As instructional designers we are constantly being bombarded with new technologies and new trends. It’s difficult to distinguish which are fads, and which are worthy of our investments of time and resources. The safest, and often most expedient course of action is to continue to focus on the delivery technology we know is NOT a fad, the traditional classroom. After all we’ve been using the traditional classroom forever, how can we possibly go wrong teaching in a classroom in front of an audience? As new technologies, like the virtual classroom, eLearning, and social media, are introduced, we continue to play it safe by trying to make these technology experiences replicate the classroom.

You want your managers to deliver results. Not just any results - you’re looking for breakthrough results. In order to get that done, they must be viewed by their teams as smart, likable, hard working, and caring. But there’s another quality that can make or break a manager’s pursuit of success. Managers can only get their teams to execute the strategy successfully if they start with themselves. They must understand the strategy itself and see how internal/external forces and trends impact the business. They must know the customer needs and requirements, as well as be a role model of the culture, behaviors, and values of the organization. This paper will help managers discover, synthesize and internalize these critical qualities. Download Below.  

Small bites content is small, standalone, useful and accessible content. More importantly, it is learningcontent needed instantly for a micro task or activity at work. 

Managers are the connective tissue of your culture, creating a series of invisible, interwoven links between individuals, leaders, the business, and the strategy. When managers are living, promoting, and celebrating your culture, they are bringing it to life every day at the team level. This is critical because that’s where the real employee experience takes place.

Use this infographic in your organization to kick-start discussion on how to bridge the chasm of The Disengagement Canyon. For change to be successful, it must be clearly defined, aligned, understood and sustained. To do this successfully, address the 3 Critical Engagement Points in the infographic.

This paper is focused on the mobile virtual classroom but don’t worry, we’ll be covering the other concepts (globalization and social networks) in future publications. (The concepts are useful here to help explain the context in which we will be discussing the mobile virtual classroom and its place in the modern virtual classroom.)

Discover the impact of a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA) world on current and future leadership requirements.    Learn how thinking agility will help you and your leaders adapt, focus and get more done in a rapidly changing and increasingly noisy environment. Explore four specific steps you can take to build your own and others’ thinking agility. Create your own action plan from the provided checklists to start putting better thinking to work for better performance and results.

Paper in Brief Discover the limits of "feel good" teambuilding activities, especially when critical business results are on the line Explore a thinking-based system to help teams build trust faster, streamline communications, make better decisions and get the benefit of diverse perspectives Learn how to apply the latest research on thinking and team effectiveness to achieve specific business objectives, whether the team is virtual or co-located, intact or cross functional Get practical tips for overcoming three common team challenges

Is your business prepared for the way we’ll work in the future? To stay ahead of the competition you need a proactive, integrated approach to your entire  talent management lifecycle. SuccessFactors offers a full suite of talent solutions to help you: Attract,engage,select, and hire the right talent Get your new hires up to speed in record time Provide continuous performance management Reward and retain your top talent Identify and anticipate talent gaps Provide learning anywhere, any time Get content as a service Harness the power of collaboration

"Performance management" sounds wholly positive. After all, who can argue with better performance? And effective performance management (PM) programs can deliver significant, tangible benefits such as: Increase in time spent on strategic priorities Improvement in employee productivity Jump in project completion rates More decrease in turnover

An Approach - The Reality of Product Management  The illusion of control drives adversarial relationships between customers and the project team. Made up dates/effort in the Project Schedule are treated as truth. Project Managers are judged by their ability to meet these made up dates regardless of what happens during the project. Leaders and customers shy away from defining the measurement of DONE. Lack of clarity about expected measurable outcomes and how this ties to business ROI is often avoided, vague or missing entirely in discussions.

Imagine the difference between looking across the room through a glass of muddy water and a glass of clear water. The muddy water represents how our decision making is impacted by negative emotions. Our minds were designed to keep us safe. Every moment your brain is scanning around you to see what might threaten you. Luckily, most of us are not physically threatened very often, but our brain also picks up threats to our self-esteem. 

We struggle with problems that seem unbeatable. Will we ever be able to improve employee engagement, cut costs, grow profit, and improve quality? These organizational problems are really team problems, and team problems are primarily people problems.  

You’ve heard it a hundred times. Continuous learning is critical to your talent management strategy—and your organization’s bottom line. To that end, you’ve invested in a powerful learning management system (LMS) and social tools, not to mention great content. But something still isn’t working. So what’s wrong? Simply put, your current learning strategy is no longer enough. Read on to find out why.

Do you wake up every Monday raring to go to work, full of new ideas, confident that you’ll be able to implement them, and passionate about what you do?  If so, would you like to stay that way?  And if not, doesn’t that sound pretty great? Best-selling author, keynote speaker and bona-fide expert on employee engagement, Bob Kelleher has researched and reflected on these issues deeply.  In his new book, I-Engage:  Your Personal Engagement Roadmap" Bob offers valuable insights and even potential solutions.  Click below to download the first chapter of this latest revelation.  It begins... Engagement is the key. Back in 2003, global consulting firm Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) identified and defined an intriguing concept that would go on to revolutionize the way companies thought about their most important asset: their employees. Called "employee engagement," it was originally loosely defined as "the capture of discretionary effort." Discretionary effort, simply put, means going above and beyond at one’s job, or putting in additional effort, because one wants to do so. 

Talking with the C-suite, having a seat at the table, being a trusted advisor…whatever you call it, this form of success only comes from credibility fostered by a reputation of consistently giving good advice. This white paper will help you develop what it takes to propel yourself and your department into the confidence of senior leaders, reliably and consistently.

How do we make sense of the huge barrage of information that we encounter on a daily basis? We need to let go of  the need to know everything. We need to train our learners and leaders to resist the tendency to dump content. We need to help learners focus on usefulness and context of the content. We need to design and deliver training and elearning programs to reflect this principle. Workshop Tip60

Industry research shows that effective sales coaching can dramatically improve the performance of a sales team - in some cases driving up revenues by 20% or more.   The reason for such potential improvements is the significant "multiplier effect" sales organizations can achieve through sales coaching: one trained manager can coach multiple sales professionals and improve their overall performance. With such potential benefits it is no wonder that many sales organizations recommend that their frontline sales managers spend 25% - 45% of their time sales coaching. The High Impact Sales Coaching Guide provides expert advice on essential sales coaching skills to help sales managers effectively empower their teams to reach their highest potential.

Recursive learning and Creativity   Learning is a creative process. We start with a question, a challenge, a problem, an opportunity or possibly simple or complex tasks. Then we go back to asking more questions. Because of what we want to do, accomplish or learn, our minds go through discovery and creativity.   The focus of this tip is on Recursive Learning and Creativity. People learn recursively. We connect past experiences, with new experiences, and formulate new insights.    These then, become part of our new and improved expertise. Doing these repeatedly help us build skills, mastery and expertise.   The compounding effect of incremental insights show us where our interest areas are, and where our vocation and our passion lie. People tend to do things that give them pleasure. What gives them pleasure allows them to pursue interests. Eventually and along the way, our expertise is rooted in our passions and vocations, whether we are consciously or just unknowingly pursuing them.   Generating insights is normal and common. But deepening insights which is a creative process requires some level of intensity and penetration of desire. Is it difficult to attain? Not really.   It is easily provided when it is incremental - thinking through your insights as it happens is where the epiphany is. It is like when you eat really great food at a 5-Star Michelin restaurant. It is at the moment when your taste buds savor the flavor - at that moment - where experience is highest. This is the moment of ecstatic insights, sometimes euphoria or the Aha! moment. This is similar to the feeling when one generates fresh ideas to change a product and improve services in order to achieve organizational goals. This is similar to the Aha! moment when one discovers the connection between two previously unrelated concepts. According to David Jones, "Aha! moments may be sudden, but they probably depend on an unconscious mental process that has grown slowly." Jones argues further that we can't truly have new ideas, rather, we can connect existing facts or notions by observing others.  The Social Component of Creativity Creativity does not occur in a vacuum. Experts agree that while creativity or insight is a personal experience, "creative thinking is not so much about an individual trait but rather a social phenomenon involving interactions among people within their specific group or cultural settings."   By curating and sharing back to the community "prompt questions," members find it easier or faster to direct their attention to answers and therefore facilitate discovery and insights.   The most intriguing part about prompt questions is that it sends or kicks off learners into an automatic recursive learning process. When we ask questions, our minds go on autopilot to find what we already know, then search outside to discover what else we can learn about. This allows us to reflect and gain insights -- this is recursive learning or creative musing in action. This happens in milliseconds. Although this is most often unconscious, it is most effective in learning and gaining insights.   Prompt Questions Facilitate Thinking To help members in TrainingMagNetwork.com, we provided a prompt-question-driven search engine. It starts with "I want to learn about__________." After members search a phrase, the results go beyond showing a list of resources. It also presents related prompt-question search outcomes.  See the list under "Also try..." (See Image - 1)  Furthermore, when the member clicks "See all questions", a list of prompt questions appear in a categorized format. See Image-2) Both these steps facilitate the learners’ "creative musings." We introduced the process called "Path2X trending" which means that as you add and record insights, you are able to see your "crumbs" - where you have been and what you have been thinking aloud, and the interests you are pursuing and the knowledge and learning that you are accumulating. In essence you are building expertise, but instead of a whimsical and tentative way, we allow members to see the trends of their insights. Here are the two phases of creative musing:  1. Generative phase - During this phase, one tends to generate different solutions to a given problem. Also known as the divergent phase, the creative mind is in a brainstorming mode and tries to consider a variety of ways in which a problem can be approached and a solution can be had. This is what we commonly call "out of the box" thinking.   2. Exploratory/Evaluative phase - Also known as the convergent phase, during this phase the creative mind tends to focus on the best solution to the problem. No longer is the mind brainstorming ideas, rather, with surgical precision, it decides on what to do and faces the problem head on.  According to Robert L. DeHaan, "During the generative process, the creative mind pictures a set of novel mental models as potential solutions to a problem. In the exploratory phase, we evaluate the multiple options and select the best one." Conclusion Creativity is the result of incremental and recursive learning. While we tend to think of it as an innate talent, it cannot be separated from the social context. As a matter of fact, it is enhanced by social interaction as observed from the curated "prompt questions" by TMN members. With "Path2X trending," members can focus and see the trend of their creative musings.

This is the second installment of of my five-part blog series on helping members of TrainingMagNetwork understand their expertise better. We believe in unshackling our thinking and providing learners as much access to content and this is what this post is about.   Trainers and content developers can no longer hold back learners from using other sources of knowledge. There is a breaking away from control as these new discoveries continue to sprout like mushrooms. This allows them to accelerate learning. It is in this openness that we encourage the learners to explore, create and develop. The Proliferation of Open Learning We have witnessed the dramatic increase in open learning. If you have been following the online trends, you will have noticed the popularity of sites like Coursera, edX and other spinoffs. The dramatic decrease in cost of producing learning materials contributes to the proliferation of open learning.   According to Caswell, Henson, Jensen, and David Wiley, "This marked decrease in costs has significant implications and allows distance educators to play an important role in the fulfillment of the promise of the right to universal education. At relatively little additional cost, universities can make their content available to millions. This content has the potential to substantially improve the quality of life of learners around the world."   But the cost is just one aspect. While technology made open learning easy, it is the current attitude requiring more flexibility and collaboration in learning that made this possible. Rigid and traditional approach to learning is a thing of the past.     According to Liyanagunawardena, Adams, and Williams, "Connectivity is usually provided through social networking, and a set of freely accessible online resources provides the content or the study material... For example, MOOC participants may create their own blog posts discussing aspects of the MOOC in different spaces and/or may use microblogs such as Twitter to express themselves."   eLearning pioneers like Jay Cross are advocating informal learning wherein unofficial and impromptu encounters between learners and people in the know take place. Jay posts that "formal training and workshops account for only 5% to 20% of what people learn from experience and interactions."   If you are a lifelong learner, you can find free and open courses at Harvard Open Learning. Are you looking for a new recipe to cook for lunch? You can just head to Youtube, watch a video and turn yourself into an instant chef. We haven't witnessed this level of openness before and this is just the tip of the iceberg. With technological development mostly done in the open, the high level of interactivity required to respond to modern challenges and the attitude of modern learners all converge to spice up Open Learning. The concept of Open learning is far more vast than what we have witnessed and I believe the best is yet to come.   The Philosophy Behind TrainingMagNetwork's Open Learning  Richard Baraniuk shares his vision of open learning which led to the creation of OpenStax, an open-source, online education system which allows teachers to share and modify course materials freely and globally. Different programs have varied degrees of openness and diverse implementations of the concept of Open Learning.   Over 50,000 (growing) blogs, white papers, articles, webinar recordings, live webinars, case studies, special reports, and many more At TrainingMagNetwork.com, we allow the members to search over 50,000 blogs and resources (growing each day). We believe we can only serve the learners by enabling them to access quickly, assist them to search with prompt questions and discover what they want in the abundance of content. They drive the learning - not us nor the designers, or any form of formal structure. In fact, we don't have a hierarchical learning design that is typical of other associations and learning providers. 

This is the third installment of the five-part blog series about the The All-New TrainingMagNetwork.com Open Learning Environment. At Training Magazine Network, we capture the crumbs of insights as they happen. This level of self-awareness enables our members to keep track of their train of thought. While in webinars, reading white papers, watching videos, etc., members can quickly record the ripple of their insights. They also encourage real-time noting, sharing and tracking of other members' insights.   Savor the moment. As members go through all types of content that they find interesting through the help of a powerful search engine, they are constantly encouraged to record their insights as it happens. The key idea is to allow them to document what piqued their interest at the moment. Their learning preferences and interest areas are captured by the system. This provides them a unique perspective of their pursuit of expertise. Why Evaluate Insight? The idea behind evaluating one's insight is established by a huge quantum of studies. Organizations discover that giving appropriate feedback enhances personnel's ability to grow. As a matter of fact, neglecting a good evaluation or feedback mechanism is a recipe for disaster. According to Jane Bozarth "We often treat evaluation as an afterthought, focus on measures that offer little real information, or, when the effort looks difficult, just don't do evaluation at all. In looking at evaluation strategies, choose those that will get you what you need. Are you trying to prove results, or drive improvement? And above all, remember: some evaluation is better than none."  A founder of Triad Consulting Group and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, Sheila Heen delivers a talk on the importance of feedback. Giving the right kind of feedback takes center stage in sharing and tracking of other people's insights. Technology-Enhanced Feedback Mechanism  There are a lot of advantages in using technology as a feedback mechanism. First of all, the time and distance constraint is easily overcome. A good LMS (Learning Management System) can easily incorporate feedback mechanisms like forums where learners can discuss the ripples of insight.   Through this mechanism, peer learners can easily assess and give feedback on each other's ideas. This can be personalized even in a large group. On top of that, real-time tracking of feedback is easy with fast data transfer.    Insights Leading to Path to Expertise (Path2X)   The Training Magazine Network just released the first-of-its-kind member service we call Path to Expertise or Path2X. It incorporates a technology-enhanced feedback mechanism.

I am proud to share that in a few weeks, Training Magazine Network will release a new first-of-its kind member service. Our research confirms this is brand-new. We call it Path to Expertise or Path2X. I am humbled by the experience and learning during the Path2X platform creation and making it available to our members. Thanks to everyone who has helped make this vision a reality. Path2X has these key elements.   1) Power of the Prompt Questions With over 90,000 TMN members asking questions in their search activities, we curate and share these questions with the whole community. These prompt questions get crowd-sourced. We refer to them as, "exploratory thinking," "thinking aloud" or "intense curiosity." As the saying goes, "the solution is possible if we ask the right questions."   It's challenging to formulate these questions and if we reuse and repurpose all of them including the search results, it would save time and add more context to the learning.   2) Freedom to Learn One's Interest Areas We allow members to follow their interests and passions openly through access to unbundled and unrestricted sources of content.   Training magazine is a 40-year-old company. It has developed the best-of-breed resource materials in the world of training. Yet, the breadth and depth of knowledge required by learners surpass our present capabilities to provide this to our members. So, we unshackled our thinking, pushed beyond our current boundaries and uncovered a path for learners to have far-reaching access to varied learning.   We published guest blogs - now 50,000 and growing each day. Our learners deserve to enjoy the abundance of open content from all other sources.   3) Ripple Effects of Insights Encourage real-time insights noting, sharing and tracking.   Savor the moment. As members go through all types of content that they find interesting through the help of a powerful search engine, they are constantly encouraged to record their insights as it happens. The key idea is to allow them to document what they find interesting at the moment. Their learning preferences and interest areas are captured by the system. This provides them a unique perspective of their pursuit of expertise.   In TMN, we capture the ripples of insights, those small and micro instances of learning - as they happen. While in webinars, reading white papers, watching videos, etc. members can quickly record the ripple of their insights. They also share and view other members' insights.   4) Trending and Patterns of Insights are Predictors of Expertise Areas Articulate your expertise/digital tracker.   I like the book Show Your Work by Jane Bozarth. It suggests a profound change of our outlook. When we share our work, we actually learn a lot better. I recall a story from a toxic waste company client about how they apply "Chalk Talk." After each training they ask participants to use chalk and blackboard (may be flipcharts, white boards and markers) to talk about what they have learned.   This is a powerful self-learning process that enables the learners to articulate what they know and correct themselves along the way. Let's call this the digital tracker.   At TMN, we allow members to capture trends and patterns. They discover, learn and track what they are good at and they show it off in the "Trending Report."   5) Celebrate and Stand Out as Experts and Specialists Feedback to self, peers and significant leaders.   Mobile apps and digital watches are so good at this. Their entry into the market is by providing people immediate/instant feedback - whether they are walking, running or consuming calories. The key is feedback for people to correct and achieve their goals. In the Path2X (Path to Expertise), our members achieve this through Path2X eShare.   TMN members can share with friends, peers, leaders and if they wish, in the world of social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. We encourage TMN members to announce and celebrate their accomplishments. What is the single most compelling Benefit to TMN Members? The new world of learning is open, limitless, abundant and exponential. It is our ardent hope that TMN members experience first-hand this new learning environment. As they discover possibilities, gain insights into their expertise and interest areas and showcase their achievements, we strongly sense that members will eagerly pass on this breakthrough in learning environments to their own learners - helping them to learn better and faster.  

Have you ever shared your thoughts with someone? On a grander scale, have you tried sharing your work or a potential masterpiece with like-minded people? Sharing your work simply means that it is where your mind is at. It is where your expertise can be found. The patterns of your insights showcase your expertise areas.   Of course you can imagine the satisfaction you get when you receive the approval of people you respect. But the approval of like-minded people is not the only thing. Rather, it's making your work bigger than yourself that matters.     In this fourth installment of my five-part blog series about The All-New TrainingMagNetwork.com Open Learning Environment, I'm going to talk about the importance of sharing your work. The Internet and a good portion of its supporting technology has been the result of open sharing of ideas. Inevitability of Sharing Insight Apart from the climate of openness, we can't expect to enjoy what many would consider to be the greatest invention of modern times. Buzzwords like "open source," "collaboration," and "crowdsourcing" are all synonymous to the sharing of ideas and the climate of openness that it entails.   Although the effort to share one's ideas is not something recent, modern development made it easier to collaborate. According to Josh Lerner and Jean Tirol in their book The Simple Economics Of Open Source, "While media attention to the phenomenon of open source software has been recent, the basic behaviors are much older in their origins. There has long been a tradition of sharing and cooperation in software development. But in recent years, both the scale and formalization of the activity have expanded dramatically with the widespread diffusion of the Internet."   On a more limited scale, programmers have been sharing source codes as early as the '60s and the '70s and this has been called "sneakernet" due primarily to the actual movement of files through people wearing sneakers. I'm sure you can imagine the inconvenience but you get the picture. There is no way ideas can be prevented from getting shared. The Power Behind Sharing Insight Matt Ridley shows that the great progresses experienced by human history have been the result of collaboration or the "meeting and mating" of ideas. I like the book Show Your Work by Jane Bozarth. It suggests a profound change of our outlook. When we share our work, we actually learn a lot better. I recall a story from a toxic waste company client about how they apply "Chalk Talk." After each training they ask participants to use chalk and blackboard (may be flipcharts, white boards and markers) to talk about what they have learned.   This is a powerful self-learning process that enables the learners to articulate what they know and correct themselves along the way. Let's call this the digital tracker.   At TMN we allow members to capture trends and patterns. They discover and learn and track what they are good at and they show it off in the "Trending Report."  How is Openness Beneficial to Organizational Performance   The advantages of collaboration to organizations are enormous. Bozarth opined, "Showing work offers increased efficiencies, the possibility of innovation and increased ability to improvise, and promises correction of longstanding deficits in organizational communication."   In another study, Martine R. Haas and Morten T. Hansen proposed that, "An organization's  capacity to share knowledge among its individuals and teams and apply that shared knowledge to performing important activities is increasingly seen as a vital source of competitive advantage in many industries."   While it's nice to think about the solo working genius, it's undeniable that we are at a time when certain problems are just too big for the individual to solve alone. We need the insights of other like-minded people whose expertise are in other areas.  Conclusion   The pattern of your insight is a clear predictor of where your expertise lies. While the solo genius presents an attractive picture, sharing these insights expands your horizons. It is only through openness that ideas take on a new life because they meet and mate with other ideas. Innovation becomes possible and inevitable when ideas are shared. Problem-solving is facilitated by not one person but through the contribution of others.

In the previous tip we talked about sharing your insights. In this fifth installement of the five-part blog series about The All-New TrainingMagNetwork.com Open Learning Environment, we will talk about presenting yourself as an expert and specialist of a specific field.   TMN members can share with friends, peers, leaders and if they wish, in the world of social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. We encourage TMN members to announce and celebrate their accomplishments.   On the other hand, people with whom members share their achievements are likewise provided the facility for feedback by sharing ideas and comments. Mobile apps and digital watches are so good at this. Their entry to the market is by providing people immediate/instant feedback - whether they are walking, running or consuming calories.   Feedback is key for people to correct and achieve their goals. In the Path2X (Path to Expertise), our members accomplish this through Path2X eShare. Path to Expertise Progress The classic resume is static. It is insufficient because it fails to provide the reviewer a better perspective of the capabilities and experiences of an applicant. With teams, leaders have no immediate way to assess capacities,  status of ongoing learning and new skills developed by team members. They have to wait for evaluation and assessments which may happen only once a year.   In Training Mag Network we try to provide a dynamic way for leaders and members to update interests and skills development. TNM members share their Path2X progress with their leaders, bosses, friends, peers and team. These people are able to comment and have discussions with the member/owner of the report. They can drill down into what resources the TMN member has "actually" studied, reviewed and submitted insights to. Members can share the Path2X report as often as they like. The Path2X Progress Report helps the member "celebrate, announce and demonstrate" their deliberate efforts in building skills and expertise.   The graphics below is an illustration of the Path2X Progress Report. Seth Godin talks about connecting with the customers and standing out as an expert in this short clip of an interview with Bryan Elliott. In the world where competition is the norm, how do you stand out against everybody else? Nowadays, it's not enough to be good at something or be connected to someone, you have to standout. According to William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson, "In today's workplace, creativity has trumped loyalty; individuality has replaced conformity; pro-activity has replaced hierarchy. Those who succeeded were aware of their talents and confident enough to use them to stand out and consistently deliver value to their teams.