A brief reflection on barriers to entry in the learning business and related areas, inspired by a recent experience.
© Hypatia Consulting 2010
You’re welcome to reproduce this material providing full acknowledgement and links to the original source are cited. And please let me know.
What’s collaboration software for?
It may come as a surprise to learn that ADDIE isn’t the unique domain of the instructional designer. Analysis-Design-Development-Implementation-Evaluation are the key phases of problem-solving approaches in numerous disciplines, including marketing, engineering, IT, and architecture. ADDIE looks, smells, and quite possibly tastes like project management fundamentals.
While ADDIE isn’t rocket science, it helps put rocket science to work.
As a small business owner, would you welcome advice from a management consultant if you knew that he or she won’t get paid unless at least half your workforce enrolls in accredited training? Would you even let the consultant in the door?
Book Review: Leveraging the New Human Capital by Sandra Burud and Marie Tumolo
Burud and Tumolo have assembled a formidable tidal wave of credible evidence for recognition of three critical elements shaping change in western workforces – the rise of human capital, the shift to a knowledge society, and the rise of the dual-focus worker whose attention is divided between work and home.
Creating The Project Office is a thoughtful meditation on the practicalities of establishing a project office in large organisations. It’s a useful introduction for managers and change agents considering establishing a project office within their organisation, and a valuable source of inspiration for existing project offices reviewing their operations.
Following on from last week’s post on why most reward and recognition systems don’t work, here’s a list of features of R&R systems that do.
This really sounds like Parenting 101 (which isn’t altogether surprising when you consider some of the things a leader needs to do), and the list isn’t exhaustive, but the key features of effective reward and recognition systems include:
Most Reward and Recognition schemes don’t work.
Like bad training, they don’t address the real performance issue.
Most reward and recognition schemes mean well, but have consequences that often have at best a neutral, and frequently detrimental, effect on morale and performance. Like bad training, bad reward and recognition doesn’t address the real performance issue, and in many cases, contributes to the performance issue.
While people’s behaviour in the workplace usually depends on the consequences involved, most reward and recognition systems fail to provide appropriate consequences, and therefore rarely add much value to a business. Alarmingly, they often have the opposite effect. Many inadvertently punish or demotivate the people who management would really like to see improve. There is very little evidence to support the idea that most reward and recognition systems provide a motivational, morale or bottom-line benefit.
However, when properly designed and implemented, reward and recognition systems can have positive benefits for the business.
This article introduces the importance of understanding behaviour and its consequences when trying to change employee’s behaviour. Future postings will address:
• The key features of effective reward and recognition systems
• Common problems with popular reward and recognition systems, and how to fix them.
Behaviour and consequences
Essentially, behaviour is a function of its consequences.
Web 2.0? There’s another one? How did I miss that? Oh, you mean collaborative web stuff that is getting easier to do.
Web 2.0 is a precise title for a boundary-less something that seems more like a cloud of concepts. It seems to have as much to do with culture as IT. According to Brian Solis of the blog bub.blicio.us, Web 2.0 “is driven by the social economy and the social capital that defines the new landscape.”
OK. I suspect this roughly translates as it’s good for connecting, sharing, networking, and generally interacting with a self-consciously cool cultural overlay.
There are thousands of training providers in numerous market segments, claiming to add value to your business. But can they deliver what they say?
Regardless of whether it’s training in leadership, systems or sales, or business coaching and similar personal development services, the following questions can help to cut through the promotional hype. This list is by no means exhaustive: Continue reading
High profile e-learning industry analyst Clark Aldrich became disenchanted with the yawning gap between the promise of e-learning and the reality. Attracted by the potential application of computer gaming techniques for training simulation purposes, he quit his job with the Gartner Group and joined a project team attempting to design a computer-based leadership development simulation. The result was Simulearn’s Virtual Leader. Aldrich’s book recounts the experience in this book. 
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