Serendipity and Learning

Many years ago, a senior leader was addressing a gathering of newbies. Email was relatively new then and people still diligently read forwards. And he shared an example of the General Motors and Ice-cream story. Needless to say, the audience did not clap, they went 'meh'. Why, because information is free. Once you have email - it is a matter of time before every known forward made its way to its inbox. Exactly the same way, you will notice that the same set of forwards keep circulating in all your whatsapp groups within a day.  So, if everybody has the internet (and we google and call it research) and you are picking stuff that everyone knows into training material, you have got something wrong.  So whats the answer? It is the same - there is space beyond this easy keyboard hunting...there is space beyond the obvious and beyond the crowded 'easy'

Everyone wants learning to go digital, but it just isn't sticky. What gives? Here is a graded summary of what works and what doesnt work as per my learning... Purely self motivated - I want to learn - works best. But it may or may not be relevant to organisations. While I might want to learn decoupage and might be supremely motivated, it may be irrelevant and even distracting to the organisation. If we could channel this and align the motivation of the employee to the organization needs - this is the place digital learning would work best. Thus, if your sales training is motivating enough for your sales team or if your analytics training is cool enough for your analytics team - it will work. You may want to add a social layer (sales cohort, analytics cohort), get the leader to lead or a gamification layer, but if you havent cracked the 'motivation' - the need - the social and gamification layer is a wasted effort. The leaders effort and inspiration wont help beyond a...

After so many years, Ask versus Tell still remains my favourite conversation skill moment (Thanks Balaji for putting this in my head). Each time , each audience, each industry whereever we have gone over this, Ask versus Tell almost always creates a moment of pause from the audience. We all know this intuitively, but the fact that it highlights is that it is a difficult skill to build. Actually all skills are difficult to build. It takes time, deliberate practice and faltering before it becomes second nature...

The title should have a some in it, but then it isn't quite dramatic. I am part of multiple LnD forums and groupchats on Whatsapp - mostly. All day mostly they are looking for 'content' for a training program or for 'activities' for something. The other activities that happen are asking for a trainer or pointer to some topic or marketing their own work. What is not happening is debates on how to do things (better?) or what are the new advances and challenges. And even with that not happening, the best place to get content is google. And the worst. Because the laziest content seekers go with the first page on wikipedia or whatever else they can find. And if this is your idea of content, you are dead on arrival. Why not read yourself? Talk to people? Find out more? Go beyond google? Luckily, it is some people. The rest are doing a better job of it...

This is well known - the moment one talks about learning to say No - the most common road is 'assertiveness' skills. However, by and large assertiveness is not the issue. The issue is something else. The issue is that there is no greater yes that enables your no. The greater yes is the assertion that you need to say no, not the assertiveness as a skill. This was an old realization for me (nothing original - well researched, consultants know this, salespeople practice this and negotiators swear by it), but it came back while working on a short project. 

A few weeks ago, I got an innocuous request. Can you help a small team frame conversations with their stakeholders. I spoke with a couple of the stakeholders and heard them out in terms of the way the problem was framed. I was lost after the initial framing. This was a topic that they had dealt with in depth through two frameworks in 6 months and I was wondering how to take them through this. This was my uncertain territory where there is a search for a solution. I usually like this uncertainty because it results in some insight sooner or later. And sure enough thats what happened. I was able to break conversation skills into a few distinct parts, break it into what they are doing now (stakeholder inputs) and in doing so, what are they missing out on. The breaking in the parts was not a surprise for them or for me. The what they are doing now was also not a surprise. What was not obvious was the final framing of what are they really supposed to do (as opposed to what they are do...

A few years back we were designing a learning program for a senior management team. And the partner I was working with came up with something - say, the SWOT analysis. And I said, well, that is too simple for a leadership team. They would have learnt in MBA, if not earlier. We need something complex was my reasoning. The partner did not agree - he gave a reasoned argument - which I was not fully convinced and I thought of fighting this battle some other day. But I saw this work in action - and the leaders struggled with the SWOT analysis - and the partner was able to pick it apart. They did not err in their SWOT - if thats what you think I am hinting at - but there were gaps in their framing, there were gaps in the way that they shared it with their team and so on. And the partner did not say anything - but I had learnt my lesson. When we go after explaining something complex - the audience is confused in the framing and will attribute gaps in the framing to the complexity of th...