Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In the main, Google commemorates landmark events, festivals, achievements,icons in the form of doodles on its home page. Thoughfully suited to region and country sometimes. What is significant is that Google makes it a point to feature doodles on achievements and achievers that are relatively obscure or distant for a world used to consume todays information yesterday. Scientists, astronomers, artists are prominent in the selection. And more often than not, the ones featured are those whose pioneering contributions of great historical, scientific, and cultural importance have led to the breakthroughs we may know of. These people are the giants on whose shoulders the famous and well-known achievers have stood. In doing this, Google does not just organize the world’s information, but digs up gems long buried under the sands of time. This is thinking beyond eyeballs and click-throughs. This is putting your hand-up, and taking a stand saying , ” We believe this is significant, worth-knowing, and appreciating. This has enriched our world in ways…
Suicide Helpline Counsellors, the Army & Formula One: Helping L&D & other professionals learn by seeing with new eyes.
It is very difficult for those inside a box to think outside of it – Russell Ackoff When we want people in our organization to ‘expand’ their learning horizon, we face a standard challenge. Get people from our own industry to train and those with experience believe there is nothing new to learn. They are too familiar with their own industry and organizational challenges. Get people from outside the industry and people ask, “What do they know of our industry? How will they relate to our company challenges?” As a learning & development (L&D) practitioner, I believe the greatest contribution L&D professionals can make is in equipping people to learn how to learn. When they learn how to learn it is equivalent to learning how to catch fish & feed themselves. To help people how to learn, we have to start with ourselves. How do we respond to the standard challenge I referred to earlier? Have we ourselves learnt how to learn about expanding people’s horizon? What experiences can trigger that kind of learning? What beliefs and assumptions hold us…
Wanting what we measure
Isn’t it wonderful that we can measure the things that really matter in life and work?! Really straightforward, isn’t it? Not quite so, explains Russell Ackoff. Ackoff’s F/law Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. For example, those who want a high quality of work life but don’t know how to measure it, often settle for wanting a high standard of living because they can measure it. The tragedy is that they come to believe that quality of life and standard of living are the same thing. The fact is that further increases to an already high standard of living often reduces quality of life. Unfortunately and similarly, the ( unmeasurable) quality of products or services is taken to be proportional to their ( measurable) price. The price of a product or service, however, is usually proportional to the cost of producing it, not its quality: and this cost tends to be proportional to the relative incompetence of the organization that produces it. Like economists, managers place no value on…
4 Standard Learning & Development Practices & Their Unintended Harm
What if the ‘right’ things to do in training are hurting you without you even coming to know of it? What are they? And how do they hurt? Organizations have mandatory training man-days, dedicated external training partners, full-time internal trainers, plans to track return on investment. They point to these resource commitments as a reflection of their solid commitment to training. And they are right. They do walk the talk. They put in the time, the money, and the resources. But, do they evaluate the unintended consequences or the missed opportunities of their actions in the areas referred to? That is something to explore. Mandatory Training man-days – Planning is not an event. It is a continuous process that adapts to everyday reality. Mandatory Training man-days are cast in stone. Mandatory Training days are a relic of the industrial era when safety drills had to be incorporated into the running of plants. Downtime had to be scheduled. When an organization has mandatory training man-days, it can showcase its commitment to people development in a tangible way. A grand plan can be…