Personal Value and Change
I presented yesterday around eLearning 2.0 at ASTD. I walked through how the landscape for knowledge work is changing and that the methods and skills are evolving. I introduced the usual eLearning 2.0 tools (RSS, Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarking) and provided context for where they fit into knowledge work activities and their advantages.
The comments by in large were quite positive about the session, but one comment just jumped off the page because it really represents what we are up against:
Useful stuff but did not wholly convince. I don’t feel the need to change my work habits. I’m actually quite effective as I am.
Now I’m not quite sure how you can start this feedback with “useful stuff” especially when you clearly have no intent to make any change. Quite the opposite - you are saying this is not useful at all.
I commend this person for giving an honest assessment. Most of the people who give high praise and say they are going to do something as a result of the session won’t. They also feel “quite effective as I am.” And they won’t really make any change.
But this brought a flood of questions and issues back for me …
Do you remember the time when managers had their administrative assistants print out their email?
How did we overcome that? How did we get them to change?
And now that we are seeing what appears to be much faster cycles around methods and tools, how do we more quickly move the adoption cycles forward?
At one point, I was much more positive about the prospects for adoption of web 2.0 tools and cited the technology adoption model:
Adoption Rate = Perceived Usefulness (PU) * Perceive Ease of Use (PEOU)
And with how easy these new tools are, the PEOU is going to be high. So, it will come down to their Perceived Usefulness (PU). So …
It’s first and foremost about personal value.
There’s also a factor of the individuals feelings about their capabilities related to the system.
What is clear from the comment after my session - I need to work on convincing someone that their is personal value for them. Love to hear thoughts.
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June 3rd, 2008 at 9:54 pm
PEOU is still an illusive value. I worked with a bunch of faculty today on RSS, Google Reader, wikis, and Google Docs. Some of the set-up and use is not intuitive and was throwing them…and this with a group that had already figured out some of the perceived usefulness. We early adopters see the new tools as relatively easy but that is simply not the case for the mainstream. Or am I just tired after a long day?!?!
June 4th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Britt - that’s exactly the experience.
Isn’t our role then to translate it for them?
June 4th, 2008 at 11:16 am
[...] ist erstmal Tony Karrers Blogbeitrag Personal Value and Change (via Steffen [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Ah, Tony, you have fallen into the “short-term results” trap. The fact is that the person giving you the feedback most likely did feel they did not need to change at this time (why change something that is working? especially when you don’t have much time to really put into the learning curve). However, the “good stuff” could mean that he will keep these thoughts on a back burner and should the situation arise, try them out.
I have had to train myself to take baby steps with anything new. This semester was very frustrating as I learned a new LMS at the same time I was trying to fine tune how to use wikis in my class, and created a new course on New Communication Technologies. At one point in the semester, I had a student complain because my course was “a mess” (in other words, she could not access the gradebook and I couldn’t figure out how to use it). Truthfully, without the support I finally received from our ITS people, I would never do another course using Blackboard.
However, I force myself to look at a larger goal which might not give me immediate feedback. The training I received on Blackboard was not relevant for me: until I started to design my course. Truthfully, I probably could have taken better notes. On the other hand, I trusted the trainer to have a reason for showing me some of the options. Did I know it when I needed it? No. Did I know there was an option later when I needed it? Yes. It was a good 5-6 months before I realized that there were things in the initial training that I could use and that I should get some follow-up training.
I have addressed some of the issues I write about here on my blog .
June 4th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Virginia - I just have a hard time believing that someone could be exposed to some of this stuff and not question whether they have an opportunity to improve and feel that they should at least check it out to the next level. It takes some real guts to say - “nah I’m good enough already” … especially in the face of some pretty interesting things.
I completely agree with you that the best way to learn any of these things is by doing over time. However, my concern here is that we won’t even get that if people don’t feel there’s any need to change. They won’t start any kind of learning until they get past that stage.
June 4th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I thought about a comment I left on a previous post - and wanted to add this: we are expecting people to use all of these new technologies to connect, which is important and good.
I believe the underlying technology should be seamless, or we should have training on the most common types of new technologies.
Then, we have to teach how to control the connections. For instance, my group does pre-release software training. We can’t connect with everyone everywhere for some of this training, it would not be good for business. Maybe some stakeholders are worried because no one talks about using these things as a business tool. It’s all about OPEN! Connect with everyone! And people can’t run businesses that way.
We need to teach people who to know when to connect, and when to be private about their connections.
June 4th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Tony
I was at ASTD last year and heard your presentation, acted upon it and one year on (i) my personal learning has been enhanced via the discipline of having a blog to drive reflection (now approaching 60 posts); (ii) my virtual network provides me with new ideas & challenging feedback (greater than all the conferences attended over the past year); 7 (iii) in the workplace I’m more effective on a day-to-day basis through using blogs, wikis, RSS and rapid elearning - so THANK YOU
However, I admit it would have been very easy to have taken the same approach as the person who was ‘not wholly convinced’. And this is not a reflection on the presentation you gave !
As I see it, the nearest thing to a universal solution, is to adopt the frame-of-reference of the majority of the target group …which as early adopters can be incredibly frustrating.
These are not ‘cool tools’ … these are ‘extra on-line communication tools for folk with too many emails’ - so it can be helpful to understand the biggest issues folk have and, if appropriate, diagnose a Web 2.0 solution.
In the workplace I’d suggest Wikis & RSS are likely to be most relevant for the majority ….given how intranets get outdated, require multiple permissions and long lead times to alter - similarly, if there are several websites that folk revisit often - they will be receptive to learning about RSS.
Blogs are very powerful - but in the world before Web 2.0, how many course delegates ever completed learning diaries to help their reflection … so unfortunately I feel this may remain a tool for the few
June 4th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
John - that’s great to hear. I was literally just looking at a document that cited you and Pfizerpedia and you make this comment. Good timing.
Unfortunately, right after that I had a phone call with someone talking about this topic and he told me that there was resistance to indoor plumbing, electric lighting and all other new technologies. I needed to find how to translate this into:
“with a minimum amount of effort I can do something I already do better”
He also said - “no one wants to learn - they learn because they have to - and they learn the minimum”
Wow, we need to figure out how to do this!
June 4th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Tony, I heard your presentation and liveblogged your session (as well as all the others I attended), so at least there are a few Web 2.0 folks around. It has taken me some time to embrace Web 2.0, and while I try to make use of new technologies, I can tell you my organization is in many ways not ready to hear about them.
As a matter of fact, I find myself learning about technology only after I see some direct use, and if my organization itself is the only barometer of direct applicability, then that fellow’s comment makes a lot of sense.
I spoke with him after your session, and in many ways he reminds me of people with whom I work. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Of course, by the time the US workforce wakes up to the fact that it has been broken for some time now, we won’t be the king of the hill any longer.
That is one of the reasons why I am in the learning field, to help people see where we really are, based on whatever barometer we choose.
June 4th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Jeffrey, good meeting you at the conference. BTW - you don’t look like your picture.
Interesting thought - “only after I see direct use” … I’m somewhat like that … and then I personally add … after direct use …
I somehow missed your live blog notes. Thanks for pointing me to it.
One of the thoughts that has occurred to me … flash of the obvious … is that we partly have to show where things are broken today. Here’s something that probably won’t work out well for you today.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Tony, this might be related to something I blogged about recently, which is that training is trumped by attitude and systems - an idea I got from trainer David Maister’s piece Why (Most) Training Is Useless.
My point is that the person may have felt that their current organisation/customer does not reward them for providing ‘extra’ material, and so they do not see the point in going the extra mile in preparing their course content.
I think that someone like that is simply expressing people’s natural tendency towards inertia. Without others imposing new vision and management systems on them, they see change as the enemy of success.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
We breathe in and remember that what we are talking about is change and change management. This is not a small change but large scale change so we can’t expect it to happen overnight. Reality most big changes across organisations take 5 to 10 years. How long did we take to move from knowing about emails to now using it as part of our daily life?
So what do I do in these situations is to remember:
1) The Roger’s Innovation Adoption Curve, what makes each buy into ICT is defendant on which category they belong to
2) Reflect on the concepts of Change Management that says asking people to change provokes different emotions in various individuals. Joy, sorrow, sadness, happiness, anger. 3) In any group there will always people who say “this is a waste of time” because this is their instinctive response to change.
How can we address it? Don’t lose heart or get frustrated. Implement regular workshops in our workplaces that gradually scaffold training all staff in these skills so they gain knowledge and experience using these tools. How will they ever learn these essential skills if they aren’t being exposed to them. Look at these type of programs as long term not one off or short term.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Angus - I think that people will accept and embrace change when it’s change they welcome. Otherwise, we’d never get married, have kids, or anything else. That said - yes - not changing is easiest.
Sue - I’m looking to find things that are small scale changes for individuals that lead to long-term changes. After all, you likely didn’t adopt everything at once.
Seems like we are on the same page about models that will work.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Sue, great point about change. Sometimes I think we want people to change to go “forward” and be innovative. However, not all change is good and will make things better. During the East Coast blackouts a few years ago, I was at my family’s summer house off of Long Island. We had a battery operated TV from many years ago that my mother had not gotten rid of. We also had a telephone from the 1940’s (the house has been in the family for 80 years). We were able to find out what was happening by calling my sister in Chicago (the only relative not in the Blackout) and listening to broadcasts via the battery run TV (most of the broadcasters in the NYC area have backup generators after 9-11). I have been in the Adirondacks where there is limited internet service. I could use my dial-up service 120 miles away to access the internet and keep up on the news and weather. Now that I have high speed internet, I will not be able to access the internet when I go into the mountains.
In these instances, new technology does not improve my life, finding new ways to use technology does.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Tony:
The factors playing into the adoption rate may not be as simple as the equation you’ve applied here. I believe there are inverse correlations that work against adoption and an additional positive correlation that favors faster adoption. While “perceived usefulness” increases adoption, more legacy systems, policy constraints and conformity pressures in the employment context all slow the adoption rate, in spite of personal usefulness. Likewise, ease of use will increase the rate, while the variety of available tools with varied combinations of functionalities — will slow the adoption rate — regardless of how easy a new tool is to use. Incorporating your added inverse correlation of an “existing sense of efficacy, competency, adequacy”, there’s a numerator of contextual instability, uncertainty and innovation which increases the rate of adoption. Thus a more accurate formula might look like this:
Adoption Rate = (perceived usefulness / pressures from legacy systems) * (perceived ease of use / preponderance of comparable tools) * (perceived instability / personal efficacy)
In this model, perceived instability (in the industry structure, business infrastructure or customer needs) could drive the faster adoption rate and diminish the counter effects of all three denominators. In other words, the crazier things get, the less legacy system will be enforced, the more urgency will arise to “test drive and compare” new tools and the less confidence people will have in their current abilities.
June 5th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
This is a really interesting discussion–one thing I think is going on is that there is no one answer. Some people will be motivated by an opportunity to be more productive, while others will be motivated by a chance to learn more about themselves. Some will come at the new tools starting through a work environment, while others will start with more personal interests. I started blogging, for example, for personal reasons and then moved into the professional realm.
My point is that there is no one way to bring people along because there are many motivations, opportunities and points of entry. Just as the tools themselves are about customization and flexibility, we’ll need to use this same thinking in trying to find ways to help people develop these literacies.
June 6th, 2008 at 8:20 am
@Tony “I’m looking to find things that are small scale changes for individuals that lead to long-term changes.” Trouble is we aren’t really talking small scale change for majority of the people. Just because people are using computers in their work place doesn’t mean they are tech savvy.
What seems like the simplest thing to you and me e.g. downloading and installing a program or creating an online account are huge barriers for most. Fear of the unknown, being less than adequate, that they might damage their computer, or that people could access their bank accounts if they set up accounts are real concerns for many. Getting them feeling comfortable setting up and using any online tool is a major change for them; this not a small change. You have to slowly talk and walk them through the process until they become comfortable with it.
June 6th, 2008 at 11:10 am
I agree Sue. What is more, companies are not looking for small changes. If they are going to invest in training, giving employees time off or time for learning, etc… then they want to see instant change that is measurable so they can justify those investments.
They also have to overcome the institutional concerns (which are justifiable) in terms of hacking, making outsiders vulnerable to the system or even the organization as a whole, and the impact on the organization when the structure is changed due to new communication and information technologies.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I remember managers having secretaries print out their email — and this at a company that sold email services to its clients.
I often think that people move more easily from the specific to the general — for example, a presentation slide that says “Links to all my sources are at del.icio.us/dave/slidepitch” along with either a live link or a screen shot.
Ideally that’d be in a work context — e.g., someone’s presentation on customer service, with the links related to that topic.
I think Sue’s comments about change management are apropos. I’d add, from over twenty years of experience as a corporate “individual contributor,” that many organizations train people to hear “change management” as code for “brace yourselves.” Both early adopters and organizational leaders actually get more time to think about and fiddle around with the change. The closer it gets to the average bear, the more urgent the need for change seems to be to the hierarchy, and so the less time there is for others to ponder it, acclimate themselves to it, etc.
June 7th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Dave that’s a great point about going from the specific to the general!
Rather than showing someone del.icio.us, I should really tell them that they can find my links on the topic at. Oh, and I share links with my family around our vacation this way. And links with my work group this way. And I get to see what people are saving in eLearning this way. … Basically, the methods (and value proposition) for how I use the tool - not the tool!
Then, you show them how easy it would be to adopt it.
I’ve tried something similar before, but when I was doing it, I was showing them way too much in my examples.
June 7th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Tony, exactly. The example I had in mind was a presentation being made by a teacher to teachers, dealing with various social tools. As I recall (I didn’t tag it), most of his audience didn’t use these tools, so it was a kind of overview or intro.
What I do recall is his saying that he’d prepared for an hour but had just learned he only had 40 minutes. The second slide in gave his del.icio.us tag for this presentation [– and he explained what that meant:
“You can copy this one URL, and when you go there, you’ll find links to every site I mention in this talk. You don’t have to write any of them down.”
I wasn’t his audience, but it struck me that here was new technology with a point. And for this audience, you could throw in two more sentences about del.icio.us — “Anything you bookmark, you can save on del.icio.us. And you can label the things you save with tags, so you can find things that share a label.”
That gives anyone with a browser enough about del.icio.us to figure out whether they want to know more… either right now, or later. I guarantee that five times as many of his listeners perked at “find all the stuff I have here with one link” as opposed to “this is a cool site.”
June 9th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Dave: In this case I think you are referring to the instructional design that we choose. I find there is little discussion on how to choose appropriate instructional designs for what we want to accomplish.
I always present new tools by first identifying what my problem was (e.g. I was not able to access my bookmarks from the multiple locations where I work…for students who use the library, this is a real problem) and the various solutions (I could use flash but not the bookmarks, I could save the links on the LMS system, but sometimes they weren’t relevant and the current system we have will deny access after classes finish, or I could use del.icio.us). Often what happens after is a discussion between those that currently use the tool (and how they use it)and those that might be interested. I also sometimes have to force students to try it (by giving them an assignment which will help them to use the tool).
Ultimately,however, it is the instructional design’s fit to the purpose of the teaching which will dictate how I present the new tool.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Virginia - it’s both instructional design and it’s how to help people really evaluate the utility of what you are discussing for them to make an adoption evaluation. You are right that approaching from the problem is the right thing to do, but also we have to think about the likely problems that they face.
Most people I don’t think worry all that much about getting bookmarks via multiple computers/locations.
So a big part of the issue here are identifying the common problems that people face that will point them towards adoption.
Or maybe it’s that they don’t even recognize they have a problem. After all, did anyone think they had a problem before there was email? Somehow everyone thought things were just fine.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Tony, your last remark about email triggered a thought. No, people didn’t think they had a problem — and, especially in the early days of email, they didn’t. Mail, phone, and fax communications worked just fine; email opened up new possibilities.
That’s not to correct you or Virginia; more to see the current situation from the other person’s viewpoint. I remember a discussion with an executive VP of a large organization with several call centers. A consultant had studied some problem and began his report to the VP by saying, “Your annual turnover in these entry-level jobs is very high — 80%.”
To which the VP replied, “I’ll tell you if my turnover is too high.” In fact, it was significantly lower than that of competitors, and the organization was meeting its quality standards.
Sure, the VP’s organization might have done even better with lower turnover, but turnover was not seen as a problem and produced no effects that added up to problems as measured by the organization.
So, to pick up on the accessible bookmarks: if 90% of the time I work at my desk, on the same computer, the value of bookmarks I can access from elsewhere is pretty small (at least to me).
On the other hand, it might be that some type of understandable document sharing (like Google Docs, rather than a wiki, I’d say) could make a lot of sense as opposed to sending attachments back and forth between members of a virtual team.
(On my current project, we’ve got a doc-sharing application to make this easier — but it doesn’t have a checkout feature, which means two people can end up altering the same document. Who designs this stuff?)