Week 3 KM 630

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Week 3 KM 630

• Training Strategies and Instructional Design
  Needs and KM/ Knowing Your Users/ Knowledge
  Profiling

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• 1) Examine the skills and theory behind
  sound instructional design practices and
  competencies in knowledge management and other
  learning contexts.2) Explore the value of
  knowledge profiling/knowledge harvesting to form
  the basis of end user needs assessment in varied
  learning environments. 3) Identify methods of
  learning about users/workers information needs
  and knowledge transfer barriers.
• 4) Familiarize themselves with the
  literature of instructional design within KM and
  information technology settings.5) Investigate
  instructional models and methods appropriate to
  learning needs of various users and clientele
  (e.g., staff, professional colleagues, students,
  adult learners, seniors, children) 6) Gain the
  skills needed to design a presentation by
  creating a lesson plan/outline.

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"Teaching Smart People How to Learn" by Chris
Argyris

• Business success depends on the ability to
  learn but most people/organizations don't know
  how to learn.
• They excel at solving problems created by
  external forces but they fail to recognize that
  to learn one needs to look inward at one's own
  behavior.
• Argyris states there are two kinds of learning
  which he names single loop and double loop.

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Overview of Text Reading

• Teaching Smart People How to Learn
• Chris Argyris (Published May-June 1995)
• How to Make Experience Your Companys Best
  Teacher
• Art Kleiner and George Roth (Published
  September-October 1997)

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Teaching Smart People How to Learn

• Realization that most human behavior patterns
  block learning in an organization
• Discussion of why well-educated professionals are
  prone to these patterns
• Analysis of how all companies can improve the
  ability of their managers and employees to learn

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Teaching Smart People How to Learn

• Success in the market place increasingly depends
  on learning, yet most people dont know how to
  learn
• Learning Dilemma
• Companies have difficulty addressing this issue
• Some companies are not aware this issue exists.

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Argyis Summarizes Our Typical Misunderstanding of
Learning

• Two mistakes made in the effort of becoming a
  learning organization
• People define learning too narrowly as mere
  Problem Solving
• The common assumption that getting people to
  learn is largely a matter of motivation

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Types of Learning
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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How Professionals Avoid Learning
Good at Single Loop Learning not Double Loop
Learning Put simply, because many professionals
are almost always successful at what they do,
they rarely experience failure. So whenever
their single-loop strategies go wrong, they
become defensive, screen out criticism, and put
the blame on everyone but themselves. In
short, their ability to learn shuts down
precisely at the moment they need it most
themselves. p. 83
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Single Loop Learning

• Thermostat example
• Single loop learning involves correction of a
  deficiency or completion of an action without
  questioning why??
• Actions lead to consequences but the governing
  variable behind those actions is not addressed

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• According to Argyris, single-loop learning is
  learning that is primarily one-dimensional. For
  example, a leader may believe that he/she has
  nothing to learn from a subordinate, but that the
  subordinate can learn from her. Therefore, the
  interactions between the leader and the
  subordinate will be primarily one-directional, or
  single-loop.

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Introduction Creating a Learning Culture
Strategy, Practice, and Technology by John Seely
Brown and Estee Solomon Gray ,Palo Alto,
CaliforniaAugust 2003

• For those paying attention, the management
  conversation about learning had begun almost two
  decades earlier, when Chris Argyris and Donald
  Schön published Theory in Practice.
• They challenged organizations to recognize the
  limitations of single-loop learning, familiar
  from the quality movement, which fosters the
  ability to detect and correct errors within the
  frame of current assumptions and policies, and to
  aspire instead to double-loop learning, the
  ability to detect, determine, and perhaps even
  modify the organizations underlying norms,
  policies, and objectives.1

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Double-Loop

• In contrast, Argyris argues that effective
  leaders engage in double-loop learning processes,
  which involve a reciprocal interchange between
  leaders and teams. This means, of course, that
  leaders coach and direct and instruct their
  teams, but that teams also help their leaders to
  learn.

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Is Knowledge Transfer Fostering Single or Double
Loop Learning?

• Your thoughts

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Behavior Theory

• Espoused Theory How people think they behave
• Theory-in-use How people actually behave

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Theory-in-use

• Governing Values of theory-in-use
• To remain in control
• To maximize winning and minimize losing
• To be as rational as possible

The purpose of all these values is to avoid
embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or
incompetent
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Defensive Reasoning and the Doom Loop

• Encourages individuals to keep private the
  assumptions, inferences, and conclusions that
  shape their behavior and to avoid testing them in
  a truly independent, objective fashion.
• Performance evaluations are tailor-made to push
  professionals into the doom loop

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Your Fired
Learning from The Apprentice Opportunities for
performance improvementEdward T. Reilly.
Employment Relations Today. Hoboken Winter 2005.
Vol. 31, Iss. 4 p. 15 (8 pages)
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Learning How to Reason Productively

• Managers must become aware of their defensive
  reasoning and its results otherwise any change
  will just be a fad
• Change must start at the top
• Connect the program to real business problems
• Learning to reason productively can be emotional,
  but the payoff is great

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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Common company mistakes

• Defining learning too narrowly as problem
  solving
• Assuming that learning is largely a matter of
  motivation

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Conclusion

• Effective learning is the product of the way
  people reason about their own behavior
• Companies need to make the ways managers and
  employees reason about their behavior a key focus
  of organizational learning and continuous
  improvement programs

Teaching Smart People How to Learn
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An Interview with Chris Arygris
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Where are organizations now? And where are they
headed with respect to learning? In all
fairness, there are Hr and training people who
understand the difference between single and
double loop learning. They say they havent been
able to concentrate much on double loop learning
and that they didnt they had permission and
enthusiasm from top management.
Additional Information
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How to Make Experience Your Companys Best Teacher

• Author Art Kleiner George Roth
• Originally published in Sep-Oct 1997
• Key Points
• A Different Approach to Institutional Learning
• Create a Learning History Piece by Piece
• Why Learning Histories Work
• The Future of Learning Histories

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The Learning History

• Is a written narrative of a company's recent
  critical event, nearly all of it presented in two
  columns.
• In one column, relevant episodes are described by
  the people who took part in them, were affected
  by them, or observed them.
• In the other, learning historians--trained
  outsiders and knowledgeable insiders--identify
  recurrent themes in the narrative, pose
  questions, and raise "undiscussable" issues.
  The learning history forms the basis for group
  discussions, both for those involved in the event
  and for others who also might learn from it.

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A Different Approach to Institutional Learning

• Not as easy as individual life experience
• Learning history
• A written narrative of a companys recent set of
  critical episodes (20-100 pages)
• Developed at MITs Center of Organizational
  Learning
• Used as the basis for group discussions
• Based on an ancient practice community
  storytelling

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Creating a Learning History Piece by Piece
Title Full-column prologue
.....
Commentary, insights, and questions by the
learning historians
Title or position of participant Participants
story with the use of quotations

Full-column interlude
.....
Generalizable lessons can also be provided by the
learning historians here.
Title or position of participant Participants
story with the use of quotations

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Why Learning Histories Work

• They build trust
• They raise issues that people would like to talk
  about but have not had the courage to discuss
  openly
• They have proved successful at transferring
  knowledge from one part of the company to another
• They help build a body of generalizable knowledge
  about management

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The Future of Learning Histories

• Learning history is still emerging from its
  experimental stage in 1997.
• Many see this as a first generational step in KM
  it is foundational as an inventory.