Metaphor in learning and development

Have you ever stopped to count the metaphors we use routinely in learning and development and wonder why they come from where they do?

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that many of them derive from the industrial age, and reflect the activities that people seemed to value in an industrial setting. Thus we speak of workshops and of benchmarking, and use this sort of language so much that many of us will not stop to think that these are, in fact, metaphors and not literal expressions for what we’re doing.

What’s interesting about e-learning is that the metaphors are different, perhaps reflecting our move away from the industrial age to the information or digital age. Thus we have portals, platforms and even passwords. This seems to me a good thing, as instead of dwelling on the past, we are looking ahead, and many of the new metaphors are about rising, or opening up, or reaching for something new. If this encourages a more positive, creative outlook, that has to be of value.

Now just don’t get me into the ball-park of sporting metaphor: I’d hate to sound like I’m not a team player, but everyone wants to hit a home run, right?

Intellectual Capital

Intellectual capital seems to be making a comeback. It features as the cover story of the current issue of People Management, and the expression, dormant for a while, seems to be in use again. For me, this is a welcome development.

It first emerged in the 1990s, and was a vogue expression, along with knowledge management, in the most swollen state of the dot com bubble. When that bubble burst, the expressions went out of fashion, but that always struck me as unfair, as the underlying principles were sound.

Tom Stewart’s Intellectual Capital, the seminal text on the subject, is one of the best books I have ever read, and more than ten years from its publication still seems very profound.

What I like about the concept is it explains hidden assets, intangible capital, and value that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. This is important for advocates of learning and development: we see spend on learning as valuable investment in human capital; accountants tend to see it as just running-cost expenditure. If investment in learning is to be taken seriously, we need to be able to show that it adds value, and is not merely a drain on expenditure.

Tom Stewart argues that the most important measures of value in a business are its knowledge assets, and that strategic development and deployment of these assets is the key to lasting competitive advantage, now and in the future. Stewart caricatures the work of corporate accountants as counting the bottles rather than describing the wine, and insists that it’s the latter sort of value that is the hidden gold of organisations.

Knowledge assets are developed through the efforts of people, who work, learn, research, develop, and create and refine knowledge. Organisations need to recognise that investment in learning and development leads to increased intellectual capital, which in turn leads to business growth and improved profitability.

The Seven Pillars

My latest article, The Seven Pillars of the Corporate University, has just been published on the EPD website. Link.

I chose the “seven pillars” imagery, a blatant steal from Lawrence of Arabia, because of the happy coincidence of there being seven factors to consider, and because I liked the idea of the factors, or pillars, supporting the edifice. The association of Lawrence’s original usage with wisdom helps the metaphor.

I’m finding an upsurge of interest in corporate universities. The American market may have become saturated a long time ago, but the concept has been much slower to catch on in Europe and the rest of the world. Perhaps that’s because the academic universities of the old world have a different gravitas, derived from their longer histories, or perhaps in Britain the legal meaning of the word university has been an impediment. There may be other explanations.

I prefer to believe it is because the latest incarnations of corporate universities offer much more than was conceived in the pioneering US institutions like Walt Disney, or later Motorola. The most popular current model is more like Hilton University, with its new emphasis on digital learning.

As always, happy to discuss.

Discussing my book

Readers interested in my new book on e-learning may want to know more than the usual publisher’s blurb that appears on Amazon and elsewhere. The book sets out to demonstrate a strategic approach to considering and implementing e-learning, and includes features like: a foreword contributed by Bill McGrath of Scottish Enterprise; an introduction that places modern learning in the context of how digital technology is increasingly dominating our lives; a “virtual round table” discussion; an illustrative project; a glossary of technical terms; consideration of how to evaluate e-learning; an annotated bibliography; and a look at what the future may hold. All of this is relatively straightforward.

However, there are a number of issues raised in the book that I would expect to be more controversial, including:

1. A new way of understanding e-learning, as an approach that encompasses all new methods of learning utilising digital technology.
2. Identification of five distinct models of e-learning – and there may be more.
3. A matrix for considering the impact of different kinds of e-learning.
4. A call for more strategic thinking about e-learning.
5. Condemnation of techies for overuse of misleading jargon.
6. Condemnation of e-learning vendors for misleading clients and “vandalising the market”.
7. Dismissal of e-learning technology standards as largely irrelevant.
8. A new model for e-learning design – the “route map”.

I look forward to discovering how reviewers regard these issues. In the meantime, you can contribute to the discussion by adding comments here.

Publication date

I’m pleased to announce the publication date of my forthcoming book, Delivering E-learning: a complete strategy for design, application and assessment.

It will be available in exactly eight weeks, on 3 April 2009.

You can place an advance order with Amazon, or direct with the publisher, Kogan Page.


AmazonLink

KoganPageLink


And I promise plenty of opportunities to discuss the book here.

Evaluation of learning

I caught the latest of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares on Channel 4 last night: a “Great British Nightmare”, it seemed like a couple of extreme examples of the genre, including an exposé of a restaurant in Sheffield run by a former recruitment consultant. You could tell the proprietor had picked up some evaluation tips from the world of HR.

He proudly showed Gordon some customer response cards, where his diners had rated the food as “excellent”, the service as “excellent”, and said they would be happy to come back again. Gordon’s retort is unrepeatable, replete with his trademark in-your-face aggression and gratuitously offensive language. But the gist was to point out that the restaurant was losing money hand over fist, so it didn’t really matter what anecdotes were coming from the diners.

This is the sort of mistake learning and development professionals often make, confusing the easy-to-gather and flattering information from what is critical to their organisation. We have our equivalent of the restaurant’s response card for their diners in our “happy sheets” usually distributed at the end of courses, which invariably show how happy the learners are. What they don’t show is the impact the learning has for the business.

My forthcoming book (another shameless plug, and more to follow in February) dedicates a whole chapter to evaluation, and although my focus in the book is e-learning the lessons apply equally to all forms of learning and development. The chapter discusses Kirkpatrick’s four levels, Return on Investment (ROI), Return on Expectations (ROE), Six Sigma, and Total value-add. All of these systems have merit, but I reserve special favour for total value-add because it reaches the parts other evaluation systems don’t reach. More in another post.

Recessionary pressures

They used to say that training was one of the first things a company would cut in a recession. But that was in the days when many companies carried large numbers of trainers on their staff. The old saw may only be true for organisations that still directly employ a lot of trainers.

Still, modern learning and development budget holders are bound to feel under threat in the current climate. So what are the arguments for maintaining spend on learning and development?

Investing in people’s talents is always a good idea, but it’s only an imperative if you can prove it impacts on flexibility, competitiveness and the bottom line. As the recession bites, learning and development professionals need to be able to make these arguments, and prove that learning is vital to their organisation’s current and future prosperity – and perhaps survival.

This may be a time to revisit fundamentals, and ask ourselves what resources we really need to fulfil the priorities in our remits. For example, is a software system that costs the annual equivalent of the salaries of two or three HR professionals really the best use of those funds? It may be time to take a blank sheet, or consider the opportunity cost of services we’ve taken for granted up to now.

At the individual level, I’m grateful to HR Network Scotland magazine for drawing my attention to the Open University’s resources “for workers to outsmart the recession”. We need more ideas like this.