What I Learned Today

So there I was minding my own business. I’ve been gradually cleaning out closets and storage areas in my house. My town has made it very easy for me. I can put out a bag of just about anything in any shape to be picked up and repurposed for a new life. No washing, no cleaning, just put it into bags provided by the company that does the repurposing. Yes, the company makes a profit, but they also pay the town for the privilege of collecting our discards. Yes, many people in the town object to giving reusables to the for-profit company, but I like that the town benefits and – as importantly, I don’t have to clean or think twice about donating something.

As I was saying before I wandered off topic, I had a few things in my spare bedroom on the bed ready to go into the bag. But when I lifted the pile I also pulled up a blanket I had folded at the end of the bed. Nuts and shells poured out. OK, maybe just a few fell out, but it seemed like a lot at the time. I know that no one was eating in that room and if, on the off chance someone had, it certainly wouldn’t have been the nuts that were now on the floor. I knew that I had a problem, but being from New York City (or as I say it, “the ciddy”) I wasn’t sure what type of animal could have caused the situation. I decided that whatever it was, I would need help.

I left the room taking the bag I had filled. I then headed to my office to see if anyone had any ideas of what type of situation I was facing. I was the first one in and logged on and began reading my mail. As luck would have it my local Nextdoor web site had several posts from people talking about the squirrels that were getting into their homes. ‘Ah ha!,’ I said to myself, ‘I now know what is causing my problems.’

I contacted two pest control organizations and got the name of two more from friends. One friend told me he’d had a squirrel problem and it cost him a thousand dollars to fix the situation. ‘Oh my goodness,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll start with the service I have been using for carpenter ants, poison ivy, etc. ever since moving into my current home.’ Their web-site says they do rodents too. They are a small family owned company and I hoped they would have availability to handle the situation the same day. I called them and they told me yes, they had availability, but it would cost $400 to trap a rodent. What choice did I have? It sounded better than $1,000, at least. Although people on the local web-site had offered solutions to the problem, I know that the solutions they listed are way beyond my skill set. So I said yes, please come ahead and fix the situation.

When the service person arrived, he inspected the outside of my house and then came inside and looked at the room where the incident had occurred. He asked me if I had recently brought anything down from the attic or anywhere else and put it on the bed. I assured him I hadn’t. He explained to me that he saw no evidence of any squirrels. He told me he had been in the business for over 30 years and it was likely mice.

He went into the attic and basement and inspected the bait he had placed there at the beginning of the winter. Sure enough, he found evidence of mice activity. He said they often come into the attic and then come down to other rooms. He said they bring in the nuts that I showed him. He upped visits to my house from twice a year to four times, which my current contract covers. So today was a “free” visit.

So in the end I learned that it is important to seek expert advice and not to jump to conclusions when I don’t know what evidence I should be looking for. As a learning professional, I am always telling potential clients that there are professional resources that they should consult before implementing a strategy to solve a problem. So yes, I hope the next time I need a professional service I won’t tell them what the problem is, but rather allow them to identify what is needed and make a recommendation for how to proceed. Just like I tell clients when they want to hire me to implement a solution that they have identified rather than allowing me to use my expertise to recommend a strategy for their needs.

Even though we are professionals, we sometimes forget to follow our own advice to achieve the needed end result! I hope to do better in the future. And I hope to have fewer non-paying tenants eating nuts in my spare bedroom.

All Together Now

As learning professionals, it is important to constantly monitor what your organization is doing and what type of learning events they will need to be successful. While you may not consider yourself to be in a sales role, you still need to be tuned into what your business organizations are doing and what they are planning to do. It is important for you and your colleagues to figure out the type of learning events the organization will need to be successful. If you only function as an order taker and wait for your client organizations to tell you what they need, it is likely that you will not be giving them what they actually need.

You need to be plugged into each organization that you serve. You need to get copies of their plans, marketing materials and hiring needs, as well as anything else that will inform you of where the organizations will be going.

In years past, once the business directions were identified, the training team could work with key individuals to develop training and development products that met the organizational needs. Today things are different. Instructor-led training events with learners all in the same place is rarely an option. Learners are frequently scattered all over the world. In addition, each learner is likely to need to develop a different set of competencies, knowledge and skills. Learners will also likely want or need to consume their learning at different times and in different ways.

While training events need to meet individual employee’s learning needs, events also need to ensure that the employees learn how to apply learnings as a team. Very often, a product or service offering requires the involvement of different corporate organizations. Sales needs to sell the product; support needs to service the product; marketing needs to make customers aware of new offerings and how they will meet their needs. Most successful organizations have representatives from all these internal organizations working together to meet customer needs and business objectives.

I recommend that as you move forward into 2018, your training organizations develop connections to members from each business function to develop mini-modules that together meet customer wants and needs for your product and service offerings. I believe it would be a good idea to have a training team with members from all organizations – for example, sales, services, marketing, finance and so on – that meets regularly, just like product and service teams. This training team should discuss the learning needs both for internal folks and customers regarding new and existing product and service offerings. This will allow for the development of mini-modules of training. These modules should include information from all organizations whose work relates to the product. It should also include service offerings that the organization wants customers to be informed of, and of course to purchase them as well.

While corporations that develop and sell services and products may have different internal groups working on their offerings, the customer likely has multiple organizations using the vendor’s offerings in different ways in different places. Developing mini-modules of instruction that can be consumed by different people and in different ways for different purposes will go a long way towards helping us improve the effectiveness of our learning offerings.

Thoughts, thoughts, and more thoughts

We are halfway through the first month of 2018 and my thoughts continue to swirl around what I want to do in 2018. I didn’t make any resolutions this year. Instead, I decided I’d figure things out as I go. Yet every night as my head hits the pillow, my mind revs up thinking about what I have to do (or want to do), what I will do the next day, and things that I need to do but I’m not ready to address.

As I noted in a recent blog, I am going to bed and getting up at pretty much the same time every day. I think it is working, I am feeling better throughout the day. But, it does take me a while to fall asleep as my mind keeps making lists.

This morning, as is my habit, I had a morning show playing in the background as I got ready to leave the house. I don’t know what show it was, but they said that making a list of things you need to do the next day before going to sleep would improve your ability to fall asleep. A light bulb lit up for me. Back when my day ended when I left the office (read pre-smart phone days) I always made a list for the next day and then cleaned off my desk and went home. When I came in the next morning I looked at my list and began working on it. That is not to say that the days events didn’t impact the list and what I actually worked on, but I always felt good about starting on my list as I began my day. Now-a-days I work in a number of different places each day but I do have a smart phone in which I can make my list for the next day. Thought #1 for the new year, make a list before going to bed that hopefully will lead to a better night and better next day.

My thoughts also involve friends and relatives all across the country. I’ve lived in many places and my friends and relatives have done the same, resulting in my having connections to people all across the country, and some in other countries as well. Yet except for birthdays, holidays and other major events, we are not in touch as much as I would like to be. Note to self: add calling contacts more often to events for this year. Put entries into calendar to call and just say hello. Case in point my sister who lives in another state called a few days ago just to say hello. When we were catching up, I mentioned that I had gotten the battery replaced in my smart phone. She didn’t even know you could do that and her own phone very much needed a new battery as well. So note to self, see why it is important to keep in touch.

I’ve been considering things I can do to continue learning. A friend of mine lives in a town where there are many opportunities to get involved in different educational events. That town also has many offerings for entertainment from plays to discussion groups to speakers. Not only have I thought about continuing to learn. I have also thought about offering workshops on developing resumes and other areas where I have expertise. I haven’t made any resolutions around these thoughts, but does thinking mean intention to do? Note to self, you don’t need to make a resolution to take an action. Check into learning and teaching in the new year.

Exercise and diet are so often topics of resolutions. All through last year I did well in going to the gym and working out. However, in December and now into January I seem to be constantly fighting one bug or another. I do have some exercise equipment at home and I have been doing mini-workouts at home. While I haven’t managed to do this every day, does it still count as a reasonable effort to exercise?

The gym is in walking distance. But, I keep telling myself that it is too cold to walk and well, maybe tomorrow will be warmer. See this is why I didn’t make a resolution: I didn’t want to feel guilty about not keeping it. Ha, my mind has outsmarted me; I feel guilty anyway.

OK enough of my thoughts (until next week!). I hope that 2018 will be a good, productive and enriching year for all of us.

New Year, New Blog

Happy New Year Everyone!

A while ago I was speaking to a women who taught English to recent arrivals from Spanish-speaking countries. She told me that one of the most important things for teaching them how to pronounce English words was to not show them the written word. She said she has had much more success by keeping them from pronouncing words as they would in Spanish when they encountered a new written word.

Remembering this conversation got me to thinking about how we train people. Would we get better results if we presented information in the abstract? Would we get better results without telling them where the new content connected to what they already know?

Yikes, I can’t believe I even wrote that paragraph. I have always been a big believer in telling the learner where things fit into what they already know. But, I have also been thinking about flipped learning and the Khan Academy practices. While this blog isn’t about applying these concepts, it is about looking for opportunities to think outside the box, which is what both the flipped learning and Khan concepts do. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box)

My thought is that, while we have had some good successes in improving learning, we are still looking for additional ways to improve how learning happens. In particular, I want to address learning in business environments.

Perhaps we can apply some strategies that wouldn’t be applicable to university settings. Perhaps in some business cases, it might be that people need to learn how to do specific things in a specific way. Given that we are starting with this premise then people only need to learn how to do the specific activities and how to correct any missteps. In this situation, you wouldn’t need to teach the context, the history, or any of the whys or wherefores. Yes, I’m out on a limb here, but please stay with me.

So for these specific situations, we could begin by creating a list of what learners need to be able to do. Then we could break each topic into all the steps that need to be taken. Next we divide each topic into what the learner needs to do step-by-step, and also what the learner needs to know to take the step. Then we identify where things could go wrong and how to apply fixes. Next, list just the minimum actions that the learner needs to take. Finally we can create an exercise that the learner will need to be able to do in order to demonstrate that they know how to do the activities.

One of the best ways to identify the steps that need to be taken is to have someone perform the steps while someone else takes notes. After each step, discuss what could go wrong and document it. Then integrate how to recover from the missteps as part of the instruction.

Once you are satisfied with the process, review the write-up and remove extraneous content. Does a new learner need to learn everything that has been documented? Also is there anything else that needs to be added to the steps?

Document the steps but don’t add any instruction. Next have someone who has the prerequisite background but doesn’t know the new activities test out the instruction. Sit with them and ask them to “think out loud” about what they understand about what needs to be done, as well as anything that they don’t understand or anything that confuses them.

I realize what I’m suggesting requires a bit of up front work but I hope that the results will provide better learning and performance. It is, at the very least, an experiment worth trying, I think.

To Sleep or Not to Sleep

I am now reading “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, PhD. I’m finding this book a fascinating read and wanted to make others aware of it. If you are not already aware of it, I suggest that you might want to check it out or at least look at some of the reviews. I’m not suggesting he’s right and I’m not suggesting he is wrong, but it is definitely an interesting read and I thought I’d recommend it to everyone.

There are many reviews on-line, and all that I have read praise this work. I haven’t yet found a scholarly review. However, he does a very good job of providing references throughout the book.

In reading this book, I keep wondering how my life might have been different if I had known some of this when I was younger, maybe even when I was a teenager. I have no way of knowing if the teenage me would have given this book any credence, perhaps not. I just don’t know.

Here is a quote from one review by Russ Allbery:

http://collab.debian.net/portal/planet-debian/russ-allbery-review-why-we-sleep

“Walker opens the book with a discussion of the mechanisms of sleep: how we biologically fall asleep and why, how this has changed over time, and how it changes with age. Along with that, he defines sleep: the REM and NREM sleep cycle that you may have already heard of, how it manifests itself in most people, and where dreams fit in. The second part then discusses what happens when you sleep, with a focus on what goes wrong when you don’t. (Spoiler: A lot. Study after study, all cited and footnoted, has found connections between sleep and just about every aspect of mental and physical health.) The third part does the same for dreams, fitting them into the picture along with a scientific discussion of just what’s going on during dreams. The fourth and final part tackles the problem: why don’t we get enough sleep, and what can we do about it?”

Given that I can’t go back and change my sleep habits I’m left wondering how much damage I have already done to my health. I’m also left wondering how much benefit I and others can obtain from beginning to follow the recommendations made in the book at whatever stage in life we are now in. Perhaps a follow-on volume will answer these and some other questions.

I’m also wondering how much damage I may have done to myself during my college and gradate school days when I, like many others, burned the candle at both ends. Like many students, I needed to work to pay my tuition and my bills. I also needed to spend time at the library. Yes, I went to school before anything I might have needed was available on line. I also felt, and still do feel, I needed down time, and that was generally only available to me late at night. In general, I rarely got to bed before midnight. In those days I was proud of the fact that I could function on five or less hours of sleep. I almost always fell asleep immediately. Which in reading this book, I now know is a sign of the fact that I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I got good grades and was happy with my life. But, now I wonder did I sacrifice some later years by living and sleeping the way I did. In the back of my mind, I wonder if living like I did was better than having more years later in which my life may not offer as much as my younger years did. But, since I can’t redo my past, I need to decide how much – if not all – of the advice being offered by this book do I want to adopt.

I also wonder if I try to change my habits now is it too late to do me any good. What if I follow some but not all of his advice? Will it help my health? I also am cautious about recommending this book to the high school and college students in my life. I know that when I was that age I wasn’t very good at accepting advice from older people.

Today I don’t fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow like I did in earlier life. I also sometimes have trouble sleeping through the night. So I have started to work toward going to bed and waking up at the same time each day and trying to get eight hours of sleep. I’ve been on this regimen for a whole three days so I suspect it might be too soon to make any decisions. But, I have to admit I’m feeling better the next day. Of course this could be a placebo effect, but….

I have to say that I am happy to have read this book and I hope that whatever I do or don’t do as a result will help me to have a better life.

Again, I hope that my sharing information about this book will be of value to you.

Happy New Year to all!