At the IITT National Trainers Conference it was great to see Nigel Paine make the keynote, even though he'd only five hours earlier got off a plane from Australia and was clearly feeling it. Anyway, what an effort and well appreciated by the attendees.
Nigel talked about five key shifts evident in workplace learning:
- From courses to environments.
- From knowledge delivered to knowledge shared.
- From control to free flow.
- From individuals to communities.
- From skills to values and attitudes.
Can't argue with that. But what really caught my imagination was the two pictures he showed - one of his bike and another of a frog he encountered in his garden in Australia. Organisations are more like frogs than bicycles, he maintained. You simply can't take them apart and re-engineer them as you would a bike. If you do, they're apt to die.
Organisations can't be re-engineered because they're organic, they're made of people. Which is why all that business process re-engineering nonsense achieved so little except as income for major consultancy firms.
Long live the frogs.
Clive, I find looking at a PowerPoint presentation without audio about as informative as staring at inkblots. That's why I always narrate anything I'm going to put on SlideShare. Posting a silent PowerPoint insults the audience.
ReplyDeleteDisecting frogs in Australia isn't really a bad thing is it?
ReplyDeleteAny kind of learning is better than watching your fav soap on the tellybox. Or a combination of both, Distance Learning for example.