US marketers are still oblivious to Web 2.0

Zoomerang will be publishing a study next week which reveals that even though Web 2.0 has hogged the business headlines (for what, a couple of years now?) 8 out of 10 marketing professionals still are not even familiar with the term. At the other extreme, one third of those who have latched onto what is going on are using web 2.0 approaches in their marketing, and most of those (70%) are having success.

Assuming the study is correct, what does this say about how in touch with their markets most marketers are? Marketing is all about understanding consumers and reacting to (if not anticipating) shifts in interests, attitudes, values, and behaviours. It is hard to imagine that web 2.0 (which, despite what its detractors may say, heralds a megashift in consumer culture) has gone unnoticed by the hordes of marketing wonks, their agencies, researchers, and advisors. I could accept that they don't really understand it or that they dismiss it as a temporary anomaly -- but that they have never even heard the term web 2.0 is just scary.

Corporations (particularly of the kind reviled by The Cluetrain Manifesto) are notoriously slow to catch on to or care about what their customers or potential customers are doing. You sort of expect that level of indifference in the folks in Finance or Production or even in the boardroom. But if anyone should be intimately in touch with the chaotic changes in the consumer world, it's the Marketing people. Maybe there's a new digital divide to think about: those who care about what is going on in their professional area have tuned into digital media; those who do not are still waiting for the memo from corporate.

$100 laptop finally ships

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) $100 laptop 2B1 Children's Machine laptop developed by MIT's Media Lab has finally made it to the real world. The first few hand-built units of this little machine made it from Taiwan to the US yesterday. It's a nifty green-and-white device that looks suitably toy-like. I hope it is robust, given its intended market.

The technology is interesting: it's intended to be both a computer and a wireless router, so that each machine forms part of a mesh even when the laptop is closed. It comes with a small solar-powered repeater that can be nailed into a tree to get better range. The laptops run Linux using AMD's Geode processor, and have 128MB of memory and 500MB of flash memory rather than a hard disk.

Apparently a bunch of central American countries have put in a purchase order, so it's going to get out there as soon as production-line versions are available. Congratulations to Nick Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, and of course to OLPC.

Changing cultures through training?

As a growing awareness spreads through the boardrooms of South African companies that the internet is not only coming, it's already been here a while and it's changed fundamentally the way customers (and employees) think and behave, a ripple of alarm goes out: are we able to survive, even thrive? Or are we corporate Titanics, hurtling full-speed into the pack-ice while the officers waltz blissfully in the ballroom?

And when the realisation finally sinks in that not only their structures and processes but also their corporate cultures are handicapping attempts to adapt to the new digital age, there's inevitably a demand for more and more training.

I have done a lot of what passes for culture change work in my life, and it still irks me when someone asks me to help them develop a training programme that will change the organisational culture of one group or another. It's not that senior managers don't understand that there is much more to engendering such a change than simply training people, it's that they don't want to be bothered with anything more complicated. And they certainly don't want to be in the awkward position of having to acknowledge that they themselves may be a large part of whatever problem it is they have defined.

You can’t change an organisational culture simply by “training” one person at a time (unless of course you start at the shareholders and the CEO and work downwards, but that’s another story). Bottom-up culture-shifts cannot be induced by senior management -- they usually only happen as uncontrolled revolutions initiated by employees themselves. That happens more often these days of course, with the disruptive hierarchy-oblivious culture of digital natives bubbling up into the lower levels of organisations and challenging legacy processes that were installed way before the web-born collaborative age. But the culture of openness and sharing which the web has fostered is, unfortunately, rarely the kind of culture-shift that upper management would like to induce.

Training is not futile -- far from it -- but in order to get the intended culture-shift momentum going training has to be concentrated in time and enterprise-wide in scope. And it needs to have a shifting-culture context already in place if the training is going to take root and grow. Anyone in the corporate learning field knows that training is typically only one component of any performance improvement initiative, just as culture change is but one component.

Organisations waste vast amounts of time and money looking to one-dimensional strategies to solve multi-dimensional problems. There are natural reasons for this: the silo mentality makes it hard for any one decision-maker to influence more than one area; we habitualy measure and reward low-level tactical activities rather than high-level strategic impacts.

The e-business culture shift problem has more dimensions to it than most senior managers are comfortable getting their heads around. Up-skilling is but one of those dimensions: you have to get all of your employees, from top to bottom, to understand the essential technology and process issues, as well as what it means to be an e-business.

But there are so many other dimensions, macro and micro: customers are more discerning, better informed, less tolerant, and a lot less loyal; the media for communicating marketing and PR messages are mutating; competitors are now global, often appearing overnight so you never see them coming; the pace of transaction processes has to accelerate up to real-time, having knock-on effects on systems and the employees and suppliers who use them; corporate strategy-setting processes may be inadequate to deal with the flexibility the rapid disruptive market changes demand; and the impact of all of this is felt through production, logistics, legal, HR, and finance departments.

The primary reason why businesses fail to become e-businesses is management resistance to change; which is also the primary reason why businesses fail, period. So getting a change of culture in place, fostering a culture that embraces change, is vital. But it is typically upper management where that culture change is most needed. Despite the quaint notion of dynamic leaders at the helm boldly charting new courses, in my experience senior managers don't change unless they become aware of a compelling need to do so. Perhaps this is the point at which a little training might go a long way. When senior people come face to face with just how far adrift of current realities their own norms have become, it's interesting to see who who bolts for the lifeboats, who goes back to the ballroom, and who heads for the bridge.

ISPI Europe Conference

Last week I was in Prague where, with my colleague Sarah Ward of ALTER Inc., I was speaking at the European Conference of ISPI (the International Society for Performance Improvement). The September edition of ISPI’s journal Performance Improvement published an article that I co-authored with Sarah and our friend and collaborator Dr. Karen Medsker on the processes required for large organisations to create a strategic approach to learning evaluation, and we were in Prague to see how those ideas fit with European business cultures.

The theme of this year’s conference was building performance into organizational culture in Europe. Presentations covered various case studies or approaches dealing with the need to increase competitiveness in the face of continued global economic pressure, and how best to improve existing job design, work processes, and organizational systems. For a small conference, there was amazing diversity in the participants – more than 40 nationalities were present. It was a little disappointing to see US speakers getting half of the air-time, though there was a concerted effort to work the lessons from existing American models into evolving European models rather than just advocate US-centric approaches. America is, after all, only America, and despite what most Americans may believe, its business culture is as unique and un-exportable as any other culture.

That said, there were many fascinating inputs from American and Canadian speakers that fuelled much discussion both in session and later over large glasses of Pilsner Urquell. Bob Evans, Director of IT Operations at France Telecom did a keynote on how he was brought in to build performance into the organizational culture of the France Telecom Group, demonstrating that often it takes someone perceived as a “crazy outsider” to shake up a calcified culture that is so habituated to its own stagnation it cannot see the advantages of change. In similar vein, Bill Daniels (author of Change-ABLE Organisation, one of the most useful books on change agentry I have ever read) talked about overcoming cultural resistance to performance improvement. His emphasis, which resonates with my ongoing focus on large-scale strategy, was on looking beyond individual performers to the system as a whole.

Other presentations covered a surprisingly broad canvas, with case studies from several eastern European countries providing a lot of practical insight into the performance challenges and solutions in developing nations.

Among the luminaries that I was delighted to get to know during the Prague meeting were Roger Kaufman, who has published an impressive 38 books on various aspects of performance improvement and is one of the most fun people I have ever spent time with at a conference; Tony Marker and Linda Huglin from Boise State, who had done some interesting work on the state of research in the performance improvement field; Mary Norris Thomas of the Fleming Group, who could be the next Celebrity Researcher; Bob Carleton who is probably the practitioners’ practitioner but shares my concern that research is moving too much toward cookery book replication and too far from rigorous case-specific craftwork; and John O’Connor of O’Connor Consulting in the UK, who spent many years earlier in his career where I grew up in Zambia (small worlds getting ever smaller). What impressed me about every conference participant that I talked with was their candour and their grounding in reality – the last thing you would expect from an organisation whose publications set very high standards and often read like doctoral theses.


Bob Carleton, Bill Daniels, and Timm Esque and his wife enjoying dinner in Prague.

I can recommend unreservedly ISPI’s European conference to anyone involved in performance improvement in their own organisations. It is a really intimate meeting where you can easily know who’s who and get to hang out and share experiences with anyone of interest – and everyone was of interest. You know you have been at a well-managed event when you look back at it and can’t quite work out how you had so many worthwhile conversations with so many people in so few days. Perhaps a key factor was that there were no vendors there, or at least none that made themselves conspicuous.

I have pretty much had it with the vast 8,000 plus conferences that I used to find so stimulating, and now prefer much smaller more focused events where you are more likely to find yourself among peers and “conferring” is more likely to happen. ISPI Europe is definitely on my calendar for next year.

Montreux and the ISWC Mothers of Invention

I have always liked Montreux. It is an idyllic lakeside town that would ooze class and opulence were oozing not just too tackily post-19th century. Its olde-worlde feel is overlayed with a general bearing of grace, politeness, and pleasure in service which is neither too obsequious nor too begrudging. When I lived in Switzerland in the 80’s and 90’s, I visited Montreux often en route to or from the neighbouring town of Vevy (home to the international headquarters of Nestlé and Philip Morris), and, as in the rest of the country, not a lot seems to have changed. Tipping is still considered vulgar; people still don’t walk on red at pedestrian crossings; the stores still close for lunch; and the trains still run on time.

Lounging below vine-covered hillsides at the eastern end of Lac Léman (that’s Lake Geneva to the non-Vaudoise), Montreux is the kind of resort town that Merchant Ivory would set movies in, had E. M. Forster ever written stories based there, and, of course, had Ismail Merchant not recently gone to join the choir invisible. As has Freddy Mercury, who loved the town and apparently lived out his last years there, his loyalty being rewarded by an appropriately larger-than-life statue of him jutting out his butt and punching the air in triumph as he glares across the lake at France.

Creative types have always been attracted to Montreux. Lord Byron was inspired by the nearby lakeside castle to write The Prisoner of Chillon whose opening line “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!” could be the T-shirt slogan of the blognoscenti. Queen owns a recording studio in the Montreux. Deep Purple burned down the casino while recording there some 35 years ago (actually, it was a fire that broke out during a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), inspiring Smoke on the Water, the guitar riff from which is also commemorated in a lakeside sculpture. David Bowie has a home in Montreux, though nobody in the town would be so indiscrete as to tell you where. Every summer a horde of jazz musicians and fans descends on the town for the amazingly wonderful Montreux Jazz Festival. Where else, as I was lucky to do one year, can you see onstage in one evening Deedee Bridgewater, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Santana, and John McClaughlin each playing their own sets and then jamming till the early hours with many other musical legends who are in town to listen and play?


Freddy does Montreux

This year another black-clad crowd of unconventional but somewhat geekier Mothers of Invention descended on the town to enjoy the engineering equivalent of jazz. While the inventors of the air guitar T-shirt were missing from the Montreux symposium, a few hundred other engineering students, professors, policy makers, industrialists, and techno-hucksters from all over the globe converged for a few days of future-gazing, presenting the improvisations, concepts and experiments that must surely be at one of the bloodier edges of bleeding-edge thinking.

The International Symposium on Wearable Computing melded out-of-this-world engineering, ergonomics, and human-computer interfaces with some of the more intense needs for performance improvement that exist in the real world: The GPS-linked head-up-display on fire-fighters’ visors that guides them out of smoke-filled buildings; the doctor’s hospital note taking system that works on arm gestures so as not to take attention away from the patient (pity the unfortunate patient seeing a doctor repeatedly making a sign of the cross at his bedside); the scary guy who uses his skin as a conductor to send 2 Megabits per second of data across his body, eliminating the need for iPod headphone cables; the see-through eyeglass displays and motion-sensing wrist bands that train auto-workers to install headlamps. The theory sessions, covering topics like “Humans – A Tutorial,” were even more mind-bending than the practice sessions.

For someone like me who is engaged at the application and performance impact end of technology, it was fascinating and a little humbling to spend a couple of days in the company of the brilliant minds that actually have to conceive, design, and build the revolutionary tools in the first place.

International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC)

A couple of days ago I was a guest at IEEE’s annual International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC), held this year in Montreux, Switzerland. I was there to judge entries for the annual ISWC Design Competition, and to award the check and prestigious IEEE trophy.

As the sponsor of this year’s competition, I chose to set a challenge that took the thinking away from designing ultra-expensive cyborgian machines for ultra-niche purposes and instead focused on designing ultra-cheap solutions for ultra-mass markets. I wanted to see if anyone could come up with a design for using already existing devices and infrastructures to facilitate education and training in developing countries where computers (and even electricity) are simply unavailable and where a month of web access costs typically more than the annual per capita income.

Though I did not say so in the brief, for some time I have been advocating the idea of using mobile phones (that most ubiquitous of wearable computers) and the extensive wireless phone infrastructures for core literacy and basic business education. While MIT and others are making great strides toward the $100 computer, that’s an idea whose usefulness is severely undermined by the difficulty of distributing the device and the general lack of electrical power or conventional internet access in those areas where such a machine might be most desirable. The cell phone, on the other hand, is everywhere already and it’s already connected.


Jose Gonzales explains his team's entry to Paul Lukowicz, ISWC Chair.

The winning entry was submitted by a team of graduate engineering students from Florida headed by Jose Gonzales, whose day-job is designing data-acquisition systems for aircraft in the US military. If a sign of true creative genius is the ability to dramatically reverse your perspective and still stay clear and focused, Jose is a very impressive intellect. I’d be a little concerned that I liked his design simply because it aligned rather well with my own vision, but the other judges concurred unanimously that the entry was streets ahead of the competitors. The conceptual technical design approach was well-researched, elegant, cheap, and pretty much ready to roll. Now we need the content, instructional design, a little political will, and some kind of sponsorship for both the development and the running of the phone-based learning service.



In essence, the design takes advantage of the ubiquity of GPRS (its coverage around the world is remarkably comprehensive) and its data rate of 115kbps, which is more than adequate for sending text and speech in various configurations. This is complemented by the ubiquity of devices – in places like Kebira in Kenya, more than 8 out of ten people have access to a mobile phone, though they may not have electricity or running water. Hand cranks can provide charges, or for a few cents people recharge their phones from someone running a small street-corner generator. Put your content through a free open-source Java tool that configures it so it will work and look good on any of more than 500 different phone models, and you are (at least in theory) ready to teach.

But what is the economic model? It should be possible, given the low entry cost, to get large corporations, NGOs, or even governments to front the cash for development of the content, and to subsidise the delivery. Large corporations have a vested interest in getting involved in such projects, in part because they believe in good corporate citizenship, and in part because it’s a great marketing opportunity. In fact I had a brief conversation with a Nokia representative after I had made the award announcement, and he was keen to take the discussion further. Watch this space

Been fishing

I apologise for taking a few months’ hiatus at Parkin’s Lot without sticking a “Gone Fishing” sign on the blog.

I’d like to thank all of those people who were concerned enough at my prolonged absence to e-mail me and ask if I was still breathing, and for all the kind comments from those who missed my posts.

I’ve been busy road-showing the learning evaluation strategy approach and doing a lot of “Marketing 2.0” work (or should that be 3.0?), while simultaneously changing lifestyles, companies, and countries. And no, George, I was not renditioned by the agency for my occasional caustic comments about management in corporate America.

I am also now in a land where access to the web is erratic and absurdly expensive – how does $300 a month for 300kbps “broadband” access sound? You can get it a little cheaper, but you then have to live with the system shutting you down once you hit your total bandwidth usage cap of 3Gb/month. Welcome to the world of state telcom monopoly, where through ignorance, greed, indifference, or complacency the government gets to handicap the growth of the economy and education by effectively denying it access to what elsewhere has become a knowledge utility.

(OK, so it’s not a total monopoly – I can get 100 kbps on my “G3” mobile phone and pay a mere $1 for every 3 Mb transferred either way).

But I have found a way forward at last, so will shortly be back to my usual unpredictable posting regime.

Learning Evaluation: useless without a strategy

In an interview this week with the UK's TrainingZONE, Martyn Sloman of the CIPD (Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development) made the astonishing assertion that it is not necessary to evaluate training. His statement that “If you’re properly aligned to the business needs and the organization recognizes the value of the training and development there shouldn’t be any need to be obsessed with the figures after the event” is a sentiment we’d all like to agree with, but it’s not realistic.

In order to know that you are continually aligned and to get the organization to clearly perceive your value, you do have to measure the outcomes of your activities on an ongoing basis. Even if you are aligned and if the organization recognizes your value, you still need to keep track of that status in order to be able to adjust your performance and keep those perceptions unshakable.

Now it is true that not a lot of companies bother with evaluation. The American Society for Training and Development does a ‘state of the industry’ study every year.

In 2004, 74 per cent of US companies evaluated training at Kirkpatrick’s level one; 31 per cent at level two; 14 per cent at level three; and only 8 per cent at level four.

In my experience, evaluation within organizations generally is not worth the time and effort that goes into it. Evaluation is generally poorly conceived and executed, often measuring the wrong things in the wrong way, typically subject to significant errors in interpretation, rarely producing actionable or meaningful information, and hardly ever being adequately communicated to decision-makers.

On that basis alone, I’d agree that evaluation, as it is normally carried out, should simply be terminated. OK, keep scaled-back smile sheets as an ego stroke for classroom trainers, but ditch the rest.

Unfortunately companies have reporting requirements, and, like other departments, training departments are under pressure to produce any kind of data which demonstrate that the money being spent has some kind of positive payback. You can’t do that with smile sheets. Nor can you do that with the in-vogue assumption-laden ROI approach, which, to anyone who knows anything about statistics, is fatally flawed at worst, specious at best.

As companies start to accept the changing nature of organizational learning, with an increasing emphasis on the informal, the challenge of evaluation just gets greater. Measuring the impact of formal training interventions is tricky enough, but with informal learning it’s hard to get a grasp of both the impact and the cost, to say nothing of the difficulty of knowing who was even involved.

In putting together evaluation strategies, you have to look at the “desired business impact” end of learning and work back down to the activities that are supposed to cumulatively result in that impact. Typically, trainers seek to do evaluation the other way around: measure as much as you can at the training activity end, then cut and run, leaving someone else to cobble together some aggregate ROI number a year later if it is really demanded.

This leads to the systemic unnecessary collection of huge amounts of irrelevant data with massive disconnects between what is measured and what needs to be measured. The hidden costs of badly-done evaluation are enormous. Trainers and ISDs are simply not qualified to evaluate training, nor should it be a part of their responsibility.

Depending on the training priorities of a company or department, I will usually advocate a strategy that minimizes conventional in-class, all-learners, questionnaire-based data collection, and makes use of well-established market research methods instead.

Use samples instead of evaluating everyone, use bigger collective impacts instead of evaluating every course, and use your results to diagnose problems worthy of more detailed investigation. In order to do this, because you are stepping out of the classroom and into the business, you need to expand the mandate of the training department. This means you need top-level commitment to your evaluation strategy.

You can, for example, get very actionable information about at-work application from a couple of dozen learners in focus groups, rather than having hundreds fill out Likert-laden questionnaires. You can use mystery shopping techniques to confirm actual implementation of, say, customer service skills.

For a very convincing job of demonstrating business impact you can simply “data-mine” already collected information. For instance, in evaluating selling skills training, using small samples of salespeople you can look at before-and-after sales performance and at changes in performance between a control group and a group who has been trained.

Arguing the business case for training is like making a case in court: you assemble the evidence and present it in such a way that it makes a very convincing argument.
You don’t need to produce a smoking gun, and an ROI number can easily be discredited. For those C-level reports in which you justify your ongoing existence, you can select the above plus an array of key performance indicators that reflect, in whole or in part, the impact of the work of your department.

Present your evidence graphically in a dashboard, so that everything is on one page. If you set up your systems to update the dashboard monthly or quarterly so that trends can be established, evaluation can rapidly become an essential ingredient of senior management decision-making.

Far from being unnecessary, evaluation is strategically vital to the ongoing health and success of any training endeavor.

Podcasting Goes Mainstream in Training

In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a brief guide to podcasting, suggesting that this would rapidly become a useful tool in the training world. Eighteen months later, with podcasts proliferating from the BBC, CEOs, neighborhood gossip bloggers and marketers, it seems like at least for knowledge transfer the podcast has gone mainstream.

But podcasting is still controversial and largely misunderstood in the training world. There are those who look on podcasts as nothing more than upgraded audio cassettes or books-on-CD. Their objection is that there appears to be nothing new to justify all the fuss. Others will avow that passively acquired audio-only is an ineffective medium for learning, so podcasting must be a retrograde step, even if you can now podcast video and images too.

Then there are those who see accessibility issues looming – what about learners who don’t have an MP3 player? On the other end of the spectrum are the techno-zealots who, predictably, over hype podcasting as a revolution in learning. But in the middle are an awful lot of people who are quietly just getting on with it, and are making learners rather happy.

As for the view that iPods are like CDs or cassettes: is TiVo like a VCR? Is BitTorrent like the BBC? Just because the digestible output is similar does not make the user experience or the benefits the same.

Yes, the end product is audio content, but then you get that from the telephone, the radio, and the towne crier. Where podcasts differ, and they are significant differences, is in:
1) Their ease of creation and immediacy.
2) Their disintermediation of lengthy and expensive supply lines.
3) Their ability to time shift delivery.
4) The user's ability to seek and even automate acquisition of only those targeted pieces that are of interest.
5) The ease with which they can be integrated into other web 2.0 resources such as blogs, discussion forums, communities of practice, and so on.

Try doing that with a commercially produced and distributed CD system.

What about the argument that audio-only is a poor training medium? Well, that may be true for many subject or skill areas. But it’s not necessarily a poor learning medium for many other fields. You can’t blindly accept the conventional wisdom that you retain only ten per cent of what you hear, and make sweeping decisions about all learning on that questionable precept.

It's alternately amusing and annoying that bogus "statistics" like the "10% from hearing" notion manage to embed themselves so deeply in the folklore of training.
Many have no academic study behind them; others have questionable studies to support them; others may have a sound study or two in the background but have been widely misinterpreted or misapplied. We all like simplistic rules by which to manage our work, but often what we take as fact is nothing more than gross generalization at best, pure mythology at worst.

Podcasts will be created badly and used inappropriately by many, but this is true of any technology that enables (democratizes?) content creation - PowerPoint, web video, the digital camera. It was only a few years ago that the august professors at Stanford were putting talking-head videos of actual lectures online and selling it as e-learning.

I have wasted a lot of time partially listening to bad podcasts. They suffer from fuzzy audio, atrocious speaking styles, muddled structure, and often simply incorrect content. But, as with other resources, you learn to discern good from bad, and you select those sources which are useful to you.

There are a lot of things that I would not choose to learn in an exclusively audio mode, but I find that podcasts are a very convenient way to stay in touch with what is going on in my fields of interest. Being able to hear the voices of people who I respect adds a dimension that holds my attention, often better than their written words.

It's not easy to podcast well, even if the technology is simple and you have well designed content to convey. I've made many attempts, and find I just don't have the voice, but I keep on experimenting (watch this space..).

I can see a time in the next year or two when podcasting skills training will appear in the catalogues just as presentation skills training or webinar skills training does. Now there's a business opportunity for someone …