Always Learning - Rebooted

I've just spent a painful few weeks with my blog down as I changed hosting companies. But Always Learning is back, with only minor changes.

I dropped the Business Travel Tips category, and also removed some of the older announcements that are no longer relevant.

Another announcement is that my business, B. Watkins Database Training and Consulting, is no more. The domain name bwatkins.com has reverted to my personal use. Email addresses should all still work, and the blog will continue to be at this address.

I have plans for new articles on areas of personal interest, such as resiliency, change management, training, Getting Things Done (GTD), and of course, Oracle.  Please stay tuned!

My Outbox

I've had an IN box for as long as I can remember. But it's only comparatively recently (a year or so) that I've had a formal OUT box. Here's what I've discovered about using it.

It's not actually a box or tray, like my physical IN box. Rather, it's more of a "landing zone" on top of the printer stand - a designated bit of clear space which, in my mind, carries the label "OUT".

When something needs to go out of my office, I put it there. Bowl from this morning's cereal? OUT box. Completed expense reports that need to be mailed? OUT box.  Mail that needs my wife's attention instead of mine? OUT box.

In the same way that a pad of paper lets me capture thoughts without acting on them immediately, the Out Box lets me stage items that need to be moved somewhere, without interrupting my flow of work. I can let go mentally of the thought that this item needs to be put away. When I do want to take a break and stretch, all these "somewhere else" items are in one place so it's easy to scoop them up and walk them to where they need to be.

What I DON'T put in the OUT box are things "to be filed".  I've learned that that doesn't work. It grows without bound, and then OUT is useless because it's cluttered.  I file most things immediately, though I'm ashamed to say there's still a bit of a TO FILE pile that needs attention.  (It's on my "IN OFFICE" action list to clean that up.)

So, the two habits I'm working on right now have to do with comings and goings: (1) when I enter my office, I need to toss any notes I've taken into my In Box for processing; and (2) when I leave my office, I need to check the Out Box to see what can be delivered elsewhere.

Simple things, but they help.

Most expensive training vehicle?

I was listening to the replay of a webinar by datango AG and Neochange about trends in end user adoption of IT applications. One comment really grabbed me:

"With the average cost of a help desk call hovering between 35 and 45 dollars, that's your most expensive training vehicle."

It reminded me of the Fram oil filter slogan quoted often by David Allen:  "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later."  If companies don't invest in training up front, they'll pay more on the back end in help desk calls. But one way or another, there will be a training cost. It's not optional.

Overall, the survey question, "% of Application Budget Spent on End-User Programs" revealed that most of the money spent on end users was skewed to new users (End-user training for new hires) and "laggards" (Help desk support).  Power user support for other users and a self-help knowledge base were second, and Perodic Refresher training for all users was last.

But companies that had a higher than average investment in end user training also had the highest adoption rates - go figure!

The survey can be downloaded from the Neochange link above.

Mike Smith's Open Education Resources (OER) List

I ran across this list of open education resources, posted by Tom Vander Ark at edReformer.  Lots of great stuff here, including government sources, MIT's Open Courseware program, Curriki curriculum wiki, and various other courseware consortiums.

I saw some other interesting posts on the site, such as reading lists and reports on experiments in education, such as a teacher-run school in Minnesota that operates as a producer's cooperative -- as the article notes, not unusual in the Midwest but unusual for schools.

Although the site seems to be oriented toward K-12 and post-secondary education, I think there will be useful information there for corporate trainers as well.

New Year's Resolution: Unlearning

It's the time of year for articles about New Year's Resolutions -- and most of them are about doing things, such as establishing new habits. Some, though, urge the reader to stop doing things. An example is this one, from the Drucker Exchange (devoted to the writings and management philosophy of Peter Drucker):

"If you’re like most people, you’re working on a list of resolutions for 2011: Eat healthy. Go to the gym more. Read the classics. But Peter Drucker would have likely asked you for a different kind of list: What are you going to stop doing?"

An older post by Bob Sutton, "Bad is Stronger than Good", echoes this theme:

"Studies on workplaces suggest ... that bosses and companies will get more bang for the buck if they focus on eliminating the negative rather than accentuating the positive."

It seems to me that the same thing applies to learning. As 2011 begins, in addition to listing the things I want to learn I'm also asking myself: "What have I learned, that is no longer useful or relevant? What do I need to un-learn in order to move ahead? As Wll Rogers once observed, "It ain't so much what a man doesn't know that causes him so many problems, but what he knows that ain't so."

No More Learners?

I ran across a short video by Jay Cross today, in which he states:

"Let's not think of people as learners. Let's think of them as people, and use our opportunities together -- in conversation, in collaboration, online, face to face, whatever -- to be partners in learning...."

"We're brothers and sisters here", he writes in the intro to this clip, "not parents and children".

I couldn't agree more.

If you've ever been in class with me, you've probably heard me talk about how most of us subconsciously see a person in the front of the room, and neat rows of desks where we're sitting, and think: "Oh no, I'm back in high school."  I try to defuse this subconscious tendency by making it explicit at the start of class.  "You're not here to serve me; I'm here to serve you."  It's a servant leadership model that I've been using in the classroom for most of my career in technical training. It also puts most of the responsibility for learning upon the learner.  I can't teach anybody anything -- but I'm pretty good at helping them do the learning.  "I Karate teach; you Karate learn."

Occasionally, this approach doesn't work. I've had individuals, and sometimes entire classes, that WANT the strong leader to take responsibility for them, to tell them what to do. If that's the culture at the organization, I blend with it and am only occasionally "subversive."  But my goal is always the same: to help a group of individuals get what they need from the time we have together.

Business and Technology Black Belts

I've seen several references recently to black belt rankings in business and technology, similar to those used by some martial arts schools. In some martial arts (by no means all), the color of the belt used to hold one's practice jacket closed is colored to indicate student rank. Tests given in front of the class and judged by a panel of teachers are the basis for the ranking. A scheme widely used in Karate, for example, includes the sequence: white belt (the natural color of the belt) for beginners, advancing through green belt, brown belt, and black belt.

Although a recent invention, not an ancient practice (the black belt was invented by Judo's founder Jigoro Kano in the 1880's, and colored belts date back only to the early 1900s), it has caught the popular imagination, especially the black belt that indicates the first of the advanced ranks. Because of this popularity, some business and technology organizations have adopted the terminology.

For example, the manufacturing quality program Six Sigma developed by Motorola in the 1980s, ranks its practitioners as green belts (beginners), black belts (advanced), and Master Black Belts (champions and coaches).  David Allen, author of the Getting Things Done productivity system, has referred to "GTD Black Belts" in some of his talks, although he has no formal system like Six Sigma.  And another company I'm aware of, which has cloud-based process modeling software, also grants various belt rankings to the consultants who implement their methodology.

I'm not sure what to think about this, having been a student of both Judo and Aikido in the past. I remember vividly suiting up for Aikido class one night, glowing with the accomplishment of passing my last test in the MIcrosoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) series. I was sharing with the other students getting dressed, who didn't know "Microsoft-fu," that this was like a black belt in computing.

They looked at me like I just crawled out from under a rock.

I tried to explain that I knew that the black belt isn't the top or expert level, that it is in fact really the starting point (it shows you're a serious student), and that I felt the same way about achieving my Microsoft certification. Still, I got the same stony silence.

It was many years and many certification tests later that I realized that while my analogy had a certain amount of truth to it, there really is no comparison between the daily practice and dedication it takes over years to get to that "advanced beginner" stage in a martial art, and passing a series of computer-based tests that you can cram for. You can't cram for reality.

Certification programs, in general, have been criticized for not being reality-based.  Some people have advocated putting into place a certification review board, like those for other professions, in which your peers would decide if you qualify. The Microsoft Certified Architect program uses this approach. Others have promoted the idea of hands-on lab testing. The Oracle Certified Master (OCM) program is an example: it requires a two day, timed, practical test performing the kinds of activities a database administrator would be called upon to perform.

I think that identifying senior level practitioners is a useful idea, and if borrowing martial arts terminology because it's familiar makes it easier to understand, all the better. But in the words of Mr. Miyagi, the wise teacher in the Karate Kid movies:

"In Okinawa, belt mean no need rope to hold up pants."  

Words to live by.