Sunday Posts

I have had several conversations with Learning and Development managers in large companies in India, primarily in an attempt to get them to adopt the Global Business Professional credentials that we have developed. These interactions present me with some insights what the Indian Learning and Development community is doing, and re-ignite an old discussion about the need to re-imagine the profession in India. Indeed, in most cases in my experience, Learning and Development is a non-strategic function in the Indian companies, an extension of Human Resources. The Learning and Development Manager, who, despite his/her title, mostly a junior operative, engaged in functions such as induction training and compliance related work, traditionally HR domains. Whether the company is focused on 'inner market', where Indian companies in most sectors enjoy a level of protection, or export-led, which is far more competitive, does not seem to matter such. The IT Services companies that I e...

I have been reading Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner's timely book, The New Social Learning , which points to the social nature of organizational learning. I would rate this book only 3 out of 5, and found parts of it quite laborious to read. Lots of it reads like PowerPoint slides put together, which makes it quite dry and difficult to engage with: However, the book nonetheless makes important points that any Learning and Development practitioner should take notice of. The central thesis of the book is to conjoin the psychological and sociological approaches of learning theories together. Starting from the point of organizational learning, indeed Tony Bingham heads ASTD , or the American Society for Training and Development, which is one of the most respected professional associations for training and development practitioners in the world. Their approach, however, centers around facilitating a 'learning organization', through 'paving online community roads' and ...

Usually, politics is a negative word these days. Gone are those times when politics was a liberating force, a way of thinking and doing things for ascendant middle classes (and later still, for working classes), something that led to freedom and progress. Now, this means manipulative behaviour, something that one should not do. This negativity is nowhere more pronounced than in business literature. The reason for this is the rational roots of business thinking. We must remember that management as a discipline was created out of the great industrial organizations of United States and Europe in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century. The roots of business education lie in the economics and organizational science departments in North America, with great rationalist thinkers like Herbert Simon etc. The founding assumption of management as a discipline is that everyone, at least most people, would act in a rational way, with an enlightened self interest. There is little room to hav...

Changing organizations can be a thrilling, all consuming, life enhancing experience. It is not easy, and often it may look quite scary. But, if one's convinced about the pay-off, not just in money terms but the value one would create, every bit of the trouble seems worth it. But, then, there is nothing straightforward about it. As I told a colleague recently, everything is culturally grounded. This is something management gurus often don't get it, because they are not inside an organization. It is often easy for consultants to see and do things to change an organization, because they see and work from outside. If they have the mandate, they can follow the cold logic of management rationality. However, this de -personalizes the organization, as the logic employed can be only of money and shareholder returns: Such re-engineering can only end up with a narrow focus on stock value at the expense of everything else. Changing from inside, though difficult, can be more rewarding, in t...

My understanding of the Workplace Learning is that the practise is dominated by behaviourist paradigm. So, the key principles held dear by the workplace learning practitioners are the following: (a) Observable behaviour change, rather than internal processes, is the key. So, the effectiveness of any training interventions should be measured or evaluated by what people do, rather than what people think, see or feel. (b) The environment shapes one's behaviour. What one learns is determined by the environment, the design and delivery of the programme and incentives at work, and not by individual learners. So, a programme should be seen as a part of the environment, designed to enhance the experience and create a common platform of understanding so that common stimulus-response pattern can be expected. (c) Workplace Learning should establish contiguity [how close two events must be to form a bond] and reinforcement [any means of increasing the likelihood that an event will be repeated...

After I wrote the rather 'autobiographical' note on how I got frustrated in my efforts to establish an open learning-orientated environment in a training organization, which, I reasoned, would have triggered culture change and resulted in greater commitment and team work, I was reminded by some of the readers that I have not explained fully why I think command-and-control learning is such a bad thing. Yet others reminded me that corporate learning can not happen in a cafeteria format, and companies do not pay for learning to educate people but to get the job done. So, they reasoned, the companies must focus the learning efforts of an individual on what they need, rather than on the whims and fancies of the individual employees. In summary, they suggested the opposite conclusion from my own: the pendulum actually is swinging away from my own, learner-directed learning end. I think I made one mistake in my previous post. I stated that I do not like command-and-control systems a...

I had an interesting experience last week which is worth writing about. I was asked to recommend ways to improve the operations of an organization. This was outside my work, and I knew little about the business and its operations before I was asked to sit in a few meetings, observe and give recommendations. The request was made by someone who I could not say no to, despite the fact that I have enough on my plate now. I ended up having a very interesting, insightful experience, which was my main takeaway from the exchange. The organization in question is a government contractor, and delivers training services in various occupational areas. The organization has grown over many years, and some of those growth was ad hoc . The systems and processes that I noticed seemed to have grown organically, from its roots as a small firm, and somehow did not scale up when the organization got larger. Besides, following a merger a few years back, this firm has suddenly become very large, have achieved...

Suddenly, Learning Organizations are back in the agenda. Or, is it? Someone reminded me that training budgets were the first to go in recession, and obviously that does not mean the organizations are serious about learning. I do think that it is that straightforward, and current budget cuts may indeed have been prompted by real difficulties in the market place, but it gives out the wrong signal. The point is, okay, that the organizations NEED to get more serious about learning. Because the world is changing again - from the way business is done, to the buyer-seller composition. New ideas and challenges will emerge now, as it always does in the aftermath of a bruising economic crisis. Deep recessions like this always keep claiming their victims long after they have lost prime time presence, possibly because of the panic button reactions sometimes stop organizations from learning and moving forward. It will be interesting to study how successful organizations deal with deep recession. We...