A year after stepping through the looking glass into the world of full-time employment in a large company, I ask myself, “What was I thinking?”

I know exactly what I was thinking — the need to establish credibility, get a strong brand on my resume, support for my work, and opportunities to work on interesting problems. As I  re-read Part 1 of Through the looking glass I remember the apprehension I felt about going to work for a very large company. I remember being worried about how I would have to conform, change my identity and pretend to be what I was not. I remember thinking I would have to let go of my independent contractor identity as I accepted the rules of this new game. That was my main worry. None of that really came to pass in the way that I imagined.

• First, I did not expect my work to be so very virtual. Now, hear me out — I have done virtual. I love virtual. I’m a telecommuter. I believe that virtual is here to stay, and is the future of work. But whoa! Starting all your relationships virtually because you’re on a national team– now that’s hard. Not having any work reason to connect with people in my local office, that’s also hard. I realize now that I’ve always started face-to-face.
• But then it gets more interesting — I also am never on a consistent project team. That’s right – no intact teams. Not only are you relationships virtual, but you’re always remaking them as you move from project to project. That’s even harder. It means that on every project you are re-negotiating your role, understanding how others define their roles, and getting a good handle on their skills and capabilities. Most of the time, project teams don’t bother to do that “teaming” stuff because there’s too much work to do. They don’t bother to really understand each other as humans with 3-4 other projects going at the same time. Yet we come into these project teams loaded with expectations. At some point, always, you run into a snag, a bump, a wall of frustration.
• The work is lonely. I did not expect to feel so completely alone in my work. Yes, I’m on a project team, but as a learning designer/instructional designer — I’m suppose to be an expert, so all that “content-development stuff” or “working with SMEs stuff” is left to me. Very little collaboration. A lot of loneliness in the work. And even though I love working virtually, being a telecommuter, diving deep into the content, living in my introvert world — I deeply miss collaborating. To me, that’s the whole purpose of a team. Without that team collaboration, I might as well be on an assembly line. And you know what — it hurts. I miss it dearly.

That last paragraph was really hard to write.

Heres’ the good stuff -

• I do get to work on interesting projects and let my ideas run as wild — if I can convince others to run with me.
• I do have amazing people that I work with and for on a daily basis — I just don’t always get to collaborate with them.
• I am learning so much — about my capabilities, my value-add, what I do and don’t like doing, what I need to learn more about, about eLearning, and most importantly — about the dynamics of working in a large organization and the effort it takes to get alignment and stay on message.
• My identity has not been that changed — except that they require me to use my full legal name for my email – which sucks. And I have learned to filter my words and think about my intent in a given situation; and that’s all for the better, IMHO.
• I’ve also learned to appreciate the value of my past experiences — I’ve had incredible teams in the past, incredible mentors, incredible leaders. I deeply appreciate that I experienced those others in my life.
• I get to travel some, but not too much — so far.
• I meet incredible facilitators and coaches as a part of my work, and yes, get to work with them sometimes.
• I get the benefits that come from working in a large organization (yes, health, dental and a 401K are a nice to have). I never thought I’d say this — but I like that I have a number to call in case of a natural or other kind of disaster. It’s that paternalism of a large organization because it’s to their benefit that we are all healthy and taken care of. I’m a dual-citizen American/Canadian , so don’t get me started on who I think should really be providing that safety net.

As long as I’m still learning, and the good balances or even outweighs the bad, then it’s worth staying. But if that starts to shift, or if the work that I do is not longer aligned with my goals, then back through the looking glass I’ll go.

For those of you not yet in the know, an open space meeting is essentially a gathering, spanning one day or several, around a common topic, where there is no preset agenda. The participants create the agenda on the day by putting up topics for small group discussion. The facilitators provide a grid of time slots and meeting spaces, and people put up the ideas or problems they would like to discuss. At the appropriate times, people vote with their feet and go to the small group gathering that interests them most. They can stay at one group, or flit between groups. Meeting notes are captured, and then published in a wiki or some other format.

The quality of the conversations depends on the participants, the topics, and the energy of the space. It’s a different way of having a professional conference. You are responsible for creating your own experience. Ok, I buy into that. But still, I find myself wanting more. What’s missing for me?

For me it’s the difference between formal and informal learning, where structured conferences are the former, and unconferences are the latter. There is a place for both. One is about learning in a designed path, in a structured way, to a particular outcome. The other is about exploring a topic.  So it depends what I need at that time. Am I exploring or wanting to get somewhere?

What I love most about the open space meetings is going places where I never thought I’d go. What I don’t like is when I’m looking to plunge deeply into a topic, and be taken to place I didn’t know I could go, by someone who has explored and thought about it in depth — when I need a guide.

Now that I’ve written this it seems obvious, but it’s not so obvious in the moment when you’re having great conversations and still find yourself looking around for the sage. I want both. I want to dive deep with a guide, and then explore, with others, and find my own way. Like improvisational jazz — structure and unstructure within the same experience.

Can’t we design a middle way?

• Why the heck am in a meeting with a bunch of OD folks when I think of myself as an Instructional Designer?
• What’s is organizational development? How is it different from organizational learning?
• What the difference between development and learning?

Flash Mob Dance - Informal Group Learning?

I realized that  really liked the folks at this meeting — it was the first meeting I’ve been to in the Bay Area where I felt “Ah, I’ve found my people.” Since I want to keep going, I had to figure out a WHY I was there — what was the connection?

Development vs. Learning

Why not start with the basics?

• Development – stages that one goes through in one’s life or one’s life or one’s career, often thought of as change in roles (becoming a mother or becoming a manager). These stages in development can be biological (aging); psychological (maturing, identity); or sociocultural (change in roles, life or career events/problems/trajectory). In addition, there are variables such as race, gender, and sexual orientation and the impact and influence on that person’s development.
• Learning – knowledge, skills and attitudes required to master a subject, attain performance, or understand a domain, or innovate. Learning, like development, is about change and growth. Or sometimes just about “running to stand still” — keeping up with change to maintain one’s position. There is formal and informal learning; online, face-to-face, and blended; there is the technology of learning from CMS/LMS/Performance Management systems to Webinars to games and virtual worlds. Learning is a part of development. Learning integrated with development leads to “teachable moments” — learning appropriate to developmental stages. There’s much much more but I’ll stop here.

Organizational development vs. learning

Continuing from the explanation above, then organizational development is about the stages of an organization. It has an action orientation — it’s about evaluating and creating an intervention. Examples below:

• What an organization need when moving from start-up to mature organization
• Using diagnostic tools to understand what “life event” an organization is facing and creating an intervention, such as:
  • Using organizational 360 or SLCQ (Strategy Leadership Culture Questionnaire)
  • Using something like the Periodic Table of Strategy (Mercer-Delta) to determine the challenge and potential strategic moves for an organization
  • Gap  of where an organization is, where they want to go, and what it will take to get there.
  • SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
• Based on Senge’s five disciplines to create the learning organization:
  • personal mastery
  • mental models
  • shared visions
  • team learning
  • systems thinking
• Using coaching, mentoring, other tools to improve organizational performance

Organizational Learning

Quite simply, organizational learning is the collection of stuff involved in individual and collective learning inside an organization. It is also about the analysis and support of learning processes, formal and informal.

• Courses and curriculum
• Informal learning – social media, water-cooler learning, blogs, wikis, enabling conversations, mentoring, etc.
• Technology that support the above
• Design that supports the above
• Understanding of the cognitive and social processes that support learning
• Understanding the organizational processes that support or impeded learning
• Design of learning that supports organizational strategy
• Senge’s five disciplines

It’s in the last four that we cross-over into the realm of organizational development. There is clearly a link between the two — when things aren’t working on an organizational level, often we often turn to learning and development. However, much less often, do we turn to learning and development when things ARE working – or when we want to make things better when they are already good.

Why an Instructional Designer meets with OD folks

Instructional design (ID) is too narrowly focused on creating learning — instead of being more broadly focused on creating learning specific to organizational strategy — specific enough to measure impact. Because of the narrow focus of ID, I’m am pulled to people and groups asking bigger questions, with an organizational focus.

I love thinking about how people learn, but I also need (for my sanity) to think about how organizations learn, and how individual learning is relevant in this bigger picture.

That’s why I joined BAodn.

References for this Learning vs. Development article:

• Learning in Adulthood: A comprehensive guide by Merriam, Caffarella, Baumgartner
• Infed website: http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning-organization.htm
• Organizational Learning vs. the Learning Organization by Carol Gorelick (Google Books)

This one is created by Marcus Buckingham, the Gallup genius who helped create and market First, Break All the Rules, and Now, Discover Your Strengths. These books respectively say – each one of us is an individual and different, and managers should realize that and treat us differently; and people who do best focus on their strengths. The Strong Life Test for Women is a take-off on the latter.

First I took the online assessment, then I went to the bookstore and read the related book in about 2.5 hours (after reading academic papers, most business books are an easy read.)

Is is useful?

Well, it depends. If you’re looking for work, or a new life path, no one test is going to provide you the answer. What it may give you, is some insights into yourself, not because the test reveals your true self, but because you reveal your true self  when you react/interact with the test.

So I took this test. It told me the following:

• Strongest Role: Advisor. I like to ask the question – What’s the best thing to do?
• Supporting Role: Creator. I like to ask the question – What do I understand?

To be honest, I didn’t like that Creator was a supporting role. I’m an artist damn it! Ok, know that we’ve got that straight, we can move on, eh? I read my complete role descriptions and noted my reactions to the descriptions — yes, I like figuring out the answers and the best way to do things — I like being the expert (Advisor). Yes, I like starting with my own insights and finding the pattern underneath life’s craziness (Creator). Yes, I like tests that reconfirm how I think about myself, and make me remember what’s important to me.

The interesting difference

What’s different about this test, is not so much the test itself, but the accompanying literature that asks one important question:

• What are your strongest moments? In your working life, family, marriage, etc.?
• At what points do you feel you are at your best?
• What is is about those particular moments?
• How can you deliberately create those moments?
• Investigate those moments – what is it about them that you like?
• Celebrate and acknowledge those moments?

It is this difference – focusing on strong moments in your life, and the specifics of those moments — that makes this interesting. The most important exercise you can do is find the words to describe those moments.

The test is just a starting point.

Just an FYI – a list of roles as outlined in the book:

1. Advisor
2. Caretaker
3. Creator
4. Equalizer
5. Influencer
6. Motivator
7. Pioneer
8. Teacher
9. Weaver

Personas - courtesy galiciaCAD.com

Having been on the job market for several months now, I’ve noticed that Captivate and Articulate are required for almost every e-learning or instructional design position that I see posted. Having used Captivate, and having seen Articulate being used – I now understand why so many consider e-learning boring. These two software tools are designed to rapidly convert PowerPoint presentations into e-Learning. They also make it easy to tack a quiz onto the end of the learning. The metaphor behind the software design is “book”, is “page-turner”. The result is boring e-Learning.

Now hold on, am I just blaming the tools — especially since I haven’t really used Articulate? Am I limited by my own vision of what these tools are capable of? Possibly. Am I asking too much of e-Learning designers? Maybe. It is hard to create engaging e-Learning. Just look at my own portfolio — can’t say the learning is *that* engaging.

Research, Think, Write, Design

So here I come to my tag-line: research, write, think, design. Will this make learning more engaging? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it might make it more relevant.

• Research the business outcome. Why are you creating this learning course/widget/thing? What business outcomes are you trying to effect? What behaviors are you trying to change? What do you want people to do?!? Not just “We want people to learn this new financial software” — but “We want people to increase their efficiency and accuracy in expense reporting (or budget planning or budget management)”. This leads the question: “Well, heck, what are they doing now? Who are THEY?”
• Research the learners. Are they novices? experts? do they have different roles/needs? can you create personas from these needs? Is it possible to actually collect data on them? How technically savvy are they? How do they get their information? How do they interact with their LMS? Do they interact with the LMS? Examples of defining personas and how to use personas can be found on the Cooper Journal website. One can think of personas as meaningful customer segmentation made real by colorful descriptions — see the description of how Best Buy uses personas in designing their stores and interacting with their customers in my review of The Deciding Factor.
• Think about the research – well, can we just call this analysis? Sure, analyze you data. Concept. Examine the correlations. What can we learn from these data patterns, without making correlation errors. Clearly this is one of the areas that I need to address, in addition to designing better research.
• Write about it – does it seem redundant to write about your research and analysis? I think not. The process of writing and having to explain your research analysis is key to communication and deepening the understanding. The writing process forces the assumptions to the surface. It exposes the flaws in your argument. Writing is also key to the design process.
• Design – for me this is where you begin to explore methodologies, tools, techniques. This is where you think about learning outcomes, the learning experience. I also strongly believe that the basis of good learning design is good writing — understanding the subject matter, finding good examples, writing good scripts. The quality of the discourse matters. The writing underlying the learning design is often where it all falls apart — maybe the writer can’t imagine the learner persona. Maybe they do not fully understand the subject matter or business outcome. Good research and analysis don’t always lead to good design, but directs the design, channels the creative energies.

Yes, then we have development, where we use whatever toolset (choosing of which is part of the design process) or perhaps organizational constraints dictate what tools to use. Then the implementation, then the evaluation. Well, the evaluation should actually be a part of the research phase — if we know the business outcome, how will we know when we got there? Define success at the beginning and figure out how to effectively measure it.

For example, “We want people to increase their efficiency and accuracy in expense reporting (or budget planning or budget management)” — well there may be measurements in time required to do X, or accuracy in X (how many times to redo), or how many people to do X, what is the cost of doing X — then see if these metrics change after/during the learning. Of course, this assumes these metrics were collected in the first place for you to measure change against.

A role that incorporates this level of thinking, research, design would be ideal. Writing this down helps.

My question – Are Training & Development departments  thinking this way? Are organizations thinking this way? Is it that people just “don’t have time!” to do this level of research? You know, I don’t think so. I think much of the information is there, easy to get, is we ask the right questions. User-experience designers are already doing this. Product Management is already doing this. Let’s do it internally and not just for clients/customers. This is low-hanging fruit – but a big mental adjustment.

This is as close as it gets to who I am: a translator between worlds. An explainer – someone who learns and understands quickly and can communicate to others. A designer — someone who cares passionately about the quality of the writing , the image, the narrative, the experience, the learning.

I prefer to make things beautiful, functional, and understood. And I’m flexible and versatile. Time to change my tag line once again — make it simple, make it easily understood.

Rani H. Gill – speak, manage, and design in three languages — technology, education and business.

A note on education vs. learning:

• education – the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life. (Dictionary.com)
• learning – the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill. (Dictionary.com)

Education is wider in scope and possibility. I want to help learners perform better, but I also want them to understand what they are doing — to approach any situation with an educated perspective. Thus technology + education + business.

• educational technology
• instructional technology designer
• learning + cognition + technology + business
• corporate learning developer

Nothing wrong with these categories — I am all of those — but none of them really encapsulates my aspirations. Instructional technology designer is what I have been calling myself lately, but the profession of instructional design in general is under pressure of becoming irrelevant (see Harold Jarche – The Relevance of the Learning Profession .) Learning has proliferated into mutliple channels – the traditional instructor-led classroom training (increasingly rare) to web seminars, books, ebooks, Twitter, Google search, and blogs of course. All of these channels cannot be controlled by the training department. It is reminiscent of what happened to network channels once cable entered the picture.

What then is left for the learning professional?

So here we go — an attempt at a new definition for myself (“again!?!” says my mother, “Yes, mom, again”. )

• Support learning and lead by example – make things easier to find, become a knowledge center/clearing house. Thus this blog.
• Support performance tied to organizational outcomes rather than learning outcomes. Create learning that matters to the organization. Create learning that can be measured.
• Make learning fun and anticipatory. That doesn’t mean it’s all games (though games can be pretty serious as well). It doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. The learner is motivated and engaged.
• Enable people to learn on their own and become self-directed learners. What skills, knowledge and attitudes do they need? Research, melioration, critical thinking.

So here I come to my tag line – learning + tech + fidelity.

• learning – how do people learn; how do we help them learn; how do we help them create their own personal knowledge environments (aka Stephen Downes) or personal knowledge management (aka Harold Jarche, et. al).
• technology – what technology tools can help people learn and how
• fidelity – has several aspects. on one level – just how good is the technical aspect of the media (quality of video, crispness of photos, etc.); how good is the content (quality of writing, design, camera work); emotional fidelity – how does the creator of the content connect with the audience/learner. How human is it? This is an area I’m just beginning to explore.

As so I begin.