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Making The Shift From Knowing To Doing – Thoughts From Learning 2012

October 24, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

My post-conference perspectives are always interpretations on the themes of the conference rather than a blow by blow recap of the things I went to and what I learned. This post will be no different. For a comprehensive back channel digest, I recommend David Kelly’s (@LnDDave) curated digest.

There was plenty of talk at this year’s conference that continues to reflect the themes of retention, gaming, “fun” learning, and engagement. There was also a continued emphasis on video, and informal production of small learnings and those enabled through corporate implementations of social communities. Around the edges, in the visible fringes, there are grumblings about transformation of not just the learning function, but also the organizations, systems and processes, the root cause of the need for training.

When we look at why we need training, when we flip it on its head and focus on outcomes, it becomes clear that the emphasis of evaluation needs to be on “doing” and much less on “knowing.” Leaders should place value on measurements of behavior and performance above whether employees simply know the correct procedure or the preferred interpretation of policy.

If you don’t act and interact in accordance with what you learned, why does it matter if you remember the training? Retention can’t be the goal and certainly isn’t a good measure of effectiveness. Validating my perspective on the shift to performance, there were several sessions on performance consulting and both a keynote highlight and joint session with ISPI.

I did appreciate the continued conversation around story telling- not because I think it helps with retention of knowledge, but because stories make learning situational and provide the context needed for when to apply knowledge so that it equates to performance. General Colin Powell (Ret.) displayed this in his keynote by stringing numerous and memorable stories spanning his entire career. These stories make General Powell a must see public speaker if you are given the opportunity.

I want to continue the dialogue about the evolution of the training professional into performance-centered consulting, where resources are curated, designs are user-centered, and results are measured in actions.

Root Causation: 4 Steps To Finding The Truth In A Story

September 28, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

I am currently waist deep in a broad ranged process transformation effort with a very recognizable brand, and this company has the most passionate staff I have ever encountered. We are in the beginning of a diagnosis phase in our methodology, and we are asking for stories about processes to identify where the process in place falls short.

I never want a diagnosis session to turn into an airing of grievances, but people tend to make their stories personal. A few times during our diagnostic processes, the passion of the people involved combined with the personal nature of their stories has led to tales of processes gone awry. A challenge in consulting is to pull the root cause out of a story without allowing the truth to be obscured by embellishment.

I follow these basic steps when I evaluate stories:

Assess Risk – Sometimes the risk of something out of ordinary is low enough and the risk it represents is small enough that you just have to let it go. Bad things happen. Sometimes process can prevent it, but what is the cost to the organization vs. the risk it represents?
Determine Repeatability - If this risk is great enough, did it happen more than once? Do the conditions still exist that it could still happen again? If so, you’re going to have to dig a little deeper.
Identify Measures – If it can happen again, how will you know when and how often it happens? This is especially difficult in something that you want to measure in terms of cost avoidance, since the measure is the lack of an occurrence.
Find the Triggers – Most people tell stories in a linear way from beginning to end. Look at the story and try to find what went wrong first. If you can identify and address the initial trigger, then subsequent triggers may be irrelevant. A good way to get someone to self identify triggers is to ask them “what would you do differently?” If someone remembers a story vividly, chances are he or she has spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to prevent the problem from happening.

Sometimes a story is just a story, but stories can also be parables that tell exactly what we need to know and what to do about it. An expert will be able to find the truth in the tale.

Chicken Pox and Change Management

Chicken Pox Change Management

Recently the Media 1 team went through a performance consulting refresh with Judith Hale, author of the Performance Consultants Fieldbook, and other titles related to performance centered consulting.

During one of our sessions, Judy referenced “learning by disease.” What she was referring to was the sometimes common practice of “exposing” employees to new process in hopes that they would “catch the disease” and learn the new process. This of course reminded me of my childhood when it was not an uncommon practice to expose a child to another child with chicken pox especially if that chicken pox outbreak coincided with a time that there wasn’t school or a family vacation planned. Disclaimer: I remember clearly missing school, so I do not think my mother planned my chicken pox.

This is such a clear metaphor for unmanaged and unmitigated change, not only in learning, but for any process change (and one I fear one we are all guilty of from time to time). However, I’m not so sure that all concerns come from the same place. All too often, we are so concerned that our people don’t catch the disease that we tend to forget that chicken pox – in whatever way it’s contracted – makes the person infected with it pretty miserable.

We should be less concerned about exposure to the disease and more concerned about the effects of it. The “change by the exposure” method only addresses the environment for change, It doesn’t take into account whether the individual has the skill or capability (except in rare cases, you only can get chicken pox once, and I hear they have vaccines now), and it certainly doesn’t address the way you would want to transmit change (no school or family vacation). And most importantly, why would your employee ever want to catch it (motive)?

Unless our goal is to fail (Ebola anyone?), we need to design and use better models than the world’s worst epidemics. Hopefully this metaphor will help you recognize where this model is being used in your organization, and help you manage change with performance in mind, as opposed to hoping for successful exposure.

4 Distinctions from the SPTech Conference: Branding, User Acceptance, Maturity, and User Experience

July 27, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

I was very fortunate to be asked to speak at BZ Media’s SPTech Conference in Boston this week. My talk was “Way Beyond Portals: SharePoint as the User eXperience Platform (UXP)” where I explored the concept of utilizing SharePoint as an underlying technology for enterprise driven user experience based systems.

While there was a lot of talk at the conference about technical topics related to SharePoint, there were also quite a few sessions on branding, user acceptance, and maturity. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of chatter that seemed to confuse the topics. It got me thinking about the distinctions between branding, user acceptance, as well as maturity and how those things contribute and factor into user experience.

Branding – I have never experienced a business application that was relevant because it was branded, but I have experienced many applications that fail because they failed to attract enough attention to be relevant. “Don’t put lipstick on a pig” was an analogy I heard mentioned, but I would argue that the only time you should build a pig is if your end goal is bacon, and if that is the case, bacon is a better brand than the pig. The distinction here is that branding is not something you decide whether or not you need, it’s a requirement. There are varying levels of effort that go into branding, but it’s just not optional.
User Acceptance – There are two components to user acceptance, position and value. Branding fits on the positioning side of the equation while value determines how “sticky” the application is. There are many sites that are positioned well in terms of both branding and purpose, and pass initial acceptance, but over time fail to show sustained value. Information sites tend to fall into this position. I think that there is a place for information sites, but we need to make intelligent design decisions on how “sticky” we want those sites to be. If we want sustained acceptance we need to design in value that exceeds knowing something to include a connection to real work.
Maturity – As the architect of the SharePoint Maturity Model, Sadie Van Buren is the pre-eminent expert on defining maturity for SharePoint installations. While branding is a component or indicator of a mature model, a branded site is not necessarily a mature site. While user acceptance is not a named component of the maturity model, it’s hard to imagine a mature application of technology where acceptance was not achieved. I think the real power of the maturity model is as an indicator of the willingness to leverage technology for real business purposes (value). Highly mature installations show both intuitive user experience and a clear business-based purpose.
User Experience – Defining user experience as the culmination of the acceptance of a process and the ability perform a value-based behavior, it’s easy to see how important branding, user acceptance, and maturity are to user experience. It’s impossible to have a successful user experience if the design of that experience fails in any regard. User experience isn’t just a branding exercise; it also involves the performance-based design that demonstrates sustained value and maturity.

Clearly there are valuable distinctions between these topics but they are all critical components of successful technology implementations whether they are SharePoint sites or applications, and all deserve an effort in our design processes. As I continue to think and write about user experience it occurs to me that best user experience may not be a “positive” one. While we certainly don’t want to create negative experiences, if our experiences are truly intuitive and functional they are transparent in and of themselves. Positive and negative are only relative to prior experience. But I will write more on that some other time.

3 Impressions from the mLearn Conference

July 6, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

It’s been two full weeks since I returned from the eLearning Guild’s mLearn Conference in San Jose. I had hoped to have this blog post out within two days, but I suppose we all struggle with things that we “need” to do taking precedence over the things that we “want” to do.

As usual, I’m going to give you my interpretations from the conference rather than a blow by blow. For another perspective, check out Brian Dusablon’s recap here.

1. “Anything but a course”

This was actually a quote from thought leader and friend Clark Quinn from his keynote. The theoretical talk on the conference floor was that mobile was not about pushing courses onto phones, yet there was a trade show full of folks pushing tools for converting and authoring courses for use on phones and a line of people waiting to hear how it’s done. Mobiles devices have real advantages and the explosion in growth is undeniable, but a course-based strategy just isn’t what your users are ultimately looking for. Your users want their mobile device to help complete the objectives of real and meaningful work. They want to use their mobile device to DO THINGS that align with their personal goals for their job, not the goals of the training department. When we understand and embrace this truth, “anything but a course” will only ring more true.

2. Tablets and phones are different animals

I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll say it again, tablets serve user needs in different ways than smartphones and deserve to be designed differently. Adaptive CSS and various authoring tools are doing a great job of helping us make sure that content looks good on both but a tablet isn’t a giant phone and a phone isn’t just a little tablet. While they have similar features and sometimes the same operating system, one makes calls and the other doesn’t. One is really good for taking pictures, the other not so much. One can fit a lot of information on a screen, the other you can fit in your pocket. You get the idea. In an age where BYOT (bring your own technology) is happening whether you want it to or not, your users will tell you how, when, and what type of device they want. It’s our job to listen and make sure the things that we design meet their needs. One caveat though, bring your own doesn’t mean any device ever made under the sun. I see a lot of people spending money supporting platforms that were dominant at one time, but don’t seem to have much of a future. You can put constraints on BYOT…

3. BJ Fogg is a very smart man

Stanford-based psychologist, BJ Fogg is a brand new favorite for me and he deserves a look by you, too. He’s doing some really interesting studies and experiments on what he calls building “tiny habits”, and he is showing some amazing results creating systems for behavior change. This is stuff you can use right now. Check out his website and make sure you do some reading on his Behavior Grid.

Your Social Media Policy Is Useless

June 14, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Last week Heather Bussing from HR Examiner published the best article I’ve read yet on Social Media Policies. I’m not going to recap the points she made because the article does a really good job of that all on its own. You really should go read it; however, my favorite line in the article is:

“Do you have a telephone policy? Do you control what employees say in email?”

When you take “new” technology out of the picture and you apply the standard to technology that is so ubiquitous that it is transparent, the ridiculous level just goes through the roof. The cold hard truth is that social media is not a passing fad and will become as transparent as the telephone to the way that we do our jobs.

Social media policies are just another example of focusing on the wrong things like measuring the consumption of learning rather than performance improvement. If you really need rules to reinforce good common sense, have the rule prohibit stupidity and forget the rule prohibiting how you share it.

You know what else besides social media isn’t a fad? Mobile.

But instead of having a mobile computing policy, most companies just seem to make sure there isn’t any way to do real work on our tiny transformative devices. But that is another topic for another post.

Nine Ideas from TEDx Grand Rapids

May 11, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Back in December I wrote a blog post that included my application to the TEDx event in Grand Rapids. I was in fact selected to attend the event with 700 of my peers on May 10th. It was my first TED event, and it absolutely lived up to its billing. It was a day filled with inspiration, hope, and ideas without the stodginess of a motivational seminar. I’m a convert, and I will contribute to as many of these events as I possibly can.

I’m sure someone will write a recap of the event outlining what each speaker said and what they got from it. I’m instead going to let you in on the nine tangents or ideas I had as a result of where I was, who I was with, and what I heard. However, I have to warn you, when I allow myself to be open to new ideas; the results aren’t always all about business.

Thinking about interfaces, how does silverware affect our relationship with food? Do western food implements increase the efficiency of us shoveling food into our faces? If so, what other everyday interfaces are good interfaces in terms of function, but actually feed undesirable behavior?
There is no such thing as south Detroit. It is a lie perpetuated by a Journey song. No one should ever tell stories about a boy growing up on the south side of Detroit; the notion is all wet.
There is a distinct difference between consulting and designing… and they don’t always complement each other. It’s true there may be a lot of consulting that goes into a design, but if you start to design before the consulting is done you may never find the actual problem. Sarah Bloom from Google wrote a good blog post on this last week, and I thought about it when talking about design at TED.
An Epic Fail is a failure so big it takes the sting out of the failure. In thinking of practical ways to force epic fails consider this: How much and how quickly could we learn by designing something to fail and then allowing it to happen? If it doesn’t sting, we could iterate on all the things logic tells us shouldn’t work only to discover a really great thing that does work. This was talked about in terms of gaming, and games done right can have epic failures.
I want to create a comedic character called TED Nougat. An obvious parody of Ted Nugent, TED Nougat could be the liberal alter ego with a soft fluffy center.
The idea of Insanely Good Process got me thinking about situations where repeating the same thing and expecting different results isn’t considered insane. Good process should always have the same steps, but insanely good process should produce better results each time you engage it.
Curating ideas is worthwhile whether it be material, context, or knowledge. Who said libraries can only contain books full of knowledge? One speaker at TEDx had a library of materials that could be used in packaging. What if we had libraries of stuff that had been tried before at our companies? It goes beyond knowledge management.
This year the number of cell phones will exceed the number of PC’s in the world. In some areas, the availability of phones will be greater than food or water. That means applications developed for mobile devices have the potential to reach more people than the computer ever has.
Fault does not excuse responsibility. I remember as a child thinking things were not my fault and that it just wasn’t fair that I was held responsible for things that weren’t my fault. Either because we choose to accept responsibility or because it is placed upon us, fault only speaks to fairness; responsibility trumps both.

Thoughts from SHARE 2012: Three Drivers that Transcend SharePoint

April 26, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

I just got back from the SHARE conference in Atlanta, and while it’s true that the conference is built around SharePoint as a core technology, the conference is really intended to focus on business applications of SharePoint. I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow conference report; Kristian Kalsing did a pretty good one here. Instead, I’m going to pick out for you the three drivers that are not only critical to the success of SharePoint-based solutions but really to any business solution.

It’s about the business not the technology. When is that last time you experienced or heard the tale of an executive who calls a meeting and says we need an “X”? Recent examples of “X” have included social networking, Kahn Academy, and even Angry Birds. The point being: if you simply take the order and implement your companies version of these tools, the chances of adoption are immediately in danger because nothing in the business is driving the initiative. For example, social networking in and of itself isn’t enough to merit attention, but “connecting the sales force to the engineering staff in near time or real time to shorten the sales cycle by 10 days” is something the organization and your leadership can get behind. The fact that it’s built in SharePoint or any other tool is inconsequential and may be detrimental depending on your organization’s prior experience with the tool (see #3). When it comes time to justify expense or measure ROI of your solution, having real business drivers will be critical.
You’ll need a roadmap. Every project needs a plan, but a roadmap can be so much more. When attacking tough enterprise issues, you’ve got be certain about what the real problem is and how you are going to measure your fix for the problem. Your roadmap can even include governance for the organization or project and accurate requirements gathering and analysis. Susan Hanley was one of the speakers at the conference on governance and is a great resource on governance issues. Sarah Haase from Best Buy is also a great corporate practitioner; her blog can be found here. Our own John Chapin also has a blog post on roadmap creation.
Branding is important (don’t call it SharePoint)! Unless your company sells SharePoint or somehow derives income from marketing SharePoint, you won’t do yourself or your users any good by naming your solution after the technology it was built in. This goes for any branded technology. In fact, if your users have a negative impression of that tool, it may actually interfere with user acceptance of the tool. Let’s face it; sometimes users cringe when they hear SharePoint but won’t bat an eye when you call it the “Sales Efficiency Accelerator.” The trick is this: when users visit this mythical application, it can’t contain the elements of poor user experience that caused them to hate the tool in the first place. Branding will get your users to overlook the underlying technology once or twice, but good user experiences will keep them coming back.

Overall, I’m glad I went to the SHARE conference. It’s nice to see a group of people who are focused on the business applications of SharePoint and not just the stability and scalability of a corporate technology platform. After all, the tools we use are only as good as what we use them for.

Measurement, Part IV: Four Characteristics of Measurable Performance Improvement

April 19, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

In my last blog post, Measurement as Evidence, we looked at when it is necessary to measure training, and the dangers of creating pseudo-compliance courses that take our time and attention from actual performance. Fortunately, the vast majority of learning that happens and needs to happen in our organizations is not subject to legal requirement, nor are we legally compelled to track compliance with individual events. Since the measure of compliance doesn’t help us determine business results, we can completely alleviate trying to chase measurement based on volume of training delivered.

“What’s that? You mean, don’t to track training numbers anymore?”

No.

So where does that leave us on measurement? How do we measure performance improvement for the organization? Before we are able measure our efforts towards improvement we need to make sure our efforts embrace these four core characteristics of measurable efforts:

Aligned — We start by aligning ourselves to our business. Too many people in HR and training see what they do as a cost center that is disconnected from the day-to-day operations of the business. The Kirkpatrick model enables us to perpetuate that separation by giving us a measurement system that allows us to look at training as something disconnected when in fact it’s usually only one of the factors that leads to meaningful performance. The only measures we should use are the same measures we use to determine if the business is successful or not. That means, first and foremost, profitability. As part of an overall solution mix, learning systems can help build real performance improvement once learning objectives are linked with performance objectives that have a direct “line of site” link with business performance measures. This means we have to start with defined business metrics and make sure that we’ve provided a performance environment that maximizes each person’s ability to meet those needs. This type of total alignment helps further align our performance management and career development processes toward performance improvement.
Identified Performance Improvement Factors — The role of learning in organizations is drastically changing. It’s no longer our job to simply pick out knowledge gaps and develop content that will fill those gaps. In an aligned state, we look at places we want the business to improve; we identify the performance factors and curate the solution.
Integrated, Continuous, and Connected Experiences — When it becomes clear to us that training events are no longer the panacea (never were) and content context is where we add value, we create contexts that are meaningful to individuals in focused ways; we can then build environments that enable performance improvement. This includes solutions like cohort systems and portals that are about more than just learning.
Agile — We need to embrace the need for constant change. Business needs continually change so our new role is to say aligned and be agile enough to change with it. The days where we have multi-month engagements to create large, formal training offerings are gone or greatly reduced.

If we are aligned with the business and can accurately identify the performance factors that contribute to business goals, our efforts to improve performance can be integrated, continuous, and connected.

If we live up to these core principles, then the evidence we need to measure those efforts are the same measurements we use to gauge the success of the business as a whole. Profitability as measured by the business is a very good and accurate measure of the relative success of integrated efforts towards performance improvement.

Proper execution and inclusion of these four characteristics also has a dramatic and positive impact on trust because it allows others in your organization to directly witness behaviors that confirm you are all paddling on the same tributary and in the same direction.

Five Attributes Your Mobile Sales App Must Demonstrate

April 13, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

It’s been a little while since I’ve written about mobile, but I committed this week to do a talk at the eLearning Guild mLearnCon, June 19-21 in San Jose; so it’s top-of-mind. My talk is going to be about the design process we used in an actual development scenario for a client of ours. That particular application never saw the light of day, but it got me thinking about the components of that application and why we were so passionate about including them.

Specific to the sales audience, we believe the following five attributes are critical to the successful adoption of a sales-focused mobile app. Your sales app must be:

Relevant everyday – On the surface, this means the content must be kept up-to-date. While that is critical, when you dig a little deeper, it also means the content must also be applicable every day. It has to be more than learning about the future, tomorrow’s product, or the sale they might someday have. It has to help them do their job today.
Improve some aspect of the sales process – Sales has always been and always will be about more and faster. If your mobile sales app doesn’t help them increase or accelerate the sale by letting them access more information faster from different places, or work with other people in your company more efficiently, sales people just plain won’t use it. In fact they will find some other mobile app that will help them, or they will spend that time doing some other activity even if that’s Angry Birds.
Integrated across sites and systems – In most companies, there is no lack of systems or internal sites designed to support the sales team. If mobile devices can even access behind your firewall, chances are those systems and sites aren’t very useable on a mobile device, and you can’t expect your team to ferret out and adapt while they are on the go. Your mobile app needs to be a combined interface to the sites and systems that are most critical to the sale.
Socially connected – Mobile technology at its core is about real-time communication. If your app doesn’t take advantage of this, you are missing something really important. Imagine situations where your app can help sales people get answers in seconds, when it used to take hours.
Intuitive – The reason Apple’s products are so pervasive is because they always put the user experience first, even if that means it doesn’t do everything that you imagined. This isn’t a ringing endorsement of Apple by any stretch, especially for the enterprise, but the point is that it has to be better than easy. It has to be intuitive to the point where it feels automatic to the end user. Mobile apps do not have, nor should they need, training programs. They just work. You are better off not including a piece of functionality rather than including one that needs to be explained.

This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive design guide; just five things you need to consider. Of course, there are big differences between organizations and the processes that they use. Device strategy, even if it’s “Bring Your Own Device” or BYOD, also factors into design. However, if your app does these five things successfully, it will make a difference in the performance of your sales team.

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