I'm not breaking up with Typepad but I did want to try out Medium. So I wrote a post about patterns, something I actually think is very important. I hope you enjoy the post but I also wanted to mention my thoughts about using Medium as a publishing platform.  First reaction - look to blank to me - where are all the WYSIWYG editor toolbars? Oh, they're all based on contextual action so they don't clutter the landscape when you don't need them. Cool.  Second reaction - this is nice. Almost typewriter-like in the sense of putting a blank page in the typewriter and having it stare back at you. Its uncluttered design really brings you back to the writing. Sure you can add an image (I do like how every post can have a 'cover photo') but picking out the right image isn't the heart of what you're doing. You're there to write. The font is super-clean and readable.  Third reaction - I need to understand better how to link Medium to Twitter or LinkedIn - maybe I can't and maybe that's part of the design - I just need to investigate that.  Overall reaction - I like Medium. I resisted for a long time but I like it. It's clean and easy and somehow the UI keeps me focused on the writing. Now I have to decide if I'll use it more....that would be a pattern. ;-)

I find the work by Loomio compelling. @nilofer, in "11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era" argues that "In the Social Era, the power to make decisions doesn’t come from your spot on the org chart, or rank, or any fancy-schmancy title. Power to make decisions comes from knowing which ideas matter to the organization and why." I agree. One issue though is that our current enterprise systems aren't built to recognize input at a decision level from multiple levels in the org. We are working to change that but I like the path that Loomio is showing us. The system is set up well with decisions at the heart of the process. The one thing that I'd point to is in this image >>See those options? Some of them are pretty powerful - especially that last one - BLOCK. Now imagine your CEO proposes an idea and everyone else jumps on it but you disagree with it and state you case and vote BLOCK. If you were the only one in your org to vote to block the idea - would you be comfortable with that? If not, then we have more work to do on the org design and change management side - because that comfort level - that is what it mean to BE a social organization. 

Sameer Patel, currently SVP and  in charge of SAP’s Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software Products and Go to Market recently penned a blog post, "Who Spiked the Enterprise Activity Stream?" I don't want to overgeneralize and am open to corrections if I do, but the post seems to be a critique on the fact that the design of the stream, in this case a seemingly Wild West of constantly flowing and updating information sent into the Wild with little of no direction, is not a design that focuses on a drive to "closure" and that "short bursts of closure on the way to the big finale" are how work gets done. So I have a couple of thoughts.  To begin with the ironic - I follow Sameer on Twitter and value that information but yes, I could live without his tweets :-) I could also live without knowing when each and every one of colleagues has a birthday but there is value there though in terms of providing context about the people you work with. I'll try to focus on the stream though.  I don't think the manner in which the information coming to you is actually very new. My Inbox can be a stream - at times its been a river, or a firehose. Either way, its an undifferentiated flow of information, a lot of which I did not ask for, coming at me and typically I've had very little ability to filter that flow in a way that allows me to shape it so that it makes more sense to me. I don't think I need to poll my users even to find out that they think there must be a better way to communicate than an endless river of emails. As far as driving closure....the two easiest ways to find closure in email are the FWD (an action passed is an action completed) or the delete button. The point is, it's still a flow and as such, I can still miss the occasional important email from my boss or client in that flow. So why do I like the activity stream better? First, most implementations of activity streams that I've seen allow for some way to highlight to a particular user, an important post. Much like Twitter, most streams allow for the specific naming of an individual and that triggers a notification to that user, sometimes ironically in email or sometimes just using in-browser notifications. That's all mechanics though.  The second, and I think most important differentiator for the stream is that it is (for the most part) public and visible (within the enterprise). This dynamic adds a whole new layer that isn't there in email. The very visibility of posts, within the context of that "ambient learning", decreases the chances that I'll miss something important by building on an awareness of what everyone is working on and what the important posts should be.  Driving closure though - that's the heart right? Remember the Herding Cats video? I think that video was created to tell the story about trying to drive closure through email :) I think open, transparent discussions can allow closure to be driven much more efficiently than emails hidden in Inboxes and bloated PST files. The key though is that they won't do it by themselves. Behavior has to change in order to maximize the effective use of streams. Remember when people used to print out emails? Yeah, not so effective but we learned to behave differently - why assume the same isn't true with streams?  So I don't think the stream is spiked, I think it's just a new taste. :)

So to all the folks who had a moment of crisis about seeing Ender's Game because of the hateful comments of the book's author, as wrong and misguided as I thought that protest would be (since the message of the movie countered those hateful comments), this letter, this makes me want to cross Wolf of Wall Street off my list. I say that having not seen the movie and knowing that while Scorsese is known for nuanced, multi-faceted films - that some people will come away from this seeing the Wolf as someone to emulate.I think looking again at Ender's Game and this film - the fact that one is a fiction and one is based on real people - the Wolf is still out there profiting as a motivational speaker - really makes this a more dificult call. Read the letter though, and you decide.  ============================================================ (story link)  An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself BY CHRISTINA MCDOWELLI hate to be the bearer of bad news, dear Kings of Hollywood, but you have been conned. Let me introduce myself. My name is Christina McDowell, formerly Christina Prousalis. I am the daughter of Tom Prousalis, a man the Washington Post described as "just some guy on trial for penny-stock fraud." (I had to change my name after my father stole my identity and then threatened to steal it again, but I'll get to that part later.) I was eighteen and a freshman in college when my father and his attorneys forced me to attend his trial at New York City's federal courthouse so that he "looked good" for the jury -- the consummate family man. And you, Jordan Belfort, Wall Street's self-described Wolf: You remember my father, right? You were chosen to be the government's star witness in testifying against him. You had pleaded guilty to money laundering and securities fraud (it was the least you could do) and become a government witness in two dozen cases involving your former business associate, but my father's attorneys blocked your testimony because had you testified it would have revealed more than a half-dozen other corrupt stock offerings too. And, well, that would have been a disaster. It would have just been too many liars, and too many schemes for the jurors, attorneys or the judge to follow. But the records shows you and my father were in cahoots together with MVSI Inc. of Vienna, e-Net Inc. of Germantown, Md., Octagon Corp. of Arlington, Va., and Czech Industries Inc. of Washington, D.C., and so on -- a list of seemingly innocuous, legitimate companies that stretches on. I'll spare you. Nobody cares. None of these companies actually existed, yet all of them were taken public by the one and only Wolf of Wall Street and his firm Stratton Oakmont Inc in order to defraud unwitting investors and enrich yourselves. As an eighteen-year-old, I had no idea what was going on. But then again, did anyone? Certainly your investors didn't -- and they were left holding the bag when you cashed out your holdings and got rich off their money. So Marty and Leo, while you glide through press junkets and look forward to awards season, let me tell you the truth -- what happened to my mother, my two sisters, and me. The day my father had to surrender to prison, I drove him. My mother had locked herself in the bathroom crying and throwing up, becoming nothing short of a more beautiful version of Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Ironically enough, Marty, she looks like a cross between Sharon Stone and Michelle Pfeiffer. Totally your leading ingénue type. Anyhow, after my father successfully laundered money in my name, hiding what was left of our assets from the government in a Wells Fargo bank account, I arrived home to discover multiple phone calls from creditors and attorneys threatening to sue me. He'd left me in nearly $100,000 worth of debt. He left and never told me. After all of that liquidated money was gone from the Wells Fargo bank account, things got pretty bad. My younger sister ran away at seventeen. My older sister struggled to finish school in Texas. I couch surfed for two years, sometimes dressing out of my car and stealing pieces of salami out of my boyfriends' refrigerators in the middle of the night, because I was so hungry and so ashamed that I couldn't feed myself. Tips at the restaurant weren't cutting it. It's a pretty confusing experience to go from flying private with Dad to an evening where he's begging you for a piece of your paycheck so he can buy food for dinner. But, here's the real kicker -- I believed him. I believed everything my father told me. I believed it was the government's fault he was going to prison and leaving his little princess, I believed it was your fault, Jordan Belfort. I believed that by taking out all those credit cards in my name, my father was attempting to save me. I believed him when he got out, and when he told me everything would be OK. I believed him until he tried to do the same thing all over again -- until I was at risk of being arrested myself (and I'm saving that story for the memoir). So here's the deal. You people are dangerous. Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers' fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees. And yet you're glorifying it -- you who call yourselves liberals. You were honored for career excellence and for your cultural influence by The Kennedy Center, Marty. You drive a Honda hybrid, Leo. Did you think about the cultural message you'd be sending when you decided to make this film? You have successfully aligned yourself with an accomplished criminal, a guy who still hasn't made full restitution to his victims, exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed and psychopathic behavior. And don't even get me started on the incomprehensible way in which your film degrades women, the misogynistic, ass-backwards message you endorse to younger generations of men. But hey, listen boys, I get it. I was conned too. By. My. Own. Dad! I drove a white Range Rover in high school, snorted half of Colombia, and got any guy I ever wanted because my father would take them flying in his King Air. And then I unraveled the truth. The truth about my father and his behavior: that behind all of it was really just insidious soul-sucking shame masked by addiction, which we love to call ambition, which is really just greed. Greed and the desire for fame (exactly what you've successfully given self-appointed motivational speaker/financial guru Jordan Belfort, whose business opportunities will surely multiply thanks to this film). For me, it's become goddamn unbearable. But I refuse to give up. Belfort's victims, my father's victims, don't have a chance at keeping up with the Joneses. They're left destitute, having lost their life savings at the age of 80. They can't pay their medical bills or help send their children off to college because of characters like the ones glorified in Terry Winters' screenplay. Let me ask you guys something. What makes you think this man deserves to be the protagonist in this story? Do you think his victims are going to want to watch it? Did we forget about the damage that accompanied all those rollicking good times? Or are we sweeping it under the carpet for the sale of a movie ticket? And not just on any day, but on Christmas morning?? So here's what I'm going to do first. I'm going to hand you my shame. Right now, in this very moment. The shame that I've been carrying for far too long as a result of being collateral damage. Because each of you should feel ashamed. And then I'm going to go pre-order my tickets to August: Osage County in support of Julia and Meryl -- because at least, as screwed up as that family is, they talk about the truth. I urge each and every human being in America NOT to support this film, because if you do, you're simply continuing to feed the Wolves of Wall Street. Yours truly, Christina McDowell PS. Quick update on Dad: He is now doing business with the Albanian government and, rumor has it, married to a 30-year-old Albanian translator -- they always, always land on their feet. Christina McDowell currently lives in Los Angeles. She volunteers with InsideOUT Writers, a nonprofit for children impacted by the criminal justice system, and is currently writing her memoir. You can reach her at christina.mcdowell1016@yahoo.com.

We often talk or read about how consumer-level technologies are shaping the expectations that employees bring to the workplace. This McKinsey Quarterly article though highlights another vector that will impact the workplace - the experience that consumers will have with marketing efforts.  Read the full article but look at these dynamics: 1. Now: Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time. 2. Can I: They will want to do truly new things as disparate kinds of information (from financial accounts to data on physical activity) are deployed more effectively in ways that create value for them. 3. For me: They will expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs or used to personalize what they experience. 4. Simply: They will expect all interactions to be easy. Now ask yourself how closely your enterprise software/applications are mapping to those dynamics. Remember, your enterprise software (training, payroll, expense accounting, etc) isn't judged by that system's competitors but by your users' consumer-level experiences. 

I thought I'd like to try a "Pic a Day" project this year. I asked around for suggestions and got some good ones but the one that felt right was "things I'm grateful for." I am feeling very positive right now about the New Year and I think this will be a cool way for me to express how good I'm feeling. Hope you agree.   The first one is easy.... I'm grateful for my wife, Greta (aka @sassysbgal). She is and has been my rock - so much of what I am, I owe to her and her love and support. We're totally MFEO. Beautiful, funny, kind, a great mom, I could go on but she is #1 for a a multitude of reasons. So here we go, Pic #1

No, I didn't miss one already...my Day 2 is here. I did want to mention that I'm gonna consider Twitter my 'system of record for this experiment. I'll also be keeping a set on Flickr here. I'll use my blog when I need more space than Twitter allows.  I'm grateful for my feet and my legs. As I walk around the house and go for a run, I'm reminded that are many people who can't do those things. Some because of disease or injury and too many because of injuries sustained fighting for my country. So I'm deeply grateful that either because of luck, genetics or the sacrifice of others, today I can go for a run.

I was reading a post by Chris Heuer (you should also read this one) and the central focus was on the worthiness of "social business" as a generic brand name for what we're currently engaged in. I think the key piece in the post is this sentence: "Social Business isn’t a solution to a company’s problem; it is an aspiration." That's spot on. It certainly matches up with everything I've seen working in #socbiz. Too often, the mistake is to confuse the technology with the aspiration. I think though that as a name, "social business" can capture that aspiration..."e-learning" though, I think falls short.  Becoming social as a business is something a company can strive toward. If you or your organization needs any help in that regard, feel free to contact me :-) You ever tried to aspire to "e-learning" though? Yeah, exactly. The name frames a product not a goal and that's the problem.  People think e-learning is a solution to a problem and if it is then the only problem it's going to solve is compliance. It's also not that accurate - I don't want to rehash the whole name thing but is learning really being sold online now? Or is it training? And performance support? This amorphous name thing has been clouding the ROI debate since the start of time. So now we have a name we can't aspire to and a product brand that's not really accurate.  Now "learning organization" - there is an aspirational name. I think this quote from Senge is what really got people: "…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together." I think people saw that and saw e-learning and thought..."there it is! I'll buy some of that and we'll be a learning organization!" I think people really want to be learning organizations but they want to think that it's a solution buy to get there. That's why people are on their 6th LMS. This is also exactly why Gartner says that 80% of social business efforts will not achieve their goals.  Becoming a learning organization and a social business are worthy, aspirational goals. They can be supported by technology (see again the part above where I can help with that :-)) but they MUST be supported by the appropriate organizational design and change management - the appropriate level of committment - to get there. 

Onboarding. HUGE topic right? Plays into performance issues, recruiting, retention... I was reminded during a recent chat about onboarding of one of my favorite books, Making the Corps by Thomas Ricks.  I hear what you're saying - that's the Marine Corps, we're a company that sells X but the Marines make a powerful choice with their onboarding. The USMC focuses their boot camp experience (from what I've read and have been told - I've never had the honor to serve) on what it "means" to be a Marine; skills, while important, come later. No one leaves boot without knowing in their heart of hearts that they now belong to something larger than themselves and what that organization's central beliefs are.  This got me thinking. Can we do the same? Could we differentiate ourselves from our competitors clearly and sharply in a cultural sense? Could you answer the question - what does it mean to belong to your organization versus a competitor?  If asked, could you clearly talk about the central tenets of your organziation's culture and more importantly, could you point to ways in which both your organzation demonstrated how it values those points and how individuals act on those values in their daily work lives? So here is the challenge - without talking about pay - tell me the cultural touchstones that make your organization special - differentiate it from others on the basis of values. If we can't do that, how important do you think that it is to focus on surfacing those values?

Anybody who knows me would probably call me an extrovert. I'm a wee bit outgoing. So this article has been floating around Facebook and I finally broke down and read "6 Things Every Extrovert Secretly Has To Deal With" - thinking that it'd be cool to hear what I secretly deal with. Turns out it was a load of crap. Out of the 6 things the author lists, only 1 - Number 5 - Craving the company of others - is one that I identify with. That one's true - I do get energized by being around other people - whoa, what a burden right? The others are BS. People will assume you're flirting: Really? Seriously? That's a problem for you? Is that just a humblebrag about how good looking you are or what? You're not allowed to be sad: Um, yeah you are. If you're actually around people who care about you, they won't expect you to be cheery when you're not. You're expected to keep the conversation going: That's an expectation you put on yourself. Get over it. Being labeled as shallow or unintellectual because you’re not an introvert: Look, if you're an extrovert, chances are you're talking alot. I think the only way people will think you're shallow or unintellectual is because you're giving them plenty of evidence. People will assume you are always confident: Again, not if you're open and honest with your friends. So my own that I'd add to the list is that being an extrovert doesn't mean you have to come off as some sort of circus barker or insincere - if you're scared of that, chances are you're those things all on your own, extrovert or not. Couple other thoughts - no charge - the article was written by a 22-year old. Now 22-year olds can be brilliant and insightful but if we're going to stack some folks up against people like Susan Cain who went to a couple little schools called Princeton and Harvard, was a practicing attorney and has written a well-recieved book -we might want to look a little harder. Finally, the reason why I think introverts are getting so much attention is not that extroversion is the norm - it's not -it is the IDEAL. We are expected from childhood on up, to be outgoing and gregarious - if we're not - then clearly something like "shyness" is to be "dealth with" and fixed. So yeah, as an extrovert, I count myself lucky to be on this side and yes, I do think extroverts have it easier and I'm all for raising awareness of intorverts and the way they experience the world to better understand their struggles.

To begin, if you're not reading/following Eugene Eric Kim, you should. Really. On Twitter he is @eekim and you can find his blog here: http://fasterthan20.com/. Now a couple weeks ago, Eugene wrote a post called "THE KEY TO EFFECTIVE LEARNING? SOAP BUBBLES!" The story of the soap bubbles is that they are added to soap, they don't occur naturally, to give people the feedback that they associate with getting clean. They need those markers.  Eugene made the point that in the same way, when learning, it's important to get that feedback to provide those markers that you're actually moving along. I think most of us in L&D know the importance of feedback but the folks who work on games (by that, I mean build them for a living) REALLY get the importance of timely and relevant feedback - you don't have that and people will walk right away from your product.  So let's look larger though. The whole marketspace of gamification is the re-introduction of soap bubbles. We have designed so much enterprise software that seems like it was built without any consideration that humans were actually going to use it, that we have had to go out and find a field that is built on maintaining contact with the human on the keyboard or the controller and have had to migrate the principles of that field back across the bridge JUST to get some soap bubbles going.  "Gamification" is really just the addition of bubbles to let people know that the enterprise software they are engaging with knows that they are there and has a path for them and is tracking them in a positive way to make sure they get clean - or find the inforamtion they need - or are able to collaborate with the right people.  Thanks Eugene for providing me anyway, with a much clearer way to think about the soap bubble layer. 

    The "C" word. Yep, culture. Haunts so many of our efforts. Often it's like a specter hanging over failed projects - "the culture wasn't prepared to accept that technology." We talk about it's importance and about having the right one and about disruptive ones and innovation ones but I think we need to be a bit more basic up front.      The first thing you need to understand about organizational culture is that you already have one. No one has to be tasked with creating a culture - it just happens when humans start doing that human thing and organizaing in groups. So let's begin with dropping the idea that you're going to create a culture that's going to fill a vacuum. Whatever cultural effort you undertake, know that if will be one that seeks to shape an existing culture or replace one - both are much different than starting with a blank slate....which you're not...unless you're doing a startup...that's a different post entirely.      The second thing is that changing a culture or consciously shaping a new one is a LONG TERM EFFORT. This is not a "let's measure the delta between Q1 and Q2" kind of exercise. Periodic reviews are helpful and needed to make sure that a consistent effort is maintained but this will be a year over year effort. Shaping a culture will also impact every system you have and every decision that gets made in the organization. Hiring, onboarding, pay, operations, comunications, marketing...think of an area of the organization and it'll be impacted.      I don't know if I hit that last point hard enough. When we're talking "culture"  - we're not talking about hanging up Successories pictures around the office about how great teamwork is or how important leadership is. We are talking about building a cntral core of values and beliefs that everyone in the organization knows and understands and against which they will judge the decisions they make every day - both big and small.      You also need to understand that the more successful your efforts are at creating the culture you want, the more obivous deviations from the new cultural norms will become. You need to be ready to recognize both the positive deviations - those people who go above and beyond the norm and you need to be ready to punish the negative deviations. Fail on either of those points and your culture starts to become a pale, 2D thing closer to a sterotypical mission statement than a set of values that you can order your organizational life by.      Let's recap - it's a long effort. It will effect everything. It has to be consistently adhered to.....two more points...     First - it's worth it. Done right, an organizational culture can be a bulwark against tough times and can be a slingshot past competitors in good ones. It can be an engine of innovation and collaboration and can empower people at all levels of the org., to affect positive change. Second, the end goal is definitely for everybody to "own it" - I've known lots of Marines in my life and every single one of them can tell me what it means to be a Marine they also know that ownership of that culture, the maintennance of it, is the responsibility of every member. That being said, the Marines have had a long time to cultivate that and they did start from scratch, chances are you're facing a different challenge.      To respond to that challenge, I think someone will need to "own" - explicitly - a cultural change effort. When you think about who will own it, who will shepherd it through the early days, think about the cultural values you're aiming for - if you're trying to have a more open and transparent culture, then the process of creating that should be what? Yep, open and transparent. Want a culture that makes people at all levels feel that they have input? Then guess what? Start by letting them all have input into this process. What a powerful moment in the creation of a culture when the CEO sits down at the table with a line worker and they both have input. Look for those moments when you can demonstrate the culture that you're aiming for...those moments become stories and those stories get passed along and they reinforce cultures in ways that nothing else can. So yeah, "owning" the culure will be a temp job (if you do it right) but it's an important temp job.            

mLearning. sLearning. The venerable and ancient eLearning. Can we just be clear that these names refer to product channels and/or brand names but not to actual 'learning'? I think the one that comes closest is social learning and that is most helpful in a Web 2.0 way in that it indicates, in my mind, a break with the way we've done education and training since the start of the Industrial Revolution when we started this idea that the demonstration of one's skills and knowledge should be done in some increasingly artificial and solitary manner. Social learning at least acknowledges that for the whole of human history, the activity of learning has taken place within the context of a group or social setting.  Why do I bring this up? Because it causes trouble is why. The same way that the fiction of Dale's Cone of Experience (w percentages of course) creates false expectations - the same way that the mythical story that a Hall of Fame hockey player would ever skate to where the puck isn't creates an illogcial structure for performance - these things just aren't wrong or misunderstood - they make our jobs harder.  Have you ever, ever sold learning? If you have, I'd like to buy some - what quantities does learning come in? I've seen training for sale. Seen some good performance support products. Seen some great mobile solutions. Never saw learning.  So what's the problem? Well describe the ROI of learning. Like nailing jello to the wall right? I can describe metrics related to an individual's or an organization's performance though. I can tell you if that performance changes after contact with a training product or after the deployment of a performance support system - if I have access to establish a baseline and collect the metrics afterwards. What I can't tell you is if anything was learned. Maybe it was. Maybe the folks have learned how to mimic someone doing the job right - that's learning but not a metric related to whatever product you deployed.  How about we just talk about how effective these channels are reaching more people or allowing greater access to content or support at the moment of need? I know we'll keep calling it xLearning but let's just be clear that A) it's not really learning and B) we can do that as long as we accept that we're also creating issues for ourselves by doing that. ....and no, the Chinese character for crisis is not a combination of danger and opportunity. 

Would you ever go camping and just set your tent up without checking the ground underneath? You're supposed to check the view in your mirrors when you first get in the car right? Would you ever travel to a foreign country for the first time without at least glancing at a guide or phrasebook? Hopefully you answered "no" to those questions - let's act like you did anyway.  What you're doing up there is establishing the context for your actions - hopefully you're doing that because you know that understanding that context can be key to that endeavor being successful. Now here is where it gets weird. You'll do those things, sometimes without thinking, and yet chances are you've deployed an enterprise-wide application costing many thousands of dollars without even a second thought for the culture into which you're tossing it. You also recruit people, hire them and toss them into a mix of you-don't-even-know-what. This great article by Meghan Biro really made me think about this this morning.  Everyone should understand that yes, you have a corporate culture. Culture grows organically - it doesn't need you to consciously act to grow it. The only difference is that if you are conscious of it, then you have a chance to actually influence it.  What Meghan's article did for me this morning was remind me that culture impact everything we do. Also, that at any one time, multiple groups within your organization may be living out different cultures. Don't think so? Go hang out with the developers or engineers for a while. Then go hang out with let's say the finance department. Yeah, exactly.  So how do you unite different generations and different operating units? You have to create/maintain/live a set of cultural values that is larger than any of those other silos. Don't be afraid to give people something larger than themselves to belong to. We actually really like that.   

It's no secret that I love time travel. Doc Brown and Marty. H.G. Wells...and of course, I'll take this chance to drop in this image ^ Allons-y and all that! I was reading "Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments" edited by the amazing Brigitte Jordan, and on page 16 of the Introduction, she brings up the role of time and temporality in corporate life and how those business ideas of time don't always align with how ethnographers need to grasp the organization of time in particular clients. This got me thinking though..... My employer, PeopleFluent is in the software-as-a-service space. We build human capital management software/systems (sales pitch available on request). That means that we have software developers, project managers, support, professional services, and the more standard corporate functions - finance, HR, L&D (that's me!)....it hit that all those units work together but none have exactly the same time cycles. Not only do those internal functions have their own time cycles, but because we have ongoing, daily relationships with our customers - we have their time cycles to be concerned with as well.  So what right? Well think about how the different time cycles carry their own pressures and demands not to mention the ad hoc time pressures created by someone walking into your office and dropping a new request on your desk. Then we sit around and wonder things like 'why aren't people taking our courses'? I'm just wondering if these competing time cycles are a vector that rarely gets factored into our planning. Are we trying to get hold of SMEs who are developers close to a new version release? Ever tried talking to finance folks at the end of the month?  Can we be time travellers then? Do we traverse all the time cycles of the organization and try to at least raise awareness of them? Do we factor in time differing pressures to our design and development schedules? So how could we draw all these various time cycles? Sine curves? Venn diagrams?  Can you picture a wall of clocks on the wall...they used to be set to different world cities but now they're labeled "Version Releases" "Support Calls" "Course Development"....? How different wold those be and what is that impact? ...just questions for now, for answers I'll hop back in the TARDIS and see you soon ;-)  

 We pour huge amounts of money into the recruiting process, scouring resumes and LinkedIn. We spend more hiring the exact, right employee. Are we thinking though, as Frank Herbert wrote, "a beginning is a very delicate time." So how do we handle those first, few moments when people show up on their first day, go to their desk for the first time (forget how much more delicate a beginning is for remote employees)? How much attention do we pay to that introduction to the reality of of organizations - those first moments when they are out of the recruiting envelope and into the job? I think that as it relates to this one moment at least, Ogilvy and Mather flat out nailed it.   I can't tell you how much I think this is a home run (what's more than a home run? Grand Slam I guess). They took steps to create something that not only imparts to a new hire their importance to the organization but also what the company's values are AND does it in a tangible, physical way that serves as a unifying point for all employees in a globally dispersed organization.  I'm looking at this box and the items in it and the quotes on it and although I am very happy where I am building a new learning environment at PeopleFluent; this package makes me want to do better. I can't imagine what it would be like to show up at work and find this on my desk on the first day.  So because we're all talking about organziational cultures and new forms of organizations and how to build them....this is important - THIS is a physical manifestation of organizational culture. Yes, of course it has to be backed up with real policies and support from management, etc but this is what it looks like at this level. Give everyone a rallying point. Make the culture you want visible. Make people PROUD to work for your organization. This box, this says all that. Well done. 

If you're on a business trip and you have to fly - think back to those days of yore when that meant that you would be out of touch for that time. I don't remember havign a lot of anxiety about it because we didn't kow anything else. You knew it was going to happen and you accepted it. Do that again. A couple of books (more are out there) address this - there is "The End of Absence" by Michael Harris and Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together." Truth be told, that's not even what this post about but I thought it was important since it's how I got the idea. Anyway.... I've always been interested in cyborgs. As far back in the distant past as 1995, I even got the chance to drop an article in a book called "The Cyborg Handbook." (you should all get An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology by Amber Case if you haven't). My point in highlighting those works is that they both seek a more expansive view of cyborgs than we have traditionally thought of...I'd argue that the mobile phone has turned us all into Man/Machine combinations - cyborgs. That's cute and all but why does that matter? It's important when we think about designing experiences for people using their mobile devices. This isn't just about screen size...we need to keep in mind that we're designing for something that people see as an extension of themselves. How you like some e-learning designed for and delivered in the most personal of spaces/devices? That's what phones are now. You have to respect that space very differently than you do a classroom or even a course delivered via a laptop. Appropriate and thoughtful use of that space though has HUGE potential.  I was reading an article in WIRED about how mobile phones had unlocked so many creative outlets (for good and ill). One thing that struck me was this idea that with mobile phones, we can essentially tap into an emotional infrastructure made up of all of our learners and their very personal relationships with their phones. We need to think about how the dynamics that power such an onslaught of creativity on our mobile devices can be mimicked inside the enterprise. That's what people are really after when they say they want Facebook or Twitter inside the firewall....they want, enterprises are jealous of that storehouse of creativity and emotion that people tap into for all sorts of other things. To do that though, enterprises are going to have to ask themselves some hard questions.  People engage with those platforms in the same way they do with their mobile phones - with emotion and with a sense of ownership (there are many Flickrs but this one is mine). This isn't a technology question. These will be questions around how we organize our enterprises, how we determine and model corporate values, how we build relationships with our employees and our customers. These are very human questions - I hope we can find some very human answers.   

So when I was a wee kid, you know, before the Internet, we used to go on the car trips...usually like 4-5 hours...doesn't seem bad now but then, to a kid w lots of energy, that was like a day and a half. So I had saved up and bought a tape recorder - yeah, that long ago. I used it to tape TV shows to listen to in the back of the Grand Safari while I read my comic books. I don't remember all I taped but I remember two shows - Battlestar Galactica and Mork and Mindy. I loved those shows. Still a little sad that I missed the window on those suspenders. I remember when Jonathan Winters came on as their kid. Genius.   I had "Reality...What a Concept" and almost wore that album out. Good Morning Vietnam was amazing, Dead Poets Society is a flat-out all-time favorite - powerful and laced with painful irony now - Good Will Hunting - just no words for that performance. I don't have any great lessons here...I'm just remembering and missing someone who has been making me laugh my whole life. I'm gonna miss that guy. 

...how many Twitter followers they have? LinkedIn Connections? Instagram followers? Do you know if they have a blog/tumblr? Do you have any idea at all what kind of network that person will be bringing into your organization? Why not? No, seriously, why not? When discussions about blocking networks like Twitter and Facebook at the corporate firewall seemed more common (they seem to have settled down but I could be just not hearing the stories), one example I always used was about ROI. Now if you hire me and block my networks, you get the ROI of Me - depending on who you ask, that's worth either a lot or a little. If however, you hire me and allow me access to my networks, you get me PLUS the knowledge I can draw on from those networks that I've spent years cultivating - no matter what you think I'm worth, the ROI of Me + My Network is (does math in head).....MORE. When you look at my resume though, you've got no way to judge the value or potential value of my network - why not?  I know that some marketing groups/firms are using things like Klout and Peer Index to measure potential hires' social network strength but should that become more of a standard practice? If everyone in your organization is supposed to act as a brand ambassador, do you have any idea at all what the social networking reach of your ambassadors is? Did you just hire a Maven or a Connector? Can you / should you be looking at how to teach your employees to become Mavens and Connectors? We teach them all sorts of things but are we teaching them how to build and leverage the power of networks? Are we teaching them to become more valuable to our organizations by becoming part of more productive networks? Why not?  

I was never really good in art class growing up. I’d immerse myself in the project of the day and be proud of what I’d made, only to look up at the end and discover that everyone else had glued their macaroni or painted their plate just a little better than I. I particularly liked collages, I think, because they offered the less talented more room for error — mistakes just look like creativity in a collage. Maybe elearning is like a collage. Some text here, a photo there. Some images I cut and paste along the edge. And then maybe I move everything around and try another lay-out. I like that. I like strategy and learning by experience. So mapping out a template and building it 14 ways definitely floats my boat. Rapid-prototyping was practically invented for the strategist and activator (StrengthsFinder) in me. And I like a lot of other things about elearning: Having all these programs, and multiple instances of some, open at once: Captivate, Photoshop, PowerPoint, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Word, TweetDeck, Handbrake, Dropbox, Excel, and Project. The Rapid eLearning Blog and tips like how to make a PowerPoint template. Cathy Moore’s dedication to language. That elearning people are into Twitter and Facebook (community from Cali to London to Austrailia). Creative elearning people coming up with cool logos like the awesome little Litmos monster and the ninja photo of the eLearning Brothers. Cammy Bean. The beautiful, sleek, amazing app machine known as the iPad. Screenr. Saying, "How about a hover over?" The writers I’ve read the most: B.J. Schone, Jane Hart, Tom Kuhlmann, and Clive Shepherd. Nudging assets on the screen. Tahoma, Verdana, and Kristen ITC. Articulate — the authoring tools, the company, the blogs, and the online presence. Drop shadows. PNG files. Editing the Captivate files being discussed during the conference call. Putting secret doors throughout my elearning modules, mainly so I can jump around quickly, but also the occasional surprise room I hope some learner finds. Absorb, the best LMS on earth.

The landscape of learning management system (LMS) vendors is constantly changing. There have been dozens of acquisitions in the past decade, including a big one this week. This can be a scary time if your organization happens to be using an LMS that gets acquired by or merged with another company. After all, you’ve most likely invested thousands of dollars and many hours getting it set up and configured to work well. So, if your LMS vendor gets acquired by another company, what should you do? What questions should you ask? My first piece of advice would be: Just relax. The process of merging two business generally takes a while. You most likely won’t see any overnight changes. Take this time to think through several scenarios and prepare a list of questions for your account representative. Below is a starter list of questions that you may want to ask. The account rep may not know all of the answers if the news is still fresh, but it’s good to start thinking in these terms. To keep things straight, I’ll use the terms acquirer (the company who is making the purchase) and acquiree (the company who is being purchased). Question to ask: Why (specifically) was the company acquired? How will the roadmap for the LMS change? Will the underlying technologies change? What products, services, features, etc., of the acquirer will be made available to clients of the acquiree? How will the support model change for the acquiree, if at all? Will the hourly rate change for the acquiree? (ex. For customizations) Will any of your technical or support contacts change? Will there (still?) be an annual conference for the LMS and its users? I’m sure I left off some questions. What else would you add?

Larry Ober has been nominated as Best eLearning Designer in the Maestro eLearning Awards, dubbed the OSCARS of the eLearning industry. What follows is an interview between Steve and the award’s organizers, Maestro eLearning. Q. How did you get your start with eLearning design? Several years ago we engaged a vendor to create three eLearning modules for a new product launch. As you know, good quality eLearning modules are expensive. We were happy with the results, but realized after only a few months that the content already needed updating. When I went back to the product marketing team with the request for budget to re-engage the vendor, they were less than enthusiastic. So I offered to create the updates myself, if they would pay for authoring software. They agreed, and we invested in Articulate. Since then, I have created numerous eLearning modules, games, assessments, and other content. I’ve expanded to using Toolbook and other software. My largest project to date was the creation of three learning modules for a (different) new product launch. They were very successful, and I’ve updated them twice since they were created. By doing all this in-house, I’ve saved our marketing team well over $100,000 just on that one project. Q. Wow! What are some tips you have for new developers? First, be aware that many LMS systems already have integrated authoring software. If your company uses an LMS for learning content, ask the vendor if they have authoring software as well. These packages are usually easy to use, and integrate easily with the LMS you are using. If you plan to buy a stand-alone authoring platform, first consider how  much time you can spend learning to use it, and what capabilities you really need. Authoring software can be relatively simple, such as packages that convert PowerPoint slides to a SCORM compliant module. Other brands are very sophisticated, but you’ll need to take a class on how to use it, and plan to spend a lot of time on the learning curve. Finally, make sure the publishing capabilities match your needs. Most commonly you’ll need software to publish to a SCORM compliant module, but which version of SCORM does your LMS use? Do you have a need to publish to self-running CDs? How about mobile platforms, like the iPhone? Know your actual needs before investing money and time in an authoring software package. Q. What are some of your favorite tools? So far my personal experience is limited to Toolbook and Articulate as authoring tools. I’ve also used Audacity, a free audio creation and editing tool, as well as various video encoding and editing tools. For the novice user that wants to turn PowerPoint presentations into serviceable SCORM compliant eLearning modules, I’ve been very happy with Articulate. It allows the user to include audio, simple interactive animations, quizzes, and flash video. If you don’t need the SCORM encoding, another option is iSpring, a free tool that will convert a PowerPoint to flash video. For the more advanced user, or anyone authoring eLearning full time, Toolbook,  Adobe, and Lectora offer suites of software that are state-of-the-art. Both have sophisticated authoring capabilities, but either will involve a substantial learning curve if the user isn’t already familiar with authoring tools. Q. Before we end, could you expand your earlier thoughts on mobile-conscious design? Mobile devices, starting with PDA’s and now smartphones, revolutionized how sales calls are entered, and everything about CRM. In my experience, however, they haven’t delivered big gains in training—yet. The problem has been trying to fit traditional eLearning content on the smaller screen. In most cases, the read-ability is inadequate. In my experience, the screen size is appropriate for reference material and some interactive job aids. Another common use is for reference apps, usually simple calculators or wizards, to be used on the fly for calculating pharmaceutical or medical values. Two areas that have potential for growth are, first, as a response key pad for daily or weekly training updates. This would enable the standard ‘district conference call’ to become an interactive experience. A second future use may be as a time management device. Apps are becoming available that will use GPS technology to track where you are, and how long you are there. These apps can graphically present how long you spend at each customer location during a week or month, and track that according to that account’s current or potential sales. This analysis would allow the user to spend the time in the accounts that have the most potential. About the Interviewer Maestro eLearning is a customer service company in the business of creating custom online training courses. They’re collaborating with industry consultants and vendors to launch the Maestro eLearning Awards. Delight your colleagues and consider nominating them for some awards, such as Best eLearning Designer and Best eLearning Developer.

I cursed myself in a current post (What I Like About eLearning) when I included a semi-sarcastic comment about having umpteen programs open on my computer every day in order to get my elearning work done. Since then I have articulated at least one non-HR-approved word in reaction to slow computer action or even crashes. I need more memory. I need dedicated video memory. I need software that doesn’t take so much of my computer’s resources! (I love you Adobe.) Or maybe I need to just get all the software and even the operating system off my machine all together! Can it work for elearning professionals? Can it work for you?

I feel some guilty pleasure when other trainers and elearning developers become jealous of my elearning app for the iPad. Because the Mac iOS doesn’t support Flash, many of my colleagues haven’t been able to take advantage of the best elearning tool ever: the iPad. My app did not cost that much ($7,000 developed in 2010 and $4000 for upgrades in 2011). Still, even those costs are not readily available to many training teams. So, I will share my first efforts making elearning for the iPad. It still works very well and gets "oohs and ahhs" even though it is simple and FREE. There are many tools for doing the small bit of work involved, but I will focus on the easiest method I know, using the word processing program on my computer. It’s three steps and then you are elearning: Make a simple document in Pages. Export as an epub file. Put the epub file in iTunes and sync your iPad(s). Learners can view the elearning module in iBooks, the free app from Apple. The reader app is the key, really. It has interactive functionality built in, so you just need to focus on good content. Step 1 — Pages. Pages is the word processing program on a Mac. It is simple to use, like Word. Simply add text, images and video. Formatting must be simple so the epub file can adapt to various sizes when viewed. Still the content can look great, and with multi-media, it reads more like a digital magazine than a book. It helps to make a visual cover page (your page 1) that looks like a book cover. Play around with headers and styles — because these will help the learner navigate. Step 2 — Epub. In Pages, just click Share > Export and choose the epub option. Check the box that makes your first page the cover art. You will have an epub file in seconds. If you get errors, it is probably related to formatting that epub files don’t support. It is best to keep the formatting simple — let iBooks do the work of making your module look great. Step 3 — iTunes. On a Mac, just drag the epub file you just saved onto iTunes and then sync your iPad. Like Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that. In iBooks, your module will have an interactive table of contents — created from your headers and styles. The table of contents works as nicely as a menu in a Flash elearning course. Learners can change fonts or font size to their liking, read portrait or landscape, and bookmark and annotate the module. The video content plays right on the page or can be expanded to full screen. I’ve had success with small, three-page mini-books. That’s three pages in the word processor — once in iBooks, the page numbers vary for each learner depending on  their font choices and orientation they prefer for their iPad. Learners found the content engaging and appealing, and as elearning it was refreshing to have a mini-book instead of the typical rapid elearning thriller. I’ve also made longer modules, around 10-11 pages. They were well-received, but I made ample use of white space, and I wouldn’t recommend pushing much more than that. I don’t have data on it, but the iBooks format seems to suit concise elearning efforts. If readers can page through within 15-20 minutes, they seem pleased. If you have more content, make a separate epub module and call it a sequel.