Archives for big question

ASTD Big Question: Am I still stuck?

Posted by  on Saturday, April 11th 2009     

Wow! This month the ASTD Big Question is about a blog post I wrote back in December! The post was called “I think grad school is making me crazy“.

Basically, I was venting my frustration about learning new ways of doing things while being in a role where I can’t implement change (it did not help that I was participating in the CCK08 experiment at the same time).

So here is the Big Question:

  • Do you sometimes feel stuck? Feel like you have so many more ideas about how you could help your organization or your clients, but that What Clients Want is just some training?
  • Should you attempt to get unstuck? How hard should you push your internal or external clients to get them to see the full range of what is possible? Or should you give them what they ask for?
  • If you are feeling some level of stuck, what should you do to get unstuck? How important is it to get unstuck? Is it okay to learn a lot about all kinds of different solutions, but to primarily work on simple training solutions?
  • If you are stuck, should you be concerned about your future?

The questions were based on this comment in my post:

I feel I’m going to be stuck doing the same thing forever with all these cool ideas in my head that will never get implemented.

So let me start by putting that post into perspective. I wrote it during finals, and at the end of a pretty rough quarter at work (the next quarter was even worse!). I’m lucky to have very good mentors, as well as a very stable and nurturing home life, and those things help me get over my angsty times.

I’m a little nervous that I am writing this post in the middle of a hectic quarter, also during finals.  I’m hoping this one sounds a bit more positive. :)

What I have learned is that there are always options to get unstuck, its just a matter of how you want to deal with it.

Option 1: Suck it up

Sometimes you just have to just suck it up. Sometimes the reasons you are stuck have nothing to do with you. Decisions are made for you, and if you want to keep getting a paycheck then you just have to keep doing things the way you are told to do them, even if that makes you feel stuck.

Option 2: Complain & make your points well known

Maybe you are stuck and you just can’t take it anymore. You know you have good ideas that would save resources if they were only given a chance. So you take matters into your own hands and try to force management to listen to you. When they tell you to suck it up, you complain to everyone around you all the time about how unfair management is.

This is not a recommended option unless you have other means of income than your current position. Also, this option has a way of alienating everyone, from your manager to your peers. It also tends to make you feel even more miserable.

Option 3: Figure out why you are stuck

Another option is to figure out why you can’t get your ideas implemented. This option can be used in conjunction with Option 1. Start talking with your manager, your mentors, and others who have been around longer to try and find out the answers to these questions:

  • Is this a bad time to talk about change? Why?
  • Is there someone in management who will champion your idea? Do you have or can you form a relationship with that person?
  • Is your idea really that new? Have others tried it before? If so, what was the reason it was not adopted?
  • Has there been some system change since people last tried to implement this idea? Can you show why those changes make this the right time to try the idea?
  • Can you let go of the ownership of the idea? If implementing the idea gets you unstuck, does it matter who gets credit for it?

    This is actually a statement about how you deal with power, and I’ve found its pretty important. Lots of my “innovative” ideas have been around forever. I don’t “own” these ideas, I’m just their latest conduit. Times have changed, and it may be that now is the time to try the ideas again. However, once the idea is out there, there isn’t a guarantee I’ll get credit for it. I’m ok with that because it gets me unstuck (well a little credit every now and again would be nice).

Once you figure out the why, usually you can identify who in the organization needs to be influenced so that your ideas a chance to happen. Once you know who to influence, you have to know what their hot buttons are. If you can figure out a gap someone needs to close, and your idea can close the gap, then you have a greater chance to get your idea implemented (and get yourself unstuck). If the gap has to do with making or saving money, your idea has an even better chance of being considered.

Even if they don’t accept your idea, going through this process will help you learn alot about your organization, and that is important too. The more you understand how your business unit operates, the more ammunition you’ll have for figuring out how to get your next idea implemented. At this point, you have to be willing to sit at Option 1 for a while.

So am I still stuck?

Yes and no. Yes because I still have tons of ideas in my head that I cannot implement at the current time. No because a couple of my ideas are starting to get some traction.

I’ve looked at the process of getting unstuck as an excercise in professional development. I’ve learned the following in the last six months:

  • How to look at things from a systems viewpoint. I’ve learned how to find out if my idea is really not a good fit for my current organization. I feel like this skill will be helpful in any position I find myself in, so I appreciate the fact that I have been forced to work this way.
  • How to pitch ideas to upper management. This is definitely a skill, and I am happy I’ve had the opportunity to practice (a lot)
  • How to be patient. Truth be told, I lean towards Option 2. However, I know I have to frame my ideas appropriately for others to listen to me. I know I have to figure out how my ideas can fit with my organziation’s charter. I also know that I have to be positive and encouraging to my team mates. What good is an idea unless it helps everyone out? And who is going to want to work with someone who is negative all the time?

There are some really great answers from the comments section of the ASTD Big Question as well, so make sure to check those out.

The biggest thing I have learned is to be thankful for the lessons presented to me, it makes me a better learning professional.

category: big question
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ASTD Big Question: What will workplace learning be like in 10 years?

Posted by  on Friday, March 6th 2009     

This month’s Big Question from ASTD is “what will workplace learning be like in 10 years?”. If you go to their post, there are already some really interesting thoughts and comments about this topic.

Byron said “The best prophet of the future is the past”. I’m a firm believer in that notion, so I’d like to answer the Big Question with a question of my own: what happened 10 years ago to workplace learning?

I’ve been doing some sort of training since I came into the professional workplace in 2001. I just started studying education for my graduate degree in 2007. I have some very experienced, patient folks in my department who kindly talk with me when I ask them about something I am studying or something I have read on a blog that pertains to eLearning. They seem to appreciate my enthusiasm, but they always have this weary look on their face when I tell them about all these “new” ideas. They tell me they were trying to implement some of these very things 10 years ago!

Besides having these discussions with co-workers, there is literature that goes back 10 years or so that talks about CSCL, communities of practice, and all of these things that are the underpinnings of what people are talking about doing today. So I have to wonder, are some of the ideas being bandied about today really that new? Or are they rehashed from 10 years ago? If these are old ideas given new life by improved technology, what happened 10 years ago that got these ideas pushed to the back burner? What can we learn about our past so that we can execute these ideas in the present, so that in our future we’re not going through this exercise yet again?

I also want to say that I do not agree with the idea that the training department should go away completely. For one thing, work is social. Work gets done based on the relationships we have with others, and based on the social capital that we have. This means that there will always be “others” in the workplace. This otherness will be categorized just like it is in general society: by race, gender, nationality, disability, religion, etc.

Knowledge is a form of social capital. I believe very strongly if there is no guidance, “others” in the workplace will not have access to knowledge that they need to have to do their work. This will happen either because they don’t have access to the correct network, or because they are purposefully excluded from access to that information based on their position in the social ladder.

I believe this because of my status of other (a woman in a predominately male field), and my daughter’s status of other (Asperger’s Syndrome). Training departments can be the mechanism that provides each worker with access to the information required to perform his/her job duties successfully.

If we as training groups are aligning to the business and the true competitive advantage of knowledge workers is how fast they are able learn, we owe it to the business to ensure that every worker, no matter their access to social hierarchies in the workplace,  has access to all the tools they need to help them learn.

Maybe in the future learning organizations won’t be the “givers of knowledge”, maybe we become more like librarians that help people find resources (and learn to do their own searches) as they are needed.

category: big question
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Learning Circuits Blog Big Question: What are your Challenges, Plans and Predictions for 2009

Posted by  on Friday, January 2nd 2009     

ASTD’s Learning Cirtuits Blog Big Question for January is What are your Challenges, Plans and Predictions for 2009?

Since I haven’t done my New Year’s post yet, I’ll just talk to this question.

Challenges

I’ll talk about the challenges from a personal level. How do I incorporate what I am learning about connected learning into my “day job”? How do I weave more of the connected learning concepts into my graduate studies? How do I move away from straight up developing technical courses into doing more of what I am learning about (designing), especially in a down economy?

I think that latter question is the hardest one for me right now. I do pretty well influencing my peers, or maybe one level up from where I am organizationally. How do I learn how to influence people who can really make the decisions to change things? How do I know when I am pushing to hard and when I need to back off? How do I convince my organization to take a chance on some of the ideas that I have? These are the things that I want to get better at this year.

Plans

I am about half-way through my graduate program. I need 6 more classes and one internship. I think I want to try and finish this year. I am taking 2 classes in the spring, that means I need to do 2 in the summer, and then 2 in the winter plus the internship. I am planning on walking at graduation, so that means I’ll be back home (well Tallahassee, close enough) in December. I can deal with that. :)

I plan on continuing to expand my network using this blog and twitter. I plan on continuing the Knowledge Worker Competency series I started at work, helping folks understand how to use these social tools for learning and sharing so when my organization starts using them for training everyone will be comfortable enough with the technology that it won’t be a barrier to instruction.

I haven’t forgotten about using these technologies to assist adults on the autism spectrum. I’d like to do some work on that this year.

I also want a paper published. If that doesn’t happen, I want my organization and my grad school advisor to realize that this blog has a bit of reach too. Why can’t it carry the same weight that getting published carries?

Predictions

I predict my organization will start using social media tools as part of our instructional offering. OK maybe I am really hoping we are able to do this!

Here’s my dire prediction: some organization is going to be hit by a data loss caused by social media. Then everyone will clamp down on all these activities, and we’ll be back to square one. I hope I’m wrong about that one.

I predict that I will lose my 4.0. But not by much.

I’m looking forward to 2009. Lots of things to try, lots of things to learn. Plus hopefully a year from now I’ll have my master’s degree!, and my son will only have 3 semesters till he graduates! :)

category: big question
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Big Question: What did you learn in 2008

Posted by  on Tuesday, December 9th 2008     

This month’s Big Question from ASTD’s Learning Circuits blog is What did you learn about learning in 2008?

I started grad school in the Fall of 2007. So this year I took the following courses:

  • Introduction to Instructional Systems
  • Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (I wrote a couple of papers for this class on social networking sites as a form of Instructional Technology)
  • Designing for Online Collaborative Learning – My group produced this site as a final product. I also have a work project based on what I learned from this class
  • Introduction to Instructional Design – Module, pre-test and post-test are here. The report will get published there soon.

One thing I have learned from my graduate studies is how much I already know about instructional design from work. We do a really good job of writing instruction based on learning objectives. It’s given me a better appreciation for my department, and my current skills.

I have been explaining the hows and whys of social media to my management for over a year now. I have learned how to communicate and work with a group of people who have to be concerned with things I never really thought of. It has forced me to slow down, think about why using these tools will solve problems, explain again, and just keep repeating that process. Being forced to tie things back to the business has been a huge learning experience for me.

I also participated for most of CCK08. I learned that you can learn alot from other people you don’t necessarily agree with.  I can’t even list all the ways I have used things we discussed as part of that class at work. I also made lots of new twitter friends.

I learned people love to open up and share. Once I got past the scariness, I learned that letting go and opening up is a great feeling.

category: big question
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Learning Circuit Blog’s Big Question for November: Network Feedback

Posted by  on Saturday, November 8th 2008     

The Learning Circuit Blog’s Big Question for November is all about Network Feedback, specifically if you need input from people, where’s the best place to ask?

Tony asked for specific experiences on how to find the information you need, when you need it. He posed the following questions:

  • Where to go in what cases?
  • What works and doesn’t work?
  • How do you effectively work within a given context?
  • What do you need to have done to effectively get help ahead of time?
  • Are there places you can go if you are relatively new and needing to ask questions?

At EMC, our official internal social media platform is called EMC ONE. It is for the most part product based, and the culture in the community is to keep things very business focused. Except for one sub-community called the “Water Cooler”. You can post pretty much anything that is somehow related to your day-to-day work there. We also have started to test out Yammer.

Our open enrollment for benefits ended yesterday, and I had a problem with my daughter’s coverage. Now, remember my daughter has Asperger’s Syndrome, so I pay careful attention to the state of her coverage. I called the benefits help line, but they were not a lot of help (they have to stay on script, I understand that, but special cases can’t be handled by a script).

So I posed the question on EMC ONE and in Yammer. I was hoping some other parent had been through the situation and could tell me what they did to get things resolved. I didn’t want to spend the next couple of weeks playing phone tag and swapping emails with a benefits person just to find out I could have resolved the situation if I had just ________.

I did hear from a couple of parents with horror stories of what it took them to get a resolution. That was not the feedback I needed. Then I got an email from the person in charge of everything. She called me, told me the solution, and even took care of the fixing the problem for me!

I then posted the resolution in EMC ONE, because I would imagine this question will come up again.

Here are my answers to some of Tony’s specific questions:

  • Where to go in what cases?
    You have to start first with the known areas of information seeking for a particular topic. I first called the help line, but they couldn’t fill my need for information. I was reaching out to other parents, but thankfully our benefits team monitors social media!
  • What works and doesn’t work?
    You have to have directed information seeking behavior. You can’t just yell your question out to the wind, you have to shout it in at least a general direction. You have to take clues from one search and apply them to the next one.
    In my case, after talking to the benefits help line I knew there was a gap in instruction out to the parents. That is why I shouted my question out in an area where I knew parents would be listening.
  • How do you effectively work within a given context?
    You have to know when to switch contexts, especially if we are talking in an online (visible) situation. People may want to help you, but not in the open environment of a social networking site. You have to respect that preference. Also, you have to frame your request for information in such a way that people want to help you. If I had said mean things about the benefits team out of frustration, no one would have responded to my request for information.
category: big question
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