And MIT Media Labs have developed sociometric badges.  So alongside the development of blogging literacies are the skills to use video and audio to observe and record the workplace action.    

My interest is in helping managers to:

• Look closely at the situation specific facts as the basis for action and performance improvement
• Create context-specific knowledge about how things get done: in this place, at this time, by these people, in these specific circumstances 
• Boost self confidence by helping to affirm what it is they already know or are doing
• Provide a platform from which they can then develop and follow their learning interests.