How to be Happy

There's so much gloom and doom about in the papers this year; credit crunch, loss of trust in our public figures, erosion of civil liberties, environmental concerns. It's enough to drive us to drink.

Good on the Guardian then for producing a series of articles on what makes us happy.

How to be Happy by The Guardian

For me the return of the football season is always a time for optimism, although being an Aston Villa fan it doesn't always last as long as I'd like.
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On misrepresenting the facts

I'm a keen follower of comedy and try to see as many live stand-up gigs as possible, with Cardiff as my nearest large city I probably manage to see around 8-10 shows a year. I also download loads of comedy podcasts which help to pass the time when I'm travelling between training venues, so I was interested to read the series of articles that The Guardian have been producing in advance of this years Edinburgh Fringe Festival on comedy and comedians.

One in particular seems to have proved to be particularly controversial. This article by Brian Logan presents a picture of the modern comedy scene in a way that many comedians have challenged, in particular many feel that the comedian Richard Herring has been grossly misrepresented and that his words have been taken out of context to present a misleading vision of his show and of his personal views. The responses to the article from Richard Herring himself and Dave Gorman explain why they disagree with the perspective of the article.

This set me thinking about the nature of misrepresentation and then how easy it can be in a training environment to introduce groups to theories or ideas that are out of context for the group and therefore potentially misleading or (when viewed from a distorted context) just plain wrong.

For instance, in my early years as a trainer I must have explained the Mehrabian communication ratios (Body Language 55%: Tone of Voice 38%: Words 7%) to hundreds of groups as a hard fact about communication. This was what I had been taught and I saw the same data presented and reproduced in many other training sessions and publications. It was only five or six years ago that I was presented with more information about Dr Mehrabian's study which gave me the proper context of it. I've written previously about this here.

However I still come across training sessions, publications and websites that continue to produce the data without the proper context. This is a rather good video from Creativityworks that goes some way towards explaining the issue.



As training professionals we have a responsibility to ensure that we are not only delivering information that is factual but that we ensure that the groups that are attending our programmes have sufficient context to make proper use of the training.

The saying "A little learning is a dangerous thing" become particularly apt when the people leaving our courses have been given tools to use but not the safe and proper instructions on how to use them.
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Training Evaluation

If there's one element of training that causes me more stress than any other it has to be training evaluation. I have a deep abiding hatred of "happy sheets" and tend to spend far too much time agonising over the right type of evaluation to put in place for training programmes. Add in the mind-bending financial gymnastics that make up ROI calculations and I become a potential candidate for the funny farm.

Fortunately there are some great resources out there to help when I hit the inevitable wall.

I suppose you can't really talk about evaluation with mentioning the work done by Donald Kirkpatrick, and this Slideshow is a good starting point; as is this more detailed explanation.

However, it's also worth pointing out that his approach, whilst providing the foundations for most modern evaluation, is not without it's critics.

For a broader perspective on evaluation you could do worse than look at the relevant section on Dr. Roger Greenaway's "Reviewing"website, or by looking at the guidelines provided by the Joint Commitee on Standards for Educational Evaluation

And there's also some excellent resources available at the always useful Businessballs website.
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Behavioural interviewing

Having recently introduced a behavioural competency framework in to my organisation I am now coming to grips with some of the follow-on requests and activities that need to be addressed in order to make sure that the framework beds in properly and integrates itself in to all of our people-focused activities.

One of the most significant of these is the recruitment process, we now need to revisit all of our job descriptions and thread in the relevant behavioural competences so that the interview and selection activities reflect the broad requirements of the roles.

I was really pleased to come across a site that provides a list of behavioural interviewing questions because, in my experience, this is one area the recruiting managers struggle to get to grips with.

If you have a similar problem then this is a good starting point.

Behavioural interview questions
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Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono first coined the phrase "lateral thinking" and has spent many years arguing that our traditional approaches to problem solving are flawed. He has wriiten many books on the subject and is the creator of the Six Thinking Hats approach to problem solving.

If this is a subject that interests you, he writes regular articles on the subject of lateral thinking

Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono
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Why employee development matters

Here's a link to an interesting report on the subject of employee development from Mind Leaders.

Why Employee Development Matters

There are some worthwhile conclusions drawn from the document, which come out broadly in favour of adopting a blended learning approach. There's also a useful list of elements to look for in your company which will help if you are looking to set up an employee devlelopment programme.
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Language, culture and how we think

There's a fascinating article from Lira Boraditsky titled "How does our language shape the way we think?" which looks at the ways in which the structure of different languages influences the speakers understanding of the world. Her description of how grammatical gender in language can effect our thinking is truly eye opening.

Whilst the articles main conclusions are around the way in which language effects how we think, I can't help reflecting that it also reinforces the importance of being clear in how we communicate with others, particularly if we are interacting with people from different cultures. As a trainer, how I communicate is core to everything I do, so how does the knowledge that a phrase as simple as "building bridges" potentially has a different positional context for a German speaker and a Spanish speaker. And does it have a same or similar impact on a second or third generation participant who may use both languages regularly?

To a German the word "bridge" is feminine and can be ascribed feminine terms to describe it (slender, elegant, pretty), whereas to a Spaniard it is masculine and can be ascribed masculine terms (hard, sturdy, strong). Is there a possible implication that gender bias means that they ascribe the activity ("building bridges") with a masculine (power, conflict) or feminine (consultative, caring) action bias? My instinct, if I am developing the wider implications of the article correctly, is to presume that it can.

In which case, WOW! I'm both excited and intimidated by this knowledge. Excited by the possibilities for developing ways to approach subjects using language that is more appropriate and helpful for those I'm seeing to engage, and intimidated by the implications that even a casual, unintended misuse of a word or phrase could bring to the way in which a topic is interpreted.

Also, does it have implications if you examine the cultural language of your organisation?

I've recently had experience of delivering training in my own organisation where some of the ideas I was seeking to explore with a training group were received with some hostility, now these ideas weren't controversial... in fact they were pretty mainstream from a training perspective, but the group were certainly uncomfortable with them and (my interpretation) felt that they threatened their map of the world. I'm hoping to revisit the ideas in future sessions and think this information about language will help me reflect on how I presented them and if there is a conflict between the ideas, my presentation of them and the cultural language of the organisation.
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When Brainstorming Goes Wrong

As a trainer I must have run thousands of brain storming session over the years, some of them more successful than others. In my early days I struggled to understand why some of them worked out well and some of them crashed and burned.

This was pre-web, but it would have been handy if I could have had something to refer to, to help me go through that process of elimination at the very least.

This is a thoughtful post that might help if you're in a similar position

26 Reasons Why Most Brainstorming Sessions Fail (And What To Do About It)
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Penguin Business Thought Leaders

To promote their authors Penguin regularly produce interviews/ podcasts covering a wide variety of subjects. At the moment they have a series of interviews posted on their website under the heading of "Business Thought Leaders", in which writers they describe as having "contrarian views" talk about how we should manage our careers.

The authors are:

Pamela Slim ("Escape from Cubicle Nation")
Seth Godin ("The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit and When to Stick")
Hugh McLeod ("Ignore Everybody")

Penguin Business Thought Leaders
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The Ten Commandments of e-learning

A good blog post from Cath Ellis outlining the ten commandments of e-learning.

The first one sums up a lot of my thoughts in the debate about e-learning; it's not the solution to all our problems, it's not a flash-in-the-pan, it's not going to revolutionise training and development in the short to medium term. It is however an incredibly useful option to have available to you.

1 Put the pedagogy (not the technology) first
Think about what students need to learn then think about how it is best for them to learn it. Only then think about which technology is best used to accomplish this.
Don’t be too ambitious. Start out small (eg. just a discussion board or a group blog) and build on this in subsequent years.

cathellis13: Ten Commandments of e-learning
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Mind Mapping

I'm a big fan of mind mapping, especially when it comes to the initial stages of course design. I find being able to put everything down in a pictorial form and then make links and create a flow really helps me to get a sense of how a training day or programme might fit together.


Kudos then to the folks at IQ Matrix who have spent some time putting together a series of mind maps on a number of subjects, including a very handy "How to Mind Map: A Beginners Guide".

I particularly like the one I've used to illustrate this post: Stress Management: 39 Essential Tips.
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Persuasion

This is very good.

Taken from the new book "Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive" by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin & Robert Cialdini, it's an overview of all of the techniques they describe.

50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive
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Team Building Exercises Wiki

If you're looking for team building exercises, ice breakers or energizers you could do worse that take a dip in to Teampedia.

Teampedia is a Wikipedia- style collection of exercises submitted by trainers and educators that are free for anyone to use.

Teampedia
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Blog: e-Learning help

E-learning is one of the bigger topics in Training and Development circles at the moment. Some are claiming it is sounding the death knell for traditional classroom training, others are of the opinion that it's a flash in the pan that wont last the course. It can get a bit heated as this TrainingZone article demonstrates.

I"m of the opinion that e-learning is a an exciting new frontier for trainers and instructional designers. I'm only playing on the fringes at the moment (my budget wont stretch to a proper implementation) and I'm about to start some limited application with a Senior Management Development Programme that I'll be rolling out in my organisation shortly. It will increasingly play a more and more important part in blended learning programmes.

I've found the WWW incredibly useful as a starting point for researching and trialling some of the applications that are out there, and two blogs in particular are worth recommending for anyone who is dipping their toes in the e-learning river.

e4innovation is by Grainne Cronel who is Professor of e-learning at the Open University.

Jane's e-learning Tip of the Day comes from Jane Hart, a social media and learning consultant.

Both have been incredibly useful to me as I've tried to get my head around the thousands of e-learning possibilities.

100 Inspiring Videos for Leaders

Thomas Edison once said, "Genius is one-percent inspiration, ninety-nince percent perspiration", so what do you do when you're putting all the hard work in but that final 1% is eluding you? The Online College have put links to 100 inspiring videos for you to turn to when you need that final spark to bring something to fruition.

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The videos are divided in to ten categories covering areas such as, "Changing the World", "Inspirational People" and "Staying Strong". The videos include talks, movies clips, short films, performance pieces, conversation and interviews.

Althogh nominally put together for leaders, there's enough here to inspire anyone.

100 Inspiring Videos for Leaders

Disclaimer: May not result in actual genius.
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Podcast: Coaching

Interested in coaching or engaged as a coach in your organisation? Do you want to keep your skills and knowledge refreshed?

Here is a useful series of Podcasts from Results Coaching Systems that could come in handy. Some of the Podcasts are a bit on the long side so make sure you set some time aside to listen.

Results Coaching Podcasts
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View from the Middle

Articles on leadership are ten a penny on the internet, so it's refreshing to find a regular columnist that looks at management from the perspective of middle managers, and Wayne Turmel's articles come with a healthy does of irreverant humour to boot.

Wayne Turmel's View from the Middle

Wayne also produces a regular podcast that takes a similar perspective which is available via iTunes or The Podcast Network.

The Cranky Middle Manager
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Leadership: Models, Frameworks & Theories

There are a lot of leadership models out there; Situational Leadership, Action Centred Leadership, Path-Goal Theory, Servant Leadership, etc. The following sites provide overviews of some of the common models you’re likely to come across.

Leadership Models (1)

Leadership Models (2)

To add some additional context (and building on Don Clark's work in the second link), here is a helpful article which takes and historical look at the development of the different types of theories of leadership; trait theories, behavioral theories, cognitive theories and transformational theories.

Historical context of Leadership theories

If tou're the type who likes to be able to refer to models and frameworks you may find this site useful. It's a huge list of the different types of frameworks that currently exist broken down in to fice categories; strategy models, change models, leadership models, decision-making models and communication models. A handy starting point if you come across a framework or theory that's unfamiliar to you.

List of models, theories and frameworks

Finally the generous people over at RapidBI have produced a series of free, unbranded PowerPoint slides which demonstrate a wide range of management models and theories.

RapidBI PowerPoint slides

More on informal learning

Here’s a couple of articles from ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) on informal learning

Informal learning in the workplace

Informal mentoring
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Creative CV's

OK, so in my normal HR world I'm used to seeing plenty of CV's. Most of them tend to be of the straight-as-a-die variety; 2 or 3 pages of closely typed Ariel/ Times New Roman, achievement or objectives focused and with a degree of creativity applied to the facts (if the statistics are to be believed, the average CV comes with a 50/50 chance of being fabricated.) Traditional, safe and a little bit dull

But there is a different type of "creative" CV, the type that some graphic designers or artists might produce. Take a look at these.

Creative CV's

Talk about standing out from the crowd. I LOVE these! If one of them landed on my desk I would be blown away. I would want to find a reason to give you an interview. I know its not the proper business focused, objective way, but how many CV's have ever triggered an emotional reaction in you?

And on a similar topic: 100 really creative business cards
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Learning and listening

A couple of useful podcast for you.

The Project Management Podcast by Cornelius Fichtner. An informative resource for anyone who is interested in developing their project management skills.

And

Managers Tools by Mike Auzenne and Mark Horstman, a weekly business podcast focused on helping business professionals become more effective managers and leaders.

Both handy additions to your iTunes library.

Cube Grenades

This is why I love the web so much.

Recently I was digging around Seth Godin's site for the post I made a couple of days back when I came across a reference and link to Hugh McLeod's blog. Hugh is an artist who, amongst other things, revisited the design for the cover for Purple Cow, one of the books by Seth Godin.

I was initially attracted by the art, but then some of his posts started to grab my attention. In particular his post on Cube Grenades fizzed it's way in to my brain. Cube Grenades are little thoughtful or challenging pieces that you can hang by your desk to provoke conversation with your co-workers and team members. In part he’s building on an earlier thought that he had, that social networks develop around social objects. And that these social objects can be the starting points for really interesting conversations and interactions. As Hugh says;

“This, I believe, is where my cartoons work the best - “Cube Grenades” - small objects that you “throw” in there in order to cause some damage – to start a conversation, to spread an idea, etc.”

I can't find the words to express just how much I love this idea, a lot of us will have come across pictures or quotes or objects that have resonated with us for some reason or another, that have generated ideas that we’ve wanted to share with others or given us insights that we might not have reached otherwise. A lot of people will have a Dilbert Cartoon or something similar on their wall which feeds the world-weary, cynic in all of us (confession: I start every day with a visit to the Dilbert website. It has just the right amount of world-weary cynicism to set me up for the day) but how much more powerful would the message you send out be if you had something that engaged on an emotionally or intellectually positive level.

Most of the art on Hugh’s site is free to download, on the sound principle that if you enjoy it then you might come back and purchase one of his high quality prints. Some of his Cube Grenade cartoons are here and there is loads more on his site for you to benefit from, including some really interesting thoughts on the subjects of advertising and marketing. I've included the free widget he has made available in the sidebar of this blog.

Oh, and Suz, if you're reading this, I really, really want one of his Moleskin notebook pieces.
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How We Learn from TED 2009

TED is an annual conference, first held in 1984, which started with aim of bringing together people from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence TED) to share ideas. It challenges some of the finest minds in these fields to stand up and “give the talk of their lives” in just 18 minutes. Perfect for the diminishing attention spans in our ADD world.

The TED’s website, whose tagline is “ideas worth spreading”, provides access to many of these talks at no cost. At the moment there is something like 400 talks archived and accessible. You can download them and use them providing you keep within the boundaries of the Creative Commons Licence (as I have with the Seth Godin video below), and you can subscribe and get the latest videos sent straight to your inbox.

One of the categories that you can currently access is titled How We Learn and includes 42 video from speakers like Steven Pinker, Bill Strickland, Dave Eggers and Michael Merzenich.

Incidentally, and related to yesterdays post, I found this talk from this year's TED by Seth Godin about "Tribes".

Seth Godin on "Tribes" at TED 2009

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Tribes

Seth Godin is an author and a leading voice on how to make your marketing more effective in the modern, digital, connected age. He's been described as 'the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age'

His latest book, Tribes, looks at how you go about building a movement that people will want to follow:

"...to bring together a tribe of like-minded people and do amazing things. There are tribes everywhere, all of them hungry for connection, meaning and change. And yet, too many people ignore the opportunity to lead, because they are "sheepwalking" their way through their lives and work, too afraid to question whether their compliance is doing them (or their company) any good... if you have a passion for what you want to do and the drive to make it happen, there is a tribe of fellow employees, or customers, or investors, or readers, just waiting for you to connect them with each other and lead them where they want to go."

By way of a freebie, Seth has collaborated on a list of 100 tactics you can use to help build your Tribe.

100 Ways to Build your Tribe

He's also produced a free e-book on the subject of Tribes, a sort of wisdom of the crowds piece with stories and ideas from members of his Ning group. The link is on his regularly updated Blog.

Tribes e-book
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Blog: Creative Energy Officer

I really like this blog from Jeremy Nulik. It's a good example of a well written business focused blog that has some good insights in to the elements that make businesses (and the people who run businesses) successful. Or not so successful in some cases.

Creative Energy Officer

Incidentally I found this blog when I was searching for some tips on how to make this blog more interesting (I know, I know.... I'm still working on it!). The excellent advice it contains is nagging away at me even as I write this.

How to make sure no one will read your blog (or listen to your ideas)

Active reviewing

Dr, Roger Greenaway has a really useful website providing articles, tips and advice around the subject of active (experience-based) reviewing.

Active Reviewing

There's also links to video based resources for those interested in the subject.

Academic Earth

This is an interesting idea. Six of the top US colleges (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton & Stanford) are making videos of their lectures available on the Academic Earth website. Now under normal circumstances getting access to learning material of this quality would require you to be a student at one of the colleges and all that entails, but Academic Earth have the goal to give “…everyone on Earth access to a world-class eduction.”

They state:

"We are building a user-friendly educational eco-system that will give internet users the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.”

If you search under the “Entrepreneurship” section you’ll find all sorts of lectures on subjects that are really relevant to business today. I found material on leadership, coaching, finance, marketing, negotiation…. and loads more, all delivered by some of the top business names. People like Guy Kawasaki, Jerry Kaplan, Carly Fiorina, Trip Hawkins, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page will always have something interesting to say.

Naturally they also deliver more traditional academic subjects like biology, chemistry, English, physics, mathematics, etc.

Academic Earth has an ambitious goal, but I’ve always believed that this is exactly the sort of thing the internet ought to be utilised for. The capacity to deliver the very best learning materials to anyone in the world, for free and at their convenience is well within the capability of the system. All that’s needed is the content and the will of the content owners to allow that material to be distributed. Unfortunately at the moment there are some licencing issues which can affect a particular lecture if you don’t reside in a country that has permission to view it, but as far as I can tell that is the exception rather than the rule (and you could always use an anonymizer or proxy to hide your country of origin anyway).

There’s so much potential here. I really hope it achieves its ambition.

Persuasion and Creativity

Two sites from the same stable jam-packed with free links and resources around the subjects of creativity and persuasion.

For loads of material around the subject of creativity have a look at the Creating Minds website .

If your area of interest is persuasion then visit the Changing Minds website.

Incidentally, a great introduction to the area of persuasion is the excellent book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, it's well worth having in your resource library.

The Go Game

There's an interview in the Guardian with Mei Lei and Chris Olson, the creators of the Go Game; an interactive, multimedia, real world adventure game.

I really, really want to find an excuse (and a budget) to use this for a learning event.

Guardian Go Game Interview

Alltop and Content Aggregation

I’m not 100% sure what to file this under, or how practical it is in reality, but Alltop just intrigues me so much. I can see it has potential but I can’t quite wrap my head around the best way to make use of it. Alltop is a content aggregator and the creators explain that:

“The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed.”

For example the Alltop page on leadership give you a good idea of what to expect.

http://leadership.alltop.com/

On the downside it seems to be very US-centric, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the greater scheme of things but I do like to know what’s going on in the UK and European training arenas

I think this one has to sit and settle with me for a while to give me a chance to think through whether it is something that helps me or something that distracts me…. and on the subject of distraction take a look at http://humor.alltop.com/ if you want to lose an hour or so.

By the way, one of the creators of Alltop is Guy Kawasaki who is considered by a lot of people to be one of the top modern thinkers on the subject of Marketing. He writes a consistently interesting blog which can be found here.

Guy Kawasaki Blog

Getting Things Done (GTD) (2)

More on the Getting Things Done philosophy.

The iTunes store has a link to a useful podcast by Steve Robbins which covers a whole host of personal productivity topics. Most of the podcasts are only 5-6 minutes in length which makes them ideal for listening to during the journey to work or if you just want a quick learning hit.

Get-It-Done Guy on iTunes

Getting Things Done (GTD)

For the uninitiated, Getting Things Done (GTD) is a productivity/ time and task management methodology developed by David Allen. Advocates describe it as "a relatively simple methodology for getting stuff done in your life".

The good folk over at 43 Folders have put together a useful wiki to introduce the main concepts and provide links to some great resources.

43 Folders GTD wiki

If, like me, you find yourself constantly struggling to fit in everything that you need to do then GTD might be the answer you've been looking for. It's particularly "geek" friendly and there are loads of online tools available to support it.

Black Swans

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the excellent "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" (a must- read if you're at all interested in why banks and finance houses were institutionally incapable of stopping the financial melt down we're all experiencing) has written an article with some guidelines for avoiding similar situations.

Ten Principles of a Black Swan-Proof World (opens as a PDF)

I particularly like number 3, People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus; and number 4, don't let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant

For more of his observations visit Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Talent Code

Business Guru Tom Peters interviews Dan Coyle on his new book "The Talent Code"

"It started when I was paging through the sports page and noticed that there were an unusual number of top tennis players from this tiny club in Moscow. I looked into this more. As it turned out, this club, which is at the same latitude as Churchill, Manitoba—meaning it's not exactly tropical—had one indoor court. In fact, more world top-20 players came from this tiny club with the one indoor court than came from the entire United States.

So it got me thinking, what else is like this? Of course we're all aware of these quasi magical hotbeds. There's the baseball players from the Dominican Republic, this tiny island, that make up about 11% of the major leagues now. There are the soccer players from Brazil. In the world of math, there's this one high school in Bulgaria that produces all these incredible champions. In pop music, there's a little music studio in Dallas that's produced a high number of American Idol finalists, Jessica Simpson, Demi Lovato, Ryan Cabrera. Incredible, really."

I'm particularly intrigued by his description of "Deep Practice" as a method of learning more effectively.

Dan Coyle interview

Free Training Resources

Free resources and articles from Business Training Works.

Business Training Works Free Resources

The topics covered are Customer Service, Etiquette, Leadership, Productivity and Train The Trainer.

Jay Cross on Informal Learning

Former CEO of the eLearning forum Jay Cross is now promoting the concept of “Informal Learning” to a wider audience. The concept itself is interesting in that is recognises that most people access learning in very informal ways, such as through conversations with friends and peers rather than through formally designed training interventions.

There seems to be a broad acknowledgement that “informal learning” does take place on an incredibly wide scale and is an important part of the process of acquiring new skills and knowledge, but what we don’t always acknowledge as learning professionals is just how important it is, perhaps this is because it lies outside our point of direct intervention and is therefore not within our control, or that it’s too difficult to apply a meaningful measure to. I know that when I need to educate myself on a new topic, whether that’s research for a new course, learning a new recipe or working out how to defeat some some alien bad guy in a video game, my first port of call will be Google followed most of the time by informal discussion with my peers. It’s interesting that this happens mostly because I want to learn these things, not because I’ve been told to learn them. When I am motivated to learn I will find a way that suits me and with an urgency that’s appropriate for the situation.

It would appear to me that the vast majority of learning takes place without any intervention from a learning professional at all, and the questions I am pondering are around:

• How do I make that process more effective?
• Would it help if I could facilitate access to these informal networks/ methods for people within my organisation, or does that intervention break it by definition?
• How do I measure the extent and effectiveness of informal learning?
• What does this mean for instructional design if anyone is allowed to create formal “informal learning” spaces?

These aren’t new questions but I do feel the direction I am approaching them from is different.

Some people have suggested that his ideas don’t take in to account the value that training professionals bring to the process of learning, but for me acknowledging the scope and importance of “informal learning” doesn’t ring the death knell for classroom training, elearning or any other form of traditional training intervention. What it does is add an interesting new dynamic to how I think about tapping the learning potential in my organisation.

Also of use are the links he provides to books and documents via the Internet Time Group. Well worth having a dig around.

Free Training Resources

Free training resources on Training, Recruitment & selection Interviewing and Management Development from The Development Company.

Development Company Free Training Resources

You can also register for their free newsletter which will give you access to more materials.

Useful Sites

Here are a few of my favourite Training & Development websites

TrainingZone
An interesting online forum/ resource for UK T&D professionals

Businessballs
A useful website with lots of stuff that will interest T&D professionals.

Big Dog & Little Dog's Bowl of Biscuits
Despite the off-beat name this is has long been one of the best non-commercial T&D sites on the web.

Communication

A couple of sites with useful resources about body language and communication.

The Art of Communication
A useful look at the art of communication from Spearhead Training. A good starting point for anyone who is investigating this area.

Body Language Expert
A site that specialises in features and articles about body language

Dealing With Poor Performasnce

A useful article from Mind Tools about identiying the root cause of poor performance and the potential solutions.

Dealing with Poor Performance