Tag: learning

psychology

The Developmental Psychology of Organizations

on January 17, 2019
Organizations start change somewhere

Every living thing has a journey that starts somewhere and ends eventually. Our ability to see this, understand it, and apply what we know about how humans grow and develop (as individuals and organizations) is what helps us determine how this journey unfolds and where it ends up.

The psychology of individuals is a complicated affair that involves understanding a variety of matters from personal and family history, genetics, cultural context, education, and social situating. While all of these contribute to who we are as people, the degree of influence and mix is different from person to person. It means that we are all a product of a collection of forces that combine together in various ways that make understanding how we change a challenge because of this holistic complexity.

For example, some of us might have behaviours and preferences associated with a certain personality type (extroverted and introverted) and find that quality to be relatively stable across the lifespan. While there are times we might exhibit qualities of another type, those are more situational than stable. For those who are more of an ambivert, identification with a particular preference might be more challenging. Whatever investment you place in this kind of personality assessment, what is important is that the stability and consistency of certain characteristics are what largely shapes our identity to others (and ourselves). It’s what makes us ‘us’.

From Individuals to Organizations

It has been argued that organizations exhibit much of the same kind of characteristic habits on their own while providing an aggregation of the characteristics of those within them and leading them to various degrees. Personality theory has been applied to organizational behaviour as a means of understanding how it is that certain actions, activities, habits, and patterns form from within organizations and their implications. This involves taking ideas developed for individuals and applying them to groups and the implications of this are considerable.

If we are to consider organizations similar to humans seriously, it can have significant implications for the way in which we engage in organizational change efforts. Much of the research on organizational change is tied to the development and implementation of a strategy. Strategy, in most conventional applications, is an expression of intent manifest through specific choices of focus and action. This approach rests largely on a cognitive rational model of change (pdf) where information (e.g., data, ‘facts’, perceptions, beliefs, and opinion) guides an assessment of the situation that forms the basis for a plan of action. The idea is that we see and learn things and plan and act according to that knowledge.

Most individual behaviour change models are founded on this approach that has thinking preceding action in a relatively rational, logical manner based on an objective assessment of the facts and evidence (with some emotional contributions here and there to make life interesting). So if we tie organizational change to the similar kind of mechanisms and models that we use to understand individuals, should we not apply similar modes of change facilitation? We do — but its how we do it that might be the problem.

Change Theory to Change Reality

One of the most vexing (and little discussed) issues for behavioural scientists is that the application of the cognitive rational model to personal, organizational, and social change has a rather unimpressive track record. A look at how people change finds that relatively little change comes from rationally reviewing a threat or opportunity and planning out a strategy (nevermind executing the planned strategy as envisioned). Even when the effects are modest, factors such as the match between the person, technique or intervention approach, and the problem being addressed continues to mediate the outcomes.

What happens when our theories and our practices don’t really work? Or at least don’t work as well as we think they do?

The answer — using the very argument that we are looking to disprove — is that we will address the matter as many individuals might: disagreement, resistance, and denial.

The field of organizational decision-making and innovation is littered with case studies that show how, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, organizations (like many individuals) resist change. Whether it was the speed at which those on the Titanic accepted the fact that their ship would sink after hitting the iceberg (nevermind the perception that the ship was invulnerable, to begin with) or companies who persist with a strategy that doesn’t match with changing times (e.g., Kodak and it’s photographic film business, Sears and its retail model), the inability to see, unwillingness to perceive or accept changing situations has led to major problems.

These problems are a matter of failing to change or adapt. To quote from The Leopard:

If want things to stay as they are, things will have to change

Change is something we need to do even if that is simply to maintain the status quo.

Person-Centred Organizational Change

Erik Eriksen, the Austrian-American psychoanalyst whose work focused on identity formation and development, was among the few to challenge the belief that people’s essential character was immutable and resistant to change. (The dominant view was that thinking and behaviour could change, but not ‘how one was’ as a person). He did, however, acknowledge that our ability to change who we are was not easy and takes a lifetime. This flies in the face of the dominant thinking in Western societies that we can make dramatic changes in an instant.

While talk-shows and popular self-books are filled with stories of dramatic transformation and inspiration about how you can change everything in an instant, the truth is that these cases are outliers (and often exaggerations) or misrepresentations. Much like the artist who ‘breaks out’ and becomes an ‘overnight sensation’ the journey to stardom is usually a long one that follows a Pareto distribution (that is a long, slow climb over time followed by very quick punctuation at the end). What is misread into these success stories is that the rapid change is a factor of a long, protracted build-up.

While there are some things that do follow this pattern much change is also linear and progressive. We see this in the work of another Ericsson: Anders Ericsson. His work is widely cited (and mis-cited) as being behind the ‘10,000 Hour Rule’ that suggests that expertise — a change from an unskilled novice to a skilled expert — is developed over that much time of practice. While the time itself is important, what is often missed in the citation of this work is that the key is on deliberative practice (pdf), which makes all the difference.

If we extrapolate from the work of both Eriksen/Ericsson’s we might develop a model of behaviour change that looks quite different than we have at present. Instead of trying 5-year plans, strategic goals, and inspirational visions of the future, we might be better off delving into an organization’s past, it’s formation, it’s core beliefs and personality, and spend more time looking at what it is already doing than what it seeks to do.

Developmental Organizations

We might then find what it seeks to deliberate on day-in-and-out and emphasize the ways in which to amplify the feedback that helps people learn deliberately and consistently. We might take these lessons — much like those small, tiny adjustments that expert violinists, athletes, and surgeons make to hone their craft — and make them visible and build on them. We would look upon organizations as developing organizations using approaches that fit with them developmentally (e.g., developmental evaluation). We would treat organizations like we would people.

Which is kind of funny because organizations are made of people. That’s some change.

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash

education & learningevaluation

Learning: The Innovators’ Guaranteed Outcome

on November 22, 2018

Innovation involves bringing something new into the world and that often means a lot of uncertainty with respect to outcomes. Learning is the one outcome that any innovation initiative can promise if the right conditions are put into place. 

Innovation — the act of doing something new to produce value — in human systems is wrought with complications from the standpoint of evaluation given that the outcomes are not always certain, the processes aren’t standardized (or even set), and the relationship between the two are often in an ongoing state of flux. And yet, evaluation is of enormous importance to innovators looking to maximize benefit, minimize harm, and seek solutions that can potentially scale beyond their local implementation. 

Non-profits and social innovators are particularly vexed by evaluation because there is an often unfair expectation that their products, services, and programs make a substantial change to social issues such as poverty, hunger, employment, chronic disease, and the environment (to name a few). These are issues that are large, complex, and for which no actor has complete ownership or control over, yet require some form of action, individually and collectively. 

What is an organization to do or expect? What can they promise to funders, partners, and their stakeholders? Apart from what might be behavioural or organizational outcomes, the one outcome that an innovator can guarantee — if they manage themselves right — is learning. 

Learning as an Outcome

For learning to take place, there need to be a few things included in any innovation plan. The first is that there needs to be some form of data capture of the activities that are undertaken in the design of the innovation. This is often the first hurdle that many organizations face because designers are notoriously bad at showing their work. Innovators (designers) need to capture what they do and what they produce along the way. This might include false starts, stops, ‘failures’, and half-successes, which are all part of the innovation process. Documenting what happens between idea and creation is critical.

Secondly, there needs to be some mechanism to attribute activities and actions to indicators of progress. Change only can be detected in relation to something else so, in the process of innovation, we need to be able to compare events, processes, activities, and products at different stages. Some of the selection of these indicators might be arbitrary at first, but as time moves along it becomes easier to know whether things like a stop or start are really just ‘pauses’ or whether they really are pivots or changes in direction. 

Learning as organization

Andrew Taylor and Ben Liadsky from Taylor Newberry Consulting recently wrote a great piece on the American Evaluation Association’s AEA 365 blog outlining a simple approach to asking questions about learning outcomes. Writing about their experience working with non-profits and grantmakers, they comment on how evaluation and learning require creating a culture that supports the two in tandem:

Given that organizational culture is the soil into which evaluators hope to plant seeds, it may be important for us to develop a deeper understanding of how learning culture works and what can be done to cultivate it.

What Andrew and Ben speak of is the need to create the environment for which learning can occur at the start. Some of that is stirred by asking some critical questions as they point out in their article. These include identifying whether there are goals for learning in the organization and what kind of time and resources are invested to regularly gathering people together to talk about the work that is done. This is the third big part of evaluating for learning: create the culture for it to thrive. 

Creating Consciousness

It’s often said that learning is a natural as breathing, but if that were true much more would be gained from innovation than there is. Just like breathing, learning can take place passively and can be manipulated or controlled. In both cases, there is a need to create a consciousness around what ‘lessons’ abound. 

Evaluation serves to make the unconscious, conscious. By paying attention — being mindful — of what is taking place and linking that to innovation at the level of the organization (not just the individual) evaluation can be a powerful tool to aid the process of taking new ideas forward. While we cannot always guarantee that a new idea will transform a problem into a solution, we can ensure that we learn in our effort to make change happen. 

The benefit of learning is that it can scale. Many innovations can’t, but learning is something that can readily be added to, built on, and transforms the learner. In many ways, learning is the ultimate outcome. So next time you look to undertake an innovation, make sure to evaluate it and build in the kind of questions that help ensure that, no matter what the risks are, you can assure yourself a positive outcome. 

Image Credit: Rachel on Unsplash

education & learningevaluation

The Quality Conundrum in Evaluation

on November 16, 2018

lex-sirikiat-469013-unsplash

One of the central pillars of evaluation is assessing the quality of something, often described as its merit. Along with worth (value) and significance (importance), assessing the merit of a program, product or service is one of the principal areas that evaluators focus their energy.

However, if you think that would be something that’s relatively simple to do, you would be wrong.

This was brought home clearly in a discussion I took part in as part of a session on quality and evaluation at the recent conference of the American Evaluation Association entitled: Who decides if it’s good? How? Balancing rigor, relevance, and power when measuring program quality. The conversation session was hosted by Madeline Brandt and Kim Leonard from the Oregon Community Foundation, who presented on some of their work in evaluating quality within the school system in that state.

In describing the context of their work in schools, I was struck by some of the situational variables that came into play such as high staff turnover (and a resulting shortage among those staff that remain) and the decision to operate some schools on a four-day workweek instead of five as a means of addressing shortfalls in funding. I’ve since learned that Oregon is not alone in adopting the 4-day school week; many states have begun experimenting with it to curb costs. The argument is, presumably, that schools can and must do more with less time.

This means that students are receiving up to one fifth less classroom time each week, yet expecting to perform at the same level as those with five days. What does that mean for quality? Like much of evaluation work, it all depends on the context.

Quality in context

The United States has a long history of standardized testing, which was instituted partly as a means of ensuring quality in education. The thinking was that, with such diversity in schools, school types, and populations there needed to be some means to compare the capabilities and achievement across these contexts. A standardized test was presumed to serve as a means of assessing these attributes by creating a benchmark (standard) to which student performance could be measured and compared.

While there is a certain logic to this, standardized testing has a series of flaws embedded in its core assumptions about how education works. For starters, it assumes a standard curriculum and model of instruction that is largely one-size-fits-all. Anyone who has been in a classroom knows this is simply not realistic or appropriate. Teachers may teach the same material, but the manner in which it is introduced and engaged with is meant to reflect the state of the classroom — it’s students, physical space, availability of materials, and place within the curriculum (among others).

If we put aside the ridiculous assumption that all students are alike in their ability and preparedness to learn each day for a minute and just focus on the classroom itself, we already see the problem with evaluating quality by looking back at the 4-day school week. Four-day weeks mean either that teachers are creating short-cuts in how they introduce subjects and are not teaching all of the material they have or they are teaching the same material in a compressed amount of time, giving students less opportunity to ask questions and engage with the content. This means the intervention (i.e., classroom instruction) is not consistent across settings and thus, how could one expect things like standardized tests to reflect a common attribute? What quality education means in this context is different than others.

And that’s just the variable of time. Consider the teachers themselves. If we have high staff turnover, it is likely an indicator that there are some fundamental problems with the job. It may be low pay, poor working conditions, unreasonable demands, insufficient support or recognition, or little opportunity for advancement to name a few. How motivated, supported, or prepared do you think these teachers are?

With all due respect to those teachers, they may be incompetent to facilitate high-quality education in this kind of classroom environment. By incompetent, I mean not being prepared to manage compressed schedules, lack of classroom resources, demands from standardized tests (and parents), high student-teacher ratios, individual student learning needs, plus fitting in the other social activities that teachers participate in around school such as clubs, sports, and the arts. Probably no teachers have the competency for that. Those teachers — at least the ones that don’t quit their job — do what they can with what they have.

Context in Quality

This situation then demands new thinking about what quality means in the context of teaching. Is a high-quality teaching performance one where teachers are better able to adapt, respond to the changes, and manage to simply get through the material without losing their students? It might be.

Exemplary teaching in the context of depleted or scarce resources (time, funding, materials, attention) might look far different than if conducted under conditions of plenty. The learning outcomes might also be considerably different, too. So the link between the quality of teaching and learning outcomes is highly dependent on many contextual variables that, if we fail to account for them, will misattribute causes and effects.

What does this mean for quality? Is it an objective standard or a negotiated, relative one? Can it be both?

This is the conundrum that we face when evaluating something like the education system and its outcomes. Are we ‘lowering the bar’ for our students and society by recognizing outstanding effort in the face of unreasonable constraints or showing quality can exist in even the most challenging of conditions? We risk accepting something that under many conditions is unacceptable with one definition and blaming others for outcomes they can’t possibly achieve with the other.

From the perspective of standardized tests, the entire system is flawed to the point where the measurement is designed to capture outcomes that schools aren’t equipped to generate (even if one assumes that standardized tests measure the ‘right’ things in the ‘right’ way, which is another argument for another day).

Speaking truth to power

This years’ AEA conference theme was speaking truth to power and this situation provides a strong illustration of that. While evaluators may not be able to resolve this conundrum, what they can do is illuminate the issue through their work. By drawing attention to the standards of quality, their application, and the conditions that are associated with their realization in practice, not just theory, evaluation can serve to point to areas where there are injustices, unreasonable demands, and areas for improvement.

Rather than assert blame or unfairly label something as good or bad, evaluation, when done with an eye to speaking truth to power, can play a role in fostering quality and promoting the kind of outcomes we desire, not just the ones we get. In this way, perhaps the real measure of quality is the degree to which our evaluations do this. That is a standard that, as a profession, we can live up to and that our clients — students, teachers, parents, and society — deserve.

Image credit:  Lex Sirikiat

behaviour changebusinessdesign thinking

How do we sit with time?

on May 16, 2018

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Organizational transformation efforts from culture change to developmental evaluation all depend on one ingredient that is rarely discussed: time. How do we sit with this and avoid the trap of aspiring for greatness while failing to give it the time necessary to make change a reality? 

Toolkits are a big hit with those looking to create change. In my years of work with organizations large and small supporting behaviour change, innovation, and community development there are few terms that light up people’s faces than hearing “toolkit”. Usually, that term is mentioned by someone other than me, but it doesn’t stop the palpable excitement at the prospect of having a set of tools that will solve a complex problem.

Toolkits work with simple problems. A hammer works well with nails. Drills are good at making holes. With enough tools and some expertise, you can build a house. Organizational development or social change is a complex challenge where tools don’t have the same the same linear effect. A tool — a facilitation technique, an assessment instrument, a visualization method — can support change-making, but the application and potential outcome of these tools will always be contextual.

Tools and time

My experience has been that people will go to great extents to acquire tools yet put little comparative effort to use them.  A body of psychological research has shown there are differences between goals, the implementation intentions behind them, and actual achievement of those goals. In other words: desiring change, planning and intending to make a change, and actually doing something are different.

Tools are proxies for this issue in many ways: having tools doesn’t mean they either get used or that they actually produce change. Anyone in the fitness industry knows that the numbers between those who try a workout, those who buy a membership to a club, and those who regularly show up to workout are quite different.

Or consider the Japanese term Tsundoku, which loosely translates into the act of acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them.

But tools are stand-ins for something far more important and powerful: time.

The pursuit of tools and their use is often hampered because organizations do not invest in the time to learn, appropriately apply, refine, and sense-make the products that come through these tools.

A (false) artifact of progress

Bookshelf

Consider the book buying or borrowing example above: we calculate the cost of the book when really we ought to price out the time required to read it. Or, in the case of practical non-fiction, the cost to read it and apply the lessons from it.

Yet, consider a shelf filled with books before you providing the appearance of having the knowledge contained within despite any evidence that its contents have been read. This is the same issue with tools: once acquired it’s easier to assume the work is largely done. I’ve seen this firsthand with people doing what the Buddhist phrase decries:

“Do not confuse the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself”

It’s the same confusion we see between having data or models and the reality they represent.

These things all represent artifacts of progress and a false equation. More books or data or better models do not equal more knowledge. But showing that you have more of something tangible is a seductive proxy. Time has no proxy; that’s the biggest problem.

Time just disappears, is spent, is used, or whatever metaphor you choose to use to express time. Time is about Kairos or Chronos, the sequence of moments or the moments themselves, but in either case, they bear no clear markers.

Creating time markers

There are some simple tricks to create the same accumulation effect in time-focused work — tools often used to support developmental evaluation and design. Innovation is as much about the process as it is the outcome when it comes to marking effort. The temptation is to focus on the products — the innovations themselves — and lose what was generated to get there. Here are some ways to change that.

  1. Timelines. Creating live (regular) recordings of what key activities are being engaged and connecting them together in a timeline is one way to show the journey from idea to innovation. It also provides a sober reminder of the effort and time required to go through the various design cycles toward generating a viable prototype.
  2. Evolutionary Staging. Document the prototypes created through photographs, video, or even showcasing versions (in the case of a service or policy where the visual element isn’t as prominent). This is akin to the March of Progress image used to show human evolution. By capturing these things and noting the time and timing of what is generated, you create an artifact that shows the time that was invested and what was produced from that investment. It’s a way to honour the effort put toward innovation.
  3. Quotas & Time Targets. I’m usually reluctant to prescribe a specific amount of time one should spend on reflection and innovation-related sensemaking, but it’s evident from the literature that goals, targets, and quotas work as effective motivators for some people. If you generate a realistic set of targets for thoughtful work, this can be something to aspire to and use to drive activity. By tracking the time invested in sensemaking, reflection, and design you better can account for what was done, but also create the marker that you can point to that makes time seem more tangible.

These are three ways to make time visible although it’s important to remember that the purpose isn’t to just accumulate time but to actually sit with it.

All the tricks and tools won’t bring the benefit of what time can offer to an organization willing to invest in it, mindfully. Except, perhaps, a clock.

Try these out with some simple tasks. Another is to treat time like any other resource: budget it. Set aside the time in a calendar by booking key reflective activities in just as you would anything else. To do this, and to keep to it, requires leadership and the organizational supports necessary to ensure that learning can take place. Consider what is keeping you from taking or making the time to learn, share those thoughts with your peers, and then consider how you might re-design what you do and how you do it to support that learning.

Take time for that, and you’re on your way to something better.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about how to do this practically, using data, and designing the conditions to support innovation, contact me. This is the kind of stuff that I do. 

 

 

 

 

 

complexityeducation & learningpsychologysystems thinking

Complex problems and social learning

on September 14, 2017

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Adaptation, evolution, innovation, and growth all require that we gain new knowledge and apply it to our circumstances, or learn. While much focus in education is on how individuals attend, process and integrate information to create knowledge, it is the social part of learning that may best determine whether we simply add information to our brains or truly learn. 

Organizations are scrambling to convert what they do and what they are exposed to into tangible value. In other words: learn. A 2016 report from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that “organizations spent an average of $1,252 per employee on training and development initiatives in 2015”, which works out to an average cost per learning hour of $82 based on an average of 33 hours spent in training programs per year. Learning and innovation are expensive.

The massive marketplace for seminars, keynote addresses, TED talks, conferences, and workshops points to a deep pool of opportunities for exposure to content, yet when we look past these events to where and how such learning is converted into changes at the organizational level we see far fewer examples.

Instead of building more educational offerings like seminars, webinars, retreats, and courses, what might happen if they devoted resources to creating cultures for learning to take place? Consider how often you may have been sent off to some learning event, perhaps taken in some workshops or seen an engaging keynote speaker, been momentarily inspired and then returned home to find that yourself no better off in the long run. The reason is that you have no system — time, resources, organizational support, social opportunities in which to discuss and process the new information — and thus, turn a potential learning opportunity into neural ephemera.

Or consider how you may have read an article on something interesting, relevant and important to what you do, only to find that you have no avenue to apply or explore it further. Where do the ideas go? Do they get logged in your head with all the other content that you’re exposed to every day from various sources, lost?

Technical vs. Social

My colleague and friend John Wenger recently wrote about what we need to learn, stating that our quest for technical knowledge to serve as learning might be missing a bigger point: what we need at this moment. Wenger suggests shifting our focus from mere knowledge to capability and states:

What is the #1 capability we should be learning?  Answer: the one (or ones) that WE most need; right now in our lives, taking account of what we already know and know how to do and our current situations in life.

Wenger argues that, while technical knowledge is necessary to improve our work, it’s our personal capabilities that require attention to be sufficient for learning to take hold. These capabilities are always contingent as we humans exist in situated lives and thus our learning must further be applied to what we, in our situation, require. It’s not about what the best practice is in the abstract, but what is best for us, now, at this moment. The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to is decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of what our situation is.

The usual ‘stuff’ we are exposed to under the guise of learning is so often decontextualized and presented to us without that sense of how, whether, or why it matters to us in our present situation.

To illustrate, I teach a course on program evaluation for public health students. No matter how many examples, references, anecdotes, or colourful illustrations I provide them, most of my students struggle to integrate what they are exposed to into anything substantive from a practical standpoint. At least, not at first. Without the ability to apply what they are learning, expose the method to the realities of a client, colleague, or context’s situation, they are left abstracting from the classroom to a hypothetical situation.

But, as Mike Tyson said so truthfully and brutally: “Every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

In a reflection on that quote years later, Tyson elaborated saying:

“Everybody has a plan until they get hit. Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.”

Tyson’s quote applies to much more than boxing and complements Wenger’s assertions around learning for capability. If you develop a plan knowing that it will fail the moment you get hit (and you know you’re going to get hit), then you learn for the capability to adapt. You build on another quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said:

“I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

Better social, better learning

Plans don’t exist in a vacuum, which is why they don’t always turn out. While sometimes a failed plan is due to poor planning, it is more likely due to complexity when dealing with human systems. Complexity requires learning strategies that are different than those typically employed in so many educational settings: social connection.

When information is technical, it may be simple or complicated, but it has a degree of linearity to it where one can connect different pieces together through logic and persistence to arrive a particular set of knowledge outcomes. Thus, didactic classroom learning or many online course modules that require reading, viewing or listening to a lesson work well to this effect. However, human systems require attention to changing conditions that are created largely in social situations. Thus, learning itself requires some form of ‘social’ to fully integrate information and to know what information is worth attending to in the first place. This is the kind of capabilities that Wenger was talking about.

My capabilities within my context may look very much like that of my colleagues, but the kind of relationships I have with others, the experiences I bring and the way I scaffold what I’ve learned in the past with what I require in the present is going to be completely different. The better organizations can create the social contexts for people to explore this, learn together, verify what they learn and apply it the more likely they can reap far greater benefits from the investment of time and money they spend on education.

Design for learning, not just education

We need a means to support learning and support the intentional integration of what we learn into what we do: it fails in bad systems.

It also means getting serious about learning, meaning we need to invest in it from a social, leadership and financial standpoint. Most importantly, we need to emotionally invest in it. Emotional investment is the kind of attractor that motivates people to act. It’s why we often attend to the small, yet insignificant, ‘goals’ of every day like responding to email or attending meetings at the expense of larger, substantial, yet long-term goals.

As an organization, you need to set yourself up to support learning. This means creating and encouraging social connections, time to dialogue and explore ideas, the organizational space to integrate, share and test out lessons learned from things like conferences or workshops (even if they may not be as useful as first thought), and to structurally build moments of reflection and attention to ongoing data to serve as developmental lessons and feedback.

If learning is meant to take place at retreats, conferences or discrete events, you’re not learning for human systems. By designing systems that foster real learning focused on the needs and capabilities of those in that system, you’re more likely to reap the true benefit of education and grow accordingly. That is an enormous return on investment.

Learning requires a plan and one that recognizes you’re going to get punched in the mouth (and do just fine).

Can this be done for real? Yes, it can. For more information on how to create a true learning culture in your organization and what kind of data and strategy can support that, contact Cense and they’ll show you what’s possible. 

Image credit: Social by JD Hancock used under Creative Commons license.

behaviour changeeducation & learningsystems thinking

Learning fails in bad systems

on August 28, 2017

2348137226_2d6536745e_o_Edits.jpgEnormous energy is spent on developing strategies to accomplish things with comparatively little paid to the systems that they are being deployed in. A good strategy works by design and that means designing systems that improve the likelihood of their success rather than fight against them and this is no truer than in the effort to learn on the job.

 

A simple search of the literature — gray or academic — will find an enormous volume of resources on how to design, implement and support learning for action in organizations. At an individual level, there are countless* articles on personal change, self-improvement, and performance ‘hacks’ that individuals can do to better themselves and supposedly achieve more in what they do.

Psychology and related behavioural sciences have spent inordinate time learning how individuals and organizations change by emphasizing specific behaviours, decision processes, and data that can support action. A close inspection will find that relatively few strategies produce consistent results and this has to do less with execution, skill or topic and more with the system in which these strategies are introduced.

To illustrate this, consider the role of learning in the organization and how our strategies to promote it ultimately fail when our systems are not designed to support it.

Knowledge integration: A case study

Consider the example of attending a conference as a means of learning and integrating knowledge into practice.

Surajit Bhattacharya published a primer for how to get value from conferences in medicine, pointing to tips and strategies that a medical practitioner can take such as arriving a day early (so you’re not groggy), planning out your day, and be social. These are all practical, logical suggestions, yet they are premised upon a number of things that we might call system variables. These include:

  • The amount of control you have over your schedule week-to-week.
  • The availability of transportation and accommodation options that suit your schedule, budget, and preferences.
  • The nature and type of work you do, including the amount of hours and intensity of the work you perform in a typical week. This will determine the amount of energy you have and the readiness to be attentive.
  • The volume of email and other digital communications (e.g., messages and updates via social media, chat, project management platforms) you receive on a daily basis and the nature of those kinds of messages (e.g.urgency and importance).
  • The amount and nature of travel required to both attend the event and the amount you had prior to attending the event.
  • The level of rest you’ve had. Sleep amount, timing, and quality all factor into how much rest you get. Add in the opportunity to engage in an activity like walking, exercise or stretching that one might do and we see a number of factors that could influence learning performance.
  • The setting. The lighting, air quality and air flow, seat arrangement, room acoustics, and access to some natural light are all factors in our ability to attend to and engage with a learning event.
  • The quality and format of the content and its delivery. Speaker quality, preparation, content and overall performance will all contribute to the ability to convey information and engage the audience.
  • Food and drink. Are you eating the kinds of foods and beverages that enable your body’s performance? Do you have access to these foods and drinks? Are they served at times that suit your body?
  • Your level of comfort and skill at engaging strangers. This matters if you’re more introverted, dislike small talk, or are not energized by others.

These are all platform issues: those in which motivation and energy can be channeled to focus on and engage with learning content. The fewer of these factors present the greater the energy expenditure needed on the part of the learner.

Learning within systems

W. Edwards Deming noted that most of the issues of performance in any organization were due to processes and systems (estimated to be up to 85% or more) rather than individual employees. While Deming was referring largely to manufacturing contexts, the same might be said for learning.

Consider our example from earlier about the conference. We’ve already outlined the factors that could contribute to learning at the conference itself, but let’s extend the case further to what happens after the conference. After all, a surgeon, engineer, computer programmer, law clerk, or carpenter isn’t going to practice her or his craft at the conference; they’ll do it when they return to regular work.

Now consider what our attendee encounters after they have made the trip home to apply this newfound learning:

  • A backlog of emails, phone messages and other correspondence that has either been left untouched, scantly attended to, or fully managed. In the first case, the backlog might be high and requires a considerable amount of time and energy to ‘catch up’ on upon return, however at least the learner was fully present to perform the many activities suggested byBhattacharya in the earlier article. In the second case, there is a higher than usual amount to attend to and the learner might have been selectively disengaged from the learning event. In the third, the learner returns to usual life without a backlog but may have sacrificed considerable attention toward the usual correspondence than actually learning.
  • A backlog of meetings. Scheduled meetings, calls or other events that require a co-presence (virtual or physical) that were put off due to travel are now picked up.
  • A backlog of administrative tasks. Submitting receipts and conference expenses, regular accounting or administrative tasks are all things that either was left untouched or, in the case of submitting expenses, unlikely or impossible to do until the trip has returned.
  • Fatigue. Sitting in a conference can be exhausting, particularly because of the conditions of the rooms, the volume of content and the break in the routine of every day (which can be energizing, too). Add in any travel issues that might arise and there is a reasonable chance that a person is not in an optimal state to take what they have been exposed to and apply it.
  • The usual organization processes and structures. Are there are opportunities to reflect upon, discuss, and process what has been learned with others and spaces to apply those lessons directly with appropriate feedback? How often have we been exposed to inspiring or practical content only to find few opportunities to apply it in practice upon our return in enough time before the details of the lessons fade?

It’s not reasonable to expect to have optimal conditions in our work much of the time, if ever. However, as you can see there are a lot of factors that contribute to our capacity to learn and the required energy needed to take what we’ve been exposed to and integrate it into our work. The fewer of these situations in place, the greater the likelihood that the investment in the learning experience will be lost.

An organization or individual requires a platform for learning that includes systems that allow for learners to be at their best and to provide a means for them to take what they learn and apply it — if it’s valuable. Otherwise, why invest in it?

This isn’t to say that no good can come from a conference, but if the main focus is on actual learning and the application of knowledge to the betterment of an organization and individual why would we not invest in the platform to make use of that rather than discarding it.

Rethinking our systems

When I was doing evaluation work in continuing medical education I was amazed to see how often learning events were held at 7 or 8 am. The rationale was that this was often tied to shift changes at hospitals and were the one time of day when most physicians were least likely to have other appointments. This was also the time when physicians were either highly fatigued from a night shift or having battled traffic on their commute to work or were planning the rest of their day ahead — all circumstances when they might be least focused on actually learning.

This choice of time was done for scheduling purposes, not for learning purposes. Yet, the stated purpose of continuing education was to promote learning and its various outcomes. Here, the strategy was to expose medical professionals to necessary, quality content to keep them informed and skilled and doing it at a time that appeared most convenient for all is an example of an idea that had logic to it, but ultimately failed in most regards.

How? If one looked at the evaluation data, typically the results suggested this strategy wasn’t so bad. Most often post-event surveys suggested that the overall ratings were consistently high. Yet a closer look at the data yields some questions.

For example, the questions asked to assess impact were things like: did the presenter speak clearly? or did the presenter provide the content they said they would? In most cases, participants were asked if the speaker arrived on time, presented what they said they would, were intelligible and whether there was a chance the learner might find useful what was presented. It had little to no bearing on whether the content was appropriate, impactful or applied in practice. This is because the system for evaluation was based on a model of knowledge transmission: content is delivered to a person and, assuming the content is good, the lesson is learned.

We know this to be among the weakest forms of moving knowledge to action and certainly not something suited to more complex situations or conditions, particularly in health systems. This is still what prevails.

Design for learning

If you’re seeking to promote learning and create a culture where individuals across an organization can adapt, develop, and grow learning requires much more than simply sending people to conferences, hosting seminars, providing books and other materials or watching some instructional videos. Without a means to integrate and promote that new knowledge as part of a praxis, organizations and individuals alike will continue to get frustrated, lag in their efforts to anticipate and respond to changing conditions and will ultimately fail to achieve anything close to their potential.

Designing for learning is as much about a curriculum as the context for how that curriculum is delivered and how learners are set up to engage with it all in their organizations and everyday lives.

*This is literally the case because the volume of new articles being published daily is so high.

If you’re looking to create learning systems in your organization, visit Cense to explore what it can do for you in shaping your strategy and evaluation to support sustainable, impactful learning for complex conditions. 

Image credit: “Platform” by Martin L is licensed under CC BY 2.0

 

innovationpsychologysystems thinking

Decoupling creators from their creations

on June 1, 2017

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The world is transformed by creators — the artists, the innovators, the leaders — and their creations are what propel change and stand in the way of it. Change can be hard and its made all the more so when we fail to decouple the creator from the created, inviting resistance rather than enticing better creations. 

If you want to find the hotspot for action or inaction in a human system, look at what is made in that system. Human beings defend, promote and attend to what they made more than anything. Just watch.

Children will rush to show you what they made: a sandcastle, a picture, a sculpture, a…whatever it is they are handing you. Adults don’t grow out of that: we are just big kids. Adults are just more subtle in how we promote and share what we do, but we still place an enormous amount of psychological energy on our creations. Sometimes its our kids, our spouses (which is a relationship we created), our ideas, our way of life, our programs, policies or businesses. Even something like a consumer purchase is, in some ways, a reflection of us in that we are making an identity or statement with it.

Social media can feel like one big echo-chamber sometimes, but it’s that way because we often are so busy sharing our opinions that we’re not listening — focusing on what we made, not what others made. Social media can be so harsh because when we attack ideas — our 140 character creations sometimes — we feel as if we are being attacked. This is one of the reasons we are having such traumatized, distorted discourse in the public domain.

Creations vs creators

The problem with any type of change is that we often end up challenging both the creator and the creation at the same time. It’s saying that the creation needs to change and that can hurt the creator, even if done unintentionally.

The interest in failure in recent years is something I’ve been critical of, but a positive feature of it is that people are now talking more openly about what it means to not succeed and that is healthy. There are lots of flaws in the failure talk out there, mostly notably because it fails (no pun — even a bad one, intended… but let’s go with it) to decouple the creator from the creation.  In many respects, creators and their creations are intimately tied together as one is the raw material and vehicle for the other.

But when we need to apologize for, make amends because, or defend our creations constantly we are using a lot of energy. In organizational environments there is an inordinate amount of time strategizing, evaluating and re-visiting innovation initiatives, but the simple truth is that — as we will see below — it doesn’t make a lick of difference because we are confusing the creators with the creations and the systems in which they are creating.

Sometimes we need to view the creator and creation separately and that is all a matter of trust – and reality.

 

A matter of trust, a matter of reality

If you are part of a team that has been tasked with addressing an issue and given a mandate to find and possibly create a solution, why should it matter what you produce? That seems like an odd question or statement.

At first it seems obvious: for accountability, right?

But consider this a little further.

If a team has been given a charge, it presumably is the best group that is available given the time and resources available. Maybe there are others more suited or talented to the job, perhaps there is a world expert out there who could help, but because of time, money, logistics or some combination of reasons in a given situation that isn’t possible. We are now dealing with what is, not what we wish to be. This is sometimes called the real world. 

If that team does not have the skills or talent to do it, why is it tasked with the problem? If those talents and skills are unknown and there is no time, energy or commitment  — or means — to assess that in practice then you are in a truly innovative space: let’s see what happens.

In this case, accountability is simply a means of exploring how something is made, what is learned along the way, and assessing what kind of products are produced from that, knowing that there is no real way to determine it’s comparative merit, significance or worth — the hallmark tenets of evaluation. It’s experimental and there is no way to fail, except to fail to attend and learn from it.

This is a matter of trust. It’s about trusting that you’re going to do something useful with what you have and that’s all. The right / wrong debate makes no sense because, if you’re dealing with reality as we discussed above there are no other options aside from not doing something. So why does failure have to come into it?

This is about trusting creators to create. It has nothing to do with what they create because, if you’ve selected a group to do something that only they are able to do, for reasons mentioned above, it has nothing to do with their creation.

Failing at innovation

The real failure we speak of might be failing to grasp reality, failing to support creative engagement in the workplace, and failing to truly innovate. These are products of what happens when we task individuals, groups, units or some other entity within our organizations, match them with systems that have no known means forward and provide them with no preparation, tools, or intelligence about the problem to support doing what they are tasked with. The not knowing part of the problem is not uncommon, particularly in innovative spaces. It’s nothing to sneer at, rather something that is a true learning opportunity. But we need to call it as it is, not what we want it or pretend it to be.

My colleague Hallie Preskill from FSG is big on learning and is not averse to rolling her eyes when people speak of it, because it’s often used so flippantly and without thought. True learning means paying attention, giving time and focus to what material — experience, data, reflections, goals and contexts — is available, and in . Learning has a cost and it has many myths attached to it. It’s difficulty is why many simply don’t do it. In truth, many are not as serious about really learning, but talking about learning. This is what Hallie sees a lot.

The material for learning is what these innovators, these creators, are producing so if we are valuing creation and innovation we need to pay attention to this and entice creators to continue to generate more quality ‘content’ for us to learn from and worry less about what these creators produce when we task them with innovation missions that have no chance to ‘succeed’ just as they have no chance to ‘fail’

A poor question leads us to poor answers.

Consider what we ask of our innovators and innovation and you’ll see that, if we want more and better creators and if we want more and better creations we need to see them in a new light and create the culture that sees them both for what they are, not what we want them to be.

Image credit: Author

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