Xyleme Learning Blog

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” - The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

We’re coming to the end of another economic bubble, this time in the financial sector. The folks who underwrite all our commercial activity got infected with the madness of crowds and tried to have themselves a post-fact economy. Didn’t work out so well. Home prices and consumer confidence reflect the reality, the post-post-fact economy, the hard truths that are reflected in economic forecasts and consumer billing statements everywhere.

Some years ago, I read an essay by Paul Graham about why nerds are unpopular. (Bear with me for a moment.) His basic thesis was that they’re unpopular because teenage popularity takes work, and nerds, or geeks as some prefer, would rather spend their time working at other things. Where that overlaps with our current problem is his explanation of the type of work it requires to be popular in junior high and high school, which is to say, the work of learning how to identify and conform to social norms.

The majority of the American workforce spent their formative years learning a number of isolated facts that they don’t use in their daily life, and how to conform. And the skill of conforming, they almost certainly use on a daily basis, as do all people to some extent.

Not that conformity is a sin, or bad in itself. It’s good that there are norms of politeness and etiquette that allow people who don’t know each other to interact without hassle or giving offense. Our social norms, in computing terms, could be thought of as human interoperability standards. And being able to work together, to coordinate activity among large groups of individuals, is humanity’s greatest strength.

We need some degree of conformity in order to survive.

It’s just that there can be too much of a good thing. Then you can get situations where entire industries fall into herded lockstep, groupthink, and irrational exuberance. The financial industry convinced itself that the party would never end, but end, it certainly has.

Any industry that’s going to weather the coming storms can’t rely anymore on doing what they’ve always done. It’s not going to work anymore to look at what your neighbors are doing and copy them, not if you want to avoid their fate. Companies will be on the lookout for innovation, they’ll need to get creative, but what exactly should learning professionals be fostering in order to support that?

Certain types of teamwork can help. Innovation is a process that needs buy-in, people have to be made comfortable with it, and so you need to look towards creating an environment where employees are supported in making new suggestions and also enabled to seek the support of their peers.

A couple passages from an old business classic, The Change Masters, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, elaborate:

… Though innovators are diverse people in diverse circumstance, they share an integrative mode of operating which produces innovation: seeing problems not within limited categories but in terms larger than received wisdom; they make new connections, both intellectual and organizational; and they work across boundaries, reaching beyond the limits of their own jobs-as-given. They are not rugged individualists — as in the classic stereotype of an entrepreneur — but good builders and users of teams, as even classic business creators have to be. And so they are aided in their quest for innovation by an integrative environment, in which ideas flow freely, resources are attainable rather than locked in budgetary boxes, and support and teamwork across areas are the norm.

… just about all innovating has a “political” dimension, … But I am using “political” not in the negative sense of backroom deal making but in the positive sense that it requires campaigning, lobbying, bargaining, negotiating, caucusing, collaborating, and winning votes. That is, an idea must be sold, resources must be acquired or rearranged, and some variable numbers of other people must agree to changes in their own areas — for innovations generally cut across existing areas and have wider organization ripples, like dropping pebbles into a pond. …”

A successful innovator, by Kanter’s description, has a good enough sense of group norms and conforming tendencies to secure the help of colleagues throughout the sectors of the company may be affected. They have an understanding of the everyday sort of politics we all started learning as young people (see, I said they were useful skills), but there’s an extra element, the spark that often starts it. Kanter describes innovation as beginning with the all-important step of problem definition:

… Innovators may be visionary and self-directed, but they are only occasionally self-starting, in my experience across companies. Even entrepreneurial managers ane frequently stimulated by the assignments they are handed, [or] the entrepreneur listened to a stream of communication from superiors, peers, subordinates, users, or customers and identified a perceived need — a “sore spot” — a missing piece for a high-priority areas, a hole in the system. (Indeed, it is well known that a large number of important industrial innovations were first suggested by users of the products.) …

As assistants to ongoing learning in the workplace, we need to help our colleagues batten down the hatches and readjust to the worsening economic weather.

So in addition to the primary goals of specific tasks or bodies of knowledge that are being shared, it’s important to ask whether we’re helping them see things as they are, rather than as they’ve been told they are? Or helping them become good requirement gatherers who can see openings for innovation? Are we helping them take a fresh look at skills they already have, like social conformity, so they can repurpose their innate talent for getting along with others to a goal like creating a good political climate for positive change?

The party might be over, but if elearning actively promotes innovation and adaptability in your workplace, the fun might be just getting started.

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” - Herbert Stein, economist

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