Here’s something that probably shouldn’t have shocked me but did.

It was the last day before the Christmas holiday yesterday. So I was faffing around. More than usual even.

We got to talking about new, exciting stuff we’re going to do next year. And how we’re going to make sure we’ve got enough slack in our schedules for people to learn to do these new, exciting things well.

I used to ‘do’ Learning & Organisational Development. I’ve done my 10,000 hours and more.

I’ve been conditioned to analyse stuff, build competency frameworks, develop schemes of work, curricula and training plans, draw up assessment frameworks, produce learning materials — all that malarkey. I’ve done this for teams of hundreds of people in ‘onboarding’ programmes or as part of ‘redeployments’. And, on occasion, for reasons I’ve not entirely been sure of.

But I haven’t done it for a while. So, I thought it might be fun to develop a ‘course’ for old times’ sake. Three courses, actually.

And here’s the bit that shocked me. It took me ten minutes. Plus a further twenty minutes of conversation asking ourselves the question, “Erm, that seemed a bit too easy. What are we missing?”

I’d mentally set a timer for a couple of pomodoros. I thought I’d sketch out some ideas and see how far I got.

But I actually finished. I gathered everything I needed to ‘do’ the whole thing in 10 mins. This includes all the materials, all the curricula, all the assessment methodology, all the malarkey for three courses.

And, even more weirdly, this also includes getting a fairly enthusiastic agreement to do these three courses over seven weeks/90 minutes or so a day. Knowing these people as I do, I have absolutely no doubt they’ll ‘finish’ and put the stuff into practice before the end of January.

(We also managed to plan a way to make the first steps towards ‘embedding’ the learning into our background processes.)

It might not work, of course. But you can say that about any ‘learning intervention’.

Here’s a blockquote from Daniel ‘Pat’ Moynihan I like – Why Some Agilist Think One Size Fits All:

I wish these thought leaders would stop talking about how things that “could be or should be,” and start writing about their actual experience in a case study they have personally participated in, and how those actual cases could be transferred to other domains and context. By this I mean actually doing the heavy lifting of translating those personal experiences into a real project in another domain, then “connecting the dots” between what worked in one domain and how those process can be applied to the new domain.

But I’ve learned – the hard way again – that those who preach the gospel of agile or lean may not have the past performance [in] another domains to support their claims of universality of their philosophies.

I’ve done my fair share of talking about the way things could be or should be.

But it seems to me this is how it is for many of us now (and will be pretty much everywhere else soon) when it comes to learning stuff.

There’s nothing new here. Lots of people have been talking about this stuff for ages. But I’m not sure it’s been brought home to me so vividly before. Like I say, I was shocked.

This isn’t ‘agile’ but it is pure Open Source methodology. I realise I hadn’t fully connected the dots between the domains before in my head. Even though I thought I had.

Digging stuff up on The Proverbial Google, reusing it intelligently, adapting if necessary but only as a last resort — Drupalizing learning interventions, to use an example close to my heart.

Teaching is toast.

---

Image: Shutterstock Emotion from Mister Mochiman on Tumblr