Better Together: Moving From Push to Pull Learning

Corporate training is outdated. Uncertainty and change in today’s business environment mean that the model employed by many learning organizations to push out pre-built training is increasingly obsolete.

“Training programs are less and less relevant,” said author and consultant John Hagel. “It’s anticipating in advance what people are going to need when they’re going to need it. It tends to focus on knowledge that is already explicit and codified.”

Hagel is the co-author, along with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. The book describes the ongoing shift in power from institutions to individuals through what the authors call “pull,” a mechanism that allows people to find and access relevant resources at the point of need. Hagel said the dominant model for institutions today is one that pushes, rather than pulls.

“Virtually everyone operates on the model that says that your first challenge is to forecast or predict demand and then to organize to make sure all the right people and right resources are in the right place to meet demand,” he said.

That model requires a tightly integrated and executed system, increasingly difficult to maintain in a rapidly changing environment.

“For a variety of reasons having to do with long-term trends playing out in the world, the ability to predict and forecast is more and more challenged and there’s a need ... to think about pull platforms, which allow you to draw out the right people and right resources wherever they’re needed, whenever they’re needed,” he said.

In a pull platform, talent development emphasizes on-the-job learning and informal structures rather than a formal training program. Pull learning gives people the ability to confront challenges and draw out the resources needed to develop solutions.

“The learning is actually a byproduct of facing unexpected challenges and ever-increasing performance requirements,” Hagel said. “If you really took that seriously, you would end up rethinking all aspects of the company from operations, how you design the organization, even what kind of business strategy you would pursue, and certainly what kind of technology platforms you would use to support them in their work environments.”