The story about blue tits and robins and social learning

There is a reason why blue tits flourish and robins don't. It goes back to the days when we had milk delivered in bottles to the door step.  I can remember picking up a silver topped bottle more than once as a child which had been pecked off by a bird and the cream off the top of the milk dipped into.  How did they know that by pecking the foil and persisting there would be this reward?  The answer is social learning. Blue tits gang up in flocks and teach each other how to do these things, they learn from each other how to problem solve and take impromptu opportunities when the bottle appears, communicating to each other to take advantage on demand.  Robins on the other hand are more solitary and don't live in social groupings.  Hence their ability to adapt, change and get the cream doesn't happen.  So - social learning works, has individual and group benefits, helps solve problems .... sounds like something we can do at work!  

Up until recently social learning was a marginal way of delivering learning at work, but the digital revolution, remote and agile working and personal use of smart phones, tech and tablets has taken over.  Social learning is on the up.  Research shows it is on the increase big time! Social media tools are in over drive and Twitter is the top method for social learning (for now).  So it's time for us learning and development practitioners to change and bring our work into the 21st century too.  And about time, as the profession could be said to have been resting on its laurels and is in danger of staying in the doldrums of training, courses and classrooms.

I have always believed that if you claim to be a practitioner it means something - that you are: 

• qualified
• you keep up with trends and skills and knowledge you need
• you can demonstrate continuous professional practice and how you are making a difference with those you work with or for
• you reflect on learning and you know how to learn
• you self manage your own learning and invest in it
• you are proactive in seeking out new experiences that stretch and these are beyond formal learning environments
• you take advantage of informal, formal, planned and unplanned learning
• you have a CPD plan which you review and update regularly and introduce annually as part of growth and continued improvement

Talking with some fellow practitioners recently at a Leaders in Learning event, one remarked that learning and development is behind the times and needs to change (and us with it). I agree 100%.  The event was the third in a series of CIPD events addressing this challenge. So far we have looked at digital learning and agile learning, both at the fore front of where we need to be taking learning at work. The latest session was about social learning.  All of these, but especially the latter, should be of no surprise in truth and social learning especially is, as I have inferred, on the rise.  It makes sense when we all have tablets and smart phones and use them at work as well as home, with colleagues and customers, to solve problems, find ideas on demand whilst doing our job.  Yet how many of my clients or indeed businesses big and small generally are shifting their learning and development approach to keep up with these changes at work and in society?  I think there is a job to do on three levels:

1. Collectives. Continue to bring practitioner thought leadership together to explore, share practice - the doing - and help to understand how to enable the change practically, including moving minds of clients and learners.  As a small micro business owner that both designs and delivers I can help transmit this directly with my clients who have limited or no L and D internal capacity or have not yet considered trends and changes and are "hanging on" to classroom based thinking as the key plank in HRD strategy.  Helping to make a business case for agile or digital, for example, as well as offering to facilitate them is possible.

2. Research and Evidence. Keep on with research and evidencing and publicising where agile, digital and social are having an effect in alignment with 70-20-10.

3. The Profession itself.  Start to shift the boundaries of what a practitioner in Learning and Development learns from qualifications to ongoing CPD. National bodies can do this, but so can trainers of trainers, for example, and heads of OD or Learning.

Implications

The implications of shifting to new, 21st century ways of enabling learning at work may need to be thought about and discussed, but I hope people don't take too long!  One of my clients is already embracing and integrating all of this thinking into its ways of working and managing people and it's already changing the way it procures training services, as well as its client/consultant relationships, performance management approach and financial model.  It would be great to see others follow.

Pulling Learning and Development up by its Boot Straps

Anyone reading this will notice that although I refer to training, my focus is learning and development.  I consider that the traditional notion of training is fast fading and that learning is at last shifting from the so called professional to the individual massively, through the digital revolution, and through remote and agile working becoming common place.  These are the levers for change and we really must all in this profession pull ourselves as well as our practice up by the boot straps and get stuck in.  Individuals have become, even if they don't consciously say it, self managing learners.  They have caught us up and will overtake us (great). It is time to catch up as practitioners, be the practitioners in practice, from how we speak, think and refer to learning as opposed to training and acting more like flocks of blue tits than robins.