I always advise people to a refresh their networks. 'Time to get networking' I nod sagely, and everyone agrees.  'Yes you are right I have been neglecting that of late'.  'Must get stuck in'. 'Great advice'. 

I know that it has taken me a while but I started to think about what that statement actually ment, and if I had a clue what networking should be, or whether I was slipping into cliche?

Is networking saying hi to people you have ignored for months?  Or, maybe, working your way through a mountain of business cards in order to select a few to write to people:  'I met you at such and such a conference..'. Or go early to a seminar and mingle.  Is any of that networking? Does it work? What is the point? 

 My ten conclusions:

 1. A network is not a one to one connection.  It is about being part of some kind of group.  It is the power of the collective that makes a difference.

 2. Sometimes announcing I am here, I am full of beans ....is a worthwhile message. You slip into the consciousness of your community.

 3. Joining a group (even an online group such as LinkedIn) is potentially useful. 

 4. If you catch up with a people you have not contacted for a while, then don't start with 'can I pick your brains?' and don't ask for something in the first two minutes. Otherwise this will be your last catch-up.

 5. Read stuff. A great article can work better for you  than 50 spurious emails to people you hardly know.

 6. Comment, have views. Be a player. 

 7. Ask for advice  in the most appropriate places. People like being asked. Usually.

 8. Think about your groups and contacts.  There are more out there than you think.

 9. Be happy and positive.  No one wants a moan who feels sorry for him or herself.

 10. This is not a quick fix for the next few days.  You are starting on a journey.  See it as a one year term investment:  it might go up and down from day to day, but the trend should be up, and you will be in a better place after one year. If you give up after a week you will have expended energy for nil return.

 So networking is important.  But it is worth trying to work out first what that means to you personally and what you want to achieve.

Well, it has nothing to do with the bricks and mortar.  The place was never very upmarket and it needed a major refurb. It was the people:  both staff and members. It felt like a small community. Everyone looked after everyone else.  There was a warm atmosphere in the place and it felt a home from home.

True of every place:  we love a job because of the people not the buildings or the business.

Yet we are most careless of those people; particularly the ones who -without being star performers- act as the glue to keep the place together. They are always not taken seriously enough and missed only when they have gone and it is too late to do anything.

Think about your best communities and do something to keep them together.  And all that might be is a thank you.

Innovation and creativity are going to be at the heart of many learning and development conversations over the next year.  I can almost guarantee it.  The current financial crisis has prompted organisations in the public, private and non-governmental sectors to be thinking hard about how they can manage their way through crisis, and deal effectively with the, as yet, unknown.  If you want proof, look at the new book by Thomas Freedman: ‘This Used to Be Us’. In it he argues strongly that innovation is the only option if the US is going to flourish again, as most of the innovation is happening elsewhere in the world.

In the charities sector it is no less true.  The current funding malaise will require organisations to think in entirely new ways in order to survive, and those that do will leave those that do not a long way behind.

If you want additional proof, I have been reading a timely book.  Havard Business Press has just published:  Innovation to the Core by Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson.  I think you should read it as well as Friedman’s.

This is a book that gives case study after case study of organisations thriving through better investment in people, and through building an effective environment where ideas flourish and diverse communities feel empowered and motivated.  And the message is really simple:  you can innovate your way out of almost any crisis.  And you can innovate your way to game changing successes.   And the places that innovate, are the organisations of the future, because they can cope with uncertainty, ambiguity and volatility better than the average operator.  And increasingly we live in uncertain times. 

The book takes apart the processes required to embed what it defines as three separate kinds of innovation.  The first allows you to exploit an entirely new opportunity, the second, to revalue the unappreciated, and the third to leverage your strengths. You do this by questioning deeply held dogmas inside your organisation about what drives success, and spotting unnoticed patterns or trends that could point the way to new opportunities.  It means thinking of your organisation as ‘a portfolio of skills and assets’, and if you learn to get inside the mind of those you serve you can articulate unmet and unvoiced need. Skarzinski and Gibson call this: ‘challenging orthodoxies, harnessing discontinuities, leveraging competencies and strategic assets and understanding unarticulated need’.

So what has this got to do with learning?  The answer is everything!  Innovation will not happen because the Chief Executive thinks it is a good idea.

Building innovative organisations requires long-term commitment and long-term investment of effort.  Innovation requires an environment that values ideas, as well as skills, systems and processes to manage and exploit those ideas.  Innovation requires a cadre of experts and implementers from across the whole organisation.  All of this implies a whole swathe of training and development initiatives both to drive cultural change and deeply to embed the requisite skills and attitude.  It simply can’t happen with out the engagement of the learning teams and the driving commitment from the top.

The authors list three pre-conditions for generating these breakthroughs.  The first is space for reflection and experimentation.  The second is building a diverse community to create divergent thinking, and the third: fostering what they call:  ‘connection and conversation’ which is the breeding ground for ideas.

Organisations that innovate ask themselves some pretty fundamental questions on regular basis about whom they serve? What they provide? How they provide it? And how they differentiate their services?  You need to do this in order to question the fundamentals, and gain new insights.  None of that is worth anything, unless action and change occurs.  And this is where you need to build what they call ‘an innovation architecture’ in your organisation. 

To get at the truly great ideas, you need to generate, manage and evaluate lots and lots of ideas that may not go very far, in order to create the few that will endure.

This is all about learning: learning to learn and learning to adapt, in order to cope with the increasing pace of the world outside. This requires skill development, organisational development, a coaching and mentoring culture, reward for ideas; a celebration of team work and boundary spanning as well as clear evaluation of impact and contribution.  If you are supporting learning in your organisation this is not a bad place to start. 

Any failure is hard to bear but one where the team finished bottom of the table and were the first to be relegated is doubly hard. No glorious fight to the finish or plucky rally but an ignominious downright straight up failure.  No saving graces really and not much to cling onto in terms of "if only this decision... or if only that ball had gone in".  No this was defeat fair and square.

"I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are."

Thanks to Shaun Usher (@LettersOfNote) for the reference.

The article also reminded me of how huffy John Humphreys was about the new fangled internet in 1999 and the appalling way he read out urls to show that he did not really approve!

How to Create a Learning Explosion

I am just finishing Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson's latest book called:  Innovative Performance Support and I have enjoyed it. It has two really powerful virtues.  The first is that is is easy to read and more importantly, perhaps, it comes at a really important juncture in the trajectory of corporate learning.  It is the right book, at the right time, in the right way.

Two concrete examples:  the chapter headed ‘supporting performance at all five moments of need' is a thoughtful insight into comprehensive learning issues around engagement. The five moments are: when it is something new; when you need more breadth or depth; when you apply what you have learnt; when you need to solve problems and when things change.

Performance support interacts with all five of those moments of need whereas most conventional learning programs never get past the first two: 'new' and 'more'. Performance support gets you the right kind of learning at the moment when it is most needed, in order to help you perform most effectively.  Take a performance support perspective and what constitutes learning and how learning interacts with the learner has a new shape and a new focus. The book really gets this point over.

The second example is the effective use of checklists to summarize and point to action for the reader.  If you want to design a support solution, the checklist on p89 takes you though the main issues to consider.  In one page, the authors help the reader apply the five moments of need to a specific issue or problem that she faces and help her sketch out a solution.  This is incredibly helpful and focussed.

Each chapter has an few pages of comments from a thought leader in that particular field tagged onto the end.  I have never seen this before.  Essentially an expert in the particular subject has a few pages to exchange insights that works alongside the more text book/how to do it approach of the book.  It succeeds brilliantly. I loved, for example, Mark Oehlert's insights in the "Employing the strength of social learning" chapter. In just two pages he picks up on three critical blockers that prevent social learning from being implemented: the challenge of fear, the threat of loss of control and lack of trust.  The pages complement the more theoretical perspectives from the two authors and add value to the chapter as a whole.

I also like the little stories that begin each chapter, from a first kiss to Bob's mother's 80th birthday party. They are amusing anecdotes but relevant.  I suspect I will remember the stories in detail long after the rest of the text has faded.  They might be oblique to the tenets of the book as a whole, but totally relevant to the content as it gives everything an authentic context.

The book takes you though a logical sequence beginning with "The case for Performance Support" through establishing the five moments of need, to building a process for delivery, and finally "Implementing your Performance Support Strategy".  It covers all of this in 245 pages which are insightful, practical and filled with  boundless evidence for taking this practice seriously and developing it effectively.  It is a book that will become dog-eared from use as it is both a narrative and a reference.  Valuable now, and over time; it is worth every cent of the $30 cover price.

Ten lessons from the Shard

1. Build strong foundations:  the Shard has 53 metre deep piles to support the building.  That is a lot of concrete.

2. When they were building the foundations, it looked like the building would NEVER raise above ground level.  But the strong foundations were critical.

3. Less is more: the building has a concrete core; steel frame hung off that and then glass on the front.  Simple, simple structure but quite elegant.

4. You can build something magnificent even if you have only a small area to work in.  The floor pan of the Shard is remarkably small when compared with the height of the building.

5. Make very fast progress when you can.  At peak building speeds, it was growing by 10 metres a day.

6. Consolidate:  rapid growth was followed by periods when the superstructure caught up.  It did not look like progress but it was vital that the whole structure went up together. 

7. Protect your core.  The concrete core was always surrounded by steel  as quickly as possible.

8. Communicate what you are doing:  each stage of the Shard had an illuminated display explaining the building process and the components being used like concrete poured, steel erected, glass installed etc.

9. Have a vision of the finished product:  there are massive images of what the Shard will look like in situ.  This shows the building from every angle and helps us make sense of the construction logic.

10 Never give up.  Planning permission was granted in 2002 yet building did not start until 2010.  In the interim there was a frantic rush for partners; sponsorships and even ownership of the site and development rights. 

The term was used to describe learning that was delivered on a computer, so it described a kind of distance learning, but electronic.  It was a useful catch-all term for something quite sophisticated, challenging and new. Now, some 20 years later the term is more confusing than accurate.  It engenders more arguments than it clarifies and is poorly defined.  

The reason is, is that there are so many great pieces of learning that COULD be described as e learning, that the difference between the extremes of what could come under that banner is so great as to render the term effectively useless.  A program that delivers an electronic document which requires little more than virtual page turning for interactivity, is hardly in the same electronic universe as as a dynamic exploration of a virtual world.  Yet both lay claim to the term e learning. Hardly helpful, descriptive or clarifying!  Having listened to endless presentations trying to pin the term down so that it covers 'my output' rather than 'their output',  I have come to the conclusion that it is all simply 'learning'.  The degree of electronic processing involved is neither here nor there and not a defining characteristic.

I think that we are in exactly the same position now with mobile learning! It is a term that has already had its day.  It is now so broad, so unsophisticated and so unhelpful a term as to be meaningless.  Let me explain. Mobile learning started life as 'learning on your mobile phone'.  Mobile learning was exactly what it said on the tin.  But in world where your phone, your lap top and your 7 or 9 inch tablet are increasingly sophisticated and interchangeable in function, what people actually crave is multi-platform learning rather than mobile learning per se.

If it runs on your company supplied, locked- down lap top, you could call it 'mobile' ie it runs outside your office physically,  but not outside your office literally, as it is still confined to live inside your firewall.  But what you want is something, or a variant of something, that runs on your iPad, and your droid smart phone as well as your laptop and your office based desktop.  That is your definition of mobile: multi-platform in some shape or guise and anything that does not meet your needs is not what you ordered and simply not mobile enough.  In essence the term has gravitated from defining place, to defining options but the term has not evolved with it.

The notion of working remotely is so complex and widespread that it no longer defines anything particularly.  The notion of 'multi-platform', however, still poses challenges and makes demands on providers.  The sooner the customer starts to say what he or she means, and demands, not just mobile but multi-platform instead, the faster we will get to the place that is obviously our next destination:  what we need, delivered when we need it, in the appropriate way and on our platform of choice. Then we will be truly agnostic in terms of time and place (apart from that pesky small point about wi fi and its lack of ubiquity). So in conclusion, I hope we all begin to shout, preferably in unison, 'mobile learning is dead, love live multi-platform!'  And, then, maybe we will get it!

Once you have finished swimming, and you step from the pool, the fact that you are wet means that walking in the rain is quite fun, and as long as it is warm, it is a pleasant experience making your way to the changing room or the shelter.

It is rather like change in organisations:  the status quo feels like the pool and the change is like the hammering rain, uncomfortable and difficult to manage.  It is only when you make the deliberate decision to get out of the water that you realise that the rain is actually quite comfortable.  Change like rain is always worse looking at it from the outside than it is when you are in the middle of the process.