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Workflow Learning Gets Real

Monday, February 14, 2005

Jay Cross, Internet Time Group, and

Tony O'Driscoll, IBM

Given That… Workers in most American factories

spend just 20 percent of their time making things.
Supervisors spend no more than 20 percent of their
time doing things that appear in their job
descriptions. Knowledge workers spend just 20
percent of their time adding core value; the rest of
the time they're looking for information, re-writing
reports that have already been written, trying to get
their computers to work, or attending meetings.

And That… This same 80/20 rule applies to training. Ask workers where
they learned how to do their jobs, and 80 percent of the time the answer
is "at work." Most learning takes place on the job, outside the purview of
formal learning. When we do conduct formal training, 80 percent of it is
wasted effort: Workshops progress at the pace of the slowest participant,
content is dated, the learner needs little of what's being delivered, the
method of delivery is not tuned to the needs of the individual worker,
motivation is absent, or timing is off. The half-life of newly learned
material is three days; if learners don't use it immediately, they lose it.

At the same time that… Networks are spewing tidal waves of information
that workers must absorb to make sound decisions, yet their minds
process no faster than in primitive times. As if speeding things up weren't
enough, the world is growing more complex. The collision of complex
systems yields unpredictable results. A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo
and causes three hurricanes in a row in Florida. Boundaries between
disciplines crumble. We can no longer rely on specialists who "know more
and more about less and less." We must all be generalists who must
know more and more about more and more.

It all adds up to… An era of real-time enterprise that will set the 80/20

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rule on its head. Changes afoot in commerce, information technology,

network interoperability, and how work is organized will wring much
(though never all) of the slack out of work. After decades of job stress,
frustration, wasted effort, and disengagement, we have an opportunity to
rewrite all the rules.

The New Imperative

All humans are learners—and workers learn every day. If the training
organization in every company evaporated into thin air or disappeared
through a wormhole to teaching heaven, individuals would continue to
learn.

We are not the reason employees learn; we are here to help them learn
more effectively. But instead of helping them where they are, too often
we make them come to a class or interrupt their work to engage in
content they find frustrating. Traditional courses are an albatross around
our necks, and if we don't change our delivery mechanisms, we will be
sidelined.

We are in the midst of the greatest migration of labor in the history of the
world. Service work is crowding out manufacturing, much as
manufacturing replaced farming in the last half century. We don't mean
service work as in hamburger flippers or janitors; we mean everyone who
creates an offering that is consumed as it is produced. Doctors, lawyers,
system administrators, and police officers are all service workers.

We are more accustomed to production workers who have job

descriptions and follow a script. Future workers will be value-driven
because there is no script. Everything will be improvised. Learning will be
fused into work, delivered in small fragments ("right size") on whatever
device tethers them to the Internet ("right device" and "right place") just
when they need it ("right time"). In other words, we will have what we call
workflow learning.

How does this vision of workflow learning differ from Gloria Gery's
concept of electronic performance support systems (EPSS)? The
philosophy is exactly the same: performance-centered design. Workflow
learning is networked EPSS, operating in an environment where the
worker is plugged into the job and learning is delivered in small chunks as
it is needed. Workflow aggregates at the work-process level, while EPSS
largely compensated for poor application design. By moving up the value
chain, we can dramatically increase workers' productivity while
simultaneously reducing their frustration.

HP's Carly Fiorina suggests that the future will be digital, mobile, virtual
and personal. John Chambers of Cisco asserts that Internet technology
will change the way we work, learn, live and play. Terry Semel of Yahoo!
contends that search, personalization, community and content is the
future of the Internet.

In the not-very-distant future, workers will:

•Have a unique, personalized view of their work, based on their role

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in the enterprise.
•Have learning snippets embedded in work.
•Be alerted when needed.
•Directly connect to experts as necessary.
•Have easy access to peers.
•Have smart FAQs and simulations for guidance.
•Be location aware (GPS).
•Always be online wirelessly (ambient computing).
•Have support for understanding work in its strategic context.

Networks Rule

Networks come in many forms: the Internet, intranets, financial networks,

the human brain, social networks, communications systems, the central
nervous system, and more. The value of any of these networks increases
exponentially with each new member.

In The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your
Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life (Harvard Business
School Press, 2004), Thomas W. Malone observes that all networks are
alike in that they form and grow in similar stages. At first, nodes are
unconnected. Then, when communication becomes feasible, they evolve
into a hub-and-spoke arrangement around a single source of power. As
communication becomes cheaper still, all nodes begin to take on power.

For example, early humans organized in bands of 30 to 40 people (larger

groups would have over-hunted the local area.) When spoken language
and writing came on the scene, kingdoms formed. And when printing and
mass communication appeared, democracies replaced them. Similarly,
business networks evolved from mom-and-pop shops to national chains
to today's decentralized behemoths. Computing evolved from standalone
mainframes to client-server networks to the distributed Internet and what
IBM calls On Demand computing.

Training is no exception to these network rules. In past times, training

was individualized; people learned at grandma's knee or in the studio of a
master craftsman. With printing came instructor-centric schools. As we
enter an age of informal and workflow learning, authority is less
centralized than ever before. "Learning is best understood as an
interaction among practitioners, rather than a process in which a producer
provides knowledge to a consumer," says Etienne Wenger, a social
researcher and champion of communities of practice.

We've essentially outgrown the definition of learning as an individual

activity. We've moved back to the apprenticeship model, albeit at a
higher level. We learn in context, with others, as we live and work.
Recognizing this fact is the first step to crafting an effective workflow
learning strategy.

We humans exist in networks. We are part of social networks. Our heads

contain neural networks. Learning consists of making and maintaining
better connections to our networks, be they social, operational,
commercial or entertainment. Rich learning will always be more than a

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matter of bits flowing back and forth, but the metaphor of

learning-as-networking gives us a way to describe how learning can be
embedded in work itself.

Several years from now, we'll all be running personalized "workware."

Everyone will have a unique view into the enterprise, a dynamic display
tailored to their role, background, access rights, and real-time picture of
their piece of the workflow.

This personalized dashboard will provide both push and pull

resources—that is, processes initiated by the worker and processes
initiated by the system. If the worker hits a bottleneck in an unfamiliar
process, she can call up a chunk of information or walk through a
simulation of what to do. If the workflow hits a bottleneck, and the worker
sees a better solution, she can push it back into the system.

We're beginning to consider a new concept of worker. We think of a

worker as the sum of employee and support systems, combining the
strengths of each into a whole greater than the sum of the parts. We use
the term dashboard because we picture the interface that appears on a
phone, PDA or head-mounted display. Bear in mind, however, that this is
a two-way dashboard. It empowers the worker to give as well as receive,
to collaborate with other people and to be contacted by others.

Whither instructional design?

Business process analysts and modelers are already defining and

developing the business infrastructure of the future. If you work for a
Fortune 1000 company, you have a group that has described your
business in workflow terms. This consists not only of defining a business
process but also of defining the flow of artifacts (information, interaction,
collaboration, communication) around the process.

The modelers' work is similar in some ways to the work of instructional

designers. Both analyze a situation and design a solution to improve it.
However, there is an important difference: Instructional designers are
well-versed in what it takes to motivate learners and change their
behavior. Explore working with these people to understand the learning
processes that occur naturally within the workflow and think hard about
how to ply your craft to amplify them.
We're going to need a much broader definition of design to support
performance. How do we know how often and how much to support
learners until we release control to them? What's the smallest bit of
information we can give employees to get them to this point? We can't
research each individual case, even if that's the ideal solution; we need
principles refined over time. In the meantime, training must align with
other enterprise business units working on ways to streamline workflow
and foster innovation: knowledge management, business process
analysis, and organizational development.

The Potential of Workflow Learning

Like atomic energy, workflow learning has the potential to do enormous

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good or a great deal of harm. On the one hand, we could create dream
jobs for the workers of the world: challenging work, tailored to the
potential of the individual. By balancing workflow and worker, we can build
what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called psychological flow into the learning
and execution of work. But on the other hand, imagine Dilbert's
pointy-haired boss and his HR director Catbert at the helm of a system
that monitors workers' every move, reports comparative performance to
the third decimal, and dishes out scutwork until workers burn out.

A future that belongs to that Dark Side is a very real possibility—unless

we build dynamic, collaborative learning systems. People remain the most
vital ingredient in business. Their skills, knowledge, and beliefs are
assets worth developing.

With the right perspective and some hard work, the training and
development community can make learning a true business process. Our
results will become transparent to executives and investors. And we will
change the world.

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