Professionals too busy to learn LO8723

Dave Pollard (pollardd@inforamp.net)
Mon, 29 Jul 1996 13:32:17 -0400

Replying to LO8639 --

And the replies: LO8664, LO8682, LO8692

Back in LO8639 I posed 4 questions, and I am delighted at the thoughtful
and practical advice I have received & read on the list. To resummarize:

(1) How do you motivate very busy professionals to learn?
(2) How do you design curricula for different learning styles?
(3) How do you deal with senior execs who don't think they need to learn?
(4) How do you mix generalist and specialist training/learning in a company?

Your responses suggest that these are really facets of the single larger
question of motivating/enabling busy people to take the time to learn new
(general and specialized) things. I've met the Learning Coaches at Herman
Miller furniture and they've done the best job of this I have seen. They
have execs who work 80-90 hour weeks looking after customers' needs and
THEN go home and learn stuff that will help them do so better the next
week. The key at HM (if there's anyone from HM on the list please correct
me if I'm wrong) seems to be Making Learning Fun. Their learning programs
are always heavily participative and include elements that are both
enjoyable and relevant to business success. I've also read about
"hopeless" schoolchildren who have become exceptional students when the
learning experience became enjoyable (e.g. multimedia, interactive,
role-playing). Part of my job is to design useful "knowledge bases" for
on-line reference by our professionals. While at first I was determined
to make them simple, fast and utilitarian, I'm now trying to develop
access tools that are more graphically interesting and which encourage
lateral thinking by pulling ideas from "outside the specialist silo" that
might cross-pollinate to another area of endeavor. I'm also trying to get
more "generalist" content (publications like Wired and Fast Company and
our own proprietary Ideas Newsletter)into the knowledge bases and indexed
to "show up" more often when a specialist does a search. Now if only I
could make accessing and reading professional knowledge more fun...

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dave Pollard, Chief Knowledge Officer, Ernst & Young
Caledon Hills, Ontario, Canada
pollardd@inforamp.net
Dave.Pollard@CA.EYI.com

-- 

Dave Pollard <pollardd@inforamp.net>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>