For five days, I’ll be eating my way through Southern France’s Côte d’Azur. Today Philip and I lunched at an unassuming restaurant in Villeneuve-Loubet. The back of the place is a laundry for the owners of yachts moored in the marina across the street.

We began by splitting a baker’s dozen of sweet, briny oysters.

I opted for the Salade Corse, a great selection of ham, spicy sausage, cheese, and jam. Philip had salmon lasagne. We washed things down with the house white. The tab came to €25 apiece.

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Auguste Escoffier, “the chef of kings and the king of chefs,” was born in Villeneuve-Loubet in 1846 and his house is now the Musée de l’Art Culinaire. Escoffier invented the organization of the kitchen that remains in place today. His recipes highlighted unami, the so-called fifth taste, a hundred years before it was “discovered” in Japan.

Aren’t these dishes for serving bouillabaisse, precursor of San Francisco’s cioppino, beautiful? Come to think of it, I must have some bouillabaisse while here on the coast of the Med.

This Matisse is made of icing. The collection of Escoffier menus made me hungry. Ecrevisses figure in many of Escoffier’s starters, and I love crawdads.

We’ll return to Villeneuve-Loubet on Sunday for the Truffle Festival. Restaurants feature truffle dishes and in the afternoon truffle-hunters will show their dogs at work.

We stopped by the local artisan baker to pick up a baguette to accompany tonight’s dinner.

We’re back at the maison as I write this. Appetizers were duck liver paté and Grisons air-dried beef. The scent of garlic fills the air. Roasted tomatoes with garlic is the main course. I’ve got to go. It’s time to eat.

My weight’s down to 75. (Kilos.)

Online course start-ups offer virtually free college

By Jon Marcus, The Washington Post, Published: January 21

An emerging group of entrepreneurs with influential backing is seeking to lower the cost of higher education from as much as tens of thousands of dollars a year to nearly nothing.

These new arrivals are harnessing the Internet to offer online courses, which isn’t new. But their classes are free, or almost free. Most traditional universities have refused to award academic credit for such online studies.

Now the start-ups are discovering a way around that monopoly, by inventing credentials that “graduates” can take directly to employers instead of university degrees.

“If I were the universities, I might be a little nervous,” said Alana Harrington, director of Saylor.
org, a nonprofit organization based in the District. Established by entrepreneur Michael Saylor, it offers 200 free online college courses in 12 majors.

Another nonprofit initiative is Peer-to-Peer University, based in California. Known as P2PU, it offers free online courses and is supported by the Hewlett Foundation and Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox Web browser.

A third is University of the People, also based in California, which offers more than 40 online courses. It charges students a one-time $10 to $50 application fee. Among its backers is the Clinton Global Initiative.

The content these providers supply comes from top universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, Tufts University and the University of Michigan. Those are among about 250 institutions worldwide that have put a collective 15,000 courses online in what has become known as the open-courseware movement.

Remember that corporate learning is “informal” and HR doesn’t own it.

If you ask any business leader “how people learn,” their most common answer is “on the job.” And this is correct – sales people learn by making sales calls, engineers learn by doing design, customer service people learn by solving problems. The key to success then is not to provide a lot of formal training, but rather create an environment that supports rapid on-the-job learning.

Our research shows that companies which adopt “formalized informal learning” programs (like coaching, on-demand training, and performance support tools) outperform those that focus on formal training by 3 to 1. In these companies the corporate training team doesn’t just train people, it puts in place content and programs to help employees quickly learn on the job. This means developing training in small, easy-to-use chunks of content and making it easy to find as needed.

Josh has this right (although I hate the misleading "formalized informal" terminiology).

2012 is the year of transformation as digital Darwinism threatens rigid and traditional practices everywhere. Regardless of industry, digital Darwinism is a phenomenon when technology and society evolve faster than the ability to adapt.

Indeed, this is a time when organizations will invest in change to better adapt to emerging market opportunities, to more successfully engage with customers, employees and stakeholders, rethink systems and processes, and ultimately, revive the company’s vision, mission and purpose. The result is an adaptive culture that signals an end to business as usual. Without doing so only expedites the inevitable journey towards irrelevance. For 2012 and beyond, the following trends serve as beacons for not only survival, but leadership.

Trends for Transformation

Leveraging Learning in Social Business
Installing social network software and encouraging people to exploit their connections is not enough. The fabric of a social business, its workscape, must incorporate structures and guidance to help people learn. After all, learning underpins continuous improvement and that’s what this is all about.

A sustainable workscape must provide the means and motivation for corporate citizens to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networking tools, blogs, and wikis. Self-organization helps but L&D professionals need to supplement social systems with scaffolding that focuses on learning. Without that, many organizations will descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat.

I take Chief Learning Officers’ abysmal track record with informal learning to-date as a warning shot. In today’s fast-paced world, people who do not learn continuously, on the job, rapidly fall behind. Yet CLOs continue to focus on formal classes, as if they’re running schools instead of creating business value. Formal classes and workshops are necessary, but they constitute a tiny slice of the overall learning pie.

Several years ago, L&D professionals began to accept the fact that learning by experience and informally, with others, has many times the impact of traditional training.

What did CLOs do with the insight that informal learning matters? Next to nothing. They left informal learning to chance. Even now, with the cost-effectiveness and responsiveness of informal learning pushing it to the top of CLO’s priority lists, most are taking baby steps if any steps at all. This is extremely disappointing. We who understand how people learn need to be at the vanguard of establishing social networks, expertise location, online communities, information streams, agile instructional design, help desks, federated content management, continuing reinforcement, peer development, and so on.

CLOs who do not make it easier for social business people to learn are toast.

Making the transition from command-and-control training operations to vibrant social learning workscapes is where I think Internet Time Alliance is going to make a major contribution. I envision us providing hand-holding, models, and advice to help Chief Learning Officers and HR executives make the journey from pushing curriculum and instructor-led events to nurturing systems for co-creating knowledge and competence with workers. Time will tell.

Lots more on this at http://www.unmanagement.net/2012/01/18/the-agile-learning-train-is-leaving-th...

Today, the expectations of learners are much different than they were only a few years ago. Much of what is currently rolled up monolithic, one-size-fits-all courses must give way to small but relevant content updated and delivered continuously to learners based on their individual profiles or needs. In other words, learning needs to go Agile.

In a recent blog post by Bersin & Associates, Josh Bersin provides a great description of how Agile applies to training:

“Agile is also built on the understanding that people learn in small chunks – so while it may in fact take a year or two to build a highly complex website, no person needs to try to understand the entire engineering program in advance. […] Daily work becomes a part of a bigger project in a continuous, dynamic process.”

What does this mean for us?

So how do Training Vendors help training organizations go agile: they adopt Agile Development. Agile Development is an approach where vendors deliver very fast, iterative product development through close collaboration with its user base (i.e. training organizations). According to McKinsey & Company:

“This agility can deliver new systems and capabilities in a matter of weeks or months instead of years. A frequent iteration cycle also keeps IT developers and business users in sync on requirements and priorities. […] Since this approach is most effective when business needs are shifting, it is gaining favor among many IT departments.”

Indeed, according to a survey of global executives by McKinsey, over 70% of respondents have deployed or piloted Agile Development within their organizations in order to be more responsive to changing business conditions.

In 2011, recognizing the rapid change in the training industry and our clients’ need to quickly adapt to the needs of their learners, Xyleme fully embraced and adopted enterprise-wide, the Agile Development Model. This post is the first in a series, written by Greg Schottland, Vice President of Operations for Xyleme, that presents the business value of using Agile, why it has proven a key competitive advantage to companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many others. Part one of this series provides a simple overview of what Agile is. You’ll begin to see the value just discussing the basics in this post.

Agile is simple:
• Build in small increments.
• Focus your team on one well defined goal.
• Keep the team small.
• Coordinate daily
• Get everything (and everyone) else out of the way.

And the result:
• A working product in weeks, not months.
• Customers that get what they are waiting for quickly.
• Developers that build what the customer wanted and nothing else.

Sounds simple, and it is. While there are volumes written about the details of effectively practicing Agile, this post will focuses on what Agile looks like “on the ground” in daily practice.

Taken from Josh Bersin’s blog

It all starts with an idea.

Somebody wants software to do something. Say we get this great idea to be able to create and store documents on the web (a la GoogleDocs). Rather than designing an entire web based document application, we start small. What is the most important problem to solve? This is simple to define. What do users have to be able to easily do at the most basic level? For our application, this would be the ability to create a simple document using a plain web browser over an average internet connection. You may be thinking, that is pretty basic, shouldn’t we at least include other basics like spell checking, text styles, maybe import/export? I mean who wants a document processor that doesn’t support bolding and italics…I mean really!

This little example is chock full of important lessons that Agile helps address. We might be inclined to design a more complete first version. The logic being it is easier to design everything in from the start. And, in some cases it is. But, more often than not, without getting key usability, architecture or market acceptance issues implemented and down cold, much of our “complete design” ends up being wasted, as key assumptions run into challenges. Years of effort and millions of dollars down the drain.

Let’s look at our example in this respect. We have put a stake in the sand and said that the one thing that has to work is the ability to create basic text document on any browser over an average internet connection. If this doesn’t work, no one will care how slick our spell checker is, nor how easy it is to bold some text. If response is slow, same problem. But, if we have version 1 prove that we can connect 1,000 users to our system, and things are snappy responsive and basic documents can be created, isn’t that a relief? Now we can build on top of this base.

So, turns out our too small initial release may be just about right. What we do at this stage is write up our requirements for this initial release in a set of short, concise documents called User Stories. They include two major pieces of information: 1) a clear statement of some small functionality and 2) detailed description of how to test this functionality. That’s it. No massive requirements document. One of our User Stories might be that users can connect to create and save a blank document. The test would detail step by step instructions of the URL, the buttons pressed, dialogs that appear, etc.

Ease of Development.

As you can see, with well written User Stories, development is a whole lot easier. We code to the test; back our design into the tests. As a development manager, or customer, I can sleep at night. Developers aren’t done until our tests work. I don’t have to watch over it.

So, our initial planning will consist of creating a small set of User Stories which define our first release. We’ll call each such small release a “Sprint.” Each Sprint will be scheduled to last several weeks. No magic number here, can be 2, 3, 4 weeks, but probably should be less than 8 weeks. You’ll go back and forth trading off initial features against time and end up with a Sprint 1 of say 4 weeks (just an example we chose, no magic number).

You’re almost ready to start coding. The one remaining task is to take each User Story assign them to developers and have the responsible developer estimate what tasks they’ll have to do to implement the User Story, and estimate their best guess of how long it will take to complete that task. But…one twist. These tasks have to be small enough that they take between 4 -16 hours to complete. This level of detail is often unnatural. But, it has magic built into it. By forcing yourself to break down work to this level, invariably important overlooked details emerge, providing for much more accurate estimates. Now, admittedly, you are relying on the best guess skills of your developers, which will vary by developer, by task and sometimes by whether they have just had their morning coffee and are feeling optimistic or not. But, it provides a starting point, and over time you’ll find your developers get better at this, and you get better at coaching your under or over-estimators.

Ready. Set. Code!

You are ready to start coding armed with User Stories and a detailed task list for each developer. You may feel like you’re traveling light, and you are. That’s the whole point. You backpack has everything you’ll need and nothing else. You will have a daily meeting (called a Scrum) with all the developers with tasks on the project and you, the project leader and no one else. No managers, no other developers, no business analysts, just the “doers.” These meetings will be no longer than 15 minutes. You’ll ask each developer just three simple questions: which task did you work yesterday, which tasks will you be working on today, what is blocking your progress? That’s it. No lengthy design discussions or play by play of your development day. Just these three simple questions and 15 minutes later you are done. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure that any blocks from progress are removed immediately and that your developers stay on task. You, as leader of the Scrum, are there to listen for blockers and remove them as fast as possible. All the team members know exactly where the project is all the time.

One final task.

At the end of each day, developers update their task list with their best guess of the amount of time remaining to complete each task. Sometimes these numbers go down as work progresses, sometimes they increase (as you discover the task is more complex or taking longer than you guessed). Over time, you get a nice chart of all the hours remaining for the Sprint, called a “Burndown” chart. This chart, while simple, is amazingly powerful. Bersin reports,

“Companies which can adapt to agile management models will move faster and out-perform their competitors.”

So that’s it. Your team writes code each day to fulfill the tests in your User Stories, meets for 15 minutes each day, updates the time remaining for their development tasks — and after 4 weeks (in our example), you done. Delivered on time and to spec.

It sounds easy, and it is!

In our next in the series, we’ll look at how this simple process translates into faster time to market, lower costs and wildly happy customers.

For a day and a half in January 2012, twenty-one thought leaders from four continents gathered in a ski resort at Stoos in Switzerland to discuss what could be done to accelerate the transformation of organizations and their management. The idea was to figure out how organizations could become more profitable for the organizations and their shareholders, as well as being better for those doing the work and better for those for whom the work is being done. The tipping point isn’t about replacing capitalism with socialism: it’s about reinventing organizations so that they become more productive for shareholders, more inspiring for workers and more delightful for customers.

The idea that a group of people who had never met before as a group talking together for a day and a half could make progress on such an immense problem and begin a global movement that would facilitate a tipping point and change the way organizations are run is on the face of it absurd. But we were encouraged by Margaret Mead’s dictum: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Great summary of the Stoos Gathering thus far from Steve Denning.

Recently I’ve been reading more and more blog posts and articles that talk of how to “manage informal learning”, so I thought it was time for another post of my own that tries to explain how this is actually misleading, and in fact misses the big picture in terms of the importance of informal learning in the workplace, and L&D’s role in supporting it.  Here’s a graphic which summarises this posting.

Although the two terms “Formal Learning” and “Informal Learning are now quite commonplace, they still seem to be causing some confusion.  So let’s look at some definitions from CEDEFOP  – the  European Centre for Vocation and Training.

Formal learning is defined by the CEDEFOP Glossary  as

“Learning typically provided by an education or training institution, structured (in terms of learning objectives, learning time or learning support) and leading to certification.  Formal learning is intentional from the learner’s perspective.”

In other words, this is things like courses, classes, face-to-face workshops, other training or educational events that lead to some “certification” or validation.

“Informal learning” is usually taken to mean all learning that takes place outside formal learning. However, many people – including CEDEFOP – actually break down “informal learning” further into “non-formal learning” and “informal learning” as follows:

Informal learning is therefore:

“Learning resulting from daily work-related, family or leisure activities. It is not organised or structured (in terms of objectives, time or learning support). Informal learning is in most cases unintentional from the learner’s perspective. It typically does not lead to certification.”

That is learning that happens doing your daily tasks as you do your job, e.g. reading stuff or observing activities, or in conversations with people.

Non-formal learning is

“Learning which is embedded in planned activities not explicitly designated as learning (in terms of learning objectives, learning time or learning support), but which contain an important learning element. Non-formal learning is intentional from the learner’s point of view. It typically does not lead to certification.”

So for instance, this includes finding things out as part of your daily work, keeping up to date with what’s happening inside and outside the organisation, as well as interacting with people (eg in professional networks) to learn from them.

So there are a number of factors that differentiate formal, non-formal and informal learnimg:

In terms of the INTENTION of the learner; both formal and non-formal learning is intentional (ie the individual sets out with the intention of learning something), whereas with informal learning it is (mostly) unintentional (ie it happens as a consequence of doing something else). With informal learning, the learner may be aware s/he has learnt something, but in many cases may be totally unaware of it.

This does not negate the power of informal learning, it just makes a difference to how L&D supports these different types of learning. In particular whereas formal learning (which is under the control of L&D) can be designed and managed,  non-formal and informal learning can not, since it is under the control of the learner.

It also means that incorporating informal media in a “formal learning solution” is not informal learning. Additionally, that systems that claim to “manage informal learning” clearly cannot do that; all they can do is manage use of “informal media”  - which is not quite the same thing!

Some might say, that this point is pedantic, and whatever terminology you are using, the fact remains that if you make use of informal media for learning, then this is still a valuable activity.  And this is of course true – but it is missing the more significant point, which is that as research has shown, the vast majority – around 80% – of what an individual learns in the workplace is informal (and that includes the non-formal).  And that this learning happens continuously, in the flow of work as people do their jobs. Whereas formal learning takes place intermittently, out of the workflow – often in a different physical place –  and/or usually requires time out of the workflow.

So what does this mean for L&D? Here are just three key points that I’ve covered before in previous posts.

1 – It means that informal learning is not something L&D can design into the formal training mix, in order to try and “manage” everything everybody learns in the organisation (an impossible task!) – but rather is something that needs to be supported and enhanced as it occurs naturally in the workflow – in order to help people learn to do their jobs (better) – a very different way of operating! Trying to control informal/non-formal learning simply turns it into formal learning  - or at least it’s not informal/non-formal learning any longer!

2 – It also means that L&D needs to think more about helping individuals and teams to use social media to enhance the naturally occurring social learning that takes place in the organisational workflow. (I have already shown in a number of earlier postings – (here) that Smart Workers are already doing this themselves and are actually working around L&D).  So it is more about building on what social learning is already taking place and encouraging others to become engage. In other words moving from a “Command and Control” model to “Encourage and engage”.

3 – It also means ensuring that the social tools that are to support learning within the organisation are the very same tools individuals are making use in their daily work tasks. (See recent postings on that topic)

Ten days ago I flew to Switzerland for a mountaintop retreat with twenty thought leaders from around the world to ponder better ways to manage organizations.

On the flight over, I watched the film Inside Job, a documentary about the shenanigans that led to the financial meltdown fueled by the subprime mortgage bubble. The movie’s incendiary. There are lots of bad apples out there: self-serving financial engineers, ratings agencies, regulators, bankers, and more. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

As a graduate of the “West Point of Capitalism,” I’d been reluctant to condemn the system but Inside Job pushed me over the edge. Business is broken. Right before watching the movie, I read a series of Harvard Business Review articles by Roger Martin about the wrong-headedness of maximizing shareholder value. This slippery slope leads to short-term thinking, cooking the books, and screwing everyone up and down the chain except grossly overpaid CEOs. Chasing shareholder value is like trying to make your car go faster by rigging the speedometer.

Dissatisfied workers, pissed-off customers, and lousy returns on investment are the outcomes of a broken system. The current business environment is a breeding ground for Murphy’s Law. Nobody’s happy and rebellion is in the air.

Stoos is a tiny village atop a mountain about an hour south of Zurich. It’s a beautiful spot for getting away from it all. Four people — a Swiss professor, a Dutch entrepreneur and author, an American agile development coach living in Switzerland, and an American management author — realized that lots of us were talking about the same malaise with management independently. They invited us to convene on the mountain to find common ground — and a better framework for doing business.

After the two-day session in Stoos, I took the train south to Lugano, a perennially sunny town that couples Swiss efficiency and Italian verve  (Mangiare!) on the shore of an Alpine lake. Fragments of the mountain top conversations rolled around in my head. My thoughts are still coming together.

Foremost is that the business world must shift its focus from things to people. Living things trump machines. Moreover, people are inherently social. We cannot thrive — or even survive — in isolation. Connections are vital to creating value. And how is that value created? By adapting to change — and that requires learning. Bottom-line: businesses are networks of learning individuals.

Financial success not the ultimate target. Chasing money for its own sake is wrong-headed and demoralizing. Drucker had it right: the purpose of business is to create and satisfy customers. People in sustainable organizations focus on doing this better and better, forever delivering more value to their customers. Do this right and the money will follow.

Source:

For several hundred years, the machine has been the metaphor for the organization. Management’s role was to make the machine work efficiently. People were cogs; managers controlled human resources as if they were interchangeable parts. Bosses did the thinking; workers were told to get the job done. It was as if workers lacked intelligence, emotion, and initiative. Shut up and do your job.

Machines work well when you need to do the same thing over and over. They’re not so hot when doing different things is required. Denser interconnections have transformed the world into one vast complex system. The past is no longer a guide to the future. Small things have enormous consequences. Logic breaks down. Shit happens. Everything’s different.

Organism, a living system. Source: http://tolweb.org/tree/learn/concepts/whatisphylogeny.html

These days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices.

Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine era’s dogged pursuit of efficiency through control. Living systems are networks. Optimal networks run on such values as respect for people, trust, continuous learning, transparency, openness, engagement, integrity, and meaning.

On the flight back to San Francisco, I watched Werner Herzog’s fabulous film about the 32,000 year old Chauvet Caves in Southern France. Herzog says the Caves are the place “where the modern human soul was awakened.” A review noted that the paintings “are exceptional not only for their age or their historical importance, but for their beauty and grace, the strange window they offer into the development of man’s ways of looking at the world through art.” The Stoos Gathering resonates the same chord. It’s all about the creativity of people.

Those of us who took part in the Stoos Gathering are sorting through what we came up with. The punchline is “learning networks of (diverse) people creating value,” but I imagine that will be refined. You can track where we’re at and join the conversation on our website and LinkedIn group.

Next I’m going to explore the implications for professional learning and working smarter.