Welcome to the first interview in our new Profiles series. Our intent in these interviews is to introduce Guild members to innovators in the e-Learning field, particularly those with whom many members may be unfamiliar. We hope you find these interviews informative and stimulating!
Bill Brandon, Editor of Learning Solutions e-Magazine, conducted this interview on November 12, 2008, at the DevLearn 2008 Conference in San Jose, California.
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David Wilkins Senior Director, Workplace and Learning Solutions, Mzinga |
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David Wilkins has more than ten years of practical experience in the e-Learning, simulation, learning community, and performance support system industries, as both a thought leader and product strategist, complemented by an educational background in teaching and adult learning. An active speaker on the corporate learning circuit, David has presented topics ranging from software simulation theory to the convergence of learning and community at numerous national conferences, including The eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering and DevLearn conferences, ASTD International Conference & Expo, Training Conference & Expo, TechLearn, NASAGA, and WinWriters, among others.
BB: Welcome, Dave, and thank you for agreeing to be our first interview. Since many of our readers won’t know anything about your company, could you start by describing what Mzinga (“muh-zing-uh”) does?
David Wilkins: Mzinga does three things.
First, we provide a social learning suite, which enables companies to do all the traditional things you’d expect from LMSs and course offering technologies, and it also “socializes” those things with blogs and social networking.
Second, we produce social communities – enterprise communities, extended enterprise communities – which enable companies to enhance networking and interaction through social media, independent of the learning applications.
Third, we provide social media and social networking, wrapping social experiences around an existing site. This would be something like iVillage or ABC News, where we may not be the creator of the core content, but we enable people to have comments and discussions around a piece of content that already exists. We socially enable these other sites, in other words.
BB: Is there a philosophy behind Mzinga?
David Wilkins: Yes. I think the core philosophy is best expressed in a project that our Chairman of the Board, Barry Libert, helped kick off, the We Are Smarter Than Me™ initiative (http://www.wearesmarter.org/), after his book of the same name. I think that’s the core philosophy, that we’re all better for the insights of others. More gets done through collaboration, when people share best practices and so on, rather than individual achievement. All three of those different parts of the business that I’ve just described will strive to do that. The first part is about sharing and collaboration in the traditional learning space. The second is about doing the same thing through traditional business processes. The third enables social interactions around an existing business that might be media-facing.
BB: This morning, “The Great e-Learning Research Panel Discussion” kicked off the concurrent sessions at DevLearn. Part of the discussion was on the question of where businesses are currently headed, and how training does or does not figure into that. Talent management came up a lot. In a previous discussion that we had, you differentiated “talent management” and “talent development.” How do you see these activities playing out in the downturn economy?
David Wilkins: I think that talent development is something you should never back away from. Particularly if you define it in the broad way that we think of it, which is not just about formal skills competencies, but about better enabling people to do their jobs. This would be through the development of their talent in multiple ways, through activities such as formal learning, social learning, and mentorship. We believe that in a down economy, you should do more of these things, rather than less.
The distinction to me is that one is about a company focus, and the other is about an employee focus. Talent management is about what the company needs – succession planning and compensation management, and definitions of skills and competencies. Talent development is about what the employee needs – how do I get to the next step in my career, how do I get the information I need to be successful in my job, how do I better collaborate with my peers – the things that help me to be successful on a personal level.
I really feel that efficient sharing and collaboration become, if anything, more important as we downsize, and as people leave organizations. We lose critical skills and competencies. Where is key equipment stored? Where is that information? Who did the employees who just left network with?
BB: Kevin Oakes on the Research Panel made the point that about 1% of companies actually see how training and development will help them in a downturn, and the other 99% slash the training and development budget. How do you turn that around?
David Wilkins: That’s a good question, and a good observation, too. Again, I think it’s about broadening the scope of the discussion.
It’s easy to see how people might decide to cut instructional designers and training, because historically we’ve done a very poor job as an industry measuring the impact of those initiatives. So everybody knows we need training, but nobody today can really define the impact of training. Aside from a few sporadic studies here and there, and some individual case studies, there hasn’t been a comprehensive mechanism where people have measured the effect of what we do. It’s not a core competency that most instructional designers have. I can see why, at the decision-makers’ level, they might want to cut.
But on the other hand, if we expand the scope to include the one-on-one conversations, the water cooler conversations, the actual exchange of information in the organization, that’s the exact opposite of what you should cut. When you lose people, it’s that much more critical to trap that information and to make it available to the people who are left behind. I would go that angle.
The other angle I would go is in reference to the fact that in a down economy, the overall macro level things aren’t changing. It’s still true that we only teach, through formal education, about 20% to 30% of what people do on the job. And we’re still not capturing or measuring or managing the other 70% to 80%. That’s still a valid fact. It’s still true that Boomers are leaving the workforce. It’s still true that Millennials are entering the work force, and so there’s still an argument to make that those underlying factors haven’t changed. If you want to drive performance in your business, you need to figure out how to reach those new employees, and how to trap expertise before it leaves.
BB: There’s some thought that the Boomers won’t leave the workforce quite as fast as people once thought they would.
David Wilkins: Yes, it’s true that the economy is threatening to keep more folks around.
BB: How well do you think the Boomers are going to adapt to the use of social software?
David Wilkins: I think there’s a subset of folks in the Boomer generation (and beyond) that we know from the Pugh data, and from other data, that just aren’t going to adapt. They haven’t adopted e-mail yet, they don’t use the Internet very well, and they just aren’t going to, no matter what we do.
On the other hand, there’s a much larger pool of Boomers, and even Traditionalists who are in that older demographic, who consistently use e-mail and social networking tools YouTube, LinkedIn, and Flickr. I think it’s a stereotype to assume that older generations just can’t do this or can’t adapt, because many of them already have.
You know, the LinkedIn demographic isn’t the same as the Facebook demographic. It skews much older. But if you look at trends on Facebook, that demographic is starting to skew a lot older as well, as people start to use that forum to network with their children and grandchildren.
If there’s enough value in something, if people see value, then they’ll adapt and adopt. The trick is finding the value point that makes people willing to make that investment.
BB: What do you do to support the change management?
David Wilkins: What we do, as a company, and what I think the whole industry should do, is really have a broad spectrum of services, Strategic consulting, to make sure that we’re identifying what the goals and objectives are, how we’re going to meet those goals, ongoing moderation (meaning to actually moderate those posts to make sure things are safe and OK), community management (which means actually paying attention to how it’s being implemented, optimizing the solution, recommending changes and suggesting ways things could be different to drive participation). And a lot of those things are analogous to what happens in learning today with back office solutions.
So for years now, we’ve offered back office capabilities, through learning management system (LMS) applications, to help administer training, to help implement it, to be like an HR role for a company, and what I’m suggesting is a similar kind of thing.
The big difference is that, at this stage, LMS is an accepted technology. I think social media is at an evangelical moment where you have to sell the value and do the change management. The last thing you want to do is set up community technologies that are in addition to someone’s day job. What we really need to do is transform the day job to require and use community technologies. If it’s always “in addition to,” it will never be adopted. If we make it “integral to” and build it in, then it will be a rather easy migration, I think. The technology’s not hard; it’s factoring in the new workflows and how people actually communicate that will be difficult.
BB: If you look out three years, and given what’s going on right now, including the downturn and everything else, where to you think we’re going to be in the training, learning, or development space?
David Wilkins: I think we’ll still be very much in the midst of this transition. To me, this is a paradigm shift. I hate to use a buzzword like that, but I think in this case it’s actually the appropriate one to use. Going to simulations and games and even virtual classrooms changed the delivery mechanism, but not the underlying paradigm or model. Whereas, what’s happening now, with peer-to-peer and user-generated content and social networking, that’s actually changing the underlying model.
We’re now going from a model where experts mediate and create the content, to where people are on an equal footing with the experts, and contributing as well as consuming content. That’s the “prosumer” concept – employees become equally producer and consumer of content.
So I think that we will still be in the midst of that transition, even three years from now. What I expect we’ll see is a lot more solutions that lead with the peer-to-peer and user-generated content model instead of the reverse. I think we’re going to see a much more dominant model trending in that direction because it supports a greater degree of scale.
Going back to your question about the downturn, had we done this two years ago, we would have more people in the organization today that would be producing content. Instead of having a central pool of instructional designers who don’t produce enough, we could spread the workload across more people by having everybody be a contributor. And then you would have scale, and you would have economies of scale that you don’t get from a central pool.
BB: So you see it as actually becoming much more strategic rather than – it frankly tends to be tactical now.
David Wilkins: Right. I think what we’re going to see is recognition of the fact that people are already learning in exchanges in the hallway or at the water cooler that right now are “one and done,” vaporware after that, that you can’t find or research. Those things will start to be critical as they’re captured, are searchable, are mine-able, and it will be come core to a company’s flexibility, and adaptability, to have access to that kind of information flow that today is essentially lost.
BB: Then, too, you lose a lot of it because of the “siloing.” You might have conversations around the water cooler, or when the smokers go outside the building, but that’s the only place the silo walls come down. Sometimes the lessons that the accountants learn don’t transfer to the engineers or to anyone else.
David Wilkins: Just to that point, there’s an interesting story. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Intel story, of how they’re using Wikipedia technology internally (“Intelpedia”). One of the things that really struck me about Intelpedia, and I’ve heard this from multiple customers and prospects, it didn’t initially start off being populated with a whole bunch of work content. The greatest number of posts was around the soccer pickup schedule, and where to stay when you came to Santa Clara.
It struck me how wise it was that they didn’t shut that conversation down. What happens when I come into town, and I join that pickup soccer game? What are we going to talk about, other than work? We don’t have anything else in common. And all of a sudden this thing that’s social becomes, like the water cooler, a mechanism to drive cross-pollination. Which is why, when people start with community, you shouldn’t just have a pure work focus. It’s OK for there to be a community of practice on your Web site about knitting, or about a soccer game, or about fantasy football, or conversations about dogs and kids, because people who participate in that way are from silos, and that can be the way to get cross-pollination, and to get people to socially network across divisions or across subject areas.
BB: Dave, we’re getting near the end our time. Any closing thoughts?
David Wilkins: There’s one other thing that I’d like to get on record, just from me personally. It’s about culture change – I think one of the biggest things we have to do as an industry is to rethink our roles. I don’t see it happening yet, and it kind of concerns me, because I think we’re missing an opportunity.
Think about what it’s going to take to get user-generated content and peer-to-peer exchange. The biggest thing it’s going to take is for people to contribute their expertise, and to comment on other’s expertise. To do that successfully, we’re all going to have to figure out how to better communicate what we know to people who don’t know it. Which is exactly what instructional designers do.
That’s our core competence – to go talk to a subject matter expert, figure out what they know, translate it for the masses so it can be consumed more generally. That core skill set is something we need to share and distribute across the whole organization. That’s a very strategic skill where we’re sort of missing the boat. Many of the conversations I’ve had are ones in which instructional designers said, “You know the user-generated content’s not going to be good,” or, “The user-generated content’s not going to be accurate.” Well, the instructional designer’s job is to help the content to be accurate, but not by being the pipe, not by being the conduit through which the information flows, but by being the plumber. Help them to be better at it.
So I sometimes will tell folks, think about how your role changes. “Teach people to fish” is the model we have today. “Teach people to teach” is the model we need to be thinking about for tomorrow. And you can see that parallel in the news business.
If you look at CNN.com, it used to be that the only people who could write an article were reporters, and then blogging came along and changed the whole model. Now if you look at CNN.com, they have a section called, “iReport.” And iReport is user-generated news, people recording video on their mobile phones, or writing articles and submitting them. And now some of the CNN employees who used to be reporters are “vetting” user-generated content, and sort of editorializing, and providing a gatekeeper function to the user-generated articles.
I think that a similar transition is going to happen with learning. We have to recognize that we’re not going to be the only people creating content, and that we need to figure out another role within our sphere of influence. That role is to help people get good at sharing, to provide a common set of tools and technologies. Then we need to figure out where we fit in this. Are we editors? Do we control it? Do we consult on it? There’s some other role there that we’re missing – I think we’re going to have to figure this out in the next few years.
Actively and strategically look at your organization, and see what information is out there. Identify the information the organization needs to achieve its strategic objectives. That’s another reason why I think trapping all that information that currently is not trapped, now suddenly gives you insight. As you start to analyze that, you could say, “We know in six months we’re going to go in this strategic direction, and after this priority, based on the information that’s in our community or in our social network environment, there doesn’t seem to be enough information about x, y, or z in order for us to pursue that larger objective.”
I think proactively analyzing the knowledge and information that’s being exchanged, now suddenly opens up opportunities to go after strategic training objectives and learning objectives to help the organization succeed in those strategic endeavors.
