Conference Balance

Just read a great post by Clive Shepherd - Cutting the Pie - where he discusses what the appropriate balance is at conferences. As you know creating Better Conferences is something that very much interests me. Check out that post, the poll results and the discussion for lots of ideas on how to make conferences better. But Clive's major point is that at today's conferences the mix is:



His definitions are:

• ideas - presentations from gurus, experts and thought leaders, primarily abstract in nature.
• examples - case studies from users, sharing successes and lessons learned.
• participation - opportunities for attendees to interact with each other to explore the ideas, share their own experiences and make contacts that can take follow-up after the event.

He'd like to see a balance:



This is interesting timing for me having just returned from the ASTD Conference. That conference was certainly the old model - mostly ideas and examples. Very little participation. But in fairness to ASTD - it seems like it's hard to get participation when 70% of attendees are relatively new to the industry and are first time attendees.

I personally tried (a little) to create my own participation ahead of the event through getting together at conferences. But I wasn't very successful.

I've always highly encourage participation, but my general sense is that people aren't really that interested in doing the Conference Preparation that might be required to Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee or using Social Conference Tools

So while I agree, my basic question:

When can you get effective participation at conferences?

It seems like the eLearningGuild is doing a better job at this recently. There were morning discussion groups last time that I thought were great. They are starting to do more with online tools. I think that conferences really need to adopt a mentality of having unconferences within a conference structure to allow for participation of all kinds intermixed with ideas and examples.

I'd be curious to hear thoughts on this as I always struggle with whether going to a conference is worth the investment of time.

ASTD Handouts

Lance Dublin mentioned a couple of handouts today from sessions I was not able to attend. It took me a little while to find this link to the ASTD 2008 Session Handouts. My session (yesterday) can be found: M313 - E-Learning 2.0 for Personal and Group Learning (PDF).

Dysfunctional Teams

At the ASTD keynote by Patrick Lencioni - Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Quick search and I found some good notes on different web sites so I don't have to type so much. Here's a good one.

He used an interesting thing in order to get questions - gave free copies of his book to people with questions. He got a lot of questions right away - not sure it works all that well with an audience of 5,000.

The Five Dysfunctions of Teams are:

Absence of Trust: Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. However, in most teams members will not be "vulnerable" with each other (air dirty laundry, admit mistakes, weaknesses and concerns without fear of reprisal). Without trust the team will not be able to achieve results.

One member of a team can break down trust. You can't go into a process unwilling to get rid of any team members.

Even if it's the leader - who you must be honest with about their issues.

You should be more vulnerable - but must be genuine. Vulnerability is always a little painful. Can you be too vulnerable? No. But showing yourself as incompetent is not good either.

Fear of Conflict: Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate about ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.

Productive, idealogical conflict is good. This looks different for different teams. Conflict in Japan is quite different from the US. He talked about NY vs. Silicon Valley. Not important the style that's in use, but you want to know they are engaging when they disagree.

You have to be able to disagree, even passionately.

Why don't you do it more? Fear of getting feelings hurt. His point is that if you don't have conflict around issues it will become conflict around people.

Leader must model and even mine for conflict.

Lack of Commitment: Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions.

Without conflict there's no commitment. He doesn't necessarily want consensus. Most times you have an important decision to make - you have to hear everyone out and then decide which one to go with. If they don't feel they've been heard, they will simply not commit.

Disagree and commit.

Avoidance of Accountability: Without commitment and buy-in to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.

Biggest problem on teams. Peer-to-peer accountability is the most powerful. If they know that peers don't buy in, then there won't be action.

Leader must be willing to confront tough problems. CEO might say - I don't have the time and energy for that. Afraid to hold people accountable for behaviors. People don't like to do these confrontational events.

Inattention to Results: Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where team members put their individual needs or even the needs of their division above the collective goals of the team.

What else can you focus on? Feelings. Relationships.

Healthy teams:

• Members trust one another.
• They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
• They commit to decisions and plans of action.
• They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
• They focus on the achievement of collective results.

Frank Nguyen - EPSS - at ASTD

Frank Nguyen is presenting at ASTD on EPSS. You can find his presentation on his site. His major points were:

• Search is not an effective method for performers to find information.
• Integrating information closer to the work flow and work interface can improve performance.
• Novices cannot effectively use the same support systems as experts.
• Providing learners with more on-the-job performance support does not eliminate the need for training and there are cases where training is preferred
• When in learning mode - people want minimal information. When in performance mode - they want more detail. Thus, you can't use the same content for both - EPSS needs more than training.
• You must focus on more than the technology in order to drive adoption of EPSS.
  

Choices for what to do as performance support vs. training:

• Routine (perform the task often) -> Training
• Not routine -> EPSS
• Critical -> Training

Only situation safe to do only support (not training), not critical, not routine.

One of the points that Frank made that I had to jump on at the session and mention Work Literacy was that even though most people know how to use Google search, they wouldn't find it to be an effective tool. I don't disagree that often search is not a great vehicle to support particular performance. However, I take issue with the claim that most people are good at using search. In fact, I would claim that most people muddle through search.

Frank is doing great research in this area. Really enjoyed his relaxed presentation style and his method of engaging the audience around key questions.

ASTD Keynote - Malcolm Gladwell

Next up at ASTD - Malcolm Gladwell - new book in November - Outliers - how people get to be successful. Talks about two kinds of creative styles:

• Experimental innovator - never has a big bold idea, works slowly, trial-and-error, empirical, approach master
• Conceptual innovator - big idea, can execute it themselves

He draws this distinction in artists, writers and the point is that it applies to any kind of field.

We have a tendency to value the conceptual innovator more than the experimental innovator. He spends about 10 minutes to show this through discussion of Fleetwood Mac vs. the Eagles and how the music industry focuses on conceptual innovators today.

Compares scouting combines in sports to how you select talent. Break down into specific skills and measure against those skills. He claims that scouting combine scores have almost no correlation to actual abilities. In the NBA, Kevin Durant - 75 out of 81 people in combines, but he was rookie of the year. Very little correlation. Similar issue of intelligence tests in the NFL. I have to check his facts - Bradshaw, Marino, McNabb all scored among the lowest on intelligence?

Interesting to juxtapose this versus the discussion of talent management by Tony Bingham. Talent management likes to look at things exactly this way.

Gladwell's claim is that you really want to find an experimental innovator in sports or other talent - who is going to grow into a star. Some of his main points:

• Talent is not a narrow, fixed thing.
• Picking talent requires judgment - hero of stories are those that can see future talent
  
• Along the way, talent will make a lot of mistakes
• Flexibility is required to be successful growing talent
• Measures (if they can even be done) must be much broader than simple skills measurement
• Must be patient
• Must be prepared to help
  

Commentary - the problem here is that in the fast paced world with a fluid flow of talent that we have today, how do you balance the need for immediate performance versus the need to be patient, develop over time, etc. To me a key aspect that is missing here is the transition of thinking about the corporation as being the key talent manager - that has moved to the individual. The corporation still has responsibility, but the individual has greater responsibility.

When you think about the parallel of this with the sports world - it's pretty close. Listen to any sports talk radio and they will talk about how you can try to draft for players who will have immediate impact or those who may develop into a bigger, more valuable player. There's a definite trade-off to be made in that choice. It's a tough choice to make. And the right answer is situational. Sometimes getting the lineman who will make immediate impact is a better choice than drafting a quarterback who may or may not develop into a star in three years.

I wish we could have had some discussion with Gladwell vs Bingham. Could have been pretty interesting.

ASTD Keynote - Talent Managment

I'm at the ASTD Conference in San Diego at the general session. It looks like there are about 5,000 people in the room. A complete guess at the number, but pretty good size.

Tony Bingham, ASTD CEO, is talking about and showing videos around talent management. It's interesting to see the message be around talent management when often that's fairly separate from the learning function. My experience is that talent management is more focused on performance review, succession planning, recruitment, retention, and other HR processes - less on specific learning / development. I've got to say that having someone showing a bunch of videos (of people from the BEST winners) isn't all that engaging or meaningful without more context.

Tony asked the audience - how many know the key strategies of your organization and then key metrics of your business. Very few (10 percent) raised their hands.

Tony's Keys at the end of his presentation:

• Create a Learning Brand
• Learning - most important role is in talent management
• Take Action on the Skills Gap
• Become a business partners

Great quote in one of the videos - self-development is the greatest challenge. It's often easier to change the world than it is to change yourself. Okay - maybe I was too hard on the videos. :)

Work Literacy Launch

I'm very happy to announce that Michele Martin and I have just launched Work Literacy - a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.

This venture comes partly from my experiences doing presentations, workshops, blogging around eLearning 2.0. When discussing new(ish) tools like blogs and social bookmarking, and discussing things like advanced search techniques, there's a gap in knowledge work skills. In fact, we all have blind spots. Why is that? It's just coming at us too fast to continue to acquire in an ad hoc fashion. We need something to help us make sense of all that is happening that changes how we do our knowledge work.

Our goal is create a vibrant network of individuals, companies and organizations interested in participating in a variety of ways: learners, testers, experts, teachers, coaches, and I'm sure many others. The network is intentionally defined in a way that will allow it to emerge over time, but there are some very interesting people involved already.

Some ways to Participate:

• Subscribe
  • RSS Feed for the Work Literacy Blog
  • RSS Feed for an aggregation of related content.
  • You can subscribe by email using the entries in the sidebar to either of these feeds.

• Answer a poll on work skills opportunities.

• Point us to resources using the Del.icio.us tag: WorkLiteracy
  

• Comment

• Blog your thoughts. When you blog, include the term workliteracy or better yet a link to www.workliteracy.com and we’ll do our best to aggregate these posts for access by the community.

I truly believe this is something important, and I hope it sounds interesting enough that you want to come participate with us.