Academy Brief: Knowledge Forum http://t.co/Ws20ENG via @NASA > Among interesting bits: Ability, attitude, assignments, alliances.—
Jeff Merrell (@JeffMerrell) May 26, 2011
Category Archives: practice
Get more from training – or give up and do an extreme makeover?
Image by Nationaal Archief via Flickr
Do the extreme makeover. That is where I am landing.
In the past few weeks I’ve had conversations with both for-profit organizations and nonprofits. The substance of the conversation is always around “getting more” out of training, or how the training organization can become a more integrated and valuable piece of the business.
And my point-of-view in these conversations is: Stop focusing on the training course. Focus on the workplace and actual work practices, then decide how – or if – a training course is a worthwhile activity.
A recent McKinsey Quarterly article (“Getting more from your training”) takes us part of the way there. (A sidebar comment here: Did I miss something? When did McKinsey start to become concerned about training organizations?). The authors make the case that getting more out of the $100B spent annually on training programs requires looking at what happens before and after the training events.
Before training:
- Help people want to learn
- Uncover harmful mindsets
- Get leaders on board
After training:
- Reinforce new skills
- Measure the impact
The examples the authors use to illustrate their points are actually pretty insightful. In explaining “harmful mindsets,” the authors point to a retailer that initiated training designed to improve the customer focus of its sales people. Participants completed the training successfully and passed certification tests. But customer feedback remained unsatisfactory.
Research uncovered two mindsets that were getting in the way of sales people changing their actual work practices. First, sales people firmly believed (incorrectly) that customers browsed in stores and then bought online — making any engagement with customers at the store a low-payoff activity. Second, sales people assessed customer potential unproductively by relying on age, gender and racial stereotypes.
After the retailer uncovered these mindsets, they retooled the training to include open discussion to address them directly and data to help expose them as myths. Sales practices changed and customer results improved significantly.
Examples cited by the authors to illustrate their other points are similar: Training program designers simply missed some important element of the workplace context.
And there’s the point. How does the training profession continue to miss those contextual elements – year after year? This is by no means a new issue. It has vexed the profession for years.
You can point to tools or methods or “new models” that might improve the performance of training organizations. (Anyone care to talk about how integrating social media and “training” will save the day?).
But I think the issue is more fundamental than that. Training organizations need to look in the mirror and admit they need an extreme makeover. As with any major change effort, you first need to declare the old way finished. Then go on the journey to create the new way.
That new way begins by focusing on developing a deep and nuanced understanding of workplace practices; hypothesizing how those practices impact performance; and designing solutions to improve performance that combine a suite of options that ranks “training programs” as a might-need rather than a must-have.
How does this help us make sense of our work?
I am becoming more convinced that this question has real value in focusing the attention of small nonprofits on how best to think about knowledge management. And frankly, probably any organization. But the context in which this insight came to light for me is in working with small nonprofits.
Small, growing nonprofits are intriguing to me because many are truly mission-driven, innovative, entrepreneurial and intent on making an impact by changing some system. To survive financially, make an impact on their mission and find their place among all of the other organizations doing good work is a significant challenge. My first hand experience in understanding just how signifcant is in the work I do as a board member of The Talking Farm, a Chicago-area nonprofit focused on facilitating sustainable production and appreciation of locally grown foods in area urban and suburban communities. But through my role teaching a graduate course in knowledge management at Northwestern University, I have also had the opportunity to engage in discussion about knowledge management with a wide range of small or mid-size growing nonprofits.
Often the conversation begins because of a felt need to improve generally how things are shared across the organization, or more specifically about sharing “best practices.” The focus on best practices is particularly interesting to me: How can an organization inventing new ways of doing things in a complex environment even have best practices? (One of my pet peeves, clearly. Let’s first focus on discovering practices that seem to work, and understanding why they do…)
But what the people I speak with often discount is the huge value that comes from dialogue and sense-making — and the fact that they are likely already engaged in very effective practices that help them make sense of their work and the environment in which they operate. They have built tremendous social and professional networks. They meet and share stories routinely. They reach outside of their own arena of practice to learn and discover.
So yes, there are lots of things a KM practitioner might recommend to these nonprofits to help improve their knowledge sharing capabilities. But I think the starting point needs to be establishing a clear understanding of what practices — recognized or not — help them currently make sense of their environment. And then carefully add things to the mix by asking first: How does THIS [new activity or technology] help us make sense of our work?
[For more on this topic of sense-making and KM, and the recent inspiration for my thinking here, see Jack Vinson's Make sense personally and with the group, and the work of Harold Jarche and Luis Suarez as referenced in Luis' recent post on personal knowledge management.]
