Some interesting statistics about social learning.

It's nearly time for the CIPD re-titled "Learning & Development Show" (HRD to you and me oldies).

If you are coming, do visit us and say "hi" at our stand (number 439), or even better attend my topic taster at 1000hr on Wednesday the 30th called 'Developing a Learning Culture'.

I will be suggesting that L&D / HR need to take responsibility for creating an organisations learning culture, it will never happen otherwise.  We will be thinking about what we need to do to facilitate this as learning professionals.  I'm going to outline what can be done using 4 steps:

1.  How to share and store examples of success and best practice.
2.  How to encourage employees to learn and imitate that best practice.
3.  How to support management in observing the employee new behaviours.
4.  How to facilitate managements involvement in motivating employees development.


A learning culture must embrace the benefit of social learning, of which there are many.  Take a look at some of the statistics in our thisworkedwell.com social learning tool info graphic:

I hope that we get to meet some of you at the show.

Best regards

Bob

Thank you for holding, we value you as a customer. A lesson in how not to give customer service...

A lesson in how not to give customer service...

I’m not normally given to complaining anyone who knows me will vouch for this, but occasionally I find myself on the end of such appalling customer service that even I begin to loose my cool.  

Right now we are experiencing unbelievable incompetence, so I couldn’t help but share this with you and try to draw out some thoughts about customer service.  Below is a summary of the failures of Talk Talk since we moved offices in May.  It’s not an exhaustive list on contact and calls, as you can imagine we have actually spent hours (I have it logged) on the phone to them listening to the same tune (I know it off by heart now) and being told “Thank you for holding, we value you as a customer and will deal with you as soon as possible”.  Not many calls by the way are less than half an hour long.  This is how it’s going...

1.  Failure to supply broadband to our change of address within the promised service levels timescale. 

2.  Failure of open reach engineer to turn up on the day promised.  

3.  Failure to communicate our new address correctly to Open reach.  We found them working on next doors phone system! 

4.  Failure to stop the phone service at our old address after we have moved (as agreed). 

5.  Failure to supply the Worksafe facility.  Still unresolved, although we don't currently have broadband anyway so I suppose that’s pretty worksafe!

6.  Failure to supply any phone service at all 16/7/13 to 18/7/13.

7.  Failure to communicate the correct address to the Open reach engineer.  Again found them working at next doors address!

8.  Failure to supply broad and service since 16/7/13 to current, still outstanding!

9.  Failure to supply a business line (open reach engineer advised that domestic line was in place!). 

10.  Failure to have a manager call back as promised, still waiting!

11.  Failure to sell correct service - Was advised by Talk Talk that a fast fibre optic service was not available.  Open reach engineer advises fibre optic fast service is available at our address.  

There is a lesson here, that maybe has something to do with becoming too system driven in the way we deliver our customer service offering.  It seems to be an inability to see the whole, the 11 failures as a single experience, instead anonymously treating each issue as though it existed in isolation.  It would be lovely if we could simply have a conversation with someone who has authority and is willing to accept in this instance they've got it badly wrong, taking responsibility to do the right thing.  That’s not necessarily the system thing.  

There might be another lesson here about using Talk Talk as  your ISP, but we'll let you draw that possible conclusion.  

When we grow as a business it becomes vital that we continue treat customers as individuals, always being prepared to listen and perhaps tend towards giving the benefit of the doubt.  Customer service is a personal thing first, before it is an organisational thing.  Customer service happens as human interaction, so we need people in these roles who have responsibility, take accountability and own the required authority to act.  

Anything less and customer service erodes into a hopeless, unbelievable claim that “we value your call...”

Is it better to learn from the success or the failure?

Where do you prefer to gain your learning insights?  For many companies the answer would  be "from analysing our mistakes".  "So that we don't make them again" they suggest.  This may be the wrong answer?

Tom Rath goes to length in his book 'How full is your bucket' to build the case for learning from our success not our failure.  In his research those that took encouragement from and built on their existing success far outperformed those that were focused on failures.  He went on to identify this phenomena in many walks of life.   Often sports teams would celebrate success but look to learn from failures.  When it went wrong they would run the footage and analyse the game in detail.  When they won they would visit the bar and celebrate together.  However the most successful teams did the reverse drowning their sorrows when they failed, but analysing the game when they won.  In another example children that do well in school exams were frequently offspring of parents who focus on the A score when a child comes home with an A two B's and an C.   This is something of a play on the old carrot verses stick argument - but in a world that has proven many times that the carrot keeps winning.

There are in fact limits to the carrots power and it is true that the stick does work on occasions, but if Tom Rath's research is to be believed then the ratio that works is something like 5 carrots being needed to 1 stick.

So yes we should learn from our failures, but we should learn much more from our successes.  This seems especially relevant in the area of informal, or on the job learning.  We do well to create vehicles that share success within our businesses, especially those successes that others can replicate and take advantage of.  For example a retail business relies on the success of its sales staff, So being able to share what worked well on the shop floor today, allows staff to adapt their customer approach tomorrow.  Imagine on a daily basis taking the highest performing staff members and sharing their own recipes for success with the rest of the staff, that's a potential game changer. The same could be said of a managerial scenario, an operational scenario, or any other scenario. If success is shared then others will learn what they must do to succeed as well.  

This is not hard to facilitate, although social media tools can help  (watch this space thisworkedwell.com).   You can also follow our new twitter feed @thisworkedwell.

Work at sharing success in your organisation on constant basis and the research tells us you will begin create high performance on a wider and deeper scale.  Now that's really bringing informal learning to life.

Bus or bike? Informal learning is gaining pace, but will it replace?

Formal learning is a bit like a bus - the learner gets on and the driver takes
them on a journey from A to B.

Informal learning is like a bike, the learner gets on and chooses where, when and how fast they make their journey.

Here’s the issue...

Some people are suggesting that formal learning is dead and informal learning will take over, but that’s just daft!  Informal learning is not superior to formal they are equally valid, we simply need to plan solutions that are like buses and like bikes.

I think this is an example of where people with good ideas take them too far?  Like Pareto who observed the whole 80:20 principle thing, going too far and suggesting that you lose 80% of your friends because they only bring 20% of the value!  Bikes are good, but so are buses and we don’t need a fight to sort out which is best, we just need to find a way of using them both through our life of learning.

I learn daily, I love to learn, I often learn subconsciously like when I hear two colleagues disagreeing on something and somehow I store up understanding of ‘what to’ or perhaps ‘what not to’ say when I’m talking with those people in the future.  We do an enormous amount of informal learning, all of the time.  Yet when I think about some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned recently and when I think about some of the biggest changes I’ve made recently, they have come about through the formal learning cycle.

A significant example of this big change for me is caught up with a personal confession that may be incriminating so please don’t tell!  I have been throughout my life a daily law breaker!!  You see from my teenage years (having motorbikes on the local wasteland) I have loved speed.  This resulted in a driving style that broke the speed limit almost every time I got in a car.  Sometimes deliberately sometimes through absent mindedness.   Anyway, I kidded myself that I was a great driver especially when I took up Motorsport and started to bring home occasional 3rd, 2nd and 1st place trophies.

Today I am pleased to tell you, I do not ever break the speed limit on the roads - no really, I have totally and majorly reformed my awareness and practice.  I know automatically the correct speed limit for any piece of road I am traveling on, I have strategies in place for maintaining legal speeds whether in town or on the open road, and most remarkably this life change took-place overnight about 18 months ago and am still maintaining my new behaviours every day.

So what was the catalyst for this change?  Was it my informal Learning?  Where driving is concerned there has certainly been lots of it over my lifetime.  I love to drive and I like the skill of driving, I have paid attention to great driving and learnt many lessons especially on the track.  I have sat next to ex touring car professionals and learned first hand how they loaded the springs a fraction of a second before a turn to ensure that the car is balanced and settled as they take a corner on the slippery limit of adhesion.  I suspect their has been countless occasions on the highways where I have learnt how to drive better almost subconsciously through what I have witnessed and experienced.  All of this is great informal learning, but my biggest learning and biggest change took place through an afternoons face to face speeding ticket training course - formal learning.

If someone tells you formal learning is dead (like in the currently very popular book I’ve been reading) give them a reality check.  Yes informal learning works and us L&D people can help facilitate it much more, but don’t let the buses tyres down yet because we all need the big crisis / wake up / game changing formal learning interventions too.  

The truth is, we need proper blended learning solutions that maximise learning, 
buses and bikes all the way.  

Bob

The value of learning, a new perspective.

Kirkpatrick has served us all well for many years in providing his 5 ways of evaluating learning.  Effectively evaluating learning is indeed a subject that has taken up much time and attention yet seemed to have developed very little. 

I have a different take on this subject and in a series of blogs I hope to explore my ideas, encourage your comments and if you are willing engage you in some research that may provide some helpful insight.   

Here's my hypothesis, that all education always delivers a valuable return. 

I think L&D people have stopped trusting in this phenomena and are actually trying too hard to measure the wrong things as indicators of learning success.    

Take for example this simple observation from data collected over the past 200 years. 

It shows primary and secondary school enrollment rates alongside birth and death rates.  Given that the population has grown massively over the same period, this is a very compelling set of figures.  It might be easy to challenge the correlation between these sets of figures, surely there are many contributing factors for these improvements in society?  Science and medicine has made huge advances, society has progressed, laws have stabilised communities, our understanding of so many things has advanced, technology has transformed our lives.  Yet every one of these factors are reliant upon people who are able to access these complex worlds and use their ability to progress their own sphere of expertise.  Where does this capability begin?  It must begin with increasing numbers of educated people.  This is two hundred years of evidence that education delivers a valuable return. 

Here's another insight from a very recent study looking at the impact of education in 2012.  

This one looks at the level of unemployment and the average monthly salary of people groups with differing levels of education. 

The story is compelling and not unsurprising. When people drop out of learning early they reduce their potential to be employed and their ability to bring home income.  It is telling to see that that these indicators improve so clearly as the individual sticks with education and so develop their potential.  This is current evidence that education delivers a valuable return. 

Wherever you look it's not hard to find confirmation that education delivers benefits.  

I'm a big fan of real blended learning, the 70:20:10 concept makes sense to me and as L&D people we need to set up all kinds of learning opportunities within our organisations.  What we don't need to do is support the belief which suggests we measure learning outcomes by evaluating the change in the learner.  Focusing on the nitty gritty behavioural level misses the point that all learning delivers a valuable return.  The way to measure this needs to be aligned with the performance indicators of the organisation, not trying to capture the intricacies of the small individual changes. 

Having some data to support this view would be very helpful for all of us L&D folk.  So here’s what we are doing...

If we are able to collect a sample of c.500 L&D budgets alongside the indicators of organisational success we may be able to observe whether an increase in L&D spending correlates with improved performance results.  Perhaps not too many organisations have seen improved results over recent years, so we need to look at organisations within sector to understand how the relative success compares.  

Measures of success are easy to identify within the private and charitable sectors, but we need your help to determine what to measure in public sector organisations.  

If you are at all interested in the question of L&D return on investment, please complete our survey and if possible pass a link to this blog page onto other L&D professionals that you know.  Current results will be displayed on completion of the survey, and our full report on findings will be sent to everyone who takes part.  If you are working in the public sector, then please use our survey to suggest the right indicators of performance.  

Your thoughts on any of the above would be very welcome.  

Regards

Bob

Things to do at HRD 2013 - Free Learning and networking at HRD 2013.

There are 50+ learning sessions taking place at the HRD Exhibition covering a wide-range of topics including L&D, OD, coaching, leadership, talent, e-learning, learning technology and more.

With so much on offer it's difficult to know which sessions to attend, so we've had a good look through the programme and can suggest the following:

1. Firstly the 'must attend' session has to be 2pm on Thursday (25th) with our own Bob Bannister presenting the topic Are Businesses Serious About 70:20:10 Development?  This session will explore what an effective 70:20:10 model looks like, how to establish the relevant learning culture in your own organisation and the 7 key requirements for successful adoption.
2. Making Innovation HR’s Business looks like a promising session looking at the integral role of L&D in ensuring the continued innovation of organisations; training and development of staff to facilitate agility and to help foster innovators; encouraging knowledge sharing and crossboundary working, to realise business benefits.  That's also Thursday at 1545hr.  
3. Finally just because we love the creativity of the title (and therefore we hope the presenter will be equally as fun), there is Mi5takes aer Prabobly Costnig you a Frotune!  Pick up simple, powerful tips to develop accuracy skills and promote attention to detail in your organisation. That's 9:15 am on Thursday too.  

If that's not motivation enough, here are 10 more reasons why you should attend HRD 2013:

1. Focus on specific areas such as coaching or talent or get an update across all areas of L&D.
2. Benefit from sessions in three different formats and find a learning style that suits you.
3. Get practical tips and advice to improve individual and organisational performance.
4. Hear from L&D and business leaders, who are experts in their chosen fields
5. Work through your business issues in practical workshops with like-minded peers.
6. Benchmark your existing approaches to learning and development.
7. Hear from leading organisations who are tackling the same challenges as you.
8. Meet top L&D suppliers and get tailored advice to issues you're facing.
9. Take a look at the latest products and services in learning and organisation development at the free exhibition.
10. Get professional development advice and try speed networking and make new contacts.

For all the other stuff and free registration here's a link to the HRD site.  

Hope to see you there. 

Bob Bannister
@bbbannister

After you...

It's a funny thing when a book published in the 1980s has a lasting impact on the way you live and work. Especially when the idea is so very simple, and it's application so easy to do. For me this is definitely the case.

I am referring to the practice of understanding before you are understood, or to put it another way diagnosing before you prescribe. The book I'm sure will be known to many of you as Covey's Seven habits of highly effective people.

Perhaps there are many good insights in this book, but I have for years found this advise 'to let the other person have their say first' exceptionally helpful. After all who would value a doctor that writes out your prescription before asking you what was wrong?

Understanding before you are understood works in almost every single situation you can imagine. I can't think of a time when I have not benefited from leading the other contributor to have their say first.
Immediately you are put in a position of strength, able to reflect and select your reply in the light of the others position. Able to answer more specifically the need of the other person, able to think for a few seconds more about the response that you make.

Whether this is a new idea to you or just one that you'd forgotten about, give it a chance today. Make the simplest of all behavioural changes and let them go first.
Bob.
Bob Bannister