Are You Committing Learning Malpractice?

We know what good learning is. The ways that formal learning, performance support and social learning work best are well known. Unfortunately, they’re not practiced reliably in what organizations deliver.

The reasons for bad learning aren’t surprising but the overall outcome is. Old habits are hard to break and change is hard to sustain. The costs are real. When you invest in learning initiatives that follow old principles, you are throwing money away. Software training that precedes the launch by more than a day or two, typical content-and-a-quiz e-learning, the average training event, even social media initiatives in the wrong context, are time and money wasted. And that is a crime.

Our learning responsibility should be to support formal learning, performance support and social learning. Leaving any one to chance is a form of learning malpractice.

Our formal learning goals should be retention over time and transfer to all appropriate problems, and no inappropriate ones. What leads to effectiveness? Initial powerful awareness of the issue, models to guide performance, appropriately annotated examples and meaningful and sufficient practice. But rather than focus on those effective practices, we watch as the event approaches, leading to a lack of emotional engagement and a surplus of drill and kill. Lack of engagement obstructs learning, rote knowledge testing doesn’t lead to transfer to real problems and insufficient practice means learning is gone by the time it’s needed.

Performance support fares no better. We are concerned with providing the right tools, resources and information for performers to do their job well. Tools should be at hand, available when needed and easily found. Instead, we find a veritable maze of resources, like portals where resources are organized by providers, not by task. Search mechanisms are simplistic or opaque if they exist at all and there is no information architecture or management.

In this time of increasing change when answers are often irrelevant before they are formalized, people need to support each other. Innovation is a necessary key to survival and tight execution is only the cost of entry. Innovation is social and your worth is not just your skills but your network. Performers need to find undocumented answers, collaborators for emergent problems and engage in ongoing communication with colleagues and mentors.