Learning – Page 6 – The Consulting Artist

A Review of HR Unscrambled

At the CIPD Conference in Manchester earlier this month, Meg Peppin and I were invited to facilitate a short unconference session titled ‘HR Unscrambled’. Here are our reflections from the session.

“Whether you’re passionate about improving organisational culture, employee-led change, employee communication or anything else that will help make work better, we’d like to invite you to HR Unscrambled.” Our invitation to members.

We wanted to co-create an opportunity for dialogue between the CIPD, its members and any other people interested in exploring both the CIPD purpose, Championing better work and working lives, and the future for HR. We believe there is great meaning to be found in exploring ways to work co-actively, doing things with each other. HR Unscrambled represents the beginning of that learning.

In the future we shall:

Explore ways to broaden the reach – build on the social media energy that is growing, and extend beyond it too.
Utilise more open space facilitation at future events and conferences.
Integrate research from the CIPD and other relevant parties and involve members in shaping the future.

8.00am one morning in Manchester

Our space was airy, breakfast was available, and tables were set up for four people. Guests were invited in small groups to discuss what brought them to the session. There were 30 contributors from a wide range of backgrounds including, CIPD staff, HR and Learning and Development professionals from the UK public and private sectors, and independent consultants. We were delighted too that Peter Cheese the CEO of CIPD joined us for the first half despite seemingly being everywhere else too!

The emerging themes were connecting, sharing and learning – and the future.

The connecting and sharing through networking – in its most enjoyable sense – included sharing insights, building on those insights, reflecting and thinking through them together and the implications for organisations.

A question that users of social media are asking with increasing frequency – how can we invite in those who don’t access SoMe – how do we extend the conversation?

Learning comes from connecting and sharing, and having space to assimilate the learning. We explored technology and how it is changing the way we learn, what we know about how we learn, and how we can integrate technology into our Continuous Professional Development. There was also a desire to think about generational learning differences.

Implications for the future – what the generational differences and similarities are, what self directed learning means culturally within organisations, and what skills HR professionals need – were all up for discussion.

Learning

People grouped together in fours to explore common interests around these subjects. The conversations were self-organised; people went where they had the most interest. During the discussions, we invited people to move tables with the purpose of stimulating the development of the conversation and to facilitate more networking. People were also invited to use flipcharts to capture their thoughts, priorities – what they would like to share with people who weren’t there.

We noticed that across what seemed like a broad range of topics, a dominant theme emerged in relation to learning. Discussions encompassed the tools for learning, how people learn, how technology is changing traditional methods and creating opportunities for people to become curators of their own learning. IT can get twitchy but technology, self-directed learning, and the autonomy it offers has arrived. This has so many implications, and we were left with some big questions:

Social Media brought people together in this space – it feels edgy but are we just on the edge? There’s a huge community of HR people both members of CIPD and non-members. How can we bring them in?
What implications does self-managed learning have for how organisations are designed?
What does the HR of ten years time look like; how can we build towards that now?
What could we do more of in relation to mentoring?
What manager capabilities are needed for the future?
Are we too inward looking; how can we engage more outside our community to broaden our perspective?

We’d like to thank all of those who were motivated to get up early and create this event, and we look forward to building on this.

Meg Peppin and Doug Shaw

These notes are available free to download.

How to Change Education – from the ground up?

Today’s blog post title may look slightly familiar. I recently wrote about a talk to be given by Sir Ken Robinson at the RSA about changing education, then my name popped to the top of the waiting list and I was offered a ticket, so I rolled into London on Monday July 1st to have a listen. The talk took place in the recently refurbished Great Room (the room struck me as more ‘very nice’ than great – though that’s not such a snappy title eh?), and was live streamed too. The room was full, I’d guess it holds about 120 people. At 1pm the CEO of the RSA Matthew Taylor took to the stage to introduce Sir Ken Robinson. Matthew said that the two hot tickets in the last few days were this one, and the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury. He mawkishly went on to suggest that what we were about to receive was somehow the winner in this two horse race and oddly used the word ‘elite’ to introduce a talk about change from the ground up for education. Hmmm? Anyway, to keep the rock theme going for just a moment longer, if Matthew Taylor was in Spinal Tap, he would have just turned the smarm all the way up to eleven. On with the show…

Confusing intelligence with academic capability

Sir Ken Robinson (I’ll refer to him as SKR from now on) started by telling us how the current model of education confuses and conflates intelligence with academic capability. There is a misapprehension within government that education at the highest level = Oxford and Cambridge. We can’t all go there, and many of us don’t want to – so this aspiration is a disastrous waste of human talent. SKR talked about how education is built around an outdated factory model. Every 40 minutes the bell rings and we all change rooms. He suggests that were we to run a business like this, we’d be broke in a week. I didn’t think broke, I thought of sweat shops.

The factory model is wrong

This factory, or industrial model which works as if humans are machines is wrong at every level. Governments everywhere seek to mechanise people through their approach, SKR asks us to listen to policy makers language, they believe that you can deliver a system improvement by shouting commands at it. Input equals output. In part, the task is to persuade politicians to do things differently, and because they have short time horizons, they are unlikely to change. But if we do things differently first, they will follow.

SKR then briefly referred to the STEM principle – the in vogue focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as being necessary and not sufficient to prepare learners for what comes next in the world. So what other things need focussing on?

Economics – education is vital, and powerful for economic advancement, but not if education continues to follow an outdated industrial model. SKR referenced research by IBM who asked companies in 18 countries what keeps you up at night? 2nd most popular response was the need for adaptability, and here SKR used the Kodak story to illustrate how an essential brand can become redundant through failing to adapt to a changing market. The most popular response was the need for creativity, and here SKR believes that education currently enacts a systematic quashing of the appetite for creativity.

Culture – most conflict is this way inclined, conflict around ideologies. We need to understand cultural identities – the arts, languages etc. Then SKR read a glib quote about being British these days means driving home in a German car, having an Indian takeaway in front of a Japanese TV etc. before ending on, the most British thing of all is suspicion of anything foreign. This got a lot of laughs but I’m not sure it was a particularly helpful point.

Social – communities matter more than ever, politics is disenfranchised. SKR referenced Emily Davison who famously stepped in front of the King’s horse at Epsom race course in 1913 as part of her campaign for votes for women. The injuries caused by her actions led to her death four days later. And here we are a hundred years on with fewer and fewer people voting. Civil discourse is important.

Participation – education needs to be more personal – about people, different talents, interests etc. Diversity is nuanced, education is not. 30% of USA kids don’t finish high school.

Theatre of education

SKR got round to a bit more government bashing, saying that top down directives don’t work. The government cannot improve education through vilifying teachers, their involvement and support is what’s needed. He asked, what can you take away from education to get back to the core? By way of an analogy, SKR said that theatre is the relationship between performer and audience. The same goes for education. Children have voracious appetite for learning, and yet they don’t need to be taught everything. We don’t teach kids to learn how to speak, they learn how to. Education currently dissipates this appetite for learning and the conceit of education is to think we can do this (teaching) better.

Teaching is currently just a delivery system. It should be revered as an art form, you need to know your stuff sure, and beyond that you must excite people to learn – that is the gift. How? Get the kids involved. Harvard is starting to flip the classroom to become much less dependant on the lecturer, increasingly students are learning from and with each other. You can change this now yourself don’t wait to be told. School needs to be a community of reciprocating individuals.

Habits and habitat

Complex adaptive systems – involves loads of different people reciprocating. Do something different and when it works it will grow. Tend to your own microclimate. Values can change, ground up only. Rock n roll, the Internet, these are not government initiatives. iPhone – when it launched there were 800 apps, now 750000. Unplanned – these things just just took off. Organic growth is cultural and already happening, system is adapting but not at government level, SKR hopes they realise and respond. A loving relationship is not command and control, but climate control. Change the micro climate.

Creativity in learning

We need to know how to play the instrument but not top to bottom – creativity is about finding other people who know more chords. Recognise individual learning styles, dissolve more learning down to the individual. Schools that engage and inspire are better. Acknowledge the power of ‘I don’t know’, facilitate more, ask more questions encourage collaboration, balancing instruction with intrigue. Standardised testing is wrong, testing should be a support for education not the point of it.
Quality of teaching and learning – that’s what matters, structure is much less important, gather round the quality aspect.

Breaking the system

SKR asks, is government trying to break public education by stealth, in order to privatise the whole thing? He feels this would be a disaster and if it’s part of the plan then tell us so we can have an informed disagreement about it.

SKR sits down to huge applause, then takes a few questions, all of which were broadly in agreement with his assertions, followed by a very long queue of people buying books and having them signed. I’m afraid I didn’t join the queue.

Reflections

I confess that I enjoyed listening to SKR speak – he is an engaging speaker, and though his humour was at times a little bitchy, he was also very funny. But – having been provoked and excited by the animated version of his previous RSA talk on Changing Education Paradigms, I was expecting something much more radical from SKR. I left the Salon of Disappointment (sorry, the Great Room), feeling…underwhelmed. I felt the talk was aimed more at trying to bolster the egos of teachers, and less about changing the system from the bottom up. A more robust challenge might have been to question whether we need the vast school infrastructure with all of its cost and inflexibility. Home schooling didn’t even get a mention, despite acknowledging the power of community in the talk. This wasn’t so much about changing education, more like a little bit of light tinkering.

Sourcing Inspiration

Back in February 2013, I read ‘You’re Not That Great’ by Dr Daniel Crosby. In his book – the good doctor writes about idea jamming, creation and remixing and suggests:

Choose three books that you’ve always wanted to read (or that would deepen your understanding of some desired content area) and purchase them today. Right now. Seriously….go ahead. Now choose a date three months from now by which you will have read all the books. Determine a reward for reading them in time as well as a punishment for not having read them and and make it known to someone you trust who will hold you to your goal.

My desire for reading had been drifting so I took the challenge, stating that I would read Good to Great by Jim Collins, The No Arsehole Rule by Robert Sutton, and Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Three months later I have failed the challenge. I read Tipping Point, well most of it – truth is I got completely turned off by Gladwell’s circular repetitive style. The way he continually loops stories back on one another feels patronising to me, so I quit on him at Page 202 and drifted away from the challenge. I wasn’t the only one who failed though. Despite Gladwell’s best efforts to turn me off reading again, he failed too. I had taken just enough value from reading Tipping Point to want to carry on with my renewed interest in reading. The irony of this is not lost on me.

Since abandoning Gladwell I’ve discovered Daniel Kahneman. He’s written Thinking Fast and Slow, a fascinating book about how we reason, how we choose and how we think. It’s quite a heavy read for a simple guy like me – but I’m enjoying the challenge and I’ve gained great material for my talks, and for my stories on this blog, from this valuable book. I’m also reading Adapt, by Tim Harford – recommended to me by Joe Gerstandt. This is a fascinating book on why success always starts with failure, and I’m loving it. I have a small stack of books waiting for me beyond my current read, and I’m excited by what more I will learn and share.

I failed the challenge – but I feel like a winner.

Thank you Daniel Crosby for the challenge. Thank you Malcolm Gladwell for trying your best to put me off. Thank you Daniel Kahneman for stretching me. Thank you Joe Gerstandt for the excellent recommendation.

PS – if anyone wants my copy of Tipping Point – get in touch and I’ll post it to you. You may have more luck with it than me, what have you got to lose?