Definición del plan para la dirección del proyecto.

The first and perhaps most influential finding in recent years is the realisation that much of the really useful stuff that people learn, the stuff that makes a difference to

performance, is generally not acquired in the classroom, or indeed any formal setting. Most studies show that somewhere between 70% and 80% of our learning comes through informal sources. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics defines informal learning as “the improvised, unplanned instructional efforts that are part of the everyday fabric of business operations”.

Grebow points out that it is this informal learning that has the dominant impact on performance because it brings about a different level of cognitive engagement. The worker is not merely engaged in knowing, but rather fitting the new knowledge into context by adopting and adapting, see Figure 9 (Grebow 2002).

Building Performance Over Time

Study by Sally Anne Moore, Digital Equipment Corporation ‘Time to Performance’ ‘At the Water Cooler of Learning ’ by David Grebow

5%

20%

75%

Informal

Learning

Formal

Learning

Performance

I Adopt & Adapt

Figure 9 - The Importance of Informal Learning

A simplistic approach would be to class informal learning as “learning by doing” but this is to miss the point of what is going on. Learning by doing is a pedagogical strategy that can, and should, be employed to some degree in any well designed learning

programmes. But informal learning is more than this. It is largely organisationally anarchic in so far as it can occur in the most unlikely settings and situations and it is uncontrolled and untracked by the organisation. Informal learning is learner-centred, associated with work but individualised in content and context. It tends to be short term and practical in nature to fulfil specific needs. By contrast formal learning is more general, longer term, standardised, isolated from the context of work, teacher centred, scheduled, measured and to some extent controlled.

The alarming thing is that, if Informal Learning really does account for around three quarters of useful, performance enhancing learning, why do we direct 80% of our spend and efforts at the 25% of learning that provides the least organisational value? And why do our very few efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of our organisational training spend make no mention of the impact of this dimension of learning?

The second major insight concerns the pattern and nature of learning over time. All of our educational and training systems have always front-ended the learning experience as shown in Figure 10. Bob Mosher, Director of Learning and Strategy Evangelism at Microsoft is quick to point out that our traditional approach to preparation for the workplace puts far too much emphasis on initial learning (Mosher 2005).

Initial

Continued

Remedial

Upgrade

Transferred

Acquisition of Knowledge

Instructor Centric

Classroom Centric

Application of Knowledge

Mentor/Coach Centric

Real-World/ Solution Centric

The learning Migration

Figure 10 – Moving the phasing of learning in the career path

Mosher points to an increasing recognition that our corporate learning efforts should shift to place emphasis on providing continuing learning opportunities. Furthermore, the nature of the required learning tends to move from straight knowledge acquisition to modes of learning that he terms remedial, upgrade and transferred. By this he is suggesting that the main cognitive load in these modes is in terms of understanding what has changed in the environment and how the new understanding can be applied within the learners’ operational context. The means of supporting this sort of learning tend also to be different; there is a greater emphasis upon mentoring and coaching and upon informal interaction and serendipitous learning.

Some learning professional have latched upon this insight to argue the case for Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS). These are repositories of context- specific, easily referenced information that can be made available alongside operational systems to provide process and procedural help on a just in time basis. In some cases these systems can contain deeper references in the form of embedded learning objects that can replicate initial or continued learning requirements and fulfil the remedial role. Whilst it appears probable that such systems will indeed proliferate over the coming years, for me, what is significant is the underlying shift in thinking about the provision of learning opportunities rather than the technical implementation of a point solution.

This shifting picture of learning fits well with the structure of informal learning previously discussed. It also mirrors many of the findings that came out of the knowledge

management research field and their delineation between Explicit and Tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1974; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). Nonaka argued that Tacit knowledge, perhaps best described as “know how”, represents over 70% of all human knowledge. Tacit knowledge is inextricably linked with personal, context specific experience; as such it is hard to formalise and codify whereas Explicit knowledge deals with knowledge that is transmittable in formal, systematic language, (Nonaka 1991; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). If we take Tacit knowledge as the product of human beings creating and organising their own experiences, then that knowledge that can be expressed in words and numbers represents only the tip of the iceberg of the total body of human

knowledge. As Polanyi stated, “We can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi 1974).

This definition of Tacit knowledge perhaps explains why performance enhancing learning takes place informally through the interaction of humans in context specific engagements, it also goes a long way to confirming the finding that over 70% of learning occurs informally. As a side note, it also indicates why systems such as EPSS may ultimately fail in so far as the knowledge they are able to codify and make available is by and large not the Tacit knowledge that forms the heart of the informal learning

interaction.

The third and final fundamental insight comes from work done by Robert Kelly at Carnegie Mellon University in Chicago who carried out a longitudinal study from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s. He was interested in assessing how much of the information that professionals need to do their job was stored in their own mind. His data showed that in 1986 the average professional carried around 75% of working knowledge (context-specific information) in memory, but by 1997 this had fallen to around 15% to 20%. This is a remarkable drop and if we assume that the pattern of decline has continued since 1997 it would be reasonable to assume that professionals are now operating with only around 5% to 10% of their knowledge in memory (Jennings 2004).

This is a remarkable insight, but perhaps not a surprising one. Professionals are neither capable of, or have the need to, memorise all the information they need to perform their tasks. What they do need is to become more adept at knowing where to look for information and to be better at synthesising seemingly disparate chunks of information within context to structure new knowledge and in so doing form novel and appropriate solutions in new problem domains. The task of the leader is to manage ambiguity and mobilise action not store accurate knowledge of their environment (Sutcliffe and Weber 2003). So what price for learning initiatives that place a premium on remembering

things? And how relevant are professional accreditation’s that emphasise factual recall over practical application?

These three insights, when taken together have, I believe, the capacity to bring about a paradigm shift in corporate education. A fundamental shift towards learning initiatives that are aimed at the upgrade and transfer learner, emphasise real world application, are learner controlled both in terms of content and process of learning and are positioned to maximise the potential for informal learning. This in turn will bring real challenges to the world of training evaluation for how can you measure the effectiveness of the

contribution of informal learning, when by definition we are largely unaware that it is happening? A paradigm shift in the way we provide access to learning must perforce require a paradigm shift in the way we value the outcomes of that process. One might be inclined to opine that in view of the current state of evaluation, this might be no bad thing.

Overall then we might conclude that the changes currently taking place in corporate education are likely to lead to a desire to:

♦ bring learning closer to the workplace

♦ base the process of learning on discovery and problem-solving ♦ root learning in real job related competencies and reduce the time to

competence

♦ Increase the amount of collaboration in learning and move the process away from an essentially singular activity towards team based competence

♦ Provide greater control for the learner over both the content and process of learning

♦ Find mechanism to facilitate and encourage the natural informal learning that takes place in organisations

♦ Place less emphasis on what people know in favour of a greater emphasis on flexible learning and a demonstrable ability to synthesise new knowledge