This year, I wanted to be a bit more thorough and we made some changes to the process. So I asked a member of our Editorial team, the wonderful Jess Adair, to summarise what we did. This will give you an idea of what was involved and might help if you want to carry out a similar activity in your own organisation as part of a learning needs analysis.

You’ll find the results and some analysis at the end of the post, but how we got there is just as important as what we found.

Over to Jess …

How we analysed the search data

Our first stop was to use our analytics package to generate a list of all the individual terms our users searched for in 2010 and 2011 [1]. We knew, however, that this alone would only go some way to tell us which management topics were most popular with our users. Because the report returned every unique term our users searched for, the list generated was, unsurprisingly, extremely long and with a good deal of overlap between some terms (e.g. ‘change management’, ‘change’ and ‘Change Management’ were all listed separately [2]).

Faced with such a long list, we needed to decide on a sensible cut-off point for our analysis; we knew that looking at every single search term, including the thousands that had only been searched for on one occasion, would not be particularly helpful. We noticed that after a certain point in both the 2010 and 2011 lists, the numbers of ‘unique’ searches dropped off quite dramatically. With this in mind, and given that many subsequent search terms were actually synonyms of the more popular words and phrases, we decided to restrict our analysis to identify the30 most searched for terms in 2010 and 2011.

Our next job was to develop a method for identifying all of the synonyms for each of the search terms we wanted to analyse. To do that, we took the following systematic approach:

1. Identify a key word for each of the search terms (for example, ‘time’ in ‘time management) and search for other iterations of this in each list. In 2010, ‘Time Management’, ‘time management model’ and ‘Time management’ were all popular terms (depending on what analytics package you use, the search terms might be case sensitive), along with ‘time management’, which appeared at the top of the original list.

2. Disregard any results that aren’t relevant to the management concept to which the original search term refers. For example, ‘time sheet’ appeared in the results for ‘time’, but was not included because it does not directly relate to ‘time management’.

3. Look for other words and phrases that relate to the original search term. For time management, we looked for phrases such as ‘workload’ and ‘deadlines’. As before, we disregarded any results that weren’t relevant, and included those that were.

4. Record the total number of synonyms and add this figure to the number of searches for the original search term to create an aggregated total for each of the first top search terms.

5. ‘Rinse and repeat’ to generate an aggregated total for each of the search terms displayed in the original analytics reports.

So what impact did all this have on our results? Quite a substantial one! An initial review of the data would suggest that ‘time management’ was the most searched-for term in 2010. However, after taking all the synonyms into account, change management shot to the top of the list, with almost twice as many synonymous searches as there were for the term itself. The results took a similar twist in 2011, with leadership – originally the tenth most search for term – soaring to the top spot after we counted its synonyms.

Undertaking this exercise has given us a much clearer picture of the topics that our users were really searching for in 2010 and 2011 – you can see what this looks like in the two lists below (those who are more visual can feast your eyes on the Wordle images we produced at the end of the post [3]). But what else do these results tell us about the day-to-day learning needs of leaders and managers?

Owen will carry on the story …

The truth is sometimes a bit boring!

It may seem a little boring, but the most striking thing about the search analysis exercises we conduct is how little the results change from quarter to quarter, year to year. An interesting story would be how the financial crisis affected what managers were looking for support with, but the truth is that we’ve seen pretty consistent results over the years. Two key things have stayed the course:

1) Managers seek out content on the ‘basics’ more than any other kind of topic. Change, leadership, communication, coaching … they’re all the core components of what you’d expect to find in any management development programme. A question that arises from this is: if these are core subjects that are covered by management development programmes, why are managers looking for additional support with them so frequently?

2) The on-demand needs of managers are incredibly diverse. In both the use of our content, and the searches that managers make, we see an extreme example of ‘long tail’ demand. For example, in 2011 over a third of all searches across our products were terms that were completely unique i.e. they were only searched for once by one person. Over half of all searches were terms that were used three times or less. Even when you wrap up the synonyms, the content requirements are very broad. To show you just how extreme this ‘long tail’ demand is, this is a to-scale graph of the search term frequency:

What might this mean for you?

This information is available in your organisation. Every search term and every click on your intranet or LMS can be analysed to draw out hidden patterns and stories that can and should inform your strategy. All it takes is putting the request in to the right person and taking some time to do the analysis.

Although we see a similar picture across most organisations we work with, there is some variation. In a very few cases, this variation is significant. So, it would be wrong to look at our results and assume they automatically apply to your own organisation. However, they do provide a very strong indication that your organisation’s mangers are likely to have very similar needs to the ones highlighted in our results. There’s only one way to find out for sure …

[1] If you’re not sure how to do this, your IT department will be able to help you. It’s a five minute job, don’t let them tell you different! For those that are interested, we use both Google Analytics and server side logging to track usage. However, for the purposes of this exercise, Google Analytics was easier to use.

[2] The analytics service is case sensitive when it comes to search terms

[3] The wordle representations of the results, where the more frequent the search, the larger the word appears:

2010 results

2011 results

Measuring trends in organisational learning

For two years now, we’ve worked with INL Consultancy and Reed Learning to produce the Learning Trends Index; an attempt to track the general attitude and spending trends of those responsible for learning and development in the UK. Thanks to the talents and hard work of our research lead on this project, Stef Scott, we now have a useful historical record to examine longer term trends in the provision of learning in organisaions and are able to highlight some of these in the report along with all the data.

Learning Trends was originally inspired by the ASTD’s Learning Executives Confidence Index (LXCI) report, but focused on the UK market and with a slightly broader question base.

While the comparison with the equivalent questions from the US respondents is quite interesting in itself (you can find the latest LCXI report on their website), what’s really caught my eye is how consistently our respondents have highlighted technology based learning, informal learning and social media as key areas that they expect to grow.

Intent versus delivery

This makes perfect sense. The economy is tough and everyone is being asked to do more with less. Technology, in particular, has always been a way for society to get more done with less effort/resources. However, one interpretation of the results of the Learning Trends Index is that, whilst the desire is there, the reality is proving slower than anticipated.

For example, we’ve seen a consistent 30% or so of respondents say they expect to see a significant increase in technology based learning and around 50% report that they expect a minor increase. Those that expect to see a reduction barely even register.

But why has this number not changed over the last two years? Respondents are asked to state what they anticipate happening over the next six months, so for over two years we’ve seen consistent reporting that increases in the use of technology based learning solutions are just about to happen. For some, surely after two years of significant increases in technology based solutions, the use would be no different to the previous six months – that it would have become ‘business as usual’?

I suspect that what is happening is that many of those responsible for learning provision in their organisations see the need for change and want it to happen, but are perhaps a bit unrealistic about how quickly it might actually embed. After all, it’s a significant change which necessarily involves a steep learning curve for those in the learning function themselves.

However, that’s just one interpretation of one of the many trends we’re starting to see and one reason we. Indeed, that’s one reason why we and our partners wanted to start this report – to stimulate debate and discussion. So, please do go and download the report – it’s free – and let us know what resonates with you, what surprises you and what trends we might have missed.

Ah, statistics. If ever there was a topic guaranteed to turn off an audience, this would be among the favourites. But it’s important, so I’ll persevere since someone, somewhere, might find this little primer useful.

But before I go into the detail of the what and the why, it’s worth making two points about statistics. The first point is that statistics is the worst taught subject in the education system. This is simply because those teaching the subject have neither the aptitude nor the enthusiasm necessary. The second point is that statistics is the best tool we have to see the world for how it really is, rather than as the comforting, but false, picture that our brain paints for us.

As learning and development practitioners become more focused on performance, and identifying ways to improve performance, it follows that we are going to be working with performance data more often.

This presents some challenges and requires those working in L&D to develop their statistical knowledge and skills. We don’t need to be experts, but we do need to know the common pitfalls that people naturally fall into and the right questions to ask when we want to establish whether a workplace learning or performance intervention has had a real world impact, or if an intervention is even necessary.

Our internal error machine

Our intuitive reaction to some information is incredibly accurate, especially in those areas where we have genuine expertise. However, understanding the true nature of cause and effect, especially when presented in the form of numerical information is not one of those areas.

Science, and especially the medical profession, has developed tools to overcome our innate psychological problems in this area. Unfortunately, it’s mostly people who have received scientific or statistical training who are equipped with these tools; not the natural catchment for those working in L&D.

To someone who hasn’t gone through that kind of training, it can seem like the person who insists it’s necessary to find/use a control group, or that a larger sample is needed, is causing unnecessary additional work. And that’s quite simply because what makes sense to us intuitively is so powerful. What feels right in these areas is so often wrong that having a basic grounding in statistics can help prevent you from making mistakes and your organisation from wasting money.

Starting out

To start the ball rolling for anyone wanting to develop their statistical knowledge, I thought I’d put together a list of resources worth consulting. These aren’t dry textbooks, but blogs, articles and book chapters from engaging and passionate writers who can help get you started on the road to statistical confidence.

Nathan Green’s S Word is a series in the Guardian that aims to demystify the basic tools of statistics and explain how to use them: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/series/nathan-green-statistics.

Michael Blastland’s Go Figure column on the BBC’s News website takes news stories and explains how the reality is more complicated than what’s reported. It’s a brilliant way of introducing critical statistical thinking through familiar stories.

Several chapters in Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science use familiar medical examples to explain complex statistical concepts like ‘regression to the mean’ and ‘confounding variables’ in straightforward language. The following chapters are particularly valuable:

• Chapter 4: Homeopathy
• Chapter 8: ‘Pill Solves Complex Social Problem’
• Chapter 12: Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things
• Chapter 13: Bad Stats

Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow (which I will admit to being almost obsessively impressed with) covers ‘regression toward the mean’ and ‘the law of small numbers’ in an engaging and easy to understand way.

Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres gives real life examples of where data has been used to make predictions and improve business by overturning long-held beliefs. In it he covers the key techniques that can be used to interrogate data along with some key principles such as the dreaded standard deviation. By giving context to these concepts, he makes it easier to understand how they can be used in everyday business.

To help with what to focus on initially, concepts that you should understand in order to truly understand performance data are:

Statistical significance (p-values)

One of the most surprising lessons you learn when you start learning about the statistical nature of our world is just how many things can occur simply by chance. So many events that we think are remarkable, or ‘must mean something’ are simply the result of random variation. Significance is a way of determining how likely it is that an effect occurred simply by chance alone. Why is this important for us to understand? Well, let’s say that a sales training programme resulted in sales improving by 12%. Calculating the significance of that result will tell us how likely that increase is to have occurred simply through natural variation in sales performance.

Correlation (is not causation)

This is the most famous term to come out of statistics, and is simply a mantra against the most common mistake that people make when interpreting data, which is to assume that just because two things happen together, that one causes the other. It’s so easy to make that mistake, because it’s often true. But terrible mistakes can be made, and have been, by getting this wrong.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Literally meaning ‘after [this], therefore because of [this]’, post hoc ergo propter hoc describes the temptation to assume that just because an event (such as an improvement in sales performance) follows another event (such as the running of some form of sales training) that the second event occurred because of the first, rather than because of other explanations such as random variation or ‘regression to the mean’. Which brings us to …

Regression to the mean

Someone starts to perform very poorly. Their manager gives them a stern talking to and their performance improves again. The manager pats themself on the back for a job well done; their talking to did the trick. Right?

Regression to the mean is probably the most difficult concept to truly understand, but it’s important if performance data is to be understood properly.

The most famous example of regression to the mean is the so called ‘Sports Illustrated curse’, which suggests that sportswomen and men who appear on the cover of the magazine are jinxed in some way so that the run of great performance that led them to get on the cover mysteriously ends.

Sample sizes, confidence level and confidence interval

You want your evaluation results to be credible. So, if you have a learning solution that 1000 people participate in, how many people’s performance should you be measuring before and after the learning intervention so you can be confident in your results? Well, thankfully there are calculators out there for that, and understanding exactly what a survey or sample data is, and is not, telling you is an incredibly important skill to master.

The law of small numbers (or hasty generalisation)

The regions in which the sales penetration of a brewing company’s beer are highest are mostly rural, sparsely populated and located in traditionally Conservative voting counties in England. How would you explain this?

In the few seconds you thought about that you formulated hypotheses, rejected many of them and may well have settled on the explanation that perhaps the company’s brand plays better in rural areas than urban areas, or that there was no simple explanation for this based on the information given.

However, the key information is that the regions are sparsely populated, which means that random variation is more likely to throw up extreme results. Understanding the incredible impact that small samples in larger data sets can have is incredibly important in order to avoid drawing the wrong conclusions about the causes of excellent or poor performance.

The very best method for thoroughly analysing data ever

I left this to the end, almost as a reward if you made it this far! Reading the blogs, columns and books I’ve recommended and understanding the concepts I’ve highlighted is a good start. But there’s an incredibly valuable technique you can use to make sure you’ve truly understood what the data is telling you, whether that’s data you’re using as part of a performance analysis or the evaluation of a learning intervention: get help from someone who’s already got the skills.

You’ll find them in finance, business analysis, R&D, marketing or IT. Nearly all organisations have experts in analysing data who would be able to help out and make sure that you’re not missing anything obvious. Being from another area, they may also have an alternative viewpoint that could prove useful. Don’t be a martyr and struggle on with that Excel sheet for hours when a colleague in another department might be able to work out that tricky standard deviation in five minutes.

It’s important to note that all of these will highlight areas where there are performance needs. Whether the solution is some form of learning intervention or a change to some other part of the workplace performance ecology is the subject for a future post.

* Interview a cross-section of managers (including senior managers). It’s important to note that you should not be asking the managers what L&D interventions they think their staff need, but rather ask them about what they need to achieve in the coming year/quarter, what the key deliverables of their business plans are, what challenges they think they and their teams/departments might face, and what they personally have found to be the most challenging aspects of their jobs in the last three months. When you interview them, you should solicit real life examples rather than vague generalisations. Recording the meeting and making thorough notes afterwards will allow you to look for any trends across the business or in particular areas. [1]

* Survey a cross-section of all your (target) employees. To get some quantitative data, a survey is a very easy way to get useful information to feed into your analysis. As with the interviews, it’s critical that you don’t ask questions like “How useful would you find a course on presentation skills?” or “What training would help you to achieve your goals?” because you won’t get at what the genuine needs are. Rather ask about what’s challenging about their jobs now, and what they believe future challenges will be based on the future strategy. SurveyMonkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/) is a brilliant tool for collecting and analysing this type of information.

* Analyse the development plans of a sample of your target population. You don’t need to review all 1500 development plans, just a significant enough a sample to identify the key development requirements across the employee base. You can do this by textual analysis or even a simple tallying process. Again, look for trends and discount any plans that simply have ‘communication skills course’. You’re looking for what the real needs are, not what managers and employees think is the right solution. You’re the L&D expert.

* Review search terms on your LMS and/or intranet. Your IT department will definitely be able to get this information for you and it’s a rich source of information. Take a look at this video where the Head of Google Learning Labs describes what happened when they conducted a similar exercise (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ-bMbynst0 skip to around 15 minutes in). He and his team did an extensive traditional TNA and compared the top search terms on their learning portal against the top learning needs identified in their TNA – they matched exactly! I wouldn’t want to rely on the results of search terms on their own, but they’re definitely worth reviewing to see what they can tell you.

* Review business plans for the key areas in your organisation. You’ll get this information from the manager interviews, but it’s worth reviewing them to make sure that you (or they) haven’t missed anything.

* Review key business metrics and trends. Understanding where the organisation is failing to hit its key metrics can lead you to some hidden needs. If you work for a large organisation, the people responsible for producing the organisation’s annual report usually have this information to hand. Otherwise, you may need to get it from key departments individually. The kind of danger signals you’re looking for are things like:

• increased customer complaints
• increased absenteeism
• lower sales
• increased product defect rates
• increased staff turnover
• deteriorating financial indicators

You don’t have to do all of these if you’re pushed for time, but a training/learning/performance needs analysis should be thorough. It’s the basis of what you spend your budget on and you want to make sure that your budget is spent as effectively as possible.

[1] Alternatively, you may want to try running a few focus groups. This has the advantage of getting greater numbers, but there’s the danger you run into groupthink and, ultimately, I think interviewing is a better approach overall.

A few years ago now, Richard Wiseman conducted research into the key differences between resolutions that were kept and those that fell by the wayside. You can see a summary of his findings on his website, and get a fuller run down of the research and its findings in his book 59 Seconds [1].

What’s striking about his suggestions is how mundane they are; how lacking in the wow factor. There’s nothing in the list of actions you can take that makes you think “I’d never have thought that”. It’s all pragmatic, common sense stuff which is why a great many people will simply ignore it. It’s too much like hard work; too much effort is required; there’s no short cut.

It’s the long term that counts

At the same time this advice is being ignored, ‘detox’ diets will be all the rage. Now, don’t get me wrong, any diet that encourages you to eat more fruit and veg, and less red meat, dairy and fat is most likely a good thing. However, changing your diet for a week or even a month doesn’t make a difference. Most lifestyle changes only have a significant impact over a lifetime. Stopping smoking just for a month is pointless; stopping drinking for a month might make you feel better in the morning over that period but will make no overall difference to your general wellbeing; ditto for the gym. Long term changes are good. Short term changes simply make you feel psychologically better for a very short period of time.

Silver bullets vs hard work

These are just examples that real, lasting, positive change is usually hard work. That there are no silver bullets out there to magically improve things with little or no effort. Helping social learning take off requires effort on the part of dedicated users, changing the practice of managers in the workplace requires effort on the part of those same managers and those in the organisation who believe change is necessary.

However, there are ways to make it easier. Not easy, but easier. Being informed about what has worked for other people helps. Learning from your past mistakes helps (though you have to be wiling to admit to yourself that you’ve made them). Getting support from friends and colleagues helps.

Is that a negative viewpoint? I really don’t think so. I’m saying the most impactful approach you can take to any endeavour is to put in the effort and take a sensible approach, backed up by evidence where possible. Luck plays a role in almost everything, but you can tip the scales in your favour.

Happy New Year!

This year, I realised that I only had two books that I wanted to highlight and so I decided to tap into the expertise of the rest of the team at GoodPractice to find out what they would recommend.

Below, you’ll find our list of the best books on leadership, management and learning and development in 2011.

Adapt by Tim Harford

Every now and then, someone pulls together the strands of many different ideas and research across a wide range of disciplines to create something that makes you go ‘Of course! That’s so obvious!’ And that’s the trick, it’s only obvious after you’ve read it.

At the start of 2010, Dan Pink did that on the subject of motivation with his book Drive. This year, Tim Harford achieves the same feat with problem solving in his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. In Adapt, Harford describes how problems in complex systems are never solved by clever people coming up with the answer straight away, but through a natural process of trial, error and adaptation.

It’s a truly brilliant book that everyone who ever has to solve a complex problem should know about.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Along with his colleague Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman paved the way for a new understanding of human behaviour. Rather than thinking of people as rational machines, Kahneman and Tversky uncovered the foibles and frailty of human cognition that inform so much of our modern understanding of decision making, judgement, risk and behavioural economics.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is Kahneman’s summary of of how we think. It’s a tour de force, and understanding the contents is essential for anyone working in jobs that require an understanding of human behaviour. Luckily, it’s not a dense, technical read and I’ve seen no better description than in the Guardian’s review:

“It is an outstanding book, distinguished by beauty and clarity of detail, precision of presentation and gentleness of manner.”

Future Babble by Dan Gardner (recommended by Stef Scott, Editor)

In Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them Anyway, author Dan Gardner takes a critical look at the accuracy of so-called ‘expert’ predictions from across the fields of business, politics, environment and economics. He examines the psychology that explains why people are so compelled to believe and rely upon these predictions, even though they consistently fail.

The New Learning Architect by Clive Shepherd (recommended by James McLuckie, Learning Engagement Manager for Eden Tree)

With so many different learning theories and ideas already in existence, it’s often difficult to get excited about a new one. However, renowned learning designer Clive Shepherd provides a rich argument on behalf of the ‘new learning architect’ concept. Shepherd outlines how learning professionals are failing their clients and customers unless they design environments that allow learners to take advantage of all available opportunities for development, be it formal or informal, or online or offline. Profiles of some of the world’s top learning architects help make this a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking must read for anyone working in learning and development.

Nail It Then Scale It by Nathan Furr and Paul Ahistrom (recommended by Peter Casebow, Chief Executive)

This may not seem like an obvious inclusion, but there is a lot to learn from the evidence based approach suggested by the authors both for organisations and specialist areas such as Learning and Development. If you are looking to stimulate innovation or make sure you are delivering what your customers need then this is the book for you. It’s full of counter-intuitive wisdom.

A thought on external memory

I just wanted to share one other thought I had when I compiling this list. When I did this last year, I had to rack my brain to remember when I had read specific books. I asked myself whether I had read Drive in 2010 or before [1], and browse my bookshelves at home as well as the ones at work.

This year was different, because every book I’ve read has been on my Kindle, or consumed via Audible (the audiobook service from Amazon). I simply had to check through my history on those services to be reminded of the books I had read. It saved me time and was probably a much more accurate process. It was also a really nice way of reflecting on what I’ve learned over the year, because I read certain books at certain times, which came back to me as I was reviewing them online.

Anyway, those were some of our best reads of the year. What about you?

[1] Luckily that was easy to check because it wasn’t released until January 2010

It may not be shiny, but I’ve found the GTD methodology to work really well, and when we trained everyone in the business in the ideas and techniques many of the team said it was the most valuable and useful day’s training they had ever had. This, coming from experienced and capable managers (who suddenly found capacity and time to think released), was high praise.

However, GTD leaves it to the individual to decide on the best way to implement their system and this is where I continue to evolve my thinking. I notice in my GTD blog two years ago I was using Toodledo and as a Mac user I soon transferred to Omnifocus. Omnifocus is a fantastic way of maintaining a sophisticated to-do list that is constantly in sync, whether I’m on my iMac at home, iPad, iPhone or Macbook Air.

Studies of the Hands of Erasmus

With all the gadgets work tools I use, I’m drawn to make everything digital and in the cloud so that it is always available. So I also use Evernote as a means of storing ideas and notes, and I was starting to use DayOne as a journaling tool. Each application works well, and my main frustration is that I can’t quite sketch ideas on the iPad in the way I’d like to. So why do I still find I’m drawn back to my Cross Pen and Moleskin A5 notebook as a great way to take notes and sketch ideas? A Fast Company article may provide the answer; ‘The Pen is Mightier Than The Phone: A Case For Writing Things Out’, which reported a Forrester Research Survey of business professionals that found that 87% of them supplemented their use of gadgets with paper. Frankly, this doesn’t seem that surprising, but I was interested to read ‘By committing your thought to paper, you’re also doing more to lock it into place.’ Virginia Berninger, professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, has the brain scans to prove it. Berninger told the Wall Street Journal in Oct. 2010 that as your hand executes each stroke of each letter, it activates a much larger portion of the brain’s thinking, language, and “working memory” regions than typing, which whisks your attention along at a more letters-and-words pace.

A 2008 study, also cited in the Journal, asked adults to distinguish between characters in another language and their trick mirror images. Those who had a chance to write out the original characters with pen and paper had “stronger and longer-lasting recognition” of the proper orientation than those who found the character on a keyboard.

So perhaps that explains why I keep wanting to go back to my Moleskin notebook. I have started to sketch ideas out on paper and then add them to Evernote as a photo for easy reference later. A blended approach to learning?

After reading the Fast Company article on Monday night, I found Dan Gold’s e-book on using Evernote to simplify your GTD system and have everything in one place. Not surprisingly, I’m not using Evernote as effectively as I could be. So, I’m going to give it a go and try to simplify my GTD system to just my Calendar, Evernote and of course my Moleskin notebook.

The original McKinsey article [1] was written in 1997 and has since sparked a corporate focus on talent retention and talent management.

Ian, Bradley and Mark make a strong case that our current thinking about talent sets up the expectation and assumption that talent is only found in the few. If, as we often do, act on this assumption then we immediately ignore the potential of the majority. What a waste.

Source, Developing Leaders Issue 5 2011

As they say: ‘We are not short on talent; it is an inherent part of being human. What we lack is people who have a feel for the talents of others, the believers, the sensors, the inviters of talent and the designers of meaningful work that allow us to contribute our talents alongside the talents of others.’

Of course the writers are not the first to argue for the adoption of a more holistic approach, which recognises that everyone has talent that can be maximised and leveraged to create organisational competitive advantage.  For instance, alternatives to the McKinsey model include:

1. DeLong and Vijayaraghavan, who argue that the effective development of B and C players is just as important as looking after high potential A players. [2]
2. Jeffrey Bradach, who proposes a ‘just in time’ model of talent management, where organisations buy in talent on a short-term basis to fill gaps as when and where they arise.[3[
3. Pfeffer and O’Reilly, who say that organisations should focus on recruiting, retaining and developing internal talent at all levels. [4]

Organisations have many choices to make when it comes to talent management and there are no easy answers or magic formula. However, meeting this challenge does present a great opportunity for organisational leaders, line managers, HR, Learning and OD practitioners to work together on talent management.

As long as nobody ever again mentions “the war for talent”!

p.s. Why do I hear the voice of Basil Faulty,  “Listen, don’t mention the war! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.”

References

[1[ Chambers et al, ‘The War for Talent’, The McKinsey Quarterly, No 3 (1997) pp 44-57.

[2] Thomas DeLong and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan ‘Let’s Hear It For B Players’, Harvard Business Review (June, 2003), pp 96–102.

[3] J L Bradach, ‘Flexibility: The New Social Contract between Individuals and Firms’, Harvard Business School Working Paper(June 1997)

[4] J Pfeffer and C O’Reilly, Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People (Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

This is what he came up with and it’s worth ten minutes of your time to watch Nigel place learning at the heart of the 21st century organisation, but only if it is focused on behaviours.

He argues, this will lead to an explosion of learning that will have a profound impact on productivity and organisational performance. I couldn’t agree more.

My reason for wanting to lose more than a stone is that I do a lot of mountaineering and, at my age, anything I can do to help my knees is a good thing. Mountaineering also teaches you about the importance of progress. When you are on a steep slope that seems to go on forever, the most important thing is to keep aiming for small goals and taking the next step. Don’t look at the big mountain ahead of you (the size and steepness can seem overwhelming) but rather find the next small goal and get there. If you’ve climbed any sort of hill, you’ll know when you look back down it always seems incredible how far you’ve come.

The Progress Principle

The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer is an important book that outlines the significance of managers helping their team find the small areas of progress every day and the importance this brings to working life.

It’s based on the diary entries of 12,000 participants in a study and according to the ‘progress principle’ of all the events that can keep people engaged and happy at work, the most important is simply making meaningful progress. The progress doesn’t have to be big; even small levels of progress have a positive effect.

The flip side is, of course, that a perceived lack of progress, or being stalled at work, stymies creativity and innovation, and reduces wellbeing.

Today, with ongoing financial uncertainty and change being a constant, one of the ways a leader can make a really positive difference is to help employees see the progress being made and value the small steps. Achieving major goals and visions (the equivalent of reaching the mountain top) are rare and so helping people achieve small wins every day is vital.

Of course, there will always be problems along the way and Amabile and Krammer suggest three ways to turn setbacks into progress:

1. Don’t treat setbacks as failures, but rather as challenges and learning opportunities.
2. Don’t constrain the solution in advance. Be open to learning and changing direction.
3. Focus on the small achievable wins.

As leaders and managers we need to know what the big goals are, but everyday we also need to help our teams see and feel that the hard slog up the hillside is a small step forward. If we don’t, we miss the most important opportunity we have to inspire and get the best from them.

A small positive win for me today was stepping on the scales and finding I’m the lightest I’ve been for a decade. Much more to do, but another small win and yes, it does feel good.