Using Knowledge Sharing to Future-Proof Your Organization

Full Transcript

Malika:

Welcome to The Skill Shift, a podcast for organizations that want to future-ready their workforces, brought to you by D2L. I’m your host, Malika Asthana, senior strategy and public affairs manager. Each episode will speak with guests from some of the most innovative businesses around the world about their unique approaches to learning and development. They’ll share specific, actionable insights into how they’re preparing their workforces for the future and the ways they’re addressing skills gaps in their industries. You’re listening to The Skill Shift.

Our guest today is Mary Bollash, engineering learning and development officer at Carrier, a global innovation company building healthy solutions for homes and connected cold chain solutions. Mary leads knowledge management and transfer activities within the engineering function for Carrier. She has created learning ecosystems for large global organizations over the span of her career to improve business results and employee engagement. She has a PhD in education with a focus on adult learning, a Master of Arts in Education from Capella University, and a Master of Science in Organizational Leadership from Eastern Connecticut State University. Mary, welcome.

Mary:

Hi, Malika. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Malika:

We’re so excited to have you. So I want to highlight off the top that your role is not part of HR, but part of engineering. So I understand that when you joined the company, there was already a learning program in place, but it was being run by engineering fellows. Subject matter experts in their own right, but distinct from your responsibility for learning and development. What was your experience like taking over the learning program at Carrier and how did you overcome the challenges that came along with this?

Mary:

Well, some of the challenges were that we had some of the smartest people, some of the best subject matter experts creating content and delivering content. So that was actually really good. There was also a lot of content, it was all over the place though. So that when I came to Carrier, first of all, I had to work with people that I was not taking over for them because I couldn’t, not in the way of the subject matter expert in their experience and their knowledge, but in the way of like, “Okay, let’s put some structure around this. Let’s curate content.” And of course, change is hard. That was a little bit difficult. The fact that these folks had many, many years of experience at Carrier and I was new, that was also a challenge. So basically, I just kept going. I just kept being annoying and asking to get in their meetings and try to work with them.

And once they realized that I could do a lot of the more logistical, more instructional, those kind of tasks and that my team could help them, then it got easier. But one of the more challenging pieces was the fact that information was everywhere. It wasn’t really curated in any way. There were pockets of curation, but then there were pockets of not. There’s a lot of redundancy and things like that. And so I had to really just start from the beginning and earn their trust and say, “How can I help you? I’m here to help you.” And I think that now, three years later, we have a really good relationship. But at first, it was a little bit, I think challenging for them and challenging for me.

Malika:

Right. I can imagine. I think the interesting part you said there was about being annoying and asking almost the same questions, but phrased differently to get to the right answer of how do you curate a learning experience? So what were the types of questions like? You’re not asking them like, “Where is all your course content in the library and what modes of delivery are you using?”

Mary:

My biggest question was always and still is when I engage with them. Our fellows are the smartest people that you’ll ever work with. They’re absolutely fantastic. But I’m always like, “How can I help you? Why are you spending time doing hands-on creation? We can help you with that. Why are you spending time looking for resources? My team and I can help you with that.” So what can we do for them? And that’s something that I would strongly suggest for anybody working with a functional group outside their area, put yourself in their shoes and say, “How can I help you? How can I benefit you? How can I save you time?” Save you frustration.

Malika:

I love that.

Mary:

And I think that by doing that, we’ve gotten to a pretty good partnership.

Malika:

I love the way you phrased that, and I think it speaks also to the idea of co-creation. You’re not trying to take over their work but trying to use them more effectively. So in terms of the work you’re doing, do you feel like you’re the one who’s mapping the learning that already exists or the learning that could exist to organizational needs?

Mary:

Yes, to some extent. What I’m trying to do is just, yeah, it’s around the organizational needs. But within the disciplines, they have to do that. I have to pull that out of them like, “What does your discipline look like? How healthy is your discipline? What does it need? If you don’t have content, maybe it’s a new technology or something. If you don’t have content, what can we do together to get content? Because if you don’t have it, maybe one of our universities does. If you don’t have it, maybe there’s a cross-functional group that has it.” And so when they have to create content, that’s okay. And we do a lot of that, don’t get me wrong. We do a lot of that, but we also sometimes find things or reach out to partnerships and things like that.

So I do a lot of, not at the individual person level like, “How is your proficiency in this discipline?” But more overall like, “What can we do? How can we provide a different perspective?” Maybe we want to look at instead of… Right now, we’re curated across our college and our technical disciplines. Maybe we want to add another view to that. Maybe there’s a cross-functional view that we want to add. And that’s really where I try to help out is how can we… Not so much. I mean, we definitely deal with every single course that is offered, but it’s also about the cross-functional in this and how can we display it? How can we make it more searchable? How can we help you find things from our libraries and from our subscriptions and our collections and things like that. So it’s formal and informal learning.

Malika:

Right. So let’s give a practical example. So some of your role focuses on internal knowledge transfer and specifically succession planning. So how do you determine what knowledge needs to be documented and passed on in order to have a smooth transition?

Mary:

So we have a program that is fully researched. I did a lot of research on it. There’s bits and pieces on how to do this, right? There’s books and there’s podcasts and TED talks and things like that, but there’s nothing that really fit our needs. So I put together this program. And internally, we refer to it as the knowledge sharing program. It actually has a different name, but I’m not really going to say that out here. So this program was based on a book that I give the person full credit for. Really, it was a great starting point. It was very, very practical. But basically, the way this works is 150 experts were identified by leadership. That doesn’t mean that we only have 150 experts. It means that for whatever reason, they were prioritized. So we have 150 experts that were identified as experts.

We formed triads with them. The triad is the expert, a nextpert, which is really a next expert or more. There might be more than one, and a manager or coach. And those triads work together to create a plan for knowledge sharing. And it’s very intentional. It’s very focused. It includes tools like focus mentoring, which is I watch for a little while. When you and I have agreed that I have mastered this or that I’ve seen enough, then I get to practice, and I practice for a little while. And when you and I have agreed because you’re the expert, I’m the nextpert that I’ve managed to hit that next set of milestones, then we continue on with partner until ultimately, I’m also an expert. So our boss has now two experts, not just one. So this program has been very, very important for us to intentionally and with some structure share knowledge because everybody thinks that sharing knowledge is a good thing.

There’s no doubt about that, right? Yeah, sharing knowledge. Sure, let’s do it. The problem is that often people don’t get priority to the time that it takes to do it. So even if you just dedicate an hour a week, like open office hours, hour a week, that’s going to help you because it gives both the accountability. So if I don’t attend a bunch of our meetings, then it’s clearly on me because we’ve set the expectation upfront that we are going to prioritize this for an hour a week or maybe a half hour a week, or maybe I’m going to teach a class and share my knowledge that way. Explicit knowledge is easy, implicit knowledge is achievable, tacit knowledge is really hard. It’s really hard to share. So sometimes you have to be very intentional as you go at it.

Malika:

Absolutely. I love the way that you described that, especially the triad dynamic. We talk a little bit about the three-legged stool sometimes, and it reminds me a little bit of that. But the expert and the nextpert is quite unique. I don’t think I’ve heard something like that before. Do you have the name?

Mary:

Dorothy Leonard is the person. She wrote the Deep Smarts book. She’s brilliant. I used a lot of different resources for this program, but that was probably the one I relied the most heavily on.

Malika:

There’s so much interesting meat to what you’ve just shared. I think part of it is the idea of putting theory into practice and recognizing that off-the-shelf solutions, well, they’re not going to work for everyone because one size does not fit all. But it’s using your expertise to really map it out and map it against that question. The answers to the question you shared at the very beginning, which is, what can I do to help you? So it’s not just, “Oh, I’m the learning and development person. I’m going to come in and apply my framework to you.” Of course, this will work out, but making sure that everyone has a unique approach.

Mary:

Yeah. And so they make their plan and we do it in a workshop. So they actually go hands-on. Okay. And in their plan, they look at the tools we offer, which they may or may not use. They may use one tool, they may use 10 tools, they may use none. It’s up to them what they find useful. We give them the concept. And a lot of times in what our follow-up has been because we’ve been following up now at like the six-month mark to say, “Hey, are you doing this? Are you sharing knowledge? How it’s working?” And time and time again, what we’re hearing is, “Well, yeah, we’re using the tools, we’re using them somewhat, whatever. But the biggest benefit that you guys have given us is making us talk to each other and intentionally looking at that lens.”

And it’s not about necessarily people retiring or leaving or whatever like that. It’s really, for us, it’s about building best teams so that if you have, say, an expert who wants to become a fellow, you have a nextpert with an N, who wants to be recognized as an expert. It gives those people that opportunity to do that. It helps people to think like, “Oh, wait. I only do have one person who knows this particular information. Gosh, I better share it.” And maybe what that person has to share, like I said, you might have multiple nextperts for one expert. And so what we’re hearing as feedback is they’re really glad they went through the program. It doesn’t take long. The whole thing, I think we’ve done in two hours for the workshop. So it’s really not bad.

Malika:

That’s incredible. Wow.

Mary:

But we have their plan, they look at the tools, they determine their scope, they look at their risks and their mitigations. We do ask them to recognize what kind of resources they’re going to need for their next steps and for their next, next steps kind of thing. We want them to have a clue about how… Like you don’t want to solve world hunger. I mean, we do want to solve world hunger, but we can’t do that. So we want to do achievable. And we always say specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. And that really is true for this. So setting goals and milestones two to three months out, perfect. Even 12 to 18 months and anywhere in between, that’s okay.

If you’re going to start setting milestones five years out, probably not. So what we try to do is get them to build on it. Do your 12 to 18 months, and then if you have more stuff that you want to share for knowledge, do another 12 to 18 months. And then pretty soon you’re at five years. But you can’t set a goal that’s so far out there that you’re not going to get there.

Malika:

Yeah. I think one of the unique things that you’ve shared about the program is that it’s so personalized. It’s actually putting the humans first, and it’s not as process oriented. And I think the minute you start to say, “Okay. Here are the time markers, and now, you must follow what I’ve set out for you,” it feels like knowledge transfer has some finality to it. And it’s a checkbox exercise of something to be offloaded rather than to be shared.

Mary:

That’s absolutely true, Malika. One of the things that we are really struggling with is that they’re engineers, right? Like one of the questions I used to get all the time is, “How do we know we’re done? I did everything. Are we done?” And my response is, okay, first of all, when you’re an expert and when the nextpert can do what he or she and the expert have agreed to, that’s success. When as a manager or a leader, I now have two experts, that’s also success. But how do I know when I’m done? Ideally, you don’t because ideally… So you’re the expert, I’m the nextpert, we work together. Then the next expert for me, I would also carry that process down.

So I would continue to kind of how you pass along family recipes and things like that. Ideally, you’re passing this along, and it’s not a finite beginning to end. It’s more of ideally, if we’re doing this right, which is too soon to say that we’re going to get there. But ideally, it’s just part of the drinking water. You start to think about who needs to share knowledge with who and how do you make that happen? And it becomes just a habit. We’re not there yet, but that’s the visionary goal.

Malika:

Well, I’m going to take your cooking example further because I think that’s so amazing, and bear with me while I do this. But I think one of the things you just talked about is this assumption that knowledge is dynamic. You can’t just say, we’re done, because then nothing ever changes. You’re just holding all of the training constant. But as we know, there’s technological change, there’s differences in approaches to how you do things. Think about, my family has this, I think it’s called an Imperial Cookbook, and it’s actually one of my favorite ones. There’s a pineapple upside down cakes from the ’80s. It’s one of my favorite cookbooks. But yesterday, when I was looking for a recipe for something, I needed something that could be in the Instant Pot because I didn’t have two hours to stand over the stove. And the Instant Pot didn’t exist that much long ago. So it’s that idea that things could be adapted. I really like that.

Mary:

It’s funny because we actually have… In the workshop, we actually have a little, I’m going to call it a cartoon video. And the whole story is about the explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge. And so you’re needing the Instant Pot, you wouldn’t know that unless you have to try to figure out how do you match that, right? Because you’re looking at it going, they’re telling me to stand over the stove. How can I possibly do that? And in our example, this guy wants to make his grandma’s homemade bread and the homemade bread like she’s got the recipe, but she’s on a cruise. So he calls his mom and says, “Hey, do you have the recipe?” The mother’s go, “Sure.” She texts it to him and it says, “And don’t forget to sprinkle it with love.” Kids like, “What that? Like what are you talking about?”

And she’s also using words like smidget and smidge, different words that literally meant nothing to this person. And so he goes, “Okay, mom, I don’t get it. What?” She goes, “Well, actually…” And so that was the explicit knowledge. She just sends them the picture of the recipe. Then the next thing is she says… He’s like, “I don’t get it.” She looks in the cover, the front cover of the book. And there’s a code that translates smidget is this, hot means this, for the hot water, whatever the case may be. So he’s like, “Okay. All right. Fine.” He goes, “But I still don’t get it. What is that sprinkle it with love thing.” And the mother says, “Actually, I have no idea. But she always says it, so just say it and you’re good.”

So he makes the bread, comes out okay. It’s not amazing. So then he calls the grandmother and he goes like, “Okay. She’s just back from my trip.” He goes, “I made it, but it’s not yours. What’s wrong with this?” And he’s watching her. So he’s physically watching her the next day and she’s making the bread. They get it done, and she reaches over and pulls out a jar and she just start sprinkling it. And he’s like, “What is that?” And she’s like, “Oh, it’s cinnamon, sugar, spices. Things that my grandmother always just sprinkle on the top.” And she goes, “And it’s called love.” And he’s like… If he wouldn’t have seen it, neither one of them were looking for that disconnect. But if he wouldn’t have seen it, he would’ve never known. And she thought he was crazy because she’s like, “As long as you followed my steps, you’re fine. You’re going to get my bread. This is what I do. This is what I’ve done your whole life.”

So it’s a fun, little way to really talk about tacit, explicit, and implicit knowledge because we have to transfer knowledge depending on the type of knowledge and the cognitive dimension. If it’s cognitive, physical, behavioral, or whatever, if we are going to share knowledge, we have to think about what that knowledge is and what’s the best way is to share it. It makes so much sense when you think about that.

Malika:

Yeah, it does.

Mary:

It’s not just like-

Malika:

Well, I think we can all relate to that experience of trying to learn how to cook. It’s almost a universal type of thing. And figuring out where you’re starting. And I think one of the things you shared in our preparatory call was this idea of encouraging employees to learn. And one of the things we found in our research at D2L is that the biggest barriers that people cite for not being able to do more professional development is about time and money. But there is something to it when it comes to increasing employee uptake as well. So what has your experience been like at Carrier?

Mary:

So the first thing is we are global. And I don’t think the days exist anymore where you can count on bringing 20 or 30 people into a room somewhere at a regular cadence. That just doesn’t happen. For every one of those 20 or 30 people in the room, there’s probably 20 or 30 other people who are not in that room who want to be. So I’m not saying you don’t do on ground instructor like training because you absolutely can do it, and you absolutely should do it when the learning objectives require it. But in our world, we’ve done everything that we can to break down the barrier of location and time if we can. We really want to transcend those roadblocks so that if you’re in China, if you’re in India, if you’re in Poland, if you’re in California, if you’re in New York, if you’re in Connecticut, if you’re in Canada, it doesn’t matter. You can still take it.

So for every one of our live virtual instructural ed sessions we offer, we record it. And then once we record it, we try and sometimes we get to do it ahead of time, but to split that flat out recording into things that are actionable. Whether they’re a practice, activity, whether they’re an assignment, whether they are a discussion. We try to put something in that validates those learning objectives. But that way, the person can do it on their own time, at their own leisure, from their own home. You’re saving travel costs, you’re okay maybe not getting the full networking benefit as you might get, but you’re getting the content. You’re letting the person, as an adult learner, go at their own pace. And if their phone rings in the middle of it, it’s okay. So traditionally, think back to you’re in a conference room, you’re getting trained, your phone goes off, you have to go out, you go, you take your phone call, you feel really bad.

The instructor makes you sing when you walk back in the door because you were late, whatever the case may be. We’ve all had some very interesting, I think, on ground experiences.

Malika:

Definitely.

Mary:

This takes away any of that. And again, so the trade-off is the networking and the personal connection, but the benefit is there’s no limit to how many of us can take it. We’re all getting the same message consistently. So for every one of our 500 courses, well almost every one of our 500 courses, we have a recording that goes with it. And ideally, we’ve turned that recording not just from a recording, but into an actual online self-study course, not always, but we really try to engage the learners. And a lot of times if there was an on-ground activity, and we try not to do hybrid courses too because technically and logistically, that’s really hard. We’re better off if we find to do live and then transition it into an online self-study versus having some people online and some people in a room because you always get either the instructor paying attention to one or to the other. You can do it. I find it to be harder.

Malika:

Right. There’s different approaches almost to how you teach those courses. So if it’s the same person having to do both, that can be challenging and hard to design for.

Mary:

We always have a producer. We never let the instructor be out on his or her own. I mean, some instructors are really good, and they can do that, but we’re always better to have a producer. The producer supports the instructor so that instructor is not saying, “I can’t hear you. I can’t see you. What site are you on? Can you do that demo again?” That kind of stuff. The producer is handling all that from behind the scenes. And from a learner perspective, the producer is funneling the questions. So we don’t have like, “I just talked over you by mistake.” Ideally, the producer has handled that by, I enter the question in and then, “Hey Malika, we have a question about the process that you’ve just demonstrated.”

Malika:

Right. Right. In terms of the sharing of learning between employees, you shared that you’d done an open house for Carrier Engineering University. I’d love for you to tell us a little bit about how that went and what some of your learnings from that were.

Mary:

We had a blast. And we’ve done it a couple of times and it’s hard to know how much you want to do self-promotion, but I’m starting to think that there is no such thing as too much, at least in our world.

Malika:

Space it out a little bit.

Mary:

A little bit, right? So we did two sessions to account for the different time zones. We put on every piece of social media internally that we could think of. We had about 1,000 people total, I think maybe 1,200 altogether between the two sessions. And what we did is we put together a little bit about who we are and what we do, but we did it very quick. And in the middle of it, we did games and like with prizes. They’re little prizes. They’re just like Carrier Engineering University like water bottles or earbuds or something like that. But we did really quick what we do, and I had my whole team participate. It wasn’t about us though. Again, the whole perspective is what can we do for you? And we showed them if you’re a learner, here’s the benefits, the stuff we do. For example, we are IACET accredited, which means that we can grant continuing education units.

So we’re IACET accredited. We have all kinds of offerings for them. The library, we set it up just like the college. So there’s lots of people don’t know about what we do. We are tied to our system of record, which is our learning portal, which means that anything that you take through us is different than just clicking through a training on a website. Because it goes down with your history, so you can see who took what and when and where they were. And so there’s a level of accountability by doing that. So we showed from the learner perspective the benefits of working with us and taking courses. We talked about our variety of courses, we talked about our different offerings, the different types of offerings. But then we had a piece on if you’re an instructor or a subject matter expert, how can we help you? In a half hour, we covered a lot of stuff, and we took it. But again, the whole approach was what can we do for you? How can we help you?

Malika:

Right. Right. And pass on that knowledge. It’s not solely about, this is what we need to get done, but here’s some opportunities for creativity.

Mary:

Yeah, exactly.

Malika:

What might people like to learn. One of the things you shared in our preparatory call also is that you weren’t necessarily asking what are your most popular courses to these engineering fellows, but it was something along the lines of what do you teach 15 times a month, I think you said. And how do you make it fun for people to take on? Well, you don’t assign it, you make it optional.

Mary:

Out of the over 500 courses, we only have one required course, and that’s the Carrier 101, our products. Everything else, we encourage you to take. What we find, and it’s from another role that I had that I learned this, that it could be the best course in the world. We do it on a one to seven scale. It’s getting 6.8, 6.5, 6.9 ratings consistently. As soon as somebody decides, “Oh, we’re going to make this mandatory,” those ratings go down by about 5.1, 5.2, 5.7.

Malika:

Wow.

Mary:

They go down a lot. And what we found is, again, with an adult learning principles, adults have to see what’s in it for them. And adults want to have control. Adult learners, if you look at Knowles’ theories of adult learning, it’s really about giving them the control so you can take the exact same course. If I make it mandatory, I can almost bet you that you’ll find that the feedback is a little less than if it’s strongly encouraged. I had somebody the other day that said, “Oh, we want to make this mandatory.” I said, I wouldn’t do it. Unless you have a need. Let’s say you’re rolling something out and you need to know that your whole entire population has heard this message by a certain amount of time, then yeah, okay, you got to make it mandatory because they’re not going to do it and you’re not going to get everyone. But if you have any flexibility, I’d say encourage, make them want to do it.

Our fellows teach. It’s an amazing opportunity to be with them and to hear them because you might not see them. We’re global. You might never see them, never talk to them, and they might actually be able to help you solve a problem, maybe it’s not even in the class, but because you realize that “Hey, this guy has some expertise in this area.” That actually happened at another job that I had. Actually, the student was listening, heard the fellow teach about stuff and went, “I think that this guy can help me.” They got together after he said, “Can I get together?” And we always ask the instructors to say it’s okay for the learners to contact them and whatever, email them or whatever. And it ended up like he solved the problem. The fellow and the guy working on it together. The guy had been working on it for like eight months. They solved it in a span of two weeks because they-

Malika:

That’s incredible.

Mary:

We just put the learners in… Like I didn’t make the connection even for them. I just said, “Person one, this is person two. Here you go. Have a nice conversation.” And it ended up working out really, really well.

Malika:

Yeah. Sharing that, I mean, it sounds like knowledge sharing is happening formally and informally, which is I think the goal. Even if it’s not a habit yet from your perspective, sounds like it’s well on the way. So you’ve got extensive experience in this field. You’ve devoted your life in education to learning. What advice can you provide to others who are getting started on trying to formalize knowledge transfer and success in your planning?

Mary:

Make it personal. Don’t just try to, like we were talking about before, apply a one size fits all solution. That would be one thing. I think another thing is, understand what you’re asking and what knowledge sharing means in your organization. I mean, in some cases it’s a lot easier. You say like, “Okay. These are my contacts, these are my process, steps, whatever.” And typically, that’s the explicit knowledge. That’s pretty easy to get anyway, to ask yourself truly and honestly, what information do you need to share? Because it’s not always in that super obvious like, “Here’s my contact list and here’s my process, and here’s where I store stuff.” That’s all good. Don’t get me wrong. That’s great. But it’s that magic in the tacit knowledge that you may or may not be capturing.

And I would say really look at that and see… We did one workshop where the people they were like, “Oh, here’s this, this, this, and this. We’re done.” And I was like, “Well, yeah, that’s great.” And I said to the expert, “But don’t you have any secrets, any magic that you apply?” And the guy’s like, “No, no, I don’t think so.” And then I said, “How long have you been with the company?” “22 years.” I’m like, “Okay.” I said, “So if I just take your list of stuff and I could do your job?” He goes, “oh, no, no, no, no.” I’m like, “Okay. Why not?”

Malika:

Right. Right.

Mary:

He goes, “Oh, well, you have to have a little bit more knowledge than that.” And he was so humble. But until I pushed him, he thought that by giving me a box of stuff, like a virtual box of stuff, he thought he was good. And if I had to take just a box of stuff, it would have been helpful. Don’t get me wrong. It definitely would have been helpful to know who to start. And he was extremely organized. This gentleman had… Here’s my contacts for this, here’s my processes. He had his standard work documented. So it was good, but it still didn’t capture the magic that was in somebody’s mind and heart and soul and experience. And sometimes like the grandmother, never in the story, never even realized that she was reaching for the jar until he goes, “What is that?” And she’s like, “What’s what?” “That, that jar. What is that jar?” “Oh, that’s this.”

Malika:

Yeah, exactly. I love that so much. We’re coming to the end of our time. I’ve so enjoyed this conversation. I want to end off on a look ahead to the future. So you’ve been studying adult learning for many years. You’ve shared so many interesting theories and books and resources throughout this conversation. I wanted to ask you what trends are you seeing in adult learning more broadly as you look ahead and how has it changed over the course of your career? Big question.

Mary:

That’s okay. The first is a paradigm of butts-in-seats. And I truly think that when you’re on ground, yes, absolutely learn it can happen. But we also, in the on-ground world for years, didn’t really do it justice because just because my butt is in a seat, in a classroom somewhere, away from my desk does not mean I’m learning. Should I be? Absolutely. But sometimes we either, and historically, have made people drink from the fire hose or they’re drinking, getting so much information thrown at them. So like on Monday, they’re all excited. They’re there, 8:00 like, “Yeah, let’s go.” They want to learn the content. They’re open, their hearts are open, their mind is open. We give them a whole bunch of information. And then Tuesday, they have to go like, “Okay, you know what? We did talk about this and this and this on Monday.”

By Wednesday, if you ask them what they learned at like 8:15 on Monday, you may or may not get an answer. By Friday afternoon sometimes, they’re jazzed to go back to their workplace and apply what they’ve learned. By the drive home, they probably have lost about 10 to 15% of that knowledge because we just gave them so much. So the actual accountability in making sure people understand, sometimes you actually, even for an on-ground session, have to build in, which is hard because usually people are traveling for that. You have to build in time for people to process and understand. You have to build in hands-on activities that bring you where you’re connecting your work to your learning. So we try to do that with the virtual classes as well. But one of the benefits of the virtual stuff is you can actually give somebody a little bit of time. Go take time to go do this assignment.

So the paradigm of butts-in-seats being the perfect answer and the perfect solution, that’s one definite change I’m seeing. I think that the more effective training does either use real activities instead of simulations. Okay. Go out to your email and do A, B, C, and D where you’re actually telling them to go do their real job as part of the training. That is helpful. The other thing I think is coming on is the use of technology like the AI, extended reality, artificial intelligence, things like that. We’re going to see it play more and more of a role both from the course designer perspective and the learner perspective. I think that the use of technology, and I think that the willingness to use tools like what we’re doing right now, tools like Zoom, tools like Teams, I think that that’s also really helpful. And I think more comprehensive solutions because it’s not just a deck and slides with a couple videos. If you think about it with technology, you can actually demonstrate more potentially than you can in a very traditional learning because things are all connected. Things are all linked.

So I think that the butts-in-seats is not the best thing since sliced bread, and I feel like I’m bashing it and I’m not. Butts-in-seats is great. Like if I’m going to do CPR, you want me to show you how to do that with the dummy. You want to see that I know what the steps are, right? If I’m brazing something, if I am physically doing a skill, you might need me to be there.

And sometimes it’s what Elliot Massey used to talk about is digital surround where you do some free work online. Maybe it’s an online self-study. Maybe there’s a couple meetings that you attend virtually. Then maybe you do come together in a room. So you go from everybody needs this information to a bunch of people need this information to a few people or a handful by whatever criteria. Really, really, really, really need to be hands-on. And then from there, you might go back to a digital solution like, “Okay. Afterward, altogether, everybody go take that activity that we learned about. Go do it. And we’ll come back in three weeks to see how we’re doing.”

Malika:

Yeah, it’s interesting.

Mary:

A digital surround I think is helpful.

Malika:

Yeah. That’s great. Mary, you’ve given us so much to think about. I’m even thinking about how we share some of the insights from this podcast based on what you’ve shared about adult learning. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. We’re really excited to have you here.

Mary:

Thanks for letting me. This is really fun.

Malika:

Thanks for listening to the The Skill Shift. This episode was produced by D2L, a global learning innovation company, helping organizations reshape the future of education and work. You can find links to the resources we discussed in this episode on our website, D2L.com. There, you’ll also find the video version of this podcast, related content and more. You can also find other episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Thank you for joining us.

Resources Discussed in the Episode

• Critical Knowledge Transfer: Tools for Managing Your Company’s Deep Smarts by Dorothy Leonard (Harvard Business School)
• Enabling Learning for Life: New Realities for Work and Education (D2L)
• Adult Learning Theory and Malcolm Knowles (research.com)
• The Digital Surround, Elliott Masie