For a long, long time I’ve been arguing that differences in the way people learn, see and think is a good thing despite the fact that the mainstream would have those who don’t process information in a traditional and linear way diagnosed with any number of “defects.”
Until now information has typically been delivered as text - black letters on white paper. And not very creatively at that, I might add. Letter-by-letter, line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph, page-by-page, no color, no movement, no sound, no design, no patterns, nothing. It’s just not very interesting to many people and to some it’s outright boring. The point being that it all depends on a person’s brain. I had one parent with an extremely academic, engineering and financial mind and another who could paint, draw and sculpt the most incredible beauty imaginable. Nothing was wrong with either one of them. They were equally talented. Just different. Meanwhile, I landed somewhere in the middle with dyslexia and a strong belief that the more you diversify and expand the way you communicate, the more broadly appealing and inclusive the message.
Then technology came along and suddenly, reading is not the same. Tradition is out the window along with linear thinking. Now, we watch videos and read articles. Written words are more colorful, graphic and engaging. Even the “pages” themselves are lighter and brighter and more apt to stimulate a brain who likes that kind of presentation over a piece of white paper with black letters on it.
Then Dan Pink came along and wrote a bestseller called “A Whole New Mind,” which is about the movement toward right-brain thinking and how a shift in the value of creativity over logic will change the way we work, live and learn. At last, I have a cohort with whom I completely agree. And finally, I think there will be space for everyone thanks to the information age.
I’ve been making the same argument for a long, long time. And that is that training can easily be a waste of time and a waste of money - and I say this as a trainer. Let’s face it, we are the first to go when budgets get cut. Well, it’s no wonder! One of the bigger and more divergent trends in training has taken the concept of “off-sites” to a whole new level by shipping employees to all corners of the earth (usually first class) to learn new things. But what these things actually have to do with work and contribute to a business’s culture, growth and bottom line is tenuous at best. Some argue that these programs help retain workers in general, and top talent specifically. Maybe so. But I say there are far more cost effective, strategic, sound, business-savvy, inclusive ways to retain employees without making others feel as if they don’t measure up enough to be selected to play in a company’s “reindeer games.” It’s exclusive. And “big picture?” It can’t be good for moral across the larger organization.
About a year ago, I wrote about feeling similarly conflicted when it came to the teambuilding bandwagon onto which so much of corporate America has jumped. It’s all too often that neither teambuilding nor training programs work because the objectives themselves are too far removed from business results. It makes no sense. Training is not a luxury; it’s a necessity that shouldn’t be eliminated in the same way that people cut back on vacations during belt-tightening times. What it should be is not cost prohibitive, but ongoing and highly relevant to the immediate, short and long-term needs of the business.
Well it seems I’m in good company. Douglas MacMillan also wrote about this recently as a questionable trend in Business Week. He’s not convinced, nor am I that ROI is anywhere to be found on these ”training trips” that actually train people to do very little that pertains to work, if anything at all.
As I was thinking about how political correctness has infiltrated the workplace and exacerbated our need to name things a certain way, it triggered additional thought about our dependence on labels and definitions in the first place. While having words to identify things is admittedly a linguistic necessity, I think often times it also comes at the price of considerable distortion.
Here’s an example of what I mean…
Last year I’d been written about in TheNew York Times. The story was about dyslexia in the workplace. Naturally, as the feature on the front page of the Sunday Job Market section, it (and I) got some exposure. That exposure prompted many a phone call to my office, the most mind-boggling of which came from a woman who worked at a university in Florida and studied learning disabilities. She berated me for “being part of the problem.” Why? Because I allowed myself to be labeled a person with a learning disability. Huh?
She was armed with “evidence” based in theory after theory, naming study after study that people with learning disabilities weren’t disabled at all. ”How could I?” she asked. Why did she care? I thought. What she completely failed to grasp was that I was the evidence. It didn’t matter what anyone called me. I tried to tell her that she was ascribing way too much power to a name of something she obviously did not understand, despite her education and expertise in the field.
Granted, while having dyslexia may have prevented me from becoming a biochemist, tax attorney or astronaut, it has not prevented me from doing anything that I have actually wanted to do. That is the point.
Labels - we can’t live without them, but maybe we should try not to take them so seriously. I say we’d all be better off in the long run as a result.
Sometimes I get a weird reaction when I explain our company and say that we don’t think there is any difference between marketing and training. People have a hard time grasping the idea at first since historically the two have always operated in silos strictly independent of one another. One department always handles the “people” while another takes care of the “products.”
But if you think about it, they are more similar than they are different. Each has an audience and whether you are a marketer or a trainer, you need to motivate, educate and affect a target group of people. Good marketers sell products, good trainers sell learning and good companies integrate the two. A good marketer would never put a product “out there” and accept a dissatisfied customer, nor would he/she tolerate a product that didn’t work or one that failed to capture the intended audience in full. Training should be no different.
So when compared, we see that the components are actually the same. You have an objective around which you must build a message and then all of your strategies must be aligned and implemented to reinforce both.
In the April 12th issue of Economist magazine, a series of articles appeared that were so good and so poignant that I think every business should take its message under advisement. Basically, the upshot is that the effect of technology on our society, lives and behaviors has only just begun to take shape. Most specifically, it talks about the role of mobility, a trend toward “nomadism” and how in the very near future, there will be no need for anyone to stay in one place. The implications it has on the workforce are staggering since it means that everything we know about organizing and getting things done, will no longer be anything we know. I highly recommend it.
Like many things these days in corporate life, the needs and trends around training employees are changing. Gone are the days of traditional models and linear learning. Whereas we used to have curriculum designers, facilitators and measurement professionals, we now need graphic designers, technologists and programmers too. I predict that in the near term, training presentations the way we know them will no doubt be a thing of the past, meaning that overall training strategies need to shift, starting with the selection and recruitment process.
So the training teams of the future will be a configuration of a new and different set of skills and will require roles that look something like this…
Curriculum Designers with learning diversity expertise
Facilitators who can perform and teach at the same time
Business Partners to provide content which is organizationally relevant
Graphic Designers to create a higher quality interface for learners
Programmers to meet training objectives online
Web 2.0 Strategists to guide training decisions along the appropriate technological landscape
After that? My guess is that it is only a matter of time before Avatars are somehow delivering training.
We truly are our own worst enemies. Think about it. On one hand we have an entire movement devoted to treating kids with Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD), which aims to keep them focused often with the use of prescription drugs. On the other, we have these same children being raised in a society blooming with technology that affords them a five second attention span, or less. In the meantime, the “experts” are walking around scratching their heads wondering why children today have such a hard time concentrating. This is not the 21st century mystery that people make it. Kids can’t pay attention because they are being raised, and therefore shaped, by sound bites, movie clips, video games, text messages, blogs and google - all of which recruit and exercise areas of the brain different from those parts used to process straight, linear, traditional text. It’s like any other muscle. Those that get used get stronger and those that don’t will atrophy. Hence we have the prevalence of ADD/ADHD increase alongside the evolution of the information age.
All we have to do is stop trying to undo the effects that have been created naturally by environmental factors and start accommodating the quantum shift that has occurred in how we learn, receive and process information. Shutting off or accelerating parts of kids’ perfectly functioning brains via medication is no more an answer to helping them succeed (in the long term) than pesticides and growth hormones were an answer to our food supply - at least not if being healthy is the goal. The solution is not to force children into a mold that no longer exists, but rather to understand the cause and effect of technology on learning. By working with it and not against it, we can bring the best out in people and not rob them of what makes them who they are.
In a perfect world, we would all do what Peter Shankman did, which was to say the heck with all the noise about ADD/ADHD. I am who I am and I’m going to make it work.
Workforce demographics and dynamics are changing and the corporate world is trying to keep up. The challenges of today however, differ from those of the past because the needs of the emerging workforce are far more intangible than they had been previously. For example, the link between two unlikely, but convergent groups - those with dyslexia (or more broadly, learning disabilities) and Gen X/Y - is becoming more and more apparent as companies wrestle with workforce development. Together these two groups represent 40% of the workforce and share common attributes in their needs and preferences to learn, communicate, process and share information. At first blush, this overlap may seem far-fetched, but upon closer scrutiny, it is not a leap at all. Progress being what it is, we now find that the thinking processes of people with learning disabilities mirror the way the information age has taught younger generations. In other words, people with learning disabilities are born to learn and think one way, which coincidentally is similar to how technology has shaped the brains of our future. We not only have almost half of our workplace needing to move away from traditional methods of teaching, learning and communicating, but we are also faced with an environment that is not positioned to accommodate the shift.
Abandoning our past is not the point, but incorporating the present into our future is.
I had a stunning conversation the other day with Ty Smith, who is the VP of Organizational Development and Effectiveness at HBO. We were talking about the nature of dyslexia and specifically about an article that had come out on December 6th, 2007 in The New York Times citing a study that said dyslexics share common traits that can be invaluable to businesses. The problem however is that these individuals often self-select out of mainstream corporate because the system as it exists does not accommodate their strengths. Rather, it is tailored to accentuate their weaknesses. As we continued to talk and discuss why that was the case and what characteristics specifically made it true, he astonished me by switching gears and suggesting that he saw the possibility of a link between Gen X and Gen Y and people with learning disabilities. Why? Because the way that kids with learning disabilities are born to learn is uncannily similar to the way kids’ brains are being shaped to learn today in this new age of information and technology.
Think about it. Information is no longer linear, fixed nor character-driven, the two factors that cause the most difficulty for dyslexics. The dependence on written text is now balanced (and thence lessened) with pictures and moving images, and the black and white pages of days passed have turned into colorful renditions of the same material. The point being that what used to produce the challenges for kids with learning disabilities has now been mitigated by virtue of qualities brought forth by the computer. Things like keyword searches have rendered the days in the library wading through page after page and book after book, irrelevant.
Basically, the internet has done to reading what the calculator did to math. It provided a way for people to calculate numbers who could not otherwise do it in their heads or on paper with a pen or pencil. But here’s the point. Today’s kids are shaped to learn the way dyslexics were born to think. Things like text and instant messaging fragment language in a similar way that learning disabilities fragment words for someone who has a “disability.” So what happened? A new category was born. Now instead of really looking at, and understanding nonlinear thinking and learning, we labeled the new generation made up of those either born or made to think differently as ADD or ADHD. We’re going in the wrong direction.
At Krysalis, as we’ve been talking about learning disabilities in the workplace, what we’ve really been talking about is the importance of cognitive diversity - a term we coined to describe differences in how people process information, think and learn. For us, it’s about appreciating minds of all kinds and reaping the benefits that differences in people’s brains can bring to bear on business results. I personally love the idea and see it as the next step in the evolution of diversity in corporate America. When I learned that the Asperger’s community had come up with “neurodiversity,” a similar term that meant similar things, I was delighted. It too focuses on the importance of valuing differences across groups of people beyond what we refer to as the “verticals” like color, race, ethnicity, marital status, etc… We think of it as a horizontal approach that includes everyone regardless of any given label.
So as the concept of diversity in thought gains traction, it is challenging organizations to reach for new ground and expand their capacity to think differently and open their collective minds to the new and exciting possibilities that stand before them. What companies who “go there” are finding is that diversity is not an HR issue alone. It is a matter of business that touches everything from marketing and innovation, to sales and customer service, to inclusion, engagement and retention.
Donna 
