Spare the rod, spoil the child?

Indirectly, I stumbled across a piece in my RSS feeds this morning by David D. Friedman (son of Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman) on children and make believe. In it, Friedman one of the leading figures of anarcho-capitalism (no, I'd never heard of it before either) makes the case for bursting the bubbles of four year old children.

To paraphrase, he believes that you should play to win with you children otherwise they will never learn to deal with life, which to be fair is a view that dates back to the ancient Spartans at least.

But I think it misses the point on one of the most important lessons of life. It is not the competition which is important. Any idiot can learn to be competitive. The thing that we need to help our children learn is how to deal with defeat.

Too many people have unpleasant learning experiences early in life which put them off learning for good.

Whilst I entirely concur that it is pointless to wrap children in cotton wool, if you set out to scarify them, all you will create is insensitive scar tissue.

New learning, old learning

Reading Charles Jennings's excellent post (which of course links in with the LCB Big question of the month) about which skills we should be teaching the workforce of tomorrow, made me think about an ongoing conversation I have been having with a number of people.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to follow this blog since it's inception will know that I am a huge fan of Randy Pausch (the link goes to a video that lasts an hour but it is an hour well spent). The last lecture is a conceit, we should apply to the question at hand.

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow what skills, knowledge would you pass on today?

It rather sharpens the mind doesn't it? But it helps significantly with filtering out all the extraneous noise and superfluous rubbish with which we clutter our lives and our workplaces.

Charles's taxonomy is very good (and I reproduce it in full below)

Search and 'find' skills	To find the right information when it's needed
Critical thinking skills	To extract meaning and significance
Creative thinking skills	To generate new ideas about, and ways of, using the information
Analytical skills	To visualise, articulate and solve complex problems and concepts, and make decisions that make sense based on the available information
Networking skills	To identify and build relationships with others who are potential sources of knowledge and expertise, within and outside the organisation
People skills	To build trust and productive relationships that are mutually beneficial for information sharing
Logic	To apply reason and argument to extract meaning and significance
A solid understanding of research methodology	To validate data and the underlying assumptions on which information and knowledge is based

But I wonder if it can be refined even further?

One of the oldest university curricula in the world, which could be argued to predate Christianity but has definitely been around for over a millennium is the Trivium (logic, rhetoric and grammar). It was followed by the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy). These two programmes were the core of an early mediaeval liberal arts education which was preparation for life and seem to overlap significantly with Charles's suggestions above.

Now, I haven't got time to teach my daughter or my staff all of the above in my self imposed final day... So what would I settle for?

Probably to encourage confidence and curiosity, tempered with reason. If you have these then you can pick everything else up.

Hmmm.

Am I the dinosaur or the meteorite salesman

A lovely serendipitous collision of ideas yesterday.

Firstly, sitting next to Charles Jennings at Training Zone Live listening to Jim Kirkpatrick reprise his father's model. The new Kirkpatrick model includes the introduction of a protected term ROE (for Return on Expectation) which is preferred to ROI. I could be cynical suggest that this is because Jack Phillips's model was an addition to the original model and not owned by them (but there is nothing wrong with trying to earn a crust). However, as Charles tweeted during the session, the fact that session focused on the 10% (or thereabouts) that is classroom training, the whole argument was effectively putting lipstick on a pig.

We carried on our discussion after the session about how it is so widespread in our industry to conveniently ignore the whole cost of learning. Jim (citing Rob Brinkerhoff's research) claimed that 10% of the spend on formal L&D is wasted on incidentals and only 90% goes into actual value in the classroom.

But this figure ignores cost of sale (to outsourced providers), procurement costs, finance costs, management costs, development waste and duplication, admin costs, travel costs, cancellation fees etc. I have long been suggesting that the actual spend on intellectual property or actual learning content as a percentage of total is probably less than 5%. But to accept this you must first accept that there is a large amount of waste and duplication in our industry.

And turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

Then Jane Hart send me a delightful tweet, asking me if I had drawn this picture.

I told her that I wished that I had as it summed up some of the conversations of the day perfectly but it was another Hugh who deserved the credit (the extremely talented author is Hugh MacLeod add him to your RSS feeds). Then I laughed as the incisiveness of Jane's wit finally dawned on me...

Too busy to think

I notice that I have not been blogging much this month, which does not herald an awful self-referential blog on blogging. Euurk!

I always used to use reading as a barometer of a balanced approach to life. If I was reading books at a reasonable rate, then I was OK. If I wasn't reading at all, then something was out of kilter. Of course the solution was not to pick up a book but to address, where possible, what was going wrong elsewhere in life that was denying me the time, strength or inclination to read.

In any case I am now wondering whether frequency of blogging is a good indicator of balance too?

Over the last month (which of course contained the milestone of the first anniversary of my wife's death) I have managed to look after my daughter, work, sleep and precious little else. I still read my RSS feeds but I have been hitting the "Mark all read" button more often than usual. Fortunately, Twitter allows me to be as superficial or as profound as I like so I haven't completely missed out on the month.

Reflection requires effort... maybe that's why so many people can't be bothered?

Dangerous territory... politics

This is and has always been a learning blog. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that a general election is less than a week away, so I suppose it had to crop up at some point.

The Chairman of the Reed Group and my boss, James Reed has done some interesting little interviews of the three potential Secretaries of State for Work and Pension, which are posted on our jobsite. In them he asks each of the candidates the same five questions so you can compare their answers.

How on earth am I going to make this relevant to learning...?

Well, the thing that has been making my blood boil over the length of this campaign is the degree to which we are all complicit in allowing the three major parties to get away with adversarial positioning rather than actually testing their assertions.

A couple of quick examples:

Not safe in our beds: overall crime and nearly every individual type of crime has never been lower since records began. It has been falling consistently since 1996 (if you don't believe me go look at the British Crime Survey data). But you wouldn't know this from any of the major parties... Broken society? Words fail me!

This is going to hurt... but I'm not going to tell you how much. As Greeks are on the edge of open revolt against the further cuts in public sector pay and increases in taxes that are being placed on them as conditions of support from the EU, we in the UK blunder on naively assuming that our economy is much sounder than Greece's. Do you know how big the UK's structural deficit is? (If not click here). All the three main parties seem to be trading insults around the £6bn that Labour is accusing the Tories of threatening to cut straight after the election. Yet the Institute for Fiscal Studies has criticised all three of failing to disclose their real plans. (It's well worth reading Stephanie Flanders on the difference between British and Greek debt if the above worries you too much)

They are all behaving like embarrassed parents, who when confronted by a child who asks an awkward question they don't want to answer point into the distance and say, "Woo! Look at that! Shiny!"

My point is, if you are ever going to learn anything of value, don't accept what you are told. Go and check for yourself...

And stay awake because it will all change tomorrow...

With some sense of satisfaction and potentially equal concern, I think I am starting to understand the value of twitter (I have a tendency to be a little late to parties).

Having blogged before about the fact that I couldn't really see the value of it and admitted to worrying about those who have the time to fritter their lives away in twitter, this is mildly embarrassing.

I am an evangelical fan of RSS feeds and Delicious and love what I have learned through them over the past two years. But I have been immensely busy at work over the last couple of months and have not had the time to work methodically through the unread items in Google reader that are starting to pile up.

This was what I liked about RSS. Emails are generally chores and obligations, rarely ideas or motivators. RSS by contrast was stuff that I was interested in. But if it got on top of me I could always hit the "mark all read" button. However this always felt like a bit of a betrayal (the tyranny of the unread) and I've been doing it more often recently.

And so I got the joy in twitter. It doesn't mind if you go off and earn a living for most of the day. It will be there when you get back and will not pointedly remind you how much you have been avoiding it. And most of the good and interesting ideas get retweeted if you follow enough people with shared interests.

Learning without guilt. How marvellous!

Motivation...

I'm a fan of Dan Pink or rather I am a potential fan of Dan Pink, having thoroughly enjoyed his presentation on Ted talks about the science of motivation. I have bought but not yet read his latest book, "Drive".

So naturally I am following him on Twitter as it is easier to read 140 characters than a whole book... Which lead me to his blog post today... Which cited some interesting research conducted at a university fund raising operation.

University call-centre fundraisers were split into three groups. Group one were given information on the benefits of being a good fundraiser [personal benefit] ; group two were given information on the benefits their fundraising provided to those who received the scholarships [task significance] and group three were given no information [control].

"What happened?

The results were “amazing,” says Goldstein. Employees in the Personal Benefit and Control groups secured the same number of pledges and raised the same amount of money as they had before the intervention.

But people in the Task Significance Group, the ones who read about what their work accomplished and how it affected the world, “earned more than twice the number of weekly pledges (from an average of 9 to an average of 23) and more than twice the amount of weekly donation money (from an average of $1,288 to an average of $3,130).”

Is it really that amazing?

Or just further evidence that people sell better when they understand the benefits derived by purchasers from the product or service they are selling. In this case those donating money are more likely to give it to someone who can tell them specific stories of how donations change people's lives; rather than to someone who wants to make the commission on the donation or is building his/her CV for employment after university.

FAB?!