The Blended Learner

Banks Under Water

In the halcyon days of bank deregulation before the dotcom and subprime meltdowns, replicants on K Street, Wall Street and Main Street stirred a vortex of chicanery that has come to define our spiraling global economy.

In the midst of that euphoria, a mega bank headquartered in the Bible Belt launched a national advertising campaign called The Financial World.

The campaign was insanely complex and sophisticated. Cutting across currents of irrational exuberance, the TV spots you see here looked like bonfires of the vanities. They warned that explosive markets and financial services were rife with evil, that money was mad, that many bankers, brokers and underwriters were monsters.

It seemed so crazy at the time. Now it looks rather prescient. You can watch the spots and decide for yourself.

Launch

Tenement

Noise

Cityscape

Sharks

Bank chairman and CEO Ed Crutchfield, advertising giant Hal Riney, and movie mogul George Lucas authored the campaign’s dystopian vision. Hundreds of millions were spent producing and broadcasting the spots on Super Bowl Sunday and across the prime time spectrum. 

Yet almost nobody understood The Financial World, least of all employees of the bank itself. 

Everybody knows that advertising gets a brand into the minds and maybe hearts of consumers. Yet if employees act contrary to the brand, consumers will believe the employees and not the advertising. When that happens, everything the right hand (marketing) gives, the left hand (human resources) takes away. The brand becomes tinsel, and the organization comes down with cognitive dissonance.

That’s when learning a brand is critical. 

Becker Multimedia figured this out (it's not in a textbook) when we helped leverage the The Financial World across several dimensions of corporate training: onboarding, brand boot camp, customer service, change management, and leadership development. Our assignment was to train employees who didn't necessarily understand or even like their brand how to live it.

The Igniter shown here is a very narrow slice of the method we used. We composited nether world imagery from Industrial Light and Magic with candid shots of bankers at work and families at play. We created a call to arms directly from Hal Riney to all bank employees (not only the elite) and mixed his authoritative voice with an uplifting song about unity by Celtic music star Dougie MacLean.

Suddenly brand concepts that were obscure and alien began to feel exciting.

The Igniter was a one-hour broadcast that ran weekly for two years on the bank’s satellite network. Together with several other training applications, it turned the CEO’s vision outside in and showed employees how to live their brand rather than wear it or fear it.

The bank gradually morphed into the second largest financial services firm in the United States. The Financial World campaign was eventually retired, but its essence remains highly relevant today:

You enter the financial world in search of a secure future. Instead you find chaos and confusion.

You'll hear those words in "Noise." They could have been minted this morning. With most banks basically underwater, there are very few bankers these days living a brand and throwing out a lifeline. It's not because they can't. They just don't know how.

Being There!

Experiential learning is based on practice. People practice what they’ve been taught by themselves or others. They practice what they invent or clone from precedents. In every case they learn something by doing it, usually over and over until they get it right.

Make way for an exciting new paradigm. Learning by doing now has a partner called learning by being.
The idea is simple. Instead of just training people by giving them tasks to perform, we also give them environments to inhabit. The environments are interactive, multidimensional and multi-sensory.

Once in such an environment, people can learn in bolder better ways through immersion. Immersive learning is the process of seeing and understanding not as a role player, but as a participant.

Immersive learning is not new. You could say it started with baptism and communion, but it's actually older than that. 



The planetarium is an example that began in antiquity and still thrives. Occupying the center of a virtual universe, people engage with the physics of energy and matter. They learn by becoming one with the stars.

Dr. Stan Cohen, a gastroenterologist with the Children’s Center for Digestive Health Care in Atlanta, uses an immersive technology much smaller than a Zeiss (“we make it visible”) projector. Weighing less than four grams, the PillCam SB is a vitamin-sized capsule with a miniature video camera inside. A patient swallows the capsule. The capsule takes flash photography as it travels the length of the GI tract, two shots per second for about eight hours, producing more than 50,000 detailed color images.

The images are transmitted from the capsule inside the patient to a storage device on the patient’s belt. Software transforms the data into a virtual world. Dr. Cohen can then explore that world on a “fantastic voyage” of computer-assisted investigation, detection and diagnosis. 



This is immersive learning in the service of children’s health and it’s incredibly powerful.

Becker Multimedia is creating powerful immersive learning for a real world producer of fantastic voyages. Our assignment is to orient new employees of a cruise line before they ever set foot on a ship. By the time they arrive, they'll have already seen and understood the ship from the inside out, engaging as participants in an amazingly complex and challenging business environment.

Our immersive learning strategy uses a new robotic camera mount called GigaPan Epic. Weighing less than four pounds, the robot is small enough to stand on a tripod and set up in the smallest spaces imagined by ship designers (the shower in your stateroom). 



A photographer tells the robot what to shoot, then presses go. One GigaPan setup may include up to a 360 degree panoramic range-of-motion and a -60/+90 degree tilt range-of-motion.

In other words, the robot can shoot everything you can see if you stand in the same place.

Only the robot sees more than you can. Because the camera is shooting high resolution close ups, details that appear in the resulting photographs are astonishing. (Remember Cortázar's Blow Up, filmed  by Antonioni? This is Blow Up on steroids.)

It’s no exaggeration to say that the human eye cannot perceive what the GigaPan system records, because our eyes don’t have zoom capabilities and our brains lack the robot’s capacity to pay attention.

The robot takes pictures without human assistance. Humans are the sherpas of a GigaPan shoot, High resolution digital close ups are then downloaded to computer and processed by stitcher software. The output of stitching is a detailed panoramic photo that viewers can pan and zoom, seeing things in their totality and also in the finest detail. 



Check out President Obama to get the general idea.

In the course of one week with three GigaPan robots and six sherpas, Becker photographed the entire interior of the largest cruise ship in the world, taking about 50,000 stills stitched into 150 panoramas. It is now possible to see that ship as though you were actually standing in it. 



There's more.

Seeing is the largest part of understanding, but we go beyond seeing. Visitors to the virtual ship navigate completely around various rooms and spaces, zooming into close ups with gorgeous detail. On top of that, they click hot spots programmed onto the photographs. The hot spots support changes of perspective and interactive storytelling.

The interactive panos are published within a larger e-learning Flash application, accessible to new hires and employees everywhere in the world.

So imagine you’re a chef who’s been hired to work in a state-of-the-art kitchen on board a state-of-the-art ship. Immersive learning helps you explore that kitchen and closely inspect its fixtures, equipment and processes. It lets you ask questions, as though you’re on a tour and want the tour guide to explain things. On top of that the guide (the kitchen itself) asks you questions from time to time and scores your answers, making sure that you’re truly present in this virtual moment.

Eventually when you board the ship and start cooking,  you may experience déjà vu. Because in virtual reality, you’ve been there before.

As learning pros ponder one of life’s persistent questions, how to use virtual worlds for training and education, immersion should be near the top of our design priorities. 

In many occupations and industries, there’s just no substitute for learning by truly being there. Once you are, anything and everything is possible.

Irish Culture, Jewish Learning

The first time research brought me to Ireland, I was struck by a national oxymoron: "it is and it isn't." As in...

• The situation is hopeless. Well, it is and it isn't.
• The weather is fine. Well, it is and it isn't.
• Is this the way to Ballyglass? Well, it is and it isn't.

To someone with Germanic bloodlines like mine, it either is OR it isn't. It can't be both. And furthermore once we believe what is, then "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way" forward.

I was recently reminded of the oxymoron by guru Donald Tam, for whom it is a credo. Like most rabbis, Tam's vocation is teaching rather than preaching, questioning rather than vouchsafing. His faith is centered on learning and intellectual growth. Its scripture and devotions are spiritual and yet practical templates of education and training for life.

For Tam, "it is and it isn't" explains how traditional Jewish learning works, and works very well at that! Among other things he told me about two defining principles of Jewish learning. These principles happen to be alien to popular instructional design theory; they are missing from the standard corporate curriculum:

• Empowerment
• Dissent

Principle of Empowerment

Disciples of Robert Mager may scratch their heads. "Are you serious? How can empowerment be missing from the corporate curriculum, when training exists ONLY to enable people to do things?"

Well, that may be true, but a more precise statement of purpose for criterion-referenced instruction is that "training exists only to enable people to do as they're told." That is no closer to empowerment than training animals to perform in a circus.

In contrast to this, empowerment is primarily about engagement. The individual is taught to engage directly with the text, and encouraged to "own" the message.

Training of this kind does not exist to produce workers who do as they're told. It exists to cultivate human beings who can do what they believe is right, necessary and best in any situation.

There is a huge difference between these outcomes. And I am sorry to report that most corporate learning is admittedly about circus-like performance rather than empowerment.

In contrast, Jewish learning is mainly about empowerment and really not about performance. That may be why Jews (like the Irish) tend to argue about everything!

Principle of Dissent

Corporate learning takes direction from business leaders, as it should. However the leadership model that prevails in most businesses is a top-down hierarchy.

I think you'll agree that clarity, certainty and decisiveness are hallmarks of effective business leaders. Most don't condone dissent among employees. They expect performance rather than empowerment. They want employees to do as they're told quickly and expertly.

Is anything wrong with that? Well, there is and there isn't.

At the risk of citing way too extreme an example, I ask you to recall a scene in Schindler's List, when the Jewish inmate of a lager protests the faulty construction of a building. The lager's CEO, Amon Goeth, has the inmate shot on the spot, but not because she was wrong (she was a professional engineer trained to do what is right, necessary and best in any situation.)

No, he ordered her immediate execution because she dissented. She did not do as she was told.

I know, the example is provocative, but I use it to make a point. In contrast to an organizational model premised on obedience, traditional Jewish learning prizes dissent. Jews who are empowered by learning to become more authentic human beings are not expected to agree with authority all the time. On the contrary, they are encouraged to investigate, doubt, reconsider, reframe; and yes, to argue with peers, parents and even teachers (poor rabbi!) for their personal and informed point of view.

A concept that underlies Jewish learning is that no individual stands apart; that everybody exists in the community. For that reason, people who dissent are nonetheless bound by their common purpose, a social contract in practical terms. Dialectics get them to truth together, better than marching in lock step with transient and imperfect leaders.

Fair enough, I thought, but what about productivity and efficiency? A business can't be run with arguments! I asked Rabbi Tam why chronic dissent doesn't lead to anarchy. He had a ready answer.

Yes, Jewish learning is messy; but no, it doesn't lead to chaos. Why? Because underneath the differences is a bedrock of values. Jewish learning promotes empowerment and encourages dissent. But it doesn't tolerate deviance from core values of the faith.

Values rather than discipline and obedience have been enough to sustain the Jewish community through unimaginable vicissitudes. I was amazed to learn that there were never Jewish police until Nazis created them.

And the Irish?

Ireland has a traditionally scholastic Christian culture. But the hero of Ireland's national epic, Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses, is Jewish.

Joyce's vision of his native land was that nothing is absolutely certain for everybody. Everything can be known, and lost, and found again in something different and perhaps nearer the truth. Every student is a seeker. Every teacher is a guide and fellow traveler.

If I were to say that traditional Jewish and Irish culture have much to offer the designers of corporate learning, you could say, well, it does and it doesn't. And I would reply, now we're getting somewhere!

Sales Training that Works

As we brace for landfall of Hurricane Economy-Run-Amok, let's recall a happier time for retail: the eighteenth century.

According to Judith Flanders, in 1759 the greatest retailer of Western Civilization opened his first store in Staffordshire. His name was Josiah Wedgwood. He was the Ralph Lauren of his era.

For Wedgwood then as for Lauren now, life began humbly. With astonishing imagination, both men built vast commercial empires around luxury brands, and made plenty of room for the aspiring middle class to partake.

Flanders explains Wedgwood's success. For him, "selling was an intellectual pleasure, an art form." I know exactly the same is true of Lauren. No business model or formula explains their success. They are beyond the template.

However for most of us in the 21st century, selling has degenerated from a service that informs and delights consumers, into a custodial task of looking after the store.

I don't know why this is, but I suspect it's because selling is no longer a pleasure or an art among those who do it for a living. It's a grind, done for the paycheck. And learning pros bear some responsibility for this.

The typical sales training we design is about memorizing product information and greeting the customer, discovering needs, identifying solutions, overcoming objections, and closing the deal.

Let's be honest, this is manure.

There's nothing wrong with the proverbial five steps of selling, except that almost no retail sales associate actually performs them today. We train sales associates to do things that rarely actually happen on the selling floor.

Why? Because the five steps of selling are behavioral expressions of something that is missing from the average girl or the boy at the counter; something richer and deeper in the soul of a true retailer: Wedgwood's intuitive grasp, his flair, his zest for selling.

In so many words, experts as diverse as Len Berry and Scott Bedbury tell us that retail sales training should cultivate intuition, flair and zest for selling. If it does, then the five steps will occur naturally, maybe inevitably.

But not because associates follow a sterile template. Rather because they can connect more uniquely, relevantly, sincerely with consumers. Those are the selling skills we should teach after the current storm clouds disperse.

Onboarding with Values

Becker Multimedia has designed orientation for several fine organizations, including a global shoe and apparel company that was a top 100 Great Place to Work for many years running.

The company's CEO admired social activist Bill Shore, so I took a look for myself. I found this gem in The Light of Conscience. I imagine it's what Stephen Covey would say about onboarding new employees:

So much energy goes into legislating what people can and cannot do, like efforts far downstream to channel waters that have already taken on a course and speed of their own.  Far too little is spent on the headwaters, on creating experiences that will determine what people want to do and how they want to conduct themselves. The kind of leadership that seeks to inspire rather than control has at its foundation a faith in the conscience of people, that the more they know the more likely they are to do the right thing.

New Year's Resolutions

Learning is often a bridge over troubled water. It gives us the shore on the other side. It transforms who we are, how we behave, what we create. Always for the good. Always for the better. 

The amazing year of 2008—annus horribilis—increases the urgency of learning beyond anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. White collar parasites, blue collar troglodytes, chimeric markets, hollowed out institutions, the collapse of financial systems, industrial meltdown, a teetering global economy. The cross currents of this troubled water are a furious Hell’s Kitchen. For the most part, we ourselves are the demons.

It’s time then for learning pros to pull out the stops for our New Year’s Resolutions. Everybody makes their own. If you’ve got good ones, share them here. I’ve made a Top-10 list for myself and learning pros I work with.

1. Fun. Give pleasure. The journey over the torrent should be thrilling.
2. Games. The silver bullets of learning. Make them deep, variable, challenging.
3. Scenarios. Replace slides with stories. Experience trumps bullet points.
4. Simulations. Make sure learners can do what they know. That’s our job. 
5. Virtual Worlds. Tear down the walls of learning. Make it easy for everybody to enter.
6. Learning Management. Teach more, manage less. Stop shoveling! 
7. Social Networks. It does take a village. Catalyze peer-to-peer learning.
8. Return on Investment. Spend as little as possible on great stuff. Don’t buy crap. 
9. Training Evaluation. As in baseball measure the details. That’s how we win.
10. Instructional Technology. Put your head in the cloud. It’s the future of learning.

Resolutions like these may get us to a better world in 2009. Our time has come to shine. All our dreams are on their way.

Second Thoughts about Leadership Development

Researchers at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, have spent years identifying the core competencies of leadership. The top two they recently reported are hardly surprising:

• Honesty (telling the truth)
• Vision (forecasting the future)

What is surprising is the absence of these competencies among the most successful business leaders of our era (measured by net worth). Many have been profoundly dishonest and deeply mistaken about what the future has in store for their shareholders, employees and customers. 

This may help to explain why executive turnover is at a historic high. But with rare exceptions, it hasn't diminished executive power or celebrity. Senior executives continue to be seen as the smartest guys in the room, even though many act as dumb as the rest of us. 

As learning pros, should we be having second thoughts about the ROI of leadership development? After all, we're the ones who trained those parasites in the C suite. What have we done? 

Over the past decade or so (while research at Santa Clara University was in progress), leadership development grew from a small component of management science into a kind of religion based on the Great Man Theory of history. This religion holds that aggressive middle aged men, with gross appetites and an admirable golf handicap, are mainly responsible for the success of American enterprise.

Oddly though, it wasn't enough to recruit great men and bid up their compensation to well over $50,000 per day (yes, that's what many executives have been paid for their leadership, 365 days a year). Realizing they were not great men in reality, it was also necessary to shore them up with executive education, executive coaching and executive leadership development. We tried to transform the sow's ear into a silk purse. But it hasn't happened.

If the research from Santa Clara University is correct, then the minimum we can expect from true leaders is honesty and vision. After all, we (not they) paid for it! It doesn’t take Dilbert to see that we got just the opposite over the past decade or so. 

As great men are urged to fly first class instead of using a corporate jet and delay cashing in stock options, learning pros can also get to work on reforming our leadership development practices. In line with the professors' research, demonstrated honesty and vision should be required for a passing grade. 

Active Learning

A lot of stupid people are masquerading as "pundits" on national TV and op-ed pages. But one of my favorite real pundits is the gnome of Times Square, Malcolm Gladwell. He is more than a journalist or commentator; he's also a seeker.

His recent essay entitled Late Bloomers is full of meaning for learning pros. He attempts to explain how otherwise ordinary people accomplish great things.

Everybody who designs education and training wants to answer this question. When we have it, we will know how to turn the soft clay that plops down in our classrooms into adamantine jewels that change companies, and maybe even the world.

Romantics believe that brilliance is innate: the gifted are born with genius, it gushes from them as soon as they attain their majority. They rise quickly to the top of their profession and die young; or become crusty relics of their glorious youth.

Really? Gladwell demonstrates that some high achievers are like that. They do great things on the first try, without much training or guidance or self awareness. He doesn't mention John Keats or James Dean, but that's the idea. Nobody can teach wunderkind to perform their feats. It just happens.

Really? Gladwell further argues that most great accomplishments don't happen that way at all. They're not the products of genius, but rather of trial and error. As in, practice over and over and over again until you get it right. This process tends to start early and take a long time; hence "late bloomers."

Gladwell's hunch was more substantially explained last year by Anders Ericsson in an article entitled The Making of an Expert. Research showed that greatness in all fields, cultures and eras has one thing in common: practice. When we practice something over and over and over again, we learn how to do it well.

Ericsson further explained (and this is key) that practice is not about doing what you've been told and already know how to do. "Deliberate" practice is specifically about reaching stretch goals: doing things that are beyond your knowledge and ability, and learning from the experience. Practice is about discovery rather than repetition. Remember that the next time you design a tutorial.

Now you know why your piano teacher was so demanding. Practice two hours a day minimum, or don't bother to compete. After a youth spent in awe of the Beatles, I was startled when I watched Anthology and realized that they really were just four lads from Liverpool who practiced until they nailed it. If only I had kept practicing my guitar!

It's one thing to acknowledge that practice makes perfect, it's another to build it into our instructional systems. We leave no time for practice! In most cases we stuff people with data, call it rapid learning, and send them back to the street to do the real thing on their own.

But education and training are the real thing. With very high levels of interactivity, deeply layered content, and collegial interaction in place of droning narrative, we can teach people how to learn and empower them to spend a lifetime pursuing great accomplishments.

Teacher or Warrior

Learning pros have an interesting choice in this US presidential election between a teacher and a warrior.

One candidate is a warrior who spent his formative years in military service. At the center of many things that a warrior does, the hot core is to fight. He rushes toward adversity and sacrifices everything to overcome it.

A softer term "maverick" has been coined market this warrior, meaning that he is contrary, but that seems insincere. The warrior's modus operandi is not independence, but opposition. He is a soldier and conformist, not a maverick.

In contrast to the warrior, the other candidate is a teacher who spent his formative years in school and public service. He also taught for a decade at the University of Chicago. While there he wrote a lengthy meditation on life and values. At the center of many things this teacher does, the cool core is to impart knowledge.

Teachers are not much good at fighting because they are grossly ineffective in opposition. They view adversity as a problem to be reconciled rather than crushed. Most of the terms used to describe this candidate-teacher tie back to his vocation. He truly is a man of plowshares and not of swords.

The same person cannot be both a teacher and a warrior. The only exceptions occur in our imagination. They have names like Merlin, Gandolf and Indiana Jones. In reality, warriors are not teachers and teachers are not warriors. Warriors are deciders; teachers are seekers.

The United States was founded and has been led mostly by warriors. Our leaders attained distinction on the battlefield rather than at the lectern. The current administration is no different. It has approached every challenge the way warriors must, on a mission.

In a distressed and conflicted world, we may wonder whether a teacher or a warrior is the leader we want to follow next. It is important to realize that there is a sublime difference.

Change in this Election Season

The following quote is from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949).

As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death--the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.