Episode 94: Rethinking Your Learning Strategy to Drive Organisational Performance (Interview with Charles Jennings)
This week’s podcast guest is Charles Jennings, Partner at the 70:20:10 Institute. Charles is a big believer in getting the learning context right by better embedding learning into work, often called informal learning, experiential learning, or real learning. While the 70:20:10 model was designed to promote this approach, many organisations adopting the model are still falling short of the mark.
Charles and I dig into this in more detail throughout the episode, with many insights, both from the academic literature and practical case studies from organisations. In this episode, we discuss:
How to re-think our traditional conceptions of learning, and better embed up-skilling into daily work and social interactions
Focusing on performance analysis over skills or learning analysis, and how organisations can achieve this with examples from a couple of companies
The relevance of the 70:20:10 model for learning today and getting L&D teams back on track, thinking about performance and impact instead of viewing learning itself as the end goal
Support for this podcast comes from Medallia. You can learn more by visiting https://www.medallia.com/employee-experience/.
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Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Charles Jennings, Partner for Strategy and Performance at Tulser, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Charles, it is great to have you on the show. Can you give listeners an introduction to yourself and your work please?
Charles Jennings: Yes, thanks, David. Thanks very much for inviting me onto the podcast. I have been working on ways to improve performance for about the last 40 years. Initially as an academic, I ran the UK National Centre for Network Based Learning at Southampton Business School. I was a professor there way back in the eighties and nineties and did a lot of work around technology and learning, especially around collaborative learning. In fact, just before I left academia I launched the world's first pure online MBA, for which the Dean of the faculty and I were given a UK Innovation of the Year Award. This was back in 1995, so a long time now. But thinking back about that, it has really just been a stepping stone into a much bigger change that we have all experienced over the last 25 years or so.
Since leaving academia, especially since I took on the role as Chief Learning Officer at Reuters in 2001, I have been working on ways which organisations can actually extend their focus on learning beyond formal learning, beyond courses and programs and formal coaching and learning journeys and so on, which are still the main tools that HR and learning professionals use and yet all the research tells us that most of the learning doesn't happen there.
So I left Thomson Reuters, as it was then, about 13 or 14 years ago now and since then we established the 70:20:10 Institute, which is part of the Tulsa Global Operation and working on this 70:20:10 model, which is just a framework, but basically we found it very powerful. I found it very powerful over the years.
David Green: Great. We are going to talk a little bit about the 70:20:10 model a bit later on as well and I think it will probably weave into our conversation as we go.
Charles, it would be great first of all, to start by talking about perceptions of learning. How do you think learning at work is viewed today and how should it be viewed?
Charles Jennings: That is a really good question, David. I think that unfortunately, many people still can't differentiate between learning and schooling.
That was a specific observation that came to me from a man called Jay Cross, and Jay and I worked together for a number of years and we are good friends. Jay was a champion of informal learning or what he called, towards the end of his life, real learning. And I think that the key element is, that many managers and leaders seem to have a blind spot about learning away from formal learning and huge amounts of time, effort, and money are actually poured into skills frameworks, then mapping those into formal classes and courses. Yet the return for learning away from work, is usually actually quite poor. And the whole issue of learning transfer has bedevilled HR and talent learning professionals for years, certainly my entire career, and certainly longer than that. In fact the eminent American psychologist, Robert Woodworth and Edward Thorndike, published a paper all about that, what they call the transfer of practice. And that paper was published in 1901, so 120 years ago this year. Basically Woodworth and Thorndyke, they developed something called the theory of identical elements. They found that the closer to the environment where we learn something, is to the environment where it is going to be used, in other words where there is close alignment, the elements they talked about, actually the transfer from learning into using and working, is going to be much easier.
And it is not really complex to be honest. And in 70:20:10 terms, we always recommend what we call, planning for the hundred but starting with a 70. In other words, when an organisation has challenges that require some sort of up-skilling or developing new capabilities, HR and learning professionals should actually look first for ways in which they can help develop those skills or build that capability as part of working, rather than taking people away from work and schooling them.
So I think that is the major issue in terms of thinking about learning because there is a huge, almost box, which often HR learning people don't see, which has all that learning, which all of us do by doing stuff during the day. We are working on a project and we run into a barrier, we overcome it and then we talk with our colleagues about it, and we are learning, that is obviously what humans do. And so I think, driving this cart down this narrow road of formal learning, is just missing big, big opportunities.
David Green: Maybe for the benefit of listeners, we will ask you to just explain that high level of the 70:20:10 model, but basically what you are saying is that don't start with the 10% start with the 70%. Start with how you can help people develop their knowledge through experience and assignments, rather than formal learning in the classroom, even if it is a virtual classroom.
Charles Jennings: Yeah. At a high level, absolutely, that is exactly what the work of Woodworth and Thorndike and others have shown, that most learning occurs in the workplace. The learning that occurs closest to the point of use, is the most effective. So we have all that research.
And so when we are thinking about helping, whether it be up-skilling or just helping solve a business problem, we should be looking first of all at, what can we do at the point of use? And, how can we work from there? That is really the principle.
The principle behind 70:20:10, it is not some sort of intervention matrix. And I see it used a lot by organisations, in fact, quite often, someone contacts me and says, we have just developed this great new program built on 70:20:10. And when I look at it, what they have done is built a great new program, but it is a formal program with some social learning attached to it and some experiential learning, so some learning in the workplace, attached to it. And that is what we call, in the 70:20:10 Institute, a 10+. So, in other words, it is a good design of formal learning, but 70:20:10, if you're going to use it well, you come at it from the different point of view. You don't start with a 10, you start with the 70 and work backwards.
Sometimes it is really necessary to have those formal learnings in place and other times it isn’t. Whereas the common approach is that we develop a skills matrix or we have a competency framework, and we would identify skills in there. And the first stop on the journey is, first of all, we create learning journeys rather than performance journeys. And the first stop on the journey is, well we need to carry out some training on A,B,C,D, rather than what are the high performers? What do people need to do? What tasks do they need to undertake to execute their work well? And you are working backwards from that.
David Green: Yeah, a different way of thinking and we will definitely explore that a little bit more. I just want to get to a couple of more of the “big picture” stuff before we talk about the more practical things as I think we are going to talk about some examples, later in our conversation.
We talked about this before we started recording, organisations are currently grappling with the great resignation. There is lots of stuff about it at the moment and I am sure there will continue to be for the next few months.
What is the role of L&D, and perhaps in particular digital learning, in keeping employees engaged? And I would love to hear your views about the great resignation as well, and what the data is actually saying?
Charles Jennings: Well, L&D certainly has a role in preparing people for new roles, when they are joining an organisation, when they are moving, but I am not totally convinced about the great resignation, as a global phenomenon. Particularly in the US where, we have a lot of data from the USA, we have seen huge movements in the workforce over the past couple of years. But a lot of it has been among mid-career workers between the ages of maybe 30 and 45, but actually amongst younger workers, even in the USA, resignations have actually decreased over the last two years, as it has in older workers in the 60 to 70 age bracket.
But as I say, L&D has a role, it has always had a role, in terms of helping people into a new role or into a new job, into a new organisation. Helping them on-board new employees to be effective in their roles. Regarding the first part, helping on-boarding new employees or helping people move to new roles in the organisation, and I probably sound a bit like a broken record here, L&D and their HR colleagues need to get out of this, what we call, the training bubble. Of course, usually some initial training will help and is often necessary, but we just can't rely on training alone because whether it is on-boarding, or preparing people for the next role, or whatever.
In fact, there was a study at the European Research Centre for Education in the Labour Market, which is a group of economists who are actually researching better ways to link education with work and then feed their research into policymaking. So they are macro economists, essentially. This centre has reported that even the performance of newly hired workers is driven by learning by doing, and learning from peers and supervisors in the workplace, more than formal learning.
So L&D’s role in the great resignation, or in any situation where people are joining or leaving their place of employment, I think is an important one, and it is to help them become as productive as quickly as possible. But, I doubt we would find any CEO or CFO arguing about that aim. But I think again, the role of L&D may be different to the role that a lot of people think it is.
David Green: And again, I noticed that the 20% is from the developmental relationships. So almost you get twice as much benefit from actually helping people make the right connections within an organisation that will again, help to support their development, support them in their role, and support them to perform effectively.
Charles Jennings: Absolutely. That learning from others, that 20 in that framework, has always been important and will always be important. We learn from others, as you say, and I can't think of anyone I know who hasn't found, when they took a new role or joined a new organisation, find someone who really knows the ropes and is really a top performer, you will learn more from conversations and building networks around that than almost anything else. So it really is absolutely critical.
In fact, I produced a publication about seven or eight years ago now called, next generation digital learning strategies. In that there was a case study of the world's largest technology companies, that carried out a controlled experiment, where they on-boarded some new sales staff and they didn't put them through on-boarding, they simply put them into groups of three or four, they basically socially on-boarded them. They put them into groups of three or four and the only instruction was that they would meet once a week, over lunch or over coffee, and talk about the challenges they had, the successes they had, the insights they had, and talk about what they thought they learnt and what they could do better. There was a chap who was doing a master's degree who was studying this and I was helping him out, or giving him some input, and what he found was interesting. After about 18 months, those people who were socially on-boarded, their performance was about the same or slightly less than people who had been through the standard on-boarding process, but their levels of customer engagement was through the roof, was really high. So the stickability they were getting with their clients and their customers was really high. That led him to believe that was due to that sort of social on-boarding.
So learning from others, learning while working, all those sorts of things, are really really critical.
David Green: Yeah, really interesting.
The other thing we are hearing a lot about at the moment is skills. And to be fair, we have had guests on here working for larger organisations that have talked about how they are harnessing skills data to actually help personalise learning recommendations, career paths for employees, and stuff like that, and almost connecting that with workforce planning as well.
So in the field we are in, which broadly speaking is people analytics, a lot of practitioners are really getting involved in getting that skills data in the right level to actually personalise it, because you can't personalise something if you haven't got the right data to do it. I would love to hear your view around the skills focus?
Charles Jennings: I think there is a sort of skills pandemic going on now, I am sorry to use that term. It really seems to be that up-skilling and re-skilling is the top of everyone's minds and consuming lots of effort and time. There is a real problem if we think about skills in isolation, it almost creates barriers in some ways, because performance is a product of a number of things. The skills are certainly important, but they are not the most important factor and if you just focus on something, which is not the most important factor in isolation, you are never going to deliver improved individual, team, and organisational performance. Can we imagine some football manager deciding that actually what the striker really needed was just the skills to hit the ball into the net and they didn't do anything else, but just train them on the skill to hit the ball in the net. Clearly I think most of us would understand that is not going to win your matches. There are lots of other things going on there as well.
And so if we just focus on skills we are absolutely sure to miss some of these other factors that influence performance.
Again, I think it is worthwhile looking back and taking a lesson from W. Edwards Deming, who was probably one of the top couple of management thinkers that the world has ever known, I certainly think so, and Peter Drucker would certainly be the other one on my list.
But Deming was certainly the leading thinker and practitioner in the field of quality and quality improvement. His work in Japan, post-second world war, is legendary in fact. And over his career, Deming took time out and he used a great learning tool which is reflection, and he reflected on the causes of performance problems and opportunities for improvement. He wrote down his reflections.
At the end of his career, Deming reported that in his estimation, most organisational performance problems and most possibilities for improvement, were in the proportions about 94% due to what Deming called, the system, and about 6% being due to the performer, or the worker. By the system, what Deming meant was all those things that are actually under the control of management, whether they were things like clear guidance, adequate processes, the right tools, suitable support, all those sorts of things. And I think the key thing about Deming actually, as well as Drucker, was that they focused on performance and not on learning.
Learning is a process to deliver performance, it is not a final outcome. That is why we always should put our efforts actually into high quality performance analysis, rather than learning analysis and that is why just focusing on skills alone, I think is going to leave us to fall short.
It does bother me a bit David, that the obsession seems to be that we have got these great competency frameworks, and we have got the skills frameworks, and as long as we focus on those to up-skill, that is going to solve our problems. And the answer is, it may help but it is not going to be the panacea.
David Green: Basically, you are partly saying that one of the most important things is to create the environment for people to thrive. That will lead to the performance and skills is a contributing factor towards that, of course, but it is the environment for people to thrive in.
Charles Jennings: Yeah. And we have all been there. We have all been doing a job, believing that we had the capability to do our job, but there were barriers, things that stopped us doing the job to the best of our ability. It might have been poor leadership. It might have been that we didn't have the right tools, or the right processes, or the processes weren't defined, or it could have been a number of things. We have all been there and we know that, but we often tend to forget that in the mad stampede to up-skill folks.
David Green: Let's bring the bit about skills, the bit about the great resignation, on-boarding, and learning together. What is your advice for organisations who are looking to adopt more of a performance analysis approach, where should they start?
Charles Jennings: First of all, put aside your past thinking about learning, and about learning analysis, and about learning needs analysis, because learning needs analysis has defined the solution before you start, because you have defined that the problem is that people need to learn. Now, we all need to learn, all the time, so what learning analysis almost inevitably ends in, the result or the output, is a course, a learning pathway, or a program, because underlying this is this belief that formal learning is necessary to improve performance. That is why I mentioned the need to separate learning from schooling, earlier on, and the fact that learning is a process. But if we are looking for outputs relevant for performance improvements, so we need to be focused on that and measuring any performance improvement, we need to do some sort of performance analysis, rather than some sort of learning analysis.
Again, I would come back to what I said earlier on, I think the answer is to start at the end. What is the organisational performance aim? In other words, what are you looking at in detail? It might sound strange, but rather than starting with competencies skills mapping, start with your desired organisational outcomes in terms of, what are you going to achieve? Once you determine what is expected by the leadership and how they are planning to measure it? And that sort of ticks a box, to a certain extent, in terms of what metrics you are going to use. You can get into the detail to understand actually how the work will be done to deliver the desired outcomes. And that is one of the major problems when we start with skills, that is one of the main major oversights. The skills is about what do I need to know? What can I prove that I need to know? Or even, what can I do in a particular context? Rather than, how I am going to carry out this work to deliver the desired outcomes?
It is not mapping skills, it is actually mapping tasks. So that is the big difference.
The methodology that my colleagues and I at the Institute, wrote a book about six years ago, is all about critical tasks. In fact, if you are in a role, this was a book about up-skilling L&D, and it defined five roles. They are all performance roles.
There was a performance detective, in other words, carrying out the analysis work.
The performance architect.
The performance master builder, building the solutions.
The performance game-changer, making sure they are embedded in the culture of the organisation.
And the performance tracker, making sure that the metrics that are being used are performance metrics and do align with what the leadership wants.
So, that is the big change and in terms of getting there, one of the things you need to do is find out the way that top performers work and that often involves observational work, where you find that exemplary performers have really smart workarounds and shortcuts that they have designed to make sure they do their jobs better. And these aren't usually captured in standard operating procedures or manuals, but they are really important. And actually, if you go and talk to a manager of a team they will often say, this is what top performers do and they will give you their exposition in terms of what they do. But when you go and look, or spend some time with the top performer, you find that actually that is not what top performers do. That is what managers think they do but it is not what they do. So it is a matter of unpicking that sort of thing.
So you need to map critical tasks for specific work and then you look for these other influencing factors, these are the things that inhibit or promote tasks execution. So the ability to deliver results is about making sure that people are executing the critical tasks well and that the bigger environment, those influencing factors, actually are helping rather than hindering. That is really the important thing. As I mentioned, that is what Deming calls the system, so that is really critical.
David Green: Which is a bit of an ominous sounding name, the system.
Charles Jennings: Yes, it is a bit, it isn't it? It sounds big brother-ish I guess, but it is not at all. It really is around making sure that, for example, I was involved in a study that The Corporate Leadership Council did, quite a few years ago, with a number of big global organisations. And in that study, the researchers found that there was a number of things that managers could do that helped improve performance in their teams. The three top things that did help improve performance, one of them was really basic. It was actually around telling people what was expected of them and how they are going to be measured. So having absolutely clear objectives and people knowing that, I guess we don't do annual performance reviews so much anymore, a lot of organisations do, but we still have ongoing reviews in terms of how things are going. Just making sure there was alignment between what was expected by the leadership or the management and what each individual thought was expected of them. And simply making sure that people knew what was expected of them and how they are going to be measured, was likely to improve the performance of that individual or that team by about 20%.
The other two factors in there which were also almost as impactful, were giving people opportunities for rich and challenging experiences. So new work, maybe stretch assignments, those sorts of things, and then giving them time for reflection, giving them time to learn. So a manager or a team leader, simply sitting down with an individual or a team and say, what have you been doing? What are the challenges you are facing? What has worked well and what hasn’t? What have you learned from that? What would you do differently next time?
So creating that culture of continuous improvement.
That is why I tend not to use the term learning culture, I think learning culture is another term which has got a missing word in it, because when people talk about learning culture they often really mean formal learning culture. In other words, how many hours per week, month, year, our people spent in formal training or learning and developmental activities. And that is again, I think missing the shot. I tend to use the term, talking about creating a culture of continuous improvement, because if we are talking about a learning culture, it tends to focus down on individuals. The culture of continuous improvement tends to be much broader. It addresses individuals, teams, and organisations. So we are looking at improving the work we do, the work the organisation does.
And I think, again, that is a real challenge for a lot of learning and development people. They often talk about the business and us, you often hear L&D people talking about, what does the business want? Well, actually guys, we are part of the business, we are part of the system.
It is, again, I think thinking of it in bigger terms around continuous improvement, rather than learning, we haven't got our feet stuck in that learning process piece, we have got our feet firmly in the improvement process. I find that the 70:20:10 methodology we work with, is very aligned with things like agile methodologies and lean and things like that. Which are all about incremental changes, incremental improvements.
David Green: And as you said, it focused on the outcomes you are trying to affect and then think about what the inputs will be to help you to do that most effectively. Rather than starting at the beginning. In many respects, it is common sense, isn't it? It is just not really followed in most companies.
Charles Jennings: That's right, David, it is common sense, but not common practice.
I have had situations over my career where I have gone to work with an organisation, or maybe I have gone to run a workshop or a master class or something, and I have had someone take me to one side and say, now, this is a team of learning people we don't want you to talk about performance.
To which I will say, actually you might as well not have me come because if you are focused on learning alone and not focused on performance, we won't see eye to eye. Because I think that if your focus is purely on learning outputs and that is the end game for you, you are not even getting a fraction of the way there, because what you are expected to do, what your senior leadership in your organisation expects you to do, is to have an impact, to actually change the game to a certain extent.
I think that is a bit of a challenge that we do have.
David Green: Charles, I know what listeners love to hear in this podcast, is some examples. It would be great if you can share a couple of case studies about companies that are taking this approach to performance analysis and using that to then help shape the learning they are doing, and the business impact that they are generating from this.
Charles Jennings: Sure. I can give you a couple of cases.
One, which I think is a really good lesson in practical use of these different approaches is a company called Hilti. Now Hilti is a large global organisation that provides tools and equipment into the construction industry and other industries, which I am sure we will all know, we will have seen vans or seen the logo, as it has got a very strong logo.
We worked with the L&D team at Hilti a few years ago now, as part of our performance based learning program that we run, which is an evidence-based, immersive experience. So it is not what you would call a traditional training program. It is a program where people work on a project, which they are addressing in their work, and they apply this methodology to it. So we did that.
As part of this activity, the Hilti team was able to actually reduce what they call their, time to productivity, for its newly hired sales managers, significantly.
So Hilti had a problem. They found that at the time the company was growing rapidly, there was a lot of change going on and their churn, with the newly hired sales managers, was about 33%. About a third of newly hired sales managers were either leaving the company after a year, or were moving off into other roles in the company. So they had this major problem whereby there was a big, high levels of churn. They were using a business metric which they called, time to productivity. In other words, that was a business measure that measured for Hilti, how long it was before someone they had recruited, had paid for all the hiring, recruiting, on-boarding, getting them into role, getting them up to speed, pay those costs back and were starting to earn money for the company. So that was a sort of cutoff point. That was pretty easy for them to calculate, they knew how much it cost to advertise, recruit, hire, train, and so on.
And at the time the, time to productivity, for newly hired sales managers was around 18 months. In some cases it was higher than that. Some cases it was lower, but generally it took over a year and it doesn't take a brain scientist to realise that if you are a sales manager, you have probably got a bonus attached to your work and therefore, if you are not being productive you are not likely to hit your own targets for your bonus. So therefore, that is not satisfying as an individual and also the company was suffering.
So what the Hilti L&D team did, as part of this project with us, is they redesigned their on-boarding. They found that their on-boarding was too long and there was no focus on tasks. So coming back to that point about focusing on critical tasks and tasks. So with our help, they redesigned their on-boarding programs and reduced it. They made it much more experiential. There were some bits of formal learning that were pushed into it, so people had to do various situational awareness and things like this, the stuff you would expect a sales manager to know. There was formal bits in there, but actually what happened was that over a period of about 18 months, two years that, time to productivity, came down from well above a year to about three months for about 75% of the sales managers and less than six months for over 80% of the sales managers.
So that was just a really good case in point where the business case was absolutely clear. The business case was in millions, in terms of productivity for the company.
David Green: Incidentally, Charles, on that one and you may not know this. But in doing that was one of the other knock-on benefits to actually reduce their attrition for the first year as well? You may not know, but my hypothesis being that if people perform, they are less likely to leave.
Charles Jennings: Yes. I don't have data on that, but I believe that was the case. One thing I can tell you, which is linked to that to a certain extent. I was talking to Rachel Hutchison, who was the person who headed up all this work in Hilti, after the pandemic first hit, back in the middle of last year. And she said she could look around across the globe, in the Hilti countries, and she could tell the countries where they had use this new on-boarding approach to those that hadn’t, because they were remaining productive.
And again, we have seen that in the past when there was lots of changes, if people have the right skills, they have the right environment, they have the right leadership, particularly the right first level manager, they are more likely to remain productive than others.
So that is one specific case. If we have got time, I will just tell you briefly about another case study that is a project we worked with at Citibank.
Citibank had a major challenge in that they were investing huge amounts of money in their courses and training programs and so on and again, felt that they weren't seeing the benefit that they felt they should. So Citibank did a whole pivot from what they call courses to campaigns. So they moved from a focus on courses to a focus on campaigns. One of the early campaigns, or one of the frameworks they used, was something called #BeMore. It was all about how people working in Citibank could be more individually and actually how the bank itself could be more. They did some really good work there. They adopted the 70:20:10 framework, but they didn't call it 70:20:10. When I sat down and had meetings first of all, with Citibank, they said, look, Charles, as a group we have got nearly 200,000 bankers in this organisation. Give them numbers and they will just go down the rabbit hole of wanting to know, what the 70 is, what the 20 is, what the 10 is. So we talked through it and they adopted what they call, the 3 E’s. The three ways in which learning can really help. The three E’s were-
Learning through education. That is the formal learning.
Learning through experience. Obviously that is the learning through working.
And the third one was, learning through exposure. Learning through exposure to others.
So the learning through education corresponded to the 10, the exposure, corresponded to the 20, and experience corresponded to the 70.
They rolled that out and actually David, within Citibank, the people in marketing and internal comms were as involved as L&D in this, because one of the things that L&D doesn't do well, and why should it, we are not great as internal marketeers and getting the messages and getting the changes embedded in the culture of the organisation. Which is why when we produced the roles and read the book we had this performance game changer, which is specifically about driving the projects through, but also embedding them in the culture of the organisation.
Citibank's #BeMore program was very successful in terms of changing that focus from courses to campaigns, L&D changed the way it did things. They did some really great work in terms of having, and they still run, a 30 day challenge. So everyone in the organisation can sign up to a 30 day challenge, which are micro activities that people are expected to carry out each day. And the activity might be sometimes quite challenging activities like, find someone in your team, someone you work closely with, and ask them, how am I perceived by everybody? Now, that is not something you would normally get someone in learning and development facilitating or supporting, but actually things like that were really powerful and they flip the approach. The standard approach to learning and development is, we learn and then we share, and then we apply. Actually they flipped it so the idea was, you would carry out some activity, you would apply something through these 30 day challenges, a lot of the challenges could be done not necessarily at work, but that can be done over a glass of wine or when walking the dog or whatever. And then on their social platform, you shared your experiences, shared your learning, and what you discovered from that, on the platform and then if you wanted to explore further, there was a lot of learning materials and learning content. So you had the opportunity to dive deeper.
I thought it was a really good, practical way of using this model, which is about, sure, formal learning is important but there is a hell of a lot more that we can do in order to help people think differently and work better.
David Green: And is part of it just connecting the 70, the 20, and the ten together better than is traditionally done?
Charles Jennings: Yeah. And again, in our book, we talked about them being recursive. Often people will say to me, oh, is this a 70 activity? Or is this a 20 activity? And I will say, actually it is difficult because often a good 10, good formal learning, will have elements of social learning in it and will often have elements of some sort of experience and learning in the workplace in it. And when we learn socially, we are often reflecting on what we are doing, so it is reflecting on the 70. So they are recursive and so the trick is to think about them holistically. Think about them all together and not to worry and bother too much about, oh, is this a 10? Is this a 20? Is this a 70? Actually, we are trying to help people get better at doing their jobs. We are trying to align what L&D does with the organisation, with the leadership's objectives and the changing objectives of the leadership.
70:20:10 is simply a framework for helping that happen. So don't get hung up on the numbers.
And in fact, even the numbers from the original research, which was carried out at The Centre for Creative Leadership, back in the eighties, even the numbers are manufactured because the original study had 16 categories. And Bob Ikinger, who was working with The Centre for Creative Leadership at the time, and was also at PepsiCo. Bob looked at this and said to the academics, look, no one is ever going to understand this. So let's just take away a couple of the categories, which are around things people did at home and also adversity. He said, I don't think you can ask any manager to put people in a position of adversity, because we know that is great learning, but that is not what we should be doing. And he looked at the rest and said, well it is roughly about 70% from learning through experience and practice and so on. About 20% from conversations and networks and so on. Then about 10% from formal. So even the original numbers, as I say, are sort of manufactured. Bob, I spoke to three or four years ago, and he referred to it as a meme, which I thought was quite a nice word.
We always refer to it as a framework, a reference model, or a framework, but Bob talks about it as a meme and it really is just an approach to extend our thinking and practices about, to come back to your very first question. 70:20:10 is really an approach which helps us step beyond formal learning as a way to help people work better and help organisations perform better. That is all it is.
David Green: I think you have just answered my next question, which is, what is the model's relevance today? So if you wanted to expand on that, then please do and maybe, are there any misconceptions around the model that you would like to just talk about as well?
Charles Jennings: The answer to the first question is really easy. Yes, it is as relevant today. I have had lots of discussions with people that say, it is not really as relevant because social learning wasn't as important then as it is today because we are much more networked within organisations. Organisations are much more flatter, they are not so hierarchical as they were. And of course, that is the case. If you take the view that the numbers are sacrosanct, of course it has changed. But the point is adults, learn in four basic ways, and again, I like to get things down in simple terms.
All of us learn through rich and challenging experiences. We learn through opportunities to practice.
We learn through conversations and building networks. Jay Cross, always used to say that conversation was the greatest learning technology ever invented, I think in a way he is right.
And we also learn through reflection and reflective practice.
So there are those four things. I bunch conversations and networks together because they fit together. But I think those rich and challenging experiences, practice, conversations and networks, and reflection, are really the core about how people learn. It doesn't matter what domain you work in, or how experienced you are, or whatever, as you become more experienced you probably learn less, need less formal input from learning than when you were a newbie. So there will be changes there. If you are working in a highly complex cognitive work, it may vary of course, but actually those fundamentals for me, sit true across any domain. It doesn't matter whether you are out working in manual work, or in factory work, or whether you are working in highly cognitive knowledge work, it is actually those same principles.
So in that way, I found 70:20:10 just a really useful framework throughout. It is clear. I have never found a senior leader who when I have explained 70:20:10, in those terms, I have never found a senior leader say, Hey Charles, can you just tell me that again? In other words, they don't get it or anyone who has challenged me on the fact that actually most of the learning occurs as part of working. Again, as we get more experienced, we realise that we learn more from others and from doing stuff, than we ever did. Those certificates are very nice to hang on our wall as degree certificates and so on. Again, it comes back to Jerome Bruner, the great educational psychologist, who once posed the question about what is the difference between learning architecture and being an architect? I think that was his metaphor. And basically what he was saying is, we come out of university with our architecture degree. Does that make us an architect? And Bruner’s answer was no, it means you have an architecture degree, or an engineering, or a psychology, or a whatever degree it happens to be, but it doesn't make us that professional. What makes us an architect or a surgeon or whatever it happens to be, and Bruner described it as being, inculcated into the profession. In other words, knowing the right people to ask the right questions, at the right time. Knowing where to go to get help. Knowing how to do something because you have done it lots of times before. And I think it can be short cutted in a way, but actually that is a process and that is what learning is all about. This is the process and performance is output.
David Green: Ok, we are on to the last two questions and we are looking forward on both of them. So looking forwards where do you see the learning and development field in 2022 and beyond?
Charles Jennings: Focusing more on the business, on business outputs. Thinking about performance-based learning and what we call value-based learning. In other words moving from being order-takers to value creators and performance enablers. So moving away from focusing on individuals and on just putting people through the courses, into focusing on real value. I see that as being a key thing. And also I would like to think that we are going to focus more on creating a culture of continuous improvement. Not necessarily just to focus on a culture of learning.
David Green: That all makes sense and it is almost if you are in a L and D role, what can we do to support a team to develop and perform. Then if you help the team, you are going to have a bigger output than helping one person on the team. So it is just like again, your analogy with football. If you are a coach to a football team, you want to improve all the parts of the team together, don't you, it is not just as you say, making someone better at shooting. That might be part of it.
Charles Jennings: Yeah. And David, just to close, it goes back to an anecdote I can tell you about when I went to school in Australia. My housemaster at school was a great rowing coach and wrote a book about coaching rowing. In it he quoted an Australian gold medal winning rower of the1920s who said, you don't learn to race by rowing. You learn to row by racing.
And to the football analogy, and it is not just sporting I think it is any sort of work, you learn to do things better by doing them. And if you have got some guidance and support, and you have the right networks, that is the best way to learn. So we shouldn't take that out of our eyesight, in terms of as a L&D professional or a HR professional, we are not a machine simply to design, develop, and deliver training courses, programs, learning journeys, these sorts of things. We are an important function within an organisation to help build organisational capability and performance.
So we need to reflect on and change our direction a little bit, or quite a lot in some cases, in order to do that.
David Green: And the last question. Again, looking forward, although just for the rest of this year, 2022. This is the question we are asking everyone on the series. What is the future of employee experience in 2022?
Charles Jennings: Oh, David, we could spend a whole hour talking about that.
The research indicates that things like experience and engagement particularly, so not just experience but employee engagement, actually improved employee engagement does not necessarily lead to improved performance. In fact, the converse is true. Micah, did a big meta study on this some years ago, and it showed that better performing employees are usually more engaged but more engaged employees are not better performers. So the employee experience, in terms of learning and development, is important. It is important to help people. We all want to feel part of an organisation. We all want to feel that we are valued, there is no doubt about that. But again, if we start from the perspective that just building employee experience is the most important thing, I think we are starting from the wrong point. What is most important is performance. How do we help people to do a job better?
All of us, I am sure, at some point in our careers have done jobs well and the satisfaction you get from doing a job well means that the outcomes are great, you feel better, and therefore you are going to be more engaged with the organisation and with your teams and so on, to do it.
Again, it is not rocket science, but it is something I think people tend to forget because employee experience, sure it is important, but it is not the be all and end all. And we mustn't go down that line of thinking that if we have engaged employees, everything is going to be great, because the research doesn't tell us that.
David Green: Great. What a perfect way to end it on, Charles. Thanks for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast.