Learning Matters

Is it really possible to develop individuals, teams and organizations in recessionary times?

With rapidly falling house prices, a significant credit squeeze and fast rising prices in the shops and at the gas stations, despite the fact that most Governments are in denial about the word, we seem to have entered a “recessionary” period, or at least in most of the western world. No-one knows how long this recession is likely to last or how deep it may go, but it is probably safe to assume that the next 12 months at least are likely to be much more difficult ones for most people.

 

For businesses of all sizes and types (no matter what sector they might be in) this usually causes a large-scale “tightening of the belt” as far as expenditure is concerned and one of the very first casualties of this tightening is training and development. In many ways, development at all levels (individual, team and enterprise-wide) has always been a “soft” target.  It is soft because the direct impact of reducing or eliminated training altogether is not usually felt immediately (and often not even in a single year budget cycle). This affords operational managers the opportunity to make visible savings immediately or to use the money saved in other areas that appear to have quicker pay-offs.

 

Human resource and training professionals tend to be philosophical in recessionary or cut-back periods in the life of their organisation and reluctantly accept that their overall role is one of being a short-term overhead “burden” which can’t expect to “carry on as usual” when times are tough for the business as a whole. Ironically however, the so-called “people factors” are likely to be most crucial in recessionary times and may make the difference between “riding out the storm” poorly or well. Such people factors in recessionary times include the need for:

•ideas and guidance (especially in the leader population) about how to achieve team and organisational goals in times of resource constraints

• greater commercial “savvy” at all levels

•greater change and project management capability

• knowledge about how to better service customer needs or sell more efficiently and effectively

• methods and techniques to streamline internal processes

•proven and reliable ways in which to manage poor performance

• more collaborative teamwork and cooperation at all levels

• more creative problem solving  and decision analysis

•Better ways to manage time, pressure and stress

 

This may not always read like a normal “menu” of training and development needs for individuals, teams and even the entire organisation but it can be the generic “blue-print” for the HR and training professionals to start thinking about how to make the kind of offerings or interventions that are really needed.

 

If we take the above list and convert it into a more familiar set of potential “offerings” from the training or organisational development group’s perspective, it is likely to look something like this:

• Coaching for success (or coaching skills in tough times)

• Develop commercial awareness for better business results

• Setting up and successfully managing change projects

• Building sales through greater customer service

• Reengineering operational processes to reduce costs and lift revenues

• Successfully managing poor performance

• Building strategic alliances, teamwork and collaboration

• Creative problem solving  and decision analysis

• Successfully managing time, pressure and stress

 

Of course, even this list may have little appeal to operational managers unless what is offered is backed up substantively. In other words, a course, e-learning program, set of tools or internal consulting intervention must do “what it says on the box”. This means that existing programs may well have to be adjusted to ensure that content is entirely fit-for-purpose  and, in many cases, that new content is sourced or developed as quickly as necessary. Hence, far from sitting back on its haunches and waiting to better times to roll around again, the HR, training and development team have the opportunity to take the proverbial “bull by the horns” and to be at the fore-front of how the business is going to tackle its major future issues. The only challenge now is how to practically do this.

If an organization has relatively well-staffed HR, training and OD function, it may have the opportunity to set up its own project team to look at the existing offerings to the organisation and start to make some changes. This will usually involve some input from line managers to discover where knowledge and experience shortfalls might lie to tackle the recessionary challenges being faced. It will also suggest particular areas where guidance and help to better tackle current problems and issues should be included in future training or development offerings (at the detailed content level). This “business needs analysis” is conducted in the same way as a “training needs analysis” but (as the term implies) the business requirement must come first and training may not be the only solution. Armed with this data, support and intervention design effort can commence (using internal or external resources as necessary and depending of the scale of the need and the deadlines that have been suggested).

 

If an organization has a relatively lean HR, training and/or OD function, external support may be needed much earlier and may even assist with the “business needs analysis”.  Although this may have some up-front budgetary expenditure implications, there are many training and OD vendors who are prepared  to work with organisations at relatively low cost and to only earn the more substantive fees to effect recovery of cost for them as programs and solutions are successfully deployed.  Put another way, many external consultancies will “risk-share” with the client organisation in some negotiated way so that payments are only made when operational or line consumers are using the designed solution and seeing it to be valuable in real and tangible ways.

 

Summary

Recessionary times often cause the HR, Training and/or OD department to simply accept that their budgets and programs will be cut until there is greater financial flexibly within the enterprise.  Because people are an even more critical asset during cut-back times (and we need to make even greater efforts to retain and motivate individuals as much as possible in these periods), the HR, Training and/or OD department can play a leading role in supporting the business in its time of greatest need. This effort to be at the fore-front depends upon a clear identification of the greatest business needs in the circumstances and the flexible design of support programs and interventions that are going to be truly valued.  Both internal and external consulting skills are likely to be necessary to achieve the best results but these can be often rendered extremely cost effectively with an open and honest up-front agenda for what is needed and by when, as well as a negotiated joint stake in future results.

 

Jon Warner

www.ReadyToManage.com

 

The Learning "organisation"-The work of Chris Argyris

The work of Chris Argyris (1923-) has influenced thinking about the relationship of people and organizations, organizational learning and action research. Chris Argyris has made a significant contribution to the development of our appreciation of organizational learning, and, almost in passing, deepened our understanding of experiential learning. On this page we examine the significance of the models he developed with Donald Schön of single-loop and double-loop learning, and how these translate into contrasting models of organizational learning systems.

Chris Argyris was born in Newark, New Jersey on July 16, 1923 and grew up in Irvington, New Jersey. During the Second World War he joined the Signal Corps in the U.S. Army eventually becoming a Second Lieutenant (Elkjaer 2000). He went to university at Clark, where he came into contact with Kurt Lewin (Lewin had begun the Research Center for Group Dynamics at M.I.T.). He graduated with a degree in Psychology (1947). He went on to gain an MA in Psychology and Economics from Kansas University (1949), and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Cornell University (he was supervised by William F. Whyte) in 1951. In a distinguished career Chris Argyris has been a faculty member at Yale University (1951-1971) where he served as the Beach Professor of Administrative Science and Chairperson of the department; and the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard University (1971- ). Argyris is currently a director of the Monitor Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Chris Argyris’ early research explored the impact of formal organizational structures, control systems, and management on individuals (and how they responded and adapted to them). This research resulted in the books Personality and Organization (1957) and Integrating the Individual and the Organization (1964). He then shifted his focus to organizational change, in particular exploring the behaviour of senior executives in organizations (Interpersonal Competence and Organizational Effectiveness, 1962; Organization and Innovation, 1965). From there he moved onto a particularly fruitful inquiry into the role of the social scientist as both researcher and actor (Intervention Theory and Method, 1970; Inner Contradictions of Rigorous Research, 1980 and Action Science, 1985 - with Robert Putnam and Diana McLain Smith). Much of the focus on this page lies with his fourth major area of research and theorizing – in significant part undertaken with Donald Schön – around individual and organizational learning. Here the interest lies in the extent to which human reasoning, not just behaviour, can become the basis for diagnosis and action (Theory in Practice, 1974 ; Organizational Learning, 1978; Organizational Learning II, 1996 – all with Donald Schön). He has also developed this thinking in Overcoming Organizational Defenses (1990), Knowledge for Action (1993).

 

The www.ReadyToManage.com web site has many resources relating to learning and learning styles. This includes the Learning Styles Questionnaire or LSQ which is available as an on-line assessment.

 

Dr Jon Warner, ReadyToManage Inc

Jon@OD-center.org

Brain preferences-The work of Ned Hermann

For the last two decades, Ned Hermann dedicated his life to applying brain dominance theory to teaching, learning, increasing self-understanding and enhancing creative thinking capabilities on both an individual and corporate level.  Ned's contribution to the universal application of brain dominance brought him worldwide recognition.  In 1992, he received the Distinguished Contribution to Human Resource Development Award from ASTD - an honor symbolic of the significance of Ned's work.  He keynoted world conferences on Creativity, Gifted and Talented Children, Instructional Systems Design, Training & Development, Creative Management and Cerebral Dominance just in the last few years.  In 1993, he was elected President of The American Creativity Association.  Ned was inducted into the HRD Hall of Fame in February 1995 at the Training '95 Conference in Atlanta.  He received an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in May 1995. Hermann died in 2001.

Though known today as a master of human resource development, in college Ned studied the sciences and performing arts.  He majored in both physics and music.  This dual interest in both the arts and sciences seemed to pull him in two different directions but continued to intrigue him throughout his long career with General Electric. With this background, Ned was well prepared for what would eventually become his life's work:  to integrate the scientific study of the brain with the study of creative human development, in his search for the nature and sources of creativity.

 

Hermann became Manager of Management Education for GE in 1970.  With his primary responsibility of overseeing training program design, the issue of how to maintain or increase an individual’s productivity, motivation, and creativity were serious concerns.  A prolific painter and sculptor himself, personal experience was a valuable resource.  In fact, Ned's participation in an art association panel on creativity first opened his eyes to the burgeoning research on brain function, particularly with regard to the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex.  He integrated his own concepts with Left Brain/Right Brain and Triune Brain theories into a new "brain dominance technology" which produced immediate and dramatic advances in an individual's self-understanding, productivity, motivation, and creativity.

 

In 1978, Ned created the Herrmann Participant Survey Form to profile workshop participant's thinking styles and learning preferences in accordance with brain dominance theory. Sponsored by GE, he developed and validated the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), the scored and analyzed Participant Survey, and designed the Applied Creative Thinking Workshop (ACT), which has been internationally recognized as a leading workshop on creative thinking. 

 

How can we use this thinking?

Hermann's thinking on brain preferences is helpful in getting us to thinking about the different ways in which people perceive the world. The Emotional Intelliegence Style Instrument on the www.ReadyToManage.com web site was inflcuenced by Hermann's work and is worth checking out as a practical tool to use in the workplace.

 

Dr Jon Warner, ReadyToManage Inc.

Multiple Intelligences-The work of Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner theorized that there are multiple intelligences, and that we all use one or two for the most effective learning. Our culture teach, test, reinforce and reward primarily two kinds of intelligence: verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical. His theory proposes that there are at least eight other kinds of intelligence that are equally important. They are "languages" that most people speak, and that cut through cultural, educational, and ability differences. The mind is not comprised of a single representation or a single language of representations. Rather, we harbor numerous internal representations in our minds. Some scholars speak of "modules of mind," some of a "society of mind,"  in this case it is "multiple intelligences." They include:

Ø  Verbal Linguistic intelligence (sensitive to the meaning and order of words as in a poet). Use activities that involve hearing, listening, impromptu or formal speaking, tongue twisters, humor, oral or silent reading, documentation, creative writing, spelling, journal, poetry.

Ø  Logical-mathematical intelligence (able to handle chains of reasoning and recognize patterns and orders as in a scientist). Use activities that involve abstract symbols/formulas, outlining, graphic organizers, numeric sequences, calculation, deciphering codes, problem solving.

Ø  Musical intelligence (sensitive to pitch, melody, rhythm, and tone as in a composer). Use activities that involve audio tape, music recitals, singing on key, whistling, humming, environmental sounds, percussion vibrations, rhythmic patterns, music composition, tonal patterns.

Ø  Spatial intelligence (perceive the world accurately and try to re-create or transform aspects of that world as in a sculptor or airplane pilot). Use activities that involve art, pictures, sculpture, drawings, doodling, mind mapping, patterns/designs, color schemes, active imagination, imagery, block building.

Ø  Bodily Kinesthetic intelligence (able to use the body skillfully and handle objects adroitly, as in an athlete or dancer). Use activities that involve role playing, physical gestures, drama, inventing, ball passing, sports games, physical exercise, body language, dancing.

Ø  Interpersonal intelligence (understand people and relationship as in a salesman or teacher). learners think by bouncing ideas off of each other (socializers who are people smart). Use activities that involve group projects, division of labor, sensing others' motives, receiving/giving feedback, collaboration skills.

Ø  Intrapersonal intelligence (possess access to one's emotional life as a means to understand oneself and others exhibited by individuals with accurate views of themselves). Use activities that involve emotional processing, silent reflection methods, thinking strategies, concentration skills, higher order reasoning, "centering" practices, meta-cognitive techniques.

Ø  Naturalist (connected to the intricacies and subtleties in nature such as Charles Darwin and Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame).  Use activities that involve bringing the outdoors into the class, relating to the natural world, charting, mapping changes, observing wildlife, keeping journals or logs.

According to multiple intelligences theory, not only do all individuals possess numerous mental representations and intellectual languages, but individuals also differ from one another in the forms of these representations, their relative strengths, and the ways in which (and ease with which) these representations can be changed.

 

How can we use this model?

Perhaps more than any other learning theorist, Gardner suggests that we live in a mainly two dimensional world of Verbal Linguistic intelligence and Logical Mathematical intelligence. The more we can focus on and appeal tow other "intelliegencies", some of which may be stronger for certain people, the better the learning experience will be for all concerned.

 

There are many resources related to learning and learning theories on www.ReadyToManage.com including an on-line module called "Personal Development" which looks at several writer's views including those of Howard Gardner

 

Dr Jon Warner, ReadyToManage.com

Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles

Honey and Mumford (Peter and Alan) are best known for their learning style questionnaire (based heavily on the work of Kolb). This self-administered questionnaire determines your preferred learning style. According to Honey and Mumford, knowing your learning style can also help avoid repeating mistakes by undertaking activities that strengthen other styles For example, if you tend to “jump in at the deep end”, consider spending time reflecting on experiences before taking action.

 

Activitists (Do)

Ø  Immerse themselves fully in new experiences

Ø  Enjoy here and now

Ø  Open minded, enthusiastic, flexible

Ø  Act first, consider consequences later

Ø  Seek to centre activity around themselves

 

Reflectors (Review)

Ø  Stand back and observe

Ø  Cautious, take a back seat

Ø  Collect and analyze data about experience and events, slow to reach conclusions

Ø  Use information from past, present and immediate observations to maintain a big picture perspective.

 

Theorists (Conclude)

Ø  Think through problems in a logical manner, value rationality and objectivity

Ø  Assimilate disparate facts into coherent theories

Ø  Disciplined, aiming to fit things into rational order

Ø  Keen on basic assumptions, principles, theories, models and systems thinking

 

Pragmatists (Plan)

Ø  Keen to put ideas, theories and techniques into practice

Ø  Search new ideas and experiment

Ø  Act quickly and confidently on ideas, gets straight to the point

Ø  Are impatient with endless discussion

 

How can we use this model?

Honey and Mumford's work builds on the earlier work done by David Kolb but perhaps offers simpler categories for different people's learning preferences. Once again, our role in communicating with others is to "flex" our approach to better appeal to these preferences as much as we can.

 

There are several resources on learning and learning styles on the www.ReadyToManage.com web site including the learning styles assessment or LSQ which builds on the work of Kplb and Honey & Mumford.

 

Dr Jon Warner. Ready To Manage Inc

Action Learning

Action learning is a specific process for workplace-based professional development that has grown out of the work Reg Revans (who died in 2003) has been widely used in many organisations in the UK and Europe since 1945, and has spread to many other parts of the world. The term is sometimes with broader meanings, to include a range of ways action learning principles have been adapted to more or less different processes, but in the interests of clear communication, we refer to the work of Revans and his successors.

Action learning is different from mainstream training, education and professional development. The main objective is to learn how to ask appropriate questions in conditions of risk, rather than to answer questions that have been defined by teachers, and do no allow for ambiguous responses because the examiners know the approved answers. Action learning typically involves groups of people (learning sets) working on real workplace problems. It is about people learning to solve problems at work, from experience through reflection and action.

While action learning is individually focused, it uses a small group, known as a 'learning set', which provides a forum where set member's ideas can be challenged in a supportive environment.  Action learning is an iterative, experiential process, involving a cyclical notion of learning. The elements of the cycle are:

Ø  an action; or some kind of current reality

Ø  reflection - considering of the effects, successful and unsuccessful, of that action; (theory formation)

Ø  generalizing - identifying new learning from this experience, that can be applied;  (option generation) and

Ø  planning - on the basis of generalizations, deciding how to act in the future (aspirational focus).

 

While all elements of the cycle are necessary for the action learning process to take place, the notion of reflection is particularly crucial to an understanding of action learning: Action learning is based on the relationship between reflection and action reflection is the essential link between past action and more effective future action reflection is a necessary precursor to effective action and learning from experience can be enhanced through deliberate attention to this relationship.

 

How can we use this?

We can easily apply action learning principles by establishing our own learning "set" or small group of people with whom we can discuss a topic, issue or share something we have recvently learning. Discussions can then focus on how new knowldge or insights might be applied in practical terms.

 

A 20 page booklet on Action learning is available as a PDF doenload at www.ReadyToManage.com

 

Dr Jon Warner, ReadyToManage Inc. www.ReadyToManage.com

Learning Styles-The work of David Kolb

Kolb's learning theory sets out four distinct learning styles (or preferences), which are based on a four-stage learning cycle. (which might also be interpreted as a 'training cycle'). In this respect Kolb's model is elegant, since it offers both a way to understand individual people's different learning styles, and also an explanation of a cycle of experiential learning that applies to us all.

 

Kolb includes this 'cycle of learning' as a central principle his experiential learning theory, typically expressed as four-stage cycle of learning, in which 'immediate or concrete experiences' provide a basis for 'observations and reflections'. These 'observations and reflections' are assimilated and distilled into 'abstract concepts' producing new implications for action which can be 'actively tested' in turn creating new experiences.

 

Kolb says that ideally (and by inference not always) this process represents a learning cycle or spiral where the learner 'touches all the bases', ie., a cycle of experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting. Immediate or concrete experiences lead to observations and reflections. These reflections are then assimilated (absorbed and translated) into abstract concepts with implications for action, which the person can actively test and experiment with, which in turn enable the creation of new experiences.

 

Kolb's model therefore works on two levels - a four-stage cycle and a four-type definition of learning styles, (each representing the combination of two preferred styles, rather like a two-by-two matrix of the four-stage cycle styles, as illustrated below), for which Kolb used the terms Diverging (CE/RO), Assimilating (AC/RO), Converging (AC/AE), and Accommodating (CE/AE)

 

 

How can we use this model?

Kolb's work is useful in suggesting that each individual may have different preferences when it comes to learning. The more we can then appeal to these different preferences when we are communicating, communicating, coaching or trying to lead another person, the better.

There are many resources related to learning and learning styles on the www.ReadyToManage.com web site including the Learning Styles Questionnaire or LSQ , which build directly oin Kolb and Honey and Mumford's work

Dr Jon Warner, Ready to Manage Inc

Welcome to Learning Matters

Learning matters is a new blog that will focus on adult learning in all of its forms. This will particularly be related to learning in the organisation or the world of work.

Blogs will be posted by a range of authors from www.ReadyToManage.com.  Ready to Manage offers a complete selection of organizational and personal development tools for companies, consultants, trainers, facilitators, and individuals to help people reach their potential.

Our intention is to post blogs each week on a topic that is hopefully of interest to a wide range of people. The infomation and ideas they contain can be used by readers in any way that they wish. However, much deeper and richer resources are available at the www.ReadyToManage.com web site, which has almost 1500 resources to browse. This includes a wide variety of self-paced on-line courses, books, booklets and fill manuals or guides as well as presentations, scripted workshops, storyboards, assessments and many other tools.

We hope you enjoy "Learning Matters" and will recommend it to anyone that is as passionate about continuous learning as we are. For us, it is the key to success in life.

Dr Jon Warner, Ready To Manage Inc