(Note: For what follows, I have not quoted the scientific research or resources referenced by David. Please contact him directly for that. Just take everything noted here as true, with the assumption that its all proven by the neuro-science.)

There are different kinds of talent philosophy and you should think about your own

Some people think that leaders are naturally born and there is nothing you can develop. You are either born “smart” or you are not. You can’t change much. With this point-of-view, giving feedback and “stretch-goals” is considered dangerous because there is no point trying to develop people. It will only make things worse. The brain feels threatened by such approaches.

Others (like most of today’s attendees) believe that leadership competences can be acquired and developed. By using assessment and development, coaching, training, performance management etc.. we can help people improve.

Interestingly, David Rock adds that each individual’s capacity for personal development may depend on which of these philosophies he or she believes in. We are primed to grow (or not) based on our perception and those with the growth mindset have, for example, much better more active brain responses to feedback and performance evaluation.

You need to know which are the most important talents to develop in today’s leaders

David says that in the past values, strengths, general and emotional intelligence were considered as the most important talents to develop in leaders.

Today values, strengths and general intelligence remain important, but emotional intelligence is a turn-off phrase for managers. New talent ideas to develop include self and social regulation, adaptive intelligence, network intelligence and global mindset.

But in addition, given our highly networked mobile connected environment, David adds that we must now pay even more particular attention to assessing and developing team talent. He says that collective intelligence is far greater than the sum total of the intelligence of its individuals. This is proven and must be remembered. I see an interesting link to what Shari Yocum said yesterday about analysing informal social networks…

Assess talent correctly

David says that classic assessments may not be the best way to search out talent. Most of our approaches to assessment only assess people’s ability to do assessments. In other words, clever people who can spot patterns in the assessment process come out better.

He adds that classic interview processes also fail for recruiting (or developing) real talent. The people who perform best in interviews are the people who perform best in interviews. In my own experience, I have seen countless engineers and techy people who fail miserably to express (read “sell”) themselves in interviews. But they would have otherwise been a good match for the competences required.

Add to that the fact that everyone assessing the talent of others will be massively biased and its clear that these approaches to talent assessment are doomed to failure.

What does David suggest? At the NeuroLeadership Institute, they recruit people by giving them concrete measurable tasks to perform that are as close to the reality of the work as possible. An editor is given a document with 100 errors and asked to edit it. A salesman is asked to go out on the floor and sell something. An engineer is asked to design something. As a side-note, reading “Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?”, you can see that Google suggest the same approach…

Develop talent. (And its not about performance management)

According to David Rock, you can forget about performance management and performance evaluation. People are not happy with it, they say it doesn’t create any significant change in performance and rarely reflects employee contributions. This seems SO wrong. Why?

Firstly, Rock says that humans are not wired for feedback. Getting feedback activates some of the same parts of the brain as dying (!!!). It is scary. And we are not capable of listening properly to people. Especially not if they are different to us. Which everyone is.

Secondly, there is too much focus on the process within performance management and not enough on what happens during the actual conversation and dialogue. The Neuro-scientist knows that status, certainty, perceived autonomy, relatedness and fairness all have an impact on our (in)ability to have good dialogue. Which is one of the building blocks of effective for most performance evaluation moments.

Finally, having performance evaluations once a year is not going to work. Intuitively, we already knew this.

So what can you do about all this? David Rock says there is SO much we could do (and encourages you to read his research) but adds that if you could only do ONE thing today, it should be to help the leaders involved in talent development, performance management and evaluation to understand the impact they have on others and what is going on in the brain.

Thanks for reading!
D

Disney is famous for its customer service. Many years ago, dear old Walt said that his people should “give the public everything you can give them”. Is this relevant for learning? If so, how?

Firstly, a question: What is customer service anyway?

The classic definition is about having the highest standards and meeting needs. At Disney, it’s about exceeding expectations through attention to details. In order to achieve this kind of service, you first need to have a clear idea of your own customer service values and mission. And then you need to act accordingly.

Exceeding customer expectations

Stu Levine shared a story about a small boy who lost his teddy bear at Disney, unknowingly leaving for home without it. When the staff found the bear in room 217, their customer-centric values came into action….

Classic (poor) service would have meant putting the bear in the lost and found and waiting to see if the family calls. Unrealistic and unsustainable customer service would have been sending the top employee to drive the bear back to the boy’s home 1000km away and hand-delivering it to the boy with full-on Disney movie music and heavenly lights.

What did Disney do? They took the bear to 2 or 3 attractions in the theme park and took a few pictures of it on the rides. Then they printed the pictures and put them in a box with the bear and a note saying “Sorry I was late home. Had a great time at the park.” Then they sent the box back home to its owner. The motivation for this? Well, for Disney, “even if its not our fault, its our problem.” According to Stu Levine, this “little Wow” is what Disney is thriving for in their customer service. They go the extra mile because they have a clear idea of their customer service values and mission. And then they act accordingly.

It’s all in the details

A major principle that Disney uses to deliver magical customer service is that in everything they do they put the customers’ needs and context first. In order to do that Disney relentlessly studies their guests and what they really want. And then they act accordingly.

For example, one of the most regular questions that Disney theme park employees receive is “What time is the parade?” A bad customer service would be to answer that “It’s in the brochure you received on arrival.” Classic service would be to answer “It’s at 3pm.” Good customer service would be to answer that “The parade starts at Frontier Land at 3pm and it’ll be here by 3.15 so you want to be standing over there by the restaurant by about 3pm.”

The Disney approach is to think about what the customer really wants (their situation, values and needs) and then to go the extra mile to deliver what really counts for them. This means not focussing on facts and process, but focussing on delivering real value to the customer: “The parade starts at 3pm in Frontier Land and will pass by here by about 3.15. But if you have the time to go over to Frontier Land now, there are less people watching the parade there and you can get some shade from the sun with your kids. The tram is over there, just about to go, but I’ll get them to wait a moment for you.”

Listening to Levine, I want to propose 6 simple ideas to help you deliver this kind of service

When you read these notes, ask yourself: “What does this mean to me and how will I use it to improve my learning offer…?”

To wrap the session, a few wise words from Mr Disney himself:
“You don’t build it for yourself. You know what the people want and you build it for them”

Good luck!

In session M200, speaker Francis Wade is helping us to understand why it is so difficult to create real change with learning programmes and to see what we can do about it. As an example, he is using a time management training case. Francis says that the dream of instructional designers and trainers is this: “If we figure out the behaviour and tell it to the learners, they will listen and they will do it.” But they don’t.

They don’t listen because they are über-connected and under-attentive. They don’t have the time to learn and they are not motivate for new behaviours.

And they don’t do it for several reasons:

What you wanted them to do was not clear enough

In my own definition, I say learning is the acquisition and implementation of knowledge, skills and attitude. Francoise Wade is interested in the “implementation” part of that definition that will help us to do it better, forcing us to work better with our learning design. According to Francis: “They haven’t learned anything unless you can observable, measure and coach new (correct) behaviour.” This means that before you design your learning, you need to be 100% clear on what behaviour you expect afterwards, to what standards and in which contexts. This will allow you to do a good level 3 evaluation afterwards.

It wasn’t relevant to their own reality

Most people don’t receive any formal learning on topics like time management until after the age of 20 years old. When they come to training, they come with a whole lot of baggage. Ignore that at your peril. Training that consists of shoving knowledge at participants and expecting it to be relevant will not work. You need to use the participants’ own experience as an integral part of the learning process so that they see how to integrate learning into their reality.

You gave them what they asked for

Managers have a tendency to ask for tips and some new knowledge in an attempt to solve business problems. Learning participants who complete some form of intake questionnaire will also tell you what they know or don’t know, do well and do badly, need and don’t need. But both the managers and employees are biased. And they are not learning experts. And they are impatient and unrealistic and demanding.

Before you do anything, first see what they are actually doing right now and assess how this impacts the bottom line of business performance results in terms of 5 key business drivers. Now you have a solid benchmark of what is needed, instead of a Christmas list.

You ignored them when they were most motivated to change behaviour

It is not uncommon for trainers working on things like time management to run into participants a few weeks or months later and hear that “It was good and fun, but I haven’t managed to do anything with it yet.” All the good intentions that may have been built up during training are left aside when we step out of the room.

Francis Wade says that it is important to have a post-training support system in place for participants, but that giving a set of tools to training participants for this doesn’t work. It would be better to encourage them to themselves create their own post-training support system. This will help them to tie their own needs and learning to their own context and resources and will be more motivating.

As a side-note, read my ASTD post “before all that self and social learning, one last little training for everyone.”

At the beginning of Francis’ session I thought I may have made a mistake with my choice, as it started to sound like I was hearing things I already knew about learning program design. And I did. And I still do.

But am I doing them? Are you? And if not, why not?

Thanks for reading. My trip to ASTD2013 is sponsored by Kluwer Training in Belgium. Be sure to check out their blog page www.learninglive.be for posts from my Kluwer colleagues at the conference and many other lent inning resources.

According to Ken Robinson, it is early. Too early. Having spent the night trying to remember how to sleep, he is not sure it’s actually a pleasure to be at ASTD2013 today. But he is here. And he’s got a message to share.

Referring to the chainsaw juggling duo The Passing Zone who introduced Tony Bingham’s speech this morning, Sir Ken reminds us that we each have deep talents and you have to work to find them. When The Passing Zone were at school, neither of them had an idea that they would spend the rest of their lives juggling. They didn’t get taught it at school and they would never have said it would be their future.

The Passing Zone love what they do. They have passion. What is your passion? Sir Robinson says that every person IS something. Every person has talent that speaks to them, that animates them. When we find that something, we will never work again. We will do what we love and get paid for it. It will change everything.

But if you want to discover that passion and talent, you have to create the right environments. He adds that many organisations do not do this. Schools neither.

The school system created during the industrial revolution is supposed to get everyone learning the same things in the same way. As Robinson said in his famous TED talk, the school system was not designed to help a young child discover the joy of juggling, or to feel the wonder of balancing accounts. Or to help a top-class concert pianist realise that, in fact, she wants to be an editor.

Ken Robinson tells us that we are facing an education and happiness crisis. In the US, more money is spent on education (per head) than any other country and class sizes are smaller. Yet more people drop out than anywhere else and less people graduate. And if that wasn’t worrying enough, Robinson also tells us that in the US more drugs are sold for depression and psychological issues than anything else. People are unhappy. And people NEED to be happy.

Why is this? Why are we not making it through school and coming out awesomely happy, working in line with our passion and talents? What can we do about it?

TWO THINGS TO BEAR IN MIND TO FIND YOUR ELEMENT

Firstly, Ken Robinson wants to remind us that we are unique. Since the beginning of time, there have probably been around 100 billion people on Earth. And they have all been different. No-one on Earth has ever had the same life you are leading right now. And never will. As the Dalai Lama said to Ken Robinson at a recent Vancouver conference on world peace through inner-peace: “The fact that you are alive at all is a miracle. So what are you going to do with it?”

Secondly, you have to realise that you are responsible for making your own life. You are given life …but you are not given your CV when you are born. Your own story, successful or not, is a result of your own talent, personal disposition and circumstance. Ken Robinson underlines the importance of this last point and says that we need to create circumstances in which people can flourish, discover their talents and make them grow. We can all be creative, we can all do something special and people need to be given opportunities to explore.

As the folks at the BlueMan Group say “If ordinary people can find their element, extraordinary things can happen.”

Think about it.

DANs closing questions:

ps Check out my Daily Dallas Weather Reports on http://www.youtube.com/dansteerchannel

Thanks for reading.
Please come to session TU306 and share this article.
D

What’s on Tony’s mind today?
According to Tony Bingham, the “me, me, me generation” is having an impact on how we do learning today. Our new learning participants have grown up on fast self-service mobile connected learning. They don’t want to sit in slow static training classes, 6 months later than they asked for it. The traditional model of static HR-organised boring learning is not going to work forever. We need to deliver a new learning model. Generation Y will prevail. Are you on the train?

…and it’s not just the kids
Tony Bingham tells us that even if it is the younger generation that has forced us to be aware of new (learning) needs, the issues are relevant for everyone. He asks if anyone still thinks that mobile is going away, despite the fact that there are more mobile devices in commission that humans on the planet. He encourages the learning community not to pass-off mobile as a fad that will go away, or use the “fad-argument” as an excuse for inaction. And he tells us to take more action. At the moment, not enough people are taking up the opportunity: Only 31% of learning organisations utilise mobile to deliver content. Mobile IS here to stay and it’s a great opportunity.

On a personal note, I heard this same point from Tony Bingham last year on day 2 and apparently it was on the opening agenda in 2011 as well. This begs the following questions:

If you ARE going mobile, here are some tips:

Thank you Tony!

ps I had the chance to speak with Tony prior to the conference. You can read the interview here.
…and don’t forget to watch the Daily Dallas Weather Reports live from ASTD2013 on http://www.YouTube.com/dansteerchannel

But in fact, HR and learning professionals can really have impact on organisational performance and development by taking the time to analyse these informal networks and use findings to support succession planning, engagement, knowledge sharing…. Shari Yocum tells us how.

Learning and HR professionals have a lot of tools at their disposition, but key business results still need improvement

Our speaker tells us that despite the myriad of tools available for learning and development (performance reviews, to training, succession planning, coaching and assessments…) many business leaders still don’t see HR as a trusted partner who actually gets things done. They say that HR needs to better focus on the key business areas that create value. As Kevin Cope might say in session W310, they need more business acumen. And according to Shari Yocum, effective analysis of informal business networks will help those same HR people to become strategic partners who lead change, developing leaders and cultivating the organisational culture. Sounds good! Lets go…

Why are we talking about informal networks and social network analysis today?

We are shown a video of Gini Rometty, CEO IBM, who reminds us that we are now in a knowledge era and that it is not processes and conveyors belts that create great results. It is people. We need to “understand the social network not as [our] water-cooler, but as [our] new production line.”

In that culture, the informal networks that exist across the functional and divisional organisation charts found on the intranet have a massive impact on the way things actually happen. They can make or break change initiatives. They can communicate for you. They learn by themselves. A “conversation with Jim” affects me more than anything I might receive from HR or the CEO.

At the moment, according to Yocum, many HR tools help us to understand individual employees and their function, problems and needs. But they don’t get far enough into the network to which the person belongs. Yet that network is massively important.

OK, it sounds good, but what exactly are we talking about here? Let’s define some network terms…

Yocum defines a network as a structure made up of a set of actors (such as employees) and a complex set of ties between them. This network consists of:

Different parts of the network are considered as more central (relevant or important) than others. This might be based on proximity to others or their position in the network “flow”.

Specific nodes within a network can be seen as:

Networks within themselves can be evaluated in terms of (non-exhaustive list):

For more information about the different elements of a network, here are some references:

What can be done with social/informal network analysis?

According to Shari Yocum, effective network analysis can show many extremely important things in an organisation. Without much analysis skill, you could easily see:

My own feeling listening to Shari is that this list of applications could go on and on. The concepts of network analysis seem very important to me today. AND I am starting to see a trend today on “seeing the bigger picture” in terms of the organisation and its performance. More on this later…

Thanks for reading.
Please leave a comment or subscribe to the blog.

And don’t forget to check out my Daily Dallas Weather Reports fresh from the ASTD2013:
http://www.youtube.com/dansteerchannel

According to David Kelly, many people do not really understand what curation is about. Some do not even think about it. But in today’s fast-sharing, content “creating and commenting” learning environment, it is a critical future competency for everyone.

What is curation and why is it so important?

Most people associate curation with the role of a museum curator. That person collects and displays articles in a set place for other visiting people. In the learning world, curation is basically the same thing.

In our digital (learning) world today, there is a lot of noise. People who find, rate and share things for others create more and more Internet noise every day. Add to that the fact that production of new content is easier than ever before and we have more and more and more and more noise noise noise… So we need good curators.

Who is curating content? Who should be?

How should we approach curation? What steps should be followed? When? How?

Are their different types of curation?
According to David Kelly, there are at least 5 types of curation, which are mixed together in different ways

What are the key competences required for effective curation?

One of the critical components of effective curation is trust. If your approach to curating things is to retweet and share and email information across an organisation or community, you risk to just make a lot more noise. People will only come back to you and follow your train of thoughts if they trust you. You have to have an attitude that makes sense to the people you are curating for. They have to see quality in what you do, so they believe that it is worth coming to “your museum”.

3 other important things are:

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to tune into the ASTD2013 Daily Dallas Weather Reports on http://www.youtube.com/dansteerchannel during the conference…

For more references on curation, read the following posts:

A colleague of mine just followed a MOOC on Gamification with @kwerb and Coursera. She had a great opportunity to gather a lot of information and learning on a new topic that really interested her. (You can read my mini Twitter interview with her on this post) In Belgium, we just had a great MOOC on how to use Internet for learning. But if you want to set and run your own MOOC what are the key steps to take? How can you ensure success? What are the key competences required of a MOOC facilitator? What are the challenges for MOOC participants to really learning? And are MOOCs only interesting for large multi-site organisations? Let’s see what Julia and Phil had to say…

Why is Google interested in MOOCs?

Google’s mission is to organise and make available all of the world’s information. Clearly MOOCing is linked to that. But why is it interesting? What is the added-value?

When the very first MOOC went online, over 100 thousand people got involved. Some of the online students did better in the course than the people who followed it IRL at Stanford. Why? Google’s own evaluations showed massive satisfaction from the learning population. They loved the format. They saw more search results related to the content during and after the MOOC (engagement)…

What is a MOOC?

A MOOC is a massive open online course. To be massive, you have to have at least 100 learning participants and maybe as many as 10000. MOOCs have instructors, instruction (content) goals and schedules. It may be as simple as delivering knowledge to the masses, or it may include discussion forums or Q/A sessions with experts, testing and certification. At Google, they used several of their own branded tools to create interactive, measurable learning activities (eg Google Hangouts and YouTube). MOOCs can be used to learn specific knowledge and skills, but may also be an opportunity to have crowds of people learn together to solve complex human problems, like traffic problems in Tokyo.

What do Google do to get MOOC success? What can YOU do?

How can normal non-Google people get started with MOOC building?

One of Google’s strategic interests is the ability to easily scale solutions. For that reason, they have created (and open-sourced) Google Course Builder. This free tool can be used right out-of-the-box to make simple MOOCs with content you already have. Phil Wagner repeats: “It could be online this afternoon.” But if you want to make it more sexy or if you have coding experience and time, it is completely open-source.

Gret first session with Julia and Phil. Met Rick Lozano IRL and feeling energised for more

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to tune into the ASTD2013 Daily Dallas Weather Reports on http://www.youtube.com/dansteerchannel during the conference…

Session SU111 on MOOCs with Julia Wilkowski and Phil Wagner from Google

• To which business performance and learning objectives does a MOOC best correspond?
• Which businesses or learning audiences can best profit from a MOOC? Are MOOCS only suitable for large, multi-site organisations?
• What are the most important principles to consider when setting up a MOOC? What steps must be taken to succeed?
• What specific competences does a MOOC creator or facilitator need? (eg: Are Community Management skills required?)

Session SU210 on the importance of curation with @LnDDave David Kelly

• Why is curation such an important concept today?
• What are the competences that must be developed to curate well?
• How does a good curator filter and contextualise well for his people?
• What kinds of tools and platforms can help with curation

Session SU301 with Shari Yocum on analysing informal networks in order to identify and develop essential business assets

• What do you mean by “holistic analysis” and how is it conducted?
• How can a good analysis helps to make better development choices??
• Which tools are available and in what areas has success already been proven?

Tune back in soon to find out what I heard!
D

Thanks for reading
Please comment or follow this blog
Find me on Twitter and share…

Q1: In the previous conferences you have attended what have been the most interesting sessions you followed?

I usually break conference sessions into two categories: Sessions that will provide me with knowledge and skills that I can use today and sessions that will expand my skill sets and prepare me for skills I will need tomorrow.

I’m at a point in my career where I probably allocate my sessions to 25% “today” and 75% “tomorrow”. However, I’m lucky enough to have been in this field for about 15 years and have been to more conferences and professional development opportunities than most in the field. The average practitioner has less experience and does not regularly attend conferences, so I would expect their allocation to skew more towards skills they can use today.

Specifically for me though, I usually try to find one or two sessions that break the mould from what you might expect from a learning professional conference. For example, some of the sessions I’ve been interested in at recent events include topics like sketch-noting, looking at design in places outside of instructional design and gaming.

Q2: I know you’ve spoken at and attended a number of conferences in the past few years. What topics do you think still merit more work and attention in 2013?

I recall reading a statistic recently that said the average experience of people in our field is five years. If that’s true, then most of the people in our field are likely novices. As I mentioned a moment ago, a sizable percentage of any conference audience will be new to the field and may actually be attending a conference for the first time. As such, there’s always going to be a need for entry-level programs that help those novices develop skills they can use immediately. And I think that’s very important.

What interests me more though are the sessions that go beyond the basics and stretch the novice skills set. I think conferences need more sessions that make attendees rethink the traditional “training” paradigm; sessions that help refocus our field away from “training” and “learning” as the default and start shifting our focus towards “performance” and “contextual connections”. With that in mind, I’m hoping to see more conferences including sessions focused on topics such as telling better stories with our data, performance support instead of training, experience design over instructional design, and breaking away from the course model.

Q3: What are according to you the 3 biggest challenges that learning and development managers will face over the next 5 years?

Just three? I’m kidding. Here are three that immediately come to mind:

• Redefining data: There’s a lot of buzz around data right now. If you look at most conference programs you’ll likely see sessions including terms like “Big Data”, “Tin Can” and “The Experience API”. Learning professionals need to pay attention to this. The way we define data, in terms of metrics like completions or pass/fail, is going to be replaced with data that tells a much more meaningful story around performance. The question is: Will learning professionals be ready?

• Learning as part of the work: Traditionally, workers needed to stop work in order to learn or be trained. You needed to either leave the workplace to attend training or stop working to sit in front of a computer to complete an elearning course. That’s changing. Technology now enables learning and skill development to be built right into the existing workflow without the need to have an employee stop working to attend ‘training’. It’s less intrusive and fits better into the model of how workers really learn how to do their jobs. The problem is: The traditional training skill set does not support playing in that space.

• Shifting from “knowing” to “connecting”: The shelf life of information is decreasing rapidly while the speed in which performance support interventions are required is increasing even faster. In today’s world of exponentially increasing data it is impossible to know everything. What is therefore far more important is to be able to find the answer to anything in a timely manner. With that in mind the role of the learning professional shifts away from building and delivering solutions towards building connections between those with needs and those with the resources that satisfy the need. This involves competencies that are new to the learning profession such as curation and community management.

Q4: People not attending a conference can follow content via your backchannel “hub page”. Do you have ideas on how they can get more actively involved during conference week?

Without question the best way to be more involved in a conference backchannel is to prepare yourself for it ahead of time. Many people want to participate, but don’t regularly use Twitter, where most backchannels today take place. That’s a recipe for failure. The value of a backchannel comes from the sharing and from the connections and interactions you have with other like-minded professionals. You can’t concentrate on “what to tweet” to participate in a backchannel if you’re still struggling with “how to tweet”.

Q5: What are your own personal objectives for conferences this year?

My objectives for conferences are actually pretty consistent when examined at a high level. They include:

• Learning about the trends that will impact our industry in the future.
• Looking for sessions that might provide answers to problems I am actively trying to solve.
• Connecting with attendees and continue to expand my personal learning network.

Maybe you have a question for David yourself? He will be speaking at the ASTD2013 International Conference and Exhibition during session SU210 “Curation: Beyond the Buzzword”.

You can find him on Twitter and keep in touch with his opinion on the ever changing world of learning and development.

Or you can leave a comment here.

Thanks for reading!

David Kelly is the Program Director for The eLearning Guild based out of New York, USA. He has over over 15 years of experience in the learning field, serving capacities of training director, internal learning and performance consultant, social media trainer and community manager. Regularly referenced as king of the conference backchannel, David is also a Twitter chat curator. Learn more about David at his website: http://davidkelly.me.