The Least Noticeable Difference

Years ago I heard Noel Tichy describe the concept of least noticeable difference. In a nutshell, it means that those inside an industry are often the least likely to observe and respond to significant discontinuous change. One of his examples was the icebox manufacturer whose response to the development and introduction of the refrigerator was to build better, fancier iceboxes. Today, many companies have implicitly organized their employee and customer training around the classroom model, without realizing that the classroom is empty. If they don’t respond to the cultural and technological changes that shape today’s worker, we might well end up with the learning equivalent of that icebox company.

The New Knowledge Worker

“There must be a new generation of knowledge tools to facilitate the growing social nature of work and to allow a more ad hoc and unstructured approach for knowledge work.”

That quote from Michael Fauscette’s recent post stuck with me. Most of the business systems in use today follow designs and processes established decades ago. While they still address the same underlying needs of businesses today, they completely fail to address the nature of knowledge work for the current generation. This is true for everything from ERPs to CRMs, and as I’ll talk about more in depth, enterprise learning.

It’s precisely such discrepancies between the tools at hand and the needs of a new generation that create opportunities for innovators to bring widespread, discontinuous change to an industry - and this is precisely what SaaS and cloud computing companies have done. They have jumped into the breach, providing flexible solutions that can scale rapidly and integrate new technologies as quickly as they’re developed - from mobile applications and platforms, to social networking features, to collaboration tools, and beyond. When a solution this powerful comes along, it’s not just an answer to a problem, it’s a revolution.

The same forces that have brought this revolution to enterprise IT are spurring similar disruptive change in enterprise learning. Similar to cloud computing, this disruption in learning is driven less by technology and more by contextual factors. In the case of the cloud, the disruption is created by the commercial and service models as much as by the core applications. In learning, the central driving force is about content – its creation, form, access and utilization.

Why does this matter to you? Whether you lead an enterprise learning organization or a rapidly growing SaaS company, your employees or customers expect learning and knowledge tools that are in step with the way they work and think. Just as we've learned that for students in the computer age to be successful, they have to be taught with computers, workers in this new generation want access to tools that embrace the mobile, social, crowd-sourced environment they live in.


The More Things Change… Welcome to the Third Wave in Enterprise Learning

The last revolution in learning began perhaps 20 years ago – that journey has brought us a whole industry around e-learning and spawned what is now a relatively mature set of learning management and content management applications and service providers. Interestingly, despite the enormous power and undeniable impact of this change, the central paradigm for learning has stayed the same. Whether it’s sales training, technology certification, SaaS customer training, or anything else, it’s still centrally driven by the classroom model. In a way, the e-learning revolution is to learning what automation was to transaction processing – it sped things up but it didn’t change the model. Measurement, pricing, learner access, and vendor supplied content was still organized around a traditional educational classroom model.

Now a new wave of transformation is at hand, created in part by new technologies, but primarily originating from the adaptation of social media to learning. Ironically, the literature in learning for many years has pointed to just-in-time, real-time learning as a far more powerful delivery model for learning that sticks. Most of us recognize implicitly the power of great mentors and trial-and-error learning. Our challenge has been to find ways to scale that model, and to build in capability to reduce the inherent variability in process and quality – the SaaS and cloud computing models now give us the tools to do that.


What’s Driving the Change in Learning?

There are a number of convergent factors which are building this momentum. They stem from three primary drivers:

1. The sources of content: Historically, learning content was created by instructional designers, building from source documents and subject matter experts. Increasingly, this model is giving way to user generated content (think YouTube), immediate access to experts (think threaded chat), and sophisticated search capability (think Google). In addition to the ubiquitous capability to connect with colleagues and extended resources through capabilities such as AIM, MSN, Yammer and others. While such sources carry with them their own risks and some companies have been reluctant to endorse such unfiltered sources for fear of liability, it is clear that, supported or not, such content sources will flourish and expand.


2. The nature of content: There are two somewhat disparate factors in this category. One of the biggest is the migration of gaming and simulation capabilities from entertainment to learning. It’s still early days, but the declining price/value ratios, the capacity for rapid development and the undeniable power for learning from these experiences will spur dramatic expansion of these methodologies. The other major factor is the ability to create and deliver context sensitive learning. This is another migration journey, this time moving capability from e-commerce into learning. Presenting learners with content specifically suited for them, based on a deep understanding of their current performance, style preferences, current tasks, most recent updates to policy or process, and just in time support is all within our grasp. This is especially important in a cloud computing environment, where frequent updates and releases are part of the fabric.


3. The nature of work and workers: The impact of the Next Gen worker is well documented. We are now perhaps 5 years into a workforce that has grown up with and expects to utilize the capabilities cited above. Perhaps just as important, however, is the nature of work itself. Mike Fauscette’s argument (read his whole post) is that we are moving to a whole set of complexity driven by knowledge work, which defies the standardization that legacy applications have been built to create and support. In a recent meeting on health care service delivery, one of the participants said: “the practice of medicine now is beyond the capability of human cognition.” In ever increasing numbers, today’s jobs and workers live in an environment where it is impossible to perform relying on routine, memory or policy manuals.

Implications of This Change for Learning

This coming change is so large, it can be hard to recognize for what it is. Like the icebox manufacturers of the last century, many in the learning industry are caught up in responding to small pressures without grasping the wide-ranging implications of this new wave. The classroom is empty; learning today has to be recreated where the learners went – in the cloud. And the cloud demands changes in every area: from the roles of learners, to the structure of training, to the technologies that will be needed.

The greatest impact will be the nature of the roles and responsibilities for service providers. While good instructional design will always be needed, new roles will need to evolve which may look more like librarians – one of my former clients took a cue from Foursquare and anointed “mayors” of his online communities. These were not necessarily people designated to training or learning, but deep experts in their field who served as collectors, resource managers and community organizers. Perhaps an even better analog stems from roles in art, museums and libraries: the role of “curator”. The key emerging skill set in learning may well be the ability to organize, maintain and present content versus structured creation of content.

Just as impacted will be commercial and organizing frameworks. Over time, we have evolved a well-developed set of commercial structures for creating, delivering, and acquiring content. But when the unit of measure is no longer a course and the creator of content may no longer be an instructional designer, we will need to develop a whole new set of commercial models. Likewise, our current system of measurements is deeply tied to our current learning paradigm. Both measures of volume and outcomes will need to be examined. How do we apply Kirkpatrick’s model in an environment where learning and doing are tightly bound together? And what are the impacts to the learning BPO marketplace? In other markets, BPO is giving way to KPO – Knowledge Process Outsourcing. Could that be the next iteration for these large service providers?

Finally, what are the implications for the legacy learning technology industry? Already, we are rapidly disintermediating the boundaries between traditional learning management systems (LMS) and newer portal technologies. If the trend continues, these more nimble, flexible learning and knowledge portals will likely replace our current notions of learning management systems. The SaaS model, itself a disruptive model, for acquiring and utilizing these technologies could be but a step on the way to cloud sourcing. And we will see yet another iteration of innovative companies undertaking the reapplication of existing technologies in gaming and e-commerce to the learning marketplace.

Once again disruptive change is coming, driven by new demands of the cloud-based worker and fuelled by changes to learning content and technology. This change will create a new wave of innovation and service capability every bit as big as the last one, and it will affect every aspect of the learning value chain. Some companies will embrace the cloud and everything it offers, while others will be left behind, looking in the classroom, wondering why it’s empty.

For the latest insight on learning, SaaS, and cloud computing, follow us on Twitter and Facebook

To get first-look at new articles like this, sign up for our monthly newsletter:  

]]>