Related articles:
- Do I Need to Paint a Picture? – May 2nd, 2007
- Do I Need to Paint a Picture? (part 2) – June 27th, 2008

Good training equals good sex. That’s right, there are no spelling mistakes in the previous sentence and you are still reading a business-related blog. Below you will find a one-minute interview (don’t worry: no explicit language) with Marc Vermeulen that was recorded during the bi-annual VOV-beurs for training & development.

In 60 seconds he tells us what good sex and good training have in common: they both come in three distinct but essential parts: the foreplay, the intercourse and the ‘afterplay’. In other words: good training events run the full training & development cycle.

I like this metaphor a lot because it puts the training issue in a very sharp perspective. For example, as a training manager you could ask yourself the following questions:

- How many times did I not engage with participants last year? (equals: "no foreplay – just sex")

- How many times did I deliver a standard of-the-shelf training last year? (equals: "boring sex")

- How many times did I force people to go to a training over the past year? (equals: "abuse")

- How many times did I deliver a training when the real need was leadership? (equals: "sex in response to a need for love")

- How many times did I let people fill out evaluation sheets and then do nothing with it? (equals: "call you later – yeah right…")

Your imagination may be richer than mine so I’m pretty sure you can think of more lively questions to complete this list.

Just remember: Thinking more about sex at work may actually result in better training.

About a month ago I attended the 20-minute presentation of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte at TEDx Brussels. In case his name doesn’t ring a bell: Negroponte is the face of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Their mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education.

Yep – these people are on a mission.

Children as Agents of Change

During his 20 minute talk Negroponte explained the basic idea behind the project: development through primary education. The fundament is the inspiring and radical idea to “leverage children” and the way we think about them: no longer as recipients of information, but as agents of change. According to Negroponte they had no other choice: “When you are faced with illiteracy numbers such as Afghanistan, where 75% of the girls don’t go to school, building more schools will not close that gap.”

Just imagine the resistance and laughs Negroponte must have gotten when he first started talking about this project. For example, even now people resist the idea of dropping laptops in desolate areas where people hardly know what a laptop is. “You know what?” Negroponte continued, “You can! Just a few days after we have dropped these OLPC’s we saw connections taking place and activity on those laptops and networks.”

So they decided to change the way they look at children. And when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. To their surprise, looking at children as agents of change has led them to unexpected results: teachers coming back out of retirement and children teaching their parents!

By the way: as you are reading this each kid in Uruguay has an OLPC. Duh… think about that – there might be a lesson in there about belief and commitment.

What’s to Learn for us?

It makes me wonder: if dropping laptops in desolate areas of developing countries can make them leapfrog literacy, couldn’t connecting each employee on Twitter have us leapfrog economic growth?

You may say this is a stupid idea.

You may say it’s impossible.

I say it might just work.

I say it costs you nothing.

I say if employees are your most valuable asset, maybe it’s time to tap into their potential.

I say what do you really mean when you talk about Human Capital Management or Talent Management? Do you mean carrot-and-stick, or do you mean passion-and-growth?

I say it’s time we start looking at employees as agents of change instead of recipients of information.

I say what have you got to lose?

I say it’s a project with a name: OTPE: ‘One Twitter account Per Employee.’

Let’s open up a little in 2010 – shall we?

Bonus for the heart: below is the A to Z of OLPC, I must have played it about a million times: it touches the heart.

Last Friday I was at the VOV beurs  - one of the big events on training and development  in Belgium. Starting from my experiences in SAP projects I shared my thoughts on bicycles, hunger, interaction and PowerPoint.

The video is in Dutch (with my own Flemish accent ) and you will find the English transcript below. So there you go: my thoughts on film and a free language course in one article!

Less training, more learning

I have an SAP background and some experience in large scale SAP projects. SAP is software that typically impacts the complete organization and a lot of users at the same time, and there is a great need for training. Last year the plant manager of a big plant came to see me. The fact that the return for the people on the SAP training sessions was disappointingly low caused some frustration.
What happened here? The organization thought that sending people to the SAP training was enough in order for them to be prepared for the day-to-day work with SAP. Together with that plant manager I discovered that people remember maximum 10% of what was taught in the training sessions.

In my opinion that’s normal because 90% of the things you need to know in order to perform your work cannot be taught in the classroom; you learn it when you need to solve a problem, when you receive the right communication and whenever you are obliged to take some actions in practice. Training managers need to be aware of that. 90% of what is needed for my job is situated in the field, so as a training manager I need to be in the field.

Bicycle?

Let’s suppose that we agree on me teaching you to ride your bicycle. I will prepare thoroughly and I will tell you all about the mechanical aspects of a bicycle. Next, I will tell you all about the laws of gravity. Then I will tell you about the organ of balance because it is the critical success factor for riding a bicycle without falling over. Finally, I will even make the training practical by showing you a real bicycle and I will even ride some laps so you can see what cycling is.

At the end of the day I expect you to be capable of riding a bicycle because you know all about cycling from A to Z.

This may sound absurd but is the current state of training and development: we teach people how to ride a bicycle by showing them PowerPoint slides. When they come out of the classroom we are surprised that "the thing isn’t working".

Cause?

What went wrong with the bicycle training? I made the mistake of looking at the training as a purpose in itself:
- I prepared the best materials;
- I showed the most beautiful bicycle;
- I may even have invited Lance Armstrong as a guest speaker.

While doing so I focus too much on the satisfaction of the participants. And what happens when the participants are happy? All of a sudden the training was brilliant in achieving its goals! All of a sudden whether or not you are able to ride a bicycle has become irrelevant. That’s immensely frustrating.

Solution

How are we going to solve this bicycle problem? I will alter my starting point towards what is needed for you in order to cycle. As a consequence:
- I will ask you to bring your own bicycle;
- Instead of preparing manuals, I will prepare a safe trail for you to drive around;
- Instead of standing in front the whole day animating and telling you how to ride a bicycle, I will be standing behind you to catch you if you fall.

Hunger

Whenever I conduct a training I ask the participants to state their personal objectives in the beginning of the day: ‘what is it exactly that you want to be better at when the day is over?’. At the end of the day we turn back to these objectives on the whiteboard and we evaluate whether the participants reached their goals.

The message here is clear: as a participant it is your responsibility to use me as a trainer in order to reach your objectives. That’s the best way of going through the day. It’s important to sharpen the training hunger so the participants are fully aware of what they want to get out of that day.

Interaction

I am aware that participants only remember about 10% of what I tell them or show them and therefore I trigger their own experiences as much as I possibly can.

My task is to ask the right questions and then to frame the answers that I receive. So I will not be standing in front too much of the time. Rather, I will be standing behind the participants to motivate them to come up with those answers.

Island

I often come across project managers complaining that people are stupid. When I ask them why they think so, they show me their slides and then they say: ‘my slides are very clear, don’t you think? I couldn’t possibly be clearer that that?’

But it’s not about the slides! At best those slides contain 10% of what a participant needs in order to perform his job in practice. The last 90% is situated in the field: in the middle of conflicts and problems. That’s where we need to be heading. That is exactly the reason why we are standing next to this lifebuoy: for the project leaders and training managers who desperately need to leave their PowerPoint Island.

_________________
Related articles:

- Knowledge = a Social Fabric – September 13th, 2009
- Return-on-Training? Wrong Question! – January 18th, 2009
- Do I need to paint a picture? SAP and Learning! – December 20th, 2008
- The End of Teaching – November 2nd, 2008
- Teaching versus Learning – May 13th, 2008
- How do you learn? – September 23rd, 2007
- It’s About Involvement, Stupid! – June 1st, 2007
- Learning and Resistance – May 22nd, 2007

A few weeks ago a friend told me that the only thing he can do as a parent is to stand behind his kids – both hands open – saying: ‘I will cath you if you fall". He continued: "For example: a three year old carrying a big bottle from the kitchen to the dinner table is a breathtaking sight for most parents. We are tempted to say ‘careful’, ‘don’t let it fall’, ‘hold it with both hands’, etc. Now, if the bottle arrives at the dinner table unharmed, is that THANKS TO our verbal support or is it NOTWITHSTANDING our comment?". 

How would our children grow and learn if we would be more at ease with the circumstances they are in? Whenever we comment / advise / suggest our children with all of our hearts, our support and the lessons learned from our own from bruises and breakdowns; aren’t we just pushing them into learned helplessness?

In my opinion, this is the very point where the skill of education stops and the art of parenting starts. Like a balancing act, both empowerment and protection are necessary for a healthy development.

As the above drawing indicates, the development of children (and grown-ups) needs a perfect mix of nudging and nurturing; a balance between empowerment and protection. It is exactly at that same point where the skill of management stops and the art of leadership starts.

To your opinion, where is the best place to learn that art? At Harvard or at home?

Related articles:
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 6) – September 21st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 5) – May 24th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 4) – March 1st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 3) – February 21st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 2) – February 16th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 1) – February 9th, 2009

Strange things happen on my way to work and they lead to awkward insights. For example: last week on the train to Brussels – my regular itinerary for the past two years – my computer bag got stolen. In case you would wonder: I suffer no trauma and no harm was done. Moreover: the police officer who took note of my claim told me that I was his 4th theft that day – and it was 8 am!

The stolen bag and the annoyances that it brought forth were as time consuming as I expected them to be, except for one observation: the way I recovered all of the data, information and knowledge that I lost. I am a management consultant, so my portable computer and my paper notebook are vital work instruments.

The way I got a hold on the stuff that I lost was fairly simple:

- trace back the ’sent’ and ‘received’ emails on the email server

- ask people to send me back one or other document that I sent them earlier on

- go to a network drive, document management system or any other web-based platform where I previously shared, published or distributed documents and files

I have to say that this way of recycling got me astonishingly far into reconstructing what I considered ‘my knowledge base’. And that’s when it hit me: my computer and my notebook may contain far more data and information than the parts that I recollected, but the important bits that make up my knowledge had been shared, distributed, copied or discussed with others.

Getting my computer bag stolen is a strange way to confirm that knowledge is a social fabric. Along the lines of the thinking of John Seely Brown, my hard earned evidence demonstrates that knowledge is a social thing. It exists in action, participation with the world, participation with problems and participation with other people, i.e., practices. All of my knowledge came into being through the practices of the people and the environment I’m working in.

To summarize I would like to use a quote that is generally attributed to Aristotle and modify it in order to make sense of my insight:

1. Aristotle once said:
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."
2. A management consultant now says:
"We know what we repeatedly share. Knowledge therefore, does not reside in individuals, but in communities."

Hello Organizational Change Practitioners,

This is to inform you that I have done my homework. A few weeks ago LinkedIn allowed us to create subgroups within this group. Subgroups are like a break-out session at a conference. They enable you to create more focused areas than in the main group.

I decided to create a maximum of FIVE subgroups. But before I would do so I asked to hear from you which ones you would recommend. I received about 90 answers, each containing on average 3 recommendations. I didn’t expect such a response!

As a next step I had to cluster. My intention was to create a poll on LinkedIn in order to select the final 5, but the polls running on LinkedIn only have maximum 5 entries. So I decided to have a second look … and there I was with the final 5! Please read on if you want to find out how I selected the final 5, and why I gave them their particular name.

PART I: CATEGORIES FOR SUBGROUPS => CLUSTERING

I obtained the below categories by shuffling, re-shuffling and re-shuffling the suggestions:

1. LEADING CHANGE
Communication
Consultants
Managers
Change Leadership
Leadership
Communication
Large Scale Change and the Individual
Leadership Support
leadership
Leadership/Sponsorship
Stakeholder Management
Communication
Building Capability
Leading teams through change
Leadership and organizational alignment
Busting silo barriers
vision, leadership & communication
leadership change
Stakeholders and sponsors
Leadership Alignment (strategy, ROI, performance issues)
Board/Exec team level interventions

2. ORGANIZATION REDESIGN
merger integration
divestment
Mergers and Acquisitions; Divestitures
mergers, downsizing, integration issues
Restructuring (merger, acquisition, re-engineering, downsizing, growth, globalisation, etc)
M&A driven change
Business Transformation
Organization Design
organization
Enterprise Architecture (touches IT, Culture, people, leadership, ROI)
Strategy driven (e.g., change in products or markets)
organisation design
Strategy
Structure
strategy,
Strategy-driven transformation
strategy
Re-engineering/ redesigning organizations (M&A, functional, performance)
Strategic Change (include M&A, Business Transformation Outsourcing)
Business Process Change
Corporate
Strategy driven transformation
Organisational Strategy
New organizations
Organization Development
change process itself
Organizational Maturity
Process
Dynamic Systems Alignment
process improvement
Alignment with HR Processes
process,
process
strategic change

3. ROI (Return On Investment)
ROI
value driven target operating model
ROI
performance management
Performance driven change
Capacity Development
Organizational Effectiveness
Performance Improvement (could include Six Sigma, Best Companies, Customer Insight, IIP, ERP, Balanced Scorecard, Training and Skills, Mentoring, etc)
Compliance driven change 

4. OCBOK(Organizational Change Practitioners’ Body Of Knowledge)
Training
Methodology
Resources (Tools and Techniques)
methodology
Books, Articles, & Research Findings
Tools and mental models
Methodology
Methodology (culture, org alignment, training, communication, coordination with business process redesign)
tools – models, methodologies, and roadmaps, processes
Change management practice
books/articles related to change
Change Models (approaches, best practices, case studies, resources)
Models and Methodologies
Lean Six Sigma Change
Methods and Tools

5. HUMAN SIDE OF CHANGE
awareness
common denominator – human beings and change. What about the ‘human element’
human behavior
human behavior
behavioral change
TRANSFORMATIONAL
sustainability (‘what makes change stick’)

6. CULTURE
culture
Cultures/Strategy
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Intercultural
Culture change
CULTURAL
context – international, large scale, health care, etc.
culture
culture change
workplace cultural change
Culture change
Culture (public, private, non-profit, small biz)
culture
culture
organizational culture
Organisational Culture (could include Attitude change, Team Building, Motivation, Gaining ‘Buy-In’, Coaching, Engagement, Staff Surveys, Management Styles, Leadership, National and Global cultural development. etc.
Non western contributions to change

7. IT RELATED CHANGE
system changes
IT Service Management
ERP
IT Service Management
changes in IT
IT Governance
ERP
Technology driven (e.g., ERP implementation)
systems
IT projects/new systems implementation
Technology (ERP, Web 2.0, emerging technologies)
Technology-Driven Change (ERP, Web 2.0)
Technology enabled change
systems implementation
technology
systems change
‘New Technologies’ – this could then evolve continuously as new opportunities develop with advances in technology

8. WEB 2.0
E-Culture (Web 2.0 and further)
Web 2.0
Web 2.0
E-Transformation

9. INDUSTRIES
Careers
Government
Research
Non Profit IT Governance
health care delivery change management
nonprofit
energy
transportation
manufacturing
public sector
retail
health care
communications
pharma
hi-tech
Customers
Market Segments: Government; Corporate; Research; Non Profit, Emerging (e.g., Web 2.0)
Health care
health care
HR
business

10. REGIONS
regional sub-groups
geography

PART II: REDUCING CLUSTERS TO MAXIMUM 5 SUBGROUPS

In order to select the final 5, I have broadened some categories up:

1. LEADING CHANGE
2. ORGANIZATION REDISIGN & ROI (Return On Investment)
3. OCBOK (Organizational Change Body Of Knowledge)
4. CULTURE & BEHAVIOR
5. TECHNOLOGY DRIVEN OR FACILITATED CHANGE

As for "industries" and "regions", I have decided not to create them, as these are either tackled in other LinkedIn groups, or they run across our five subgroups.

PART III: WILL I APPOINT SUBGROUP MANAGERS?

I don’t know yet… let’s first see if we can make this work!

Good luck to our community and thanks again for contributing!

Luc Galoppin

PS: Not yet a member? Join us right now!

Related Articles:
Web 2.0 includes Invisible Hand – June 29th, 2009

Over the past week I experienced that the good old brainstorming techniques that are derived from de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats don’t need a nudge in the Web 2.0 age.

6 Thinking Hats

I have used this brainstorming technique in a variety of different settings: to generate ideas, to solve complex problems, etc.  The Six Thinking Hats method provides a way for groups to think together more effectively. ‘Together’ is the absolute key word here: instead of having individuals reacting their own way (as usual), the group agrees to deliberately step into each possible ‘way of thinking’ sequentially. There are 6 different types of thinking or hats one can wear in a discussion:

* Neutrality (white) – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
* Feeling (Red) – instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification)
* Negative judgment (Black) – logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
* Positive Judgment (Yellow) – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
* Creative thinking (Green) – statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
* Process control (Blue) – thinking about thinking

In my experience until last week – the Six Thinking Hats was a powerful tool to generate ideas and solve complex problems through parallel thinking. On top of that it creates a greater feeling of momentum in team that otherwise would be cluttered in a ‘being right’ discussion.

6 hats on Web 2.0??

By now most readers of this blog must have noticed that I am making my first babysteps into the Web 2.0 communities. One of them is LinkedIn, where I am lucky enough to manage the Organizational Change Practitioners group (4.722 members subscribed at the time of writing). Recently I decided to have ask the members contribute in which subgroups we would create in this forum.

What I witnessed next was multi-thinking at different dimensions at the same time. One of the most beautiful examples of Six Thinking Hats I have ever witnessed from close by!  At the time of writing, there were over 85 reactions that demonstrated the six thinking styles:

* Neutrality: people responding directly to the question at hand (e.g.:"I suggest to creat a subgroup on human behavior")
* Feeling: people volunteering to become a subgroup manager (e.g.: "Great idea, Luc. If you need help, I would be ready to facilitate/moderate the Web 2.0 group")
* Negative judgement (Black): people opposing to the idea of subgroups (e.g.:"Seems to me the additional structure may add bureaucracy rather than make it easier to navigate and participate.")
* Positive Judgement (Yellow): people supporting the idea (e.g.: "I think having focused discussions would be great so that when dealing with a particular issue, you wouldn’t be all over the place.")
* Creative thinking (Green): people suggesting additional ideas (e.g.:"Maybe a poll would be a good idea to select the final five")
* Process control (Blue): people looking at this process happening (e.g.: "watching and participating in a wonderful new (to me at least) process: asynchronous, large-group virtual conversation and decision making"); one participant even Twittered this discussion thread!

Invisible Hand

The most fascinating observation however, was that the discussion thread almost chronologically went through all of these hats. In the same way as during brainstorming sessions each thinking hat is triggered by one reaction, which sparks a range of reactions that belong to the same thinking type.

Coincidence? Not in a million years. But then, what caused this to happen? How did the group trigger a specific hat, go to a climax of reactions, a decline and then moved on to a next hat? How did the group decide the order of the hats to think by? Honestly – I DON’T KNOW. But I did experience that we were parallel thinking! We simply cannot deny that there is some kind of invisible hand doing some fine work.

Two weeks ago I argued that parenting is an excellent leadership crash course because we learn the hard way that it is important to trust oneself, to find an emotional balance and to take care of oneself. Last week I added that understanding and accepting the development eb and flow – rather than trying to control it – is the first step towards mastery in terms of parenting and leadership. 

Building further on the insights of child development, there is another fundamental leadership characteristic that one will never learn at Harvard, but only in the day-to-day family-life: it is the importance of setting boundaries. But first you need to know more about the concept of "matrix".

Matrix

Joseph Chilton Pearce introduced the concept of matrix. According to him, our lifelong development is a series of matrices through which we move. Life begins with three critical matrix periods: the nine months in the womb-matrix, the next nine months in the “in-mother’s-arms”-matrix; and the ninth to eighteenth month “toddler period.” The quality, character, and nature of the first two matrices are determined by the mother, and the third by family and cultural influences.

A matrix is a safe place that provides the energy and the possibilities to discover the next matrix, and if the growing child is provided a corresponding matrix at each stage of development, it will develop, learn, grow and expand. In the safe-space of a true matrix a child can use all its life energy for the subjects at hand, easily absorbing and learning that which is appropriate to his or her age. But if there is no assurance of safety, the child must use a good portion of its energy in defense mechanisms, which divides the mind, splits attention. So first and foremost, parenting aims at providing children with a safe space where they know they belong and are welcomed, wanted, and safe—the ideal learning situation.

The concept of matrix is based on the insights of Jean Piaget – who is generally regarded as the father of child-psychology. Piaget was the first to discover that during each new stage of development, the child’s brain-mind is prepared for the new potentials appropriate to that stage of growth. If appropriate models for those potentials are given in a safe space, learning is automatic, spontaneous and natural.

Below is a very short video showing Jean Piaget as he explains the importance of development in education systems, i.e.: not to teach people what we already know, but rather to enable people to learn and discover new things.

Now isn’t that the main responsibility of a leader; providing a safe place for their team so they can use all their energy for the tasks at hand and the possibilities for absorbing and learning that which is appropriate to the goals of the team?  In my opinion, there is no better school for leaders to learn about building a matrix for their team, than being involved in the life unfolding at home.

Boundaries

OK – now how do we build a matrix in practice for our family and our team? This is the challenge of setting responsible boundaries. Children need firm and just boundaries. Within those boundaries they need the caring love and attention from us as their parents. This is what allows them to develop self-worth, confidence and self-trust. A child raised without reliable boundaries is a child who will grow up confused, unsure of themselves and their behavior, and often acting out negatively as a desperate attempt to have boundaries set upon them.

Setting boundaries is a major test of our maturity level, because it implies setting boundaries to our emotions. As I stated last week, knowing where we stop and someone else starts is the first step towards a healthy emotional relationship: using affection and emotion as a form of punishment or reward in order to control the behavior of our children or team members causes problems in the long run.

Testing and growing

In growing, children seek to and need to define their limits: the limits of their environment, the definitions of who they are and what they are doing, the limits of their peers and adults. That often shows up as testing and disobedience. That is when we need to reaffirm the boundaries.  Again, the same goes for leadership in an organizational setting: your peers and team members will be testing you, the other team members, the goals you are setting, etc… in order to define their limits. 

It’s natural and we should not take it personal. In fact, good parents and good leaders take this testing behavior as an opportunity to build matrix.  We do this by engaging in a conversation in which we reconfirm boundaries, safety and possibilities. The tricky thing here is that we need to be aware that boundaries change over time, as circumstances evolve and people evolve in their behavior with respect to the limits we impose. Also, in our response to unacceptable behavior, we should clarify that it is the behavior we found unacceptable, not the child or the person we are reprimanding.

In the business school of parenting there is no escape: we learn the hard way that whenever we set a boundary, it will be tested – that’s just life with kids. In no time, our kids can make us aware of how wishy-washy or unclear our boundaries may be.

In their book The Essence of Parenting, Anne Johnson and Vic Goodman argue: "When we feel threatened and resort to hitting and screaming when the kids test us, or if we feel used and give in when our kids test us, it is time we develop healthy boundaries for ourselves."
And they continue: "Having healthy boundaries is not something we do; it’s a way of life. It’s about taking responsibility for our own well-being and safety.  It’s knowing that no one else is to blame for our feelings. If we’re frustrated or irritated, angry, sad, lonely, or hurt, it’s up to us to recognize what we need to move through and beyond those feelings: a change of heart, more rest, honest communication, asking someone to change his or her behavior, or perhaps just acknowledging the feeling and letting it be on its way"

So once again: we choose our responses to the world and taking care of ourselves is a primary condition for our leadership development and parenting development.
________________

Recommended reading:
- The essence of parenting, by Anne Johnson and Vic Goodman

Last week the manager of a plant involved in a major organizational change project claimed that the return-on-training of his classroom training courses was disappointingly low. Over the past weeks they have been switching over to SAP, by far the most popular platform in the segment of so-called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software.

We have been preparing the users of his plant by means of extensive classroom trainings, both on process knowledge and systems skills. From his gut feeling he told me that his people demonstrated at best 10 to 15 percent return (i.e.: what they effectively remember and use in their jobs).

Training is the smallest part of Learning

I will not argue about the percentages. The point is that I obviously did not create the right expectations: he should be looking for the return-on-learning instead of the return-on-training! On this same blog I already announced the end of teaching and I also proclaimed that teaching is placebo. I even painted a picture about it in order to demonstrate what this means for SAP implementations specifically.

In retrospect the 10 to 15 percent reported by the plant manager is fairly high compared to what I always have been saying: 99% of what ‘Learning’ really is occurs outside of the classroom. The bottom-line is that training alone is not enough in order to make an organizational change happen. Increasing the quality of your training sessions will not leverage the return-on-training to the same extent. At the very best it is a starting point. From there on you will need to coach your way to the future state. The drawing below is taken from John Seely Brown (again!) and clearly depicts how learning really occurs

Now back to the return-on-training question. What could be the best way to increase that return? The answer is simple: this return can only increase if workplace learning has already occurred BEFORE the training session (in action, action through participation, participation with the world, participation with the problem and participation with other people, i.e., practices). Involvement, participation and ownership are key. 

The concept of Time-to-task is another way to look at it. Normally we use that term to describe that the training should occur as closely as possible to the task at hand. The only way return-on-training can increase is when time-to-task is negative. In plain English this means: people will get more out of a classroom training when they have been frustrated by real-life problems form the task at hand; they will posses an enormous learning pull and they will ask for and absorb every detail that is needed for the job at hand.

Here is a quote from David Maister to support that view:
"A good test for the timing of training would be as follows. If the training was entirely optional and elective, and only available in a remote village accessible only by a mule, but people still came to the training because they were saying to themselves, “I have got to learn this – it’s going to be critical for my future,” then, and ONLY then, you will know you have timed your training well. Anything less than that, and you are doing the training too soon."

Rethinking Knowledge Management

Participation, involvement and enculturation (i.e.: "belonging to") lies at the heart of learning. It also lies at the heart of knowing. Knowing has as much to do with picking up the genres of that particular sub-profession as it does with its conceptual framework. For example, how do you recognize whether a problem is an important problem, or a solution an elegant solution, or even what constitutes a solution in the first place?

Jerome Bruner made a brilliant observation some time ago when he said that we can teach people about a subject matter, for example, physics. That is, we can teach them the concepts, conceptual frameworks and facts of physics – the explicit knowledge of physics. But that does not make the student a physicist. To be a physicist he must also learn the practices of this profession. As he continues:
"We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take part in the process of knowledge-getting."

So here we are. Now what? All the evidence tells us that learning is a social thing. It exists in action, participation with the world, participation with the problem and participation with other people, i.e., practices. A lot of the knowledge comes into being through the practices of the people and the environment you’re working in. The return-on-learning question reveals the challenge we face today for rethinking knowledge management:

1. shift our mindset from "pushing knowledge to people" (authority based and explicit) to "supporting people to participate in their productive inquiry" (situational based and on-the-fly)

2. Shift from tools to increase the individual knowledge stock to tools which support relationships and interaction. 

3. Shift rigid structures from managing an academy (where knowledge gathers dust) to facilitating an ecology of different communities-of-practice (where knowledge lives and evolves).

4. Do everything we possibly can in order to introduce Web 2.0 thinking in the boardroom. Think: collaboration and moments of truth instead of teaching!

Talking about organizational change management… there is work to do!