Reading About Change Management

Change Management does not sound like an interesting topic to me. And I would be surprised if you are excited about it too, but it is a necessary part of any organisation. So recently I started reading John Kotter's book (thanks to Susi for purchasing it), Leading Change. So far I have not been disappointed. I've known about Kotter for some time as his name is often thrown around business publications but he sounded more like a theoretical academic to me. Reading his book has kind of changed my views about him as his writing is quite pragmatic, practical and not really heavy on the technical side of things.

So what are my initial thoughts about the book?

For me it's more of who should read it instead of my initial thoughts about it. To start with I think leadership teams operating at the C level should read it, and also have a good open discussion about how they can integrate some of its lessons into their organisations.
I also think managers at the mid-level should read it too. Learning and development practitioners should definitely it read since most of what they do is about supporting change. I do think the material in the book could be used to design a good training course, instead of spending money on some ridiculously expensive course.

That's a challenge for me, perhaps.

Ambitious Learning Goal

I set myself an ambitious learning goal this year: to read and review one learning and development related book each week. So far I've done well because I have read and reviewed eight books and started reading the ninth today. But why am I doing this? Is this just a pointless exercise? So I thought initially until I started thinking about one my personal dreams. A couple of years ago I came across three websites which are:

• http://www.getabstract.com/en/
• http://www.summary.com/
• http://www.bizsum.com/

These sites write book summaries and you can buy a subscription to their library of summaries. Although I never bought any of their subscriptions, I fell in love with their business idea. It was the kind of business idea I would want to have on a small scale because I do a bit of reading myself. And being a learning and development practitoner I know that after reading a book, you forget about 70 per cent of what you read in a week's time if you don't start putting it into practice. At least reading a book summary can mean you still have access to some of the knowledge, because no book summary can totally cover the full contents in a book.

With so much passion and desire I thought of the one topic I love reading about: entrepreneurship!. I went out to charity shops and Amazon uk (the used books bit) and bought about 30 business biographies (I still have them stored somewhere) and decided to start a small site with business biography summaries. Initially it was going well, but it soon became difficult and there were a number of reasons for this. A lot of the biographies especially the autos were very subjective and amounted largely to self promotion (hey look at how great I am, I have bult this wonderful business). Rarely will any biography tell you the whole truth about what made their business successful. In fairness some do but they are really the exception. I got discouraged and shelved that idea.

But now I have picked up the idea again, so I thought why don't I start writing summaries of learning and development books. The benfits for me are immense, I'm reading and learning and it may also help other people to choose books and learn from the summaries. So far I have only been writing reviews, but hopefully the summariwes will come later. Here is a link to my blog with all reviews I have so far written: http://ladtools.wordpress.com/

Creating Knowledge Connections

Here is a post from FastCompany forwarded to me from Susi at work:

 http://www.fastcompany.com/3023424/why-successful-people-have-so-many-groups-of-friends

I am still trying to figure out what the learning point but one thing is clear making connections with people, sharing information and knowledge with them and most importantly being able to speak different languages that connect you to different knowledge groups is important. This is something that i need to work on.

Handling a new service

We are about to take on a new set of residential mental health services though a TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings). These services will provide 24 hour residential care support to people with mental health illness. The services were traditionally NHS services and they work differently from the way we do. We've been discussing how learning and development can support them so here are some steps we are thinking of taking:

• Firstly organise a meeting which involves the Learning and Development Manager, Learning and Development Advisor, Manager for the new services and Senior HR Business Partner.
• We identified what a superstar support worker will look like (who works according to our values) and what they should be able to do.
• We identified the skills and knowledge they will need to work as a super star support worker and what learning support they will need. We then decided how the learning will be delivered.
• Some of the ideas we thought of were: buddying with existing workers, the staff in the new services to visit existing services, complete an exploration trivia about the organisation, attend classroom training and complete e-learning courses.

This will be part of their induction planned over a six month period.

Just In Time Learning

In a decade where things change so fast and loads of new information is generated on a daily basis Just In Time learning in the workplace sounds reasonable. With the presence of internet and mobile technology, we will have to develop  new set of skills which enables us to learn while working. Some of the tools we can leverage for Just In Time learning are:

• Search engines such as Google where you can get information instantly.
• Content libraries that can be created to store crucial information that can be accessed easily. For example success stories (and those for when things didn't go well) and work processes can be collated for easy access and learning, meaning people can learn quick from experience.
• Wiki technologies that facilitate people to share knowledge.
• Use of question and answer sites such as Quora.
• Social networking sites which allow people of similar interests to learn from each other.
• Instant messaging apps such as WhatsApp that can be used to ask questions and get answers instantly.

There are much more tools than these but after reading an article by Bruce Tulgan posted in Training Magazine titled, Learning Just in Time, these are my thoughts. What do you think? Do you know of any other tools that can facilitate Just in Time learning?

Some considerations for becoming a valuable learning function

Make sure that whatever training or learning you deliver is critical to the organisation. To do this your training must be directed by business drivers. There are three main ones which are:

• Using learning to reduce risk
• Using learning to reduce costs or decrease wastage
• Using learning to increase revenue

Be in tune with the latest trends in learning principles and technology and how they can be applied to deliver effective learning in your organisation. Trends that you currently need to be mindful of are:

• Mobile learning which provides you with the opportunity to deliver learning in small and quick bits and also provide performance support useful during the workflow.
• Social learning which involves harnessing resources available online, sharing knowledge and collaborative problem solving.
• Learning as a lifelong process for both the organisation and individuals. This is about promoting a learning culture in the organisation.

Run the learning function like its your own business. If the learning function was your personal business how would you run it? You might need to do a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis on what you are doing to identify what is working well and areas where you may need to improve.
Promote learning as a strategic resource that supports the organisation to achieve its goals. Make sure you are clear about the ROI (Return On Investment) that learning brings to the business and raise your visibility by continually communicating about the value that learning is adding to the organisation.

Peer Support Training

On the 4th of December 2013 I partook in a Peer Support Training with two other ladies. I was involved in designing the programme which is for peer mentor volunteers who will be supporting people with mental health illness. The volunteers themselves do have lived experience of mental health illness. There were three of them but it still worked out to be a very engaging and worthwhile programme. It was also a pilot so the first signs did look good. Look forward to delivering a much bigger programme.