A learning view on social systems: communities of practice in social learning systems

Communities of practice are of course not isolated; they are part of broader social systems that involve other communities (as well as other structures such as projects, institutions, movements, or associations). So the social world includes myriad practices; and we live and learn across a multiplicity of practices.

It is useful to briefly review the conceptual tools that the theory offers to talk about learning as constituting both the emergence of such a system and the personal experience of it.

Learning as the structuring of systems: landscapes of practice

Learning as the production of practice creates boundaries, not because participants are trying to exclude others (though this can be the case) but because sharing a history of learning ends updistinguishing those who were involved from those who were not. They share an enterprise, an understanding of what matters, relationships, as well as the resources that their history has produced. Boundaries of practice are not geographical; and they are not necessarily visible or explicit. But if you have ever sat at lunch with a group of specialists engrossed in shoptalk, you know that a boundary of practice can be a very real experience. Because of the unavoidability of boundaries, there is an inherent locality to engagement and to practice.

As learning gives rise to a multiplicity of interrelated practices, it shapes the human world as a complex landscape of practices. Each community is engaged in the production of its own practice—in relation to the whole system, of course, but also through its own local negotiation of meaning. This process is therefore inherently diverse. The bounded character of the production of practice makes social systems dynamic and unpredictable. Such a perspective leads to a suspicion of uniformity in social systems. If a uniform pattern is observed across the landscape, the production of this uniformity needs to be understood in terms of local production and boundary interactions.

Our ability to know is shaped in such landscapes of practice. For instance, the body of knowledge of a profession is not merely a curriculum. It is a whole landscape of practices—involved not only in practicing the profession, but also in research, teaching, management, regulation, professional associations, and many other contexts, including contexts in which the clients of the practice develop their own views (e.g., patients communities in medicine). The composition of such a landscape is dynamic as communities emerge, merge, split, compete, complement each other, and disappear. And the boundaries between the practices involved are not necessarily peaceful or collaborative. What researchers find, what regulators dictate, what management mandates, what clients expect, and what practitioners end up deciding, all these attempts to colonize moments of practice can be in conflict.

In such social systems, boundaries are interesting places. First they are an unavoidable outcome of any depth of knowledge requiring a shared history of learning. Without a shared history of learning, boundaries are places of potential misunderstanding arising from different enterprises, commitments, values, repertoires, and perspectives. In this sense, practices are like minicultures, and even common words and objects are not guaranteed to have continuity of meaning

across a boundary. At the same time, boundaries can be as much a source of learning as the core of a practice. The meetings of perspectives can be rich in new insights and radical innovations. Still such new insights are not guaranteed, and the likelihood of irrelevance makes engagement at the boundaries a potential waste of time and effort. Indeed, competence in not well defined at boundaries. This means that the innovation potential is greater, but so is the risk of wasting time or getting lost.

In every practice, boundary processes require careful management of time and attention. Depth in any practice demands commitment, and time at the boundary can be seen as taking away from core engagement. Moreover, the very value of boundary processes depends on the depth of commitment to the practices involved. Local depth increases both the tension and the likelihood of interesting insights at boundaries. The qualities of practices and their boundaries are complementary aspects of learning. There is therefore a profound paradox as the heart of learning in a system of practices: the learning and innovative potential of the whole system lies in the coexistence of depth within practices and active boundaries across practices.

Modes of identification

As we (and by extension our communities) negotiate our participation in broader systems, we need to make sense of both the system and our position in it. Doing so creates relationships of identification that can potentially extend across the whole system. It is useful to distinguish between different modes of identification³ that position learning in the landscape:

• Engagement: This is the most immediate relation to a practice—engaging in activities, doing things, working alone or together, talking, using and producing artifacts. Engagement gives us direct experience of regimes of competence, whether this  experience is one of competence or incompetence and whether we develop an identity of participation or non-participation.

• Imagination: As we engage with the world we are also constructing an image of the world that helps us understand how we belong or not. If you work as a social worker in a given city, you know that there are countless other social workers in other contexts and you can use your imagination to create a picture of all these social workers and see yourself as one of them. We use such images of the world to locate and orient ourselves, to see ourselves from a different perspective, to reflect on our situation, and to explore new possibilities. The world provides us with many tools of imagination (e.g., language, stories, maps, visits, pictures, TV shows, role models, etc.). These images are essential to our interpretation of our participation in the social world. Imagination can create relations of identification that are as significant as those derived from engagement.⁴

• Alignment: Our engagement in practice is rarely effective without some degree of alignment with the context—making sure that activities are coordinated, that laws are followed, or that intentions are communicated. Note that the notion of alignment here is not merely compliance or passive acquiescence; it is not a one-way process of submitting to external authority or following a prescription. Rather it is a two-way process of coordinating perspectives, interpretations, actions, and contexts so that action has the effects we expect. Following directions or negotiating a plan are forms of alignment asare enlisting a colleague’s collaboration or convincing a manager to change a policy.

Whichever way they go, these processes of alignment give rise to relations of identification: applying the scientific method, abiding by a moral code, joining a strike, or recycling can all become very deep aspects of our identities.

All three modes function both inside practices and across boundaries. Engagement is typical of participation in the communities we belong to, but it can also be a way to explore a boundary if we can have enough access to the practice. Imagination functions inside a community asmembers make assumption about each other and talk about their future, but it can also travel without limits and is a way to experience identification way beyond our engagement. And a community’s local regime of competence entails alignment, as do broader systems, such assetting the goal of an organization or the laws of a country.

Identity in a landscape of practices

Learning can be viewed as a journey through landscapes of practices. Through engagement, but also imagination and alignment, our identities come to reflect the landscape in which we live and our experience of it. Identity itself becomes a system, as it were. From this perspective, identity includes the following characteristics:

• Identity is a trajectory. Over time, it reflects our journeying within some communities as well as transitions across communities. It incorporates the past and the future into the experience of the present. Over time it accumulates memories, competencies, key formative events, stories, and relationships to people and places. It also provides directions, aspirations, and projected images of oneself that guide the shaping of the trajectory going forward.

• Identity is a nexus of multimembership. Identity also comes to reflect the multiplicity of locations of identification that constitute it. Multimembership is sequential as we travel through the landscape and carry our identity across contexts. It is also simultaneous as we belong to multiple communities at any given time. The experience of multimembership is thus inherent in the very notion of identity in a landscape. And so is the work of experiencing all these forms of identification at once and in one body—whether they merely coexist or whether they complement, enhance, or conflict with each other.

• Identity is multi-scale. Our identities are constituted at multiple levels of scale all at once. For instance, teachers can identify (or dis-identify) with the teachers in their school, district, region, discipline, country, and even with all teachers in the world. Identification isin some sense a scale-free process through which identity embraces multiple levels of scale. Resonance may be stronger at some levels than others; with some levels we may actively dis-identify. Nevertheless, through the combination of engagement, imagination, and alignment many levels of scale do enter into the constitution of identity.

Through learning, the landscape shapes our experience of ourselves: practices, people, places, regimes of competence, communities, and boundaries become part of who we are. Identities become personalized reflections of the landscape of practices. Participation in social systems is not a context or an abstraction, but the constitutive texture of an experience of the self.

Knowledgeability as the modulation of accountability

The metaphor of a journey through a landscape suggests a variety of relationships to practices. Some we enter and some we leave behind. Some we only visit, merely catch a glimpse of, or ignore altogether. With some we identify  strongly, with others lightly, and with many not at all.

The danger of the metaphor might be to suggest that these relationships are merely individual decisions. Some communities may welcome us, but others may reject us. In the course of our lives, we enter in contact with countless practices we have no competence in, and never will by choice or necessity. As characterized so far, identity is both collective and individual. It is shaped both inside-out and outside-in. Identification is both something we are actively engaged in negotiating and something other do to us. Sometimes the result is an experience of participation; sometimes of non-participation. Both types of experience shape our identities. We are constituted by what we are as well as by what we are not.

How we experience non-participation depends very much on our degree of identification with a practice. If you don’t understand what your neurosurgeon friends are talking about, you don’t go through an identity crisis. You may not even feel marginalized. You can just listen out of curiosity or daydream for a bit. You are not a neurosurgeon. You just know that a bit better now you have seen them in action. But you don’t identify with that practice. Since your identity is not invested in it, you don’t consider yourself accountable to its regime of competence.

The regime of competence of a community of practice translates into a regime of accountability— accountability to what the community is about, to its open issues and challenges, to the quality of relationships in the community, to the accumulated products of its history. When an academic community expects a doctoral student to contribute something new through a dissertation, it first expects that student to do a literature review. This is a way to honor the history of learning of that community. Becoming accountable to history also enables the student to discover the learning edge of the practice, the places where a contribution makes sense and is possible. It is this double accountability to the past and the future of the practice that equips the student tocontribute to its evolution as a full participant.

This kind of in-depth accountability is hard work (not just for graduate students but for any practitioner, new or old). The willingness to do it depends on the degree of identification with the community and its enterprise. When one considers a whole landscape, the situation gets more complicated. Should a nurse be accountable to research, to management, to a curriculum, to regulation? To all of them? What about close colleagues? What about personal experience? This often depends on the situation. Does the regulation apply to this specific case? There is a sense in which a professional serving a client represents the whole landscape of practice for that person. In each moment of professional service, he or she has to resolve the question of where to be accountable. This is quite a dance of the self, especially where there are conflicts at boundaries in the landscape.

More generally, one way to conceptualize knowledgeability in landscapes of practice is to think of knowing as the modulation of identification among multiple sources of accountability.

As the world becomes more complex, there are an increasing number of locations in the landscape to which we may potentially need to become accountable. Should I follow that blog, read that scientific journal, follow that twitter stream, subscribe to that website, go to that conference, or join that community? Negotiating an identity of knowledgeability is becoming more complex.

The processes and the challenges of learning in a complexifying world become clearer if we conceptualize knowledgeability as a process of modulating identification across multiple locations of accountability. This involves a constant interplay between practices and identities. In a complex landscape, trajectories of practice and identity do not evolve in parallel. The two act as distinct but interdependent carriers of knowledgeability across time. Learning takes place when they dance.

3 Note These modes were called “modes of belonging” in Wenger (1998), but I now think that the term “mode of identification” is more accurate.

4 I use imagination here in the sense proposed by Benedict Anderson (1983) to describe nations as communities: it does not connote fantasy as opposed to factuality. Knowing that the earth is round and inorbit around the sun, for instance, is not a fantasy. Yet it does require a serious act of imagination. It requires constructing an image of the universe in which it makes sense to think of our standing on the ground as being these little stick figures on a ball flying through the skies. This is not necessarily an image that is easy to derive from just engaging in activity on the earth. Similarly, thinking of ourselves as member of a community such as a nation requires an act of imagination because we cannot engage with all our fellow citizens. But it is not less “real” for involving an act of imagination. Benedict Anderson notes that people are ready to kill and die for their “imagined” nations.

A social systems view on learning: communities of practice as social learning systems

A community of practice can be viewed as a social learning system. Arising out of learning, it exhibits many characteristics of systems more generally: emergent structure, complex relationships, self-organization, dynamic boundaries, ongoing negotiation of identity and cultural meaning, to mention a few. In a sense it is the simplest social unit that has the characteristics of a social learning system.

It is useful to start by looking at the assumptions about learning in communities of practice that give the concept such a “systems flavor.”

Learning as the production of social structure

Engagement in social contexts involves a dual process of meaning making.¹ On the one hand, we engage directly in activities, conversations, reflections, and other forms of personal participation in social life. On the other hand, we produce physical and conceptual artifacts—words, tools, concepts, methods, stories, documents, links to resources, and other forms of reification—that reflect our shared experience and around which we organize our participation. (Literally, reification means “making into an object.”). Meaningful learning in social contexts requires both participation and reification to be in interplay. Artifacts without participation do not carry their own meaning; and participation without artifacts is fleeting, unanchored, and uncoordinated. But participation and reification are not locked into each other. At each moment of engagement in the world, we bring them together anew to negotiate and renegotiate the meaning of our experience. The process is dynamic and active. It is alive.

Participation and reification represent two intertwined but distinct lines of memory. Over time, their interplay creates a social history of learning, which combines individual and collective aspects. This history gives rise to a community as participants define a “regime of competence,” a set of criteria and expectations by which they recognize membership. This competence includes

• Understanding what matters, what the enterprise of the community is, and how it gives rise to a perspective on the world
• Being able (and allowed) to engage productively with others in the community
• Using appropriately the repertoire of resources that the community has accumulated through its history of learning.

Over time, a history of learning becomes an informal and dynamic social structure among the participants, and this is what a community of practice is.

Through active and dynamic negotiation of meaning, practice is something that is produced over time by those who engage in it. In an inalienable sense, it is their production. Assuming that practice is an active production is not romanticizing it. It is not to deny, for instance, that there are all sorts of constraints, impositions, and demands on the production of practice—external factors over which participants have little control. Nor is it to assume that the production of practice is always a positive process. Practitioners can be deluded or myopic. Subconscious forces can undermine the best intentions. A community of practice can be dysfunctional, counterproductive, even harmful. Still there is a local logic to practice, an improvisational logic that reflects engagement and sense-making in action. Even if a practitioner follows a procedure, it is not the procedure that does the following. No matter how much external effort is made to shape, dictate, or mandate practice, in the end it reflects the meanings arrived at by those engaged in it. Even when they comply with external mandates, they produce a practice that reflects their own engagement with their situation. A practice has a life of its own. It cannot be subsumed by a design, an institution, or another practice such as management or research. When these structuring elements are present, practice is never simply their output or implementation: it is a response to them—based on active negotiation of meaning. It is in this sense that learning produces a social system and that a practice can be said to be the property of a community.

Learning as the production of identity

The focus on the social aspect of learning is not a displacement of the person. On the contrary, it is an emphasis on the person as a social participant, as a meaning-making entity for whom the social world is a resource for constituting an identity. This meaning-making person is not just a cognitive entity. It is a whole person, with a body, a heart, a brain, relationships, aspirations, all the aspects of human experience, all involved in the negotiation of meaning. The experience of the person in all these aspects is actively constituted, shaped, and interpreted through learning. Learning is not just acquiring skills and information; it is becoming a certain person—a knower in a context where what it means to know is negotiated with respect to the regime of competence of a community.

Participants have their own experience of practice. It may or may not reflect the regime of competence. Learning entails realignment. When a newcomer is entering a community, it is mostly the competence that is pulling the experience along, until the learner’s experience reflects the competence of the community. Conversely, however, a new experience can also pull a community’s competence along as when a member brings in some new element into the practice and has to negotiate whether the community will embrace this contribution as a new element of competence—or reject it. Have you ever come back from a conference with a great new insight or perspective? It can take quite a bit of work to convince your community to adopt it. Learning can be viewed as a process of realignment between socially defined competence and personal experience—whichever is leading the other. In both cases, each moment of learning is a claim to competence, which may or may not be embraced by the community.

This process can cause identification as well as dis-identification with the community. In this sense, identification involves modulation: one can identify more or less with a community, the need to belong to it, and therefore the need to be accountable to its regime of competence. Creating an experience of knowledgeability (or lack of knowledgeability) involves a lot of identity work. Through this process of identification and the modulation of it, the practice, the community, and one’s relationship with it become part of one’s identity. Thus identity reflects a complex relationship between the social and the personal. Learning is a social becoming. The concept of identity is a central element of the theory, just as fundamental and essential as community of practice. It acts as a counterpart to the concept of community of practice. Without a central place for the concept of identity, the community would become “overdeterminant” of what learning is possible or what learning takes place. The focus on identity creates a tension between competence and experience. It adds a dimension of dynamism and unpredictability to the production of practice as each member struggles to find a place in the community.

The focus on identity also adds a human dimension to the notion of practice. It is not just about techniques. When learning is becoming, when knowledge and knower are not separated, then the practice is also about enabling such becoming. Being able to interact with our manager is asmuch part of your practice as technical know-how. Gaining a competence entails becoming someone for whom the competence is a meaningful way of living in the world. It all happens together. The history of practice, the significance of what drives the community, the relationships that shape it, and the identities of members all provide resources for learning—for newcomers and oldtimers alike.

Of course, by the same token, these resources can become obstacles to learning. Learning, once successful, is prone to turning into its own enemy. The long beak that made a species successful can be its downfall if circumstances change. Communities of practice are not immune to such paradoxes. Remaining on a learning edge takes a delicate balancing act between honoring the history of the practice and shaking free from it. This is often only possible when communities interact with and explore other perspectives beyond their boundaries.

¹ Note For more in-depth discussion of this polarity, see Chapter 1 in: Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice; Learning, Meaning and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

In this paper, I relate the conceptual framework of communities of practice to systems theory and I review the career of the concept of community of practice since its inception in my work with Jean Lave in 1987 :

• Part 1 : A social systems view on learning: communities of practice as social learning systems

- Learning as the production of social structure

- Learning as the production of identity

• Part 2 : A learning view on social systems: communities of practice in social learning systems

- Learning as the structuring of systems: landscapes of practice

- Modes of identification

- Identity in a landscape of practices

- Knowledgeability as the modulation of accountability

• Part 3 : Applications and critiques

- A powerless concept: what about power?

- An anachronistic concept: is it history?

- A co-opted concept: on the instrumental slippery slope?

• Part4 : Toward a social discipline of learning

- Practice: learning partnerships

- Learning governance: stewardship and emergence

- Power: vertical and horizontal accountability

- Identity: learning citizenship

The concept of community of practice was not born in the systems theory tradition. It has its roots in attempts to develop accounts of the social nature of human learning inspired by anthropology and social theory (Lave, 1988; Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Foucault, 1980; Vygostsky, 1978). But the concept of community of practice is well aligned with the perspective of the systems tradition. A community of practice itself can be viewed as a simple social system. And a complex social system can be viewed as constituted by interrelated communities of practice. In this essay I first explore the systemic nature of the concept at these two levels. Then I use this foundation to look at the applications of the concept, some of its main critiques, and its potential for developing a social discipline of learning.

The concept of community of practice does not exist by itself. It is part of a broader conceptual framework for thinking about learning in its social dimensions.¹ It is a perspective that locates learning, not in the head or outside it, but in the relationship between the person and the world, which for human beings is a social person in a social world. In this relation of participation, the social and the individual constitute each other. When I refer to “the theory” in what follows, I refer to this version of social learning theory.

¹ Note that there are other dimensions of learning—biological, psychological, cognitive, as well as historical and political in the broad societal sense. The theory does not explicitly address these aspects, though it is, I hope, compatible with theories that do. It needs to be combined in a plug-and play fashion with theories that address these other dimensions to explain specific situations where they are salient.

To improve, we must know our biggest failings.

In the training and development field, our five biggest failures are as follows:

1. We forget to minimize forgetting and improve remembering.
2. We don’t provide training follow-through.
3. We don’t fully utilize the power of prompting mechanisms.
4. We don’t fully leverage on-the-job learning.
5. We measure so poorly that we don’t get good feedback to enable improvement.

1. Minimizing Forgetting, Improving Remembering

It is not enough to help people understand new concepts or even to motivate them to utilize those concepts. If they don’t remember concepts when they encounter situations in which those concepts would be useful, then previous understanding and motivation is for naught.

There are three powerful mechanisms that support long-term remembering, (a) aligning the learning and performance contexts, (b) providing retrieval practice, and (c) utilizing spaced repetitions. Most of our learning interventions do a poor job of providing these mechanisms—resulting in training that may create awareness but doesn’t support remembering or performance improvement.

We need to give our learners more realistic practice using scenarios and simulations. We also need to space repetitions of learning over time—much more than we do now. Instead of trying to teach everything at a basic awareness level, we need to cover less content—but not just present it—instead giving our learners opportunities for deliberate practice.

2. Training Follow-Through

Providing training but no effort to ensure that learners will apply what they’ve learned is the height of professional malpractice. If we assume that learners remember what they’ve learned (which as we just saw is not a given), learners still must (a) remain motivated to apply what they’ve learned, (b) feel that there is some benefit to applying the learning, (c) have the resources and time to put their learning into practice, (d) get feedback and guidance to improve their performance, and (e) be prepared to overcome obstacles and frustrations in applying the learning.

Note how the first two failures create an additive effect—both significantly lessen the likelihood of on-the-job application of the learning. If learners don’t remember, they’re not going to apply what they’ve learned. If learners don’t receive after-training follow-through support, they are unlikely to provide the continuous and persistent focus needed to apply the learning in a way that creates sustainable success.

To reach a credible level of training follow-through we need to (a) engage our learners managers to enlist their support, (b) provide reminders to apply the learning, (c) provide relearning opportunities for that which has been forgotten, (d) enable additional learning to improve and elaborate on the performance, (e) ensure our learners have the resources and time they need to apply the learning and integrate it into their behavioral repertoire, (f) provide coaching support to guide the learning-and-performance process, (g) ensure the learners are incentivized either tangibly with money or perks or intrinsically by aligning efforts with personal values and sense-of-identity, and (h) encourage persistence even in the face of obstacles and frustration.

3. Prompting Mechanisms

Prompting mechanisms rely on one particularly powerful foible of the human cognitive architecture—that our working memories are triggered easily by environmental stimuli. Prompting mechanisms include things like job aids, performance support tools, signage, intuitive cues in our tools and equipment, and some forms of management oversight. They work because they prompt certain strands of thinking, and thus performance. For example, a job aid that lists 5 key interview goals, 10 key interview questions and their rationales automatically triggers in the interviewer a certain way of thinking about interviewing. For example, an interview template might remind its user that interviews are more telling if interviewees are asked to perform a work task or describe how they would perform a work task. Without such a prompt, the interviewer might focus only on how well they think the person would fit into the work culture, etc.

While we are aware of these prompting mechanisms, we are not aggressive enough in their use. If we utilized prompting mechanisms more often with our training and more often as a replacement for training, we’d create better outcomes. If we went looking for grassroots prompting mechanisms already being used and helped spread their use, we’d be more effective. If we evaluated learning facilitators on their use of prompting mechanisms, we’d be more likely to encourage the use of prompting mechanisms. If we asked learners in training to practice with prompting mechanisms, we’d see more being used on the job—and our learners would remember more of what they learned.

4. On-the-Job Learning

We as learning professionals tend to focus almost exclusively on the creation and delivery of training interventions even when we know that our learners are doing a great deal of their learning on the job without any training. Employees learn through trial-and-practice, getting help from others, through social media, by reading task instructions, by using help systems, and so forth. While we have much less direct influence on on-the-job learning than on training, we do have some influence and we ought to use it if we are serious about getting results.

Often the biggest impact we can have is by accessing managers and encouraging them to actively promote learning. Managers can improve learning in their direct reports by (a) making it a point to monitor their employees’ competencies and guide them toward learning opportunities, (b) being approachable and available for questions and advice, (c) creating a culture of learning and information sharing, (d) encouraging data-driven decision-making instead of opinion-driven decision-making, (e) utilizing an experimental mindset, for example by encourage pilot-testing and rapid prototyping, and (f) giving direct reports time for learning and exploration.

We can also have an influence on on-the-job learning by creating and maintaining social-media mechanisms that can be tailored to particular needs. For example, wikis can be used by project teams to get input from various parties and blogs can be used by senior folks to lay out a compelling vision. 
We can encourage better on-the-job learning by improving people’s ability to coach their fellow employees. Too often people asked to coach others do a poor job because they just don’t know what good coaching looks like.

We can utilize diagnostic tools to help people in the organization see things about themselves—or about the organization—that they might not otherwise see. For example, if the organization engages in an effort to improve coaching ability, those being coached can be asked to take a short diagnostic survey on how well their coach is doing in coaching them. If an organization wants to change its culture to one that is more flexible and creative, we can utilize a diagnostic to track progress. We can also use a diagnostic to get the organization talking about specifics—so that employees know what behaviors represent the past culture and which represent the new culture.

There are, of course, other things we can do to directly influence on-the-job learning. In addition, we can change our brand by stopping our tendency to be order takers for training. By changing the way we define our role, we can encourage the business side to be fuller partners in organizational learning.

5. Measurement and Feedback to Spur Improvement

We as learning professionals suck at measurement, creating a vacuum of information that pushes us to make poor decision after poor decision in our learning designs. By only seeking learner opinions about the learning, we encourage a bias toward entertainment and engagement and away from content validity, remembering, and application. By measuring only when the learners are in the training context, we don’t learn whether the learning intervention would generate remembering in a work context that is not like the training situation. By measuring only during the learning event, we measure the learning intervention’s ability to create understanding, but we do not measure the learning intervention’s ability to support long-term remembering. We also fail to examine whether any training follow-through is utilized. By utilizing only low-level questions in our tests of learning, we fail to measure the ability of our learners to make decisions that relate to workplace performance. In short, we don’t get the feedback we need to make good learning decisions.

Maintaining ourselves in a state of permanent darkness, we continue to make terrible decisions in regard to learning design, development, and deployment. We design primarily for engagement and understanding, while ignoring remembering, motivation, and application. We hire and promote trainers and training companies who get great ratings but who don’t help learners remember or apply what they’ve learned. Because our measurement is focused only on training, we fail to engage our business partners to ensure that they are adequately supporting learning application—we also never learn what obstacles and leverage points face our learners when they go to apply the learning in their jobs. We build e-learning programs that encourage learners to focus on low-level trivia instead of focusing on the main points. By abstaining from diagnostics, we leave employees blind to conditions from which they might benefit. Poor measurement enables the first four failures.

The bottom line on measurement is that measurement should provide us with valid feedback. Unfortunately, because we haven’t taken the human learning system into account in our measurement designs—and in our measurement models—we are getting biased information and drawing inappropriate conclusions from poor data.

The Five Failures are Fixable

We as learning professionals—as a whole—though working honorably and with good intentions, are too often failing to maximize our impact. Our job is work-performance improvement. We can start by improving our own work performance.

But instead of focusing on everything—which will certainly overwhelm us—we should focus on the things that really matter. We should focus on our five failures. Instead of following willy-nilly prescriptions that pop like fads from a popcorn popper—we should focus on five things that are fundamental—and inspired by the learning research. We should focus on the five failures.

In this brief article, I have provided strong hints about how to rethink and redirect each of the five failures. While such a brief synopsis is certainly not sufficient to enable you to completely redesign your learning efforts, it should, I hope, motivate you to get started.

The change towards the creative economy has major implications for the nature of what we have called assets. In the industrial age, the assets were physical resources, plant and equipment. Most of the resources were traded in markets and could thus be valued. Taking care of the value of an organization could be understood as managing physical assets and resources.

Now knowledge and people are seen as the major assets. But since neither of them are efficiently traded in markets, their value cannot easily be measured. Knowledge can neither be understood as an asset that can be managed like a physical asset. This is what many people within the Knowledge Management community learned the hard way. Knowledge is not a thing! Thus it cannot be stored, measured or shared.

From a more modern point of view, knowledge creation is understood as an active process of communication between people. Knowledge cannot be stored but is all the time constructed and re-constructed in interaction. Knowledge cannot be shared but arises in action. Knowledge is the process of relating.

The assumption was that learning and knowledge management involve processes that transmit content. This notion derived from the information theory/model of communication developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Their theory created a sender – receiver model of communication according to which person A sends a signal (message/content) to person B, who receives it and then perhaps sends a responding feedback signal back to A. From this perspective, learning and knowledge creation are processes that resemble transmission or sharing of content. This is why schools and other educational institutions still look the way they are.

But the Shannon & Weaver concept was meant to be purely technical. They were interested whether a byte sent was a byte received in a technical sense. They said nothing about the meaning of the bytes. For a human being a message can evoke a very wide range of associations and interpretations depending on the experience and emotional state of the individual. One person’s interpretation is never quite the same as another person’s interpretation. There is no linear causality in the world of human beings.

If learning was understood from a more modern relational perspective it would resemble a process of many voices interacting at the same time. In this way, each comes to know the context in which the other makes meaning. The progression of B’s understanding of A’s story constitutes also a change for A’s story – creating new meaning, learning, for both.

Social media are most meaningful when giving voice to multiple perspectives, making it possible to seek out, recognize and respect differences as different but equal.

All stories continue, meaning that learning takes place, as participants create a more shared understanding of what the other means. Knowledge that used to be regarded as independently existing in people and things – becomes viewed as co-constructed in communication.

Communication does not represent things in the world. It brings people and things into being in constantly surprising ways.

Supportive, energizing and enabling patterns of interaction are the most important “assets” of a modern organization. That is what should be nurtured and taken care of. Communication either accelerates and opens up possibilities or slows down and limits what would be possible. Communication either creates value or creates waste. Communication either creates energy and inspiration or demeans and demotivates.

Information theory is not only unhelpful but harmful, when trying to understand communication between human beings. Communication is not about sharing information but a process of formation.

This article was originally published in eskokilpi.blogging.fi

Continuous acquisition and application of knowledge, skills, and beliefs by individuals, teams, and the  whole enterprise is an essential aspect of high performance organizations. However, barriers to this learning are common in organizations. These barriers must be overcome in order for organizations to have long term success.

Twelve of these common barriers are:

1. Program focus – new programs and services are evaluated in isolation rather than as interdependent parts of the whole organization, e.g., a diversity workshop is evaluated by the participants at the end of the workshop, not by everyone in the organization weeks and months after the workshop
2. Limited resources – learning is not given adequate funding and support, e.g., staff are not given resources to experiment with new ideas before risking large scale implementation
3. Work-learning dichotomy – producing and selling things is valued whereas learning is merely tolerated, e.g., little involvement of supervisors in the training of their direct-reports
4. Passive leadership – leaders don’t ask themselves the hard questions and their boards and co-workers don’t question their actions, e.g., a hospital CEO continues to push for hospital expansion while nobody asks, “Is expansion in the best interests of patients, employees, doctors, and the community?”
5. Non-learning culture – organizational values, assumptions, beliefs, behaviors, and norms do not support learning, e.g., recognizing (praise, reward, promotion, etc.) individual success but not recognizing team success
6. Resistance to change – trying new ways of doing things is not encouraged, e.g., individuals are told to be creative and innovative but not allowed to implement their ideas
7. Not discussing the un-discussable – everyone has a shared but un-spoken understanding that certain issues are not to be confronted and resolved, e.g., one employee’s negative attitudes are bringing down morale of the organization but nobody will talk about this problem for fear of retribution
8. Need for control – managers intentionally and unintentionally use organization charts, policy manuals, rules and regulations, performance evaluation, compensation, budget and expense monitoring, security systems, and work-space arrangements to constrain and limit sharing and applying knowledge, e.g., lines of communication are enforced within an organization to the point that a manager in one department may not talk to a manager in another department
9. Focus on short-term, simple solutions – managers taking the most expedient course of action without solving the long term problems within their organizations, e.g., doing multi-person layoffs to reduce costs when the real problem is not offering products and services that customers want
10. Skilled incompetence – the tendency of managers to avoid embarrassing or threatening interactions, place blame on others, and not accept responsibility for problems, e.g., the leader of a team that failed to complete an assignment avoids asking himself, “What is it about what I am doing or saying that contributes to other people behaving in ineffective and destructive ways?”
11. Blame, not gain language – employees tend to use mostly language that is judgmental and punitive rather than language that facilitates learning, e.g., when something goes wrong, the first words out of a manager’s mouth are, “Who is responsible for this problem?”
12. Selective attention – not seeing (literally) and, therefore, not learning from unexpected events, e.g., two employees attend the same presentation by their CEO but understand the new organizational direction in very different ways

What additional barriers to learning have you observed in organizations?