Learning Technologies review

I picked up some useful pointers on using learning technologies and social media when I was presented at this year’s Learning Technologies conference last week. , but my main take aways were from the sessions more focused on learning itself.

Jay Cross was spot as as usual – have a look at Nigel Paine's live blog on this.

I particularly liked Jay’s points on the need to think about organisations from a biological rather than a mechanistic perspective – based upon “Einstein’s and Bohr’s contributions, but also because ‘we can feel it in our guts that (the machine model) isn’t true anymore’ ”.

This means that predefined organisation design can only take us so far – “things are too complicated to be engineered, but nature will find a way” – so we need to trust that everything will work out for itself – without a master pan. This fits with a lot of my consulting experience, but Jay expresses the new world more colourfully.

It also means that the use of measurement is naturally limited - “you can’t predict anything, because you can’t be sure what people are able to do”. This message didn’t seem to get through to everyone – the conference featured some fairly heated discussion about how we should best measure learning, and the rights and wrongs of Kirkpatrick, but little on whether we really need to bother measuring learning that is increasingly informal, and outputs that are increasingly intangible, at all (or certainly in a mechanistic way).

Still, it was a really excellent conference, and I was delighted to be part of it. Well done Don, and all concerned. My next post will cover some of my post-conference thoughts on the role of technology in learning and the development of organisational capability.

Complexity in global HR challenges

I attended a meeting of the CIPD’s international forum last week to hear initial findings from research into HR management in global organisations conducted by Paul Sparrow at Lancaster, and Chris Brewster at Reading universities. This research will be presented in full at the WFPMA world congress to be held by the CIPD next year.

The major focus of the research seems to be the complexity of decision making in the global environment. First of all, there is the well known duality of centralisation supporting economies of scale, and localisation responding to different labour markets. But regionalisation is increasingly having an effect. Then there’s outsourcing / offshoring and a wide range of technology based options.

Sparrow and Brewster stress that in this environment, “even the most sophisticated organisations have difficult questions”. Issues these questions need to address include streamlining processes balancing standardisation and optimisation, sourcing strategies to provide HR services effectively, and the role of line managers and the HR function, particularly the business partner.

But there’s also a need for what Sparrow and Brewster call “differentiated decisions” where these questions are answered on a local basis depending on each country operation’s particular business model, legislation, labour market, culture (eg preferences for in-sourcing versus outsourcing) etc. HR business partners need to be able to make local judgments to meet these particular requirements.

We also need to accept that nobody can understand the whole world. Even the most internationally experienced HR practitioner isn’t going to understand all the different issues in every country so we need to be realistic about the pace that we can build the level of knowledge about countries that is increasingly required. But one way we can do this is through networks of HR practitioners, and good networks may provide more impact on the overall effectiveness of global people management than the formal organisational model that’s used within HR.

So this is yet one more issue in people management that largely comes back down to the need to talk to people!

I’ll be talking about some of my own perspectives on global HR at the launch of HR.com’s virtual conference programme VIEW at 8.50pm GMT / 3.50pm ET on 12th December.

I would love to offer you the opportunity to participate for free. In addition, your free show admittance will enable you to see other Keynotes such as Carly Fiorina (Leadership is a Choice), Keith Ferrazzi (Never Eat Alone) and Kenny Moore (The Monk and the CEO), and Marcus Buckingham (Trombone Player Wanted).

Sign up at www.hr.com/view.

Complexity in HCM (sigmoid curves / 2)

One reason I think that the new people management S curve is less rather than more measurement focused is because of the nature of the elements we are dealing with.

Personnel and HR Management have dealt mainly with tangible aspects of people working in organisations – for example, absence / attendance, hard skills etc. The management of these elements depends on fairly clear chains and systems of cause and effect relationships.

Human Capital Management focuses on human capital, for example, leadership capability, engagement, wellness, etc, which are all intangibles. The management of these intangibles will demonstrate the attributes of complexity: cause and effect being distant in time and space.

In the November edition of Harvard Business Review, Thomas Stewart describes these complex circumstances as:

"Where the truth is not immediately evident even to an expert but emerges over time, where cause-and-effect relationships are not well established, where positive results come from offering incentives rather than issuing commands, and where, consequently, the tools of influence and decision making are subtle and ill-defined."

Providing a Leader's Framework for Decision Making, David Snowdon and Mary Bone compare complex to just complicated contexts:

"In a complicated context, at least one right answer exists. In a complex context, right answers can't be ferreted out. It;s like the difference between, say, a Ferrari and the Brazilian rainforest. Ferraris are complicated machines, but an expert mechanic can take one apart and reassemble it without changing a thing. The car is static, and the whole is the sum of its parts. The rainforest, on the other hand, is in constant flux - a species becomes extinct, weather patterns change, an agricultural project reroutes a water source - and the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. This is the realm of 'unknown unknowns', and it is the domain to which much of contemporary business has shifted."

They explain that in a complex environment, leaders must guard against temptations to "fall back into habitual, command-and control mode" and to "look for facts rather than allowing patterns to emerge".

Measurements don't help because "though a complex system may, in retrospect, appear to be ordered an predictable, hindsight does not lead to foresight because the external conditions and systems constantly change".

Instead, leaders must:

• Probe, sense, respond
• Create environments and experiments that allow patterns to emerge
• Increase levels of interaction and communication
• Use methods that can help generate ideas.