I started wondering earlier today, in one of the PLENK2010 discussions, how many participants come from backgrounds like mine — training and learning in organization and corporate settings — as opposed to school (primary and secondary ed) or academia ("higher education"). Partly I’m hoping to learn ways that people are trying to encourage or support learning in non-educational settings. Not just in the be-a-lifelong-learner or take-charge-of-your-learning frame of mind, but also in terms of focusing that encouragement and support around some organization-specific goal.  Because, you know, if Sgitheanach Financial is merging with Sinon Real Estate, we’re probably going to have new systems, new goals, job changes, and other things that people will need to adapt to.  It won’t all happen via Twitter and Facebook. In no way am I implying that I don’t value the contributions of people in educational or academic settings.  I’m just using this question to find people whose challenges/problems/opportunities are more clearly like mine.  Or at least like some of mine. I didn’t see a(n obvious) tool to create a survey within the discussion, so I’m trying one here.  No ulterior motive; I’m just curious about the makeup but not up to reading a thousand here’s-my-intro posts in the course Moodle. Feel free to comment.  (I suspect this may need revising, which might mean another poll.  I wouldn’t want to mess up the results of this one any more than I need to.) If you’re an independent practitioner (like me), considering answering based on where the majority of your work (or income) comes from. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. * Just an excuse to repeat the story about a reporter asking Pope John XXIII how many people worked at the Vatican.  His reply: "About half." CC-licensed survey image by psd / Paul Downey.

The third week of PLENK2010 is ending.  When I decided to sign up for this online course ("Personal Learning Environments, Networks, and Knowledge") I didn’t have a goal much more solid than "find out more."  I assumed the "more" would involve PLEs and PLNs. Finding out more about knowledge wasn’t that high on my list.  Like a vegan who’s confessing his weakness for Twinkies, I feel vaguely uneasy saying this, but most high-abstraction discussion just makes me sleepy. That probably explains a stretch of about five days when I didn’t do anything PLENK-related; I even closed the Tweetdeck column I had for the #plenk2010 hashtag.  Everyone and his cousin Bernie drew diagrams of their networks, and a daunting number of discussion posts probed the nuances of PLE versus PLN versus VLE… truly, I expected to see RSVP versus SPQR. That’s okay.  I don’t have to like, much less use, a term like MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).  I see the intention as an opportunity that’s participatory, that has a focus but not a required sequence, and from which I select what I choose to select. This post is just me, flipping through things that stand out after three weeks. In how to take this course, the PLENK facilitators said the purpose isn’t to use a bunch of tools; it’s to practice using those tools to select content, rework it, create something new, and share-particularly with others in the course. I already had this blog and a Delicious account.  I take Twitter so much for granted that I was surprised the PLENK profile form didn’t have a specific field for it. Putting the "dis" in "discuss" I find the Moodle-based discussion kludgy, from a user standpoint.  For one thing, each week’s discussion list gets sorted by most-recent-addition, which means the order constantly changes.  But there’s nothing to tell me if I’ve already read the posts in a given discussion.  Since there are 36 discussions in Week 2 and 12 in Week 3, I’m unlikely to remember on my own that I’ve seen everything in the thread with 34 posts but not everything in the one that has 31. The same way that you make less coffee if you have a finicky coffeemaker,  I find the recurring annoyance of navigating the discussions has probably conditioned me to open them less often.  I have to nag myself to make an effort, because I’ve benefited from what other people have shared. Net worth Lots of people have made lots of diagrams of their PLEs and PLNs.  I’ve skimmed some, though after a while they all kind of look the same.  I realize at some level they are the same, because the diagrams show relationships that matter to those who created them. Me?  I read Dave Cormier’s thought that the difference between PLE and PLN is mostly semantic, and thought, "Works for me." Yeah, yeah, semantics matter, but in this case not very much to me. About the best thought I can draw for myself is the value of reflecting on where and how I learn, especially in my professional life.  Some of this-exchanges with my peers, reading what experts (however defined) have written-is of such longstanding, it’s kind of like the way I write.  I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my use of passive verbs, or having pronouns agree with their antecedents, because I’m at pretty freakin’ high strength for those particular skills. I do find myself thinking more along the lines of "so what?"  What (if anything) do I do with what I take in?  I don’t want to be some kind of conceptual holding tank, or a guy with 10 gallons of Knowledge stored in the basement next to the water heater. Follow disgruntle I’ve used this phrase before.  It’s my way of telling myself to pay attention to annoying things I want to dismiss.  (Note: when you come with your friend to evangelize me, I’m still going to pretend I’m not home.) So, for example, I like to make fun of words like "affordances," which at times seems like the Learning Business’s latest synonym for "general wonderfulness."  Deep down, I knew all along that probably wasn’t the full picture; I just couldn’t drag myself to find what it was.  But in a side conversation with yet another online colleague (YAOC), I got some useful, cognitive-psychology explanation. I’m still going to make fun of "affordances," but not as often. Since I didn’t make a map of my PLE, though, I’m feeling as though I have to at least try making a concept map.  Of what, I’m not sure.  Why?  Mostly to put myself through the exercise of trying to do it-to see whether I end up with a result that seems of higher value than expected. I understand what George Siemens meant when he said mindmaps have a center but concept maps don’t.  I have to do one, I suppose, to grasp the implications of how concept maps "communicate relatedness and reasons for relatedness." Seeking Ellumination I missed the first week’s Elluminate broadcast because I couldn’t get it to work.  It took till nearly the second week’s broadcast to discover the problem was on my end (my so-called security software wouldn’t let the session open). These are handled about as well as you can handle a high-tech conference call.  The session moderators have done well, I think, and the participants share enough of a focus that the level of silliness or randomness (in the "backchannel" of the chat window) is about what you’d get in an in-person workshop. What I didn’t expect to happen is that I’ve done some post-session followup each time with individuals who spoke (or, more accurately, chatted) up during the session.  As with Twitter discussions, what someone says in an Elluminate session can move me to make further connections. * * * Hmmm… I’m kind of a wordy blogger anyway.  Skimming what I have here, I don’t have much sense of a conclusion.  In part I wrote this from the notes I kept (in an Evernote document) over the past couple of weeks.  There’s more, equally ill-formed, so I’m just going to stop now and let things percolate (or incubate) for a bit. * * * (Added afterward) I forgot to mention that my survey (asking about the backgrounds of people in the course) did confirm an impression I had.  Only 12% of respondents say they work in corporate / for-profit areas, while 39% work in academia. Another 6% say they work at the Vatican, which is a good reminder of the value of informal surveys.      

I have no idea how I ended up at unrefinery.com, "a style, design, and technology filter for gents" where they "like finding cool stuff and making fun of everything else." I’m pretty sure I’m not their target market; almost none of my clothes have the name of living people on the label.  (And even Leon Leonwood Bean, who died 43 years ago, might not count as a designer.) Even so, I appreciate their combination of focus, opinion, and attitude.  And that was before I found this compare-and-contrast gem: To fully appreciate unrefinery’s style, read the entire post.  If you stay here, I’m just going to talk about their slightly tongue-in-cheek decision guide, and about how it relates to learning at work. To bag, or not to bag? A reader asked whether a bag in an earlier unrefinery post didn’t look "a lot like a purse."  The blog agreed that the reader had a good point. "While there’s no one thing that makes a bag more or less masculine," unrefinery goes on, "there are a few parameters that taken collectively make all the difference." Now, if that’s not a nice way to concretize some tacit knowledge, I don’t use dry-erase markers on my (real) whiteboard. Here, then, are the factors ("in order of importance") used in that comparison above: Size: the bag you choose should be "at least as big as the briefcase it replaces." Aspect: "wider than it is tall.  No exceptions." Carrying method: padded handles. Failing that, a same-side strap. As a last resort, a cross-body strap (but see the full post for cautionary detail). Color: darker and more neutral.  A bag in a lighter color had better be something "no self-respecting woman would ever be seen carrying." In under 300 words, unrefinery sets out considerations and provides clear yet nuanced criteria.  (I can’t tell you how relieved I am that the black leather bag I use for my computer meets all four, though I don’t expect to see it featured on their blog.) Whether you agree with the considerations is another question, but using the points here, you could evaluate any number of bags for men and come up with a judgment that, more often than not, would align with that of the exemplars at unrefinery. Beyond the bag Hardly any jobs are entirely made up of little decision guides.  I do think, though, there’s usually a fair amount of this stuff that’s not obvious to newcomers or even people who’ve been toiling in the field for a while. (I was apparently absent the day someone said that virtually all French nouns ending in -tion, like collaboration, gestion, and natation, are feminine. There are a couple of exceptions, like un bastion. I’m still sorry I didn’t learn this 30 or 40 years ago.) So imagine people in a workgroup whipping up considerations and criteria like this for decisions relevant to the job. The effort to make the tacit knowledge more explicit encourages reflection and revision. Differences in interpretation and practice become visible.  Maybe there’s more than one way to accomplish something-or maybe the differences have resulted in unnecessary variation. Concrete examples help people work their way toward more general principles. One way to think about learning is that it involves both acquiring information and applying it to a situation.  In the world of style, you might rephrase that as savoir faire.      

I’m sometimes confused by mission statements and vision statements.  Sometimes I can’t tell the difference, and I don’t think it’s always my fault. In a 2005 post at Lifehack, Rosa Say wrote that the difference only matters if you use the the statements. Vision Statements and Mission Statements can be power-packed drivers in a company culture when they are done right, and when they are used to release the potent energy within the people who make up that company. (Don’t for a moment think that companies are made up of anything else.) The best missions and visions become mantras for action; they’re catalysts. The worst ones are those pretty, carefully crafted ones up on the walls in frames that are long and detailed: too much to memorize and remember, too much to bother with at all. No one pays attention to them, and no one lives them. Rotate them with famous quotations or snippets from eloquent speeches and no one will even notice, because none of the real people in the company say those things. She offers these crisp descriptions: Your mission is what you do best every day. Your vision is what the future is like because you do that. I wandered sideways into this topic because of Saving Private Ryan.  Though it’s been years since I saw the movie, one scene stayed in my mind as an example of people on the front line understanding the bigger picture.  It’s a brief exchange between Captain John Miller (played by Tom Hanks) and Captain Fred Hamill (played by Ted Danson), not long after the allies had secured the Normandy beachhead. That short conversation begins at about the 5:45 mark in this clip.  (I’ve put a transcript of the conversation below.) Hamill: What have you heard?  How is it all falling together? Miller: Well, we got the beachhead secure.  Problem is, Monty’s taking his time movin’ on Caen.  We can’t pull out till he’s ready, so… Hamill: That guy’s overrated. Miller: No argument here. Hamill: You gotta take Caen so you can take Saint-Lô. Miller: You gotta take Saint-Lô to take Valognes. Hamill: Valognes, you got Cherbourg. Miller: Cherbourg, you got Paris. Hamill: Paris, you got Berlin. Miller: And then that big boat home. I have no idea if real captains talked like this, but I like the capsulization.  Especially because in under 50 words, it sketches a broad plan while showing that the two men get the plan.  (The landing on Omaha beach was due north of Saint-Lô, roughly where the B is on this map.)   In a completely different setting, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines said, "I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds.  This is it: we are THE low-fare airline.  Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can." Chip and Dan Heath, in Made to Stick, note that this idea "isn’t the whole story, of course."  Many Southwest employees take great satisfaction in their jobs, although Southwest is thrifty to an extreme and "it’s not supposed to be fun to work for pennypinchers."  A clear, shared sense of purpose can’t hurt.   Vision Statements and Mission Statements can be power-packed drivers in a company culture when they are done right, and when they are used to release the potent energy within the people who make up that company. (Don’t for a moment think that companies are made up of anything else.) The best missions and visions become mantras for action; they’re catalysts. The worst ones are those pretty, carefully crafted ones up on the walls in frames that are long and detailed: too much to memorize and remember, too much to bother with at all. No one pays attention to them, and no one lives them. Rotate them with famous quotations or snippets from eloquent speeches and no one will even notice, because none of the real people in the company say those things.

Stephen Ellis is a partner at the law firm Tucker Ellis & West.  Thanks to David Maister’s blog (which Maister discontinued in January 2010), I came across a commencement address Ellis gave at Case Western Reserve School of Law in May 2008. Unlike the Case grads, I’m far from the beginning of my career, but I found Ellis’s ideas both pertinent and refreshing. And that was before this section: The fact is, our profession has become increasingly unhappy over the past couple of decades. I am convinced the vast majority of that unhappiness derives from a single seemingly innocuous event in the late 1980’s: The American Lawyer magazine began publishing the AM LAW 100, and listed the profits per partner of the 100 largest firms. Virtually all of the firms in this country immediately bought in to that statistic as the only credible measure of success. The game was on - we lawyers would now take our measure almost entirely from money, at least in terms of what was publicly discussed. Without question, integrity, service and professionalism were important, but how we measured ourselves was money. This was a terrible mistake and now, more and more of us see its dark implications: the bragging rights on how many billable hours we charge (and the matching lost weekends and evenings); rates that are topping $1000 an hour; and clients who believe their files are being worked to death by armies of inexperienced associates. Here’s the title of Ellis’s address: On Being a Happy (and Successful) Lawyer.  He speaks well (judging from the transcript), and I thought many of his points would be worthwhile to pull out and adapt to… well, to me, a person in the learning profession. So I’m putting several of those points here, for when I don’t have time to reread the entire address.  Where he talks about the law, I just mentally edit things to read "the learning profession."  It’s worth the effort. First, be someone others can count on. Clients come to you because they have a situation they cannot solve on their own. Most are not looking for an analysis of the law. Most want you to solve a problem. So solve it, don’t add to their problem by being hard to find, by missing deadlines, or by simply describing their problem back to them. Second, be an interesting person. Force yourself to do be able to talk about more than law - read books, go to movies, be part of politics, go to lectures. You’ll meet people, you’ll be able to talk about things that other people find interesting, and you won’t burn out on your job. Look out for yourself. Mentors are important, but they are only a resource.  Accept that you are in change of your success…. If you think you need experience in an area, make it your business to go get it. Determination matters. Great careers are the result of day after day deciding to do good work and being someone who others count on. Be enthusiastic. We lawyers take pride in being the first one to find fault with an idea.  Makes us look smart…. clients want to do things.  They don’t call you so they can not do things.  They want to stay in the borders of the law, but they want to be told how to do what they want to do… There is no better way to end a client meeting than saying "This is going to be great" and to mean it. Trust yourself. Among the most important conclusions I came to as a young lawyer was that if I didn’t understand something, it was because the thing in fact didn’t make sense, not because I was stupid. Most of the times I’ve found myself in hot water it’s because I let a conversation continue past the point where I understood what was being said. And virtually every time I would say "Stop, I’m not following this," someone would come up to me after the meeting and say "Boy, I’m glad you said that. I had no idea what we were talking about." People I admire talk a lot about organizational culture.  Whatever image I had of the culture of a law firm, I’ve had to modify it (at least as it applies to a good law firm) based on Ellis’s thoughts.  I know these are good reminders for my own professional life as well.

Yesterday marked one year since my dad died.  As the date approached, I thought of a term I first heard a few months ago from my friend Zoe: "a year’s mind."   Dad, with his youngest great-granddaughter It means a remembrance, as in the one year anniversary of someone’s death.  And as October 21 approached, I’d been thinking about my dad.  I had considered writing something here on the date, but decided against it.  Or had decided, until this morning, when I read Karyn Romeis’s poignant post in which she marked her own father’s birthday.   So I’ve decided to talk about one of the ways I remember Dad. My mother asked me to give the eulogy at his funeral, and while I was working on that, I found an image I’d made years before.  He’d written me a letter about ten years ago, when his parents’ house was torn down, and for some reason I’d scanned the letter.  I’m glad I did, because there’s so much of him in it. Dear Dave, Hope the shock of getting a letter from this end won’t be too hard on you. No one who knew Dad would be surprised by the wry humor. I cut this out some time back and forgot where I put it until today. "It" was a two-photo feature from my home town newspaper.  The big, cream-colored house that his father built in 1923 had been demolished. I have a lot of nice memories about life in (the) big house but my fondest memories are of the Red Rows where I was born. My home town was a coal-mining town on the western shore of Cape Breton Island.  The mine built dozens of little duplex houses, all painted red: the Red Rows.  Dad said one time of his family’s place in the Red Rows (a home for his parents, six or seven children, and his grandmother, that there was so little room that "before we went to sleep they must have given us something so we’d sleep and hung us up on hooks." I was to a dance in Windsor Saturday night.  Buddy MacMaster played and the place was jammed.  Music was excellent.  I got home about 2:15 a.m.  I went with Alex and Muggsy.  It was a nice evening as I saw a lot of friends both young and old.  It was a trip to Cape Breton. Dad and Mom were living in Dearborn, Michigan,  a suburb of Detroit; Windsor, Ontario is just the other side of the Detroit River.  Alex and Muggsy are part of  the vast Cape Breton diaspora that for decades has out-networked Facebook. As for Buddy MacMaster, he’d have played tunes like these and these, though the clips are from a concert in Boston, not a dance like the one in Windsor. I read the paragraph about the dance at Dad’s funeral-and I added that if not for the date on the letter, he could have written it any time from 1951, when he moved to Detroit, till 2009. Weather here very nice, a little frost each morning.All the rest of the family OK. I don’t think I ever had a letter or a phone call without his asking about the weather.  I’ve come to see this not just as standard conversation, but his way of connecting more with someone in another place: what’s it like for you?  Here’s how things are for me… and for the people around me. Hope you can make out the writing.  The old hand is getting pretty shaky. I suppose it was shaky enough-but every week, Dad would write a letter to his older sister. Like this one, I’m sure they rambled from topic to topic, but they were as much a part of him as sitting in someone’s kitchen with a strong cup of tea. * * * And those are some of the things I’m remembering, some parts of this year’s mind.

On LinkedIn’s Learning, Education, and Training Professionals group, two months ago, a member kicked off a discussion with this question: Increasingly, we are finding that people bring their phones, computers and Blackberrys to class expecting that it will be OK to use them. How are you dealing with this issue? As of this morning, there are 83 contributions to the discussing.  Although I’ve disagreed strongly with some of the opinions and suggestions, I’ve come to see this question as yet another example of a complex problem-in other words, one without a single, correct solution. Here’s my paraphrase of what several participants said.  To minimize my biases, I chose every 8th comment.  Well, I left out one, which happened to be my own.  (Just coincidence that it feel into the every-eighth sequence.) I display a slide with logistics (breaks, fire exits, etc.) that asks people to turn off phones or at least put them on vibrate. I show a humorous YouTube video and say this is what I did with the last phone that rang during my presentation. I make everyone take out their phone and turn them off in front of everyone.  I include a 20-30 minute break several times a day. Ask the class to set the rules.  You are there to learn.  If people were on vacation instead of training, why would they check email?  They can do that during lunch. Sometimes people are using BlackBerries and other devices to take notes. Lately I don’t even mention phones.  I trust adults to act like adults.  I do like (another person’s) suggestion of asking people to turn them on to integrate outside information. Set your phone to ring 3 minutes into the session.  Pretend to talk with the president of the company, who wants to know if everyone’s turned their phones off. Exception: if you expect the president to call, or if someone’s seriously ill. I also believe people are adults who must make their own decision. There’s no right or wrong answer.  Some teaching strategies are still focused on a society that no longer exists.  Use appropriate technology at the appropriate time. Go with the flow.  I can get irritated if a phone rings, but if the class is good and people are engaged, they’ll take their own responsibility. I like letting the learners decide how to deal with device interruptions. I don’t do much formal instruction any more, by which I mean acting as the primary source (and predominant voice) in a scheduled learning event.  I’ve done quite a bit of that, but over time found that people seemed to learn best when I talked less and they did more. Yes, when people are new to a topic, they generally need some grounding and some concepts.  Most of my experience is has not been with people new to the organization and the industry, however.  That means they tend to need less "before we begin" than a lot of instructors (and instructional designers) seem to think.  Even for a topic as information-dense as Amtrak’s reservation system, I found that a lean approach (less talking, more doing) suited the goal of having people able to use the system. The LinkedIn discussion does provide a glimpse at the many ways that people working in this field view cell phones, PDAs (does anyone say PDA any more?), and smartphones.  (Almost none of the comments address computers as such.) I see a kind of clustering around "they’re here to learn (from me)," and a smaller one around "I’m here to help them learn." My own phone, like my computer, is as basic a tool as pen and paper.  Yes, I take paper notes, but when I have the choice, I take electronic ones so I can tag, search, re-use, copy, paste-all of which are tougher to do with PowerPoint handouts or handwritten notes. I don’t want someone else telling me how to capture or retrieve information.   If they say things that I find condescending or just plain silly ("enter the world of civilized people,"  "phones are an interruption to learning"), I’ll get the message-though it may not be the one intended. CC-licensed images: Retro phone photo by Robert Bonnin.Classroom sign photo by Ben+Sam.

You wouldn’t know it by my recent output, but I’ve learned a lot this year, much of it helped by people I’ve never met in person.  I’d name you here if I were even mostly sure I wouldn’t leave someone out. Instead, I’m celebrating those connections and the holiday by posting this 1920 poem by Robert Frost, inexplicably little known.   Christmas Trees(A Christmas Circular Letter) The city had withdrawn into itself And left at last the country to the country; When between whirls of snow not come to lie And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove A stranger to our yard, who looked the city, Yet did in country fashion in that there He sat and waited till he drew us out A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was. He proved to be the city come again To look for something it had left behind And could not do without and keep its Christmas. He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees; My woods—the young fir balsams like a place Where houses all are churches and have spires. I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees. I doubt if I was tempted for a moment To sell them off their feet to go in cars And leave the slope behind the house all bare, Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon. I’d hate to have them know it if I was. Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except As others hold theirs or refuse for them, Beyond the time of profitable growth, The trial by market everything must come to. I dallied so much with the thought of selling. Then whether from mistaken courtesy And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said, "There aren’t enough to be worth while." "I could soon tell how many they would cut, You let me look them over." "You could look. But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them." Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close That lop each other of boughs, but not a few Quite solitary and having equal boughs All round and round. The latter he nodded "Yes" to, Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one, With a buyer’s moderation, "That would do." I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so. We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over, And came down on the north. He said, "A thousand." "A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?" He felt some need of softening that to me: "A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars." Then I was certain I had never meant To let him have them. Never show surprise! But thirty dollars seemed so small beside The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents (For that was all they figured out apiece), Three cents so small beside the dollar friends I should be writing to within the hour Would pay in cities for good trees like those, Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools Could hang enough on to pick off enough. A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had! Worth three cents more to give away than sell, As may be shown by a simple calculation. Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter. I can’t help wishing I could send you one, In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas. CC-licensed photo of fir trees in Nova Scotia by Christopher Jackson.

Yesterday, I saw a tweet about Universal Subtitles, an open-source site to "make the work of subtitling and translating video simpler, more appealing, and, most of all, more collaborative."  The site lets you add captions, subtitles, or translations to videos online.  (They say they work with Ogg, WebM, FLV, Youtube, Vimeo, Blip or Dailymotion.) I’d been wanting to find out how to add captions to videos, the way I’d seen song translations done on Youtube.  On La charrette pélagique, the blog I (infrequently) write in French, I’ve tried translating some French songs into English.  The hard part there is that you can’t easily fit two translations side-by-side, so you end up alternating languages one verse or chorus at a time. In addition, if you’re trying to understand spoken (or sung) language, I think it helps at times to be able to see the words in sync with the audio stream. So, for a good part of yesterday afternoon and this morning, I used Universal Subtitles to create both an English translation and a French transcription of La berceuse ("The Lullaby") by the French singer Bénabar (Wikipedia bio in English, French; French-language website). (If you’re the parent of little kids, or know people who are, I think you’ll enjoy Bénabar’s take on lullabies.) I haven’t figured out how to embed the subtitled version here, so if you’re curious: Click this link: La Berceuse Below the video, choose the language for the subtitles ("original" [meaning French] or English) Play. Universal Subtitles is a collaborative effort, which means someone else can come along to edit my French-language transcript (I have my doubts about a word here and there), my English translation, or my synchronization.  For myself, I wish there were a way to save my own version-to keep it as I made it, for my own purposes-but that’s a minor point. What’s more important is the immediate usefulness of this tool.  

Hyperlink, schmyperlink.  I’m reposting my "decoder ring" for Robert Burns’ most famous song. Why decode?  People who sing Auld Lang Syne, especially those who do so only once a year, don’t always know what the song’s about. The lyrics are in Scots-a language or dialect* of Lowland Scotland (as distinct from the Gaelic [Gaidhlig] of the Highlands). * "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." — Max Weinrich Also, overexposure tends to deaden perception.  Especially in the U.S., we associate the song with noisemakers and incoherent New Year’s Eve singing. I like revisiting the song.  Auld lang syne ("old long since") means something like "the days that are past," and especially "the times that we remember."  In a way, Burns is celebrating the treasure of a shared experience. (For extra credit:  "Syne" is pronounced like "sign."  No Z sound.  There’s a demo below the lyrics.) What Burns wrote The gist Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And auld lang syne? These are rhetorical questions: - Should we forget old friends and never think about them?  - Forget old friends along with everything that’s past? For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne. We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, For auld lang syne. Not at all-in fact, we’ll still have a drink together for the times gone by. And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp! And surely I’ll be mine! And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet, For auld lang syne. (I know) you’re good for your drinks ( "be your pint-stowp" — "pay for your tankard" ), and you know I’m good for mine. We’ve still got that drink to share for the times gone by. We twa hae run about the braes, And pou’d the gowans fine; But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit, Sin’ auld lang syne. We two have run along the hillsides And picked the lovely daisies together- But we’ve wandered many a weary foot since the times gone by. We twa hae paidl’d in the burn Frae morning sun till dine; But seas between us braid hae roar’d Sin’ auld lang syne. We two have paddled in the stream From dawn till dusk But broad seas have roared between us Since those times gone by. And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere And gie’s a hand o’ thine And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught For auld lang syne. So, here’s my hand, my trusty friend And give us (= give me) yours We’ll take a good, hearty drink For all the times gone by. Here are two versions, both sung by Eddi Reader at the opening of the Scottish Parliament’s new building. First she solos with a traditional but less-well-known melody, then has the assembly join in. Bliadhna mhath ùr (Happy new year).

If you don’t know much about Scottish history, you’ll sometimes cause pain to Scots by telling them how much you loved Braveheart. One thing the film did convey, in its final scene, was a hint of the battle of Bannockburn (June 24, 1314).  King Robert I of Scotland ("Robert the Bruce") and his army confronted an English force three times their size, led by Edward II. The legend holds that the Bruce said to the Scots, "You have bled for Wallace — will you bleed for me?"  That legend, and the victory that followed, inspired the poem that Robert Burns entitled Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn. It’s as good a verse as any to mark the bard’s birthday. Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to Victorie! Now’s the day, and now’s the hour; See the front o’ battle lour; See approach proud Edward’s power- Chains and Slaverie! Wha will be a traitor knave? Wha can fill a coward’s grave? Wha sae base as be a Slave? Let him turn and flee! Wha, for Scotland’s King and Law, Freedom’s sword will strongly draw, Free-man stand, or Free-man fa’, Let him on wi’ me! By Oppression’s woes and pains! By your Sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins, But they shall be free! Lay the proud Usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty’s in every blow!- Let us Do or Die! Many people know this in song form as Scots Wha Hae.  Here’s a version by Dougie MacLean:

A while back, George Siemens wrote a post, Questions I’m No Longer Asking. I like the title, and the post even more-because the heart of the post is what he believes about learning, and it’s from that viewpoint that he talks about questions that don’t interest him any more. (Example: "How can educations implement [whatever tool] into their teaching?  Simple: do it.") Siemens lists several points that he’s firmly convinced of.  I read them with an eye toward what I believe in terms of learning in the workplace.  I think several of them are essential to an organization’s ability to effective encourage work-related learning. No, that’s not the most felicitious phrase I’ve ever written.  It’s apropos, though, because of how I see the way most people earn their living. Ideally, the workplace is a for-hire alliance.  Whosis, Incorporated (or, for some, the Department of Whosis) wants to get things done and will pay people to help do them.  Individuals presumably want to get paid and possibly have some interest in the things Whosis does. So there’s a partnership.  And the give-and-take of that partnership extends to work-related learning. You as an individual need the opportunity, support, resources, and systems to get better at what you do or what you’d like to do, while Whosis needs people who are more and more effective at achieving results that Whosis values. What does that mean in terms of some of Siemens’s points?  I want to take up this one: Learners should be in control of their own learning. Autonomy is key. For a successful partnership, those workplace learners should be able to relate what they’re learning to key parts of their own job, or to key results that the employer values.  Not every minute, not every task, but definitely over the long haul. I don’t have much argument with Siemens’s point that "meaningful learning requires learner-driven activity."  Neither would anyone who’s ever had to present a training course to people who didn’t need or  value the training. The difference is that in the workplace, over time, most of that meaningful learning has to connect to the organization’s goals.  If not, eventually you won’t have that workplace. If we’re the Fast Twitch Gym, the ultimate outcome is profitability.  To achieve that, we value things like the breadth and depth of workout options, the availability of a skilled and friendly staff, rate of renewals, class offerings that customers enroll in and stick with, and so on.  If as an organization we thought that we’d accomplish more profitability by selling cars, we probably wouldn’t be in the gym business. If we’re the Division of Motor Vehicles, then valuable outcomes are things like efficient and convenient issuing of driver licenses and license plates.  Related to those are quantity and quality measures for our record-keeping, our delivery of service, and our cost-effectiveness. So what?  Well, as an individual, if your personal goals and values press you toward becoming a paralegal, you might not always be able to satisfy those desires entirely through your job at Fast Twitch or the DMV, because these particular workplaces don’t employ that many paralegals. Siemens is certainly right: nobody’s going to be as interested in your learning as you are.  At the same time, if you’re an employee in an organization, that organization will have goals and values that aren’t necessarily identical with yours. For the individual, the challenge is to find a satisfactory degree of autonomy: working with problems that engage you; collaborating with coworkers or clients who encourage you do get better at what you do; finding assignments or specializations that are fulfilling. For the organization, the challenge is often getting away from a not-really-working, event-focused, dose-and-exposure-oriented approach toward skill in the workplace.  If standardization and compliance are important (as in, say, pharmaceuticals or high-tech manufacturing), your workforce already knows that. Workplace learning isn’t us versus them (or me versus them).  At its best, it’s the individual and the organization having interests and goals that mesh well. CC-licensed photos: collaborating at work by Christina Xu; boredom by Quinn Dombrowski.

For a while there, I thought Joe Gerstandt was full of crap. Somebody tweeted a line from one of Joe’s blog posts:  "We are not accountants. We are Jedi.  We play on a completely different field." "Jedi" alone is often enough to make me go find something else to do, but instead I read the full post, The False Tyranny of Metrics.  And for a while, I continued to think Gerstandt was full of crap.  Or maybe just way out there, because my initial skimming said that he was saying metrics don’t matter. That wasn’t the case.  It took me longer than I like to admit to realize that the Talent Anarchy blog is (at least in part) a dialog between Gerstandt and his business partner, Jason Lauritsen.  So this post was part of their thinking out loud about what matters. The heart of what Gerstandt is talking about emerges in a follow-up post (and at the end of my post, I’ve put links to several posts from Talent Anarchy): And maybe I do not think that measurement is evil…measurement is a tool after all, so it boils down to how you use it. But this is what I do believe: one: We over-prioritize things that come with metrics. two: We have told ourselves some great lies about what we can measure. three: The outcome of our use of metrics is often evil. The conversation really struck me because of several themes or issues  running through my life right now.  One of them is a client I’ll call Hephaestus. I’ll say they make  household fans and heaters.  As a manufacturer, Hephaestus has some serious metrics having to do with production-rate, quality, reject rate, cost, all the sorts of things you’d expect.  And the sorts of things that make sense there. Does Hephaestus have other ways of knowing how they’re doing?  I’m pretty sure they do, though the project I’m dealing with doesn’t extend that far.  I haven’t been called in by the CEO or the VP of manufacturing.  Even so, I see potential wisdom for me and for my client in the Talent Anarchy discussion. Our project is about how to bring new manufacturing workers to competency.  If you’ve worked in a plant, you have some idea what these jobs can be like.  At a GE appliance factory, I observed workers in charge of powder-paint application, wire-harness installation, and similar jobs. How do you help a new person do that safely and accurately-and with acceptable progress to the necessary speed? It’s not all feeds and speeds, either with regard to turning out those appliances, or with regard to how people learn.  I think there’s a lot of value in questioning assumptions, especially those we don’t even recognize as assumptions. Here are links to the posts in the discussion at Talent Anarchy, along with a quote pulled from each.  Worth the time to go through.  You’re likely to find value in the comments as well: The Measurement Imperative (Jason) (the post in which Jason starts the discussion)I know that measurement and metrics aren’t your favorite thing to talk about, but what do you think?  Where does measurement fit into the work we do? The False Tyranny of Metrics (Joe) (from a comment on this post)I was talking with my boss about the situation [of half the staff at a health facility frequently arriving late] when he asked me if my team cared about the people we served and if they were dedicated to helping those folks achieve outcomes. I answered yes - they excelled at achieving outcomes. He then challenged me by pointing out that the only reason I was on my time-clock tirade was because I could hit a button on the computer and spit out the metrics related to the situation. Punch reports were the metrics I had available so that was what I managed to. Despite What You May Have Heard, Measurement Isn’t Evil (Jason) What I heard you say is that putting metrics and measurement before the actual work, or worse, substituting it as the work is really damaging and counter-productive.  And I would agree with that.  When the metric becomes what you are trying to accomplish, you have lost. More Metrics Madness (Joe) I do understand the importance of profit.  I am a business owner myself…I get it.  But the purpose of my business is not profit. I work, at least partly, because I need to make a living, but I do the particular work that I do for reasons that have nothing to do with profit.  Profit is mandatory, I am not in any way confused about that, but saying that an organizations exists for the purpose of profit is kind of like saying that the purpose of a persons life is breathing (which also can be measured quite well by the way). A Defense (of a sort) of Metrics(a guest post by Mark D. Hirschfeld and F. Leigh Branham We may not be able to measure honesty, compassion, and courage, but we can measure the results that those traits produce-lower voluntary turnover, lower quit rates, fewer grievances filed, more internal job progressions allowed, more customers returning more frequently and referring their friends, more managers coaching (often confronting), recognizing (more often) and giving constructive feedback, more new employees being hired through referrals from happier, more engaged employees-all measures of not just more, but of better places to work that do indeed serve as measures of progress toward becoming a remarkable workplace. CC-licensed production parts image by iamphejom.

If you use social media, you see status updates about attempts to achieve InBox Zero. I hadn’t probed that phrase much, so didn’t realize its connection to Merlin Mann of 43folders.  I had figured out that people were struggling to empty their email in-boxes.  I’d also guessed that many  people were not necessarily following a strict regimen, just using the phrase loosely, the way they say "best practice" or "customer focus."  Or, after a sneeze, "bless you." The loose sense of inbox zero is an email counterpart to the Cleared-Off Desk.  Either of these things can be ripped from context, turned from a possible indicator of progress  into the Talisman of Virtue. Recently I spent a distressing  amount of time mucking around with my email, especially the rules I’ve created to initially process stuff.  This felt a lot like work (in the "chores you need to get around to" sense), which had me musing yet again on training versus learning. I had this idea: training is about YOU; learning is about ME. To generalize energetically, one of the most common meanings for "training" in organizations is: A planned, focused, structured approach… over a limited amount of time… for novices, especially in groups… to develop competence they currently lack… in applying mainly procedural skills… in a limited amount of time. That’s what’s behind how to use the email system, how to manufacture ceramic heaters, how to write a flood insurance policy" or how to open savings accounts.  Those are examples of predominantly procedural tasks from projects I’ve worked on, either for newly hired employees or people needing to learn a  process significantly different from the old one. "Training is for you" is shorthand for saying that someone’s delineated this cluster of skill.  Yes, I know that often the delineation isn’t that great-but for now assume  somebody did sufficient analysis to say: These people can’t do these things They can’t because they don’t know how Knowing how will enable them to produce these results to this level of quality. At the risk of seeming to lowball, I’m thinking about that end-of-training level of quality as competence.  Competence, as opposed to mastery.  In that highly-conditional context in the box above, you develop training for others ("training is for you") to help them become competent-to perform adequately in a new environment. Remember, though, they’re the people doing the learning ("learning is for me").  What’s more, as on-the-job performance moves from the relatively narrow context of isolated procedural skills (how to complete a mortgage application) to more complex situations (how to help clients understand and choose a mortgage option), you can’t help people achieve competence, let alone mastery, through traditional training and development approaches. Even in the small area of dealing with email, I noticed the value of clusters of skills, not all of which would fit easily into a cookbook-style job aid. * Like understanding and applying tools.  Not just to create email rules in Outlook (in my case), but to apply options that mark, sort, auto-delete incoming mail-and to handle my replies, a harder task when you’re not on a corporate server. Or like periodically perform maintenance, like tracking down the causes of persistent problems, or like reviewing, editing, and pruning existing rules. Or like knowing when to stop doing more of what you’ve been doing. On that last point, I’m thinking of GE’s Jack Welch.  He talked once about inventory turns, a way to measure how you’re controlling inventory costs.  If you try to keep 100 niblicks on hand, and you sell 500 a year, you have 5 inventory turns.  In general, a lower number of turns means higher cost. If the niblick group tries to improve from 10 to 11 turns a year, they’ll probably do the same things, only faster.  To go from 10 to 15 turns  in one year, "faster" won’t work.  They’ll have to rethink assumptions, re-examine givens, see the parts and the whole.  As as Welch saw, even if they don’t hit 15, they’re likely to far surpass what they would have done incrementally. If you focus simply on getting your inbox to zero, there’s a risk that you’re just moving and deleting stuff faster.  You’re dealing with procedural specifics at a task level.  If instead you focus on processing information that comes to you, you’re do this right now, put this on the afternoon’s schedule, file this with that project, route these to the keep-for-now-but-autodelete-in-a-month folder. Part of Merlin Mann’s approach is to route incoming items to logical next steps.  In other words, inbox zero doesn’t mean you’re done; it means you’re ready to start with things that matter. That more complex cluster of skills isn’t something that traditional training will achieve.  It’s a performance improvement that depends on individuals learning and on various kinds of collaborative work that’s encouraged and supported by the workplace.  The kind of better practice that surpasses "best practice." * How clever of you to notice that I was happy to stop editing email rules for a while so I could sit back and philosophize analyze at a higher level.

I’m a big believer in the curse of knowledge-the idea, as Chip and Dan Heath phrase it, that once we know something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it.  Consider the way you pronounce "often" — do  you sound the T, or not? — and how bizarre it seemed when you first met someone who pronounces it the other way. Recently someone asked whether I’d be interested in working on a project as a "user experience strategist."  I don’t think I have the necessary qualifications, whatever they might be, but I do have a growing collection of items that fall into the intersection of user experience and curse of knowledge. This, for instance, is a message I encountered while waiting for some online animation to start: I actually don’t remember what the animation was about.  I do remember that the entire load took perhaps 25 seconds, a span of time for which ten-thousandths of one percent rarely matter.  Even if the load took 25 minutes, 1% of that time would be 15 seconds.  Two decimal places (0.01%) would be 0.15 seconds.  Close enough. The next example is from a local government authority in Scotland.  "Council" here means something like the town or county government in the U.S., with responsibility for things like public safety, roads, and schools.  While the page does have a sidebar for "quick links," what you see in the box below is the entire text for frequently asked questions. Not only are questions frequently asked, they’re frequently anticipated, which may explain this FAQ example from a long-distance phone service: And as we turn to the last example-I know peeves are often kept as pets, but this one I think has gone feral: I don’t understand why so many websites and blogs fail to include a preview button for comments. So, in this next example (from an advertising-industry publication), the upper section shows what you see when you want to make a comment.  The lower section shows a result that isn’t all that surprising.   Behind all of these, I think, is likely someone whose assumption was "people will know what this means" or "this will help them do X."

My wife and I were married on the last day of February, three years ago.  I had asked my daughter, who’s a poet, if she would read something at the ceremony.  She did that doubly: first,  a poem by Robert Burns.  Next, an unexpected gift-a poem she wrote for us. So, two poems, which goes well with how we mark our anniversary. As I said, we were married on the last day of February, which in 2008 was the 29th. I’m glad for the two poems, since during non-leap-years I tell people our anniversary is the day after February 28 and the day before March 1. Love for Love Ithers seek they ken na what,Features, carriage, and a’ that;Gie me love in her I court,Love to love maks a’ the sport. Let love sparkle in her e’e;Let her lo’e nae man but me;That’s the tocher-gude I prize,There the luver’s treasure lies. - Robert Burns tocher-gude: dowry, marriage portion A Roof Against the Rain We did not always marry for love. Marriage began as business, a mode of commerce, a means of conquest. The right wife provides heirs, status, income. So a rich man chooses his bride without ever consulting his heart. And the poor man, too, for he cannot afford to dwell on a girl’s pretty face or sweet nature. Both men must instead consider the count: the number of cattle, or gold coins, or allies that he needs. The number he desires. So wives take lovers. Or their husbands do. Every consort pays the price. Some are happy. Some not. But kings die, and countries fall. Livestock is eaten. Money is spent. A loveless life lasts as long as any other. And is our modern world so very different? We come home to darkened rooms, sleep between cold sheets, wake to a blinding silence. We buy, and sell, and collect all the trappings of civilization. Sex is a biological function, like eating, or breathing. Love is a myth, perpetuated by popular culture. And yet we seek companionship. We long for the quickened heartbeat, the flushed cheek. We savor the first kiss, the next meeting. We will the phone to ring, linger over coffee with strangers, wanting to become friends, wanting to hold hands in the dark, wanting the happier life, where marriage is a choice, and love a refuge, a roof against the rain. - Gillian Devereux

An article by Adam Bryant in the New York Times deals with Google’s "quest to build a better boss."  Bryant looks at an effort by Google to mine its own data and figure out what made people better managers.  The list of behaviors, Bryant says, looks "forehead-slappingly obvious" : Have a clear vision and strategy for the team. Help your employees with career development. Be a good communicator and listen to your team. (From the Times, a fuller list of eight good behaviors and three pitfalls for Google managers.) More important is the source of the ideas, and especially their relevance to managing at Google.  The company collected data from a range of observations about its own managers: performance reviews, feedback surveys, and so on.  They coded that data to help uncover patterns.  They conducted interviews with managers to collect more data. One thing they found that they hadn’t expected: a manager’s technical expertise ranks "dead last" among the eight behaviors they uncovered. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers. One drawback to lists of management behaviors like this one is a sort of horoscopic skew: you skim the list and decide that the ones that stand out are the ones that apply to you.  So a person who prides himself on his technical background might believe that as manager of technical people, he or she needs to have high tech skills. That may be true on a project team, but to the extend you’re really managing, I don’t think so.  Think of the tongue-in-cheek definition of manager as "someone who gets other people to do the work."  In a sense, that’s true: the manager is a kind of executive producer, helping to create the conditions in which the group can best accomplish its goals.  An often-overlooked aspect of that is acting as a non-judgmental resource to help people figure out how to solve their own dilemmas. This is one of the main points of a classic article by William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass, Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? (PDF).  They compare business problems to monkeys, and discuss ways in which subordinates try to put the monkey on the back of their manager.  Here’s a manager who’s working at empowering his staff (which is where most of the problem-solving should occur): "At no time while I am helping you with this or any other problem will your problem become my problem. The instant your problem becomes mine, you no longer have a problem. I cannot help a person who hasn’t got a problem. "When this meeting is over, the problem will leave this office exactly the way it came in—on your back. You may ask my help at any appointed time, and we will make a joint determination of what the next move will be and which of us will make it. "In those rare instances where the next move turns out to be mine, you and I will determine it together. I will not make any move alone." - Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec. 1974 Granted, you need to ignore a certain assumed hierarchical bias in HBR articles.  Even so, I’d argue that this, too, is head-slappingly obvious.  But "obvious" is often an after-the-fact label.  It’s easier, more dramatic, and perhaps more fun to pound the desk, to shout, and to act in general like a BlackBerry-toting gunslinger than to do the persistent work of helping people achieve the best results they can.

Guy Wallace said this on Twitter a while back: I always wanted the Client to own the analysis & design data rather than me. I don’t convert their words to mine - or to Noun-Verb patterns. He’s summarized a lot of good ideas about the consulting process.  And his phrase about noun-verb patterns reminded me of  two principles I keep in mind when dealing with performance problems (and with their much-smaller subset, training problems): Behavior you take with you; accomplishment you leave behind.(That’s Tom Gilbert talking.) A result is a noun; doing is a verb. "Doing" is a good example of a fuzzy label, and that’s part of why I’m writing this.  When someone starts talking about what people do at work, it seems to me it’s easy for their focus to shift. Sometimes when someone’s talking about what people do at work, he might mean the actions they perform, the processes they go through.  That’s how a person works.  It’s the doing part of what they do.  It’s a verb. If you need to repair the water damage in your basement, then what the contractor does at work-the verbs he carries out-are things like measuring dimensions, testing materials, inspecting damage, examining structures, considering costs,  and calculating square footage. Alternatively, when someone’s talking about what people do at work, he might mean on the things those people produce, what they accomplish-the result of their work. A result is a thing.  It’s a noun. That’s the case even in so-called knowledge work and in service occupations. From this angle, what the contractor does-what he produces-is an estimate for the job.  Or a list of suggested approaches (on paper, or  verbal), or a series of questions for you to ask yourself-a kind of contractor’s initial consultation. That’s what’s left behind when the contractor leaves. I think this behavior/accomplishment distinction is crucial when you’re talking about performance on the job.  Companies and organizations are crammed to the institution rafters with ritualized behavior that continues in the absence of any real accomplishment except that the behavior got done: sales people are required to make 30 cold calls a day-not because of any company data about the effectiveness of cold calling, but because Veronica, the sales director, had three early successes from cold calls. Working from the other direction, Umberto, who handles accounting for your department, tells you to charge the new software under "training materials."  Not that the software is going to be used for training-but your boss has authority for twice the expenditure under that category than he has under "computer resources."  Changing the accounting codes is such a slow process that not only would the software be out of date, but Umberto and you would both be retired, before it happened.  So Umberto’s helped accomplish a result (software deployed) but if caught you and he will both be sentenced assigned to Purchasing Refresher Training. When you focus on results, you can work backward through the factors that influenced those results.  Sometimes (most of the time, actually) you’ll find that "lack of skill or knowledge" on the part of the performer is not the major hindrance to accomplishment.  That, of course, means you’ll likely be wasting your time (and the performer’s) if you try to resolve the situation through training. As Guy Wallace said, you want the client to own the analysis and the design data.  I’ve said before that while I myself try not to use "understand" as a learning objective, I might go along with the client’s use of it, so long as the client and I can agree on what it looks like (what the results are) when someone "understands" how to perform a FEMA elevation certification. Now, if the client is hell-bent on ignoring any data that doesn’t say "deliver training," I’m pretty sure I’m not the right person to be working with that client. Images adapted from this CC-licensed photo by Sebastian Werner / blackwing_de.  

A discussion on lrnchat included lots of comments and questions about data collected about people’s performance, particularly in training, testing, or learning situations. I’m always inclined to say you can’t do evaluation if you don’t measure, which means I quickly exasperate people who think evaluating is measuring.  For them, perhaps it is.  For me, measurement is a kind of quantification (Conor weighs 187 pounds, Raylene booked $4.7 million in  sales last year), while evaluation is your comparison of the measurement with some standard (Conor is overweight, Raylene made 125% of quota). That seems straightforward, except for a depressing tendency to assume we’re all using the same standard-and that tendency’s sidekick, the assumption that our measures take in the right requirements.  In that lrnchat discussion, Jane Bozarth mentioned an online course where the instructor based his evaluation in part on the number of comments a student posted.  Naturally, someone set out to put up 100 meaningless posts. What to do?  Well, you could turn to Tom Gilbert, who mused about what he called the dimensions of performance measuring back in 1978 (and probably long before that).  He saw three classes (or requirements) for measurement: quality, quantity, and cost. "When we measure an accomplishment, any one or more of these requirements may be relevant, and one of our principle tasks is to identify them."  In other words: figure out what’s important about the desired performance, which will help you determine what to measure and the standard to use. Gilbert saw three possible aspects to each of these dimensions. Quality, for instance, can involve: Accuracy-how well does the accomplishment match a model without errors? Class-is the accomplishment superior to most in some way beyond accuracy? Novelty-does the accomplishment demonstrate originality?  Does it embody features or aspects that distinguish it favorably in particular dimensions? Quantity or productivity can involve: Rate -accomplishments per unit of time. Timeliness-accomplishment by some end point. Volume-accomplishment when time is not a significant factor (e.g., sales per month). Cost: Labor-the amount spent for the labor and associated items directly related to the accomplishment. Material-supplies, tools, equipment, and so on. Management-the cost of supervision, administration, and support related to the accomplishment. As Gilbert points out, the requirements are relevant only when people’s accomplishments vary based on the requirements.  So running a 10K doesn’t normally involve accuracy. Framing a custom home involves timeliness, and could possibly involve rate, but most often novelty wouldn’t be a requirement. However, class as a quality measure might apply, if the craftsman needs to adapt quickly and successfully to changing conditions: "Leo, this suite needs to be wheelchair-accessible.  Can we move the doorway?" I think it’s useful to have these categories in mind regardless of the type of work you’re considering.  But don’t take my work for it.  Here’s Gilbert: …Jobs which seem unmeasurable are actually mesurable once we identify their accomplishments and relevant requirements.  Many jobs that people say cannot be measures ("you can’t measure show-horse breeding-it’s an art") seem that way only because we are thinking of behavior rather than accomplishment. How would we measure the behavior required in selecting good breeding stock?  I haven’t the faintest idea.  But we can measure results… There’s more to say on this topic, but this will do for a start. CC-licensed photos:Measurement (of coffee) by flyzipper / Steve Michos.Evaluation (of accomplishment) by afternoon / Ben Godfrey.

I’ve been trying to get better control over the projects I work on and the data related to those projects.  So this isn’t me avoiding work; this is me reprocessing by talking about the challenges I felt and then about how I’ve tried to address them. What I had wanted to do was: Reduce my paper clutter Reduce my digital clutter, which felt nearly as heavy Reclaim my workspace, both physical and virtual Seize more of the potential of electronic notes than I had so far That sounds like mainly organization and housekeeping, but if you rise above the roadway, it’s managing.  I wanted to do better at managing both work and non-work projects.  I figured if I could accomplish any of those things in the list, and especially more than one at once, I’d be far more likely to get a project done.   Or at least get it moving. What would matter? At GE, we talked about CTQs: the critical-to-quality items that represent a customer’s view about what’s most important for a product or service.  My own CTQs for doing better included: Retention-whatever’s in the system is ultimately in my own custody, not solely a wisp in someone else’s cloud bank. Ubiquity-a system that I could use in my office, on a client site, or somewhere else. Dwell time-an increased ability for me to stay with the task at hand. Was that a wrong note? For some time, I’ve used Evernote, which modestly says you can capture anything, access it anywhere, and find things fast.  (Optional side trip: Evernote’s 90-second intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQP0gkPnEcY .) Evernote lets you create individual notes, store them in virtual notebooks, and access them on your own computer, from any computer, or through a smartphone-hey, ubiquity!  The database with your notes is stored not only on their servers (which you don’t own) but also on your PC, with automatic synchronization. You can cloudify if you like, but having a local copy of the database helps satisfy my CTQ for retention. I’ve used Evernote for more than two years, mainly in that unfocused, plunge-right-in, that’s-kind-of-cool way. (A particular favorite: because I sketch a lot of ideas on flipcharts, I love being able to snap a picture, transfer it to Evernote, and later search for text in the image.) Most of the time, though, I was also making multiple notebooks and creating a myriad of tags.  When it comes to tagging, some people believe that enough is enough and too much is plenty, but for me there’s a real problem with diminishing returns.  (We’ll skip over the issue of typos, as well as the pluralization dilemma: Is the tag finance or finances?) I’d been cruising a predictable arc, from an initial everything-fits enthusiasm to a distressing suspicion that I’d reinvented the junk drawer. To be is to be done? On a separate track, I’d been reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done.  I approached this book with hesitation, or more accurately evangeloskepticism, because of the… well, let’s say, the ardor of some GTD adherents.  The people who always say "GTD." If they were Apple users, they’d be the ones who care about the code name for the next operating system. Messy and distractable I may be, but I appreciate the advantages of a system, even if I sometimes appreciate it from afar.  Allen’s approach is more about thinking systematically than about particular tools-though you can, if you desire, buy a set of 43 plastic file folders for only $39.95 (plus shipping).  So I’ve been applying elements of that system, and adjusting the way I work with my paper files and with Evernote, and I’m happy with how the results look so far. Different ways to see your project Two useful, intertwined concepts: first, a task is something you can complete in a single chunk of time. "Peel the carrots" is a task.  If you’re like me, "do the grocery shopping" is also a task; I may have a big list of items, but I get them in one trip. At my house, we have a cluster of grocery-related tasks: plan dinner  for the week, check the ingredients we need, build a grocery list, shop (ideally, with the list).  Getting Things Done calls such a cluster a project: "any desired result that requires more than one action step." Which leads to the second useful concept: you don’t do a project, you do the next step.  From a manage-your-work perspective, think of the project as the goal you want to achieve (groceries purchased, workshop delivered, kitchen remodeled).  You revisit the project to generate thoughts about what the next steps might be.  When you don’t have any more steps, the project’s done. So I create what I call a project page, which is a highfalutin name for a note on which I put a short description of the goal of the project, along with a timeframe (however nebulous) and the tag I’ve chose for that project.  I’ll also use the project page to jot notes about ideas related to the project.  That means the project page becomes a kind of greenhouse where idea seedlings can germinate until they turn into action steps. Action steps (things I can do) become separate notes, each tagged as part of the project.  So do reference items, like email that I forward to Evernote, making the contents of the email more readily searchable.  So do things like PDF documents, which can be dragged into their own note. Now I have a Projects notebook.  I use Evernote’s filtering tools to control what I see when I click the Projects notebook, like this: Previously, I had more than a dozen project-specific notebooks in that sidebar. And if I create a new notebook for any multi-step effort I have (even small one with long duration, like "get a digital copy of the LP that Mom has no turntable for"), I could easy have three or four dozen. This works better.  And I can do the same sort of selective display across multiple notebooks. If it’s not a step, it might be a reference David Allen suggests putting all your project-support material (things that don’t require an action but that you want to retain) into a reference file.  He leaves the form of that file up to you, though he’s quite the fan of a single, alphabetical-order, paper filing system.  I have those, but I prefer keeping digital (i.e., searchable) copies, which now go into a Reference notebook. Allen might be less in favor of a separate location for the work-specific diaries that I call project logs, so if you see him, don’t tell him that’s what I have.  I tend to make the logs for large projects; for small ones, I’ll jot ongoing notes on the project page.  Not necessarily consistent, but, oh, well. More than a third of my Evernote items are in the REFERENCE notebook.  To me, this makes sense.  For active projects, a lot of the relevant material isn’t a trigger for action; it’s project support.  It’s reference material. If an item appears useful to more than one project, I apply multiple project tags.  That way it’ll show up in project-specific searches. I also have a Project Archive notebook.  When I complete a project, I select all its items from the Projects notebook and move them to the archive.  Why?  Because that’s what I’ve always done. In my corporate, cubicle-based days, the bottom of my four-drawer file was labeled Attic. It became a combination of historical record, reference room, and security blanket.  (I’m no hoarder, though;  every year or two, when it got full, I’d weed it back by a third or so.) The Projects notebook and the Project Archive account for another 20% of my notes, which means that together with Reference, half of what I keep in Evernote is in just three notebooks. Not that there’s a prize for Fewest Notebooks Used-though if there were, Ruud Hein would be a real contender.  He wrote an Evernote GTD How To that inspired me to experiment and adapt.  (I also like his tone and his pragmatism.) Speaking of pragmatism, this post is long enough.  I have a follow-up underway with some more examples of what I’ve tried and what results I’ve gotten. Evernote examples are my own. CC-licensed images: dwell time by Owen Blacker. Junk drawer by windsordi / Di Bédard. Archive of papers by Ben McLeod.

One of the lesser-known treasures of Washington DC is the Folger Shakespeare Library, home to scholarly research, to intriguing exhibits about the Elizabethans, and to the Folger Theater, which presents at least three plays each year (this season’s were Henry VIII, The Comedy of Errors, and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano). And every April the Folger throws a birthday party for that glover’s son from Stratford (none of that elitist Oxfordian piffle, thanks). This year’s party is next Sunday, which was as much excuse as I needed to post this now instead of April 23rd. Will never manages to show up (I’ve watched for him), though there’s a red-headed woman people insist on called Elizabeth I who does take part, making pronouncements and cutting a ceremonial cake. (You can number monarchs as you see fit, but Henry VIII’s younger daughter was never queen of Scots, so to me that "Elizabeth I" means a certain wild and crazy grandmother with a lot of corgis.) So here’s… William Shakespeare on: Career choice To business that we love, we rise betime, and go to it with delight. (Antony and Cleopatra) Consulting When I was at home, I was in a better place, but travelers must be content. (As You Like It) Email (or, perhaps, spam) When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions. (Hamlet) Needs analysis Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise. (Troilus and Cressida) The systems approach If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me. (Macbeth) Professionalism Have more than thou showest; speak less than thou knowest. (King Lear) The cult of leadership Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered. (Cymbeline) The cult of thought-leadership Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving. (Othello) Fads and bandwagons The fashion wears out more apparel than the man. (Much Ado About Nothing) Conference keynotes (or, perhaps, blogging) Brevity is the soul of wit. (Hamlet)  

Somewhere, yet another big organization is working on yet another big computer system.  Legions of stakeholders are fussing about what the system needs to have if they’re going to get their real work done. Few of them, alas, are making the case for a robust, easy, and safe way to practice.  A shame, considering the universal desire to have people learn such systems. Instead, people are mired in situations like a financial services project I worked on.  Its banking module, used by the people at a branch, enabled them to electronically open accounts for a customer, transfer funds, and handle loan applications. But there was no way to practice those tasks.  If you wanted to get skilled at, say, processing an auto loan, you had to process an actual one-preferably for yourself, so you wouldn’t need someone else’s Social Security number.  You couldn’t complete the transaction.  Well, you could if you were actually getting a car loan.  Seemed like a mighty rigorous prerequisite.  And training people to do A, B, but not C — quick, hit cancel! — is disconcerting. A practice system, like its first cousin, a test mode that truly works like the actual system, is a kind of performance-support forest that companies can’t see because all the stakeholders are focused on the system-spec trees. When I managed online training for Amtrak’s reservation system, we inherited three imaginary trains that agents could access with a training ID. Granted, learners could reserve seats and sleeping compartments, but not much more.  And the practice provided was suboptimal. Each imaginary train had a consist (a set of cars, with passenger accommodations), but there was no automatic cancellation of the fictional reservations.  In other words, the imaginary trains could sell out. As for transferring skills, the trains didn’t follow any actual Amtrak route.  One went from London to Rome; Another, from London to Dublin-by way of Donegal. More to the point, pretty much all you could do was reserve space.  You couldn’t calculate fares, in part because Amtrak didn’t have fares on the London-Donegal Express, but also because there was no connection between the imaginary trains and other parts of the system. Like fares. During my time as head of online training , we decided to do better.  Leslie, who’d been a reservations agent, worked with John from the Train Operations group.  I’ll discuss specifics not because you need to know about Amtrak reservations, but to show the kinds of factors to consider when planning a sturdy practice system. Realism: Leslie and John created training trains based on real ones: they cloned trains 3 and 4 (Chicago - Los Angeles) as 9003 and 9004 (no real-world trains had numbers in the 9000s).  Same cities, same accommodations, same schedule. Coverage: They identified all the different types of Amtrak accommodations, then created training trains to include them all.  They took in geographic routes, so that while they didn’t duplicate the entire Amtrak system, they had trains in every part of the country.  This country. Integration: the training trains got their city information, schedules, accommodations, and fares from the live system. When the fares changed on the real route, they changed on the training trains as well.  The training ID could access all the information-only parts of the system: fare quotes, current train status, and the like. Resilience: you could make as many reservations as you liked, for whatever day you liked. At midnight, they’d all get purged, so as not to clog the system with imaginary trains filled with imaginary passengers.  And for entire new services, we could clone another real-world train and launch it in the training environment. Security: we built in safeguards against error.  If you logged on with the training ID, you couldn’t reserve space or issue tickets on real-life trains.  Your real-system ID would not let you use or even display the training trains.  The burden of requiring  a training ID for practice was low, and the separate systems meant that even if you forgot which mode you were in, you couldn’t do anything harmful to a real reservation. Continuing the security angle, you could make ticketing entries on the training trains.  That means you could pull up a training-train reservation and tell the system you were issuing tickets.  You couldn’t print the tickets, though, and the financial system ignored "sales" on the training trains. What did Amtrak get out of this? Any Amtrak ticket clerk or reservation agent (more than 2,000 people at that time) could practice virtually any entry, or combination of entries, via the training trains. The new training trains, based on real-world routes, reinforced the layout of Amtrak’s route structure.  You could work with complex fares and experiment with complicated connections.  You could also build skill with accommodations or trains, like Metroliners, that you might not encounter often. As new features went into the live system, they were available immediately in the training system as well. Safe practice in many live systems is harder than it should be.  Often "harder" means "not possible."  Less-safe practice can mean goofy messages going to customers.  Phantom sales inflating revenue.  Accidental cancellations of live orders.  Triple demand for supplies. No matter how firmly your company insists on formal training, your learners and the entire organization  can benefit from support provided on the job by a realistic, feature-rich way to practice skills. CC-licensed images: a few stakes by TonZ; log slices by the queen of subtle; caber toss by notacrime / Gregor Dodson. Detailed map of the London-Dublin Express is mine.

I know, I know, "learning events" is pretty vague.  But I wanted a crisper title than "an idiosyncratic list of face-to-face professional-development opportunities for people in the training / learning / performance improvement field." I don’t get to many in-person learning events.  This year I did go to the Innovations in eLearning Symposium (which was 40 miles from my house), and two years ago I made a presentation at a CSTD event in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The idea of presenting to your peers is a bracing stimulus, a strong incentive to reflect on what you do, what you’ve learned, and what you can share that’s useful to someone else.  Not that I always have to present, but I think sharing what you’ve learned with your colleagues is an opportunity you’d do well to embrace. I find it hard to keep track of what’s happening where (and especially when) in terms of conferences and similar events that I might like to attend.  That’s why I’ve created a calendar of learning events.  It’s a spreadsheet on Google Docs that lists these things in chronological order.   Screen shot: events listed by start date (click to enlarge) In addition to providing a link to the event’s site, the list includes  events that have already taken place; dates in the past appear in gray.  The idea is to retain them for a year.  I figure that will help me estimate when the event will take place next year, even if the organization’s plans aren’t yet available. I did find a few similar lists, but none of them had a feature I really needed:  events sorted by the due date for proposals:   Screen shot: events by due date for submitting a proposal (click to enlarge) I might ask myself why ISPI needs an eight-month lead time for proposals, but at least this way I know that’s their lead time. I thought a list like this might be useful to others, which is why I’ve put it on Google Docs and why I’m sharing a bit.ly link ( http://bit.ly/k0YOvw ) instead of Google’s 136-character URL. The document  actually has several  sheets that you can view (not including a couple of other sheets where I hide the machinery that makes the lists work): A welcome page with contents (links to the other sheets) The list of events sorted by start date The list of events sorted by due date for proposals The (unsorted) master list that the other lists work from If other people find these lists useful, or if they suggest events to include, I’ll be delighted.  That’s part of the reason for the rambly "about this calendar" page: to say more than you’d want to read here about the kinds of event I think would fit and the kinds that wouldn’t.

Sometimes, it’s worth the whole week’s subscription to The New York Times just to get the Tuesday Science section.  (It’s certainly not worth it if you’re only going to count how often in a week the Times uses the word "famously"). Science this week included Nicholas Wade’s article In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain, which centers on the work of Cornelia Bargmann. I’m going to summarize the parts of the article that most intrigued me, in part because both the grunt work conducted on a 1-millimeter worm, and the complexity that work has revealed, are probably good to… well, have in mind when you read some breathless "finding about the brain" that means you should never use magenta as a font color. (Click to see NYTimes diagram) Bargmann has spent 24 years studying Caenorhabditis elegans.  Many neuroscientists do, in part because C. elegans has only 302 neurons.  (You, by way of contrast, have 100 billion or so.)  John G. White spent more than 10 years mapping the 8,000 connections between those neurons. At that point, science had a neurological map for the worm, but didn’t know which connections made what happen.  It was like having the wiring diagram for an apartment building. As is, just the wires: not knowing what was connected to any outlet or socket. Cell bodies of the ILR, VL, and 2-neurons (ILR is about 2 microns wide) Bargmann eventually tried the equivalent of flipping circuit breakers to see which lights went out.  She knew that C. elegans "can taste waterborne chemicals and move toward those it finds attractive."  So she started killing one neuron at a time with a laser. The idea was to try to figure out what the neuron did from what the worm stopped doing. Eventually, she did find the neuron that controlled taste.  She also discovered that C. Elegans has a sense of smell, as well.  Like rats, these worms can tell what to eat and what to avoid by scent.  Bargmann learned that neurons, and not odor receptors, controlled the move-toward-good, move-from-bad behavior. This is tough learning.  In addition to the 302 neurons and their 8,000 connections, there’s another system of "gap junctions" involving chemical connection between neurons. And there are neuropeptides (250 different ones) that neurons release to affect other neurons.  Which means the pattern of neural connections changes on the fly. Cell-body image of C. elegans neurons by Thomas Boulin for WormAtlas.