September 18, 2023 • 46 mins
Clark Quinn, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of Quinnovation, Co-Director of the Learning Development Accelerator, and Chief Learning Strategist for Upside Learning. With more than four decades of experience at the cutting edge of learning, Dr. Quinn is an internationally known speaker, consultant, and author of seven books. He combines a deep knowledge of cognitive science and broad experience with technology into strategic design solutions that achieve innovative yet practical outcomes for corporations, higher-education, not-for-profit, and government organizations.
consult: quinnovation.com
blog: learnlets.com
society: ldaccelerator.com
role: upsidelearning.com
advise: elevator9.com
books: quinnovation.com/books.html
revolution book: quinnovation.com/books/revolutionize.html
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Episode Transcript
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(00:11):
This is Edwin k Morris,
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(00:32):
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Hi.
And welcome. My name is Clark Quinn.
I live here in BeautifulWalnut Creek, California,
(00:54):
which is San Francisco BayArea. If you don't know,
I currently work for clientsthrough Novation as a consultant
on learning experience strategy design.
Also currently work for the Learningand Development Accelerator,
which is a evidence-basedl and d focused society
in the capacity of co-director.
(01:17):
I just wrote my latestbook, make it Meaningful,
taking Learning Design from Instructionalto Transformational and my most
fantastic work experience with teachingat the University of New South Wales.
And I ended up developing a game forkids who need to learn to live on their
own. They're in formsof care and they don't,
and they need to just learnto survive on the streets.
(01:39):
What is an interestingthing around where you live?
Mount Diablo is a big mountain that sortof dominates the local area. From that,
you get as good of views as you'll getanywhere in the Bay Area until you get
all the way out to the Sierra Nevadas.
As organizations try tobecome learning organizations.
And I know that's a sweet spotfor you, the theory of learning,
(02:01):
or at least the action of learningis a key ingredient for you.
How do organizations functionwell or unwell in your
perspective?
The thing I've seen mostwith organizations is they're not well aligned with
what we know about howwe think work and learn.
Annual reviews or semi-annualreviews. We have a lot of evidence.
(02:23):
These aren't useful, and yet they persist.
And I've begun to believe that thisis because we have a mistaken view of,
our organizations have a mistakenview of how people actually operate.
They think we're these formal,logical reasoning beings,
and there's considerable evidence andcognitive science and marketing beha,
you know, Freakonomics types of behavioraleconomics that shows that we're not,
(02:46):
we have systematic flaws,
and yet we do things like presenttraining that's a bunch of information,
dump and think that'llchange people's behavior.
We think how people representat work doesn't matter.
We should put on on a mask andjust pretend to be professional.
And if we're having personaltroubles, it doesn't matter.
Whole bunch of different waysto what organizations do just
(03:08):
interferes with the ability to get thebest out of people. And that, to me is,
is a problem. Is.
It just the leftover mentalityof a systems assembly line,
uh,
industrial revolution mindsetof how work gets done that has
to be uprooted insomething else planted? Uh.
Yes. And so I think that tailors andthat scientific management that says, oh,
(03:31):
people are cognizant. Amachine is part of it,
but it's also in the fifties we had thecognitive revolution where we went from
behaviorism to a enlight view that said,we can know what goes on in the brain,
but those were still based on sort ofcomputer models that said, oh, well,
if we give people good rules andthey'll execute against and reliably.
And that turns out not to be the case.Our architecture's incredibly powerful,
(03:56):
allowing us to do amazing things likebe able to have this conversation across
the country. Yeah.
And yet there are also systematicflaws that we have to work around.
Also great potential we can take advantageof, and we're just not. So, it's,
it is that legacy and I think weneed to upgrade our understanding of
people and then make our policiesand practices align with that better.
(04:18):
Is it your view that most humans on the,
on the planet get their learningfrom informal versus formal?
Um, yes. And,
I I like what, um, uh,
David Geary did with his evolutionarilyprimary and secondary learning.
He talked about the things we'reorganized to learn. Well, you know,
(04:42):
we learn pick up language relativelyeasily, certainly a primary language,
and we learn how to readpeople to some extent.
But then there are things we'vecreated like mathematics and business
itself and economics that our brainsaren't wired to learn and formal learning
accelerates that we can learnit in apprenticeship. And,
(05:02):
but we also are doing things in
our formal education that aren'taligned with how our brains learn.
We're we tend to do this informationdump, test the knowledge at the end,
and we're done, which doesn'tmatch the way our brains work.
We need little bits ofincrement over time.
We need repeated practice andactually using the information,
(05:22):
the ways we'll use it afterwards. Yes,
we do learn informallyfor the things we can,
we can learn more effectively for thethings that are challenging for us to
learn. And we're notdoing a good job of that.
I have a sort of cheeky statement.
L and d isn't doing near what itcould and should and what it is doing,
it's doing badly. Otherthan that is fine..
Tell, tell me what you'resaying. L and D is learning.
(05:43):
And development, uh,
tends to be the body that runstraining and after sort of 9 1 1.
And, and also the,
the pandemic tends to beresponsible also for e-learning.
They're responsible for formallearning in organizations,
whoever is that we tendto label them as l and d.
Is that a sign of organizationalmaturity if they have an l and d
(06:08):
arm or training officialcapacity in their org structure?
No, that Oh.
Interesting.
That's like cost of entry.I believe that, you know,
in this increasingly dynamic environment,
optimal execution is only the cost ofentry and continual innovation will be the
only sustainable differentiator.
(06:29):
Having an l and d department isa step in the right direction,
but most of them are still miredin old models of how we learn.
Yeah.
They're still doing bulletpoint presentations and training where they throw
stuff around because they'reonly evaluating themselves on whether people like
or think the learning is valuable,
which turns out not tobe a very good indicator.
(06:51):
The correlation between what peoplethink learning event is in terms of its
effectiveness and what itactually is, is about 0.09,
which is zero with a rounding error.Mm. Um, it's just not l and d.
You wanna recognize that a learningorganization, but in many cases,
people are arguing, let's nothave l and d. First of all,
I think we should call itperformance and development,
because we should be also looking atperformance support because there's times
(07:15):
where it doesn't make senseto try and put it in the head.
We should put the solution in the world,
provide support for people to performin the moment rather than try and put it
in the head.
But then also we can and should befacilitating that informal learning you
referred to earlier mm-hmm..
There are ways that thatworks well and not well. Yeah.
It would help if we actually facilitatedthe most effective means of that as
(07:37):
part of the responsibility of l andd or performance and development.
Well,
how much of that is engrossed and howthe culture operates or how the culture
shows up to begin with. Ibring that up because in a,
in a organization thathas a, a high trust level,
then learning can be easier to transfer.
I would think in my,
(07:58):
my review of different organizationsin your conversation that I'm thinking
about,
to me it's like the trust level isthe indicator that shows how well
people are willing to engage inanything in the organization.
How does l and D come into, I,
I understand having training objectivesand learning objectives and all these
(08:20):
things that have to be donein our organization that, uh,
are necessary but doesn'taddress how do you motivate,
how do you motivate somebodyto learn or to engage?
Um, a couple things. You know,there are several levels.
There's sort of the skills and tacticallevels of knowing how to be an effective
(08:40):
self-learner and how to learnwell together and above that.
And you're absolutely right.You know, the culture,
whether it's a learningorganization or not, matters,
learning has to be valued andcontributing has to be valued.
So trust is important. I like what AmyEdmondson talks about safety as well.
If you have what I call theMiranda organization where anything you say can and
(09:02):
will be held against you,, , no,
nobody's going to to contribute.Right? It's not safe.
And the leadership has to walk the walk.
I argue that l and d and thelearning organization itself
needs to master these practices ofbeing a organ learning organization
internally before they cancredibly take it outside. But,
(09:25):
so it's knowing the practices,it's sharing the practices, working with people,
motivating the learning.
People have to understand thatthey no longer can stay static.
Things are happening andpeople do self-help, but not necessarily effectively.
And if we focused on trying to helppeople be better learning. Many years ago,
I worked with the late Jay Cross who wrotethe fabulous book, informal Learning.
(09:47):
We were worried about helpingorganizations help their people be more
effective learners. That may be thebest investment you can make. Yeah.
Because then people cancontinue to improve themselves,
and yet we tend to ignore that metallearning or learning to learn. Wasn't.
There like an old, something aboutteach a man to fish kind of concept.
(10:07):
There is something about,
I think there must be an inhibitor inmost people's brain pans that are like,
oh, I don't wanna learn today. Uh, yougotta kind of a, a spoonful of sugar,
right? Helps the medicine go down.So if you've got, and I think,
and then that's what brings meback to what I wanted to get to,
which is instructional design.
My experience with instructional designwas mind blowing to me because I was
(10:31):
always in military training.So let's, let's define that.
What's the difference betweentraining and learning?
Learning is something that happens,
but training is specificallyfocused learning.
It's designed to accelerate yourability to acquire specific,
you talked about instructionalobjectives or learning objectives. Yes,
(10:53):
learning people may choose whatever,
but when we want specific learningto occur to a certain level,
we design learning experiences,which you can call training.
You can call learning, experience,design, whatever you want.
But that's to achieve specificoutcomes that we know are important in,
in your military experience. That'swhere, where people's lives depend on it.
(11:13):
We tend to get the best investmentsin it. It's not perfect,
but it tends to be better. And, you know,
aviation industry and medicine are placeswhere people's lives are on the line.
Yeah. They do it betterthan most organizations.
So there's a higher fidelity ofthe why in those circumstances.
There is more at stakeis what you're saying.
Let's go back and let'sfor the listener's sake,
(11:36):
explain what instructionaldesign is all about, please.
To me,
instructional design is abouttaking what we know from how
our brains learn and using that todesign experiences that will lead to
transformation in your abilities.In other words, the process says,
okay, we need you to acquire thisskill. We will a good objective states,
(12:00):
you will be able to do this under theseconditions to this level of performance.
And then you align a series ofactivities to, to achieve that.
You do the analysis to make sureyou have the right objectives.
And then you say, what do theystart at? And then you say,
what series of activities,
what series of practice and informationwill lead them to the ability to
(12:23):
acquire that ability? And that wholeprocess is instructional design.
The one thing that traditionalinstructional design has not incorporated
sufficiently is the emotional side ofthe equation is making sure that people
are motivated.
Making sure that people aren'tbeing overwhelmed by anxiety and
deliberately building their confidence.
(12:43):
So at the end of the learning experience,not only are they capable of doing it,
but they're willing to give it a goafter the learning experience when it
matters. You, you may have heard, youraudience may have heard the new phrase,
learning experience design asopposed to instructional design.
That to me is what I want to be.
The differentiator between 'em is thatincorporation of the emotional side of
the equation. Okay. Aswell as the cognitive.
(13:03):
From my view of what I sawof instructional designers,
they were more studentfocused than they were. The,
the old style that they replaced,and this was in the military,
was the old style of military training.And the commander at that point said,
you know what? We needto change how we teach.
Because the model was old soldierscame back and taught new soldiers.
(13:25):
So you had subject matter expertsor experienced soldiers that
were behind the podiumsaying, thou shalt not.
And it was a huge cultural battle.
But what I saw was when the dust settles,
the instructional designer had noemotional tie to any of the content.
None whatsoever. Actually, noeven frame of reference, you know,
(13:48):
but they could come super objectivelyand look at the content and be
able to pull out the nuggets thatwere useful instead of hearing, well,
then we ran up this hill,you know, all the old,
old stories that people like totell versus the actual content
and make it more absorbable.And that's my term.
(14:11):
It made it more cohesive to the learner.
And maybe that was a motivationalthing too, versus a lecture format.
It was a, it was a lot of workand I didn't really realize how,
how much consumption of data andinformation it took to get to a,
a, a teachable moment.
A a a piece of learning that couldbe pushed out or taught from.
(14:35):
It's really a synthesis.It's really a, a a very mind,
mind-blowing way to synthesize somethingso the user can consume it. Mm-hmm.
.
The, and there's two points that I wannamake related to what you're saying.
The first one is,
we now have evidence that whensomebody isn't expert at a task,
like your experienced militarymen who come up and speak at the,
(14:58):
or women at speak at thepodium, they don't actually,
they no longer haveaccess to what they do.
Because the way our brain works iswe compile that information away.
They have access to what they know andthey tell stories and dump knowledge.
You know, there is a role for that whenyou have examples of stuff going into,
into context. But youneed to know a lot more.
(15:18):
And the other problem is that thedifference between well-produced learning
experiences, in other words,
where some designer has takeninformation and made it look amazing
and tests knowledge andactually effective learning,
where actually what they're doing isnot just retrieving the knowledge,
but applying it in the way they'll haveto apply it after learn experience.
(15:39):
The nuances are subtle and too oftenwell produced stuff doesn't look
much different than well producedand well, well-designed stuff.
But it makes a hugedifference in the outcome.
And yet you have to know those nuancesto be able to know when you're being sold
a bill of goods and you'rebeing sold a real solution.
So is there any organization out therethat shouldn't be listening to your
(15:59):
advice? Is there a certain industry that'slike, eh, you don't need this stuff.
Um.
a lot of the , well, the,
it's endemic because thepurchasers too much of l and d
isn't aware of what it takes.
And the people in the ground level arefighting against. People are going, well,
I've seen that you can take contentand put it into an authoring tool and
(16:22):
produce an experience in two weeks.
Why should I expect anymore than that? Yeah.
But that's not gonna lead any outcome.But the industry doesn't measure,
and the vendors go along with this,
it's easy for them to takecontent and produce it.
So you've got both sides of theequation, not aware of what it takes.
I argue that l and d needs to startmeasuring impact, not just efficiency.
(16:45):
Right. Now they measure how muchdoes it cost to put a button,
a seat for an hour? And insteadof measuring is that button,
that seat for an hour actuallyimpacting our business.
And we need to break that.
Walk me through what exactlyis broken in the alignment of
an organization that needs to be fixed?
Um, a couple things. Learningand development can't remain in a little bubble.
(17:09):
It's very comfortable to take ordersfor courses and produce what to ask for
and believe it. It's really a faith-basedindustry, and I use that term loosely.
don't hold me too strictlyto it. If we build it, it is good.
And that can't happen. They needto be more practical and go,
you want a course on this? What isthe problem you're trying to fix?
(17:30):
And let's make sure we're solvingthat. And how will you know it's fixed?
So that that's what you start with.
And I argue that if you startinstituting appropriate measurement,
that will be a catalystto force people to go, oh,
what I'm doing is isn't working. Andthey're scared of that right now,
which is a problem. And we need to makeit safe for them to admit that and,
(17:51):
and start doing better.
And then I argue they need to go beyondthat and start looking at performance
support, job aids, which you,I'm sure you had in the military,
you had checklists and.
Lots of job aids. Oh boy. Yeah.
Because they make sense.Yep. People talk about, oh,
micro learning is that YouTube videodownloaded that helped you fix your dryer?
I did that. I absolutely have a dryerthat's now worked ever since.
(18:15):
I didn't learn a thing. Ihave no idea what I did.
And that is perfectly okay,. It's, it's brilliant.
Why do I have to learnanything? I got the job done.
But you have to move out at that.We have to put it in the head.
And our job is training. Interesting.
We have to think our job is performanceand we need to measure that.
And then we need to start also makinglearning organizations inside l and d.
(18:38):
And when we understandit and have it working,
we then need to take thatout as well. Because,
and I'll argue that for bothpractical and principled reasons.
The principled reason is because whenyou're doing innovation, troubleshooting,
design, all these innovative things, youdon't know the answer when you start.
So by definition, they'relearning, facilitating.
There isn't anybody with the right answer.
You would bring them in and they'dtell you when you just do it.
(19:00):
But you have to figure it out.
But it still requires someof what people who know,
understand learning can facilitate.
And the pragmatic reasonfor l and d and you know,
even knowledge management is to go inand because that continual innovation is
gonna be the differentiatorfor organizations,
(19:20):
becoming the facilitator of that movesyou from being the periphery. Oh, well,
you know, times are tough.We perform well enough,
let's get rid of the thing thathelps us perform optimally. Ah,
but we need to continue to innovate tobe able to adapt in this new environment.
Suddenly you're moved from theperiphery to the center of value to the
organization. And I thinkthat's really important.
(19:40):
Strategic and a role thatis APTT for anybody who does
understand how learning works.And one of the major barriers,
back to your question,,
one of the major barriers is that toomany folks in l and D don't really
understand how we learnhow our brains work.
That sounds like something that isa necessary function in order to be,
(20:02):
as you're saying, performance-basedor outcome-based. I just say, uh,
it's a mimicking tool, right?
You wanna mimic how the solutiongot there in your ex story of the,
of the dryer. Right. And I think thatthat just pops something in my brain,
because that is something I don'tthink a lot of folks see value in.
Do I have to learn that? No. Just showme what I need to do to get the job done.
(20:25):
And if more organizations would take20% of their, their brain power and say,
what can we, you know, goingback to the training aids,
what can we do that just helpspeople out of a pickle, gives them a,
a solution set that they don'thave to understand anything.
Just follow A through Zand boom, done. Move on.
I wouldn't classify that as innovation.You know, you keep talking innovation,
(20:49):
but being able to increase theperformance level of doing and
reducing the friction of not knowing,searching, trying to find an answer,
just sit and spin is a huge game changer.
But we don't even talk about thatpiece. And once you said the mimicking,
well that's what I heard was mimicking.And it's, I've done the same thing.
(21:11):
I had a John Deere tractor, I didn'tknow how to put the snowblower on. I,
I whip out this manual and I'm like,oh my good god, I'm not reading this.
You know, because it's like page afterpage after oh of little stick figure.
And I'm like, God, no. So I didthe same thing, just search.
And the coolest thing wasthis guy just set up a camera.
(21:32):
Did not say one word.There was no graphics.
It was just the camera and this dudeputting these parts together and that's
all it was. There was nocontent development. It was just, here, watch this.
And so I would watch a little bit,pause it, go do that, come back,
play a little more. That'show easy this can all be.
(21:53):
Absolutely. It, it's really funny.
I had a consulting engagement with a firma number of years ago where they were
coming up with a strategy forinnovation and learning experience
and customer experience. And I satin on their week long workshop,
but they've broken up. So thattraining had its own week.
The rest of the website ofsupport had its other week.
(22:15):
What ended up being my whole job thatweek was to keep them from devolving
to going, okay, we're gonna put thatin a course and go, wait, wait, wait.
And the funny thing,
my direct client that I was workingwith told me that on their website,
the most successful content,
the content that was hit the mostwas a bunch of how to videos.
(22:36):
But yet they thought they had to developtraining. It was like, no,.
And I think there's a,
there's an automatic feature in land d in training facilities and
things that they've got one hammer andthat's to build courses, right? That's,
that's all we got. So everything'sgonna be a course. And it,
it doesn't have to be how doyou decipher when it should be
(22:58):
or when it shouldn't be? Of course.
There's several situations that are clues.
One is if it doesn't happenvery frequently, if it's not happening very often,
trying to put it in the head is highlyunlikely because it's gonna be gone by
the time it gets there.
Unless you spend a lot ofeffort in the aviation industry.
(23:18):
Pilots train so much everyyear for things they hope never
happens., . But whenit does, it's really important.
So if it's infrequent trying to put itin the head and if it's something that
it's contrary to ourcognitive architecture,
so there's a whole bunch of sort ofgaps. We have limited working memory.
If it requires more working memory, putit in the world, arbitrary information.
(23:41):
We have real trouble remembering arbitraryinformation. Give a lookup table.
Um, if you do somethingrepeatedly through the day,
if you look at a Towandabook, the checklist manifest.
He talks about people who performedseveral surgeries in the day,
late in the day. They wouldthink they'd perform this step.
'cause they'd performed it twoprevious surgeries. Yeah. Yeah.
And all he did was createa checklist to get by it.
(24:03):
So there's a number of ways in whichour brains struggle to do things and
providing support that workaround that. We have done it.
We can't do largecalculations in our head.
That's why we created calculators firstAbacuses, and then have calculators.
We create diagrams to understand stuffbecause we can't remember all the
relationships. The list goes onof the tools we've developed.
(24:25):
And if you are finding that the gap isbased upon one of these limitations of
our cognitive archite, your trainingprobably can't get rid of it.
That's a good time to use a tool.
There's an evaluation of complexity andtime. What, how'd you say frequency?
Frequency. Frequency. Frequency. Yeah.
Complexity and frequency are kind of yourindicators to what we develop and what
(24:46):
we don't need to.
I wanna go back to thegraphic aids because now that you've got my brain going,
I'm, I probably got an old box of trainingaids that, you know, I still have.
And it's why is it only themilitary seems to develop?
I'm not saying all civilianorganizations don't,
but that's the only place I've everseen them in, in prevalence. Mm-hmm.
. Is that somethingyou think is just an easy way,
(25:08):
a low cost kind of way to aid theorganization if they had more of that?
Or is it, is it just too lowtech and not very sexy? Is that.
It? Uh,
I think it's a mindsetabout the recognizing that trying to put everything in
the head is back to that old, we'reformal logical reasoning beings.
If we put it in thehead and we're done, um,
(25:29):
and recognizing moreaccurately how we think.
So the Coast Guard is onlyquasi-military in that sense,
and yet they really got performancesupport and they invested it heavily.
They brought in experts and they focusedon how much can we put in the world
and reduce what has to be in thehead. You talk about the military,
I'll mention also aviation and medicineas places where performance matters.
(25:53):
And that's where they tend to put agreater recognition of what works in an
emphasis of measurement. Because,
it costs 'em a lot of money if they screwup. You know, lives are expensive in,
in lots of ways.
absolutely a greater awarenessof how we could be more effective without
having to invest inheavy training is needed.
(26:14):
And when people get it, it does lead tomuch better outcomes for them. Mm-hmm.
, you know mm-hmm. sort of to the,
to the topic of knowledgemanagement, you go around, look,
and people may have created these toolsand instead of creating them anew,
we should be curating them.
One of the mantras that more progressivethinkers in l and d talk about is
curate before create, because theremay be a better solution out there.
(26:38):
Why do you have to do the not inventedhere syndrome? Oh, well I have to create,
well, no, go find somebody's ifit needs fine tuning a little bit.
Add your magic. A visual design. A graphicdesign. Instructional design. Yeah.
Cognitive design. But don't assumeyou have to create an app priority.
Go see what people aredoing. Interface design. I,
I was steeped in that early in my career,
the grad school experience of the labwas doing interface design for designing
(27:01):
for how people think my twist wasdesigned. How for how people learn. Hmm.
But they were way ahead of going andlooking at people's situation and
recognizing that they had aproblem with the interface,
but they'd solved it with apost-it that they referred to.
And so they didn't know that they hada problem with the interface because
they'd already solved it. The interfacedesigner would take that mm-hmm.
, take a photo of that,
(27:22):
post-it and go figure out what thatmeant for the design of the interface.
And we are so far behind in that fromthe l and d and instructional design
perspective.
On the medical front,
I was at a KM conference that Italked to an organization's chief
technology officer,
and I asked him about knowledgemanagement and user interface,
(27:43):
user design and all that. I said,
how does the people in knowledgemanagement show up in your organization?
How do you facet that in? He said, well,we don't care about the people. We,
we build the systems and they useit. He was just serious as heck.
It was just like, oh yeah, we don't,we don't worry about them. They use,
what do we tell 'em to use? You know,that sort of thing. And it's like mm-hmm.
, oh my gosh. Is that astone age kind of mentality for, you know,
(28:06):
organizational structures?
Well, and Don Norman up here onmy shelf, he was my PhD advisor.
He's written a number of books. One ofthem was called The Invisible Computer.
And he talked about how, you know,
marketing comes in with the requirementsand engineering develops it.
And then they put in user interface atthe end to to, to make it acceptable.
What they end up doing is patchingexactly all the bad design decisions that
(28:26):
miss and he argued for bringinguser perspective upfront so that you
didn't make those mistakes.You have to patch over.
And you and I both have experienced,
and everybody listening has experiencedsoftware that's designed in that way
that says, just put an interface, fixeverything that doesn't work..
Make, make it a differentfont. They'll love it. Well,
(28:47):
why don't you give me your definitionof what knowledge management is.
My colleague, Harold Jari, was one of the,
Jay Cross wrote thebook in formal learning,
went around afterwards talking aboutit and realized I'm arguing for doing
things together and I'm doing this alone.
So he brought a few of us togetherand that included Charles Jennings,
Jane Hart, and Harold Jari. And Haroldcame from sort of knowledge management.
(29:08):
And he argued that it was brittle.
And he argues the modern versionof knowledge management is getting
people to share, uh,
knowledge and unpacking tacit knowledgeand not trying to formalize it,
but making it availableto people. And, uh,
that's my perspective on itvery much. And it's interesting,
(29:28):
I was reading about, to prep for this,
I looked up a little bit about knowledgemanagement to refresh my memory.
And one of these was mentioning trendsin 2023 for knowledge management.
The first one was knowledge is social. So, and the interesting one,
yeah, I can't remember if it wasan edit article or another one,
but they said the natural home forknowledge management is with l and d.
(29:49):
It's about learning andthere's a connection.
So I don't feel so bad having beentalking about learning so much in your
knowledge management podcast,.
There is a lot of similarities andthey, they are in hand in hand.
I always felt that, uh, in similarto what you were just saying,
I I always felt it would bebest housed alongside hr.
So you're working with requirements andjob descriptions and expectations and
(30:13):
behaviors and all those sorts of thingsto help the organization build a better
widget of why are these people here?
And if they're not built andor expected to share knowledge,
then you're shooting yourself in a foot.
You might as well say they'renot here to learn either.
They're just here tobuild stuff. That's it.
Very non-dynamic to think thatthe human ability will be happy
(30:36):
and the cog square hole,
round hole kind of mentality anymorethat may have been great 150 years ago
when you got your choices of pitchforksor, or, or what have you. And it's like,
no, that horse has left the barn.
People have a higher expectationand a want and desire and
of how they show up at work.
(30:58):
I think that's absolutely right. Youknow, in some ways it made sense.
Not everybody had access tohigher education in the old days.
And so a few people had todo the thinking for the rest.
And we didn't have as a fantastictechnology solutions as we have now.
We didn't have robots andthings. But that's changed.
And you're absolutely right.
And I think these days it's the differencebetween organizations that say, oh,
(31:20):
we have these problematic people.We have to keep 'em under control.
Versus the organization that go,
we've got the fabulous peoplewho aren't performing well.
'cause we haven't given them the organizedwhat we're doing to free them up to
be their best.
And I think that shift in mentality issort of fundamental to being able to
really create what they callthe learning organization,
which is an organization where informationis available and shared and together
(31:45):
we learn better. We aresmarter than me. Tell.
Me what the superstructure of anorganization should look like.
Now we all know hierarchical,
we all know command structure and allthat sort of thing. So, and Holocracy,
if anyone knows Holocracy Holocracy isa very interesting biological looking
org structure, and it'sall around outputs.
So how do you build the best solutionfor building an organization.
(32:10):
Uh, at one level That's beyond my paygrade type of answer. .
But, but it is something I.
Let, let's couch it likethis. You've got a magic wish.
What would be your bestdesign concept? I've.
Looked at a couple things. Ithink it was Ra I'm not sure,
but was arguing for a parallel structure.
(32:31):
You have the hierarchy to executethe things you know you need to do,
but then you pulled it out andyou created these teams that were
in parallel were pulled fromthe different hierarchy,
but they were assigned to solve problemsand innovate. So he had sort of had a,
a, a parallel structure,whereas other thinkers,
and this includes people like Dave Graywith his book, the Connected Company,
(32:53):
I think Scam McChrystal with histeam of teams, Amy Edmondson,
when he's talking about teaming,
they talked about a more modularstructure where you started having
small groups responsible and youhad groups that managed groups,
but it was all a series of groupsand periphery. Oh, Dan Pon effect,
I think talked a little bitabout that as well in his book,
(33:14):
which I have on my shelf. And, um,title isn't coming to spring into mind,
but these structures are more natural. It,
it sounds a bit like your holacracy,
where you have groups that are responsiblefor each other and responsible for
tasks,
and they have interchanges between eachother and there's a semi perial Yeah.
Will membrane at the periphery of theorganization where exchanges are going in
(33:36):
and out there as well. And I thinkthat more naturally fits people.
It's just how do you make sure it'sdoing the things it needs to do?
And I think that can be accomplished,
but it really takes a fundamentalrethink of the culture, the processes,
the policies, the infrastructure.
A lot of it has to be workingwell together for all that,
(33:59):
for that to be successful.
Well,
as organizations have adopted andadapted to the technological changes in
the world,
does the systematic approachor the business process idea
get more codified or less,
everything that you've kind ofpointed towards is a social construct.
(34:20):
Learning social construct. Organizationsshould be more of a social construct.
How do we, I guess, combat?
Because when you were saying that,I was like, well, we're reliant.
I see so many organizations that dooperations via email. You know, it's,
it's very much a broken systemwhen we're still reliant upon these
(34:42):
mundane tools as an operating capacityof an organization versus the social
structure. I don't know howmany times I've told somebody,
why are you sending an emailthat's like a phone call,
you should be callingthem. You know what I mean?
There's like different expectationsfor different modes of communication.
But is it too easy tohide behind the email?
(35:03):
Yes, and I'm guilty ofit by the way. I, I,
I have phone anxiety. So youremember the old computer anxiety?
I have phone anxiety,, but Idon't think we really have good tools yet.
For instance, our collaboration tools,they tend to be fixed into it's, well,
it's a text document or it's animage, or it's a spreadsheet.
(35:23):
Instead of recognizing, many,
many years ago on an earlyMAC program was trapeze,
which allowed you to have mixedimages and texts, blocks of texts,
blocks of numbers that interoperated.And I'm thinking that's what we need.
But when I was an undergraduate, I did a,
what was effectively an honorsproject with some faculty members.
(35:45):
We took a classroom and we used emailto conduct classroom discussion.
Half the class was split, half wasin class and half did it by email,
and then they were supposed to switch.It didn't happen for complicated reasons,
but one of the things we found was thatsome people who'd been really active in
classroom, weren't activein email and vice versa.
(36:06):
Different people have different channels.
And I think it's important tohave a variety of different channels for different
messages. You don't justhave email and phone.
You tend to have Slack or teams orsomething where you can send messages as
well.
And I think what we see happening inorganizations is we'll get beliefs about
how you should behave and this unit doesit differently. Mm-hmm..
(36:26):
And that may be okay, we may need totolerate that, but at the end of the day,
make sure the messages are getting out.
We're we're talking about howimportant it is to work out loud,
for instance mm-hmm.,
what should you be sharingand how frequently? Well,
we'll learn a little bit about it,but really it needs to be this is new,
here's what my goal is. Here's myplan, here's my current status. Okay.
(36:49):
That in itself will give peopleability to align, to understand,
be able to provide usefulsuggestions to improve.
But you also have the culture where youdon't attack people for what they share.
You look to improve if you can or youlearn from it. I, I don't think quite,
we're not quite at the place withthe right tools to facilitate this.
We don't have, you know,we're still learning the policies and procedures. Even.
(37:12):
If you went back andput the mirror of, uh,
instructional design up to whatyou're just talking about and said,
look at this, to me, it's still the,
the what's missing is, like you said,learners have different modalities they,
uh, naturally fall for.
So therefore the organization shouldbe looking at making products,
artifacts that are builtto share knowledge and or train or learn or whatever
(37:36):
the, the outcome is. But they should bedoing it in two or three different ways,
right?
Uh, yes. Yes.
If you're gonna be learner centric,
you need to come up with differentways of transfer of knowledge.
Yes. And, um,
you do need to have different channelsfor different types of messages.
You also need to recognize my preferences.
And learners' preferences aren't a goodindication for how they best learn.
(37:59):
What they state and what theydo doesn't even correlate.
So you want to find some practices.And I really like Garvin,
Edmondson and Gino wrote a paper forHarvard Business Review talking about
evaluating dimensions ofa learning organization.
And they created representationthat I use in presentations a lot,
that talks about, you know,you need this environment,
it needs to be open-minded and valuingdiversity, not just tolerating,
(38:22):
but valuing diversity andhaving time for reflection,
psychological safety. But then theygo, you also need these practices.
You need experimentation,
you need smart experimentation where youhave done it so that you learn what's
learned from that.
You either avoid that or you bake it intoyour practices and continue to evolve.
(38:43):
And finally they talked about leadershipand I sort of extended what they said,
not just they have to support it,but they have to walk the walk.
If your boss says share mistakes and your
boss doesn't share mistakes,
are you really gonna believe that ifthat's an acceptable behavior? Mm-hmm.
.
So they based that onvaluation of organizations and it was some very specific
(39:04):
recommendations I think are partof the direction we need to go,
but it included continuedexperiment and improve that.
Could you tell the listeners the nameof your book and where to get it?
Which one?.
. All right. All of them.
Right. Um,
the one most relevant forthis conversation was book I was really pleased to
(39:26):
write called RevolutionizedLearning and Development,
performance and InnovationStrategy for the 21st Century.
I argue a lot of l and d and businesspractices are still from the previous
century and we need to move it. Sorevolutionized learning development.
I've got a book out on Miss and learningorganizations subsequent to that.
I've got one on learning sciencefor instructional designers,
particularly the chapter two is reallythe core of the cognitive processing loop
(39:50):
that I think everybody who designsfor people really needs to understand.
My most recent one is actually make itmeaningful is about that emotional side
of learning experience. It's thecompliment to the learning science,
but together they sort of create a wholebasis for learning experience design.
But those are probably the ones that aremost relevant to what your audience's
interests in.
So what's on the future? What's on,
(40:11):
what's on your to-do listfor the next five years?
? Um, besides, you know, continuingwith the activities I'm part of,
I think the society is, issomething I'll continue.
I'm really enjoying the experience withupside learning because it's given me a
chance to practice what I preach andthey're really committed to, to making,
really applying learning science towhat they're doing. So that's good.
(40:33):
The one thing I'm thinking is themost important thing I can give,
I refer to that second chapterin learning science book.
I'm increasingly thinking everybody inour industry needs to understand that
basic human information processing loop.
And I'm beginning to look forways to get that available.
I have an asynchronous workshop on it.Yeah. And I could do it with a webinar,
but it really works bestlive. I do it experientially.
(40:55):
So I do some actual psych experiments tohelp make it visceral and then explain
what that tells us about it.
And I'm just trying to find away to get that to everybody,
because many people talk about learningscience, including my, you know,
PhD advisor and things and talkabout design and the cognitive loop.
But I think that one wayof thinking about it,
my now 40 years of experiencesuggests that that's the most
(41:19):
useful thing. And I'm workingon getting that out there.
L and d and knowledge managementneed to COHEs and become a
cognitive, a chief cognitiveofficer for an organization.
Should cognition be brought in, inas a principle, right? I mean, and,
and that's the super structure ofeverything we've been talking about,
knowledge management, learningdevelopment should be all in cognition.
(41:42):
So is there a way you can test anorganization's cognition proficiency?
There have.
Been a couple stabs, I think. Yes, bythe way. I think really human resources,
the human part of it isreally our brain be clear.
Cognitive science actually breaks itdown to three parts. Our cognitive,
our affective, and our non-native.And our cognitive is, you know,
how we think our affective is who weare as people and our non-native is our
(42:06):
intent to contribute, our intents toparticipate and our intents to learn.
And we need to address all of those.
But really that's what makesus human at work these days.
It's not so much our physical capacityin many ways. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yes,
I think that's necessary.
I think that organizing around supportingpeople performing at their best makes
(42:26):
sense. The first partof your question was,
should there be a Chief cognitive officer?
And that was second partof the question. And it's.
Should it, we just bring together l and d,
KM HR and make kind of a hubthere about the organization as an
organism around thoseelements of cognition?
Uh, I, I do think so. How dowe organize our technology,
(42:47):
our practices and policies,our resources, you know,
information resources to support peoplebeing able to do the best at what
they're doing? I absolutely thinkthat's a direction we can and should go.
One of the conflict points I'd seen 15years ago is that in the organization I
was in, the,
had the chief technology officer sittingat the same tip of the Chief Knowledge
(43:08):
Officer. And that's the problem.Once you build fiefdoms,
then they all have theirlines of resources and all their stuff and all their
separate piles of, I could see wherethere was a little back and forth.
It was a new structure. Granted,
that was a new structure when you'vegot a Chief Knowledge officer that's
looking at the technology,
providing the pathway foreverything that we're doing versus
(43:32):
A C T O, which says they're incharge of all the hardware software,
and you'll do what I say. And that wasmy perspective there. There seems to be,
now, if you had a, a Chief cognitionofficer that was like, Hey,
you guys will play and playnicely. I don't know. It, it, I,
I know organizations are struggling totry to figure out what's the best way
(43:52):
forward.
And I think a lot of org structures havethe same problem with trying to figure
out how are we gonna strategizeour digital setup here for
even be relevant in 10 years.
There's just a lot of things tothink about running an organization,
and this is just one of many.
Absolutely. And that tensionin some ways is, is productive.
Because I always tell instructionaldesigners, you get so frustrated at it,
(44:17):
they want, you know, you think of themas the preventer of, of services, right?
, um, do you then I ask them,
do you get upset when the networkgoes down and they go, yeah, yeah.
Understand that they want need to do this,
this in a way that's secure andreliable and uptime and you want what?
So work with them and understand.
(44:37):
And yet a good IT department knowsthey have to continue to, to advance.
And one story, uh, wastold to us many years ago,
a company that no longerexists, unfortunately,
but they had that tensionbetween the two silos and they
did something very interesting.They made one small change.
They made each of their bonuses partlydependent on the success of the other
(45:00):
organization. Hmm. Just thehead of those two units.
But their bonuses were dependent.The success of the other one.
Suddenly they were incented to get.
Along. Very, very chummyafter that. Yes. Yes.
Maybe we should talk more. Yes.Maybe. Oh, that's funny. People,
you know, they're, they'rea funny animal. We are.
(45:21):
. .
Thank you, Clark. It's beena great investigation into a very interesting topic.
One that I find verypotent for the future.
Well, thank you.
It was indeed a great chance to exploresome of these issues and the tensions
they face. So I appreciatethe opportunity.
(45:42):
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B y n tk@pioneerkss.org.
(46:07):
You have just finished our latest becauseyou need to know a public service of
Pioneer Knowledge Services.
Please join us on LinkedIn andfind us at pioneer kss org.
This is Edwin k Morris,
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If your company or organization wouldlike to help us continue this mission and
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b yn tk@pioneerks.org.
Hi.
And welcome. My name is Clark Quinn.
I live here in BeautifulWalnut Creek, California,
(00:54):
which is San Francisco BayArea. If you don't know,
I currently work for clientsthrough Novation as a consultant
on learning experience strategy design.
Also currently work for the Learningand Development Accelerator,
which is a evidence-basedl and d focused society
in the capacity of co-director.
(01:17):
I just wrote my latestbook, make it Meaningful,
taking Learning Design from Instructionalto Transformational and my most
fantastic work experience with teachingat the University of New South Wales.
And I ended up developing a game forkids who need to learn to live on their
own. They're in formsof care and they don't,
and they need to just learnto survive on the streets.
(01:39):
What is an interestingthing around where you live?
Mount Diablo is a big mountain that sortof dominates the local area. From that,
you get as good of views as you'll getanywhere in the Bay Area until you get
all the way out to the Sierra Nevadas.
As organizations try tobecome learning organizations.
And I know that's a sweet spotfor you, the theory of learning,
(02:01):
or at least the action of learningis a key ingredient for you.
How do organizations functionwell or unwell in your
perspective?
The thing I've seen mostwith organizations is they're not well aligned with
what we know about howwe think work and learn.
Annual reviews or semi-annualreviews. We have a lot of evidence.
(02:23):
These aren't useful, and yet they persist.
And I've begun to believe that thisis because we have a mistaken view of,
our organizations have a mistakenview of how people actually operate.
They think we're these formal,logical reasoning beings,
and there's considerable evidence andcognitive science and marketing beha,
you know, Freakonomics types of behavioraleconomics that shows that we're not,
(02:46):
we have systematic flaws,
and yet we do things like presenttraining that's a bunch of information,
dump and think that'llchange people's behavior.
We think how people representat work doesn't matter.
We should put on on a mask andjust pretend to be professional.
And if we're having personaltroubles, it doesn't matter.
Whole bunch of different waysto what organizations do just
(03:08):
interferes with the ability to get thebest out of people. And that, to me is,
is a problem. Is.
It just the leftover mentalityof a systems assembly line,
uh,
industrial revolution mindsetof how work gets done that has
to be uprooted insomething else planted? Uh.
Yes. And so I think that tailors andthat scientific management that says, oh,
(03:31):
people are cognizant. Amachine is part of it,
but it's also in the fifties we had thecognitive revolution where we went from
behaviorism to a enlight view that said,we can know what goes on in the brain,
but those were still based on sort ofcomputer models that said, oh, well,
if we give people good rules andthey'll execute against and reliably.
And that turns out not to be the case.Our architecture's incredibly powerful,
(03:56):
allowing us to do amazing things likebe able to have this conversation across
the country. Yeah.
And yet there are also systematicflaws that we have to work around.
Also great potential we can take advantageof, and we're just not. So, it's,
it is that legacy and I think weneed to upgrade our understanding of
people and then make our policiesand practices align with that better.
(04:18):
Is it your view that most humans on the,
on the planet get their learningfrom informal versus formal?
Um, yes. And
I I like what, um, uh,
David Geary did with his evolutionarilyprimary and secondary learning.
He talked about the things we'reorganized to learn. Well, you know,
(04:42):
we learn pick up language relativelyeasily, certainly a primary language,
and we learn how to readpeople to some extent.
But then there are things we'vecreated like mathematics and business
itself and economics that our brainsaren't wired to learn and formal learning
accelerates that we can learnit in apprenticeship. And,
(05:02):
but we also are doing things in
our formal education that aren'taligned with how our brains learn.
We're we tend to do this informationdump, test the knowledge at the end,
and we're done, which doesn'tmatch the way our brains work.
We need little bits ofincrement over time.
We need repeated practice andactually using the information,
(05:22):
the ways we'll use it afterwards. Yes,
we do learn informallyfor the things we can,
we can learn more effectively for thethings that are challenging for us to
learn. And we're notdoing a good job of that.
I have a sort of cheeky statement.
L and d isn't doing near what itcould and should and what it is doing,
it's doing badly. Otherthan that is fine.
Tell, tell me what you'resaying. L and D is learning.
(05:43):
And development, uh,
tends to be the body that runstraining and after sort of 9 1 1.
And, and also the,
the pandemic tends to beresponsible also for e-learning.
They're responsible for formallearning in organizations,
whoever is that we tendto label them as l and d.
Is that a sign of organizationalmaturity if they have an l and d
(06:08):
arm or training officialcapacity in their org structure?
No,
Interesting.
That's like cost of entry.I believe that, you know,
in this increasingly dynamic environment,
optimal execution is only the cost ofentry and continual innovation will be the
only sustainable differentiator.
(06:29):
Having an l and d department isa step in the right direction,
but most of them are still miredin old models of how we learn.
Yeah.
They're still doing bulletpoint presentations and training where they throw
stuff around because they'reonly evaluating themselves on whether people like
or think the learning is valuable,
which turns out not tobe a very good indicator.
(06:51):
The correlation between what peoplethink learning event is in terms of its
effectiveness and what itactually is, is about 0.09,
which is zero with a rounding error.Mm. Um, it's just not l and d.
You wanna recognize that a learningorganization, but in many cases,
people are arguing, let's nothave l and d. First of all,
I think we should call itperformance and development,
because we should be also looking atperformance support because there's times
(07:15):
where it doesn't make senseto try and put it in the head.
We should put the solution in the world,
provide support for people to performin the moment rather than try and put it
in the head.
But then also we can and should befacilitating that informal learning you
referred to earlier mm-hmm.
There are ways that thatworks well and not well. Yeah.
It would help if we actually facilitatedthe most effective means of that as
(07:37):
part of the responsibility of l andd or performance and development.
Well,
how much of that is engrossed and howthe culture operates or how the culture
shows up to begin with. Ibring that up because in a,
in a organization thathas a, a high trust level,
then learning can be easier to transfer.
I would think in my,
(07:58):
my review of different organizationsin your conversation that I'm thinking
about,
to me it's like the trust level isthe indicator that shows how well
people are willing to engage inanything in the organization.
How does l and D come into, I,
I understand having training objectivesand learning objectives and all these
(08:20):
things that have to be donein our organization that, uh,
are necessary but doesn'taddress how do you motivate,
how do you motivate somebodyto learn or to engage?
Um, a couple things. You know,there are several levels.
There's sort of the skills and tacticallevels of knowing how to be an effective
(08:40):
self-learner and how to learnwell together and above that.
And you're absolutely right.You know, the culture,
whether it's a learningorganization or not, matters,
learning has to be valued andcontributing has to be valued.
So trust is important. I like what AmyEdmondson talks about safety as well.
If you have what I call theMiranda organization where anything you say can and
(09:02):
will be held against you,
nobody's going to to contribute.Right? It's not safe.
And the leadership has to walk the walk.
I argue that l and d and thelearning organization itself
needs to master these practices ofbeing a organ learning organization
internally before they cancredibly take it outside. But,
(09:25):
so it's knowing the practices,it's sharing the practices, working with people,
motivating the learning.
People have to understand thatthey no longer can stay static.
Things are happening andpeople do self-help, but not necessarily effectively.
And if we focused on trying to helppeople be better learning. Many years ago,
I worked with the late Jay Cross who wrotethe fabulous book, informal Learning.
(09:47):
We were worried about helpingorganizations help their people be more
effective learners. That may be thebest investment you can make. Yeah.
Because then people cancontinue to improve themselves,
and yet we tend to ignore that metallearning or learning to learn. Wasn't.
There like an old, something aboutteach a man to fish kind of concept.
(10:07):
There is something about,
I think there must be an inhibitor inmost people's brain pans that are like,
oh, I don't wanna learn today. Uh, yougotta kind of a, a spoonful of sugar,
right? Helps the medicine go down.So if you've got, and I think,
and then that's what brings meback to what I wanted to get to,
which is instructional design.
My experience with instructional designwas mind blowing to me because I was
(10:31):
always in military training.So let's, let's define that.
What's the difference betweentraining and learning?
Learning is something that happens,
but training is specificallyfocused learning.
It's designed to accelerate yourability to acquire specific,
you talked about instructionalobjectives or learning objectives. Yes,
(10:53):
learning people may choose whatever,
but when we want specific learningto occur to a certain level,
we design learning experiences,which you can call training.
You can call learning, experience,design, whatever you want.
But that's to achieve specificoutcomes that we know are important in,
in your military experience. That'swhere, where people's lives depend on it.
(11:13):
We tend to get the best investmentsin it. It's not perfect,
but it tends to be better. And, you know,
aviation industry and medicine are placeswhere people's lives are on the line.
Yeah. They do it betterthan most organizations.
So there's a higher fidelity ofthe why in those circumstances.
There is more at stakeis what you're saying.
Let's go back and let'sfor the listener's sake,
(11:36):
explain what instructionaldesign is all about, please.
To me,
instructional design is abouttaking what we know from how
our brains learn and using that todesign experiences that will lead to
transformation in your abilities.In other words, the process says,
okay, we need you to acquire thisskill. We will a good objective states,
(12:00):
you will be able to do this under theseconditions to this level of performance.
And then you align a series ofactivities to, to achieve that.
You do the analysis to make sureyou have the right objectives.
And then you say, what do theystart at? And then you say,
what series of activities,
what series of practice and informationwill lead them to the ability to
(12:23):
acquire that ability? And that wholeprocess is instructional design.
The one thing that traditionalinstructional design has not incorporated
sufficiently is the emotional side ofthe equation is making sure that people
are motivated.
Making sure that people aren'tbeing overwhelmed by anxiety and
deliberately building their confidence.
(12:43):
So at the end of the learning experience,not only are they capable of doing it,
but they're willing to give it a goafter the learning experience when it
matters. You, you may have heard, youraudience may have heard the new phrase,
learning experience design asopposed to instructional design.
That to me is what I want to be.
The differentiator between 'em is thatincorporation of the emotional side of
the equation. Okay. Aswell as the cognitive.
(13:03):
From my view of what I sawof instructional designers,
they were more studentfocused than they were. The,
the old style that they replaced,and this was in the military,
was the old style of military training.And the commander at that point said,
you know what? We needto change how we teach.
Because the model was old soldierscame back and taught new soldiers.
(13:25):
So you had subject matter expertsor experienced soldiers that
were behind the podiumsaying, thou shalt not.
And it was a huge cultural battle.
But what I saw was when the dust settles,
the instructional designer had noemotional tie to any of the content.
None whatsoever. Actually, noeven frame of reference, you know,
(13:48):
but they could come super objectivelyand look at the content and be
able to pull out the nuggets thatwere useful instead of hearing, well,
then we ran up this hill,you know, all the old,
old stories that people like totell versus the actual content
and make it more absorbable.And that's my term.
(14:11):
It made it more cohesive to the learner.
And maybe that was a motivationalthing too, versus a lecture format.
It was a, it was a lot of workand I didn't really realize how,
how much consumption of data andinformation it took to get to a,
a, a teachable moment.
A a a piece of learning that couldbe pushed out or taught from.
(14:35):
It's really a synthesis.It's really a, a a very mind,
mind-blowing way to synthesize somethingso the user can consume it. Mm-hmm.
The, and there's two points that I wannamake related to what you're saying.
The first one is,
we now have evidence that whensomebody isn't expert at a task,
like your experienced militarymen who come up and speak at the,
(14:58):
or women at speak at thepodium, they don't actually,
they no longer haveaccess to what they do.
Because the way our brain works iswe compile that information away.
They have access to what they know andthey tell stories and dump knowledge.
You know, there is a role for that whenyou have examples of stuff going into,
into context. But youneed to know a lot more.
(15:18):
And the other problem is that thedifference between well-produced learning
experiences, in other words,
where some designer has takeninformation and made it look amazing
and tests knowledge andactually effective learning,
where actually what they're doing isnot just retrieving the knowledge,
but applying it in the way they'll haveto apply it after learn experience.
(15:39):
The nuances are subtle and too oftenwell produced stuff doesn't look
much different than well producedand well, well-designed stuff.
But it makes a hugedifference in the outcome.
And yet you have to know those nuancesto be able to know when you're being sold
a bill of goods and you'rebeing sold a real solution.
So is there any organization out therethat shouldn't be listening to your
(15:59):
advice? Is there a certain industry that'slike, eh, you don't need this stuff.
Um.
it's endemic because thepurchasers too much of l and d
isn't aware of what it takes.
And the people in the ground level arefighting against. People are going, well,
I've seen that you can take contentand put it into an authoring tool and
(16:22):
produce an experience in two weeks.
Why should I expect anymore than that? Yeah.
But that's not gonna lead any outcome.But the industry doesn't measure,
and the vendors go along with this,
it's easy for them to takecontent and produce it.
So you've got both sides of theequation, not aware of what it takes.
I argue that l and d needs to startmeasuring impact, not just efficiency.
(16:45):
Right. Now they measure how muchdoes it cost to put a button,
a seat for an hour? And insteadof measuring is that button,
that seat for an hour actuallyimpacting our business.
And we need to break that.
Walk me through what exactlyis broken in the alignment of
an organization that needs to be fixed?
Um, a couple things. Learningand development can't remain in a little bubble.
(17:09):
It's very comfortable to take ordersfor courses and produce what to ask for
and believe it. It's really a faith-basedindustry, and I use that term loosely.
And that can't happen. They needto be more practical and go,
you want a course on this? What isthe problem you're trying to fix?
(17:30):
And let's make sure we're solvingthat. And how will you know it's fixed?
So that that's what you start with.
And I argue that if you startinstituting appropriate measurement,
that will be a catalystto force people to go, oh,
what I'm doing is isn't working. Andthey're scared of that right now,
which is a problem. And we need to makeit safe for them to admit that and,
(17:51):
and start doing better.
And then I argue they need to go beyondthat and start looking at performance
support, job aids, which you,I'm sure you had in the military,
you had checklists and.
Lots of job aids. Oh boy. Yeah.
Because they make sense.Yep. People talk about, oh,
micro learning is that YouTube videodownloaded that helped you fix your dryer?
I did that. I absolutely have a dryerthat's now worked ever since
(18:15):
I didn't learn a thing. Ihave no idea what I did.
And that is perfectly okay,
Why do I have to learnanything? I got the job done.
But you have to move out at that.We have to put it in the head.
And our job is training. Interesting.
We have to think our job is performanceand we need to measure that.
And then we need to start also makinglearning organizations inside l and d.
(18:38):
And when we understandit and have it working,
we then need to take thatout as well. Because,
and I'll argue that for bothpractical and principled reasons.
The principled reason is because whenyou're doing innovation, troubleshooting,
design, all these innovative things, youdon't know the answer when you start.
So by definition, they'relearning, facilitating.
There isn't anybody with the right answer.
You would bring them in and they'dtell you when you just do it.
(19:00):
But you have to figure it out.
But it still requires someof what people who know,
understand learning can facilitate.
And the pragmatic reasonfor l and d and you know,
even knowledge management is to go inand because that continual innovation is
gonna be the differentiatorfor organizations,
(19:20):
becoming the facilitator of that movesyou from being the periphery. Oh, well,
you know, times are tough.We perform well enough,
let's get rid of the thing thathelps us perform optimally. Ah,
but we need to continue to innovate tobe able to adapt in this new environment.
Suddenly you're moved from theperiphery to the center of value to the
organization. And I thinkthat's really important.
(19:40):
Strategic and a role thatis APTT for anybody who does
understand how learning works.And one of the major barriers,
back to your question,
one of the major barriers is that toomany folks in l and D don't really
understand how we learnhow our brains work.
That sounds like something that isa necessary function in order to be,
(20:02):
as you're saying, performance-basedor outcome-based. I just say, uh,
it's a mimicking tool, right?
You wanna mimic how the solutiongot there in your ex story of the,
of the dryer. Right. And I think thatthat just pops something in my brain,
because that is something I don'tthink a lot of folks see value in.
Do I have to learn that? No. Just showme what I need to do to get the job done.
(20:25):
And if more organizations would take20% of their, their brain power and say,
what can we, you know, goingback to the training aids,
what can we do that just helpspeople out of a pickle, gives them a,
a solution set that they don'thave to understand anything.
Just follow A through Zand boom, done. Move on.
I wouldn't classify that as innovation.You know, you keep talking innovation,
(20:49):
but being able to increase theperformance level of doing and
reducing the friction of not knowing,searching, trying to find an answer,
just sit and spin is a huge game changer.
But we don't even talk about thatpiece. And once you said the mimicking,
well that's what I heard was mimicking.And it's, I've done the same thing.
(21:11):
I had a John Deere tractor, I didn'tknow how to put the snowblower on. I,
I whip out this manual and I'm like,oh my good god, I'm not reading this.
You know, because it's like page afterpage after oh of little stick figure.
And I'm like, God, no. So I didthe same thing, just search.
And the coolest thing wasthis guy just set up a camera.
(21:32):
Did not say one word.There was no graphics.
It was just the camera and this dudeputting these parts together and that's
all it was. There was nocontent development. It was just, here, watch this.
And so I would watch a little bit,pause it, go do that, come back,
play a little more. That'show easy this can all be.
(21:53):
Absolutely. It, it's really funny.
I had a consulting engagement with a firma number of years ago where they were
coming up with a strategy forinnovation and learning experience
and customer experience. And I satin on their week long workshop,
but they've broken up. So thattraining had its own week.
The rest of the website ofsupport had its other week.
(22:15):
What ended up being my whole job thatweek was to keep them from devolving
to going, okay, we're gonna put thatin a course and go, wait, wait, wait.
And the funny thing,
my direct client that I was workingwith told me that on their website,
the most successful content,
the content that was hit the mostwas a bunch of how to videos.
(22:36):
But yet they thought they had to developtraining. It was like, no,
And I think there's a,
there's an automatic feature in land d in training facilities and
things that they've got one hammer andthat's to build courses, right? That's,
that's all we got. So everything'sgonna be a course. And it,
it doesn't have to be how doyou decipher when it should be
(22:58):
or when it shouldn't be? Of course.
There's several situations that are clues.
One is if it doesn't happenvery frequently, if it's not happening very often,
trying to put it in the head is highlyunlikely because it's gonna be gone by
the time it gets there.
Unless you spend a lot ofeffort in the aviation industry.
(23:18):
Pilots train so much everyyear for things they hope never
happens.
So if it's infrequent trying to put itin the head and if it's something that
it's contrary to ourcognitive architecture,
so there's a whole bunch of sort ofgaps. We have limited working memory.
If it requires more working memory, putit in the world, arbitrary information.
(23:41):
We have real trouble remembering arbitraryinformation. Give a lookup table.
Um, if you do somethingrepeatedly through the day,
if you look at a Towandabook, the checklist manifest.
He talks about people who performedseveral surgeries in the day,
late in the day. They wouldthink they'd perform this step.
'cause they'd performed it twoprevious surgeries. Yeah. Yeah.
And all he did was createa checklist to get by it.
(24:03):
So there's a number of ways in whichour brains struggle to do things and
providing support that workaround that. We have done it.
We can't do largecalculations in our head.
That's why we created calculators firstAbacuses, and then have calculators.
We create diagrams to understand stuffbecause we can't remember all the
relationships. The list goes onof the tools we've developed.
(24:25):
And if you are finding that the gap isbased upon one of these limitations of
our cognitive archite, your trainingprobably can't get rid of it.
That's a good time to use a tool.
There's an evaluation of complexity andtime. What, how'd you say frequency?
Frequency. Frequency. Frequency. Yeah.
Complexity and frequency are kind of yourindicators to what we develop and what
(24:46):
we don't need to.
I wanna go back to thegraphic aids because now that you've got my brain going,
I'm, I probably got an old box of trainingaids that, you know, I still have.
And it's why is it only themilitary seems to develop?
I'm not saying all civilianorganizations don't,
but that's the only place I've everseen them in, in prevalence. Mm-hmm.
(25:08):
a low cost kind of way to aid theorganization if they had more of that?
Or is it, is it just too lowtech and not very sexy? Is that.
It? Uh,
I think it's a mindsetabout the recognizing that trying to put everything in
the head is back to that old, we'reformal logical reasoning beings.
If we put it in thehead and we're done, um,
(25:29):
and recognizing moreaccurately how we think.
So the Coast Guard is onlyquasi-military in that sense,
and yet they really got performancesupport and they invested it heavily.
They brought in experts and they focusedon how much can we put in the world
and reduce what has to be in thehead. You talk about the military,
I'll mention also aviation and medicineas places where performance matters.
(25:53):
And that's where they tend to put agreater recognition of what works in an
emphasis of measurement. Because
it costs 'em a lot of money if they screwup. You know, lives are expensive in,
in lots of ways.
having to invest inheavy training is needed.
(26:14):
And when people get it, it does lead tomuch better outcomes for them. Mm-hmm.
to the topic of knowledgemanagement, you go around, look,
and people may have created these toolsand instead of creating them anew,
we should be curating them.
One of the mantras that more progressivethinkers in l and d talk about is
curate before create, because theremay be a better solution out there.
(26:38):
Why do you have to do the not inventedhere syndrome? Oh, well I have to create,
well, no, go find somebody's ifit needs fine tuning a little bit.
Add your magic. A visual design. A graphicdesign. Instructional design. Yeah.
Cognitive design. But don't assumeyou have to create an app priority.
Go see what people aredoing. Interface design. I,
I was steeped in that early in my career,
the grad school experience of the labwas doing interface design for designing
(27:01):
for how people think my twist wasdesigned. How for how people learn. Hmm.
But they were way ahead of going andlooking at people's situation and
recognizing that they had aproblem with the interface,
but they'd solved it with apost-it that they referred to.
And so they didn't know that they hada problem with the interface because
they'd already solved it. The interfacedesigner would take that mm-hmm.
(27:22):
post-it and go figure out what thatmeant for the design of the interface.
And we are so far behind in that fromthe l and d and instructional design
perspective.
On the medical front,
I was at a KM conference that Italked to an organization's chief
technology officer,
and I asked him about knowledgemanagement and user interface,
(27:43):
user design and all that. I said,
how does the people in knowledgemanagement show up in your organization?
How do you facet that in? He said, well,we don't care about the people. We,
we build the systems and they useit. He was just serious as heck.
It was just like, oh yeah, we don't,we don't worry about them. They use,
what do we tell 'em to use? You know,that sort of thing. And it's like mm-hmm.
(28:06):
organizational structures?
Well, and Don Norman up here onmy shelf, he was my PhD advisor.
He's written a number of books. One ofthem was called The Invisible Computer.
And he talked about how, you know,
marketing comes in with the requirementsand engineering develops it.
And then they put in user interface atthe end to to, to make it acceptable.
What they end up doing is patchingexactly all the bad design decisions that
(28:26):
miss and he argued for bringinguser perspective upfront so that you
didn't make those mistakes.You have to patch over.
And you and I both have experienced,
and everybody listening has experiencedsoftware that's designed in that way
that says, just put an interface, fixeverything that doesn't work.
Make, make it a differentfont. They'll love it. Well,
(28:47):
why don't you give me your definitionof what knowledge management is.
My colleague, Harold Jari, was one of the,
Jay Cross wrote thebook in formal learning,
went around afterwards talking aboutit and realized I'm arguing for doing
things together and I'm doing this alone.
So he brought a few of us togetherand that included Charles Jennings,
Jane Hart, and Harold Jari. And Haroldcame from sort of knowledge management.
(29:08):
And he argued that it was brittle.
And he argues the modern versionof knowledge management is getting
people to share, uh,
knowledge and unpacking tacit knowledgeand not trying to formalize it,
but making it availableto people. And, uh,
that's my perspective on itvery much. And it's interesting,
(29:28):
I was reading about, to prep for this,
I looked up a little bit about knowledgemanagement to refresh my memory.
And one of these was mentioning trendsin 2023 for knowledge management.
The first one was knowledge is social
yeah, I can't remember if it wasan edit article or another one,
but they said the natural home forknowledge management is with l and d.
(29:49):
It's about learning andthere's a connection.
So I don't feel so bad having beentalking about learning so much in your
knowledge management podcast,
There is a lot of similarities andthey, they are in hand in hand.
I always felt that, uh, in similarto what you were just saying,
I I always felt it would bebest housed alongside hr.
So you're working with requirements andjob descriptions and expectations and
(30:13):
behaviors and all those sorts of thingsto help the organization build a better
widget of why are these people here?
And if they're not built andor expected to share knowledge,
then you're shooting yourself in a foot.
You might as well say they'renot here to learn either.
They're just here tobuild stuff. That's it.
Very non-dynamic to think thatthe human ability will be happy
(30:36):
and the cog square hole,
round hole kind of mentality anymorethat may have been great 150 years ago
when you got your choices of pitchforksor, or, or what have you. And it's like,
no, that horse has left the barn.
People have a higher expectationand a want and desire and
of how they show up at work.
(30:58):
I think that's absolutely right. Youknow, in some ways it made sense.
Not everybody had access tohigher education in the old days.
And so a few people had todo the thinking for the rest.
And we didn't have as a fantastictechnology solutions as we have now.
We didn't have robots andthings. But that's changed.
And you're absolutely right.
And I think these days it's the differencebetween organizations that say, oh,
(31:20):
we have these problematic people.We have to keep 'em under control.
Versus the organization that go,
we've got the fabulous peoplewho aren't performing well.
'cause we haven't given them the organizedwhat we're doing to free them up to
be their best.
And I think that shift in mentality issort of fundamental to being able to
really create what they callthe learning organization,
which is an organization where informationis available and shared and together
(31:45):
we learn better. We aresmarter than me. Tell.
Me what the superstructure of anorganization should look like.
Now we all know hierarchical,
we all know command structure and allthat sort of thing. So, and Holocracy,
if anyone knows Holocracy Holocracy isa very interesting biological looking
org structure, and it'sall around outputs.
So how do you build the best solutionfor building an organization.
(32:10):
Uh, at one level That's beyond my paygrade type of answer.
But, but it is something I.
Let, let's couch it likethis. You've got a magic wish.
What would be your bestdesign concept? I've.
Looked at a couple things. Ithink it was Ra I'm not sure,
but was arguing for a parallel structure.
(32:31):
You have the hierarchy to executethe things you know you need to do,
but then you pulled it out andyou created these teams that were
in parallel were pulled fromthe different hierarchy,
but they were assigned to solve problemsand innovate. So he had sort of had a,
a, a parallel structure,whereas other thinkers,
and this includes people like Dave Graywith his book, the Connected Company,
(32:53):
I think Scam McChrystal with histeam of teams, Amy Edmondson,
when he's talking about teaming,
they talked about a more modularstructure where you started having
small groups responsible and youhad groups that managed groups,
but it was all a series of groupsand periphery. Oh, Dan Pon effect,
I think talked a little bitabout that as well in his book,
(33:14):
which I have on my shelf. And, um,title isn't coming to spring into mind,
but these structures are more natural. It,
it sounds a bit like your holacracy,
where you have groups that are responsiblefor each other and responsible for
tasks,
and they have interchanges between eachother and there's a semi perial Yeah.
Will membrane at the periphery of theorganization where exchanges are going in
(33:36):
and out there as well. And I thinkthat more naturally fits people.
It's just how do you make sure it'sdoing the things it needs to do?
And I think that can be accomplished,
but it really takes a fundamentalrethink of the culture, the processes,
the policies, the infrastructure.
A lot of it has to be workingwell together for all that,
(33:59):
for that to be successful.
Well,
as organizations have adopted andadapted to the technological changes in
the world,
does the systematic approachor the business process idea
get more codified or less,
everything that you've kind ofpointed towards is a social construct.
(34:20):
Learning social construct. Organizationsshould be more of a social construct.
How do we, I guess, combat?
Because when you were saying that,I was like, well, we're reliant.
I see so many organizations that dooperations via email. You know, it's,
it's very much a broken systemwhen we're still reliant upon these
(34:42):
mundane tools as an operating capacityof an organization versus the social
structure. I don't know howmany times I've told somebody,
why are you sending an emailthat's like a phone call,
you should be callingthem. You know what I mean?
There's like different expectationsfor different modes of communication.
But is it too easy tohide behind the email?
(35:03):
Yes, and I'm guilty ofit by the way. I, I,
I have phone anxiety. So youremember the old computer anxiety?
I have phone anxiety,
For instance, our collaboration tools,they tend to be fixed into it's, well,
it's a text document or it's animage, or it's a spreadsheet.
(35:23):
Instead of recognizing, many,
many years ago on an earlyMAC program was trapeze,
which allowed you to have mixedimages and texts, blocks of texts,
blocks of numbers that interoperated.And I'm thinking that's what we need.
But when I was an undergraduate, I did a,
what was effectively an honorsproject with some faculty members.
(35:45):
We took a classroom and we used emailto conduct classroom discussion.
Half the class was split, half wasin class and half did it by email,
and then they were supposed to switch.It didn't happen for complicated reasons,
but one of the things we found was thatsome people who'd been really active in
classroom, weren't activein email and vice versa.
(36:06):
Different people have different channels.
And I think it's important tohave a variety of different channels for different
messages. You don't justhave email and phone.
You tend to have Slack or teams orsomething where you can send messages as
well.
And I think what we see happening inorganizations is we'll get beliefs about
how you should behave and this unit doesit differently. Mm-hmm.
(36:26):
And that may be okay, we may need totolerate that, but at the end of the day,
make sure the messages are getting out.
We're we're talking about howimportant it is to work out loud,
for instance mm-hmm.
what should you be sharingand how frequently? Well,
we'll learn a little bit about it,but really it needs to be this is new,
here's what my goal is. Here's myplan, here's my current status. Okay.
(36:49):
That in itself will give peopleability to align, to understand,
be able to provide usefulsuggestions to improve.
But you also have the culture where youdon't attack people for what they share.
You look to improve if you can or youlearn from it. I, I don't think quite,
we're not quite at the place withthe right tools to facilitate this.
We don't have, you know,we're still learning the policies and procedures. Even.
(37:12):
If you went back andput the mirror of, uh,
instructional design up to whatyou're just talking about and said,
look at this, to me, it's still the,
the what's missing is, like you said,learners have different modalities they,
uh, naturally fall for.
So therefore the organization shouldbe looking at making products,
artifacts that are builtto share knowledge and or train or learn or whatever
(37:36):
the, the outcome is. But they should bedoing it in two or three different ways,
right?
Uh, yes. Yes.
If you're gonna be learner centric,
you need to come up with differentways of transfer of knowledge.
Yes. And, um,
you do need to have different channelsfor different types of messages.
You also need to recognize my preferences.
And learners' preferences aren't a goodindication for how they best learn.
(37:59):
What they state and what theydo doesn't even correlate.
So you want to find some practices.And I really like Garvin,
Edmondson and Gino wrote a paper forHarvard Business Review talking about
evaluating dimensions ofa learning organization.
And they created representationthat I use in presentations a lot,
that talks about, you know,you need this environment,
it needs to be open-minded and valuingdiversity, not just tolerating,
(38:22):
but valuing diversity andhaving time for reflection,
psychological safety. But then theygo, you also need these practices.
You need experimentation,
you need smart experimentation where youhave done it so that you learn what's
learned from that.
You either avoid that or you bake it intoyour practices and continue to evolve.
(38:43):
And finally they talked about leadershipand I sort of extended what they said,
not just they have to support it,but they have to walk the walk.
If your boss says share mistakes and your
boss doesn't share mistakes,
are you really gonna believe that ifthat's an acceptable behavior? Mm-hmm.
So they based that onvaluation of organizations and it was some very specific
(39:04):
recommendations I think are partof the direction we need to go,
but it included continuedexperiment and improve that.
Could you tell the listeners the nameof your book and where to get it?
Which one?
Right. Um,
the one most relevant forthis conversation was book I was really pleased to
(39:26):
write called RevolutionizedLearning and Development,
performance and InnovationStrategy for the 21st Century.
I argue a lot of l and d and businesspractices are still from the previous
century and we need to move it. Sorevolutionized learning development.
I've got a book out on Miss and learningorganizations subsequent to that.
I've got one on learning sciencefor instructional designers,
particularly the chapter two is reallythe core of the cognitive processing loop
(39:50):
that I think everybody who designsfor people really needs to understand.
My most recent one is actually make itmeaningful is about that emotional side
of learning experience. It's thecompliment to the learning science,
but together they sort of create a wholebasis for learning experience design.
But those are probably the ones that aremost relevant to what your audience's
interests in.
So what's on the future? What's on,
(40:11):
what's on your to-do listfor the next five years?
I think the society is, issomething I'll continue.
I'm really enjoying the experience withupside learning because it's given me a
chance to practice what I preach andthey're really committed to, to making,
really applying learning science towhat they're doing. So that's good.
(40:33):
The one thing I'm thinking is themost important thing I can give,
I refer to that second chapterin learning science book.
I'm increasingly thinking everybody inour industry needs to understand that
basic human information processing loop.
And I'm beginning to look forways to get that available.
I have an asynchronous workshop on it.Yeah. And I could do it with a webinar,
but it really works bestlive. I do it experientially.
(40:55):
So I do some actual psych experiments tohelp make it visceral and then explain
what that tells us about it.
And I'm just trying to find away to get that to everybody,
because many people talk about learningscience, including my, you know,
PhD advisor and things and talkabout design and the cognitive loop.
But I think that one wayof thinking about it,
my now 40 years of experiencesuggests that that's the most
(41:19):
useful thing. And I'm workingon getting that out there.
L and d and knowledge managementneed to COHEs and become a
cognitive, a chief cognitiveofficer for an organization.
Should cognition be brought in, inas a principle, right? I mean, and,
and that's the super structure ofeverything we've been talking about,
knowledge management, learningdevelopment should be all in cognition.
(41:42):
So is there a way you can test anorganization's cognition proficiency?
There have.
Been a couple stabs, I think. Yes, bythe way. I think really human resources,
the human part of it isreally our brain be clear.
Cognitive science actually breaks itdown to three parts. Our cognitive,
our affective, and our non-native.And our cognitive is, you know,
how we think our affective is who weare as people and our non-native is our
(42:06):
intent to contribute, our intents toparticipate and our intents to learn.
And we need to address all of those.
But really that's what makesus human at work these days.
It's not so much our physical capacityin many ways. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yes,
I think that's necessary.
I think that organizing around supportingpeople performing at their best makes
(42:26):
sense. The first partof your question was,
should there be a Chief cognitive officer?
And that was second partof the question. And it's.
Should it, we just bring together l and d,
KM HR and make kind of a hubthere about the organization as an
organism around thoseelements of cognition?
Uh, I, I do think so. How dowe organize our technology,
(42:47):
our practices and policies,our resources, you know,
information resources to support peoplebeing able to do the best at what
they're doing? I absolutely thinkthat's a direction we can and should go.
One of the conflict points I'd seen 15years ago is that in the organization I
was in, the,
had the chief technology officer sittingat the same tip of the Chief Knowledge
(43:08):
Officer. And that's the problem.Once you build fiefdoms,
then they all have theirlines of resources and all their stuff and all their
separate piles of, I could see wherethere was a little back and forth.
It was a new structure. Granted,
that was a new structure when you'vegot a Chief Knowledge officer that's
looking at the technology,
providing the pathway foreverything that we're doing versus
(43:32):
A C T O, which says they're incharge of all the hardware software,
and you'll do what I say. And that wasmy perspective there. There seems to be,
now, if you had a, a Chief cognitionofficer that was like, Hey,
you guys will play and playnicely. I don't know. It, it, I,
I know organizations are struggling totry to figure out what's the best way
(43:52):
forward.
And I think a lot of org structures havethe same problem with trying to figure
out how are we gonna strategizeour digital setup here for
even be relevant in 10 years.
There's just a lot of things tothink about running an organization,
and this is just one of many.
Absolutely. And that tensionin some ways is, is productive.
Because I always tell instructionaldesigners, you get so frustrated at it,
(44:17):
they want, you know, you think of themas the preventer of, of services, right?
do you get upset when the networkgoes down and they go, yeah, yeah.
Understand that they want need to do this,
this in a way that's secure andreliable and uptime and you want what?
So work with them and understand.
(44:37):
And yet a good IT department knowsthey have to continue to, to advance.
And one story, uh, wastold to us many years ago,
a company that no longerexists, unfortunately,
but they had that tensionbetween the two silos and they
did something very interesting.They made one small change.
They made each of their bonuses partlydependent on the success of the other
(45:00):
organization. Hmm. Just thehead of those two units.
But their bonuses were dependent.The success of the other one.
Suddenly they were incented to get.
Along. Very, very chummyafter that. Yes. Yes.
Maybe we should talk more. Yes.Maybe. Oh, that's funny. People,
you know, they're, they'rea funny animal. We are.
(45:21):
Thank you, Clark. It's beena great investigation into a very interesting topic.
One that I find verypotent for the future.
Well, thank you.
It was indeed a great chance to exploresome of these issues and the tensions
they face. So I appreciatethe opportunity.
(45:42):
If your company or organization wouldlike to help us continue this mission and
sponsor one of our shows, email,
B y n tk@pioneerkss.org.
(46:07):
You have just finished our latest becauseyou need to know a public service of
Pioneer Knowledge Services.
Please join us on LinkedIn andfind us at pioneer kss org.
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