Surviving and thriving in today’s dynamic workplace demands one thing above all else: having your head screwed on straight about career development.  The mixed messages and ever-changing expectations have left many employees genuinely befuddled. So, here’s a guide to the mindsets that will make sense out of the complex environment in which most of us work and provide guidelines for enhancing career satisfaction and results. Old mindset #1: For decades we’ve envisioned career success as the predictable progression from one role to another, always upward (and normally on schedule every 18 months) toward that ideal job (and corner office) in the sky. New mindset #1: Lose the ladder! It no longer exists… and it hasn’t for some time. After years of belt-tightening, outsourcing, right-sizing (and all of the other ‘zings!), organizations are leaner, layers have been dramatically slimmed down, and the opportunities to move up are less plentiful. But, that doesn’t mean that career development is dead. In fact, quite the opposite… especially for those who are willing to expand their perspective beyond the traditional vertical focus to include a scan horizontally.  Today’s career development environment looks more like a rock-climbing wall than a ladder, with opportunities up, over, around, and down in countless interesting combinations. This more fluid and lateral approach offers many more opportunities for growth than the ladder ever could. Old mindset #2: In days gone by, the organization, HR, or the boss took the lead around career development, doling out opportunities to the worthy (lucky?) few. New mindset #2: Today, individuals must own their own career development. Employees can no longer be the passive consumers of career development services. Everyone needs to take the lead, set the pace, determine the goals and then actively co-create the career development activities and results they are looking for. Managers can help facilitate the process but no one else is responsible for our professional growth. Period. Old mindset #3: Career development is synonymous with movement. New desk. New department. New business card. Want to grow? Take on a new position. New mindset #3: Defining development as changing roles narrows the playing field unnecessarily for too many people. No move? No growth? No way! Development in place is the most viable way everyone can take responsibility for advancing their capabilities, contributions, value, and growth. And it’s as simple as looking inward to determine what you want to learn, explore, enhance or strengthen… then looking outward for the experiences that enable that. Want to cultivate your ability to teach and coach others? Offer to conduct some departmental training. Interested in sharpening your financial acumen? Volunteer to manage a project budget. Need to improve your writing? Sign up to post a blog on your company’s website… or a client’s. Formal, organizationally-orchestrated and condoned career development programs and paths are simply incapable of accommodating the number of people who want to grow on the job. But that’s no reason to sit idly by and stagnate. Change your mindset. Get your head screwed on straight. And start growing today. Image credit: bradcalkins / 123RF Stock Photo The post Career Development Today: Is Your Head Screwed on Straight? appeared first on Julie Winkle Giulioni.

Jacob Wright's blog post was featuredLet's Have More Psych-Positive TechnologyMetrics are a powerful way to manage a business, but also a narrow one. Arguably the concerns that are emerging over the impact of technology on our brains are because of the tech industry’s focus on narrow metrics. Hopefully in 2015 we will start to see this change.In one sense slot machines are the archetype of successful design in the tech industry. Computerisation has taken them from a distraction for little old ladies to the source of 85% of the gambling industry’s profits in North America. Technology has enabled these machines to precisely manipulate the odds, to eliminate the need to feed in coins and even to be so ergonomic in their design that people can sit at them for longer.It’s a fascinating example of how much of today’s tech industry is really a psychology industry. Today’s slot machines are designed to optimize the amount of time a person plays. And they do this by allowing the user to bet on thousands of lines at a time, giving a steady (but random) drip feed of rewards - flashing lights, sounds and feedback that are actually more powerful than money at encouraging players to stay for longer.Optimising around key business metrics is what the tech industry does best. Whether its daily users, time with an app, or average revenue per user, all the tech giants have in some sense cracked the psychological code for users in their category. For Amazon it might be product recommendations, for Facebook it’s choosing which posts show up in the feed and for Candy Crush Saga its knowing what to offer for free, and what to charge for.This psych-tech fusion is certainly powerful, certainly lucrative, but is it a good thing?Firstly it’s a fine line between a product being "sticky" and it being addictive. Gambling is certainly addictive - and debate rages fiercely about whether technology can be considered addictive in the same way. Psychologically, the evidence seems to suggest that it can - brains respond equally strongly to in-game rewards as they do to pleasurable ‘real’ stimuli.Secondly there appear to be multiple negative psychological consequences to the use of successful tech products. We’ve seen studies showing reduced attention spans, memory problems, increases in distractibility, feelings of social isolation and mood swings. And while google has certainly succeeded at making the world’s information more accessible, perhaps in so doing it has created a generation who are less curious and less inventive.And this is not just limited to consumer products. There is a rush to automate functions like flying airplanes, driving cars, diagnosing diseases and making business decisions but evidence is beginning to accumulate that doing so makes human errors more catastrophic, and creates as many problems as are solved (as well as eliminating meaningful jobs).Finally there are the physical consequences - repetitive strain injuries, lack of exercise, poor eyesight.Essentially this adds up to the age-old story that what you measure determines what you get. If all we measure is revenue, user numbers, and time spent using the technology, is it any wonder that we end up with something that resembles the virtual equivalent of addictive drugs?Despite the "making the world a better place" rhetoric very few companies are trying to optimize their products for positive physical and psychological outcomes. But there are some signs that such a thing is possible. Headspace have made headlines this year by amassing 500k users for their mobile meditation app. Government bodies like Public Health England are working with Psychologists like Richard Wiseman to try to create technological fixes for lifestyle diseases.Some things that it would be great to see in 2015 are: Facebook optimizing the newsfeed to help its users grow and develop, not just click. Amazon optimizing recommendations for user satisfaction, not just purchase. Brain-training that actually works. Services that allow people to better understand themselves, make better decisions, become happier.Metrics and optimization can work wonders - maybe in the new year businesses can set better targets for their products and ensure that the successes of our era are seen as beneficial not just lucrative.Jacob Wright is Head of Strategy at VisualDNA.See More

If you’ve attended more than a workshop or two in your career, you’ve likely been introduced to the four stages of competence or the four stages of learning any new skill.  Developed in the 1970’s by Noel Burch, this model describes the process by which new skills are acquired: Unconscious incompetence: You’re blissfully ignorant of what you don’t yet know. Conscious incompetence: You recognize the need for a particular skill and may even be aware of some of the steps to get there, but cannot yet perform it. Conscious competence: You know how to perform the skill and can be successful doing so with deliberate attention and concentration. Unconscious competence: You’re on auto-pilot. The skill is second nature to you. You’ve developed the mental or muscle memory that allows you to perform it with ease. When I first learned about this model, unconscious competence was positioned as the ‘nirvana’ of learning… the place to strive for and settle comfortably into. And perhaps that was appropriate at the time. But today’s business environment no longer lends itself to the comforts of ‘settling into’ anything. The ever-increasing rapid pace of change in business requires everyone to be nimble, flexible, and able to turn on a dime. There’s no room for unconsciousness… even around what we know and do well.  In today’s workplace, unconscious competence looks an awful lot like catatonic complacency. So, what can everyone do to honor their competence but continue to challenge their ability to stretch, grow, and improve?  There are two high-value strategies that meld nicely with today’s business challenges. Move your groove. When we become comfortable and get into a groove, we stop stretching. We lose sight of the edge. We don’t push the boundaries… because we aren’t even thinking about them. Yet, it’s precisely when confidence and competence are highest, that we need to get out of our grooves. We need to create some discomfort by mixing it up, trying something new, going beyond what’s known and easy. We need to exit the safety zone and enter boldly into new and untested territory and methods. You may be thinking: But doesn’t that increase the likelihood of mistakes and failure?  YES!  And that’s exactly the opportunity for those who are highly skilled to take their capacity to the next level. Failure is rarely fatal… but it’s always instructive for those who are willing to learn and grow. Testing the boundaries will generally expand them. Pushing the limits - even if they push back - builds greater confidence and awareness of what’s working… and what’s not. Teach to reach.  Providing instruction to someone else is the most powerful way to enhance performance… for the student and the teacher. Slowing down enough to figure out what one is actually doing returns a level of consciousness to the act or skill itself. It’s an opportunity to examine key steps and rationale… and it’s an opportunity to recognize ways to improve. So, as we develop over the course of our careers, it’s important to remember that our best can always get better… especially if we bring greater conscious to our unconscious capacities. The post Unconscious Competence or Catatonic Complacency? appeared first on Julie Winkle Giulioni.

A New Year's Day story by American Public Media focuses on the disappearance of the lecture as a teaching tool in physics.  Reporter Emily Hanford specifically quotes physics education innovators Eric Mazur and  Joe Redish (whose wife is one of my mentors).  They talk about the end of the lecture and the rise of the interactive classroom, which promotes discussion, discovery, and clarification as key elements of teaching.  In some cases, they advocate for recorded lectures to clearly and effectively communicate concepts. Some people see this as the death of the lecture.  I'm not sure I'd be so quick to rush to that conclusion.Such classrooms are as driven by instructors as the all-talk classroom.  What differentiates these classrooms, however, is that the instructors share the podium with their students and engage them in conversations and inquiry with one another during the class lesson.More fundamentally, these instructors seem to go to the inconvenience of planning their lessons and investing considerable thought about not only what they want to cover (which seems to be the traditional approach) but how, and seem similarly concerned about which techniques ultimately result in the highest level of retention among their students.  See the article at http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-lose-the-lecture-as-teaching-tool

Gita Chandra, Lisa Fairbanks, Fil Greenwich and 15 more joined Innovation Insights

..most books on writing and instructional design emphasize the importance of knowing your learners — not on the use of that knowledge in the choice of sentences and phrases to avoid offending them...Check out my new article on avoiding assumptions in writing in Learning Solutions Magazine at http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/833/avoid-making-assumptions-that-backfire?utm_campaign=lsmag&utm_medium=email&utm_source=lsm-news

Avi Singer posted a blog postNo More Helpouts? Big Mistake, Google.Google recently announced that it was shutting down its Helpouts service.The platform, as Google puts it, is a "home for people to connect with experts on topics they want to learn about or seek advice and solutions to everyday problems.""Unfortunately, it hasn't grown at the pace we had expected," Google said in the post announcing the shutdown.The obvious question is: "What went wrong?"If anything, we are currently seeing growth in the sharing economy at an incredibly rapid pace. There should be a huge market for easily finding experts to teach you something at an affordable cost. I believe Google missed a huge opportunity here to own a service that will eventually be much more commonplace: hiring experts online.Parents hire tutors online and companies use services like Gerson Lehrman Group or AlphaSights to help them find experts on various topics. There is no reason why individuals would not go online to search for someone who could teach them skills like how to make creme brulee or create a website.  We Need A Place To Seek Experts, Google, We Really Do.With trillions of search queries typed in Google last year alone, it’s obvious most individuals go to Google to learn or find something.Typically, if you search for a "How-To" topic you'll get a combination of results. For example, if I search for How to Knit a Scarf, the results will include steps pulled from a page, videos on YouTube and some other sites or documents. The one thing that you'll notice missing is the ability to find someone who can teach you how to knit.While some may prefer to learn through videos or documents, many like to learn directly from a person. This does not necessarily mean they need to be in person, but more and more people are becoming comfortable using Skype, FaceTime or other video calling tools to communicate with one another.Here’s What Went WrongThere is no reason why the Google search results could not have also directed people to Helpouts by Google to find someone to teach them to knit (go ahead, click on it). By offering these results, Google would actually be offering a great service to all learners out there.Looking to build shelves? Right now, you now have options: videos, sites or people on Helpouts willing to teach you for a nominal fee. They are just not all in one spot.Individual learners need options. That's why we’re beginning to see more education experts turn to social learning initiatives.In fact, of the 550 education professionals surveyed in Kaltura’s March 2014 report, 65 percent use video for remote teaching and learning. The use of online tools to connect individuals will only increase as the demand for information’s accessibility increases -- and Google could have capitalized on that demand.Instead, they barely scratched the surface of their service’s potential.I believe the future of learning will be heavily influenced by the sharing economy, an iceberg of which we are now barely seeing the tip. We’ve already seen an influx of peer-to-peer platforms changing the way employees work with one another. We use crowdsourcing to extract ideas through resources we didn’t always have instant access to: other people’s minds.With several Helpouts competitors continuing their climb in the marketplace, eventually someone will figure out how to get the experts on their platform to pop up in search results. It could have been Google -- but instead, maybe we’ll get to see a new name making headlines soon.Avi Singer is the founder of showd.me, a social learning platform that allows employees to easily train and learn from other employees across an organization. Connect with Avi and showd.me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.See More

Guest Post by David M. Dye I’m honored to help my friend, David Dye, celebrate the launch of his book with this guest post.  The Seven Things Your Team Needs to Hear You Say was released earlier this month. I had the pleasure of reviewing a preview copy and was impressed with the clarity with which David outlines today’s leaders’ key priorities. This is a must-read for anyone concerned with team performance… and teams! Clothing Catastrophe? At a state correctional facility, Christine had a problem. With no prior supervisory experience, as one of a small handful of female staff in a mostly male prison, and with a highly diverse and contentious inmate population, she had been placed in charge of creating a clothing factory. One year later, Christine’s factory was out-producing the prototype operation, had an impeccable safety record, and could run itself without supervision. The Difference-Maker When I asked Christine what made such a rapid transition possible, she said, "It began with my belief in the people. When they came to me, they wanted to tell me about what they had done on the outside - why they were in prison. I cut them off, told them I didn’t really care about who they were last year. ‘This is who we are going to be in this factory and this is what we’re going to do.’ Most of them didn’t believe it at first, but pretty quickly they responded to someone believing in them." She described how male inmates would initially object to sewing because they thought it wasn’t something men did. Christine would walk over to one of the industrial sewing machines, quietly operate it, produce a garment, return to the men and say, "You’re telling me women can run this industrial machine better than you men? I don’t believe that." Impossible Impasse? In my early twenties, I had the honor to serve as an elected City Councilman in Glendale, Colorado. The Mayor at the time was a man named Joe Rice. Joe serves in the National Guard and has done several voluntary tours of duty in Iraq to assist with building local governments and civic institutions. After his term as Mayor, he went on to serve a number of terms in the Colorado state legislature and works today in the space exploration industry while continuing to serve in the Guard. Joe’s leadership success comes from a relentless optimism and belief in his team’s ability to solve problems and get things done. When we faced a contentious city government decision, there were often three or four opposing groups involved. The professional city staff with their interests, the elected officials (who rarely shared a unified opinion), service providers, and the public would frequently reach logjams - even when everyone generally agreed that change was needed. These three or four different groups would get stuck. "What are we going to do?" they would ask each other. Somebody would propose a solution, and it would get shot down: "Oh, we can’t do that…" After a few minutes of this, Joe would say, "We can find 1000 reasons why this won’t work. That’s not the question. The question is, ‘How can we get it done?’" Joe’s question presupposed that a solution was possible, and that we could accomplish our goals. Not surprisingly, we did. That one question and the belief it communicated was all we needed to break the impasse. Bring Out the Best Your team may be tough, but they probably aren’t convicted criminals or politicians! (Insert your own joke here…) When Christine and Joe told their teams, "You can!" their belief became their team’s belief. If you want to bring out the very best from every member of your team, then they need to hear you say, "You can!" Your belief in your team will become their confidence. Ultimately, this is the distilled essence of leadership: transferring the belief that together we can have a better tomorrow. What About You? Who are the leaders in your life who believed in you - even when you couldn’t see it for yourself? How did they impact your life?   David M. Dye works with leaders who want to get more done, build teams that care, and meet their goals. David is a former nonprofit executive, elected official, and believes everyone can master the essentials of influence. His new book, The Seven Things Your Team Needs to Hear You Say, provides leaders with practical tools they can use to build engaged, energized, and innovative teams. You can connect with David on Twitter (@davidmdye) and through his blog. The post Bring Out the Best in Your Team appeared first on Julie Winkle Giulioni.

Check out What does the Transactions Publish? What do Transactions’ Readers Want to Read?,, which I co-wrote with Nancy Coppola, George Hayhoe, and Helen Grady and was recently published in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication.In the process of exploring what readers want, this article also characterizes the state of the material published in the peer-reviewed literature on technical communication.As the abstract of the article notes:  Research Problem: The change in editorship of the Transactions on Professional Communication provides an opportunity for investigate the match between the content published by the journal and the content sought by its readers and to assess the uniqueness of the niche that it fills among peer-reviewed journals on professional and technical communication. Research Questions: What content does the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication publish? How does that compare to the content published by other journals in the field? And what content do readers of the Transactions want to read?Literature Review: Researchers in most fields occasionally analyze the entire body of literature within their disciplines as a result of a particular request or a research initiative.  The general purpose of these analyses is to assess the current state of the literature, although each analysis usually has a more specific focus that affects the entire field it covers.  Such reviews have had goals like identifying the leading works in a field, assessing the state of the literature of the field, providing a basis for changing the direction of a journal or body of literature, and assessing the alignment among different parts of  a body of literature. This study is rooted in a particular study intended to prepare for a transition among editors of a journal.  Methodology: To identify what the Transactions publishes and its unique niche among peer-reviewed journals in the field, researchers identified all peer-reviewed articles published by four major journals in professional and technical communication between January 2006 and December 2010: the Transactions, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly. Using the STC Body of Knowledge schema, two researchers coded the subjects of articles and adapting a schema by Klein (1999), they categorized the type of research underlying the articles.  To identify reader preferences, the other two researchers surveyed members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society (publisher of the Transactions) about their preferences for content and types of research (using the same schema). Results and Discussion: The studies provide insights into the extent of alignment between  the material published by the Transactions on Professional Communication and the preferences of its readers on the types of topics covered and the methods used to generate them.  To see the complete article, visit http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=47.  (Note: Only free to members of the IEEE Professional Communication Society and to those entering through university libraries with a subscription to IEEExplore.)

Rick Hutley posted a blog postWhy Data Scientists Are Not EnoughBig Data and analytics is all the rage today. Everywhere you turn someone is talking about the importance of tapping into the vast quantities of data at our disposal and using analytics to extract invaluable nuggets of gold. Is it really that simple? Can executives simply build a team of data scientists and set them loose on their mountains of data while they sit back and imagine how they are going to use the promised insights to become the next 800-pound gorilla in their market?Not exactly. It is true that analytics holds enormous potential for almost every company, in every industry but along with this great insightful power comes great executive responsibility. In February’s Forbes BrandVoice, Scott Gnau of Teradata comments, "Data has the power to drive innovation, reinvent your business, and tap into newfound opportunities and revenue streams-but only if you have the analytic tools, strategies and, perhaps more importantly, the corporate mentality to make the most of the information you have now and will gather in the future."Modern analytics enables us to view the world around us in ways we couldn’t even imagine before. We now have the ability to determine with ever increasing accuracy whether customers will be more interested in product A versus product B, or what level of risk a prospective applicant represents. We can almost instantly detect fraudulent activity, sense the emotional reaction of our users, predict when a piece of equipment is likely to fail or even determine which of the available courses of action is projected to have the most beneficial outcome for our companies. Whether we are interested in consumer sentiment, industry trends or corporate performance projections, analytics has a tool that can improve our insights.One of the first, and most critical requirements is of course building a team of experts that understand the arcane language and tools of analytics. This is a new breed of expert typically referred to as a "data scientist"; whose skills extend beyond those of the statistician or data analyst. These are highly skilled individuals who truly understand the fundamental nature of data and are able to develop complex analytic models that can interpret what the data are telling us - to derive the deep insights - and then present those back to their corporate masters in a way that enables business decisions and action. Not only are they able to use analytic tools and applications as statisticians and data analysts do, but these are the Jedi-masters of the data world who can also design and develop the tools that help executives avoid the "data swamp" where information goes to die. They live in a world of Markov Chains, Machine Learning and Neural Networks (to name a few) and the insights they derive are hugely important for today’s companies. But alone, data scientists are not enough.There is more to managing analytic insights than crunching the data. Far more, because the data is only as good as those who can interpret it. Business executives must take the insights derived by the data scientists and interpret them with reference to the company’s vision, goals, and various socioeconomic impact. It would be easy to think that data analytics is the silver bullet to all of a company’s woes but without someone to read the "tea leaves" and make decisions, the impact will be minimal or even counter-productive.Consider for a moment the potential impact on a company who uses their analytic insights to approach their customers in new ways. Possibly using more targeted marketing or predicting product failures and proactively reaching out to customers with remedies before the customer even knows they have a looming problem. Is this a good thing or not? How are customers likely to react? Will they see these moves as helpful or intrusive? Does using the data in this new way infringe consumer privacy rights - or even their perception of their privacy rights. Is it even legal, let alone ethical? Just because Data Scientists can provide the analytic insights does not mean a company should necessarily take action upon them.Business executives must learn the core lingua-franca of analytics. They have to know how to communicate with their Data Science team in a way that enables them to make sense of the analytic insights and from there, sound, well reasoned business decisions. In addition they must understand that they have specific responsibilities that their Data Science team do not own. This includes such issues as:Legal and regulatory complianceInformation securityCustomer and employee privacyEthicsAnalytics in today’s world of Big Data is critical to driving innovation and keeping companies ahead of the game. Failure to innovate will doom companies to quickly falling behind, and analytics provides the essential insights to enable those innovations and rapid business decisions. Analytics is far from hype - it’s very real - but executives must understand they have a crucial role to play in the analytic process. Data scientists alone are not enough - executives too must step to the analytics plate.Rick Hutley is the Director of Analytics at the University of the Pacific, frequent keynote speaker and former Vice President of Innovation at Cisco Systems.See More