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It’s obvious that our world is undergoing changes that are far beyond advances in organizational learning and development…but some of the similarities are apparent.

Business 2.o’s recent cover read “The Next Disruptors:  Meet 11 Companies Whose Breakthroughs Will Change Everything.”  In it we meet businesses that are tackling everything from software to lending to advertising.

The common thread through all seems to be individualization.  Consumers today are becoming more and more catered to and as a result are receiving products and services that are more refined to meet their needs.  We get what we want instead of taking what we’re given.

• Advertising:  Most people were forced to watch commercials on TV breaks because they didn’t want to miss what was “up next” - TiVO has changed that forever and advertisers are now forced to rely on products placed in the actual shows.  Think there’s a market there?  Hamet Watt does.  His company NextMedium “automates and standardizes the process of product placement in TV shows, movies, and videogames.” 
• The two players mentioned in the technology space are Coghead and NetVibes.  Both are built on the philosophy of end-users creating exactly what is right for them.  With NetVibes, more for the individual, “users can rapidly change the look of their start page, select content, add RSS feeds, and custom-build features from other Netvibes users.”  While with Coghead, more for organizations, users “who can code a simple Excel macro should have little trouble using Coghead to create even sophisticated enterprise apps like logistics trackers, CRM programs, or project management systems.”
• And then there’s lending.  A company by the name of Zopa has created a peer-to-peer model for people to lend and borrow money that cuts out the bank, gives lower rates to borrowers and a return to individuals as lenders.  Brilliant! 

These three examples reflect the progressive trends bubbling up in learning and development.  No longer do participants want to sit in a class when much of the information being presented doesn’t pertain to them.  They want to ‘fast-forward’ to what matters.  They want the option to customize things just they way they need or like them.  And, they get most of what they need from their peers. 

Hence the popularity of podcasting, social networking sites, nano-learning, workflow learning, mobile learning and communities of practice.  Take out the middle-men, edit out the commercials, let us get the information to do our jobs when we need it and how we like it.

In the coming years I’m sure we’ll see this trend of customer customization only grow.  As societies figure out that they control what the market gives them, more and more we will be demanding just what we need.  The field of learning and development is paralleling these changes and what is now considered traditional training will be so 1.o.

I have just returned to my room after the first day of the CLO Academy in Lansdowne, VA.  The sessions started at 5pm so I’ve only seen a glimpse of what we’re we will be experiencing but so far so good.

At the orientation session we were told that our time here will largely be playing the role of consultant’s with a fictitious firm.  I don’t know much more about it yet but if I did I wouldn’t write about it - you’ll have to experience it for yourself. 

Following orientation we were introduced to Frank J. Anderson who is the President of Defense Acquisition University.  Frank talked about his experience at DAU and how he has guided this organization (with a budget of $120 billion - yes billion) to be a world-class learning organization.  His stories and examples were amazing yet somehow easily understandable to an audience that cannot comprehend overseeing a budget, staff and responsibility the size of Frank’s.  I was thilled to hear Frank mention terms such as Communities of Practice and Action Learning - he told the group he had not come from a learning and development background but had surrounded himself with people that were experts in it - he clearly selected a talented team.

CLO Academy is really taking advantage of the informal learning opportunities here.  During dinner I ate at a small table with other participants and with a faculty member that is also a learning executive with Microsoft. 

The final activity was a ‘Fireside Chat.’  A voluntary session where we sat in a circle, drank wine and did a freeform exchange of ideas from all of our different sets of experience.  Frank Anderson loosely led the discussion but the group largely set the course of what we talked about. 

More to come from me - but not tonight.  It’s late and I still have my consulting homework to do…

Want to know how other learning and development professionals would respond to your questions?

TDF (Training Director’s Forum) e-Net is a free newsletter put out by Training Magazine.  In each edition they ask for input from readers on a question posed by a reader.  The following edition will have some of the responses by individuals as well as some vendors. 

In today’s edition the topics were ‘Getting Managers Involved’ and ‘Sales Training Resources.’  One characteristic of collective group intelligence is that you have to sort out what works for you - I sometimes require a grain of salt as I read but I have found many useful nuggets in past issues.

Subscribe here if interested.

In a Chief Learning Officer magazine article titled “People, the Neglected Part of Technology”, author David Miller explains his perspective on how learning and knowledge management should be integrated with the implementation of new technologies, such as a new ERP package (i.e. SAP).  He even provides a specific statistic from the Gartner Group that says, “when 17 percent of the total program budget is spent on these initiatives the chances of success go up significantly.”

I found David’s points to be applicable beyond tech implementations and to all of organizational learning.  I like reading articles where I find myself subconsciously nodding my head in agreement as I read and that happened numerous times throughout this article.

David calls on the combination of the usuals for learning such as “telling the learner, showing the learner and letting them try” and adds to that the elements that will support the more informal channels that allow people to build on what was formally designed for them.  He suggests strengthening the network, cultivating communities of practice and providing just-in-time access to information that people can call upon at the moment it is needed. 

Doing the above creates what David calls a “culture of shared experiences” allowing organizations to capture the often elusive tacit knowledge of how work really gets done.  This results in people having access to the information they need as opposed to “sterile, clinical information found in manuals and training courses.”  This concept can be applied to any training, regardless of the topic.

Follow David’s advice and you’ve got the diverse learning and development portfolio that will do more than just allow you to implement technology effectively - it will put you on the fast track to being a true learning organization.  How will you know if you’ve done it correctly?  David advocates the use of a balanced scorecard for establishing and assessing the metrics associated with the learning initiative (nod, nod).

Training Outsourcing recently added forums to its website, allowing visitors to “find solutions…exchange ideas.”  It looks like the first posts were only about two weeks ago so don’t expect much content just yet but they’re definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Their first guest was Tracy Cox, Director of Performance Consulting for Raytheon Professional Services.  He led a webinar titled “Creating Business Value Through Social Network Analysis” for TrainingOutsourcing.com recently.  (A free registration is required to view the webinar or participate in the forums mentioned above.)  Since the webinar, Tracy has been visiting the Training Outsourcing.com forums and discussing social network analysis and how it can help with communities of practice, knowledge transfer, informal learning and the overall corporate learning function.

A recent report in Chief Learning Officer magazine stated that 90% of all sales training programs resulted in only moderate increases in sales and those increases lasted for just a very brief period of time (90-120 days). 

The report was compiled by ES Research (ESR) Group and it lists some specific findings; the main message, though, is that most sales training doesn’t stick.

For organizations looking for sales training, ESR’s report confirms that many vendors can fill the need of a training event that will boost sales for a brief period.  I encourage people to look at how a training vendor will sustain the momentum created in training. 

Can the vendor cultivate a community of practice for the sales positions?  Will they seed a knowledge management repository to capture the best practices of participants as they take the foundational concepts and make them their own?  How about action learning assignments for sales managers that have them optimize the sales function within the operation of the rest of the company?  How can the networks of informal learning be supported around the initial sales training?

There are countless things that could be done that would extend the effectiveness of a sales training initiative.  I believe that the selection of a training supplier takes a back seat to exploring some of the options that can be implemented that would complement the content that is delivered.

P.S. Sales training certainly has a high profile due to its direct link to organizational performance but the lessons learned from this report could be applied to any area of learning.

I was born and raised in St. Petersburg, FL and now I call Denver, CO home.

I actually just returned from FL last night; just ahead of the impending Tropical Storm Ernesto.  During my years in FL I saw my fair share of heavy rain storms.  They typically came in quickly and often resulted in flash floods through the streets in my neighborhood.  As a child it was always fun to ride your bike through flooded streets and look for the high water marks on homes and trees. 

As an adult I learned that these downpours were little fun and little benefit for much of anything, though.  Sewers couldn’t handle the volume of water, hence the flooding and runoff.  Plants weren’t able to do much with it either; many of them wound up washed away or damaged as a result of the current or the sheer volume of water. 

We don’t typically experience that kind of rain in CO.  Prior to my latest FL trip we enjoyed some (unusual) days of drizzling rain here in Denver.  Although not enough to quench the thirst of many plants in Denver’s arid climate, it got me thinking about the contrast of these two approaches of nature and how it relates to organizational learning.

Many organizations provide their employees with a downpour of learning.  Coming down in sheets, these learning downpours cause the drainage systems of participants to overflow and the majority of the learning ends up as run off.  It does little to provide the knowledge needed to grow; rather it typically floods people with too much information and can be an intimidating current.  Have you ever been prepped for a session by the words ‘firehose’ or ’slingshot’?  You probably experienced a downpour.

Just like rain, the best method for learning to be absorbed and utilized is when it is delivered as a drizzle.  Falling lightly, in small drops and over a longer period of time, a drizzle of learning ensures that participants have ample time to absorb one drop before having to consume another. 

Organizations can transition from a downpour to a drizzle of learning by investing their training dollars in things that support people’s natural tendency to learn.  Communities of Practice, informal learning, nano-learning, action learning, JIT learning, podcasting, rapid e-learning and mobile learning are just a few examples of different approaches that can be blended to create the ideal mix that can be absorbed by participants. 

A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.

This is the basic underpinning to the concept of Net Present Value (NPV) in finance.  Given the option, businesses are going to want their money in their own hands until the last possible second.  The more time a company can hold on to their money, the more of a return the money can generate for the company. 

This is the reason for some magazines offering subcriptions that steadily reduce as the years go on if you pay for them today.  They want that money now!  Even if it’s less than the full subscription you would have paid in three years, they would rather have it today to improve cashflow, invest, etc.

We discussed NPV in the Level 6: Beyond ROI class while I was at the CLO Institute in January.  Ever since then I’ve been playing with the idea of NPV and how it relates to methods of learning that don’t fall under the category of ‘traditional.’ 

I decided to write after reading the July edition of Education Signals.  One section of the report was about the ’Top 20 Companies in the Training Outsourcing Industry’ that is compiled by TrainingOutsourcing.com.  In it, the authors share the following data points:

“The largest percentage of revenue from the leading players came from content development (35%) and training delivery (30%) services.”

Content design/development obviously comes at or near the beginning of a training outsourcing initiative.  That means that over 1/3 of the money of contracts is in the hands of the training supplier soon after the project begins.    

If I were in a position to be hiring a training outsourcing firm, I would look for a deal where the fees weren’t so front-loaded.  I would want to keep my money as long as I could and let it make more money for me. 

Enter informal learning (i.e. communities of practice, blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc.).  As illustrated in this post from Jay Cross, and as others have been preaching, much of learning doesn’t come from ‘content.’  It comes through the informal and unscheduled channels of an organization.

Informal learning may have an additional advantage.  Since there isn’t near the level of design/development required for informal methods as there is for more formal events such as workshops and e-learning modules, a company that was buying these services from an outsourcing company would pay less up front.  This allows them to keep their money longer and let it make more money for them.

Although I’ve only cited one report that I’m basing this post on, I came from the instructional design world.  We charged crazy fees (usually way more than 35% of the total contract) for design/development at my old firm and that was the first thing the client paid for.  I also realize that there is a need for some structured content in a company’s learning and development plans - I just think it should be provided in minimal chunks.

I’m suggesting services that would be a double win for companies purchasing training outsourcing.  With more informal elements in the mix to create a more diverse learning portfolio the client would not only receive more effective learning and development, they would pay less up front and get to make money from the money that they would have spent on instructional design and development fees.

Note:  I’m consciously not addressing the area where training outsourcing firms make the second most amount of money - the 30% from delivery of training services.  Informal learning, by nature, requires less delivery than its traditional counterpart.  For this post, though, I wanted to emphasize the benefits of not paying design/development fees up front.