You Can't Put the Learning Genie Back in the Classroom Bottle

Lots of interest in the learning blogosphere (is that word still hip or am I waaay behind on this one?) about the Aug 19 NYT article 'Study Finds that Online Education Beats the Classroom'

Here's the summary...

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

And the 'design' from 30,000 feet...

Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

I'm sure there's a ton of analysis in the full 93-page report. I mean this is a statistician's dream (or nightmare).

More interesting to me are the reactions to the general results by learning professionals. For example,

“We are at an inflection point in online education,” said Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program."

“People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”

First, that's an amazing conclusion to come to given the data summary. Seems a little less community improved performance about 9%.

Second, it's going to be an ONLINE COMMUNITY, Phillip. Learners are going to find online communities of peer learners. People they like, respect and have experiences that enrich their own learning.

Learing pros are still trying to stuff learning back into the classroom bottle. 'Online learning is a good adjunct to classroom.' WRONG. If we've truly hit an inflection point, then that's reversed, i.e., classroom should support online.

And, as I've said numerous times, all learning is personal. I'm happy to include 'individual' in that definition if you want to argue semantics.

A student of any stripe sitting in a classroom with 20 other people is going through a personal journey. The material is being spewed at one rate, but that doesn't mean that everyone is learning at the same rate. The thoughts running through people's heads are all over the map.

• I'm bored; I learned this last term.
• He's going too fast; I'm lost. I wish he'd repeat that last point.
  
• Interesting, but I wonder why they do it that way?
• What the heck is he talking about? Is there a picture of this thing somewhere?
  
• When are we going to get to try this stuff?
• Another question?! Is that guy totally stupid or what? It's so clear.
  

Multi-faceted online learning lets each of these people go at their own pace and in their own style. Like it or not, learning is moving out of the hands of trainers and teachers and into the hands of learners.

Just like drawing and design software empowered users (and disemboweled professional artists and designers), digital technology and learning management software are going to empower learners and disenfranchise professional teachers for 99% of material.

Proof that Talkers and Doers Don't Mix Well

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

How Gen Z Will Learn

Penelope Trunk's latest post, What Generation Z will be like at Work, inspired me to think about what how they'll learn, especially at work.

These intensely self-directed, information junkies juiced up on neuro-enhancers will swamp most training departments efforts to teach them anything. By the time T&D's rolled out a course, Gen Z will have learned what they needed to already and moved on. Next challenge!

Their tech savvy will allow them to create learning materials for others in no time flat and, while most company learning management systems will be closed to these "unofficial" courses (another post topic for sure!), they'll use their social networking skills to show off what they know and teach others outside the company's reach.

We really need to put Gen Y and Gen Z in charge of delivering training. They may not know what's important to understand (the content), but their keen understanding of networking and creative technologies can be used to deliver it effectively and efficiently.

Medieval IT Helpdesk

Think of your own great quote to capture this video's message...

Learning is All About Motivation

Sure, you can ‘Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ But what if he doesn’t want to learn? Or doesn’t even know he needs to?

Creating learning content is the least of our problems today. In my blog entry, Learn Like The Wind, I wrote about how I used the web to learn how to repair my roof after the wind blew some shingles off. If you had tried to get me to learn that before my shingles were scattered around the yard, I’d have given you the brush-off. Once it happened, believe me, I was all ears. And I learned exactly what I needed to know for free in about 20 minutes.

Websites like Lynda, ehow and even YouTube offer inexpensive (often free) instructional content that caters to a variety of learning styles. Step-by-step instructions. Videos with narrations. Diagrams. Whatever you want is out there in a format to fit your needs.

Learning management system vendors now offer ‘software as a service’ complete with content authoring tools and shopping cart. Individuals can create courses on anything and offer them to the world via the web. The learning content created by people around the world is exploding. And prices start at ‘FREE!’.

E-learning suites offer hundreds of courses on hard and soft business skills. PowerPoint. XML programming. Active Listening. Giving Feedback. Each one available on your desktop and at your convenience. There’s plenty of content out there.

The question is: how do we motivate people to take advantage of it?

Teach Employees the Big Picture. It Makes Them Hungry for Details

At a recent business conference, I spoke about learning motivation and asked what the audience members taught their employees about how their businesses ran, why they were successful and how they made money.

NOT ONE person said they had taught this material.

‘Your Business 101’ is the stuff that primes the employee learning pump. As an Operations Director, I gave regular ‘5-Minute Business Lessons’ at our monthly all-employee meetings. I’d cover one topic; give an overview, how it affected us and answer questions.

After a couple of sessions, you could see the wheels turning. And, even better, people started to ask tough questions. “So, if capacity utilization is so important, why’d you buy that fourth machine? It sits idle most of the time.” A excellent (and embarrassing) question, Bob.

Are you missing a HUGE opportunity to get people excited about learning more about your company and building their skills to be successful? Teach employees at all levels the fundamentals of your business. Putting them into the big picture naturally will get them wanting to learn the tools and skills that contribute to it.

Check out The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack. Inspiring and practical, his company’s story is worth reading.

Let’s Ride!

Flipping Over Windmills in Iowa

Here's some video I shot with The Flip Mino HD while traveling I-80 from Omaha to Newton, Iowa. Sorry for the squinting; the western sun was intense.

A video of my talk at the Newton Economic Development Corporation will be available soon.

I LOVE this technotoy!

Getting Wet at Work

Cleaning my office this weekend, I found this old picture and thought about the incident that made me get fully clothed into a safety shower at work.

The short version...Telling wasn't enough. Showing dramatically was necessary.

When I was a department manager, we had a chemical accident and the person who got spattered didn't use the safety shower like we'd trained on over and over. He consequentially got burned much more badly than he should have.

We held shift meetings to discuss the incident and asked people if they'd use the showers now. Silence. Finally, someone piped up "I hear the water's black from sitting in the pipes so long." A few heads nodding.

"And I'll bet it's REALLY COLD." someone added. Lots of heads nodding now.

We tried to reassure people that these were not true, but you could see the skeptical looks on their faces. No way would they ever use them. Time for Plan B.

We organized a department Safety Day where we broke the shifts into small groups and held lots of interesting demonstrations on a variety of topics. My assistant manager and I ran the one on the production area safety equipment and the coup de grace was getting ourselves dosed with the shower.

People's jaws dropped when one of us walked under it and pulled the handle getting thoroughly soaked. Clean, room temperature water.

Class dismissed!

Tweet Joke Punchline

Didn't get the joke, eh?


Tweeted on 6/16/09..."Twitter should be more than just sending people links" and then this link is attached.

Stand and Deliver

Okay, so the title's a bit hokey (and stolen from a movie about school), BUT still an interesting NYT article about physiology's impact on learning.

Hey, I hated sitting in desks at school. Pure torture. I loved my science labs. Experiments were interesting in and of themselves, but in lab you could move around. Change position. Look around. Tap. Bang. Drum. Doodle. And if you nailed the lab, no one cared. It was all about the learning; not enforcing a set of rules.

We should be creating environments that are more conducive to learning, thinking and teamwork. The right furniture is a start.

Why don't we have a national center where we figure this stuff out? Department of Education? We have Dept of Defense war colleges, labs and think tanks that have done an excellent job of making the US fighting machine efficient and effective. I mean if we can create the right gear for a Navy SEAL to parachute out of a plane into the ocean, swim 5 miles to shore and hike 2 miles through the jungle, we can surely figure out the right desk/chair arrangement for junior high schoolers.

Of course, it'll probably cost $1,459,733.21.

Learn Like The Wind

Here in Boulder when the wind gusts, it's usually at about 90mph. No kidding.

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in my living room reading when suddenly the house shook and there was the sound of deck of cards shuffled. Looking out the window, shingles everywhere. Damn. I went outside to survey the damage. Now what? I'd never fixed a roof before.

First, check tomorrow's weather report...snow. Ouch! Can't wait to make this repair.

Second, Google "roof repair asphalt shingles". I found several good sites on home repairs and crosschecked their advice. Then, I made a list of supplies to buy at the local hardware store. Roofing tar and nails. I even watched a nice little video on how to do the repair.

Last, repair the roof and celebrate my success.

This incident captured for me the future of training...MOTIVATED SELF-LEARNING. People are going to pull what they need exactly when they need and how they like it, their learning style.

Organizations need to provide resources that employees can pull from instantaneously. Could be the company's website or internal university. But, also YouTube, Lynda.com or any number of sites that provide instructional videos. Many are free or very reasonably priced. The cloud of knowledge is getting bigger and bigger, so that's not the issue.

The big issue is that people need a 'clear learning signal' and instant access to the resources above. If people know they need to learn, they'll start learning.

Never Stop Learning Or THIS Could Happen

Here's a LOL video for today's economy. And a stark reminder to NEVER stop learning and growing.



It's so easy to get complacent and think our years of experience and titles are going to carry us throughout our career. If this isn't a slap in the face for staying up on new trends and establishing a personal brand, then I don't know what is.

It's All About What Happens AFTERWARDS

Just stumbled on an article I'd saved last December from the Wall Street Journal.

'Lessons Learned' by Dr. Harry Martin at Cleveland State has some great research on how what's taught in training sessions actually gets put into practice in the organization. In a nut shell, what encourages people to change behavior?

The most impressive stat to me was how much 'peer support' improved these efforts. 3X greater than just management support alone! So, why do we make such a fuss about getting "management buy in"? I've leaned on this crutch myself and, thinking back over my career, the times when I accomplished the most was when my peers and I got aligned and committed to making something happen.

Enlisting peers in training and creating an environment where people support and hold each other accountable dramatically accelerates implementation (see my previous post on New Seasons Market). We did this very successfully for safety at one employer of mine. Most companies have, or can get, good content. It's the delivery and support afterwards that really does a belly flop.

We need to start thinking about how best to change behavior and THEN build our training content and methods and on-going support and reinforcement around THAT.

Why teach more than we can support afterwards? This is classic PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act), Lean and Stephen Covey thinking.

Align Learning with the Work Environment

The fact is your work environment IS your learning environment.

Live with it.

You can't separate the two and, quite frankly, don't want to. Creating artificial environments dilutes learning and keeps it from sticking. As an extreme, think about the whole 'Ropes Course' thing.

Hey, don't get me wrong, these events are a ton of fun. I've groped around blindfolded, fallen backwards into the arms of colleagues, leapt off poles and embarrassed myself at karoake ("Todd, I didn't know you were tone deaf." Thanks, Marilyn).

Great drinks at the end of the day. Hugs when it's over. And then ($100K later), it's back into the blender at work. Most of that 'learning in the woods' gets crushed under the pressure of project deadlines, budgets and goals. The real world stuff we left behind when we went walkabout.

Fit training and learning into the work day and rhythm of your business. Not the other way around. Too many T&D professionals see training events as a break from work. And in our wireless world there is no break. Today, people sit in classes surfing, texting, reading, in short, WORKING. They learn (maybe) between messages.

My advice..."Embrace the suck." A great military term coined in the Iraqi war.

Is your environment helter skelter where people steal time to get things done and perfection is a luxury? Then make learning easily accessible to individuals and quick to absorb. In 'Lean Training' terms don't 'over teach', minimize delays and eliminate unnecessary steps. See my Lean Knowledge Transfer white paper for more about this.

Or does your company designs rockets? Lots of technical teams working together and mistakes cost big bucks? You need a totally different approach that emphasizes relationships and mastery. High impact mentoring may be the right choice.

There are lots and lots of learning/teaching methods and technologies out there. Before you pick one do an analysis of your learner's work situation.

Then, pick what works for them. They'll love you for it.

My New Mantra is...

'All Learning is Personal'

I've said this at least 100 times this past week. To myself, clients, prospects, my wife, my niece, friends, the mailman...basically anyone who'll listen to me for 10 seconds.

I'm convinced this simple phrase needs to be the guiding principle of all training and development activities and technology decisions.

What makes for effective learning? Motivation, leveraging previous experience, teaching the right amount of information, applying the right learning style, providing practice opportunities and feedback.

And no one has the exact same combination of them. Everyone is unique. The more we can tailor training to leverage these factors, the more effective learning takes place.

More and more learning technologies are available everyday. Brandon Hall Research's newest report, LMS KnowledgeBase 2009, reviews 92 learning management systems. 92?! That's unbelievable. Which one to choose?

IT considerations aside, choose the one that allows you to personalize content more and more and allows learners to follow their own path of 'bread crumbs' to the answers. Avoid ones that simple automate pushing generalized, impersonal content AT people.

Most people know how they like to learn and, given choices, will select the right content in the right order. Embrace technologies that let people choose their own path to understanding and expertise.

All learning is personal. Let this be your guide.

Natural Foods Store Uses ‘Organic’ Training Approach

Whenever I’m in Portland, Oregon, my favorite place to shop is a natural foods chain called New Seasons Market. The produce is fresh. The selection is great. But what really sets them apart from every other grocery store is their top-notch customer service.

At New Seasons, there’s always an employee nearby to cheerfully answer a question or help me find an item, whether they’re behind the counter, in the aisle or at the cash register.

And it’s not just at one store. It’s at all nine of them. New Seasons employs 1,700 people. Having run operations for decades myself, I know you don’t get such consistent high performance by accident. What’s their secret? I wondered. Could it have anything to do with training?

In a recent phone call, New Seasons HR Director Charla Hayden and Recruiting Manager Bill Tolbert shared the company’s training philosophy with me. I was pleased to discover that many aspects of their employee development follow Lean Knowledge Transfer principles.

People-Oriented Business? People-Oriented Training.

Bill said that New Seasons specifically looks to hire people with an innate desire to help others. “We look for candidates more interested in genuine human interactions than in an ‘items per hour’ ratio,” he said.

Therefore, training delivery at New Seasons reinforces human-to-human interaction. “There’s no e-learning or videos,” Charla said. “The vast majority of our training is done by our more seasoned employees as a dialogue. Their in-store experience lends credibility. They can speak persuasively about how to do things our way because they do it themselves.”

Let Them Learn by Walking Around. Then Teach Some More.

At New Seasons, you won’t see new hires crammed into three days of New Employee Training that’s so common today. After their Day One Orientation, New Seasons newbies are pretty much set free in their departments. “New Seasons’ training is like a Waldorf School experience. There’s no codified way for people to learn most jobs. People are told to look around, figure it out and ask for help when they need it,” said Charla.

Whoa. Figure it Out Themselves? What If it’s Complicated?

“Our Wellness department has the most complex product mix,” Charla said. “New employees are given time to look around and get to know the products, ask questions, go online, read literature and shadow experienced employees. From a training perspective, we’ve created an environment where an employee’s learning style is accommodated because they learn their own way, at their own pace and in an order that makes sense to them.”

About a month after a new employee starts, they attend a short training event that the company playfully calls ‘Disorientation’. Conducted by New Seasons executives Brian Rohter and Lisa Sedlar, Disorientation allows new employees to learn more about New Seasons’ values and how to be successful.

A consistent message is that it’s okay to say ‘I don’t know’ and to ask for help. “We tell employees that explicitly,” Charla said. “We believe that if someone at the company needs your help, you drop what you’re doing and give it. We treat our coworkers like we treat our customers.”

What I like about this approach is that, rather than stuff a lot of information into someone’s head on Day 1 when they have no frame of reference, New Seasons gives them a month of experience to see the company values and methods in action and absorb them from their peers.

Matching the ‘Organic Rhythm’ of the Store

We’ve covered onboarding the newbies. What about training for more experienced employees?

Ongoing training at New Seasons happens at the store in short sessions. No one has to drive anywhere, or commit a long time period. It’s all designed to fit into the pace of the store’s work day.

“We train to the employee’s needs, not to the trainer’s. And we only teach what people can learn and immediately apply. Our test is that it has to be of value to them,” Charla said.

Bill said that class sizes are small, ten to 12 people, regardless of the topic. “We want to make sure people got the information they need and have a chance to give us feedback. In larger groups, people get lost,” he said.

Lessons from the Grocery Aisle

What can we learn from New Seasons? Three things.

1. How you deliver training should reinforce your values and business model. Is customer service key to your success? Face-to-face methods like mentoring might be best. Yes, everyone’s jumping on the e-learning bandwagon today, but before you do, ask yourself ‘How does sitting at a computer taking in information align with the value our employees deliver?’ There are plenty of situations where e-learning is the right choice. Just make sure it’s your situation.
2. Training should align with the environment. Learning by walking around at a grocery store is great. But at a copper mine? Not on your life! Too dangerous; more structure would be needed. Walking around ‘virtually’ in a simulation would be a great alternative. Whenever possible, let the work environment organically teach employees as much as it can and at their pace.
3. Training and learning should be a part of the natural rhythm of your company’s work day. Don’t let training stick out like a sore thumb and disturb your business. If you have night shifts, train at night. If your company’s work pace is irregular, then training should fit into these periods of inactivity. Here’s a simple rule: If people are complaining about training, you’re doing it wrong.

New Seasons has developed a training approach that is completely organic to their needs and delivers great results with no wasted effort. (The very essence of Lean Knowledge Transfer.) Can you say the same for your company’s training and development?

Quick Response from Saba

Thanks to Bobby Yardani, AG Lambert and Alice Hawkins at Saba (CEO, VP Marketing and Sr. Dir. Customer Loyalty respectively) for calling or emailing me on Friday about my troubles connecting to their webcast. Great response. And AG included a link to the webcast I missed. Looking forward to seeing that later today.

Nice to see a company take a customer's bad experience so seriously. Check them out at Saba.

Eat Your Own Dog Food Saba

If you're going to promote the ease, efficiency and effectiveness of training and learning through webcasts, webinars and other on-line methods, THEN MAKE THE PROCESS OF ACTUALLY LEARNING ON-LINE EASY, EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE!!

I signed up for an event with Saba and the process is clearly centered around their Marketing and Sales data collection efforts, not my learning. I tried logging in and got error messages ("User Todd Hudson is already attending an event." uhh...no he's not. I'm him.) but NO HELP in what to do next. Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

So, now what? Like most people trying to perform a task and not knowing what to do next, I guessed. Didn't work. More frustration.

It's now 15 minutes into the event...I don't have the time, or faith, to call Saba for help (no help # provided btw), so I give up. I miss the webcast and write a scathing blog post instead, the equivalent of going to the employee break room to complain to a coworker. Sooo productive.

Are your learning systems so Byzantine that your employees guess or give up rather than try to find the right answer? Read my previous post on lean and wasted motion. How much is that costing you?

The Lean CLO doesn't waste people's 'MO'

Great article by Bob Mosher, 'Do We Make Learning Easier or Harder?' in the January edition of Chief Learning Officer magazine.

He writes about how learning assets reside in pockets around companies and are largely unknown to the entire community of learners. This causes redundancy as people recreate assets and wastes time as people try to find the right asset to help them.

This is an excellent example of one of the Seven Wastes in the Toyota Production System. Wasted 'motion'.

Motion waste applied to training and learning is the time spent searching for the right learning tool, document, mentor, knowledge, etc. This could take minutes, hours or even days or weeks. Why does this matter? First, this time is unproductive. Instead of make better products or happier customers, an employee is searching the maze that is SharePoint trying to find what she needs to know.

Second, eventually people give up and either guess or use the wrong asset. Both of these cause errors that cost time and money.

Lots of time spent searching fruitlessly and then committing errors. Doubly bad.

One of the Maverick 'Lean Knowledge Transfer' Principles is 'Instant Gratification'. The right asset must be available instantaneously. If people know they can find what they need right away, they're more likely to go to that source and not guess. Less time wasted. Fewer errors.

Download (free!) our latest white paper, 'Lean Knowledge Transfer' from our website, www.maverickinstitute.com.

NOW THAT'S TRAINING!

Capt C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger clearly is "a seriously good aviator", but let's not forget that pilots undergo some serious training, certifications and drilling in the air and on simulators. And for just the situation that Capt Sullenberger and his crew faced today when they ditched their Airbus 320 in the Hudson River. Everyone survived.

Most employees aren't flying aircraft, transplanting hearts or performing similar life-and-death activities, regular practice after training is still important. It seats knowledge and prepares them whne unusual situations appear.

At MIT, Large Lectures Going the Way of the Blackboard

Thanks to Chris Hoffmann for sending me this NYT article about TEAL or technology-enhanced active learning at MIT. Exciting process and results, but the price tag...yikes! Not affordable by most schools. And, one wonders, how much of even this improved process is still waste?

Learn in the New Year!

Happy 2009 Everyone! After a relaxing holiday I'm back at it.

There's going to be A LOT to learn in the New Year. New regulations for the financial industry. New technologies for green energy. New procedures to deal with budget shortfalls. I look into your future and see lots and lots and lots of meetings. In that vein, here's some advice from Smooth Harold in Orem, UT on making this year's get togethers, if not more productive, at least less full of cliches.

2009 is your chance to do knowledge transfer the right way.

North Pole Knowledge Transfer Goes LEAN!

Dear Maverick Pals,

Santa here. Todd is busy with year-end things and asked me to write this post for him. Normally, I’d say “are you kidding?” but things are running so smoothly at the North Pole I actually have some free time.

Why is it going so well? It’s simple. This year we retooled how we transfer and share knowledge and expertise.

Back in the days of wooden trains and dolls, it was easy. The elves hammered away and hummed their elf song, the reindeer pulled the sleigh and Mrs. Claus baked cookies.

Today, we’ve got Chinese suppliers sending us XBox chipsets. The new crop of Gen Y elves are making even the Bumble scratch his head. Mrs. Claus spent so much time trying to manage all the emails flying around that the cookies burned.

And to top things off, the reindeer were badgering me to turbo-charge the sleigh. “Pimp your ride” were Dasher’s exact words, and things almost came to blows until Mrs. Claus realized he was saying “ride” not “wife.”

Everything was getting so complicated, I hauled everyone into a classroom and tried to get a whole lot of teaching done. You can imagine how that went. Three weeks later, no one could remember the difference between a gift box and a soldering iron.

Finally, in desperation, I called Todd and his posse of Mavericks, and oh Donner what a difference!

They showed us how to implement LEAN Knowledge Transfer:

• We discovered that Elves are readers. So we put all our instructions online, made them searchable and rated them with DIGG technology. Now, the Gen Y newbies easily find the exact information they need right away.
• Since Mrs. Claus loves her laptop even more than kids love sitting on my lap, we had her set up Ning social networking sites where our suppliers, elves, and reindeer can all share what they know.
• We've got the reindeer training for hairpin turns on a virtual reality simulation. You should see them fly now. WOW!
• The Mavs even got me using mentoring techniques with the kids. When little Johnnie told me he wanted the Wii, I knew to repeat this back to him and good thing, too! I thought he was saying he had to "wee"; I almost jumped up and threw him off my lap.

LEAN Knowledge Transfer is great. We’ve saved tons of classroom training money and are getting so much done that I’m planning to take Mrs. Claus to the Cayman Islands for a quick 'test flight' right before Christmas. (If they have Wi-Fi, that is.)

Check out LEAN Knowledge Transfer and see what it can do for your own organization.

Happy holidays! And as Todd always says, “Let’s Ride!” (I prefer "On Dasher! On Dancer!...")

Santa, 
Chairman and CEO
North Pole Global Enterprises, Inc.

A Pound of Training Please

Tamara Greenleaf, our VP Marketing, came into the office today exclaiming "You won't believe the on-boarding nightmare that happened at the grocery store yesterday!"

She went to the deli counter where the manager took her order for a half-pound of sliced turkey, turned to an obvious new employee and proceeded to explain how to process it, in lengthy detail. When the manager turned back to her, she started to give him her next order. He put up a hand, stopped her in mid-sentence and said: "I'm training a new employee. I need for you to give your order to him directly." Not 'Do you have time to help me train a new employee?', but 'Tough luck. You're today's guinea pig.'

Tamara and the manager then stood there and waited. And waited some more, while Newbie struggled with the slicer, the scale and the wrapping paper. By the time Newbie handed it to her, with a very nice smile, she was so annoyed she said "Nothing else, thank you." So the Newbie got trained, but the store lost about $15 worth of additional business in the process.

Is this store insane? During these tougher economic times customers are watching every dollar and easily influenced NOT to spend. You can't let training get in the way of good customer service and potential sales. And you don't have to.

Before your trainees hit the floor, make sure they have the basic skills necessary. Role playing and having them walk you through different scenarios are effective ways to test their knowledge and have them practice before directly engaging with customers. And for goodness sakes, you must intervene when your Newbie is struggling and the customer is bearing the brunt.

Have similar stories to this one? Send it to me, I'll post it on-line, and we'll gnash our teeth and have a good laugh together.

Power Tool or Cool Toy?

As the creator of LEAN knowledge transfer, and as someone who helps companies decide what new learning technologies to adopt, I have a simple litmus test whenever someone shows me the latest and greatest training technology: Do the money, time and resources required actually deliver significant measurable improvements in business performance?

In short, is it a power tool? Or a cool toy?

Last night I went to a SUN Microsystems event where they rolled out their Darkstar and Wonderland products for creating virtual worlds for gaming and training. One of the reasons SUN developed this technology was to facilitate collaboration among their highly-distributed workforce. Did you know that more than 50% of SUN’s employees work from home? Wow.

Productive collaboration between far-flung employees, tech partners and customers is a huge challenge today. And it’s great to see companies like SUN creating new technologies for doing this. At the event, I saw a lot of enthusiastic people, great eye candy and (although I’m no expert) a sound underlying technology. Darkstar and Wonderland should definitely be on your short list of products to consider, especially since they’re open source!

But they haven’t quite convinced me that VR is a viable knowledge transfer tool for the majority of companies and situations. Why not? Because the benefits don’t yet justify the considerable development costs. Does collaboration in a virtual world deliver significantly better results than a simple, inexpensive video conference using desktop sharing? Don’t know as no results were presented.

And the vast majority of development costs (like 90% in some cases) goes into creating the virtual walls, windows with views, furniture, plants and avatars. Not necessarily creating situations and interactions that help people master content which translates into better business performance.

As an aside, I feel compelled to say emphatically “STOP creating virtual worlds that just mirror the same old institutions we have now!” We’re bored as hell sitting in real classrooms. Why would we be any less bored sitting in a virtual one that has the same desks, white boards, etc.?

Now let me be clear. I’m not anti-VR. I like flying around in Second Life as much as the next guy. And simulations CAN be powerful training tools. I've seen excellent ones in the mining industry, where truck drivers can learn to handle a fully-loaded 300-ton haul truck down a rainy slope at night in total safety. The simulator is a truck cab with big flat screen displays and the program mimics the physics of the truck and environment. You feel like you're driving a truck and, when you get in a real one for the first time, you've partially developed muscle memory. Amazing! The payback is huge from an capital equipment utilization, productivity and safety point of view. The benefits clearly outweigh the development costs.

VR creation costs are falling fast with open source technologies, better development tools and outsourcing. So, we’re going to see more and more VR applications with impressive graphics and abilities. Sales training. Leadership training. Safety training. Remember the bottom line is “Power tool or cool toy? Do the money, time and resources required actually deliver significant measurable improvements in business performance over less complex methods like mentoring and social media?” Ask for, no, DEMAND data.

A Great Thanksgiving Email

A recent email I received (lightly edited to protect the innocent)...

Todd, you've ruined me. I just sat through a class and all I could think about (thanks to you!) was how totally ineffective it was.

The PowerPoint slides were worthless. The information could have been covered in less than 5 minutes, but really wasn't worth covering at all. An e-learning session would've at least been consistent throughout the organization. And I could've quickly clicked through the slides at my own speed.

I think of all the other poor co-workers who will have to go through this and come out with nothing to show for it, but a checked box in some training database. We are currently behind in our staffing needs and we can't onboard people fast enough because of our inadequate training program. I now know why you decided to focus on improving knowledge transfer; it can have a huge impact on an organization.

Hey, this as a huge success (even though the sender is clearly frustrated). When people start to look critically at knowledge transfer at their organizations, they'll see all the waste and inefficiency. Then, we can start to turn the 'training ship' in the right direction. Or sink it and build a new one.