...and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bike! (Part 1)
File This Under: You can't fix it if it isn't broken.
I hope this video coms through, if it doesn’t, here’s the link. The point though is to stop thinking that just because something isn’t doing what you think it should be doing, that it’s broken and need to be fixed. Here’s Bill Gates saying it better in 2005 when talking to the National Education Summit on High Schools (pardon the lengthy quote): “America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.” …and in the immortal words of Bob Dylan “the times they are a-changin'“
Cool but why bring this all up now? Chat GPT was released on November 30, 2022 and it’s been a scramble ever since. From “Ultimate Cheat Sheets” to “All You Ever Need to Know” articles, everyone has been scrambling to figure out how to use this new tool. What I’ve been seeing a lot of though is people trying to do what we’ve already been doing, just doing it faster and maybe cheaper. On the one hand, that’s totally understandable. On the other hand, I’m hoping for something else. Think about it this way, imagine the assembly line is invented (I mean it was invented so just imagine you’re back there). Invented and used to make cars. In America this changed everything from how we conceived of cities to national security (need to secure that oil). Now while that’s happening, you’re looking at it and going “I totally see how we can use this to make buggy whips faster.” Again, understandable - it’s not like cars took over in one day and you’ve invested a lot of money into your buggy whip manufacturing so it just makes sense. If you could look out a little bit further and look at your value and not your activity though, you could see that really, you’re just trying to cut costs faster than revenue falls as buggy whip sales shrinks. That’s not a hard graph to draw; it reminds me of Day 2 thinking.
Fun Sidenote: At Amazon, the mantra is that “it’s always Day 1” - meaning we need to keep that startup mentality and not be afraid to try something just because it’s new. I was at a pre-pandemic All Hands when someone asked Jeff Bezos what Day 2 looked like. 15,000 people in (what was then) Key Arena, did some combo of groan and chuckle but Jeff said “no I got this” and without looking at a card or a note, said “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.”
My point (yes, it’s in there), is that it is the path of diminishing returns to use something that represents a wholly new class of capabilities like #GenAI to keep doing what you have been doing. We need to be thinking further down the road. Let me throw in some additional data points. Ask one of your devs, SDEs, SDMs or whichever flavor of “person who does stuff with code” if they’ve ever used Stack Overflow and if it’s been super helpful.
Now look at some numbers from Miss Excel. You don’t know who Kat Norton is? You must not work with Excel much. She started out making funny, SHORT, viral videos on crazy stuff like pivot tables and text join. Now she has 952,000 followers on Tik Tok, 990, 000 followers on Instagram, 73,000 on LinkedIn and her own company producing content about how to use Excel. Sure she makes courses now, but that’s not how it started.
How about popping over to Jane Hart’s list of the Top 100 Learning Tools. This kind of longitudinal data is so informative. Let’s take a look at the top 5 from 2023:
Now let’s just pick one of those, Google and see how it’s tracked historically:
That’s a pretty good run. Now the first tool that really comes out of the L&D space that’s on the list is Articulate coming in at #35 and that’s way below Outlook or even LinkedIn Learning.
What’s my point? My point - the same point I’ve been talking about since my very first post here - is that can you imagine a clearer example of confusing value with activity? Look at the data - ask your own people - they turn to Google and Stack Overflow and Miss Excel and now…drumroll….ChatGPT because they get ANSWERS. That’s the value. That’s what they want. What’s L&D’s main activity? Producing courses. Or producing systems that manage courses. Or track course completions. Buggy whips. That’s no ones’ fault but it is what it is.
Look, change is inevitable - adaptation is not. In the Pentagon, I can’t tell you how many times I heard - Adapt. Improvise. Overcome. (literally from everything from how to win battles to how to find a better parking spot). The only buggy whip makers left today are probably in some historical village showing people what life was like when.
I know this is hard. Wicked hard. We’re burdened by an accounting system that only counts employees as costs to be managed vs assets to be invested in. We’re burdened by college curricula that focus on an instructional design methodology to help people build courses. We’re burdened by RFPs and client expectations that courses are what you need and what you buy. We’re burdened by the tools we have.
There’s a lot of discussion about the origins of this quote but I think that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” is pretty spot on here. Ever notice how almost every authoring tool has a book/chapter/module architecture and then we struggle to produce any kind of non-linear content? Ever notice how the rest of the business world can move in a non-linear fashion and then how our tools put us out of phase with that reality? We’re burdened by metrics like NPS, Likert, contact hours, and butts in seats. So where do we go?
Let’s take a hard look at that value vs activity question. Let’s honestly ask our clients, be they internal or external, how they get what they need to do their jobs and then be ready to shift what we do. Let’s recognize that courses aren’t going away immediately but embrace how AI can help and automate the production of those and drive down both cost and time.
Let’s raise or heads to look up the value chain and start with a couple of questions - how do we become the preferred providers of ANSWERS for people and how do we position L&D as educators for the rest of the org - teaching them how to use rapidly evolving and emerging tech in thoughtful and productive ways. Quit being order takers and become LL&D (Learning, Leading, and Development).
Wow. Now the L&D team blends my two passions, learning and innovation (weird how that worked out). This won’t be easy. We will need to address all those burdens we’ve accrued from above. That will take deep thinking and strategic planning.
Let’s stop trying to fix something that isn’t broken. It’s just the wrong design. We need to work together to design systems, services, and products that get people the answers they’re looking for. We need to build for our value and not our activity.
Part 2…coming soon….