L&D's New Hatrack

This article appeared in Inside Learning Technologies & Skills Magazine, January 2015

Our professional, personal, and private lives are being heavily impacted by a world that has become Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (a.k.a. VUCA). Sahana Chattopadhyay looks at this changing world -- and defines the new roles required by L&D departments everywhere. 

The future of work is going to be radically different from what we have experienced so far. An increasingly global and uber connected workforce, globally distributed organizations, dispersed expertise, ubiquitous connectivity powered by the affordances of social, local and mobile (SoLoMo) and the economy of individuals are giving rise to completely different working and learning behaviors. Today’s users with their mobile devices, anytime anywhere access to the internet, and connected to their networks via social platforms operate under completely different paradigms. In the light of these transformations and disruptions, It is glaringly evident that L&D departments can no longer function the way they used to, at least not if they want to be relevant and be a business partner to the organizations.

The onus lies on L&D to gauge the impact of these shifts on workplace learning, leverage technology and herald the change. This calls for the acquisition of new skills and roles in the team to meet the changing needs of a demographically diverse workforce.

I have briefly described some of the skills that are going to be critical in the coming years. 

Know how to build one's PLN

Workplace challenges are increasingly going to be unique requiring skills like analysis, problem solving, learning agility, adaptability, pattern sensing and exception handling; therefore, instilling the skills of “learning how to learn” is of paramount importance. This necessitates individuals to practice Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and build their Personal Learning Networks (PLN). To enable the workforce acquire these skills, the L&D team must "walk the talk". Since not all L&D members possibly use social media to drive their own professional development, acquiring the skills of PKM will require some time and effort. While most people today use multiple social tools, using these specifically to enhance and support continuous learning and professional development may not come naturally. Conscious effort must be made to build one’s PLN and transfer the skills to the workforce.

Be conversant in today's technological and demographic landscape

Today, L&D is faced with the challenge and the opportunity to empower a workforce spanning five generations and working in a ubiquitously connected environment. The affordances of social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) have to be factored into all the aspects of learning ecosystem design. Workers will use mobile devices including wearables to learn at the point of need, access their network and communities of practices to solve challenges, share user-generated content in response to the community needs or just to share their learning. Social media and open resources like MOOCs will foster an era of self-driven learners who know what they need, where to find it and take their pick. The learners will come with a consumer mindset--valuing what they need and not what is thrust on them. L&D will have to ensure that we have the requisite skills to facilitate this move or risk becoming redundant. 

Manage/facilitate communities and networks

Learning in the workplace will increasingly take place in communities – these could be Communities of Interest, Communities of Practice (CoP), or even communities formed out of project groups. Some will be temporary like those of people coming together for projects; some will be long term like CoPs where workers from across the organization come together to evolve their domain, learn from each other and add to the knowledge pool. While people may still come together to share and learn as they often do without L&D intervention, support from L&D in this area will not only make it more efficient and bridge silos but will also benefit the organization by providing a platform for the capture of the organizational hive mind. This is directly tied to the skills of community management and facilitation of virtual collaboration.

The role of community management will be one of the most crucial because of the global nature of organizations and dispersed teams working across time zones and continents. Communities of professionals collaborating and cooperating to learn together will be on the rise. Content will be continuously co-created and co-owned by the community members (much like the evolution of Wikipedia). Each member will bring their expertise to bear and share their knowledge and experiences. Learning will happen through conversations and participation. What will emerge is a network of diverse and connected workers skilled at PKM learning together to develop skills they can apply to their work. L&D will have to don the hat of community managers to make this transition seamless.

Most organizations today recognize the needs of a distributed workforce and are investing in enterprise collaboration platforms to support their formal learning endeavors with more informal and collaborative sharing. However, this requires community managers who can facilitate activities on the platform. L&D has to don multiple hats to enable this transformation. 

The hat of a Change Agent

Just because an enterprise collaboration platform is in place doesn’t mean that everyone will take to it like a duck to water. The natural adoption curve will set in with some being early adopters and others trailing behind. However, the enthusiasm of even the early adopters will rapidly wane if the platform doesn’t offer engaging content and meaningful conversations. This requires well thought out change-management plans.

Change management includes onboarding users onto the platform, enabling them to use it with ease and supporting them throughout. Onboarding typically covers conducting training, socializing the platform and defining different ways of contribution. Defining clear guidelines and directives go a long way towards user adoption like telling them exactly how they can contribute and collaborate. The table below summarizes some of the ways that users can contribute.

L&D has to make two things very simple -- the act of making the shift and the reason behind the shift. As community managers, we have to remove all obstacles from the path of change.

The hat of a Trainer

All new platforms – no matter how intuitive they seem – require onboarding. This can be in the form of simple how-to documents, screencasts, videos, webex sessions, and any other form that works. What is important to remember is that designing and creating these training materials is not enough. They must reach the users. This could mean creating a Training/Help Center on the platform that can be a one-stop shop for users. Reaching out to users proactively to find out if they need help makes adoption easier.

The hat of a Content Curator

Good content is one of the key factors behind why people choose to visit, stay and engage on an enterprise platform. The content can be in the form of short capsules of learning, curated articles, links to interesting resources, discussions on the forum, blogs and micro-content from other users. It is the job of the community manager to ensure that the content is appropriately tagged and curated and thus findable. To be a trustworthy and respected content curator, it is important to know the interests, needs and passions of the community. This requires constant engagement with the community. It also means enlisting the help of community ambassadors who are likely to be experts regarding the interests of that community.

The hat of a Connector

Collaboration platforms are all about connections--between content and people, between expertise and challenges, between skill-sets and projects, between people and people. As community managers, it is important to set in place a system that enables “findability” and accessibility. This could mean anything from inculcating practices like tagging for “searchability”, helping users to fill out their profiles, to manually connecting the nodes. Since community managers have a bird's eye view of their community, they are often best placed to spot a need and a corresponding solution--be it for a certain expertise, content or skillset. The role of a connector is crucial in creating business value for the organization and is a skill all community managers need to hone.

The hat of a Consultant

This is perhaps the most frequently donned hat and covers a gamut of skills including needs analysis, solution designing, influencing, and negotiating. Typically in an organization, a single community of all employees will not be an effective means of collaboration. They will split into teams and groups driven by many factors from functional areas and interests to roles and projects. These teams will form their own communities with their specific and unique goals and requirements. It's L&D’s role to help the teams articulate their objectives and enable them to design their community experience in a manner that supports their objectives.

The diagram below is an example of a learning ecosystem that L&D teams may be required to create and manage – where the online and the offline world come together. 

As the churn continues around us, L&D must gear up to transform themselves and workplace learning to tackle the future of work.  

The Importance of Being Agile in a VUCA World

We are well aware that to survive and thrive in the VUCA world, we need to be agile in all respects – in learning, towards change, regarding work as well as life. We talk about learning agility, organizational agility, individual agility, agile as a philosophy and much more. Yet, we are still unclear as to what makes an organization agile. When the agile manifesto was crafted along with its 12 principles at a ski resort in Utah, the group of people may have had software development in mind. However, during my tenure at ThoughtWorks, I learned and realized that “being agile” is a philosophy, a way of working and living, that is going to determine whether we survive and thrive or fade into oblivion in this VUCA world. A recent post by Abhijit Bhaduri called Talent Predictions for 2015 begins with the following lines: “2015 will be the year of agile innovation, agile learning and agile careers.” I wholeheartedly agree with him. It is time organizations and individuals took note. We can no longer afford to rest on our laurels, give the excuse of “this is how we do things here,” or ignore the multiple forces of change bombarding us from all sides.

Hence, I thought it’d be a fitting time to revisit my learnings regarding the philosophy and principles of Agile from my tenure at ThoughtWorks and subsequent reading, reflection, and “bunkos”.

Coming from a very traditional, waterfall-driven background replete with all the drawbacks (what I perceive as drawbacks in comparison especially in the context of a rapidly changing world), it took me quite a while to assimilate the philosophy—even the basics of Agile. A dictum like “Just deliver; don’t document unless the document is going to add value” would throw me into a tizzy. Don’t we need to document so that in case a point comes when the blame-game starts (I assumed it would), we have our backs covered? Apparently not because there is no blame game! There is no one to blame. Everyone is in this together—the team, the client, and all other remaining stakeholders.  As I mulled over these rather shocking, almost blasphemous, aspects of Agile, I thought it would be a good idea to pen down my thoughts for further inspection and feedback.

The VUCA world calls for constant communication, transparent exchanges, and action over procrastination. Communities and teams of diverse people have to work together to solve complex and emerging challenges through innovative and creative means. This is where I keep harping on my theme of workplaces as communities, and enterprise social networks as platforms for communication and learning. The VUCA ecosystem no longer lends itself to standard operating procedures, best practices based on past experiences and a handful of executive taking strategic decisions while the employees comply and carry out orders. Dealing with ambiguity is the name of the game. Dealing with ambiguity requires collaborative efforts by diverse sets of people who will bring to bear dissimilar heuristics and frameworks such that the challenges can be perceived from all angles leading to the best possible solution. All of this requires us to be agile – in principle and in practice.

In this post, I have focused on a few key aspects from a workplace learning perspective. I have perhaps taken a deliberately idealistic stand in the post, but I firmly believe that unless we adopt the fundamental philosophies of agile, we are going to go the way dinosaurs did. The original Agile Manifesto, which is my source of inspiration, can be found here. 

My interpretation of the Agile philosophy

I am trying to acquire better ways of learning and building personal knowledge networks and helping others do it. Through this endeavor, I have come to value: 

1.    Adaptive over predictive 

2.    Collaboration over documentation 

3.    Continuous feedback over periodic reviews 

4.    Specialization over generalization

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, I value the items on the left more and have found them to be in synch with what is required today to build a learning organization, an organization of motivated, passionate individuals.

Unpacking each claim 

1.   Adaptive over predictive

Ruth Clark describes adaptive in relation to expertise in her book Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement, and I think it reflects my understanding of Agile philosophy very well. Being adaptive means to be flexible, open to change, reacting to situations just as the situation demands. Adaptive expertise brings open-ended inquiry to the problem and not a pre-defined solution. Being adaptive is to be always ready. In this context, I am reminded of the phrase “a mind like water” by David Allen. Paraphrasing from Getting Things Done below: 

“Water neither flinches nor ignores the impact when a huge boulder hits its surface. It welcomes a boulder just like it would a pebble. The ripples it generates are in direct proportion to the size and impact—neither more nor less. Water neither underreacts nor overreacts. And very soon, water goes back to its natural state—open and clear—ready for the next impact.”

This is the state of being truly adaptive and agile. With the unknown and the complex becoming the norm in knowledge work, adaptability is the key to dealing with challenges, to be comfortable with ambiguity, and to move to a state where we are constantly learning.

As Eric Hoffer very aptly says (the highlights are mine):

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling. 

2.   Collaboration over documentation

Going back to my roots in traditional organizations where documentations supersede communication, conversations and listening, I can appreciate the value of collaboration. Please note that I am not advocating doing away with documentation, but documenting only what adds value and when it adds value—to the project, to the team, to the stakeholders or to oneself. I am using the Minutes of Meetings (MOMs) as an example to make my case. 

Unlike any of the methodologies that fall under the umbrella of Agile, in traditional orgs most meetings are conducted as rote and many of the crucial stakeholders are missing. Hence, a stringent documentation is required to capture what transpired and to keep everyone in the loop (so to speak). Needless to say, many of the subtleties of discussions are lost, and the minutes become more of a “save our backs in the future” documents with little of value coming out of them. If critical points from meetings must be thrashed out and discussed, let those discussions happen on the internal social platform. This way, those who may not have been a part of the meeting but has relevant knowledge and inputs, can pitch in and provide valuable insights.  

Let me clarify what I mean by collaboration in this context. When I claim that under the aegis of Agile philosophy, collaboration is more valued, this is what I imply. First of all, collaboration for me implies disciplined collaboration—a term popularized by Morten T. Hansen in his book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results. Disciplined collaboration is to collaborate for results. And this is precisely what the philosophy of Agile supports. Some of the quotes from the book that supports my understanding of effective collaboration are:

“The idea of disciplined collaboration can be summed up in one phrase: the leadership practice of properly assessing when to collaborate (and when not to) and instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when required.”

“Disciplined collaboration requires that organizations be decentralized and yet coordinated. To build this model, leaders need to detect the barriers to collaboration and overcome them without reducing the benefits of a decentralized structure.”

“Collaborative companies run on networks, those informal working relationships among people that cut across formal lines of reporting. If the formal org chart shows how work is divided into pieces, networks reveal the informal organization-how people actually work together.”

Finally, a collaborative company can do away with unnecessary documentation, remain lightweight and agile because the concerned people are all in it together. Everyone is in the loop, always! 

3.   Continuous feedback over periodic reviews

This is my biggest learning from Agile. The very environment and processes—pair programming, TDD, retrospectives, continuous integration, whatever else you will—support continuous feedback, one of the keys to learning. In this environment, a mistake becomes a stepping stone to excellence. A philosophy that centers on feedback also encourages mistakes by default. I think of these as bunkos where a “bunko” means - “to make a mistake from which the benefits of what you learned exceed the costs of the screw-up” as described in The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. Because one knows that feedback will be immediate, one is not scared to experiment, think big and explore. Imagine the reverse of this—where feedback comes in the form of yearly appraisals that tell you how many times you have screwed up far removed from the time and the context of the screw up itself. It leaves one mentally screaming, “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? How does it help now?” Making sense of the VUCA world will involve more screw ups before we arrive at a solution.

Here’s one of my sources of understanding and clarity on the purpose of feedback and the way to deliver as well as receive it: Tightening the Feedback Loop by Patrick Kua. 

4.   Specialization over generalization

As @AbhijitBhaduri points out in his post, I agree that with increasing work fragmentation, the rise of new skills, rapidly changing technology, workplaces will need specialized skills. Standard job descriptions will give way to role descriptions – the tasks and outcome someone holding the role will have to perform. Ross Dawson points out the key drivers of change in his The Future of Work infographic highlighting factors like work modularization, value polarization and economy of individuals – all of which call for deep specialization and domain expertise. The onus will lie with the individual to continuously explore, learn and connect with others to remain on the cutting edge of their skills and domains. Organizations have to support individual learning in every possible way – from facilitating connections within and without to coaching, mentoring, and encouraging exploration and mistakes.  

However, in a world and world economy where situations throw us into unpredictable circumstances and poses unknown problems, we should not confuse specialization with crystallized intelligence. Ruth Clark in the aforementioned book talks about this at length. I have described it briefly here. Quoting from the book:

“Routine experts are very effective at solving problems that are representative of problems in their domains. They are adept at “seeing” and solving the problem based on their domain-specific mental models.In contrast, adaptive experts evolve their core competencies by venturing into areas that require them to function as “intelligent” novices.
Fluid intelligence is the basis for reasoning on novel tasks or within unfamiliar contexts; in other words, it gives rise to adaptive expertise. In contrast, crystallized intelligence is predicated on learned skills…and is the basis for routine expertise.”

To remain adaptive and responsive to changing situations, it is important to develop a fluid intelligence, one that enables us to take on the role of inquiring novices when required, which in turn helps to view a problem from different perspectives. 

Thus, the new age worker must remain an eternal learner. Idealistic notion? Perhaps! But critically important IMHO.

Reference reading:

•  The Agile Warrior
• The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software
• Martin Fowler: The Agile Guide
•  Making software is about making people

Instructional Design in the VUCA World

The current trends of technology, globalization, shifting demographics and a connected globe clearly portend a dramatically changing world. We are feeling the impact in all spheres of our lives -- professional, personal and private. In my last post, I took a macro-view of the changing landscape of work and learning. In this post, I am trying to dig a little deeper and take a micro-view to see how these changes impact us as individuals and as a part of L&D. 

L&D team's work has become more complex and challenging. The L&D needs to comprise some of the following roles to cater to the changing needs of the future of work:

1. Instructional Designer/Learning Designer-someone who will do needs analysis, design learning in line with adult learning principles, structure learning events for different delivery channels, and so on
2. Learning Delivery-tasks like facilitation / presentation of learning events, engaging learners, making best use of different media
3. Learning Management-tasks include programme / project management, learning evaluation, stakeholder management, supplier management
4. Community Manager
5. Performance Consultant 
6. Leadership Development (Coaching Skills)-coaching and developing leaders is going to be of significant importance in this era of rapid change and ambiguity
7. Technology Enabler-someone who explores new technologies with an eye on how it can be used to enable learning at an organizational and personal level
8. Business and Data Analyst-maybe the same person or two different people, this role essentially requires someone to see the patterns and trends being revealed by the data captured (via LMS, through feedback, interaction of ESNs, queries raised)
9. Social and Informal Learning Evangelist and Guide 
10. Organizational Development Expert

It is not necessary for an individual to play a single role. On the contrary, it is to the advantage of the individual, the team and the organization if people are poly-skilled in different aspects as per inclination and requirement. Some of these roles have existed for years (the ones in bold). Some are yet to become recognized roles. I have highlighted the ones that have been a part of L&D from times of greater stability and lesser complexity. However, even those roles can no longer function the way they used to. The roles need to be revisited and explored keeping in mind the shifting paradigms, their impact on workplace learning, and the place of L&D in the organization. It's critical for a CLO to have an eye on the changing landscape and enable new skill sets within the t 

Historically, L&D has been vested with the responsibility of keeping skills and knowledge of the workforce updated based on: 

• Inputs from managers 
• Current business requirements
• Skill-gap analysis 

Most of the training programs were designed around "best practices" and explicit know-how gathered over the years. Training design, therefore, was not only top down but also past focused drawing insights from what worked in the past, getting expert inputs built in, and putting the content together in a linear and logical flow. This would then be packaged (ILT/elearning/blended learning) and delivered to the workforce in need of the said training. Context, conversation and collaboration weren't given much thought. These continued to happen but outside of the purview of the formal training. 

With the advent of big shifts and disruptive technology in the shape of Social, Mobile Computing, Cloud Computing and Big Data, all the old notions of work are falling apart. I wrote about L&D's Role in the VUCA World some time back. Here, I am narrowing my focus to the role of Instructional Design in the VUCA world. 

There have been paradigm shifts in what drives workplace learning today. And these in turn influence the role of instructional designers. Instructional design skills have existed as long as formal learning existed – from the designing of school curriculum to e-learning modules. However, it has changed in some very fundamental ways: In the past, instructional design presumed stable content and a fixed set of skills and knowledge. Design was linear. Children or adults – it was assumed that everyone had a set of skill and knowledge gaps that training programs could resolve. Today, that stability has been snatched away. We cannot design training programs for skills that are emergent and still unknown. Today, instructional design needs to be future focused. ID’s need to leverage existing and emergent power of technology that are inherently social and mobile. 

The table below summarizes the key shifts that impact how we design learning experiences today:

All of these together have fostered deep rifts in how we work and learn. As Instructional Designers, these are critical paradigms we have to consider when designing the learning experience in our organizations. In the infographic, Futureproof Your Careers shared by Jane Hart, we can see the top 10 skills that will increasingly be required by all. Instructional design thinking must not only keep the skills in mind but also be cognizant of the forces of Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo) that will drive user behaviour. 

Each of these forces have a transformational effect on our behaviour. Learning design must take these new usage patterns into account. Some of the emerging behaviours range from:

1. A preference to view a short 2 minute video to know about a something over reading a 2 page PDF
2. A predilection for images over text - with a smartphone at their fingertips, today's users prefer to share experiences via real-time video and images rather than long descriptive texts. Apps like WhatsApp makes it seamless to share.
3. An inclination towards accessing one's network for answers to queries over taking a formal course
4. A just-in-time, "let's get the problem solved attitude" over "let's learn in case we need it"
5. An expectation of finding courses, programs and access to their learning communities on their personal devices 

These shifts have slowly but surely crept up on us one at a time. And now their cumulative effect is being felt in all spheres. A summary of how these paradigm shifts may impact the work and skills required of instructional designers are given in the table below. 

One of the implications of the shift is that instructional designers can no longer think about designing only formal training programs that will go on the LMS. They have to think of the entire spectrum and see it holistically. Jane Hart's Workplace Learning Continuum illustrates the learning spectrum very effectively. Instructional designers need to take both ends of the continuum into consideration and leave the choice of access to users. 

Depending on the need of the hour, users can access any end of the spectrum -- taking full-fledged training programs if they feel the need, or connecting and collaborating on the enterprise social network to solve their work-related challenges. The choice is theirs to make. 

Since we are so used to thinking of formally designed, LMS-driven learning programs, we flounder when it comes to thinking about Learning Ecosystem design. Based on the framework above, I have tried to put together a visual representation of what such an ecosystem could be. 

The ecosystem brings the offline and online world together. An instructional designer must think of all modalities of learning when design thinking. 

Some questions to ask could be:

1. Are groups of users co-located? If yes, think of including some offline activities like Lunch & Learns, Hangout Sessions, and so on to strengthen informal & peer-to-peer learning. 
2. Is expertise distributed? Have an Ask the Expert section. Anyone could be an expert on any topic; in this manner, the organizational tacit knowledge will get captured, interesting questions will surface, and the value of weak ties will be explored. Learning from the edge will come to the center.
3. Do users work out of different locations, including home, hubs, etc? If yes, inculcate the practice of narrating one's work. 
4. Is the churn in workforce high? If yes, have a robust online + offline on-boarding program which includes adding users to relevant communities, an online buddy/mentor, a clearly defined roadmap based on their current role.
5. Does the workforce consist of different generations working together? Add some scope for mentoring and reverse mentoring. If the culture of the workplace is conducive, pairing individuals of different generations could be beneficial although it is important to keep in mind that stereotyping generational characteristics can be detrimental. 

None of these are likely to happen overnight. Nor are they one-time activities. Putting in place a learning ecosystem where individuals engage as self-managed learners require constant vigilance, robust design thinking, application of sound community management principles and a strong change management focus. Some of the core tasks are illustrated in the diagram below. 

Thus, an instructional designer today is required to not only understand the fundamentals of good instructional design but must also expand his/her skill sets to include an understanding of community management, the spectrum of learning from formal to informal, the impact of social, local and mobile on user behaviour, the need to equip users with self-managed learning skills. The latter is increasingly critical as we encounter unique challenges and requirements that call for emergent skills. No one can be "trained" for emergent skills. But the ecosystem can be designed to facilitate continuous learning, collaboration and communication.