Three Ideas on the Evolution of Learning and Performance Support

There is a hypothesis called “Punctuated Equilibrium” which posits that most of the existence of a species is static from an evolutionary perspective, and only on rare occasions is this stasis interrupted by an unforeseen event resulting in a disruptive change in the species evolution. While this idea has come under criticism, largely based around the presumption that the interpretations of the fossil record are incorrect, this concept has been applied to socio- economics to explain an observed cycle with infrastructure and technology.

In essence new technologies and infrastructure erupt throughout history, for example the production of steel, or the harnessing of electricity, and these fundamentally disrupt society in terms of how value is created, how and where we live, and how we interact with one another. After these disruptions occur, they are followed by a relatively long period of equilibrium as organizations figure out how to take advantage of the new technology and begin to optimize those processes. Eventually a new technology arrives and causes another significant disruption which again is followed by some period of time while society digests the change and makes it a part of the way we live and do business.

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison have argued in their blog titled The New Reality: Constant Disruption, that this historical pattern is changing, and that the rate of social and economic disruption is moving towards constant. We are climbing an exponential curve where technological capability is increasing dramatically and it is happening at an increasingly faster rate, leaving us in a state of perpetual change.

What are the implications of this accelerated disruption on organizational learning and performance support? Here are three areas for consideration:

1. Shift From Knowing to Knowing How to Find: Now more than ever before in history the amount of actual knowledge that we need to do our jobs is quite small compared to the need for connecting and drawing on resources, in the form of people and information. To facilitate this, various technologies are opening up channels to access and share information resulting in a far more fluid and ever-present exchange than has ever existed before. This can result in a general democratization of information, essentially flattening the organization chart, revealing pockets of expertise, and increasing the velocity and quantity of ideas. One key implication for organizations that want to capitalize on this is the need for a small set of clearly communicated priorities that cascade down through the various roles, to serve as a beacon.

2. Open the Box: In the early twentieth century there was a general push towards systematizing training. As with the factory line, there was a drive to find inefficiencies and to optimize. In the case of training and development, it was all about finding ways to transfer the right level of instruction in the most efficient way. In the 1920’s Sidney Pressey invented the Testing Machine. This metal box was a mechanical device for administering multiple choice questions. It was intended for drill and practice and represented an evolutionary step forward in terms of scaling and “personalizing” certain kinds of instruction. B.F. Skinner would later expand on this early work and develop other metal boxes that served as a pre cursor to our modern eLearning. Today, technological advances in social, mobile and the cloud are opening up the once closed box that relies on rote instruction, pre-programmed feedback and assessment, and we are tapping into a far more dynamic continuous development environment made up of social interactions, access to flows of micro-content, and real-time/all the time access to information.

3. Push to Pull: There is a move away from command and control models of training and development towards a more dynamic, self-serve model. Individuals are curating their own learning, accessing diverse content, on-demand, sharing, and in some cases remixing. This shift is significant from a learning and performance design perspective in that the emphasis moves from designing content to facilitating access. Artificial intelligence technologies will become increasingly important in this environment, as we seek a more personalized experience, aligned with our individual objectives and personal traits.

#Disruption #Social