Have it your way: the new learning paradigm
18th November 2011 · 0 Comments
Take a look around the office these days (if you actually work in one). The changes are evident– multiple generations are present and all have different motivators. People work from remote locations and in different time zones. And we bring our personal devices from home (like iPads and smart phones) and demand that we be able to access work information on them.
These differences in the workplace are challenging our traditions in terms of leadership and training. The Effective Edge is part of a select 245 member organization that is committed to learning from each other as we explore (and stay on top of) fast moving changes in our world of work and how learning is changing.
This month, I got an opportunity to interview Elliott Masie, internationally recognized futurist, speaker and researcher on workforce learning. He refers to these differences as “workplace disruptors” and he defines how we as knowledge workers are learning differently, given the amount of information at our fingertips and newly distributed workforce.
Christina Randle: Our mission at the Effective Edge is to transform the way work gets done at the individual and team level. Recently we’ve been talking about information overload, and I’ve been working with companies that get so much thrown at them that they’ve decided to turn it off. What is your view on how to handle information overload?
Elliott Masie: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent of the email we receive is unrequested, unnecessary and unwanted. We spend much of our day deleting things that we don’t want. There are some good collaborative tools, but we haven’t really figured out how to use them because we don’t fully understand the culture behind them. What I mean by that is that if you take the telephone, for example, I understand the culture behind it–I don’t call people at 3 AM and expect them to answer, or generally don’t expect to have a 2 hour conversation in the middle of the workday. We know how to maximize the use of the telephone.
CR: Will these changes cause us discomfort while we’re working through these disruptors (will there be a lag of productivity?)
EM: Yes, whether it’s manufacturing or leadership, there will be a short term decrease in performance. For example, if I change my sales process, I would bet that there will be an initial decrease in sales performance–there has to be. They can’t change that without some degree of gap. But are we concentrating on the short term or long term?
CR: Could you describe some of the changes in culture that you’re seeing in the workforce that leaders need to pay attention to?
EM: As leaders, we need to recognize these changes in the way society is demanding that we present information to them and it requires an examination into our daily rituals. In my presentations, I point out several examples.
The first is transactional memory, or in other words, If we know we can access information quickly at a later time, we don’t bother to memorize. How many phone numbers have you memorized since it’s all accessible in the palm of your hand?
Where there’s really nothing new in the process of collaboration, it’s our ability to tap into multiple collaborative networks instantly. Most people are good at getting what they need from people that they know, and are close to them physically. For example, working in an office, I know that the receptionist would know our shipping policies, so I could go to him or her directly with my question. If I was a remote employee visiting from out of town, I wouldn’t necessarily think to ask receptionist about the same question. We need to make it clear to our employees that it is part of their job for being a resource to others, and repeated questions about the same issue may need to be published and distributed.
Remember when every seminar was three days long? It then went to two, then one, then webinars–and now I want to watch a five minute YouTube video. Leaders need to become better story tellers about their experiences. It’s important to capture them, and retell them because of the higher retention value in others.
And most importantly people now want to learn the same way that they might order from a restaurant where they add, delete and customize things to fit their own learning nutritional needs. They don’t want to learn things they already know or things for which they will have no future use, and we have to personalize that learning.
CR: You also refer to the term nanocoaching–can you describe that for us?
EM: Nanocoaching is the inherent change in the therapeutic coaching model where I used to book an appointment from 3:00 – 4:00 on Tuesday and we’ll talk about our issues. The reality is that really good coaching is done in small bits, over time with some degree of frequency. What nanocoaching suggests is that with technology, we have the ability to deliver small doses of coaching that are either live or asynchronous. These are based on data, scheduled rituals, or on demand requests. I think that in the future that is going to be a big part of how we develop our leaders, and how we develop our organizations.
You can also view Elliot Masie’s arcvhived webinar here: http://learn.gototraining.com/forms/101111-NA-G2T-WBRARC-SM
