Posts Tagged ‘objection’

Objection #15 - The Silent Yet Deadly

Jun 20, 2008 Social Learning SIG

Objection #15 is silent. No real words are said. Yet you can never move forward. It is like neither denying or admitting an accusation. Those who ‘have the power’ won’t commit one way or another. Rather, the issue is avoided.

Answer: These people have not been convinced yet. They need to see real value. To do this, start using it yourself. Get others to use it. It will spread. Before you know it, those who make the decisions will see that it is beneficial. They will see the value. That’s all they wanted in the first place.

That concludes the 15 Objections to using Social Learning. Below is a list of them all:

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Objection #12: How Will You Measure That It Is Working?

Jun 17, 2008 Social Learning SIG

When anyone throws up Objection #12 you know that they don’t quite ‘get it’ yet.  And that is OK.  Your job is to help them get it.  Some times we hear “Right now we know when people have learned.  We have them take tests.  They fill out evaluations.  We can see in the LMS that they have taken a course.  How will we measure this learning?”

Answer: It is true that you will not be able to see who has taken which courses or that they have passed a test or that they really liked a class (Level 1 evals - which is what most organizations do anyway).  We cannot measure something new using the old methods.  We can, however, measure using other methods not native to training or learning.  The methods used are web analytics.

  • When millions of people search on Google, what are they trying to do?  They are trying to learn.  You can measure the number of times employees perform a search.  They want to learn something from every search.
  • Then, look at what they are searching for.  That will give you a great insight.
  • What information are they sharing?
  • What are they commenting on?
  • How many wiki pages were created?
  • What were they created for?
  • How many blog postings were created?
  • When was the last time someone logged in? (if logging in is part of the process)
  • How many forum questions were asked?
  • How many answers were given?
  • What are the most viewed pages?
  • Define ‘active’ and measure how many people are active.
  • How many people have become active in the last _______?
  • You can analyze not only where people are going, but how they get there, how long they stay and what they do when they are there.

This may seem odd for some.  But we also need to remember that much of what they learn we cannot account for.  It happens, but we have no way to measure it.  Although this does not verify the transfer of knowledge or skills, it is a pretty good indication.  It is a new way of measuring learning.

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Objection #2: What Does This Have To Do With Training?

Jun 3, 2008 Social Learning SIG

Objection #2 comes from many in the training field. In fact I have heard this MANY times. “This doesn’t have anything to do with training.”

Answer: For the most part, you are right - it doesn’t have anything to do with training on the outset. But it does have to do with learning. Training is only a subset of learning and there are many ways to help others learn.

Too often we, in the training field, get stuck on how to ‘train’ rather than on how to help our ‘customers’ learn which in turn drives results, which is the real goal. Our focus should be on LEARNING, not training.


Why? Training can only do so much.

You may have seen the long tail before. It was first used in 2004 to describe the business strategy of Amazon and Netflix. Basically, their model allowed them to not only hold the most asked for items (which in a regular distribution model would be the only items economically feasible) but it also allowed them to hold (much) less asked for items. In fact, those seldom requested items held a large portion of their sales and of the demand from customers.

The same is with social learning. (You will have to forgive my color blindness…) The left most color (yellow-ish?) and the middle color (orange-ish?) are what formal training can deliver. It concentrates on only those things that are economically feasible given the limited resources (sexual harassment, company products, communication skills, etc.).  A lot of people need more information / knowledge / skills (Y axis) to do their jobs, and yet training cannot touch a large part of the knowledge that is needed by only some of the employees (how to fill out the exception report, where to find information on little known refunds, how to deal with random situations). Social learning (green) does not replace training.  It may overlap a little (orange-ish, again) and compliment a lot, but it takes care of the knowledge that training will never get to.

So, in the end, social learning compliments training and covers knowledge formal training was never able to  reach. It is in addition to, without having huge amounts of formal resources needed to deliver.

And, again, our goal in the end is learning.

How would you answer this objection?

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