Sticky Ideas

Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was trying to create a strong adhesive but he actually created a really weak one. He shared his findings with his colleagues and went started over again. A few years later, Art Fry, a another scientist at 3M, was having problems keeping his book mark in place during choir practice. He remembered Silver's weak adhesive and the Post-It not was born.

What I love about this story is the culture of knowledge sharing that was the catalyst for innovation. As Fry later explained, "At 3M we're a bunch of ideas. We never throw an idea away because you never know when someone else will need it."

Creative teams inevitably have more ideas than they can ope to implement. Some are not technologically feasible at the present, while in other cases the organization is simply not ready. The challenge is to avoid losing the ideas you don't use. What is nice to have today may be necessary to have tomorrow. In the end, having ideas is the easy part. Keeping them alive and accessible is the real measure of success.

If you want your ideas to live, share them!

Leadership is a Performing Art

Last Friday I spent the afternoon with colleagues, peers from other organizations, and a group of talented improv geniuses from Second City. The session was quite both intellectually stimulating and a whole lot of fun, and I spent much of the weekend reflecting upon what I had learned.

Perhaps the biggest single lesson that I got out of the session was one that I sometimes seem to forget: leadership is a performing art. The best leaders,  the leaders who challenge us to go faster and higher and further than we ever thought possible, understand how to inspire and motivate us. They connect on a personal level even when addressing a group. They use storytelling and vivid, memorable imagery to share their vision. They get us excited to be part of the change, the journey, the new frontier.

Like any other performance art, leadership is not easy. But like any other performance art, you can learn how to do it, and practice definitely makes one better. It's a lesson to keep in mind.

Rethinking Reaction

In 1959, Donald Kirkpatrick wrote a series of articles for the Journal of the American Society of Training Directors. Fifty-four years later, Kirpatrick's levels of training evaluation remain a common benchmark among learning and development professionals. I wonder, however, if it might not be time to reconsider the first level: Reaction.

We've all seen Level 1 evaluation forms. They ask how we liked the event, how we liked the facilitator, how we found the room, how tasty the food was. No wonder trainers, and managers for that matter, often disparage these evaluations as "happy sheets" - the information seems barely related to learning. The funny thing is that Level 1 evaluations can provide useful learning-related information. If you ask the right questions.

The key is to focus on Relevance, not Reaction. Frankly, I am more interested in knowing if the learner finds the content relevant to their job and if they intend to apply what they learned than I am in finding out if lunch rocked and the room was the right temperature. Fifty-four years may seem like a long time, but it may just be worth our while to rethink how we use Level 1 evaluation tools.

A Nifty Visualization of Visualization

I'm not sure if a picture really paints a thousand words, but I do know that any people feel stretched for time. They also feel overwhelmed by the tsunami of information that characterizes our modern world. No wonder designers and learning professionals are a focusing more than ever on infographics and other ways to visualize data.

If you are looking for a simple-to-understand, graphic representation of avilable options, check out this link:

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html#​

Hover over a cell to see an example.

A cool infographic idea

Birth Certificates Redesigned as a Personal Infographic http://www.good.is/posts/redesigning-birth-certificates-as-a-personal-infographic

Identity Crisis

As a Learning and Development professional, I am often referred to as an "HR guy". Despite being in L&D full time for over 13 years I have never thought of myself as a Human Resources professional.
From my vantage point, I am an Operations professional. I help prepare learners with the skills and technical knowledge they need to get their work done. If that isn't Operations I don't know what is.

A Critical Question

Like a lot of L&D professionals, I subscribe to e-zines. The result is an inbox that is seldom empty. Sometimes the emails contain little of interest; other times they contain useful tools or pose thought-provoking questions.

Today I received an email containing a link to the following article. It's a brief post that barely brushes the surface of a critical question for today's Learning & Development professional.

Here's the link:

Can Learning Keep Up With the Needs of Business