Informal Learning

for Free-Range Learners and Disgruntled Executives

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Front-end

Thursday, December 15, 2005

by Jay Cross

Copyright 2005 Jay Cross, Berkeley, California

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Descriptive Table of Contents

 

The world we live in

The pace of life on earth is faster, faster, faster. We are inundated with information, showered with technological innovation, and pestered by multiple media 24/7. No one had enough time. Business is a blur. People are stressed. Work is hell. Something has fundamentally changed.

 

A woman with a watch knows what time it is. A woman with two watches does not. Most of us wear some watches set to agrarian age time, others on industrial age time, and yet others to internet time. Our bodies, our workgroups, our families, our employers, and our global environment are out of sync. Our lives are incoherent because our worlds are changing faster than we are.

 

Nothing is more important to business success than workers’ knowledge and know-how. In the industrial era, management’s role was training workers what to do. In the knowledge era, workers want to learn but hate to be trained; telling them how to do something insults their intelligence.

 

Study after study finds that 80% of the way workers gain job knowledge is informal. The choice is to do it well or to do it poorly.

 

Formal learning has a curriculum and leads to a certificate, degree, grades, or other recognition of completion. Informal learning is everything else, including trial & error, asking someone, calling the help desk, watching how others do it, communities of practice, checking Google, reading articles, hallway conversations, spontaneous meetings, and kibitzing around the proverbial water cooler.

 

Important as it is, informal learning doesn’t show up on the corporate radar because it isn’t recorded on industrial-age charts of account. No one has a budget for it. Accounting looks backward; innovation and growth are in the future. Organizations that fail to leverage informal learning leave buckets of money on the table. In a knowledge era, it is foolish to disregard the prime means of creating, sharing, and replenishing our intellectual capital.

 

 

Informality

At work we learn more in the break room than in the classroom. We discover how to do our jobs through informal learning -- observing others, asking the person in the next cubicle, calling the help desk, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal learning - classes and workshops and online events - is the source of only 10% to 20% of what we learn at work.

 

Informal learning is effective because it is personal. The individual calls the shots. The learner is responsible. It’s real. How different from formal learning, which is imposed by someone else.

 

Knowledge work is fundamentally different from manual labor. In today’s world, everything and everyone are interdependent.

 

Out of time

Time is accelerating. More happens in a minute today than in one of your great grandmother's minutes. Measured by how much will happen, in the 21st century, we will experience 20,000 years of progress! Alignment is the road to profit and longevity for organizations, well-being and fulfillment for individuals.

 

Networks expand or die. Linking nodes distributes information and power. Networks subvert hierarchy. The flatter the organization, the denser its interconnections, and the faster its throughput.

 

Training, development, knowledge management, performance support, informal learning, mentoring, and knowing are all one thing, for one purpose, and that's performance.

 

Learning used to focus what was in an individual's head. The individual took the test, got the degree, or earned the certificate. The new learning focuses on what it takes to do the job right. The workplace is an open-book exam. What worker doesn't have a cell phone and an internet connection? Using one's lifelines to get help from colleagues and the internet to access the world's information is encouraged.

 

What’s in it for me?

Informal learning is the path to organizational capability, agility, and profits. It also respects workers and challenges them to be all they can be.

 

Informal does not mean without purpose. Generally, payback far exceeds what you could get from traditional training approaches.

 

Informal Learning Technique

Business Benefit Example

Visualization Transform the business cascading, agile, responsive, real time Grove Consultants, Web 2.0

Google-ize product information Improve sales force readiness & customer service Cisco & Altus

 

Internet inside Distribute intelligence, lower TCO, rapid implementation CGI Technology Leadership

Foster customer communities Serve customers better, new products from customers LEGO

 

Learning to learn, reflection, mindfulness Improve morale, cut turnover Meta-Learning Lab, Pfizer

 

Architecture, prototyping, extreme goals Increase innovation MIT, Sun, Plogs, XP, Iraq blogs, MindMapping

 

Informal learning is the low-hanging fruit of worker development. Since it’s often cheap or free, it rarely appears in budgets.

 

Knowledge workers demand respect for who they are. They thrive when given the freedom to decide how they will do what they’re asked to do. They rise or fall to meet expectations. We need to set those expectations and then get out of the way.

 

Speeding

Things used to be simple. Life was under control. People had plenty of time.

 

Something snapped. Suddenly everything is complex, life is out of control, nobody has time, and most workers hate their jobs. The world has changed and we humans have not kept up.

 

• The old ways are dying.

• The future is uncertain.

• Nature knows best.

• We are not in control.

• Most training is not effective.

• eLearning often misses the mark.

• Our school system is irreparably broken.

• Human Resources is both impotent and unpopular.

 

We humans exist in networks. We are part of social networks. Our heads contain neural networks. Learning consists of making and maintaining better connections to our networks, be they social, operational, commercial or entertainment.

 

A superlative engineer can be 250 times more productive than an average performer! Making a great performer better gives more bang for the buck than moving an average performer up a notch. It’s a human butterfly effect.

 

Learning

Learning is successful adaptation to change.

 

Informal and formal learning are the end-points of a spectrum of learning overall.

On one end, formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. On the opposite end, informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route. The rider can take a detour at a moment’s notice, to admire the scenery or go to the bathroom.

 

 

Formal Informal

 

College classes are formal learning. Informal learning is what happens out of class. There’s no curriculum and no certificate of completion. It goes on all the time. Informal learning includes things like trial and error, asking a neighbor, reading a book, or watching television. Informal learning is how we learn about life. It’s how we make sense of things. It’s how we make meaning.

 

80% of the way people learn their jobs is informal yet 80% of corporate spending goes to formal learning. Corporation staff departments are more comfortable providing bus rides than encouraging bike rides. You can’t learn what you already know, so to maximize learning, people need to get out of their routines and encounter new and different things.

 

Emergent learning implies adaptation to the environment, timeliness, flexibility and space for co-creation. It is the future. We haven’t figured it out yet. Or, from the perspective of complexity science, it hasn’t figured itself out yet.

 

 

Envisioning

Visualization is transformative.

 

Humans learn twice as well from images and words as from words alone. Visuals engage both hemispheres of the brain. Pictures translate across cultures, education levels, and age groups. Yet the majority of the content of corporate learning is text. Schools spend years on verbal literacy and but hours on visual literacy. It’s high time for us to open our eyes to the possibilities.

 

Visual literacy accelerates learning because the richness of the whole picture can be taken in at a glance. Visual metaphors unleash new ideas and spark innovation. Having a sharper eye increases the depth of one’s perception and enjoyment of life.

 

Conversing

Conversation creates knowledge. Frequent and open conversation increases innovation and learning.

 

The earliest communities of practice may have been cavemen sitting around a fire talking about the best way to hunt bears. That’s the way “communities” work: practitioners come together to share, nurture, and validate tricks of the trade. Apprentices have always done this. Sometimes we mistakenly thought most of the learning was going on between master and apprentice. In fact, most apprentices probably learn more from one another.

 

People spend most of their time at work or at home. Work is a demanding, pressure-packed, rats-in-the-maze race with the clock to get the job done. Home is a comfortable, private space for sharing time with family and individual interests. Neither work nor home, a World Café is a neutral spot where people come together to offer hospitality, enjoy comradeship, welcome diverse perspectives, and have meaningful conversations.

 

Get a third of a million people involved in a single conversation, and it’s sure to give you that real-time buzz. IBM has adopted it as a management approach for our open, flat times.

 

Connecting

Knowledge workers waste billions of dollars’ worth of time looking for information and finding the right people to talk with. Good architecture and space planning facilitate learning. Organization Network Architecture connects people virtually by spotting bottlenecks and opportunities for integration.

 

The design of the workplace is an important component of productivity, yet all too many businesses are blind to its impact. Architects create corporate buildings with hierarchical floor plans and grid layouts from a previous era. Corporate efforts to reduce one-time costs and maximize usable space backfire because they hamper the work of the building’s inhabitants for as long as it stands. Speaking metaphorically, you can’t have water cooler conversations if you remove the water coolers.

 

Twenty years ago, In Search of Excellence highlighted the importance of corporate culture. If culture is so important, isn’t it curious that corporations have no cultural institutions? Wouldn’t creating a cultural center perpetuate the organization’s values?

 

Inside every formal organization is an informal organization that runs the show through an undocumented series of personal and professional relationships. It is a living entity with a mind of its own. The informal organization is a community of people: it runs on life’s rules, you can influence it but not manage it, it’s not for sale.

 

Organizational network analysis blueprints the interactions of the informal organization. Visualizing how people interact highlights potential opportunities and likely breakdowns.

 

Socializing

People are emotional animals. Gut feelings are real. Stress disrupts productivity. Acting from the heart as well as the mind makes us better people and happier campers.

 

Free-range learners choose how and what they learn. After all, they’re the only ones who know what they already know. Besides, self-service is less expensive and more timely than the alternative.

 

Today’s worker chooses the employer. Does she find the company, its vision, and its people exciting? Will she have an opportunity to make a contribution? Free-range learning is the activity of free-range workers.

 

Learning is the new work. The best way to take advantage of informal learning is to get out of its way. Less is more. Informal learning has no need for the busywork, chrome, and bureaucracy that accompany typical corporate training.

 

Design builds in limits; the potential of evolution is infinite. Why aim for good enough when it’s more fulfilling to “Be all that you can be?” People live up to or down to expectations but all begin with an innate drive to succeed; informal learning gives them the means to fulfill it.

 

Call it work, not learning. Think of whole people, not learners. Workers seek satisfaction and fulfillment at work and at home.

 

Intuition is often more effective than logic because it calls on whole-body intelligence. It draws on the power of the unconscious mind to sort through meaningful experience as well as the immediate situation. It addresses tacit, unspoken knowledge.

 

In nature, after a while you either escape the bear or get eaten. In the office, however, the mind conjures up bears that never let up. All-day stress overtaxes the body. Stress shuts down short-term memory, recall, physical growth, sex drive, and more. At the same time, it sets the heart to racing and puts adrenaline in the bloodstream. Time pressure, frustrations with others, unresolved conflicts, and anxiety born of perfectionism stress almost all of us. It doesn’t have to be this way. Perceptions lead to stress; changing those perceptions makes the bear go away.

 

eLearning

Five years after I coined the term “eLearning,” we were living in an e-world where networks facilitate virtually all learning. It has become trite to point out that the “e” doesn’t matter, and that it’s the learning that counts. I don’t think the learning counts for much either; what’s important is the “doing” that results from learning.

 

Take a robust ERP or CRM system. Add collaboration. Add enterprise content management. Add product life-cycle management. Add business process management. Add simulation and real time learning. Each element makes the enterprise system more powerful, but the resulting real-time enterprise is greater than the sum of these parts: it links strategy and execution in real time.

 

People do not know what they like; they like what they know. For example, many assume that face-to-face instruction is the one best way to teach and that online learning is inherently inferior. They seek ways for online initiatives to support the high-grade face-to-face experience. Capella University turns this view on its head, asking what face-to-face support is required to supplement online learning.

 

Blended is a transitory term that reminds us to look at learning challenges from many directions. It makes computer-only training look ridiculous. It drives us to pick the right tools to get the job done.

 

Internet Inside

The internet did change everything.

 

Informal, spontaneous, vernacular knowledge sharing is not just for the war zone. Imagine that your organization is installing an enterprise software system. Not exactly like fighting in Iraq, but trying nonetheless. One of the first things you might want to do is to set up a Plog, a project-weblog, a place to share stories about how things really work.

 

Ten years ago, most business executives saw no value in the Internet beyond cheaper communications. CIO magazine’s December 1994 issue sheepishly proposed “not to laud the future of electronic commerce nor to cheerlead the creation of a great national network that, like Godot, may never materialize.”

 

Since then, the internet has taught us:

 

• Time trumps perfection. In the old days, training wasn’t released until it passed through a gauntlet of editors, proofreaders, packagers, double-checkers and worrywarts. Everything is a work in progress. If it’s not finished, label it “draft” or “beta,” but don’t hold it up.

 

• Online networks facilitate personal connections. The internet enables one to rely on the kindness of strangers. Hundreds of people I didn’t know before have helped me learn; I keep my karma account in balance by helping others learn. The internet even enables you to talk with your heroes if you’re daring enough.

 

• To learn something, teach it. The internet empowers each of us to express ourselves publicly. Sharing ideas is both selfish and generous. Explaining something online clarifies your thinking and reinforces your own learning.

 

• It’s a small world after all. Around the world in 80 milliseconds. Wow! With Skype, you can talk with people all over the globe through Voice over IP (VoIP). For free.

 

• Me-learning. Dr. Google and Professor Amazon have taught me a lot more than four years of honors studies at an Ivy League college. Why? For one thing, I’ve forgotten more calculus, Wittgenstein, physics, Nietzsche and French than I’ll ever know because I was driven by someone else’s agenda rather than my own.

 

 

Unconferences

Business meetings used to come in one flavor: dull. New approaches create meetings that people enjoy, often organized in scant time and at minimal cost. Unconferences are characterized by:

 

• No keynote speaker or designated expert

• Breakthrough thinking born of diversity

• Having fun dealing with serious subjects

• Emergent self-organization

• Genuine community, intimacy and respect

 

Evolving

Grant me the courage to change the things I can, to accept the things I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. You cannot boil the ocean. You cannot change tomorrow’s weather. You can’t force people to learn.

 

You're going to spend your entire life learning so you might as well get good at it. Embracing mindfulness is your first step. You'll need to be flexible, to look at things through different lenses, to reflect on what you see, to try new things, to run thought experiments, and to pay attention. A mindful person often cuts off the mindless auto-pilot of aimless living to follow Nietzsche’s advice to "Become who you are!"

 

Informal learning is natural. It occurs when we treat people and organizations as organisms in nature.

 

Thinking is a skill. You get better at it with practice. People confuse thinking with intelligence. Bad mistake, for it leads intelligent people to squander their potential by not learning to think.

 

Most investments in corporate training is wasted because the training occurs too far in advance of its application.

 

Natural learning requires an attitude of surrender and acceptance. Informal learning is unbounded. It enables us to find a voice to take its place alongside other parts of who we are as humans.

 

Getting Better at Getting Better

Meta-learning focuses on improving the process of learning, including how people learn, barriers to learning, and improving the learning of both individuals and organizations.

 

Getting better at getting better is an evolutionary challenge. You don’t get there by taking one step at a time. Rather, you set up millions of little experiments, let ‘em rip, and see what you end up with.