The Keys to Mobile Technology User-Adoption: Motivation, Excitement and Value

Maintaining momentum after a program launch is often problematic. The core implementation team disbands and moves on. Energy flags. What is needed instead is the enduring support of communities of practice, populated not only with rising stars, but also with the normal mix of personalities. That means we will have to deal with a normal variability in commitments to the new direction and in the willingness to absorb change. The sad reality is that most team efforts don’t live long beyond the spark and fire of the original burst of change. Click the play button below to listen to the full podcast.

Creativity is an elusive beast: turning up in the most unusual places, but also liable to be scared off like a rabbit at the first sight of a dog. You can’t just assume that it will turn up and, once it’s there, you can’t assume it will be good. In terms of project management, it’s like a flood: something you can kind of plan for, but don’t really fully appreciate the severity of until the cold water pours over the top of your rain boots. Good learning solutions are often creative ones. Creative within a framework that is: according to a great learning methodology. Whilst learning doesn’t have to be structured, often within corporate settings it is, and in this context we want learning to be creative, to make it interesting, but rigorous, and to ensure it’s valid and actionable. So what is creativity and how do we capture it? Creativity may mean ‘not just doing it the same as last time’. It may mean coming at a subject from a different angle. It may simply mean great storytelling or great technical design. In fact, it means all of these things and more. It doesn’t mean ‘expensive’, and it certainly shouldn’t just mean using lots of flashy animations or special effects. Creativity may mean we use lots of clever features, but just using clever features doesn’t make something creative. It may just make it incoherent. If it’s so hard to define creativity, how can we capture it? Who is responsible for the creativity within your project? Is it one person, or is there a shared responsibility and, if so, can you manage collective creativity? Or are you being too creative and need more of an anchor in structured reality? It’s easy for the cart to overrun the horse and pull us along in a frenetic and slightly terrifying ride! At a practical level, I think we need to recognise that creative solutions are often more engaging than uncreative ones because they capture our interest and attention. Having accepted this, we need to ensure that we create space for creativity to flourish. We may not be able to guarantee that it grows, but we can help to ensure that it’s not choked by weeds. The things that typically stifle creativity are process and review. Process can deliver the structure for a piece of learning without ever thinking about creativity and review can easily take something creative and neuter it. So we need to counter this by retaining a broad perspective: we need process and we need review, but we need to be able to rise above this and look down to ask the question: is this still creative? Is this still effective? Creativity should not be something we seek to deploy, it should be at the heart of what we do: creativity but with rigour. Producing learning experiences that feel attractive, that capture your imagination and attention, but which also have the structure that helps us learn. They set a context, they demonstrate what we have to do and give us room to explore and reflect on this. They just do it in a creative way and then help us take individual footsteps from the learning back into our everyday reality.  

Searching for art that "speaks" to me is very similar to taking training. I am pulled in when the course resonates with my emotional sense and doesn’t just talk to my intellectual mind…click the play button below to listen to the full podcast.

How often have you attended a virtual training session and really had to interact with the presenter or other members in the meeting? Think about the last time you dialed into a virtual meeting: Were you multi-tasking and only paying attention to 50% of the information that was being delivered? Be honest! Did you hear any background noise, such as a lawn mower outside? Did several people talk over each other on the phone? If you can answer yes to any of these questions, then you may be in agreement with the statistic that only one in five people consider their company to be very effective at virtual training. As companies are cutting travel budgets to attend instructor-led training, they are seeking new ways to deliver the same material virtually. Many times they will schedule a virtual training session and have the facilitator present the material over the web. How can this facilitator gauge audience participation and ensure that the three questions above do not happen in his/her training session? To start, the format of the material has to be specifically designed for virtual training; the same design that was used for instructor-led training will not work for virtual training. When designing the materials, use lots of images to convey the ideas and content, rather than text on a page. Build in short activities to engage participants every three to five minutes, such as sending chat questions, pointing to objects on the screen, and asking poll questions. Ideally, for a 60-minute virtual training session, there should be 35 minutes devoted to actual lecture and 25 minutes for interactions. Given all of these interactions, you’re probably wondering how one facilitator can be presenting material, sending out chat questions, collecting responses, and speaking on the phone all at the same time. What if a participant has a question about performing an interaction or has difficulty joining the virtual session? This is where having a moderator available will help. The moderator can help participants with technical issues, send out chat questions, ask poll questions, and review responses. It also helps to have another voice speaking on the phone to keep the session interesting. The facilitator and the moderator will control the session by asking participants to mute their phone lines until it is time to answer a question. This will eliminate any background noise and distractions on the phone. Then, in order to avoid people talking over each other, the facilitator or moderator can ask specific people to speak at certain times or raise their hand to speak. This allows the conversations to be controlled at all times and keeps the virtual session focused. There are many other best practices and tools used to facilitate a virtual training session. I hope you can now comprehend the different preparations a facilitator must make for instructor-led training vs. virtual training. Studies have shown that participants can benefit by learning from virtual training just as much as instructor-led training. Now it’s time for more companies to build strong virtual training materials and practice delivering to virtual audiences so they can see the cost savings and benefits.

Caring is often overlooked in eLearning design. If a curriculum focuses only on the analytical objectives, then the program is at risk of being interpreted by the learners as anything from traditional, boring or even negative. As organizations deal with 21st century challenges such as corporate mistrust, distributed workforces, and pressures for mobile and agile learning, learning leaders and designers can make an enormous impact on their stakeholders by using relational learning strategies as a pillar of their future curriculum design. Click the play button below to listen to the full podcast.    

In an effort to counter the effects of jet lag when I fly a conference next week, I’ve been getting up ever earlier in the morning. Singapore is nine hours ahead of me here in England, a painful transition meaning that my midnight is their nine AM. Today I was up at four and out walking soon after and, let me tell you, the world is a very different place. By habit, I am a night owl. I would much rather be up late at a gig than up early to catch a train, so heading to bed at nine PM is a struggle. But, to compensate, there’s a whole world of people and views available to me in the pre-dawn light that I normally miss. It seems as though Westbourne is serviced at around five AM. Garbage trucks, telephone engineers, grocers, coffee shop proprietors, all seem hard at work at this time. Whilst it’s alien to me, this is their reality. In learning design, we need to understand the everyday reality of the learner: if their reality is getting up to start work at five AM, we need to understand this. The only thing I know with relative certainty is that their reality is unlikely to be like mine, so I need to do some work to tell any kind of story effectively. Somewhat like a newspaper pitching its editorial choices to their readership, so we need to pitch our learning design to our learners, and a core part of this is understanding their reality: are they used to formal learning in this role? Are they office based or on the road? Will they be assessed? Will the results of this learning impact their performance review? Does anyone case what we are doing? Is English a first language? What are the cultural dynamics of messaging coming from head office? And so on. It’s a long list. But it’s not just about pitching it right; it’s about using the right tone of voice and the correct level of pragmatism. When we are responsible for a particular piece of training, it’s so easy for us to work too hard setting the context. This is important to us all for all of these very important reasons… sometimes we even get someone senior in a suit to explain all this to people. If we spend so much effort setting this context, then we fail to recognise the everyday reality of the learner. This will only be one piece of learning amongst many that they do. Many will have a similar context and some may be concurrent. Is the guy in the suit part of my everyday reality? Does he have any relevance to me and my role? If not, why am I listening? Unless we subscribe to the positional view of authority, then do I listen just because he is in a suit, or my boss? Understanding everyday reality is not incidental to building successful learning: it’s integral, essential. For a story to have coherence, to have relevance, to stand a chance of being read and understood, it needs to have the right pitch, the right tone of voice. If your reality is early mornings and mine is late nights, we only have a narrow period to cross over in the middle of the day; we have to do everything we can to maximise this crossover and use it effectively. Originally published on Julian Stodd’s Learning Blog.

We are all experiencing a great transformation in our personal and consumer lives with the onslaught of amazing social platforms and functional utilities on our mobile devices. We see it every day, from apps that find us lunch and the best prices on products to ones that show us the constellations in the night sky and play our favorite music. Our amazement regarding these technologies is warranted, but we are slowly shifting from amazement to expectation. We are now expecting that there is an app for whatever we need and expecting to be empowered in a way that we weren’t just yesterday. At a recent business conference, I turned down the standard set of pamphlets, maps, and agendas, assuming I would be able to find it all on my phone. I was not disappointed. Is the transformation we’re experiencing in our personal lives being replicated in our workplace? For most, it is not. For both technical and philosophical reasons, some organizations—and some entire industries—have not been able to fully take advantage of these advances as quickly as they happen in the personal and consumer environments. Where adoption is more readily happening, it is usually in core business applications and rarely in learning and performance support solutions. Going social and mobile with learning. Social and mobile modalities are not new. We’ve been discussing them for over a decade. What is new, however, is the question for Learning and Development organizations: "Is there an app for learning and performance support in our workplaces, and are we using it effectively to meet our users/learners’ expectations?" First, let’s recap what we mostly agree on regarding these modalities: Mobile Mobile’s flexibility for the user/learner to engage outside of work and during non-business hours helps both the user and the organization tremendously. Short, digestible snippets work best. Mobile devices are perfect for communicating system or process changes and the resulting impacts and workarounds. Mobile devices are best suited for instances in a performance support mode when you are troubleshooting or trying to remember.  Social The power to connect across time, geography, culture, role, and business area is undeniable with social media. Social platforms very quickly allow a body of knowledge to be built, as opposed to dreaded email silos that trap nuggets of learning forever between the sender and receiver only. Success has been seen when allowing: Users to Rate Subject matter experts to Curate Business leaders to Moderate Corporate instances of social networks rarely discuss politics, lunch, or dancing cats. Blending the new with integral parts of the old. There are many more discussion points to consider regarding both social and mobile, but the key topic that must be addressed is that neither social nor mobile can stand alone. Just like ILT or WBT rarely provide a complete solution, neither will social or mobile when it comes to achieving a set of learning objectives surrounding a new initiative or desired performance shift. While these modalities do not provide a complete solution, they do provide significant affordances to positively influence learning and performance support solutions and will go a long way in boosting user engagement. GP Strategies is using the concept of Agile Learning to improve performance through the integration of both social and mobile as key elements of outcome-based learning campaigns. The flexibility and portability of these platforms make them perfect for tailoring programs to specific audiences and quickly updating program content based on learner feedback and changing business conditions. Look for more info regarding Agile Learning and outcome-based learning campaigns coming soon.  In the meantime, let us know how you’ve altered traditional ILT/WBT interventions by incorporating mobile and social into your curriculum/program design.

Recently I’ve attended two business conferences and two smaller gatherings of learning leaders. I’ve spoken with individuals who are initiative stakeholders, technical team leaders, and training directors about many of the same themes, including:   Workplace knowledge Its shelf life How to easily capture and disseminate it Lateral moves as a preferred professional career path Advances in the workplace happen so rapidly that if workers don’t continually educate themselves, their knowledge may become out of date. If we, as learning professionals, don’t evaluate and update the organization’s education resources and methods, learners will figure out their own avenues, many of them informal and collaborative. Years ago I was trained as an engineer and worked in that field for a decade before making a lateral move into consulting. Would I be equipped to return to work as an engineer today after years of doing other work? Probably not, unless I could refresh myself on the basics, and then fold in what has changed. Sounds like either a daunting task or an opportunity, depending on your outlook. But today, I’d have at my fingertips things like YouTube videos and online communities of practice that weren’t accessible "back in the day." When building or refreshing your skills, you add layers and build upon your foundational knowledge. Most of us experienced this gain moving from K through 12, and it’s held true for me in my professional and personal life. I draw analogies when I’m learning something new—analogies make the new tasks seem more familiar and easier to absorb. I heard an energy company retiree say that millennials actively seek out many different experiences in the workplace, versus starting in one organization and building a base of knowledge in that "silo." They aren’t opposed to lateral moves, and in fact, they volunteer for special assignments. The retiree’s concern was, "Does that type of movement help or hurt the corporate knowledge base?" I would argue that it helps as lateral moves give workers exposure across silos, not just inside of them. One could argue that is what consultants may enjoy about their work—the cycle of meeting new colleagues, gaining exposure to a new corporate culture, transitioning knowledge back into the organization, and then repeating the process somewhere else. I know of many people, millennials and other generations, who actively position themselves for future changes—purposeful lateral moves—so that the cadence of their work will better fit with their personal passions and obligations. So in closing, I challenge you to examine your environment, professional or personal: What’s the shelf life of your knowledge? What are the measures you have in place to capture and share knowledge? What types of moves are you planning (or dreaming about) in the next 5-10 years?

"The world is drowning in vast amounts of data!" - Mark Hurd, President, Oracle Software October 22, 2012 One of my key tests to evaluate where a technology trend is in terms of passing the tipping point and going mainstream is my extended family. Fortunately, they are not deeply immersed in the technology sector, so they are not exposed to marketing smoke and vaporware, and are not early adopters. However, they are all employed in organizations that would be impacted greatly by these trends. With regards to big data and the Cloud, I get blank stares from some of them, and some "boilerplate" gibberish from most of the others, but the majority claim to have heard the terms mentioned at work. That’s the beginning of significance on the trend for me! So, the buzz is spreading. The marketing hype is reaching astronomical scale. October’s Harvard Business Review cover highlights Big Data and its impact on the "Art of Management." The real caution point for me is that, yes, there is irrefutable evidence that data is growing exponentially. In fact, there are forecasts that state 50 billion devices will be supplying data back to businesses and enterprises by the end of the decade. However, there is scant evidence of companies either implementing big data analytics on a wide-scale basis or making significant ROI on their efforts. I am not saying that it’s not happening, but the big data vendors are doing most of the presenting of fictitious "case studies" and the potential benefits of big data applications versus actual companies reporting "case studies." In some cases, it’s because they are keeping those successes "internal" to maintain competitive advantage, but for the most part, it’s because we are still in the infancy stage and not everyone has the horsepower to attack it on a grand scale, even large companies. That, combined with the scarcity of data scientists, is holding many efforts back. For L&D, there are strong implications as this trend continues to build steam. It will impact every facet of your operations. CEOs will be asking for "actionable recommendations" to drive business outcomes based on the data in your LMSs and Talent Management databases. In many cases, they will expect that through the investments they have made in learning infrastructure over the last five years, combined with the existing resources/skills/competencies in the organization, they should to be able to gather, extract, assimilate, and analyze the learning data. They will be surprised at the pushback! The most succinct clarification of what big data means came from Gregory T. Huang’s report on Xconomy’s the Future of Big Data event in Boston: Depending on whom you ask, "big data" is either: A. Bullshit (Brad Feld) B. No substitute for judgment (David Friend) C. The marriage of corporate data with external data (Chris Lynch) D. Data that’s growing faster than Moore’s law (Richard Dale) What’s your answer? A, B, C, D, or All of the Above? So whether you are dipping your toes or beginning to feel like you are drowning, big data has arrived and you will be expected to swim in the deep part of the pool at some point. Get ready!