Innovative Performance Support: Strategies And Practices For Learning In The Workflow (BUSINESS SKILLS AND DEVELOPMENT) - Softcover

Gottfredson, Con

Softcover

ISBN 10: 007170311X ISBN 13: 9780071703116

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2010

Synopsis

Real Learning Happens as You Work!Implement performance support to increase and accelerate employee performance.

“It is a book that will become dog-eared from use as it is both a narrative and a reference. Valuable now, and over time; it is worth every cent of the $30 cover price. It is easy to read, and easy to fillet for the right information just when you need it. The book comes at a really important juncture in the trajectory of corporate learning and highlights the importance of learning in the workflow. It is the right book, at the right time, in the right way.”
―Nigel Paine, MD NigelPaine.com Ltd

“Innovative Performance Support significantly moves the learning revolution to the next level. It is the workplace, and the work itself, where performance support will make its mark, and Gottfredson and Mosher are the trailblazers.”
―Marc J. Rosenberg, Marc Rosenberg and Associates

Research shows that 80 percent of learning in the workplace occurs on the job, rather than in formal training sessions.

Innovative Performance Support offers you a concise and comprehensive overview of performance support (PS) practices―ongoing, job-specific resources that ensure employees perform effectively on the job. From free, open-source applications like blogs and wikis to sophisticated new system software, this guide will help you implement the right PS strategy for your team.

Innovative Performance Support:

• Saves the investment in formal training and increases productivity
• Reduces the learning time required to achieve successful performance
• Supplements or replaces existing training programs
• Cuts down on the use of help desks and other traditional in-house support functions

Conrad A. Gottfredson and Bob Mosher break down the hows and whys of applying PS solutions to replace the patchwork of existing training programs that you might be using now. They show how leading firms deploy PS solutions to reduce costs, retain talent, and increase productivity and efficiency.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Conrad Gottfredson, Chief Learning Strategist at Ontuitivehas 30 years of experience helping organizations in leadership development, organizational learning, instructional design, knowledge management, and content development methods. His consulting work has helped governments, non-profits, and multi-national organizations wisely employ emerging technologies and methodologies to help people achieve personal and organizational goals. He has pioneered methodologies for developing and delivering learning at the moment of need to those who need it, when they need it, in the language and form they require, from a single source of content. Gottfredson has a Ph.D. in Instructional Psychology and Technology.

Bob Mosher, Chief Learning Evangelist at Ontuitive, has been an active and influential leader in the learning and training industry for more than 25 years. He is renowned worldwide for his pioneering role in eLearning and new approaches to learning. Bob joined Ontuitive from Microsoft, where he was the director of learning strategy and evangelism. Before Microsoft, Bob was the executive director of education for Element K, where he directed and influenced their learning model and products.An influential voice in the IT-training industry, Mosher speaks at conferences and participates within industry associations such as Chief Learning Officer magazine, CompTIA, ASTD, The eLearning Guild and The MASIE Center.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INNOVATIVE PERFORMANCE SUPPORT

Strategies and Practices for Learning in the Workflow

By Conrad Gottfredson, Bob Mosher

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-170311-6

Contents

Foreword by Elliott Masie
Introduction: It Should Always Have Been about Apply
1 THE CASE FOR PERFORMANCE SUPPORT Insights from a Thought Leader: Dr. 
Timothy R. Clark
2 SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE @ ALL FIVE MOMENTS OF NEED Insights from a 
Thought Leader: Dr. Frank Nguyen
3 ESTABLISHING PROCESS AS YOUR LEARNING AND SUPPORT BACKBONE Insights 
from a Thought Leader: Dr. Ruth Clark
4 BEGINNING AT THE MOMENT OF APPLY AND DESIGNING FROM THERE Insights from 
a Thought Leader: Dr. Allison Rossett
5 BROKERING YOUR LEARNING ASSETS Insights from a Thought Leader: Dr. 
Maggie Martinez
6 EMPLOYING THE STRENGTH OF SOCIAL LEARNING Insights from a Thought 
Leader: Mark Oehlert
7 MANAGING DELIVERABLES WITH CONTENT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES Insights from a 
Thought Leader: Bryan Chapman
8 IMPLEMENTING YOUR PERFORMANCE SUPPORT STRATEGY Insights from a Thought 
Leader: Carol Stroud
Endnotes
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE CASE FOR PERFORMANCE SUPPORT

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. Thelearned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longerexists.

—Eric Hoffer, American social writer

A STORY TO GET STARTED: THE MINNOWS, FROM BOB

My father ran a summer camp as part of his work with the YMCA. During one ofthose camps I was given the assignment with a friend to teach the Minnows how toswim. The Minnows were the youngest nonswimmers in camp. On that first morningof instruction, they all lined up along the edge of the pool. I was in the waterwith my teaching partner when, without warning, he reached up, grabbed one ofthe Minnows, and tossed him into the pool. The kid quickly popped to the surfaceand started flailing around, taking in water. My training buddy then put a handunder the terrorized child and guided him along the surface, with his littleminnow arms flailing away, back to the edge of the pool. Then he lifted him uponto the edge of the pool where no other Minnow remained standing. They had allbacked as far away from the pool's edge as possible.

I stood in the water in shock. This wasn't how I had envisioned the swimminginstruction to go. Still dumbfounded, I asked, "What are you doing?" Heresponded, "Bob, we've only got a week!" My friend realized something that Ihadn't. He was focused on the reality that we had only one week to help thosekids be safe from drowning. I was caught up in the instructional plan while hewas responding to the realities of "time to performance."

Time to performance is defined as the total time required to help aperson achieve successful performance. In this Minnow story, it was the weekthat those Minnows were in camp, and the minimum performance, for them, was"surfacing and making it back to the edge of the pool."

Today, organizations are threatened by a churning pool of constant,unpredictable change. The time to performance required to stay competitive hasnever been shorter. This abbreviated timeline demands that Performance Support(learning at the moment of "Apply") become the centerpiece of all our efforts inthe vital cause of learning. This chapter is written to help you make the casefor doing this.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

In 2008, we saw a financial tsunami hit the United States. The rippling effectis still being felt throughout the world as organizations continue to strugglein how they respond to the clear and present danger of volatile change. Theconsequences of the inability to adapt at or above the speed of change havewreaked financial havoc since.

Ian Davis, McKinsey's worldwide managing director, has since written thefollowing:

The business landscape has changed fundamentally; tomorrow's environment will bedifferent, but no less rich in possibilities for those who are prepared. It isincreasingly clear that the current downturn is fundamentally different fromrecessions of recent decades. We are experiencing not merely another turn of thebusiness cycle, but a restructuring of the economic order.

For some organizations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others arepeering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to positionthemselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. The questionis, "What will normal look like?" While no one can say how long the crisis willlast, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recentyears. The new normal will be shaped by a confluence of powerful forces,some arising directly from the financial crisis and some that were at work longbefore it began.

In the midst of this "New Normal" described by Davis, keeping current inlearning is like changing a tire on a moving truck—hence the need forlearners to be rapid, adaptive, collaborative, and self-directed. Such dynamiclearners thrive most when they have the support they need at the moment ofApply. No organization can adequately meet the challenge of ever-present changewithout an intentional Performance Support strategy in place and functioningeffectively. In the broadest definition, Performance Support (PS) consists ofthe practices and tools the organization provides its people individually andcollectively for them to perform their work successfully and efficiently.

The Value of Performance Support

The proper implementation of these practices and tools can produce a measurableimpact for good. Here are some of those impact areas.

PS Delivers Greater Business Efficiencies

Learning leaders have struggled long and hard to link measurable businessresults to learners who attend some form of formal instruction, in class oronline. Why has this been so hard? Why do so many still find this exerciseexhausting, expensive, and often inconclusive at a meaningful level?

The answer is in the fundamental flaw in the way that the correlation between atraining event and improved business outcomes is measured. There is a huge gapbetween mastering content delivered in a learning event and being able to applythat content in an effective and productive way on the job. The pursuit of thereturn on investment (ROI) in the formal training environment has been a bad fitfrom the start, and without stepping into the Performance Support arena,training will continue to have a difficult, if not impossible time, tying itselfto compelling ROI metrics. For example, in the formal training ROI model, we canfairly measure the following:

• Knowledge gain

• Certification

• Demonstrable skill recall

• Compliance

But when an organization ventures into the full range of Performance Supportpractices now available (with its tools, strategies, and frameworks thatcomplement training), we can begin to effectively measure the following:

• Productivity gains

• Decreases in time to proficiency

• Reductions in support costs

• Completion of job-related tasks

• Increases in user adoption

• Optimized business processes

• Increases in customer satisfaction

• Reductions in transaction costs

• Reductions in implementation costs

The reason we can do this is that the ROI manifests itself in the workflow andon the job. Until training departments design, deliver, and maintain learningstrategies that extend into the workflow (that is, until they incorporatePerformance Support), calculating the ROI will remain a frustrating and oftenfutile exercise.

PS Promotes Retention and Transfer

If organizations want to maximize their return on their formal learninginvestment, they will achieve it only via Performance Support. PS bridges thetime gap between what is learned during formal learning and the moment whenpeople are called to act upon what they learned. The first part of this bridgeis retention. Much of what is absorbed during formal training is dead onarrival when learners are finally called upon to perform using that learning intheir work. Unfortunately, the reality of knowledge and skill loss is all tooclear. The good news, though, is that Performance Support can rapidly resurrectit all, as long as it is designed and implemented properly.

The other half of this bridge between the formal learning and the actualperformance on the job is the looming challenge of "transfer." Transferis defined as the capacity of learners to apply what they have learned to theunique environment and moment-to-moment circumstances of work life. Obviously,if there is limited transfer from formal learning to the workflow, theinvestment in training is squandered. Performance Support plays the key role inensuring that this doesn't happen and that there is a high-yield return on anorganization's investment in formal learning.

PS Expands Knowledge Capacity

Once upon a time, a long time ago, people actually knew everything they neededto know to do their work. Hard to comprehend in today's work environment wherepeople are continually being asked to learn at or above the speed of change andat a time when the information pool we're all drinking from is growing atbreakneck speed.

To illustrate: In 2003, Chevron's CIO reported that his company accumulated dataat the rate of 2 terabytes—17,592,000,000,000 bits—a day. Accordingto research conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC), the worldcreated 161 exabytes of data in 2006. That's "3 million times the amount ofinformation contained in all the books ever written." In 2009, the size of theworld's total digital content was estimated at 500 billion gigabytes, or 500exabytes. And it has been predicted that by the end of 2010, we will havegenerated more than 988 exabytes.

This same pace of information growth is occurring within the individual workrequirements of people. Clearly, today people can't store in their internalknowledge base what they need to know to do their work. It's all too vast andfluid. The role of PS is to provide intuitive access to that information in theform needed at the moment of need.

The New Blend: Making Possible a Complete Learning Ecosystem

Most organizations have two disparate learning arms: a formal learning arm whereindividual members of the organization learn in the context of speciallydesigned learning events in all their appropriate forms and an informal learningarm where individual members of the organization learn in their workflow attheir moment of need in the way they choose to learn. Historically these twoarms have functioned separately. Traditionally, the formal learning arm hasn'tknown nor particularly cared about what the informal learning arm was doing. Andthe informal learning arm has done its own thing, often struggling to integratewhat's learned formally into its informal learning paths.

Figure 1.1 shows these two learning paths. The vertical lines representthe formal learning classes a person might take over a period of time (with thatperson's path being represented by the arrow in the center of the graphic). Asyou can see, this individual has taken quite a few courses during these fouryears. But this person has also been learning in the workflow. The horizontallines in the figure represent those times when project work and workresponsibilities required or fostered learning. Experience is life's greatestteacher, especially when there are challenges including failure.

As you can see, some of the informal learning lines intersect with the formalevents (instructor-led classes, e-learning courses, webinars, and so on). Thepressing question is: To what degree do the formal courses blend with theinformal learning taking place in the person's own workflow?

The good news is that this is happening today. The New Normal is fostering a"New Blend" of formal learning opportunities with intentional informal learningpractices. Here's one example of what this kind of blending looks like:

The New Blend Example 1

• Work group members complete self-tailored prework prior to attending a virtualclass.

• They attend four virtual meetings each lasting 2.5 hours spread out over eightweeks.

• Following each virtual meeting, learners independently complete "expand"assignments—that is, assignments requiring them to use their personallearning network to learn more about what they were taught during each virtualsession. They document what they learn in the expand assignment in a coursewiki. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/for further information about awiki.)

• Also following each virtual meeting, learners complete Apply activities tieddirectly to their personal work and submit the results to their trainer. Theywork on these activities using a digital Performance Support broker thatprovides learners fingertip access to all the resources they need in order toapply what they have learned.

• Students work together in virtual groups to help each other.

• The trainer holds a virtual feedback and coaching session for each set ofApply assignments for each learner.

This New Blend of formal and informal learning practices represents asignificant scope shift for training professionals. We are now intentionallystepping into the informal side of learning. We should have always been doingthis, but emerging technologies make it more feasible. Support services andtechnical publication groups should not feel threatened by theseefforts. They have much to offer here. But there is more that the trainingprofession can and should be doing in addition.

In reality, the distinction between formal and informal learning should looklike the pie chart in Figure 1.2. Formal learning, of course, is whattraining groups have traditionally done: they build, deliver, and managelearning solutions to support organizational needs.

Informal learning, as you can see in the figure, can be divided into two areas:informal intentional and informal independent. Informal independent islearning that individuals and teams may choose to do outside what is planned,implemented, and managed by the training arm of the organization. This has beenthe elephant in the room for a long time. It's estimated that two-thirds oflearning taking place within most organizations has been happening in theinformal independent area.

It is readily apparent that there is a greater amount of learning going onoutside the formal training we have so adeptly put in place. The reality is thatthe informal side of learning is where real learning occurs because it ishappening in the workflow. However, the costs to organizations when informallearning goes wrong can be staggering. At the very least, informal learning canprove costly through inefficiencies. The root cause of these inefficiencies isthe disconnect between formal and informal learning.

The good news is that the New Normal is pushing organizations to become muchmore intentional in the informal learning area and to blend those intentionalpractices with formal learning. This New Blend looks something like this:

The New Blend Example 2

• An employee is in the middle of a pressing multimonth work project. Sheconsults her digital Performance Support broker and identifies four areas wherethere are unique twists that require additional knowledge and skills to completethe project successfully.

• She immediately accesses directly from her broker, several microblogs whereshe shares her learning need out through several follower groups (internal andexternal to the company).

• A representative from the learning group, along with other microbloggers,immediately provides recommendations. She sorts through those recommendationsand does the following:

* Schedules and takes three recommended e-learning courses, two from within thecompany's Learning Management System (LMS) and one purchased independently froman independent e-university.

* Schedules and participates in four virtual coaching sessions—twointernally sponsored and two from a colleague-friend from another company.

* Skims through three books: one hard-copy book, one digital book purchasedonline, and one digital book accessed from a free Web site.

• As she moves forward to complete the project, she frequently accesses herelectronic Performance Support broker to guide her as she and her team completeeach critical task.

• After she completes the project, she takes 10 minutes and accesses a "lessonslearned" template, via the Performance Support broker, in which she brieflydocuments the lessons she learned. She enriches it with metadata, posts it, andthen pushes it out to her direct manager as part of her project report.

As you can see, there is a blend of formal learning solutions (for example, e-learning courses, virtual coaching sessions), independent informal learning (forexample, scanning through books), and intentional informal learning (using thePerformance Support broker to gain access to the resources she needs at hermoments of Apply).

Performance Support is the discipline that harnesses informal learning and makesit intentional. Performance Support includes the practices and tools anorganization provides its people individually and collectively to enable them toperform their work efficiently.

Here's how this New Blend of formal and informal intentional learning benefitsan organization:

• Without intentional support, informal learning can be unruly and thereforecostly. Unconsciously, incompetent people often help others become the same. Astrong Performance Support infrastructure counters this.

• Most performers work in an environment where their skill sets are in a stateof continual flux. Performance Support delivers intentional capability formaintaining those skill sets in the most cost-efficient way.

• In the New Normal, performers must be able to, at any moment, learn a newskill and integrate it into their existing skill framework. Often there isn'tsufficient time to wait for a course to be developed and offered. They need tolearn right now because they need to perform right now. This blend of formal andinformal learner-performer support provides this capacity to immediately learnin response to changes in the business landscape.

• Few performers can learn and recall all the knowledge and skills they need todo their work. Most learners readily forget most of what they learn anyway. Andwhat little amount learners do remember generally has such a short shelf-lifethat the capacity and disposition to unlearn is a fundamental learningrequirement. Again, intentional Performance Support integrated with formallearning solves this challenge.

• At the moment of Apply, performers often need support in adapting what theyknow to meet the unique challenges at that moment and in some cases to learnmore. In the real world, things also fail to work the way they should. The NewBlend anticipates and meets these challenges.

(Continues...)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from INNOVATIVE PERFORMANCE SUPPORT by Conrad Gottfredson, Bob Mosher. Copyright © 2011 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 007170311X
• ISBN 13: 9780071703116
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272