Reda Sadki

Focus

Reda Sadki March 20, 2015Learning strategy

“Our challenge lies in focusing our insights. Distraction from what is important is a continual obstacle.” George Siemens (2006:136)

How do we stay focused? How do we extract important knowledge? Anchoring is the act of staying focused on important tasks while undergoing a deluge of distractions. We anchor to pay attention even when we are overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of work. Filtering is how we extract important information.

We face an abundance of information that is part of what makes us “busy”, our workload “stressful”, and means we have “no time”. We still spend much time to find what we need. We rely on a number of strategies to find and focus in order to complete the tasks, sometimes at the expense of the bigger picture. We expect technology to help. For example, we want not just a newsletter, but a newsletter on the specific keywords or topics that are relevant to us. Otherwise we lose time. We search for better tools to save time, but often come up short or, instead, find myriad options with no effective way to differentiate which one is right for us.

We prioritize in ways that are consistent with our learning culture. When we are overwhelmed, we work harder, triage, and iterate to step up to the challenge. Last but not least, we leverage networks of trust, both with our colleagues and with external partners, to update our knowledge while avoiding excessive detail and limiting exploration. We learn (in order) to deliver.

Our ethic of task completion may lead us to attend to tasks that distract us from more strategic priorities. We may also use mundane or routine tasks to reduce stress or fatigue associated with “the really tough stuff” that may be “top priority”. At times, we deliberately shut out distractions to focus. Time scarcity means that the schedule becomes the strait jacket of 15-minute increments.

Sometimes our emotions can lead us to find what we need.

We prioritize incoming knowledge in ways consistent with our learning culture. Prioritization is based on urgency (in emergencies we “drop everything” else), origin (our bosses come first), the imperative of task completion, resources, and clarity (what’s in the subject header). This may happen at the expense of continual learning when knowledge that matters (later, or from a source other than a hierarchical superior) is ignored.

Authentic, emotional connections to people we care about often trump all other factors in prioritization.

We try to keep current, but what happens when we fail? “I try to be on time to answer,” we explain, “because I don’t like to have hundreds of emails unread on my computer.” Triage, iterative prioritization, scope reduction, and increased effort are three behaviors described by team members

How do we determine the value of knowledge and ensure authenticity? How do we make sense of implications, comprehending meaning and impact? We deploy a diverse set of individual strategies that include using data to check for internal consistency, triangulation, and questioning assumptions (including their own). These individual approaches, may be shared and become team practices.

Again, the point is that we know how to do this. What we don’t know – and what learning strategy seeks to answer – is how we learned, and how we can improve.

Ebb and Flow (Alistair Nicol/flickr.com)

Currency

Reda Sadki March 19, 2015Learning strategy

Knowledge skills are increasingly important due to the pace of change in knowledge.

We know that staying current cannot rely solely on formal training. This is both because we seldom have the time and resources to stop our work in order to learn and because the pace of change is faster than our ability to capture and codify it as formal knowledge.

The notion that I can know in myself what I need to know is no longer an ideal. Instead, we develop networks and activities to ensure we can access and contribute to the most-current knowledge. We look for knowledge sources that provide currency, authority, and speed of access.

Some of us remain frustrated with abundance. Yet, we have learned to accept that abundance is not dysfunctional. It means one won’t read or know everything. The many available depersonalized, electronic channels (such as the keyword-based newsletters and searchable online databases that some of us depend on) are necessary but not sufficient to achieve currency. The most immediately useful and timely information often arrives through our network of trusted peers, prescribed by no one.

Photo: Ebb & Flow (Alistair Nicol/flickr.com)

Old rusted anchor chains at Falmouth Harbour (StooMathiesen/flickr.com)

Anchoring

Reda Sadki March 19, 2015Learning strategy

“Hitting a stationary target requires different skills of a marksman than hitting a target in motion.” – George Siemens (2006:93)

We are all knowledge workers who struggle with knowledge abundance – too much information.

Percent of knowledge stored in your brain needed to do your job

Our ability to learn is heavily dependent on our ability to connect with others. How well are we able to collect, process, and use information? Individually, we have learned the behaviors that enable us to anchor (stay focused on important tasks while undergoing a deluge of distractions), filter (extracting important elements), recognize patterns and trends, think creatively, and feel the balance between what is known with the unknown.

These behaviors “to prioritize and to decipher what is important” are “a bit of an art”, we say. How do we learn them? These knowledge competencies – and the learning processes that foster them – are central to our everyday work, and require explicit reward and recognition (for example, in job descriptions and performance evaluation), support, and improvement. Yet they remain tacit. The aim of learning strategy is to uncover them, demonstrate their value, and determine ways of actioning them as levers to improve continual learning.

Figure based on Robert Kelley’s How to Be a Star at Work: Nine Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed, Times Books/Random House: New York, 1998. Ideas on 21st Century knowledge skills are grounded in George Siemen’s Knowing Knowledge (2006). Photo: Old rusted anchor chains at Falmouth Harbour (StooMathiesen/flickr.com).

Triceratops fossil, Galerie de Paléontologie du Jardin des plantes (Paris) (personal collection)

Dinosaur

Reda Sadki March 18, 2015Learning strategy

“You’ll become a dinosaur if you don’t learn.”

People in the organization recognize the need for change, see its value, see their own roles in the process, are willing to adopt new approaches, and possess the competence to move forward with change: At the individual level, we strive to consider each task, however mundane, as an opportunity to learn. Continual learning requires cooperation and collaboration with both internal (dialogue and inquiry) and external (connect to external systems) interlocutors. It is not “not knowing” that is the problem. It is often the lack of doing – a form of knowing. Meaningful connections are made explicitly based on need, rather than prescription, often to solve the problems at hand. Feedback is the key element in how we continually learn. We use feedback to adjust, acclimate, and adapt. We strive to leverage the tension between the learning we do to deliver results and the learning we do to explore and innovate. We acknowledge that this is difficult, but recognize that it is indispensable in order to keep up with the pace of change and to improve our preparedness for the unknown.

Photo: Triceratops skeleton on display in the Galeries d’Anatomie comparée et de Paléontologie at the Jardin des plantes in Paris, France (personal collection).

One size does not fit all

Reda Sadki March 18, 2015Learning strategy

How does an organization’s leaders recognize, encourage, and reward both existing learning practices and positive change in learning behaviors that foster informal and incidental learning?

Learning strategy recognizes the value of learning in all its forms, including informal and incidental learning, formal qualifications, and in-service formal education and training. One size does not fit all: the diversity of learning options also reflects the highly personalized nature of how each person organizes their own learning.

However, learning strategy identifies learning activities that requires stopping work and dedicated resources as both difficult to apply and unlikely to be sustainable over time. Most of the learning that matters is, in fact, already embedded into daily problem-solving, dialogue and collaboration with colleagues and external partners.

Members of the organization develop individual and team learning strategies as a matter of necessity – to get things done. Hence, the learning strategy seeks to recognize existing practices at least as much as it aims to encourage new ones. Strengthening learning culture requires cultivating a learning habit in people and in the culture so that a spirit of inquiry, initiative, and innovation predominates.

Photo: Sewer grill ecology (personal collection).

Continuous movement (Matt Otto/flickr.com)

Nothing that we do can be taught

Reda Sadki March 17, 2015Learning strategy

Many people in the organization recognize the need for change, see its value, see their own roles in the process, are willing to adopt new approaches, and possess the competence to move forward with change. “Nothing that we do can be taught”, they say, “so the challenge and the learning need is almost constant”. At the individual level, we strive to consider each task, however mundane, as an opportunity to learn. Continual learning requires cooperation and collaboration with both internal (dialogue and inquiry) and external (connect to external systems) interlocutors.

It is not “not knowing” that is the problem. It is often the lack of doing – a form of knowing. Meaningful connections are made explicitly based on need, rather than prescription, often to solve the problems at hand. Feedback is the key element in how we continually learn. We use feedback to adjust, acclimate, and adapt.

We strive to leverage the tension between the learning we do to deliver results (execution) and the learning we do to explore (innovation). We acknowledge that this is difficult, but recognize that it is indispensable in order to keep up with the pace of change and to improve our preparedness for the unknown.

Photo: Continuous Movement (Matt Otto/flickr.com)

Pinwheel tessellation, version 2, reverse, backlit (Eric Gjerde/flickr.com)

7 actions imperatives of learning strategy

Reda Sadki March 17, 2015Learning strategy

The learning strategy recasts the evidence-based seven dimensions of learning culture (used to measure learning culture and performance) as action imperatives. In order to improve performance through learning, the organization needs to take specific action to:

Create continuous learning opportunities
Promote inquiry and dialogue
Encourage collaboration and team learning
Empower people toward a collective vision
Connect the organization to its environment
Establish systems to capture and share learning
Provide strategic leadership for learning

For each action imperative, analysis is grounded in the narrative of individual learning practices reconciled with best practice drawn from the vast research corpus on learning culture and performance. Patterns emerging at the juncture between narrative and evidence may then be formulated as general and specific recommendations, while carefully considering feasibility and risk in the organizational context and environment.

Photo: Pinwheel tessellation, version 2, reverse, backlit (Eric Gjerde/flickr.com)

12 questions that learning strategy seeks to answer

Reda Sadki March 16, 2015Learning strategy

Learning is the acquisition of knowledge, skills and competencies (behaviors) through experience and study. We all want to learn, so why is it so difficult to stop work to make time for learning, despite our best intentions? In exploring possible solutions to this question, learning strategy emerges from the existing practices and strengths of the organization – together with a diagnosis of where it needs to improve knowledge performance.

Learning strategy examines how knowledge and learning can be improved, starting with mundane, routine or recurring questions and frustrations of daily work life, such as:

What can I do when I have too much e-mail?
How often should we meet as a team?
How can I experiment and innovate when I have so many urgent tasks to deliver?

The strategy also answers questions about how we work together as a team and with people outside the organization (partners, beneficiaries, customers…):

How can I best learn from and with those we serve?
What is the best way to stay connected with co-workers who are halfway around the world?
How should we onboard new staff?
How can we support each other to do better as we work?

Learning strategy also guides the organization in developing context-specific, best practice and evidence-based answers to questions such as:

How do we detect patterns and trends that matter for our work?
How do we make decisions in the face of information overload or, on the contrary, when we are faced with uncertainty?
How do we get the “eureka” moments when trying to solve difficult problems?
Why are our information systems (sometimes) difficult to use – and its specific case: why do we hate our LMS?
How can I identify and adopt technology that can make it easier to communicate, share and learning with my colleagues?

Last but not least, learning strategy outlines what we may expect or ask from our managers and leaders, who have a key role in encouraging and developing people as well as in advocating for broader organizational change that recognizes the value and significance of learning as a key driver of the organization’s performance.

Photo: Rainbow of Ribbons (Fleur/flickr.com)

The Infinity Room (The House on the Rock) (Justin Kern/Flickr)

7 key questions when designing a learning system

Reda Sadki January 27, 2015Learning, Learning design

In the design of a learning system for humanitarians, the following questions should be given careful consideration:

Does each component of the system foster cross-cutting analysis and critical thinking competencies that are key to humanitarian leadership?
Is the curriculum standardized across all components, with shared learning objectives and a common competency framework?
Is the curriculum modular so that components may be tailored to focus on context-specific performance gaps?
Does the system provide experiential learning (through scenario-based simulations) and foster collaboration (through social, peer-to-peer knowledge co-construction) in addition to knowledge transmission (instruction)?
How are learning and performance outcomes evaluated?
Are synergies between components of the learning system leveraged to minimized costs?
Have the costs over time been correctly calculated by estimating both development and delivery costs?

These questions emerged from the development of a learning system for market assessment last year, thinking through how to use learning innovation to achieve efficiency and effectiveness despite limited resources.

Photo: The Infinity Room (The House on the Rock) (Justin Kern/Flickr)

Bring on 2015!

Reda Sadki December 21, 2014About this blog

A year ago, I announced the creation of Learning Strategies International, a talent network to connect learning leaders who yearn to solve ‘wicked’ knowledge problems. In its first twelve months, LSi has engaged with 700 leaders from 280 organizations to contribute to over 100 projects. In 2015, we will be announcing new services and partnerships emerging from connections initiated, nurtured, and strengthened in 2014.

It is therefore with gratitude for your support and engagement that I share our Year 2 greeting card to wish readers of this blog a faster, smarter new year.

Reda

Photo credit: The Comet in Queenstown, 12 July 2012 (Trey Ratcliff/Flickr). Typography by designisgood.info for LSi.