Serendipity and Learning

 Seth Godin nails it.    Lets call soft skills, real skills he says.  We give too little respect to the other skills  when we call them “soft”  and imply that they’re optional.  What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes and perceptions of the people who do the work. Vocational skills can be taught: You’re not born knowing engineering or copywriting or even graphic design, therefore they must be something we can teach. But we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to decision-making, eager participation, dancing with fear, speaking with authority,  working in teams , seeing the truth, speaking the truth, inspiring others, doing more than we’re asked, caring and being willing to change things. We underinvest in this training, fearful that these things are innate and can’t be taught. Perhaps they’re talents. And so we downplay them, calling them soft skills, making it easy ...

Perhaps too early to say, but curated content for which you have to pay through your nose is probably dead.  For one, most content creators have bloated content. A typical course is broken into so many videos (yes, in theory, all are short), but there is still too much noise. Getting to the core of the course is difficult.  Second, most course creators create their own framework - and with good reason because it is their brain at work and is based off their experience (and sometimes, common frameworks are probably copyrighted or just too common). As a company, those frameworks may not work for you because you may not like that framework or you may have an alternate framework in use.  Third, people (atleast in startups) and leaders (everywhere) have no time, so the overall usage of this content is quite low.  Fourth, for the most part, searching for good content is like searching for something to watch on Netflix - impossible to know if any course is good, unless you ...

 The Indian YouTuber meme is famous and if that is an indicator, looks like Indian YouTube is supporting faltering education systems the world over. I chanced upon this article about it is enabling engineering students in, hold your breath, Nigeria .  And this is something I have wondered. Why isn't YouTube eating other content providers for lunch? It can.  There are crazy niche courses/channels on YouTube that make tons of money by finding the right niche of customers. Competitive exams is an ever giving machine. 

Continuing from the previous series  How does all this translate into a corporate learning scenario? Does online work?  Short answer yes, if your participants are motivated enough and the technology infrastructure is good. If they are not motivated (My boss asked me to attend- I am not here of my own volition), this will be a painful experience regardless of technology.  If your participants are not motivated, as a facilitator you can move heaven and earth, nothing will work. They will get sucked into work - all if requires is one email ping and they will disappear.  And if they dont turn on video, then rest assured, you are screaming at a screen (honourable exceptions will remain) And so, we have completely stopped virtual trainings unless there is no other way to do it.  Second, we conduct trainings only when there is a need and the manager and their employees are bought into it.  What about Hybrid trainings? Hybrid trainings require good digital infrastr...

Continuing from the previous post on online learning education Without human (or a future ai-human-ish) interaction for doubt resolution, questions, clarifications, the online learning experience breaks down. There are good games - dragonbox is a good example - am sure there are others, but the only way you will finally learn maths is by practicing more and more complex problems that are based on your thorough understanding of the subject. Various parts of this can be moved online or be made asynchronous. But at a fundamental level, when you work together as a motivated set of students with a teacher, the learning is faster and often more meaningful. For instance, you realise that the other students are often struggling like you are. A doubt asked by one student, often clarifies something for another. The magic of interaction and facilitation (by the teacher) is yet to be cracked online.  Yes, online is a supplement. And must be. But to expect that everything can be taught online i...

A few years ago, maybe 5-6 years ago, I was approached by an upcoming ed-tech start up. The salesperson was aggressively trying to sell us a bundled course of 3 odd years complete with a free tab thrown in.  As someone in L&D (and this was pre covid), I was not a great believer in online learning when depth and understanding is required. So, I asked, "What is so special about this" and the answer "We teach physics using zombies (as an example)". That statement completely put me off.  This is a decoration versus construction fallacy. Zombies on physics are a decoration at best. There are many other, better, intuitive ways to learn physics. And there are many videos of professors teaching physics using various concepts, contraptions, demonstrations and stories.  So, we said no, we are keen on a more classroom model for learning. And went ahead with it. For the most part, it worked for us.  Then covid happened. I learnt the skills of virtual facilitation - delivere...

For the last few months, AI has been the rage. Yet, if you saw the future of work predictions from the recent past, you would never see it as a threat. It was barely visible. But now with some new products being launched, it suddenly seems inevitable.  And thats why prediction is difficult. It is easy to go along with the herd and agree to what people are saying and have common ground - it is difficult to really think ahead.  And that is why as much as one can plan 5 years ahead, it is not of much use, unless one has a contigency plan for every plan and then some. 

I am suffering from readers block - yes you read that right; I have readers block. I am unable to bring myself to read anything. Ok, thats not entirely true - I do read and doom scroll on twitter and instagram and I did manage to read half a book, but  to sit and read a book - somehow I am unable to do that.  Partly it is because of the phone, but there are other factors too I suppose! Another thing to think about.