Learning 2012 Conference - Day 3

Global Leadership Development

The conference has given me a lot to think about in the field of leadership development over the past three days. I will share what I've learned and some things perhaps to think about as we go about developing leaders in an increasingly smaller global space.

There seems to be an increasing awareness of the lack of talent who are capable of taking on global leadership roles. As we grow organizations around the world and expand our footprint in foreign lands, we have the expectation that we will be able to increase our intake of foreign-trained leaders. However, according to Accenture's Rahul Varma, talent development in emerging markets like the BRIC countries is not keeping pace with market growth. In these  countries, 1 in 7 people have access to technology that they can use to grow their capabilities. He says that we need to make the online resources available to those who have access also available offline so that emerging market talent has a chance to compete. 

John Ryan would agree. Ryan's comment on global leadership development is that one can't start too early or too organically. Recognizing the target culture and preparing high potential leaders for the culture, values and culturally defined capabilities within that new environment will go a long way to enabling success. 

The biggest risks we're making in preparing and growing our leadership talent? Ryan says focusing on the individual's performance and not on their agility or potential. According to Ryan (and the Centre for Creative Leadership) it is a person's learning agility and their potential to both learn and grow in breadth and depth of experience that determines a good leader.

Here's a good video with a short explanation of how to maximize global leadership development:

Learning 2012 Day 2

Today's focus: Professional practice and building a centre of competence

Today I focused on learning more about what others are doing and have been thinking about around building communities of practice in the field of learning.

The CIA (yes, THE CIA) has taken an interesting approach to developing their learning pros and also their new learning people and SMEs. They are creating a program that pairs masters with novices to work side by side in a kind of apprenticeship/ mentoring program that they call "tradecraft". They have taken this approach with their other  employees in transferring and mastering field, ahem, techniques that can't effectively be taught in a classroom or a lab setting. This way, the long held 'secrets of the trade' can be passed along to the people who will need to know and will need to use them.
Another interesting thing the CIA is doing is applying action based learning to their development team to help them capture lessons learned and grow in their own governance of the learning professional practice. Cool!

Along the same lines, I also had the opportunity to listen to Richard Culatta from the US Dept of Educational Technology talk about developing local communities of innovation to build better collaborative opportunities in developing people 'outside the box'. Richard recommends having an entrepreneur in residence to give you another way to think about scale and other ways of looking at your audience.

According to Culatta, Michael Porter says that regions that work together as a region work better together than groups that are geographically distributed and increase innovation hugely - you need education innovation clusters. To increase your innovation opportunities, you need to invite people who aren't in your workspace and partner with developers and entrepreneurs to see what you can do to help each other support and develop innovation for your area.

The last piece of today's quest to find information about professional practice is about growing online communities. The best advice I got in this respect is to:

• Take it slow. Communities take time to grow organically and you need to have patience. To help with managerial expectations of instant success, keep the bar low on the number of adopters at first.
• Give your community members something to look at and interact with right away. People don't have a lot of time these days and to have to imagine where they 'may' hang out later, its hard. Populate and encourage people to contribute. 
• Keep your audience and their location and their interaction styles in mind when selecting and developing a platform for hosting your online community. If you don't go where your audience is, they won't 'get' your community and you'll have an empty neighbourhood!

Learning 2012 Conference - Day 1

Today's the first day of the Learning 2012 conference put on by Elliot Masie and it's the first time I'm attending. I am going to share some of what I am learning and also consider what all of this means to myself as a learning professional and also for the organization that I work for right now.

So tonight's opening presentation had 1600 people all together and came in 4 main parts that I found interesting.  Here's what I liked.

Part 1: Richard Cullata, Director Educational Technology, US Dept Education

Richard was called an "edupunk" by Elliott and enjoyed the moniker. His take on edupunks, or eduhackers, was to think of himself as a person largely concerned with using technology as a disruptive force to increase learning. He sees the largest changes in learning will come with the ability to analyse 'big data' and says thst this will change the way we deliver learning. We will be able to see where people are really learning (and where they're guessing for example) to be able to build a better system that gives agency to learners to control their own experiences. Perhaps, he mused, learners will be able to take control of their learning to such an extent that they will be able to demonstrate competency and earn badges rather than take courses and get paper certificates.

Richard is looking to  find 'educational entrepreneurs' who will be able to see the hole end-to-end picture, make learning that is scalable, flexible and functional for these newly activated learners.

Part 2: Lisa Pedrogo - CNN

And now for something completely different! Lisa works for CNN and apparently has been working with the learning consortium for a couple of years. Anyway, they did a piece on creating video for learning and the main rules go something like this:

1. Keep it simple. You probably can only fit about 2 1/2 minutes of video into someone's head at a time so don't feel you have to get too fancy.
2. Plan your storyboard and shots before you get out the camera. This means:

• Figure out what your learners really need to know
• Create a realistic storyboard that captures the essential elements using visuals and sound
• Create your content script and gather images

2. Shoot, but before you tear down, check your shots against your storyboard

3. Edit!!!

You could also use this a start for immersive eLearning and simulations... or really great presentations. You could go here to experience it yourself: 

Nancy Duarte at TED