Homo Competens Blog

[scenarios] Leadership future trends and scenarios

2012-01-20T11:40:00.000+01:00

Around the turn of every year, we tend to look ahead at the future trends. In this post, I'll share what I found and think about the direction leadership and leadership development is headed. By definition, the future has a fair degree of uncertainty associated with it, but we do see it coming. First, let's look at some trends for the short term, and then go for long term scenarios.

1- Short term: 4 trends in leadership development

These trends come from an excellent whitepaper "Future Trends in Leadership nDevelopment" written by Nick Petrie after interviewing many experts in the field from different organisations. You can download it for free from the CCL website. I made a mindmap of the paper and included it here below.

Basically, the paper states that due to the changed environment business and leadership operates in (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous), we no longer face a leadership challenge, but also a leadership development challenge. The environment has changed, the skills needed for leadership have changed accordingly (systemic thinking, creativity, comfort with agility, etc), but the leadership development methods not so much. The latter are no longer developing fast enough or in the right ways. So some experimentation is ahead of us to figure out the way ahead...

Four trends emerge:

Vertical development : the horizontal development of skills and competencies as the sole focus of development will get complemented with more focus on the development stages (vertical).
Individuals in the driving seat : this is a trend that not only plays for leadership, but as I argued before for all kinds of knowledge work. (Refer to my book Homo Competens - Let's talk about competent people in the network age.) Like it or not, we have become the prime owner of our development. By the way, it doesn't mean individualistic (anyone said social?), it means driven by individuals rather than training departments.
Collective rather than individual leader and networks of leadership : we mark the decline of the heroic leader in favour of the collective leadership. Adaptive challenges call for collaboration and engagement rather than command and control.
Innovation in leadership development : as the current ways won't cut it, expect to see new development methods. As the author concludes: "The answers will not be found in a report (even a good one) but discovered along the way on the messy path of innovation."

Some selected quotes will give you the gist of the message:

Managers have become experts on the 'what' of leadership, but novices in the 'how' of their own development.

Some people want to put Christ back into Christmas. I want to put development back into leadership development. (Robert Kegan - Harvard)

Q: what do you think needs to be stopped from the way leadership development is currently done? A: Competencies : they become either overwhelming in a number or incredibly generic. ... It is only one aspect and their application has been done to death.

Q: What should be stopped or phased out in leadership development? A: Stop sending people to courses they don't want to go to.

The industry needs to ask itself how leadership development became so elitist. The world's challenges are big enough now that we need to think about how we can democratize leadership development, take it back to the masses - to the base and middle of the socioeconomic pyramid, not only the peak. (David Altman, Center for Creative Leadership)

If leadership is seen as a social process that engages everyone in a community, then it makes less sense to invest exclusively in the skills of individual leaders. (Grady McGonagill, Tina Doerffer)

... the coming generations will see leadership's residing within networks as a natural phenomenon.

... these (leadership development) innovators will need to be prepared to experiment and fail in order to gain more feedback from which to build their next iterations.

"In ice hockey they teach you to skate not where the puck is, but to where it is going next." (A. Nanda, Harvard)

2- Going for LeaderSHIP

Let me elaborate on the third trend: from heroic leaders to collective leadership. For the past decades, we looked for big leaders, what their traits were, what competencies and situations they needed to thrive, etc. Below I re-included my overly simplistic overview of leadership theories. Have a look at the last slide: is there is CEO fish?

Overly simplistic overview of leadership schools of thought

View more presentations from Bert De Coutere

As we move our focus to the collective, we need to shift our mindset from leaders (it is a role) to leadership (it is a process).

Leadership is a social, collective process with defined outcomes. Those outcomes are Direction, Alignment and Commitment. (DAC) (Source: CCL)

You can read the general principles of DAC in this Forbes article 'Three ways to make leadership happen', and get a bit more concrete indicators in the follow up article 'What leadership looks like'.

3- Long term: 4 future learning scenarios

When we move to a timespan of 20 years or more, trends becomes a less accurate method for viewing and preparing for the future. So to take a longer term perspective, we use scenario planning. Actually, I'm going to take the same scenarios that were developed at the Online Educa 2012 conference. Hans and Willem did a great job leveraging their experience with scenario development at Shell. The 4 future possible worlds defined are not just a valid way to think and make long term decisions for learning, but for leadership and leadership development as well. I created some fake future newspaper articles on learning in the worlds of big data, quantified self, incrowd and old boys network before.

So how will the social and collaborative process that is leadership look like in any of these 4 potential future worlds? I've only started to get my head around those, and you are welcome to join the exercise. As an appetizer, here is a (hopefully funny) cartoon animation I made with GoAnimate to illustrate the world of 'Big Data'.

Big Leader is Watching You : In the Big Data future world, work gets done based on data rather than relationships, and is tightly managed rather than enabled.

(more to come)

4- What's your 2 cents?

So, what is your view on the evoluation of leadership and leadership development? More and more people are taking a critical look at what it will take for leadership to happen effectively in the network age, and how we'll get there. One example is the recent Stoos gathering.

But what about your ideas? Let's try out a new techy tool I stumbled upon, called Urtak, to find out.

The Future of Leadership

[best] Idiot-Proof E-learning - Need Your Help

2012-01-14T12:05:00.002+01:00

Looking back at all the blog posts I skimmed last year, one of the best reads that still lingers in my head is the 'Letter from an agonized learner: I'm not an idiot! from Geeta Boos. It starts with:

I’m an adult, literate, and a professional. I manage my finances, my investments, wealth and health with equal ease. I manage my family, team, career, and social needs effortlessly. I see no reason why I cannot manage my learning and training sessions. But my training managers tend to think otherwise.

Cathy Moore's post 'Are learners idiots' reminded me. She urges us in the learning trade to assume intelligence in "our audience" and fight any assumptions our stakeholders might hold it is otherwise.

So here is the idea: why don't we help the world become a slightly better place by making an idiot-proof checklist for e-learning? If that's not a good start for 2012, I don't know what is. (Actually I do, but those things are out of my control, but now I'm just rambling...)
I want to compile a checklist to score a course on its idiocy level, and just for the fun of it maybe add an 'idiot-proof' label... So, I need your help here. What would you put in the 'Idiot-Proof' checklist?
Once we get the idiot stuff out of the way, we might actually challenge instead of question our learners' intelligence.

Here are some examples to get us started:

They explain the back button is to go to the previous page and the next button is to go to the ... well ... next one.
They ask questions that are about what I read literally on the previous page.
A voice speaks out the exact text as it is on the screen, and I didn't ask for it.
They disable the next page until I completed the page or spend long enough time on the page.
They tell me up front what I'm going to read or do in the next screens.
... your turn!

5 ways to make linear navigation more interesting

View more presentations from Cathy Moore

[scenarios] Guild Tournament Final Airs Tonight

2012-01-06T09:55:00.000+01:00

Amsterdam - Tonight, SuperTV will air the 5th Guild Tournament Finals. Over the past weeks, ten guilds had their most promising journeymen create their masterpieces live in front of the studio audience. Tonight's craft battle will determine whether the Programmer's Guild or the Bakery Guild will get the precious champion title and the associated million to support their apprentice working.

Guilds have become popular in the last decade, and are largely duplicated from the guilds of the Middle Ages. Only now, they exist for every possible profession. The concept is always the same: a 'master' will take a number of 'apprentices' to learn the skill for a tuition fee. These then become independent professionals who can become masters themselves after successfully presenting their master piece. The overarching Guilds Association points out the rise in skillful labor over the past decade, but opponents to the system worry about the closed, undemocratic nature of the guilds.

Etc

- - -

Note: This was the last in the series of fake future newspaper articles for the Learning Scenarios initiative.

OLD BOY : Guild Tournament Final Airs Tonight
INCROWD : IBMzon launches Talent Cloud
QUANTIFIED SELF : "Did you thank someone today?" asks Otto, the self coaching app
BIG DATA : Noogle's decline caused by Predictor bug?

[scenarios] IBMzon launches the Talent Cloud

2012-01-05T08:53:00.001+01:00

Armonk - IBMzon announces the Talent Cloud initiative, aimed at disrupting traditional employment and corporate learning. It is tempting to think about cloud computing when the merger of two of the biggest technological firms (IBMzon is the merger of IBM and Amazon) announces a Talent Cloud, but this initiative has little to do with IT. Through the Talent Cloud, IBMzon will develop and certify thousands of independent individuals to work on their projects on a pay-per-assignment basis.

People joining the Talent Cloud will get access to exclusive training and information, formely only accessible for employees. They will also need to pass IBMzon's certification in one of its service areas, and maintain a track record of learning updates and experience to remain in the cloud. A yearly framework contract arranges their fees and terms, and they will get deployed on IBMzon projects on a per-assignment basis.

Does this mark the end of the traditional employer-employee relationship? "No", according to Mr. Deepak Blue, the manager of the programme. "What Talent Cloud will allow us, is to flexibly tap into a workforce we didn't have before. It will allow us to align our combined workforce of full time employees and Talent Cloud associates to the market fluctuations, increasing flexibility for our many clients. Also, this allows us to extend our services into the 'long tail' of talent. Normally, you can only hire someone with a very specific and deep skill when you can ensure their full time utilisation. With Talent Cloud, we can now attract and deploy these one-of-a-kind skills. Thirdly, Talent Cloud gives us a competitive advantage dealing with the new demographics in the workforce. We can now attract young enterpreneurs that are not looking to work for big firms, as well as retain or retiring people in a more loosely coupled way."

Needless to say, the unions are worried ...
Etc

- - -

Note: this is the third in a series of fake future newspaper articles, illustrating possible learning futures. At the latest Online Educa Berlin conference, 4 learning future learning scenarios were developed: old boy network, in-crowd, big data and quantified self. This fake article illustrates the incrowd world. The image above is taken from the workshop pictures available on the learningscenarios.org site.

OLD BOY : Guild Tournament Final Airs Tonight
INCROWD : IBMzon launches Talent Cloud
QUANTIFIED SELF : "Did you thank someone today?" asks Otto, the self coaching app
BIG DATA : Noogle's decline caused by Predictor bug?

[scenarios] Otto, the self-coaching app

2012-01-04T09:29:00.000+01:00

Did you thank someone today? asks Otto, the self-coaching app

Leuven - I've been trying out Otto, the self-coaching app for two months now. The app is a newcomer in the world of Quantified Self tools, and helps people like me draft their list of 'working points'. These working points get converted in a list of questions that Otto (the name of the automatic coach) will ask you daily or weekly. Now, two months later I look back at the graphs of my goals. For some reason, I never thank people on Mondays...

The app is available for iPhone and Android and still in beta. It is made by homo competens, who brought us the quiz site about2findout.com and learning-site-in-disguise walkthe.net. Coaching is a hot item in the corporate development world these days. You can judge by the number of books on this topic displayed at airport book shops. But people don't really need these books. What they need is a solid method to make them formulate points of improvement, see a variety of reachable solutions and act upon that. The app actually mimics very expensive executive coaching who would call their coachees every day to ask the list of questions. That is obviously a very expensive process. Otto is 'coaching for the rest of us', as the makers describe it.

Coaching started out as an activity for the happy few, usually the leaders in an organisation. Its proven benefits make that everyone could actually use a coach or mentor at key moments in their careers. The problem with coaching is that it is very expensive because people-intensive and doesn't scale well. This app won't solve this problem, but will bring basic coaching to everyone, and is a helpful complementary instrument to deeper coaching.

The free version of the app will let you create a list of 10 development goals or 'working points'. The beauty of the app is that it suggests development goals based on your MBTI score - a popular personality assessment test. People with a certain MBTI profile tend to have common derailers, and I must admit I picked a few working points from that list too.

Etc.

Note: this article is part of a series fictive newspaper articles corresponding to one of the four 'future learning scenarios'. This one is part of the "quantified self" scenario.
If you think this would be a great app, feel free to help me flesh it out and build it :-) Might be something fun to do this year...

OLD BOY : Guild Tournament Final Airs Tonight
INCROWD : IBMzon launches Talent Cloud
QUANTIFIED SELF : "Did you thank someone today?" asks Otto, the self coaching app
BIG DATA : Noogle's decline caused by Predictor bug?

[scenarios] Noogle's decline explained by a bug in its Predictor?

2012-01-03T10:34:00.000+01:00

Noogle's decline explained by a bug in its Predictor?

Brussels - Over the past quarters, Noogle's share price dropped significantly as the company failed to deliver on key features and updates to its service line, and service suffered from major disruptions and intrusions. Investors and clients alike have been wondering why the better half of the ex-Google imperium started to... well, for lack of a better word 's*ck'. Our undercover reporter might have found the answer: the famous Predictor software that allows Noogle to attract and retain the best of the best apparently had a fatal flaw causing thousands of 'mis-hires' in the last year alone.

Predictor is the software used by Noogle to screen applicants by predicting their performance impact. Noogle stands for not-Google, and is the better of the two Google halfs created after courts ordered the monopolist to break itself up. The Predictor algorithms are better protected than the recipe for Coca-Cola and are assumed to be the key to the success of the steady rise of the company. The many people seeking to work for the company need to give Predictor permission to use every possible piece of information available to predict how big of an additional asset they would be to the talent pool of the company. Noone knows exactly what the Predictor looks for, but we can assume it finds your passion, learning, viewing and reading history, appraisals, goes into your social networks for your relational skills, etc. As a thank you, the many unsuccesful applicants get a list of learning resources to skill themselves in a future-proof way.
A reliable insider informs us that during one of the finetunings of the software for future trends, a bug entered The Predictor, causing thousands of mis-hires. It is not clear if the bug was accidental or the result of industrial espionage. Rumor has it Noogle compiled a list of the mis-hires, and tries to convince them to leave the company.

Note: this article and the matrix above are part of the 'learning scenarios' initiative. At Online Educa we created 4 possible scenarios for the future. They are based on the axes of how work is organised (managed versus enabled) and how work is done (data driven versus relationship driven). The fictious article above falls in the quadrant of 'big data'. For the usage and making of scenarios please refer to the learningscenarios.org site. Scenario planning is a good tool to use in an agile world. Here is what to (not) do with scenarios:

DO : flesh them out so you can feel and smell what that future would be like
DO : look for indicators if a particular scenario is on the rise
DO : use the scenarios for mid- and long-term planning and investment decisions
DO : make plans for when the scenarios become reality
DON'T : judge. We all have preferences. They don't matter for this exercise.

Over the next posts, I'll create other fictious articles for the other quadrants. Then, I'd like to do an exercise on how leadership might be different in each of the four quadrants.

OLD BOY : Guild Tournament Final Airs Tonight
INCROWD : IBMzon launches Talent Cloud
QUANTIFIED SELF : "Did you thank someone today?" asks Otto, the self coaching app
BIG DATA : Noogle's decline caused by Predictor bug?

Oh, you should also participate in the learning scenario exercise.

[event] Impressions of Online Educa 2012

2011-12-28T13:23:00.000+01:00

So what was Online Educa Berlin 2012 like? To put it in one line: it was great, and it was different.

As last year, I attended most of the Business Educa track. And that is the first big new thing to report: because the number of participants grew from 2000+ to 2500+ some of the Business Educa track was hosted in a brand new design hotel "Das Stue" in walking distance of the Intercontinental hotel, where the regular conference took place. The former Danish embassy has a few elegant rooms, and looks over the Tiergarten park. The rooms in Das Stue were set up in a more 'creative' way with lots of flip charts, posts its, a tweet wall, etc. There was even a room designated as a 'cold spot' (as opposed to a hot spot, a place with no network connection), ie a quiet room to let everything sink in away from all the stimili that surround us. The rest of the rooms were very 'hot' in comparison, and the organizers had to crank up the network capacity once more, as many people now not only bring their phone and tablet, but also the new Apple iWant.

Last year, there was a general disappointment on the lack of 'the next shiny new thing'. At the same time, there were a lot of sessions painfully showing us that as a learning industry we did not even live up to the next big thing of 5 years ago in many cases. To me, it is very unlikely that 'the next big thing' will actually come from inside the learning field as it is a rather conservative profession. So I was happy to note that as the main theme for this year, Online Educa searched out the frontiers of learning. "To boldly go where no learning has gone before" means sessions on learning where you would not expect it outside the traditional corporate training department or classroom, but also to search for inspiration in a lot of fields for their impact or application on learning. Looking up these frontiers has proven to be a very insightful experience.

One of the more subtle novelties of this year's edition was the name tag: it had a QR code that when scanned directed people to your own profile page on the myOEB portal. Yes, Online Educa now has a social community site for registered participants (this officially marks the end of the cd-rom era!), complete with everyone's profile, interests, message system, conference announcements, and a per session page with presentations (although not all speakers uploaded them), and discussion. One of the nice features is the home page suggests sessions based on your interests and has a 'Did you meet...' widget introducing you to someone you might want to talk to over a drink in the bar. The QR codes were also used throughout the conference, from scanning potential vendors at the booths, to link to the online evaluation forms.

The booths were very traditional, and to avoid vendors I'm not interested in stealing away my time, I was wearing a T-shirt "I'm not buying". It worked :-). This year, vendors could also hire a few hours on 'the sofa' or rent a separate room to give private sessions on invitation only. I'm not a vendor, but I think that approach actually has more impact than your regular booth where you had out plastic toys.

One of the keynote speakers was the famous-in-Belgium Peter Adriaenssens. He's an expert on child and adolescent psychiatry and a top notch speaker. He took the audience over the brain development of children and how that links to education. He also reminded us that most children do not deviate from 'the norm' and we might be seeing mental disorders where in fact they are not. Ignatia wrote an interesting article on Peter Adriaenssen last year.

Another noted speaker was Jef Staes, who was swearing in the church presenting the thoughts in his book "I was a sheep". In that book, he talks about the fences that we put around ourselves, and wants to free the world of the barriers of diplomas. His speech 'Can you imagine a world without diplomas' featured in the Online Educa debate. The motion was rejected (know your audience...) but the debate itself was great. Twitter quote from Jef : "If you put fences around people, what do you get? Sheep."

It was provoking, but the prize for the most provoking speaker goes to Mr Goodnrich, the CEO who dared to come explain to us why he downsized the corporate training department and why that was a good thing. Yes, he was disturbing the force, and his talk set the tone for the rest of the conference. In the same session we also had speakers giving examples of learning beyond the borders of your own organization, but together with clients (to increase customer loyalty and lower support costs), with suppliers (to optimize the supply chain), with ex-employees (to broaden the talent pool you can tap into), etc. The Apple guy showing the iTunes University new features was popular too.

In line with the conference theme to look up the borders of learning, I attended the app marathon. Ten tech enterpreneurs came to present us their latest app, and we in the audience could vote in what company to invest. For some apps, the learning application was not immediately clear to me, but it did show that learning is (or always was) spreading out to all sides of life, and is not contained in the education system or its evil twin aka the corporate university.

There was also a workshop where entertainers came to give us tips to make learning more entertaining, under Nichalos Negroponte's slogan "Good education has to be good entertainment".

I attended the e-learning "crafter festival" (yes, in 2012 God is a designer, and crafter festivals where people design live on stage is another trend). I saw people put together a learning game live in front of an audience, and that's very impressive. It made me think I was part of a cooking show, only it was elearning, not food.

I also attended a session on micro-learning, which had a few good examples but also good business models to make it sustainable instead of 'for free as long as we are interested in it'.

Another session I remember is the one titled "Not invented here". It had examples, some historical, some quite recent on non-Western styles of education and views on development.

The most fun I had at the brain lab: a room where you could try out one of those new portable brain scanners. After some limited training, I was actually able to move the cursor on the screen by pure will power! As this was a very popular lab, you had to pass a test on recent brain research findings to earn your seat (hint: left/right is sooo last century...). It is funny to force learning professionals to pass a test themselves...

After the conference was over, I stayed for a few more days. The conference has a nice after-activity: a learnrave. It is as you know one of the trends of 2012, where people get notified via social media of a public learning event and all show up, not to drink this time (although it is not forbidden :-) ) but to learn. The learnrave took place on Dec 1st on Wittenbergplatz as part of the activities for AIDS awareness and was on the subject of safe sex. I found it both funny and entertaining, a bit in the style of Isabella Rossellini's green porn.

As I said in the beginning of this article: OEB 2012 was great and different.

Note: I was late for my review of Online Educa 2011, so at least now I'm the first for the Online Educa Berlin conference taking place from 28-30 Nov 2012.

[event] Impressions of Online Educa 2011

2011-12-27T13:31:00.000+01:00

Online Educa Berlin 2011 was nice.

About a month ago 2000+ elearning fans and practitioners from 80+ countries -all nice people- gathered at the annual Online Educa Berlin conference again. I was there. I'm nice too (stop laughing, am so). Below is not an overview of the sessions I attended, because other people have done a much greater job at that than I ever would have. So I'll limit myself to some impressions.

As last year, there was a nice separate/included Business Educa track, especially for the corporate learning folks among us. That thread kicked off with an exercise in scenario planning. Hans and Willem did a wonderful job distilling 4 possible future learning worlds, and the scenarios were used all the way through the closing conversation of the business track. Curious what the 4 scenarios are, or what an exercise in scenario planning is actually good for? Check out the site learningscenarios.org. I'll chip in my part in a later post. I did spend most if not all of my time in the Business Educa track this year. It's so nice to have a clear focus on corporate, while at the same time not letting go of the cross-fertilization (don't picture it literally) between corporate, non-profit and education sectors.

The Dutch are nice people, but too much is too much as a Belgian would say. They were the number one cohort. The picture below is actually a nice Dutch guy, with his 3 toys. That's another impression of OEB: the area of the tablet has begun! The network capacity was increased by a factor 2.5 compared to the year before, but was still lacking at times (somehow I managed to lose some of my notes as the Evernote sync has not completed before I changed them...). Well, as the picture suggests the demand for network is now times 3 as we all carry multiple devices with us. Aren't all these toys nice?

The chairman of the opening plenary was a nice man. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh repeated his kick-ass opening joke of last year, and provoked the audience to stop using words as 'developing', 'teach' or 'arab spring'. While I did not agree with most/any of his suggestions, I appreciate a dissident voice in an otherwise fully anglosaxon panel. Maybe it was his way to keep us silent during the panel discussions. The panel itself did not live up to its expectations I'm sad to report. But then again, expectations were very high for speakers such as the author of 'Sex, bombs and burgers', or Dance-Your-PhD star John Bohannon. To summarize them all in one line : Peter Nowak is a fan of the dark side of people because it is the side the creates many innovations, John Bahonnon is stupid without Google and Wikipedia, and Jef Borden told us that fat people tend to cluster together in social networks. The opening did not provide any thought provoking insights that became the talk of the conference, and Mr Nice "it-is-not-a-world-crisis-it-is-a-western-crisis" did allow the plenary to go well over time so the schedule was f*cked up for the rest of the day causing let's say my session on learning impact to be cut by 30 min. But moving on... I have to be a nice guy.

The star of the plenary in my nice opinion is Mr Bohannon. He has nice chest hair, by the way. I could tell because he did not button up completely for the plenary - but I digress. He did not do a stellar show like in the video above on TedxBrussels, but he did make us all think about the trustworthiness of Wikipedia and our digital imprints and the need for critical reflection skills. He browsed the net for the dirt on all other panelists, and shared that openly with us. That may not be nice, but it was very insightful as well as entertaining. Mr Bohannon was sitting a few seats in front of my on the plane back to Brussels, him and his nice chest hair and everything.

At some times, the conference felt like Groundhog day. It is nice if you can time travel like that and think 'have I not been to this conference before?'. At the one hand, we are all searching for the next big thing in learning land and want inspiration to push us beyond the borders of our imagination. At the other hand, we whine that we are still struggling to implement the next big things of 10 years ago. What's wrong with this picture? It can't be us, can it? We're just too nice...

There are next new things actually, but you have to look for them. I was for example really impressed by something the folks at the TechSmith booth would only show when you asked for it really really nice: their Coach's Eye iphone app. In my nice and occasionally humble opinion, it might become the killer elearning app we predicted five years ago but were unable to create ourselves. In essence it is an app to provide feedback. And boy, can we all do with quality feedback! In this version, it is more intended for sports, but if in next iterations of the app they record voice it can be used to give feedback on presentations, difficult conversations, negotiation skills, etc... Now that's a nice app!

To get an actual review of the content of the sessions, you may want to read through the blog posts below. That's another thing I observed this year: there are some really really rapid (and also nice) bloggers out there. I had barely lifted my nice *ss of my seat or their review was online!

Opening Plenary (by Hans de Zwart)
Ignite session (same author)
Performance cultures (still the same guy)
Curation session (don't even ask); This was an excellent session that I half-attended, and the links are also on symbaloo.com and scoop.it. Also Moocha thinks curation is the top take-away from this conference.
Reflections on OEB11 (Wilfred Rubens - in Dutch, this might be a good opportunity to see how Google Translate has evolved since you last tried it)
Learning scenarios workshop and recap (Kasper Spiro)
Visual Notes (Saurau)

Did I mention OEB 2011 was nice?
And to make up for the fact I blogged very late about it, I'll be the first to write a review on OEB 2012. You can read it here.

[event] OEB Learning Café "Demonstrating Value Back at Work"

2011-12-10T00:47:00.001+01:00

Here are the slides used during our 'learning café' on demonstrating the value of learning in a corporate setting.

Demonstrating Value Back at Work (OEB11)

View more presentations from Bert De Coutere.

As previously described, the flow is to go from 'current state' over 'inspiration' to 'action'. Those are symbolised in the workshop handout with the magnifying glass, the 'lightbulb' moments and the action plan respectively. The workshop was a tryout of this action based method, and worked well. It would have worked even better if the morning keynotes had not gone over time, rippling through the entire first day and making my workshop effectively half an hour shorter. Oh well, here is all the material you need to repeat it back at your work. First let people come up with one or more concrete learning initiatives they want to provide evidence of impact for, then inspire with a lot of alternative models and metrics and related table discussions so people get 'lightbulb' moments, and conclude with an action plan. All corporate learning might as well not have happened unless performed, and this workshop is no exception to that harsh rule.

The workshop was loosely based on the content of the previous blog articles on impact of learning:

Part I - Kirkpatrick and friends and enemies : The current pragmatic 'state of the art' is to apply half of the Kirkpatrick model. Trends and insights within the 50 years that followed the initial model suggest we might rethink evaluation of learning.

Part II - Divergence: so much to potentially measure : In the next post of this reflection, we'll take a hike along various approaches and models for tracking or proving impact of learning and have a short thought on each of them.

Part IIIa - Convergence: a suggestion for the pragmatic and one for the revolutionary : I'll make a suggestion for 2 rough and draft models. One for the pragmatic that tweaks the dominant Kirkpatrick model,

Part IIIb - ... and one for the revolutionary that throws it away and starts allover working backwards, holistic and adaptive.

[event] Demonstrating value, worksheet

2011-11-24T11:40:00.001+01:00

So in one week time, I'll be hosting the BUS25 learnshop session at Online Educa Berlin. We will work around the central question on how to demonstrate impact of our learning interventions back at work. (And with work we assume a corporation setting, this session is part of the Business Educa track after all.)

So what will we be doing? It's a three step process, with a small preparation to make things 'real'.

Step 0 : As an individual preparation, we'll ask participants to list a few of the trainings and other learning programmes and interventions they are involved in and want to demonstrate the impact for. This will make the session 'real', oriented towards own work, and spark great conversations with peers at the tables who face similar challenges.
Step 1 : State of the art : what are we currently doing? This will be in the form of a short presentation, followed by a table discussion.
Step 2 : Divergence : get inspired by many alternative ways to demonstrate impact. We'll randomly select models and frameworks and pick what we like and might work for our programmes.
Step 3 : Convergence : coming up with new ways and ideas to provide evidence of learning impact. We'll work around one of the cases in the tables, and report back out to the full group.

The session itself will also experiment with its own way to steer the workshop towards impactful action. The handout sheet is below. The first box is for searching what to work and indicating your 'mojo' (open brain, closed brain?), the second column is for the lightbulb moments, and the third one is for actions in the short and long term.

You can also download the sheet here.

Hope to see you there!

[event] Creativity World Forum - day 2 - Ideas are the easy part

2011-11-20T09:46:00.001+01:00

The Creativity World Forum 2011 has ended, and you can watch recordings of the live streams on the site.

The second day brought us:

Scott Belsky (BTW, below is a picture taken from the Flickr collection of the event, can you spot me in the audience?) who reminds us that creativity and ideas are just not enough. Ideas are easy. You need to make them happen. He describes the creative class as suffering from 'idea to idea' syndrome, always passioned about the next idea but never seeing the previous one thru. He thinks the creative community is probably the worst organized one in the world. He calls for a bias towards action in what we do and wrote a book and started the behance and actionmethod websites to help us do so. The first one is a linked-in lookalike for creative people to put their portfolio while the latter helps to be more organised and action focused (quote: "Organisation is a competitive advantage in the creative world."). Interestingly, his formula for success includes leadership and he went into some tips on that (eg leaders talk last, value the team's immune system, tolerate failure). His description of creative communities contains three kind of people: the dreamers, the doers and the incrementals. This actually relates back pretty well to Malcolm Gladwell's keynote on day 1 stating that you don't want to be first, you want to be third (he calls it the 'tweakers' that with small incremental improvements actually unlock the true value of an implemented idea). Scott gave a PDF summarizing his points and it is posted on the Flanders DC blog. Scott ended his inspirational keynote with "Nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means."

Patti Maes from the MIT Media Labs gave an interesting 20 minutes to let us think outside of the box of the computer. If you have never seen the 'sixth sense' project videos, do it now, I included one below. The current work at the labs also includes projects to use the body as a storage device (copy paste with your fingers), etc.

Jamie Anderson talked about the fine art of success, basically a tribute to Lady Gaga and how she build her mass intimacy. We also found out that creativity is most often found in people with mental disabilities! Enough said.
The naked presentor Garr Reynolds gave a top performance on how to present. He wrote Prezentation Zen and The Naked Presenter. A note on that last one: I know naked (believe me), and that was not naked :-) . He gave a fully dressed insightful keynote on how his work with Apple and migration to Japan have influenced his presentation skills. In a world with more communication via more channels, we need clarity and simplicity. Did you know there was life before powerpoint? And there is hope for all of us, even Bill Gates went on from his 'death by powerpoint' keynotes in his Microsoft time to deliver much better ones as CEO of his foundation. Garr's workshop left me somewhat unsatisfied, but at least he gave the great tip to watch Jill Boylte Taylor's TED talk 'stroke of insight'

This wonderful day ended with a 1 hour interview with director Oliver Stone on his successes, failures and creative works from idea to implementation.

So, what does it all mean?
Some themes have come up over the past days:

Failure : we only remember the success of great inventors, we forget the many failures that are equally part of the process. How do we look at failure? How do we make it part of the system? If it is such an integral part, should we aim to fail faster or cheaper, and learn from it faster?
Insight : we think creativity is about a stroke of genius by one individual. Turns out it is a long process (usually 10 years) between at least 3 kind of people : the dreamers, the doers and the tweakers. Innovation is a very incremental process where lots of people contribute in little steps. Should we rethink our patent systems to match this reality? Should we balance our teams to include all three types of environments?
Implementation: Ideas are the easy part, it is the organisation and implementation that is hard. So many ideas just remain ideas.
White chocolate mousse with lavendel taste and a violet flower on top is really, really yammy.

I won't be there in Rio for the next edition because - well - it is in Rio for crying out loud. The tag line of the event did work for me : blow my mind.

[event] Creativity World Forum Day 1 : most myths on innovation and creativity are not true

2011-11-16T20:43:00.001+01:00

I've been drinking from the fire hose today at the sold out Creativity World Forum. You don't expect a conference on creativity to be same-old same-old, so there were quite some nice tweaks to the conference experience. For example, the conference bag is a flagbag, made from recycled bags. Participants all have different ones, and for some reason mine ended up purple-ish. The name tage is a little conference book with your name printed on and the venue has a central space with art you can smell, real grass, swings, etc. The keynote place is a big circle with 360° screens all around, tweetwall, and a catwalk with grass that cuts the audience in half and where the speakers deliver their presentations from. Some of the speakers are artists such as chicken-man Koen Vanmechelen.

I guess the overall take-away of the first day is "many of our instincts on creativity and innovation are wrong."

Jimmy Wales -aka Mr Wikipedia- told us the usual story of Wikipedia, how it works, and the numbers to underline its success. Wikipedia is an organisation that has a 'why', they have a mission. But we are so often blinded by the success stories. Jimmy told us about the many failures he scored (Jimmy is good at it) in his previous endeavors. Failure is an integral part of creativity and innovation. So should we fail faster?
Peter Hinssens gave an excellent talk on 'digital is the new normal', coincidentally the title of his recent book. His point is that we are about half-way in the digital revolution, and that we might now expect a 'flip' as the market goes to the second part of the S-curve of adoption. As an example: the old normal tells us we suffer information overload, but in the new normal that becomes filter failure. He also made the point that our education system is the weak part, slowest to adopt and jeopardizing an entire generation. In the new normal, innovation and creativity are about things that work, that are just good enough (speed beats quality) and that focus on the limits, not the now.
Alexander Osterwalder wrote a great book (I have now autographed) on Business Model Generation. Our instincts tell us we need one sound business plans, but he invited us to burn that and to focus on a business model canvas. Quote: "Prototyping is a conversation you have with your ideas". His talk is all about designing and pivoting business models for sustainable organisations. Where the first speaker talked about failing fast, Alex sees pivoting as cheaply learning from failure.
The big contra-intuitive eyeopener Keith Sawyer (author of Group Genius) gave us is that inventions are never the work of an individual, despite what all legends about the Wright brothers, Edison or any inventor might tell. Ideas emerge over time, originate from many people, and mature in small steps. He gave many examples of how creativity is the outcome of collaboration. In a workshop following his keynote, he focused on enhancing creativity through 5 steps: preparation, incubation, insight, selection, elaboration. It takes hard work. Quote: Inventors have more bad ideas than other persons. They have more volume of ideas in total. And apparently Alessi has a museum of failed designs.
The day was closed by Mr Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell debunking another instinct on innovation: why do we want to be first? He gave examples how those who are the first to have an idea are not the ones who bring a successful product to the market. Illustrations include the pioneering work Xerox has done and how subsequently Steve Jobs came along, took the ideas, tweaked them and made them better. The magic number seems to be 3, you want to be the third one, the tweaker who optimizes the invention made of an earlier idea. The very thing that makes us first actually stands in the way of putting it to practical use.

This day made me doodle this interpretation of 'standing on the shoulder of giants'.

A twitter quote to summarize the day:

"Failure is not an option. It is a privilege reserved for those who try."

Now to see if tomorrow can top this first day (and if the wifi will work properly)

[event] world creativity forum

2011-11-15T18:52:00.001+01:00

Over the next two days (Nov 16 and 17), I'll be attending the World Creativity Forum in Hasselt. The speaker line-up includes Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, Alexander Osterwalder and his Business Model Canvas, tipping point author Malcolm Gladwell, the naked presenter Garr Reynolds, director Oliver Stone, and many more.

You can see the live stream on :
www.creativityworldforum.be

[ribbon hero] Game your way to Office mastery

2011-11-03T11:08:00.002+01:00

I've been learning a lot of new faces, approaches, methods, processes, toys (blackberry would be one) ... and also tools lately. That's what happens when you change jobs. One of the changes was that I switched from Lotus Notes to Outlook mail, and from an older version of MS Office to the Office 2010 suite. It is the version that introduced the ribbon bar that is quite different from earlier versions.

Remember the times half of the bookshop would be filled with computer 'how to' guides? I did not use a book to upskill myself to Office 2010. I did not do the last century off-the-shelve e-learning course either. No, I convinced our IT guy to install Ribbon Hero 2 on my laptop and every day I'm spending a few minutes to game my way to mastery. (Yeah, that's another thing, I'm not administrator on my own laptop anymore, I need to ask...)

Ribbon Hero is a free download from the Office Labs site. It installs the game -integrated within Office- with levels that relate to a story on that annying little Clippy helper from earlier versions of Office time travelling through various ages, each with their challenging Office tasks. Those tasks will open up the appropriate Office application where you have a worksheet with what to achieve, and some hints is you would get stuck. Solve it without using hints, and you get more points. But you don't have to use the game levels. The game also installs in the ribbon and will automatically give you points as you are using more features of the tool suite.

Why is this a great example for IT training?

It uses the engagement techniques of games and play. The trendy word for that is 'gamification'. I admit it works. It is addictive to just go in for 5 or 10 minutes.
You don't have to play, it also scores you as you are using more advanced features in your day to day work. It integrates with 'real work'.
It is spaced over time, giving you the time to discover the deep functionalities that will set you apart as an Office power user. I once saw studies stating that it takes people on average more time to get to use new features than the time cycle of new versions coming on the market.
It gives you many "I did not know you could do that" experiences, luring you slowly into better using the tool and its full feature set.

What could be better? I'd love it to have a social component, like a leaderboard where you see the scores of the entire department.

All in all, a good trend in IT end user training. Maybe this is something you need to try out next Friday afternoon, or convince the IT department to just deploy it. What is the worst that could happen? You having fun finding new features to use for work?

[best] Open is the new black...

2011-10-30T14:04:00.000+01:00

Oops, I forgot to post my monthly 'best' pick. Every month, I share what I found the most interesting or inspiring article in the blogosphere. It is not too late: the title above is a quote taken from Michael Feldstein's e-Literate's blog post "Perhaps open is a flag of my disposition". Why do we see so much 'openwashing' going on?

The article deals with two very different kind of 'open' and 'free' announcements in October: Pearson announced a free, open, cloud-based LMS OpenClass, available within the Google Apps for Education platform. The other one is Blackboard's announcement on CourseSites. Both are interesting movements in the educational space, coming from a publishing power house and the number one educational LMS vendor respectively. I'll leave it to you to dig into the specifics of the announcements, and make up your mind. I'll just make a point to consider moving to cloud based platforms.

Cloud: Schools (and most organisations for that matter) should not have to worry or reserve budgets to maintain server parks with LMS and other systems if they are available in the cloud as well. BUT, only if they can trust the cloud system to be good enough (speed, security), if they can trust it will exist next year and the provider won't change the rules along the way.
Platform: with platform I mean an extendable system, like Facebook or Amazon are. An application hosted in the cloud is not good enough. You need to be able to build upon it and leverage what others have build upon it. It is one you can integrate into your own applications via APIs, where others can add their own applications to.

For both announcements, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, but I'm curious to see what happens. I'm sure I'll have lots more insights into Pearson's OpenClass next week, as they are one of the main sponsors of Online Educa Berlin. I don't know what their key note topic is about, but it is going to be this platform is my guess ;-)

Open and open and open is three... There is a lot of 'open' going on in the land of learning, even before it became 'the new black'.

There is of course open source. Moodle is the most popular open source LMS for example, although I also like ILIAS, Sakai and Dokeos.
There is open content, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare or Khan Academy or anything licensed under Creative Commons.
There are open standards, such as SCORM, AICC, Common Cartridge. Speaking of open standards, and relating to a previous 'best' on a simple future for SCORM and LMS: the tin can project has an update: there is an API spec out, and samples and a sandbox site for you to test out. (If you do, let me know, I'm a bit time constrained these days....)
Last month also had a special week, the open access week. From their site: "Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fifth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research."

Also an interesting read from the past month: Hans de Zwart's warning that technology is not neutral in this open world...

Digital Civil Rights (Bits of Freedom)

View more presentations from Hans de Zwart

What I also liked this month that was in the running for 'best':

147 super-entities dominate the networked corporate world : networks have a natural tendency to create super nodes
Mindomo now has a presentation mode, like a 'prezi light' interface. Nice way to passively move through mindmaps.
Techsmith launched a coaching app "coacheye" for iPhone. While this is intended for sports use, this is a very interesting development from one of the established players in the learning technology market...

[event] Online Educa Berlin - I'm going

2011-10-27T13:19:00.000+02:00

In the best of traditions, I'll also be attending and speaking at Online Educa Berlin this year.

You'll find me in the BUS25 session 'Demonstrating Value Back at Work'. The idea of this session is not only to reflect on the impact of our learning initiatives and our learning culture, but also make a concrete list of ideas and actions to take back home. My contribution will be loosely based upon the blog series 'learning doesn't HAVE value, it GETS value'.

Part IIIb - ... and one for the revolutionary that throws it away and starts allover working backwards, holistic and adaptive.

As a participant, I'll be attending Hans' workshop "Preparing Together for the Future of Corporate Learning" in the pre-conference programme. It will be an exercise based around scenario planning as I understand it.
Then, I plan to follow most of the Business Educa track this year.
I'd also like to meet up and talk to people about the expectations they have on leadership development specifically.
And of course, I will love to be back in Berlin after a year. It's a great place to be. How many days still before November 30?

[ibm] Bert's Last Lecture - Video

2011-10-26T09:00:00.000+02:00

I've blogged before about the 'last lecture' I've organised just before leaving IBM. It is on the topic of highly effective learners.
So here is a video shoot of the event kindly taken by Ralph with his flipcam. Yes, you would think I'm doing ballet judging on my many hand movements, but no, that's sadly how I lecture...

Bert's last lecture - Habits of Highly Effective People from Bert De Coutere on Vimeo.

[event] learning today and tomorrow

2011-10-25T11:04:00.000+02:00

Last week I was invited to join the panel at the Learning Today and Tomorrow conference organised by BE-ODL in Brussels. The location had a tweetwall, simultaneous translations and a local 'star' in the form of Alain Gerlache to moderate the day.

First keynote was familiar to me, as I had already seen Wim Veen deliver his Homo Zappiens presentation at Online Educa Berlin some years ago. He shows how kids grow up in a digital age, and he sure has played his share of games! Here are his slides:

A presentation by prof. dr. Wim Veen

View more presentations from NewLearningNetwork

The second keynote speaker was Christophe Batier and he showed how he uses a Facebook-centered approach of social learning with his students. His slides are here:

Social learning bruxels

View more presentations from christophe Batier

I'd like to braindump some of the questions that came up during the panel discussion afterwards:

These trends on gaming, zapping and social learning are not new in the sense that we did not see them coming. In fact, they will not be new to a lot of innovators, blogosphere inhabitants or people that attend conferences (the talks, not the exhibitions). But as with any change, it gets hyped and used first within its set of believers and early adopters, to then go into the 'new normal'. It's usually not the same set of people who innovate and test drive these ideas as the ones who will bring them to widescale adoption. By then the innovators have lost interest and moved on. For me, it is important to guide as much people into these new ways of working, and the best motivator for others to overcome their fears of change is to show success. Show that it works and it's not scary.
On the question if education should adapt to the expectations of digital natives, versus the other way around my take is : I trust the educational system to get it right. I know there are a lot of people calling for a revolution (You might have seen Sir Ken Robinson accusing our schools of killing creativity, or the movie trailer of We are the people we've been waiting for move, or that annoying child shouting are you gonna be my teacher?... ). The education system is designed to deal with the challenges of a few centuries ago: the industrial age. It needs retuning, some of it rather drastic. But a vast system like education that eats up large parts of the GDP, employs thousands of people, is owned by the government, and touches the lives of everyone will not change overnight. But there are so many interesting experiments going on in lots of schools that I remain positive. So I restate: I trust education to get it right. I hope it is soon enough to make the most impact for this century.
On the question what schools should teach the digital natives : There is so much content out there, maybe we should not focus on it that much anymore. I referred to the excellent and free ebook of Stephen Downes on what to learn. It starts with a section "Things you really need to learn.". Here is Stephen's list of what will get you through life:

How to predict consequences
How to read
How to distinguish truth from fiction
How to empathize
How to be creative
How to communicate clearly
How to learn
How to stay healthy
How to value yourself
How to live meaningfully

[ibm] Bert's Last Lecture - Habits of Highly Effecive Learners

2011-10-12T10:29:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I invited all the people I worked with in the past 14 years at IBM to join my 'last lecture'. I've been teaching more than anything else in my IBM career, and I always liked it. So I wanted to do it one last time before switching jobs. Below is the slideshare presentation.

Bert's Last Lecture - Habits of highly effective learners

View more presentations from Bert De Coutere.

On slideshare you can't see the nice transitions (tip: download the ppt version), but I used some of the tips in the Slide:ology book to create this.

PS, like the new dynamic layout of my blog?

[best] The simple future for SCORM and LMS

2011-10-08T16:41:00.000+02:00

I'm going to declare the past month's best read the proceedings on the Tin Can Project. That project formulates a successor for the current learning standard SCORM, and is still in the making. At the heart of their suggestion is a very simple 'actor', 'verb', 'object' mechanism. Have a look at the video below to grasp the concept:

State of the standards

As I'm about to start a new job, one less into the 'e' of 'elearning', allow me still to share my view on the standards in the learning world: it could be better. In fact, I had almost started a personal project on peer learning, but I missed the technological foundation to do it as the current standards just don't cut it. Maybe if this one matures, combined with a few other promising technologies...

Standards are important for interoperability, for making sure things just work, and for avoiding lock-in to any particular technology or vendor just to name a few advantages. More important even, standards should be open. In the learning field, the predominant standards are AICC, SCORM, QTI, 508, etc. In the past 5 years at my current job as content creator, we had one client asking for the AICC standard (in a very particular configuration, giving more trouble than it was worth), about one other that went for the SCORM 2004 standard, and all others still going for SCORM 1.2. The SCORM standards are 10 years old and heavily embedded in the mindset and technology of that time: javascript and content-centric. SCORM got updated in 2004 but never to newer technologies as web services for example. Most organisations still go for the 'previous' version number of learning standards, not the latest one. SCORM 2004 probably solved all kind of needs that noone asked for (advanced sequencing etc), or did it way too complex,.. But our clients still ask for 1.2. The same observation goes for the assessment standard QTI.

New technologies came along (ie web services), new insights in learning came along (ie it is not all about formal content locked away for safekeeping in an LMS), but the standards remained. Then there were all kind of confusions around who owns the standard and will make it future proof: ADL or LETSI or whoever. I never quite got the thing about the Common Cartridge either. It confuses me. I was craving for something SIMPLE, that would ADDRESS TODAY'S LEARNING needs.
And then I saw the video above and I got all warm inside.

The Tin Can Project says all the right things

I must admit the guys working at the Tin Can Project did a great job listening to the industry and saying all the right things. If you go over their capabilities and identified challenges, you have to admit they got most things right. Simplifying it in my own words: the aim of this project is to reduce the learning standards and the corresponding system (LMS) to only the specific learning stuff, and leave the rest to other web technologies. I've written before on how the LMS was always more about management than learning. Indeed, for most things the LMS does, we have better alternatives. We don't need the LMS for giving access, or storing content. There are plenty of web technologies that do that. What we need is a simple (yes, simple!) mechanism to store and retrieve specific learning information. I find the 'actor', 'verb', 'object' mechanism a simple and powerful one. It reduces the LMS in their own words to a 'Learning Record Store'.
So what would you store in such a record store? Sure, information like scores and completion. But also the satisfaction ratings for the Kirkpatrick fans amongst you. Or how about storing the fact someone applied a particular 'thing'. Or how about storing and retrieving learning preferences and adapting the content accordingly? A whole new range of possibilities is at reach... Now we only wait for the standards to become finalised, and worked out in APIs like this draft document suggests.

I have some additional suggestions:

Could we make this a distributed system, where people can select their 'store' of preference? I hate one entity to store or even own all my learning data. I own that! I want to be able to select which one gets to store what, and I want to be able to export and import that information. For example, I would like to get my learning records out of my current employer and move it to my next one...
Maybe we can combine it with the technology of microformats or other graph metadata that allows whatever piece of web content out there to self-identify as learning.
Let us focus on the value for the learner instead of those of the training or education entity: it will allow to bookmark learning, store learning preferences, get self-quantified metrics on your learning, see who liked or used some of your content, see what our friends learned and how (if they give us permission to see that), etc.

Other interesting reads this month include:

He died. Here is an interesting post (via Yorick) on Steve Jobs : a great leader but why?
Serious game classification and inventory (via Ralph). Search the serious games taxonomy.

[mooc] scarcity in a pedagogy of abundance

2011-10-04T13:23:00.000+02:00

I stumbled upon the chapter 'a pedagogy of abundance'. As I'm an economist tattooed with 'scarcity' on my skin (you know, the optimal allocation of scare resources), I wanted to make a small comment.

First things first: I stumbled on the article because I'm lurking around the big year-long Change MOOC (Massive, Online, Open Course). Last week they discussed the book The Digital Scholar this chapter is a part of.

I do agree with the premise of the chapter that information, content and the access to it have gone from 'scarce' to 'abundant'. You can learn most topics from existing material, available for free. It's just there at your fingertips. We need some searching and sense making capabilities to unlock that abundance, and skills like critical thinking. (For a good list of 'what you really must learn' in a world of abundant information, check out Stephen Downes ebook 'free learning'.) In short, the abundance of content and information has changed the pedagogical and 'school business' models. I can agree with that.

But the economist in me rebels: there is still scarcity.

There is scarcity in human attention for one, the authors also note that.

More important for development and learning: there is scarcity in what matters most. While content, and democratically available education are more or less 'abundant', what about meaningful experiences to learn from? What about challenges that really will shape your skills? Are they equally abundant, are they equally accessible for all? We assume that once education has done its bit, there are sufficient work experiences to apply the job, and there are sufficient challenges to set our teeth in. For me, those are the pieces with the most scarcity left, and therefore more critical than ever.

If I compare it to the 70/20/10 model. we have abundance in the 10% formal learning but there's plenty of scarcity left in the 70% learning through (reflecting on) own experience.

[reflection] Is Balance the New... ?

2011-10-01T10:47:00.000+02:00

Like anyone I hold my share of beliefs and values. For one, I'm a fan of rationality. That is the western heritage from the Renaissance times that speaks to me: logic, reasoning, objective deduction. I equally value the concepts of harmony and balance. That probably comes more from the East and ancient old wisdom of Confucius et al. [Sidenote: when I see the skyline of Shanghai and the economic boom in Asia I sometimes wonder if they have forgotten the concept of balance themselves ... ] Anyway, over the last weeks some readings have reinforced my beliefs in balance, so I wanted to share that with you.

Is balance the new growth model?

This article on the Harvard Business Review "CEOs need a new set of beliefs" illustrates the growing belief in corporate circles that the short term focus on shareholder value needs to be balanced with the long term expectations of various stakeholders. Yes, the old 'shareholder vs stakeholder' debate is back from never leaving. I have never been a die hard fan of the shareholder model and in Europe it was never as sharp as in the USA - as if shareholders actually own the company... They do not. They own a piece of paper (at best- it is mostly virtual paper) that states they invested in a company and are therefore entitled to equal and correct information to base their investment decision on. That's it. That's the deal. Now the financial markets seem to suffer from manic depressive illness, companies of the knowledge economy do not rely as much on capital as their prime 'production factor', and other stakeholders have raised their voices. Customers got more voice and power because of the social web, NGOs protest and propose alternatives at every single G20 summit, workers are more self-steering and value purpose over pay, etc. Leaders allover feel they are 'stuck in the middle', doing a balancing act on the sometimes conflicting interests of many stakeholders. But in the end, will that balancing act not get us the new growth and sustainability we look for?

Is balance the new development goal?

As this is a blog on competence development rather than on economic tendenses, allow me to relate balance to our development goals by referring to the article "Great Leaders double profits and customer satisfaction" in Training Magazine. You can read the article as the business case for leadership (hint: you don't need to be the CEO to take part in it) and you can read the article from a learning perspective. It quotes a study by Zenger Folkman on the impact of 'poor' and 'best' leaders. But the researchers also looked at the strenghts and weakenesses that made you 'poor' or 'best'. Turns out that - and I quote-

The data revealed that 100 percent of the worst leaders had two or more fatal flaws—that is, a competency at the 10th percentile.
The key factor differentiating great leaders from their average or poor counterparts was the possession of a few profound strengths. In fact, 100 percent of the “great” leaders had several profound strengths—or an ability rated at the 90th percentile through a 360-degree feedback assessment. It was not the absence of weakness that was essential to their success; it was the presence of profound strengths.
We found some “great leaders” who were not rated highly in technical expertise, problem solving, innovation, communication, and/or championing change. In other words, great leaders are not perfect, but they do have a few profound strengths.

I'm going to make the strong assumption that the above holds for competency domains other than leading too. My interpretation of the article is as follows: you are 'good' when you are balanced. That means no very strong or very weak skills. But the deviation from the balance will determine if you are poor or great. A few terrible flaws will mark your performance down. A few great strenghts will make you stand out.
Also on the individual skill level, there is such a thing as too much. In leadership frameworks such as Lominger, overuse of a skill leads to derailment. So should the new development goal be balance with a few extras?

Is balance the new work team?

Individual competence development is all very nice, but really, what can you know and achieve on your own these days? Balance is also the key success factor when I read about the very popular Belbin study and team role type classification. In her 1970s research she found that teams work if they have a balance amongst their team members. To quote the Belbin site:

the research revealed that the difference between success and failure for a team was not dependent on factors such as intellect, but more on behaviour. The research team began to identify separate clusters of behaviour, each of which formed distinct team contributions or “Team Roles”.
Whilst some Team Roles were more “high profile” and some team members shouted more loudly than others, each of the behaviours was essential in getting the team successfully from start to finish. The key was balance.

So is a balanced team the new work team?

[review] Handbook of Leadership Development

2011-09-21T10:09:00.001+02:00

I wanted to share some of my 'processing' of the Handbook of Leadership Development. It's the 'bible' for leadership development, according to the Centre for Creative Leadership. The book is split in three parts: an introduction covering the basics, chapters on leader development (=the individual) and chapters on leadership (=collective capability) development.

I'm reading this book (and many others on leadership development) for a reason. In about 4 weeks time, I'll join CCL. Giving that little fact I'm not going to write a review on it, but leave you with two reviews I found on the Internet. The first one is from the social reading site goodreads.com:

This book reads like promotional material for the Center for Creative Leadership. I do not recommend it for classroom use.

The other one from Amazon (I've shortened it):

...This book is packed with ideas and CCL has had no reservation on keeping this knowledge to them only. You will get that Aha almost every page you read. Chapters 1 on Leader Development Systems, 2 on Learning from Experience alone are worth buying the book. There is plenty of solid ideas for leader development in the remaining chapters such as Feedback Intensive Programs, Leadership Coaching, Leader Development and Social Identity. ...

Both reviews are correct. The handbook is not a listing of leadership schools of thought, it is CCL's personal approach on the matter based on their own research for most part. I did find a lot of ideas corresponding with my own as written in Homo Competens. (Shouldn't be a surprise, right?) : intensive feedback, reflecting on experience, challenges that develop you outside your comfort zone, self-driven, etc.

From individual to collective to what?

In the introduction CCL describes its very 'western' path of starting with research on individual leader development in the 70ies, slowly opening that up to the concept of 'collective' leadership in an organisation. So I wondered what's next in this evolution?

Individual leader
Organisational leadership capability
.... next?

The logical answer to that is : step up again and open up the notion of leadership to a collection of organisations, eg leading an industry.
But I'd even break that concept further open and go for : leadership in networks of connected peers. Yeah, I said it. I'm a believer in networks of connected peers as the agile network age has shifted importance away from hierarchy to collaborating workers. How do those networks set directions and commit to them? I believe especially in entrepreneurial circles we can get a good view on that, and there's Social Network Analysis as a tool to shed light on this matter.

There is no magic formula, so here is one

I've blogged before on the many views on leader(ship). Libraries are filled with books on leadership, and their authors travel the keynote speaker scene. On top of that many companies have their own leadership competency frameworks. That should be sufficient proof there is no holy grail here, there is no magic formula, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe.

Yet, I tried to reformulate the introduction chapter as a set of mathematical equations. Why? Not because I aim to find a magic formula, but because mathematics is an excellent language to express the relationships between elements and results.

My mathematical translation of the introduction chapter would go as follows:

Axioma 1: "We believe all people can learn and grow in ways that make them more effective in the various leadership roles and processes they take on."

Axioma 2: "There is no one best way to develop leaders"

LeaderDevelopment = SUM(assessment + challenge + support) * LearningAbility * LeadershipContext

LeadershipDevelopment > SUM (LeaderDevelopment)

LeadershipDevelopment = Direction + Alignment + Commitment

Axioma 1 says two things: you can develop it (vs the notion it is a born ability and you either have it or you don't), and all people might benefit from it, not just the 'boss'.
Axioma 2 states the lack of a one-size-fits-all answer, underlying the context sensitive nature.
LeaderDevelopment is about personal development. It comes by a multitude of developmental experiences. Not all experiences are equally developmental, they need elements of assessment, challenge and support for optimal impact. That impact is also a factor of your own learning ability and the surrounding context.
Leadership is the collective, organisational ability and greater than the sum of its parts. The result of leadership is direction and alignment and commitment in the organisation.

BTW, what is your favorite experience, quote, speaker or book on leadership?

[leading] Angles on leadership

2011-09-14T18:43:00.001+02:00

I've started my own 'deep dive' into leadership development a while ago. As part of that, I went back to the basics: the definition and the various schools of thought around "leading".

On Wikipedia, leadership reads as:

“process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task"

In its essence, leadership is a social skill so it should come as no surprise the whole scala of human behavior and emotion is entangled within the concept. But more than that, the Wikipedia article strikes me as poor and confusing. I'm a fan of the online encyclopedia as I usually find to the point information there; but this article didn't live up to my expectations. The concept of 'leadership' however is an important one, with lots of research on it, a heavy impact on people, its share of self-proclaimed gurus and fashion of the day, etc. Because it is such an eye catching term that has no magic formula, there are many schools of thought and perceptions on leaders, leadership and leadership development. Maybe that is why the article is going in all kinds of directions.
The scary thing is that the common view on leadership is a very narrow one, stereotypical even, and by consequence not very popular. Leadership seems to have become synonymous for '1 superstar leader' who tells 'the followers' what they have to do -even what they have to think- and who get all the credit (and money). As Jay pointed out before: just look at what a simple Google Image Search on the word leadership gets you. There's no picture of people with long, interwined arms that point in the same direction or anything like that. And as the keynote speaker on last night's meet&greet pointed out: probably for too long we have only focused and put our money on the top level of the company. Ask a lot of employees what they think of 'leadership', and you'll get a variation on the following:

There is work to be done!

Anyway, Ralph pointed me to this overview series of schools of thought on leadership, and I created this 'overly simplistic overview of 10 leadership schools of thought' based on it. Enjoy.

Overly simplistic overview of leadership schools of thought

View more presentations from Bert De Coutere

PS
On the quantified self experiment I can be short for now: it is very insightful, and would be even more so if only I logged my learning with a little more discipline. My learning pattern seems to be around 30 min a day, with a few 'stronger' days a week where it goes up to several hours.

[event] Rise of the competent people

2011-09-14T16:01:00.001+02:00

Yesterday I attended the yearly Kluwer Meet and Greet. (See also last year's post on Manon Ruijter's keynote.) They presented the results of the second Learning Indicator survey. I'm not going to tackle all the findings, I'm just going to pick out those numbers that are close to my heart. As you know, I'm a believer in the rise of peer networks of competent people that work in a fitting ecosystem. In short: power to the connected peers! So, do the Learning Indicator results point to the emerging self-reliant professional who takes his competence development in his own hands? Let's see:

88% of people say they are willing to take education; for managers this is even higher (94%)
72% of people also want to do that in their own time (excluding HR and managers this drops to 62%)
Equally 72% claims they are willing to pay from their own pocket for their training when their employer won't (again, this drops to 63% excluding managers and HR respondents). They are on average willing to pay up to 250 euro out of their own pocket.
People are most interested in developing personal skills (36%), software skills (28%), communication skills (26%)
Employees prefer to learn from and also get the most from (1) colleagues, (2) classroom training, (3) domain specific sources (eg books, magazines, etc)
68% thinks the initiative to learn should come from themselves (as opposed from HR or the manager - by the way HR folks think it is firstly the manager who decides on learning)
44% says they share their knowledge with others
The study concludes the willingness to learn is great among employees in this part of the world

In one of the breakout sessions I attended a presentation on how the TriFinance company creates and cultivates an environment for people to grow. Earlier I blogged on the "HoCo friendly" environment at the ministry of social affairs. Now I have an example in the private sector, and more specifically in a the financial sector; not exactly known for its progressive views on HR. TriFinance created a company that believes their growth will result automatically from the growth of their people, and that collective thinking results in collective creativity. They see themselves as a 'career hub' that people join and later leave at some point in their career. A very intriguing presentation indeed.