Seven Ways our Industry is Moving from Learning to Performance

We wanted to connect today about the wonderful experience we recently had at Elliott Masie’s Learning 2015 conference. Elliott and this conference celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conference being held at the Disney properties in Orlando, Florida. The venue certainly fit the upbeat and forward-looking theme of the conference. We found it quite refreshing to reflect on the evolution of the industry over the past twenty-five years. In short, the conference and the industry has moved from a focus on learning—roughly defined as packing more knowledge into participants’ heads—to a focus on performance—the application of reason and skills to successfully accomplish value-added tasks for the organization. Let’s look at seven significant moves in the industry:

1. Less emphasis is being placed on knowledge. Knowledge has become ubiquitous. Access to answers of common as well as obscure questions is only a Google- or Bing-search away. Information that used to be presented in carefully structured lesson plans and later in e-learning modules has been commoditized and as such has lost much of its value.
2. Performance support has become a commonly accepted practice. The emphasis has shifted from acceptance of the concept of specific task-based guidance accessed at the time and place of need to the development of new and creative delivery methods for the approach.
3. Learning activities or events are becoming ever more social. The emphasis has shifted to creating deeper levels of understanding and application through human-to-human conversation either synchronously or asynchronously.
4. Technology provides power. It is finally able to deliver on the promise that we have all envisioned since the advent of PCs in the workplace. The challenge now is how to focus the power that is at our fingertips.
5. The shine on gamification has faded. The corporate learner in general is not enamored by the siren song of delivering learning through “games”— though some of the techniques used to create a good game can be successfully applied to elements of the corporate learning journey.
6. Blended learning carries real weight. The single-event learning episode is dead. Impact in the workplace is best delivered through an orchestrated series of insights, skills, and practice applications held together by intentional scaffolding, all wrapped in the performer’s context.
7. Work has resurfaced as the true focus. In the corporate world, learning for learning’s sake does not add value to the organization. The intent, nature, and context of the work provides both the framework and the focus required to improve performance in the workplace.

The seventh item has been the focus of our work over the last twenty years. Developing methods and tools to bring out the few things that truly matter when equipping workers to perform at their very best is what drives our study and commitment to understanding how individual roles create value in the organization.