Category Archives: Digital Transformation

Guide to Designing, Developing and Delivering Online Learning Experiences

Culture, Digital Transformation, General, Scaling

Online training can be horrendous. It can be an unsatisfactory experience for everyone involved: students, organizations and those that build and deliver the experience. Time and resources are wasted and, more tragically, poor training can generate a stigma around learning and negatively impact the culture of the organization. Getting to better (much better!) online learning (in contrast to training) requires us to improve how we design, develop and deliver the experience.

Introduction

Many years ago, I was with a team transitioning training from the classroom to online. We had a successful business for delivering in-person training, offering multiple curriculums and courses within. The topics focused on creating software covering everything from team collaboration, to requirements, writing code, testing and even managing the code. To quickly transition to online, we took the same materials, same instructors and added in some online lab capabilities and voilà, we had an online training component to our business. Reflecting on our approach and results with a critical eye, I see that while our efforts were strong for the time, there’s a big gap between those days and what we strive for today. And a big part of that gap can be seen in transitioning from “training” to “learning experiences.”

Crafting better online learning experiences is more important than ever. To be better, these experiences need to be engaging, effective, and energizing. Such experiences help us keep pace with change and orient us toward a culture of continuous learning, curiosity, and nimbleness. If we fail in creating better learning experiences, the culture will suffer and the organization will stagnate, lag competitors and fade away. Simply put, if you fail to learn, you’ll fail to earn.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to design, develop and deliver better online learning experiences.

Why “Experiences”

Staring with the title and throughout this guide, you’ll see use of the term “learning experiences.” Creating online training and having a goal of delivering training will orient our thinking and efforts to accomplishing just that goal. We ask: “Did we deliver the training?” and can easily state “Yes, we did deliver training” and consider it a job well done. The view is too narrow and leads to weak measures of success. We’re bound to underwhelm and have limited positive impact (if we can discern any impact at all!). There’s an experience, but it’s not as fulfilling, impactful or healthy.

Starting with the idea of a learning experience changes our perspective – we think about:

  • Who will be involved?
  • What would each party gain and contribute?
  • How will we measure success?
  • How might we encourage students to become lifelong learners?

Taking this first simple step of focusing on the experience is a great start. It changes our perspective from our course to our people. Ideally, it can help us think even broader as we consider the larger challenges we’re trying to solve. We end up transitioning from an inside-out perspective to an outside-in perspective. With this perspective in mind, let’s take a closer look at how we can design, develop and deliver online learning experiences!

Team Collaboration and Coordination

Designing, developing and delivering learning experiences is a team effort. To support the collaboration and coordination needed, I’ve found it best to adopt an agile mindset with a focus on strong team competencies:

  • Getting and receiving feedback from users
  • Focus on value and impact for the user and the team
  • Leadership expected from everyone
  • Operating with transparency
  • Always planning, learning and improving

Depending on the team you have, you may find that a continuous flow model or perhaps even aspects of Scrum helpful. I caution that you don’t get wrapped up in the mechanics of a specific model. It can be easy to get trapped into the details and formality and end up just going through the motions. If the mindset and key competencies are missing – it doesn’t matter what you call it, it isn’t going to work.

Design (and Innovation!)

Just having team collaboration and coordination isn’t enough. We can’t just form a team and start building the learning experience. Thinking about the design, or “design thinking”, is critical to our efforts. And, as a nice touch, design thinking aligns nicely with the mindset and competencies we just described above – further guiding our attention toward people, empathy, learning and handling ambiguity.

When we put on our design thinking hat, we really focus on thinking about the influences, interactions, and impact of our creation. A learning experience does not occur in isolation or independently. There are people involved that will participate in the experience. We need to think about them in this interaction. What do they bring with them to the class? Are there different types of people that will participate? Do we need to cater to different audiences? What are their expectations? Do they have concerns, fears or challenges that will come with them to the experience? And if so, how would that impact how they engage and react to the experience? We need to empathize with the people that will be involved in the experience. Feelings, interpretations and past experiences all come with the people as they engage with our experience.

We also need to recognize that we are going to have to deal with ambiguity. We will need to figure out which techniques, exercises, interactions, modalities, pacing and other aspects of the experience best meet our goals and resonate with our participants and help us to achieve our desired outcomes. There is generally some exploration, meandering and discovery as we figure out the design of our learning experience.

Going beyond focusing on the people involved, we can further broaden our perspective and consider the challenge that we are trying to solve. It can be helpful to consider the problems that we’re facing and try to reframe and re-orient. And, we should look for how we can engage learners in design activities. By engaging learners in co-creation and participatory design efforts we find a path to better learning and get buy-in for the experiences that emerge. There are some tools available that can help, including:

  • Canvases – Using a canvas can be a great way to collaborate, align and get buy-in. Rather than isolating yourself and writing a traditional document, use a canvas and pull together some colleagues, stakeholders or customers. Design together, making the ideas visible and moving sticky notes around to embrace perspectives and fluidity.
  • Personas and Maps – Personas, journey maps, empathy maps and similar constructs help us to better understand the people involved in our learning experience and their learning journey.

Constraints

We now have a great foundation that shapes our mindset and provides some mechanics for how we will innovate and create. But, we never – ever – operate without constraints. That is, there are limits to what and how we can create and deliver. While constraints can sound like a negative, I see them as a positive. Constraints challenge our thinking and lead to innovation. Some constraints to consider with online learning experiences:

  • Attention / Distractions: Attention spans for online material is around 5 minutes. This is especially relevant as you think about “telling” or “showing” types of interactions. If you are lecturing, demoing or even sharing a video – you just don’t have that much time before people lose focus.
    • Remember that you are competing with multiple screens and devices.
    • And, your learners have a day job. Work continues to come in and pulls the learner toward getting things done.
  • Engagement / Coordination: When face-to-face, it can be hard to inject and find a way into a conversation (especially as the group size gets bigger). However, as we transition to online, this becomes even more difficult. This is a big issue for course design. We need to find ways to keep everyone engaged in the learning. If we don’t keep them engaged and feeling part of the learning, we will lose them.
    • Sitting, staring and listening leads to disengagement. Movement and hands-on activities help people learn but are often overlooked when transitioning to online.
  • Resources: There’s never enough time or money.
  • Change: Life and work are not static. You are racing and competing with change. Our students, stakeholders, subject matter experts and facilitators will change their mind. You will need to accommodate and embrace change.
  • Definitions of success: Whether we look at an organization, groups or individuals, we’ll find a variety of definitions for success. If we define success too narrowly, we may overlook alternate learning paths and approaches that are valued by some of our learners but differ from our own views.
  • Distribution: Participants are distributed both geographically which, at a minimum, can bring time zone challenges. A broader geographic spread can also bring cultural differences.

Making Lemonade

As they say: ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!’ Recognizing constraints can be a good first step in challenging orthodoxies and sparking innovative thoughts and approaches. Let’s look at some possibilities:

  • Multiple Screens. Having multiple screens and devices can pose a challenge as students’ attention can be pulled elsewhere during the class. Depending on your situation, you may be able to design your experience to take advantage of multiple screens. For instance:
    • Laptop screen: Main class interface for sharing slides, class chat window, main audio / managing break out rooms
    • Second screen / external monitor: Class Kanban board, shared group workspace (Google Doc, Whiteboard such as Miro/Mural/Stormboard), or even a personal workspace that the class can visit (cloud-based workspaces for developers)
    • Phone screen: Polls, games, and other interactions can see the students using their phone as their voting/game controller. Results can be directed back to the main screen.
  • Distance. Your students are distributed. No one is in the same location. This can be a positive as no one has to travel and costs for the learning experience are reduced (no flights, no hotel, no classrooms to book). Recognizing this change, you can look at how to better drive learning. Trying to condense learning into a few days of face-to-face is not always best. Slow learning can be powerful and a big win for online learning experiences. Potential avenues of leveraging distance include:
    • Keep students’ attention by breaking the class into smaller time commitments.
    • Introduce asynchronous activities / work to go along with the synchronous class time.
    • Encourage students to practice new skills and share back with the class.
    • Provide students with time to create a learning journal / portfolio. There’s more time to apply, reflect and share back.
  • Engaging everyone. Yes, it can be hard to give everyone a chance to speak. We’ve all been on calls and talked over someone, did the random pause of silence and then talked over each other again! Recognizing this challenge up front, we can put energy into finding alternative ways to engage:
    • Chat: Not all communication has to be audio. Use the chat for live interaction.
    • Break-out rooms: Create smaller groups with their own audio channel (and screen sharing) to make it easier for everyone to contribute.
    • Asynchronous communication: Threaded discussions, videos, learning portfolios, and small study groups.
    • Polls: Offer the chance for everyone to share an opinion and engage.
    • Ask everyone to use video: It helps them to connect with you – and you can more easily connect with them!
    • Collaboration tools such as Google Docs and interactive whiteboards such as Miro/Mural/Stormboard: Make it easy for everyone to write/draw/create together – and see everyone’s contributions.

Developing Learning Experiences

While there’s a linear flow to this article, it is critical to recognize that we are building and proving ideas for our learning experience as early as possible. We iteratively and incrementally build the experience. Design shapes development, and development shapes design as we balance between intentional and emergent design. Taking small steps gives us the opportunity to deliver value early, adapt to change or stop when we’ve delivered enough value. There are many tools available to help us build learning experiences – almost as many tools as they are ways to experience learning.

Some tools that are important to keep in mind include:

  • Simple low-fidelity tools. Especially in early efforts. Low fidelity representations invite feedback, adjustment and drive us to focus on ideas rather than the fit and finish. If you and your team are co-located, find some walls and use that space, sticky notes, and whiteboards to start to build.
  • If your team is not co-located, give thought to the tools that you will use to coordinate, create, comment and discuss.
    • Slack and MS Teams to discuss, coordinate
    • Trello or other Kanban tools
    • Miro/Mural/Stormboard for engaging whiteboard experiences
    • G Suite for sharing and collaboratively writing documents and working on presentations
    • GitHub is a great platform to use for many of these aspects and offers versioning for all the content you’re creating.
  • There’s more to an experience than just the content and materials that the students will see. Keep in mind that there will be facilitator guides, distribution of materials (All materials digital? Physical materials?), facilitator training, and potential building out of environments to support any lab work (if the experience relates to use of any tools)
  • Additionally, we need to consider tools that support video, audio, gaming or mobile interactions (chatbots, messaging, etc.).

Delivering Online Learning Experiences

As we approach and execute delivery of the learning experience, we need to continue with the mindset that we’ve cultivated and established up to this point. This isn’t a race to get through materials, a need to check boxes, or to just complete some form of compliance. As teacher (or facilitator or instructor) – we’re focused on impact.

We need to connect with our students and support them on their learning journey. Here are some suggestions on how to make the most of this experience:

  • Get to know everyone’s name. Coming into the class, you should already have a roster, get familiar with the names and do you best to use students’ names.
  • Answer questions. This may seem obvious, but when a student asks a question – you need to do your best to answer. Further, you can also pull other students into the discussion and have them provide perspectives as well.
  • Tell (relevant) stories. People connect with stories. As an instructor you can connect with your students – and connect them with the content through stories. Stories also build your credibility (as you speak from experience) and help to bring the content to life.
    • And, ask students to share their stories! A good teacher learns from their students.
  • Have a co-facilitator. This is especially important in online delivery. Having one person run a learning experience is especially difficult. Work with your co-facilitator in advance and have clarity on where and when you need assistance. Expect to need assistance with:
    • Monitoring chat during synchronous interactions
    • Setting up and supporting break-out rooms
    • Helping students debug technology
    • Setting up polls, opening them up and making sure that results are captured/shared
    • Capturing notes and feedback
    • Updating parking lot
    • Updating the class Kanban board
  • Pay attention to energy levels. The class is set up with a plan. But, as a teacher, you need to be ready and able to adapt as needed. Each class is unique and will have ebbs and flows in energy, engagement, and progress. Pay attention to:
    • Prompts from your co-facilitator that the class needs a break. The co-facilitator is seeing the chat window and icons that suggest a break (coffee mug, snoozing emoji, pace indicators, etc.)
    • Be wary of silence.
    • Keep an eye on the “attention measurement” feature of your training software. While not perfect, it can provide clues that you’re losing the group.
  • Be mindful of culture and time zones. Being online, you may have a much broader distribution of students which introduces time zone and cultural challenges:
    • Your class should be designed for frequent interactions and breaks. Recognize the time zones you’re dealing with and be prepared to adjust. In some cases, it may be helpful to consider shutting down early and asking folks to do a bit of homework.
    • Culture may also lead to different student expectations/behaviors. Do your students feel comfortable asking questions? If not, consider how you can confirm progress or engage in discussion and interaction.
    • Lingo and cultural references. Whether from the domain you’re teaching or just a regional phrase, be aware that not all cultural references translate well or easily. You want to bring yourself to the classroom, but you also don’t want to alienate or confuse your students. If there’s a phrase that reflects “you” and helps to convey an idea, consider how you can use it and be inclusive.
  • Stay on topic. Yes, there can be some deviations from the main topic. But, teaching a class is not all about you. You are there for the students; consider any tangents from their point of view. What value is the tangent adding? If the value is questionable – consider sharing it during a break of outside of the class. Sharing can help forge bonds, but students have goals and definitions of success for their participation – don’t get in the way!
  • Stick to the schedule. Your students have commitments beyond the classroom. These commitments could be work related or family related. Either way, you have made a commitment to them about the time boundaries for the class.
  • Building on the course content, create a list of topic-aligned questions to generate purposeful discussions. Good questions are important. Try to stay away from “Any questions?” or “Did that make sense?”, and move towards “What are some challenges you can see with doing X?” or “Can you think of a scenario where you might use Y?”.

The Interconnectedness of Design, Development and Delivery

These three dimensions of creating an outstanding learning experience are interconnected. As we learn more about development or delivery it should feed back into design and future iterations of the experience. Just as design leads us to select tools and techniques, the tools or techniques we chose bring constraints and capabilities to the mix that impact design. Be open to learning, recognizing the impact of choices and adjusting. To create a learning experience, we must be open to learning.

Further Reading

There’s a book called “The Design of Everyday Things” written by Donald Norman that I encountered as an undergrad – and I’ve been passionate about design ever since. I highly recommend the book as an entry point to thinking about Design. Some resources to consider include:

  • Design Council’s Double Diamond
  • Change by Design, Tim Brown
  • Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Jake Knapp

If you’re not familiar with Agile, I recommend starting with the Agile Manifesto. You’ll see lots of references to software (that’s where it started), but the values and principles in the manifesto apply to all kinds of solutions and scenarios. From there, look at the Scrum Guide and the basics of Kanban (additional background). Using Trello or MS Planner can be helpful for making work visible and staying aligned.

A Story about Learning, Gaming and Winning

Culture, Digital Transformation, Gaming
“When we’re playing a good game – when we’re tackling unnecessary obstacles – we are actively moving ourselves toward the positive end of the emotional spectrum. We are intensely engaged, and this puts us in precisely the right frame of mind and physical condition to generate all kinds of positive emotions and experiences. All of the neurological and physiological systems that underlie happiness – our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our emotion and memory centres – are fully activated by gameplay.”
 
― Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
 
Growing up playing games, I enthusiastically embrace the idea of learning and games. The fun, intensity and gratification that comes from playing a great game (and winning!) beats the heck out of the drudgery of old school learning. Sitting through long, boring lectures is a demotivating and ineffective way to learn. Gaming, could be introduced as a new and improved learning approach. But, we can’t assume that all games are good and will be effective (and in a similar vein, not all classroom experiences are bad).
 
In an earlier attempt at this post, I started down the path of discussing what makes a good game. In that effort I discussed theory, frameworks and concepts. This included looking at Vygotsky, Piaget, Papert, Playcentric game design and “magic circles.” Gaming theory and frameworks are interesting (and fun!), but there can be a long path from theory to impact. So, I pivoted – and we’ll look at the impact that a great gaming experience can have on learning.
 
I like to highlight that ‘being’ digital requires new ways of working and – new ways of learning. But, new doesn’t mean that we throw away the old. We bring forward what makes sense, adjusting it as needed to improve and have a bigger impact. Yes, we need to increase focus on social and informal learning. But, we don’t have to abandon formal learning. To enhance the impact of informal learning, I like to include games. Sometimes, these experiences are short and focused on a specific concept. For example, the coin game is quick and fun while highlighting the importance of batch size and the theory of constraints. Sometimes, the games are much bigger and take most of a day to play. The key is to have good games that are impactful. Doing so can impact culture and help organizations achieve their digital maturity ambitions.
 
With this background, I’d like to tell a story about impact through gaming. The story focuses on playing the G2G3 DevOps Simulation. Here are some details about the simulation:
  • This is an all-day learning experience, featuring 3 rounds of gameplay. There is a scoreboard, there are rules and it’s competitive. We remind attendees to take breaks and step away from the game.
  • Each round of gameplay includes planning, doing, reviewing and some best practices (Theory).
  • 20 people can play the game.
  • Each player gets a role: Business leader, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer, QA, Release Engineer, Operations or Service Desk.
  • To win, each role has to collaborate with the other roles.
  • The scoreboard provides everyone with views on their progress, challenges and performance.
  • Each role has a type of puzzle to complete to do their “work”. And, like the real-world, there’s a need to collaborate to be able to succeed.
  • There are two main types of work: new development that the business requests and incidents that come in via the Service Desk.
  • As work moves through the “pipeline”, one of the facilitators is bridging the digital and physical worlds. Paper cards flow through a “pipeline” and the facilitator confirms the work. The facilitator also gets to play the role of “chaos monkey”, so to speak, and gets to break servers – leading to service incidents.
  • Work from the business arrives via the Business and Product Owner roles.
With this background in place, I’d like to share one of my favorite stories about this valuable experience. My team was facilitating the simulation at a well-known, global technology company in San Jose. We had a group of senior managers and directors participating. They were in the early days of their division’s digital transformation. This company lives and breathes technology every day. But, they still found that they needed to improve and adopt new ways of working (…and learning, thinking and leading…). The agenda for the day included a two-hour overview session followed by the simulation. In total, we had a very full, 8 hour day planned.
 
I led the overview session. This goal for this session was to drive alignment on Agile, DevOps and ‘connect the dots’. The session included lecture, Q&A/discussion prompts, and a video session with their boss. The video session reinforced the importance of these efforts and highlighted the support for our day. It was during this session that I first met “Simon”. Simon sat in the middle of the room and he caught my eye. He was paying attention, rather intently, but he also had his arms crossed and was leaning back – and was radiating doubt. In introduced the benefits of DevOps: improved collaboration, better quality, and enhanced customer alignment. And, that’s when Simon jumped in: “So what – we’ve seen and heard this before! Each new approach that shows up offers the same thing. Bigger. Better. Cheaper. Faster. Why should this time be any different?” At that point, I felt the spotlight turn to me, get more intense and the focus of the room follow along. How to answer? How could I convert Simon? And, how could I avoid losing the group?
 
Pausing for a moment, I realized that I couldn’t convert him with words. I shared some thoughts and stories – but I could see the disbelief radiating from Simon. There was a bit more dialog with others in the group joining in, but we weren’t making much progress. Simon wanted proof he could touch, see and experience.
 
We completed the overview section and moved on to the simulation. We put Simon into the Scrum Master role. The intent of the assignment was to give him direct insight into how work was flowing and engage him with both business and technology roles. He was going to get his proof!
 
Round 1 of the simulation is chaotic as participants only have a little bit of time to prepare for gameplay. Simon worked hard in Round 1 and in the debrief shared his views on the results, challenges and how everyone worked together. After everyone debriefed, we discussed ways to tackle identified challenges. We provided guidance on techniques and ways of working. We empowered the group to be the driver for continuous improvement. The team had to take their experience and the practices we provided to come up with better ways of working. We repeated this pattern at the end of Rounds 2 and 3. However, for Round 3 the goal was to carry forward lessons learned into their day-to-day work. I won’t go into details of the techniques, approaches and thoughts shared (I don’t want spoil the sim for you) – but I will highlight that we made an impact. Throughout the day, Simon changed. His demeanor went from doubtful, frigid and a bit antagonistic to warm, smiling and passionate. Why? He was able to get his proof. He experienced the changes that happen as we take on new and better ways of collaborating. He felt empowered as he and his colleagues made their system work better. Data and debriefs along the way showed them bottlenecks and highlighted issues. And, new ideas on practices fed into experiments that led to solutions. For me, this was a huge win. In traditional training and coaching situations, I don’t see such a transition in one day.
 
The simulation wasn’t the end of their journey. People don’t leave as DevOps experts. But, the sim sets the stage for pulling more learning, for igniting pursuit of improvement and culture change.
 
I’ve had the chance to run the sim at some other companies and would like to share from those experiences. In one sim, my then client and now friend Keith Buehlman was a participant. Keith was the leader of the organization’s transformation. I asked him to reflect on the experience and he shared the following:
“One of the best parts of the DevOps simulation was the opportunity to go through realistic scenarios and, in the process, refine skills and learn best practices that can be used immediately. The DevOps simulation was an important piece of the overall transformation strategy as it comes to understanding the culture that was needed to really operate in an agile fashion. It truly supplemented the hands-on training and day-to-day coaching of the employees.”
I especially like the reference at the end of his thoughts. The simulation is not a one-off, silver bullet that solves all transformation challenges. But it’s a piece of the puzzle that also includes other training and coaching. And – as much as this is about skills and practices, it reinforces the cultural changes needed.
 
Other participants have highlighted that they found it motivating to see the connection between their work and impact. For others, they walked away understanding T-shaped skillsets. One participant shared his surprise that people would cheer for improvements in MTTR. And, as we put participants in roles different from their day-to-day; they come away with a new appreciation for their teammates. Empathy for others can go a long way to making the workplace more hospitable and receptive to change.
 
Through game play we have an exceptional day of learning. The energy is high, passion is evident and the time flies by. And, we create ripples in the organization that support us in driving a bigger change. In wrapping up, here’s a great quote from Ralph Koster that speaks further to the power of gaming and learning:
“Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun. In other words, with games, learning is the drug.”
I hope this story sparks interest in adding games into your formal learning events. If you’re already using games, which ones are you using? What impact are these games having? Are you creating any new games that are specific to your organization?

Book Discussion: The Technology Fallacy

Digital Transformation

I’d like to discuss the: “The Technology Fallacy” a book that has emerged from the annual work that MIT and Deloitte have partnered on, with Coming of Age Digitally being the most recent version. The book digs deeper into the topic and provides a view across multiple years of the study.

Digital transformation is hard. There are many aspects and complexities to consider in the transformation. The authors: Gerald C. Kane, Anh Nguyen Phillips, Jonathan R. Copulsky, and Garth R. Andrus have provided a strong view into the complexities, considerations and thoughtfulness needed when pursuing a Digital transformation. And, right from the cover, they make it clear that people are the key to success (and I’ll add, the reason why transformation are so hard!).

By moving from a short publication to a full book, there’s space to get much more detailed – providing more insights and more guidance. Kane et al, take advantage of this space by offering a more fine-grained look at the data through the lens of Digital Maturity, which they define as: “aligning an organization’s people, culture, structure, and tasks to compete effectively by taking advantage of opportunities enabled by technological infrastructure, both inside and outside the organization.” Viewing transformation as an ongoing activity related to continuous growth and maturity appeals. Too often, transformation appears within organizations as “the” goal, an end state. Such a view misses the point of being digital and will lead to poor choices and disappointment. Further, this view on maturity is also helpful as it takes a broad view of the alignment needed to take advantage of technology. We can’t just focus on org structure or just some training. Without alignment, it will be impossible to build the trust needed to take chances, gaps in knowledge, or share vulnerability. And in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) – how far cannot we get without trust?

A few additional things I’d like to highlight:

  • Importance of ongoing learning, adjustments and planning is critical to the success of having a digital strategy. If the digital world is dynamic and continuously changing, how can you have a strategy that is static and followed like a script?
  • “In a digital environment, organizations must shift from a world of ‘scalable efficiency’ to one of ‘scalable learning.” This quote is introduced in discussions about “Digital Leadership” highlighting that there is a significant change in mindset needed – both from leadership and throughout the organization. Who cares about efficiency if we’re not creating the right products or offering the right services?
  • Continuing on the topic of leadership, this following quote is important both for how we work and how we learn: “To enable change, organizations must harness effective leadership at all levels of the company….digitally maturing organizations are less hierarchical and drive more decision making down to lower levels, where those decisions can be made more quickly and in a more informed way.” This flattening of the organization is critical both for executing and for learning – with the two moving in lockstep.
  • STEAM vs. STEM: I’m a fan of discussing STEAM rather than just STEM and appreciated seeing Kane et al. embracing this view as well. Diversity of backgrounds is needed in organizations and the teams within – and that diversity needs to include the arts.
  • And one last quote that I’ll highlight sets the stage for discussion: “A key facet of developing digital talent is cultivating a growth mindset. Of course, no matter how much of a growth mindset you nurture, not everyone in your organization is capable of learning advanced technical skills, like Hadoop or machine learning. Yet, everyone can become more digitally literate, learn to adapt better to change, and think more critically—the skills our survey respondents identify as most important for success.”

And, if you prefer videos to reading, there’s quite a bit of related video available. As a bit of a primer on the topic, check out this video:

And there are a few deeper dives available as follows:

  1. The Technology Fallacy: An Introduction
  2. Technology Fallacy: Episode 1: Intro to Knowing-Doing Gap
  3. Technology Fallacy: Episode 2: Digital Absorption
  4. Episode 3: Digital Affordances
  5. Episode 4: Digital Attraction
  6. Episode 5: Digital Agility

Overall, the book is excellent and provides quite a bit to discuss and consider. I’ve touched upon some initial key thoughts and will look to add further commentary in future posts. In the meantime, here are a few questions to get discussion started:

  • How are you seeing success in building a growth mindset?
  • How are you building teams that embrace and benefit from diversity?
  • How are you ensuring that everyone has digital literacy?

 

 

First Peoples Principles of Learning

Culture, Digital Transformation

As we start this conversation, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. The City of Calgary is also home to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III.

This seems like the right way to start this post as we’ll be taking a look at the First Peoples Principles of Learning – produced by the First Nations Education Steering Committee. If you’ve not done so already, I highly recommend reviewing this resource. When thinking about Digital Learning (aka new ways of learning), it can be beneficial to look broadly for inspiration and embrace diversity.

First Peoples Principles of Learning
First Peoples Principles of Learning

This has a been a great resource for helping me to think about learning – both for myself as an individual and as I think about impacting learning across an organization. Here are a few of my favourite parts:

  • “Learning involves patience and time.”: Yes, the pace of change is faster than ever – and accelerating – but it still takes patience and time to (truly) learn. We need to have patience for how we learn and as we design new learning ecosystems, we need to incorporate time and patience into the ecosystem itself. In the discussion about MS Teams, I highlighted how we introduced patience and time into an Agile Coaching Academy.
  • “Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational….”: I see each of us, our teams, and endeavors as part of a larger ecosystem within an organization. Further, we also are part of the larger ecosystem of our individual lives, governments and other organizations. Our interconnectedness brings the potential for enormous complexity and nuance. To learn, we need to be able to reflect, experience and relate our efforts to other people, organizations, situations, and ideas. It is interesting to see how many of these ideas (“see the whole”, retrospectives, experiments, etc.) are embedded into agile and DevOps approaches.
  • “Learning requires exploration of one’s identity.”: Knowing who we are as learners can help us to find better ways to learn (which reminds me of the Introverts Guide to Mobile Learning). Further as someone creating learning solutions, we need to be mindful of our learners. Drawing on design thinking and human centered design are reflections of the need to explore identity.
  • “Learning is embedded in memory, history and story.”: We’re surrounded by context, experience, relationships, legacy thinking and our stories. Our learning is shaped by these aspects and then shapes them for future learning.

And considering the set of items above (and the larger set of principles) – it highlights the importance of considering our culture (values, norms, behaviors) as we embrace and support new ways of learning.

Which of the principles resonate most with you? How would you use them in your learning? How would you use them with your organization? What other principles do you consider in guiding how your organization learns? How do they guide your learning?

 

A Primer on Digital Transformations

Digital Transformation

I encourage you to take a look at a recent publication from Deloitte (via Wired Magazine) titled: “Digital Transformation: A Primer.” There are some very good concepts highlighted in this primer that can help you gain an appreciation for Digital Transformation (including Digital Learning).

They helpfully provide the following definition for Digital Transformation:

“Digital transformation is all about becoming a digital enterprise—an organization that uses technology to continuously evolve all aspects of its business models (what it offers, how it interacts with customers and how it operates).”

Some additional aspects that are worth noting:

  • The Venn diagram showing the overlap of transforming the business and transforming the organization is particularly useful. I appreciate the focus on culture, new ways of working and building capabilities.
  • The lenses through which to view transformation guide us to think broadly. We need to be careful that we do not limit ourselves or look at transformation too narrowly. From the list of lenses, I’m particularly interested in “Experiences & Engagement”, “Culture & Leadership”, “Organization & Workforce” and “Ambitions & Aspirations.” I’d even argue that this is where I’d start – as they provide the best foundation for learning. And if we’re learning, we can better tackle the other lenses.
  • Speaking of ambitions – the advice for tackling ambitions is solid and worth keeping in mind. I like to share this idea (paraphrasing from Alice in Wonderland) – “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” If we are going to decentralize, democratize and empower learners – we better have clarity about our ambitions and make it easy for everyone to pursue.
  • And last, but not least, it’s useful to have a model like Imagine, Deliver, Run to guide efforts to pull all of this together. The focus on iterative, incremental, and learning as you go serves the transformation and reinforces the learning mentality needed.

If your transformation is already in flight, what ambitions are you pursuing? How are you aligning learning and the larger transformation? What lessons have you learned along the way that you wish you had known at the outset of your journey?

Digital Transformation Reading: “Coming of Age Digitally”

Digital Transformation

“Coming of Age Digitally: Learning, Leadership and Legacy” is a joint publication from MIT and Deloitte discussing findings from the 2018 Digital Business Executive Study and Research Project. The findings are based on a global survey of over 4000 managers, execs and analysts. The research is further augmented by 17 interviews with execs and thought leaders. This research has been performed for a few consecutive years and provides some interesting insights in digital transformations (and learning!). I’m a fan of the publication for many reasons, here are a few:

  • Digital maturity: I worry that Digital Transformation is seen as an event, goal or end state. The approach of discussing maturity and that we are always maturing resonates. It aligns with the idea that we are continuously learning, improving and adapting. Life is not static – there isn’t an end state for digital transformation. This also nicely aligns with the idea of having a growth mindset. All this is critically important as digital transformation is difficult.
  • Stories and data: We relate to stories. Assessments of current state, setting of ambitions and charting a new path is difficult without insights into the experiences of others. Learning from the experience of others is valuable as it accelerates our own learning. Further, using external stories is a great way to open up a discussion.
    • While data is discussed throughout the paper, the end of the paper provides details on the questions from the survey and the responses.
  • Progressing through iterations and experiments: The path of maturing and progressing is not simple nor linear. We need to find our way – figuring out the complexity of people, technology, markets, business models, operating models, customer models, and the larger ecosystem. Experiments are the means to finding our way. Further, how we approach experiments and the learning that occurs speaks to the maturity of the organization. Embracing and sharing progress and results from experiments is healthy and drives maturity (and growing maturity guides us to embrace and share results!). Most experiments lead to new discoveries – which is a nice way of saying, we get a result different than expected. In simple terms, we’d call this a failed experiment. But, I find that many organizations aren’t ready to embrace the idea of failures as a “good thing.”
  • The criticality of learning: The data reflects the need to focus on learning for everyone in the organization. Further, it highlights the digital mindset, culture and pace of change that differentiates digital learning. At the timing of this survey, almost half of respondents recognize the need for continuous learning. I expect that this number is going to climb and soon everyone in the organization will recognize and demand support for continuous learning.
  • Maturing companies build skills (continuously!): Organizations that are more digitally mature focus on building the skills of their employees. This connects back to the first point – transformations are not an end point. There needs to be a focus on continuous learning and development.

Here’s a video of the publication’s authors discussing the study:

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the study, the stories and the interpretations. And here’s a few questions to jumpstart the discussion:

  • Which data points stand out most? Where there any data points that surprised you?
  • Are you seeing any published data / surveys that show different viewpoints?
  • How do the ideas from this publication compare to what you are seeing in your organization?

Novartis: Culture, Curiosity and Scaling Learning

Digital Transformation, Scaling

I appreciate finding and reviewing stories from organizations pursuing new ways of learning. Investigating and thinking about the experiences that others have is a great way to accelerate our own learning. A recent story that I’ve found is from Novartis; a large pharmaceutical company with over 125k employees across the world. Their corporate culture and values put curiosity and empowerment front and center. Building such a culture takes time, focus and investment – and there’s a few interviews and articles that I’ve found that speak to their efforts.

This interview with Vasant Narasimhan the CEO of Novartis has some great comments. I appreciate the focus on servant leadership, support, empowerment and the recognition of the need to move quickly.  Here are a couple of comments that particularly stood out:

  • “…the inspired, curious, unbossed”
  • “’I believe the future of companies is going to be about ideas coming from the bottom up,’ he explains. ‘We don’t need bosses. We need servant leaders. We need people to serve their teams and let their teams come up with the best ideas.’”
  • “’Every time Novartis needed to pivot in that long history, it pivoted,’ he says. ‘And this is a moment to pivot again. Pivot towards transformational innovation. Pivot the culture. Pivot towards data and digital technologies. And we need to do it fast because the world is moving really fast.’”

Simon Brown, the Chief Learning Officer at Novartis, has been sharing details about their learning initiatives (“Enabling 130,000 employees to grow in an organization committed to continuous learning”, “We’re going BIG on Learning at Novartis – here’s how…” and “In September we’re taking steps to be #Curious”). In these stories we hear about the focus on curiosity (#curiosity), the investment in learning, MOOCS, gamification, the use of VR, extended durations of learning experiences, connecting learning and work, scaling, and the many events focusing on curiosity. There isn’t a simple switch, poster on the wall or proclamation from up on high that is going to bring about the creation of a culture to support learning. Seeing the actions and activities underway reflects an alignment between intention and investment.

I’m thankful for the sharing from Novartis – getting insights on their reasoning, approaches and efforts. The sharing speaks to the culture they have and that they are trying to build. Looking forward, I’m keen to hear more about their efforts around informal and social learning, finding the right balance between “push” and “pull”, learning analytics (in particular – impact of their efforts), and the continued pursuit of a “…curious, unbossed culture.” I expect that these areas will be critical to success as they pursue scaling (both in terms of numbers of learners and frequency of learning).

What are your thoughts on the stories from Novartis? How do they compare to your thoughts and experiences?