Observing Practice

 

In my last post I said that 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.  I want to say more about this in this post and the implications for learning practice.

Workplace studies - what sort of things have been observed?

Here is a small sample of studies that have been done using ethnographical techniques.  I've added the references in case you would like to search for the source material.   

Subject	Reference
Call centre work	Whalen, J., Whalen, M and Henderson, K. (2002) ‘Improvisational choreography in teleservice work’. British Journal of Sociology. 53 (2): 239-258
Production scheduling in a print factory	Button, G. and Sharrock, W. (2002) ‘Operating the production calculus: ordering a production system in the print industry’ British Journal of Sociology, 54 (2): 275-289.
Use of humour in a MBA classroom	Fox, S (2008) ‘That Miracle of Familiar Organizational Things’: Social and Moral Order in the MBA Classroom’. Organization Studies, 29: 733-761.
CCTV surveillance	Heath, C., Luff, P. and Svensson, M.S. (2002) ‘Overseeing organizations: configuring action and its environment’. British Journal of Sociology, 53 (2): 181-201.
Use of management information	Hughes, J.A., Rouncefield, M. and Tolmie, P. (2002) ‘Representing knowledge: instances of management information’. British Journal of Sociology, 53 (2): 221-238.
Strategy production by senior managers/executives	Samra-Fredericks, D. (2004) ‘Understanding the Production of ‘Strategy’ and ‘Organization’ through Talk Amongst Managerial Elites’. Culture and Organization, 10 (2): 125-141.
Care home work	Conklin, J. (2010) 'Learning in the Wild'. Action Learning Research and Practice 7 (2): 151-166.

 What do these studies tell us? 

As you can see the range of topics is diverse, but what interests me is that each paper works really hard to show, in detail, something about what is happening in the workplace.  None of the papers try to generalise or theorise, as this is not their purpose.  Instead, their aim is to look closely at the fine-grained details of work, in a specific context, with just the people who were involved at that time.

For example, Whalen et al’s paper on call centre work gives a revealing insight into how a telephone service representative organises their workspace to provide co-ordinated and timely information to fulfil orders for products.  What it shows is a range of artful practices being used that have to be produced each time a customer calls.  Daniel Barenboim, the famous conductor and pianist, said something similar about musicians and music; every time they play a piece of music they are starting completely from scratch, but with the added knowledge of last time.

By approaching the study of work in this way, it challenges the idea of work as routine and helps to reveal how people are doing things, dynamically and in response to contexts that are changing minute by minute. 

How might this affect learning practice?

Right at the heart of what I'm exploring is how to place everyday workplace practice centre-stage so that it can be a direct source of learning.  Traditional learning theory and practice endorses, through its methods and assumptions, the valuation of abstract knowledge over actual workplace practice.  This doesn't make much sense to me given that we know that most of our learning comes from experience. So the studies I've highlighted show what there is to be learned from observing the work itself.  This means getting right into the detail of what's happening rather than glossing over things and making generalisations.

Here are 3 suggestions for practice:

 1) Teach observational research skills

As the guys at the Internet Time Alliance say: Work is learning and learning is the work. We teach a whole range of managerial skills like coaching, listening and influencing but nothing on observation and I'm not quite sure why this is.  Just standing back and observing the workplace action for 30 minutes will provide a lot of useful data for learning. However, to do this objectively does require some skills and knowledge on methods and practices.

  2) Use video and audio to produce documentaries of the workplace

We could make management learning much more interesting by inviting managers to make 'scratchy' videos and audio diaries of real workplace action and then share them using organisation-wide social learning platforms like Microsoft SharePoint.  This would give lots of opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, at scale, in the actual context of the organisation rather than the abstracted experience of the classroom.  

Some companies are already doing something like this, for example, take a look at BT's Dare2Share which is an internal You Tube site.

  3) Produce learning content based on talk-based materials

Once you have got the talk and video based materials, these could then be introduced into formal course settings as well.  Dr. Dalvir Samra-Fredericks at Nottingham Trent University in the UK uses her talk based studies with business school students to show the everyday messy and ambiguous nature of senior managers developing strategy as a counterpoint to the traditional theory. 

Conclusion

There is much that happens in the workplace everyday that is seen but unnoticed, simply because it is part of the unconscious ‘way we do things round here’. My position is that understanding how work is done, in situ, will really help move things on in learning practice because it will enable people to pay close attention to their own practice and also see how others are doing things.  And the good news is that we are living through a time where the tools to enable us to produce work-based materials are cheap and quick to share. 

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.