Burying old models

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buried alive

Image by hodgers via Flickr

Dan Pontefract writes pointedly in his blog trainingwreck on burying the Kirkpatrick model, the 50-year standard for training program evaluation. Count me among those in agreement. Training indeed needs an extreme makeover.

And while we’re add it, let’s bury ROI. Another useless and overused framework for trying to assess the impact of complex organizational questions. A well-known social-business evangelist commented in the recent IBM Social Business Jam that his standard response to someone asking about the ROI of social media is “What’s the ROI of your mother?” It just points to the fact that business folk (and heavens — even nonprofit leaders) struggle to confidently connect investments and actions with outcomes. So the knee-jerk response is to pull out models without really thinking. Indeed, what’s the ROI of your mother?

Often we do things differently and — upon reflection — we learn to think differently. Sometimes we need to force ourselves to think differently first, in order to do differently.

So – R.I.P ROI. Buh-bye Kirkpatrick model. Now let’s experiment and explore.

Innovation self-efficacy: Do you believe you can create change?

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Mazatlan Diver Sequence
I came across an intriguing and unique perspective on this question through the video of a talk given by Liz Gerber, a professor in the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University.

Liz’s talk covers her thinking on how we can use design processes as a way to change people’s belief in their ability to innovate and create change. And not just any innovation and change — but how we address some of the more difficult challenges facing society (for example, the obesity epidemic).

In the the video, Liz makes the comment that when discussing social change issues, you often hear non-designers say things like “I don’t know how to solve that problem,” or “I don’t know where to start.” But rarely do you hear something like that from a designer. Designers seem to have a fearlessness (Gerber’s word) when confronted with challenges that might require them to experiment and fail before finding a solution. So how do we teach people to have the fearlessness that ultimately leads to innovation?

Gerber’s answer is a mastery experience — actually doing design for social change. And in her case it takes the form of Design for America, a program for undergraduates at Northwestern where cross-disciplinary teams of students collaborate with local community groups and non-profits to solve real problems.

There is a great moment in the video during which one of the DfA students relates his experience and the impact it has had on his “innovation self-efficacy.” I’ve had the opportunity to meet some of these students as they work on their projects and his story and insights are common across them all. It is easy to be affected not only by the enthusiasm, but the real results that are coming out of their efforts.

For me, the challenge of learning from design process is first learning how to turn off your natural inclination to jump to a solution. There is a real payoff in dedicated empathic observation, and in combining observation with smart data gathering and analysis, before you begin to brainstorm potential solutions. Challenge #2 is in learning from prototype. Again, it’s a skill to detach your emotions from a prototype design and learn from how your target population actually engages with the prototype before moving forward. It’s good to fail. You learn. And you learn to become fearless.

Photo Mazaltan Diver Sequence By Jennifer Williams from Hayward, USA (Mazatlan Diver Sequence) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Applying design methodology to organizational change

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This is a must-read piece by a colleague — Jeanne Olson — just published by the Design Management Institute (DMI): Come Bearing Gifts: Practical Advice for Designers Working on Organizational Change.

There is a lot of interesting activity going on in this space — especially interesting to those of us who believe that design process and methodologies provide a rich tool set to deal with the organic, ambiguous, complex nature of organizations. I’m not the only one who routinely uses a phase like “assume that you are always in prototype” or “live your life in beta.” It’s a mindset that is helpful in learning how to disengage from the idea that you can actually have a “solution” and reframe the challenge by learning how to be smart about experimenting, probing and adjusting.

Jeanne’s piece is a must-read because — professionally and academically — she bridges both worlds (design and organizational change). It is written for designers  but equally valuable in my mind to anyone interested in applying design methods to organizational change.

Networked serendipity

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I believe in the value of network connections (virtual ones) in helping to foster serendipitous events.

John Hagel and John Seely Brown hit on this in the work that is the basis for their book The Power of Pull. They frame it well: You can shape serendipity by participating actively in virtual and physical world environments where you can easily connect with others who have similar passions and interests. It makes intuitive sense, and Hagel and Brown provide examples to illustrate the point. But it’s nice when you can experience this in your own work. And double nice when it can become a teaching point. Which is what happened to me yesterday.

I am kicking off another session of the class I teach — Creating & Sharing Knowledge — in the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change at Northwestern University. The first set of readings deals with the different perspectives researchers have had in viewing “knowledge” in organizational settings. Perspectives on tacit and explicit knowledge is just one example. Are they really two different types of knowledge? Can you convert one to the other? How? Or are they inseparable?

This is a bit of a splitting-hairs exercise but designed to have the students critically rethink their assumptions about what knowledge looks like in organizational settings. In two weeks, they will submit an assignment describing their own perspective on this topic by arguing whether (or not) the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is useful for practitioners.

So the class is now noodling this topic. Do practitioners get as wound up about defining (and arguing) terms as much as academics? If they think or talk about distinctions like tacit and explicit, how do they do it?

After the first class I checked my twitter feed and came upon this from Luis Suarez (@elsua):

@raesmaa Blogged about Tacit Knowledge: Quiet is the New Loud http://bit.ly/gyvQi4 // Required Reading of the Day #kmers #socbiz

Riitta Raesmaa writes about the importance of trust-based relationships in the flow of tacit knowledge, and how rich flows of such knowledge are critical to learning, creativity and even strategic success. It’s a good example of how blogging facilitates “sense-making” in that it gives us readers the opportunity to look at how an articulate, thoughtful entrepreneur translates concepts like “tacit” into meaningful ideas for business.

And that’s exactly the type of translation I’d hold up an an example for my class. So, I did (I shared the post and tweet with the class). Thank you, serendipity.

Get more from training – or give up and do an extreme makeover?

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Schoolklas begin jaren '50 / Dutch classroom a...

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?

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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.]

Taking the stairs

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The coffee is kicking in this a.m. and I was struck by the points-of-view represented in two links shared by people I follow on Twitter. I happened to open these links in succession.

The first (shared by KM blogger Jack Vinson) is a thoughtful piece from John Bordeaux of Bordeaux Associates: On Change, or Why They Hate You. The second is a video link shared by Michelle Frisque, who I know as a graduate student in the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change at Northwestern University. It’s an example of using design (and fun) to change people’s behaviors – in this case, encouraging people to take the stairs rather than an escalator.

Take a look at both. Ok: Now discuss.