Is 70:20:10 a Utopian idea?

Just in the same way that 70:20:10 is not a doctrine, there is no perfect 70:20:10 model. What 70:20:10 can help to do is build a culture of continuous learning, where employees are continuously learning and the organisation is continuously transforming itself (Pedler et al, 1997). It’s an enabler for the learning organisation that Peter Senge talks about in his writing (Senge, 2010). Modern workplaces are forever changing, the complexity of the challenges we are facing is increasing, and new forms of collaboration and continuous learning are needed to keep up. A mature approach to 70:20:10 means placing learning at the core of what an organisation does. It means focusing learning on the client's needs and how to better meet those needs. It means when an employee, manager or learning and development professional needs to solve a learning problem, they search for informal and social ways to solve it first, instead of a course. In an organisation with a mature approach to learning employees are self directed in their learning and their managers support them. Reflection and continuous improvement are embedded into everyday workflows.

The 70:20:10 journey

A mature approach to 70:20:10 doesn’t just happen. It’s a journey. Like many journeys, as you get close to what you thought was the destination, the goal moves. Learning and development professionals often hear organisations talking about how 70:20:10 is embedded into the way they work with individual programs and attempt to use this as a starting point. Both managers and employees often feel lost when this happens. They don’t have good models or a good understanding of how 70:20:10 can really work. I’ve seen learning and development people attempt to solve this problem by running a course for their managers in how to develop a 70:20:10 learning plan, but I’m not sure they realise that through focusing on such a program they are reinforcing to managers that formal learning is the only way to learn. An alternative to this would be to give managers their own 70:20:10-based learning experience.

Below I outline a staged approach to how to get started with the 70:20:10 learning model.

Stage 2 – Increasing social learning at a team level

The next stepping stone on the path to a mature 70:20:10 is to embed peer and social learning. When you first read this, you might think I’m talking about an introduction to an online social learning network. That could be part of this approach. There are some fast gains to be had for peer and social learning at a team level. Two approaches are:

Some useful learning theories

Often 70:20:10 is seen as a learning theory, but it’s actually more of a learning model that is supported by a number of learning theories. I’ve included this section on learning theories because I think it’s important for learning and development people to develop a richer understanding of how people learn.

Social constructivism

Social constructivism is a version of constructivism learning theory (Vygotsky, 1978). The basics of constructivism are that everyone builds their own understanding of the world. Indeed learning is not someone absorbing facts, but instead happens when someone builds their own insights. At a neurological level, neuroscientists have used brain scanning technology to visually map which parts of the brain are active while doing different tasks. What they have discovered is that each person’s maps are different. At a neurological level, each person's brain is literally wiring learning together in different ways.

Social constructivism was developed by Lev Vygotsky. It emphasises the social and collaborative nature of learning. Vygotsky sees that for humans to learn they need to be doing it with other people; learning is a social process not a solo process. For Vygotsky, learning needs to involve social processes such as debating and sharing ideas.

Social constructivist theory is a great underpinning for the 70:20:10 learning model. It supports the integration of experiential-based learning (the 70) with social and collaborative learning (the 20). A few examples of social constructivism are: 

• • communities of practice
  • retrospectives
  • coaching

Kolb experiential learning theories

David Kolb developed his theories of experiential learning in the 1970s (Kolb et al, 1974). For Kolb, learning is a process that has its roots in the concrete experience (the 70) and the learner needs to observe and reflect on those experiences to form an understanding of the activity. At this stage the learner forms a conceptual, often abstract understanding of the experience. Then the learner needs to practise and test these new concepts. During this practice phase the whole process can restart.

What is useful about Kolb’s process is that it’s not just about learners having new experiences, it includes reflection and practice. Learning happens during the combination of all the phases.

Often when learning and development people move to more experiential ways of learning they focus on just giving the learner an experience and forget about the reflective phases of the process. The process can be applied to simulated experiences as well.

Putting this into practice means that work and learning need to be integrated. Employees need time and guidance on how to reflect on and articulate what they have learned. Some example activities:

• • Regular conversations between learner and manager about what has been learned lately
  • Adding an agenda item to a team meeting, where each team member talks about what they have been learning
  • Personal learning logs, where learners write notes on what they are learning

Mirror neurons

Neuroscience is the study of how the brain works. One of its most useful discoveries is ‘mirror neurons’ (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). Neuroscientists have discovered that as we observe an act, the same neurons fire in our brain as those in the brain of the person performing the act. Most of the actual research has been done with monkeys but there is evidence that the process works in the same way in humans. Another way to think about this is that humans copy what we see others doing.

Mirror neurons are a great way of explaining what is happening in the 70:20:10 learning model, especially when they are focused on sharing knowledge. Employees often say they learned more on the job than during courses. One way of thinking about this is that on the job, employees see how the organisation is working and their mirror neurons are triggered. Many workplace learning strategies such as job shadowing and mirroring are based on this approach of the employee witnessing best practice. Innovation in an organisation can also be triggered by seeing examples of different practice and approaches that might be outside how one’s own organisation works.

Mirror neurons explain why change is often so hard, as we seem wired to copy the people around us. Change often means breaking those patterns or not being like them to start with. As more people become involved in change the process becomes easier because we are no longer fighting our mirror neurons. 

What the 70:20:10 learning model means for learning and development teams

Moving to a 70:20:10 learning model requires a shift on the part of the learning and development team. Traditionally, learning and development teams have been involved in:

1. 1. 1. the direct facilitation and delivery of training, or
      2. organisation and development of face-to-face programs.

But moving towards a 70:20:10 model often means the team needs to change the way they work.

From training needs analysis to performance needs analysis

One of the core activities of traditional learning and development teams is training needs analysis. Understanding the business problem and context becomes even more important with the move to an integrated 70:20:10 solution. The process shifts from training needs to performance needs. A performance needs analysis is focused on what the employee needs to do and what are the barriers to their achieving that. It’s about looking for barriers that might be more than just a lack of skills or knowledge. Asking broader questions at the analysis stage means better integrated solutions can be designed.

From service centres to consultants

Learning and development teams who focus on organising learning programs are typically seen by organisations as service centres. Moving to a 70:20:10 learning model often requires that when a section of an organisation requests training (the 10) the learning and development team needs to challenge them, working more like a consultant to identify what is really needed. Making this transition is not easy, and takes radically different influencing skills plus a shift in mindset.

Learning ecosystems

70:20:10 learning models often mean learning and development professionals move towards designing a ‘learning ecosystem’. A learning ecosystem will look different in each organisation, but it is always more than just a series of face-to-face or online courses.

My working definition of a learning ecosystem is that it is an entity made up of components that work together to create a whole learning experience. The relationship between the components means that the overall experience becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Pathways – guides to learning while working

The central tenet of a learning ecosystem is that learners need some way to navigate through it. A challenge of the 70:20:10 learning model is that the learners need to become more self directed in their approach to learning. They often need guidance in how the ecosystem works so that they can easily see the pathways that will lead to the learning goals. Heidi Grant Halvorson has found that people are more likely to achieve goals that are focused on learning than goals that are based on achieving a certain level of performance (Halvorson, 2011).

Gardeners – learning from each other

Learning ecosystems are not just about goals and resources – the driving force behind a learning ecosystem is the people involved. Repeatedly it's been found that the employee's manager is the key to their learning experience (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2005). In 70:20:10 learning models managers have a dual role: providing feedback to their team members about their performance, and leading conversations that encourage reflective thinking and continuous learning.

Jay Cross wrote extensively about informal learning as being the ‘natural way to learn’ (Cross, 2006). Informal learning is often a process of looking at what peers are doing inside and outside of an organisation and literally copying them. In many ‘70’ learning approaches involving job rotations or mentoring, this type of reproducing is just what peers are doing. One of the refreshing things about the 70:20:10 learning model is that organisations are focusing more on these types of approaches.

Hothouses – spaces to rapidly practise new skills

When I got started in training, I focused on providing learners with real experiential learning experiences. I quickly realised that learners often needed time to be able to practise new skills and get feedback before they start on real tasks. The idea of a flipped classroom is not new. The flipped classroom approach focuses on using face-to-face or online virtual classrooms for peer-to-peer learning, an approach that removes the provision of information from the learning experience. A similar way of thinking is that formal learning becomes a learning ‘hothouse’, where learners are provided with somewhere to practise the decision making that they will be doing on the job and gain rapid feedback. Providing these opportunities for practice is often left out of 70:20:10-based learning approaches because of the focus on experiential learning.

Streams – learning in the flow of work

As work is becoming more complex, learning and work is often merged. For the employee, a new and challenging task or project often means the need for new capabilities. In most of these situations there is not time to first learn and then do the task. Learning needs to happen in the flow of work. It is not a separate activity, it is integrated. For instance, a project and collaboration platform that is used to manage a project is also a place for employees to reflect and articulate on lessons learned. Learning becomes part of the work environment. Learning in the flow of work brings together many of the aspects of a learning ecosystem – learners needing to have goals, learning from peers, having access to the right knowledge and supports.

Foundations – knowledge supports

Repeatedly, one of the root causes of performance problems I’ve found has been the organisation’s intranet and knowledge bases. In these same organisations there is typically confusion between knowledge management and learning. Often, the only way to access an organisation's practices is through their training programs, though learners often seek more flexible ways to access this knowledge. A good learning ecosystem ensures learners have access to a range of job aids and support resources.

The idea of a learning ecosystem provides learning and development professionals with a framework and approach for making the 70:20:10 model a reality. As a framework it provides a way to move beyond designing courses and instead design more holistic, strategic approaches to learning.

Learning and development team members who once focused on organising training programs shift to being learning designers. Team members who were involved in direct delivery shift to roles of community manager or content curator. These shifts are often natural progressions and happen quite easily because many of the core skills of being a great face-to-face facilitator are the same as those needed to be a great community manager. But the move to becoming a learning designer is more difficult. It used to be that the external provider (who might be responsible for face-to-face delivery or developing an online module) did all the learning design. The 70:20:10 approach often means that the learning and development team designs the overall architecture and what the blend of mediums might be. They therefore need a richer understanding of how people learn.

70:20:10 learning programs are all about implementation

Project managing a learning program that is based on the 70:20:10 model is more complex than just running a course. They have more moving parts, are more than just one-off events, and learning and development operational people often find the increased complexity difficult, at least in the beginning. Running a 70:20:10 learning program is more like running an advertising campaign than running an event. Detailed plans about the program need to be part of the overall design process.

Digital learning and 70:20:10

Digital learning technologies hold many possibilities for supporting and enabling 70:20:10 learning models. There are a range of technologies and tools that can be used for enhancing and increasing sharing and reflection in the workplace and tracking learning activity.

One approach Sprout Labs has seen work well in transforming learning in highly-technical organisations is to do the exact opposite to what most learning and development professionals would naturally do, and that is to focus on technologies and then embed new learning approaches as part of those projects. Employees in these types of technical cultures are often drawn to new technologies but are resistant to changing learning practice. Focusing on technology changes is a powerful way to realign learning in a manner technical employees find engaging.

Let’s look at a few of the ways digital learning technologies can be used in a 70:20:10 learning model.

Personal learning environments

The idea of a personal learning environment (PLE) is not new, but hasn’t been talked about much in learning and development over the last few years.

A personal learning environment is often a cluster of technologies and online services that an employee uses to:

1. 1. 1. Bring information together into a centralised place to make it easier to digest information quickly. An example of this is Feedly, which enables users to read the feeds from many blogs in one place.
      2. Publish and reflect on what they have been learning and how they are putting that into practice. This process of sharing and publishing can also be a platform where other employees comment as well. This might be internal within an organisation or can be public. Blogging platforms are perfect for this process of self publishing.
      3. Track progress on learning goals.

PLEs are powerful in that a single system doesn’t have to do it all. Different systems can be used for each component. PLEs are not so much about technology as they are about processes that can be used to enhance and deepen learning.

LinkedIn can be used as a PLE. An individual can follow people and read what that person is sharing and writing about as well as publish comments, share and write posts. The challenge is that most people will read and share content, but many don’t feel confident in publishing posts. They feel like they need to be experts to write and publish. It’s actually at this stage – when people are having to reflect and articulate on learning and ideas – that really deep learning occurs and expertise develops. One way learning and development professionals can help encourage learners to publish is to show examples of bloggers who are writing in reflective ways. Learning and development professionals should be role modeling using PLEs for learning as well.

Performance supports

Often a performance problem doesn't need a training solution. It is an information problem and not a skills problem. Training is often used for information delivery but training is not a great way to communicate information. The use of training as an information dump is one of the reasons that learners forget so much of the course and the reason why knowledge is not transferred into workplace practice. A performance support is a resource that can be integrated into the work task and can be accessed at the moment of need. Examples of performance supports are checklists, cheat sheets and flowcharts. A couple of useful questions to ask during the early stages of learning program design are:

• • Does this problem really need to be solved by a learning program?
  • How can performance supports that could be used after a learning program is completed be integrated into the training program?

The second question can be useful for learning complex tasks and processes. The training program switches to focusing on how to use the performance support. This approach of thinking about different ways a performance support can be used in the learning program is called the ‘Five Moments of Need’ (Gottfredson & Mosher, 2014).

Five moments of need

Working out loud

Another simple but powerful way digital technologies can be used to increased performance has come to be known as ‘working out loud’. John Stepper describes it this way:

Working out loud starts with making your work visible in such a way that it might help others. When you do that – when you work in a more open, connected way – you can build a purposeful network that makes you more effective and provides access to more opportunities (Stepper, 2014).

This can start with simple daily or weekly status update by employees on an internal social network about what they are currently working on. The Stepper definition also focuses on building networks with peers inside and outside that can help an employee to complete their job faster. Working out loud is a simple, fast way to increase knowledge sharing in an organisation.

Some examples of 70:20:10-based learning models

It’s sometimes difficult to picture exactly what a 70:20:10 learning model looks like. The challenge with 70:20:10 models is that they change depending on the context of the organisation and its employees. This means that each model really needs to be custom designed for each situation and business problem. Below are a few design ideas.

Sharing knowledge

We're going to start with a program that is based on sharing knowledge because this is where 70:20:10 is really powerful. It’s often one of the easiest places to begin. A classic form of knowledge sharing is the technical onboarding program.

Meet Rebecca, a learning and development manager. Rebecca needs to design a blended on-boarding program for new assessors. The processes and guidelines these assessors are working with are complex and involve dealing with a lot of ambiguity. It takes 12 to 18 months for new employees to be competent and for the assessor to be able to write reports without supervision.

The new employee starts with an online learning experience that is based around simulated cases. In the early stages these are worked examples where an expert assessor explains how they go about making the decisions, and then over time the employee begins to make decisions about parts of the simulated cases. While they are doing this work, the coach is physically located close to them.

The coach is constantly having learning conversations with the new employee. The coach is not just focused on the simulated cases, they are also talking with the employee about the work they are currently doing and involving the new employee in parts of the cases that they are able to do. As the employee’s capabilities build they begin to do more real work. The employees are connected to a group of peers so that they can debate the ambiguity of the problems they face.

As they start completing more real work they develop a portfolio of evidence that is assessed against a cluster of custom competence. This assessment also includes the measurement of the quality and quantity of their work.

Communities of practice

One of the most common forms of knowledge sharing activity is the community of practice. A community of practice is a group of peers who share knowledge, with some working together to generate new practice.

Meet Jeff. He wants to increase knowledge sharing in his GP practice. Jeff runs weekly group learning sessions where each week one team member runs a training session or discussion about a topic for their peers. Jeff re-organises everyone’s patient bookings to make sure this is achievable. The practice includes a nurse and physiotherapist and they are a part of these sessions as well. This arrangement creates cross-discipline learning and sharing.

In terms of effective learning, it's probably the person running the session who is doing the actual learning. What Jeff is doing with these sessions is also saying to his team that learning while working is important. He is also starting to create a culture of learning in his team.

Bring new knowledge into the organisation

Let’s get back to Rebecca and how she wants to improve the culture of continuous learning in her organisation. She wants to embed the process of debriefing and retrospectives into the way her team works. (Retrospectives are a process where the team is constantly looking back on recent work and asking how it could be improved and what they have learned.) Rebecca’s barrier is that the organisation’s managers don’t have skills in conducting a retrospective. This means that she is going to need some formal learning experience in the learning design to introduce this new practice into the organisation.

The program starts with a survey that focuses on managers and teams self assessing their current approaches to team-based, continuous learning. This survey can be used later in the program as an evaluation tool. The learning experience starts with a story-based eLearning module. This provides the managers with an example of how to run a retrospective. The module is based around a number of things that go wrong with retrospectives. After the formal learning experience, managers are sent tips over a period of time on how to run retrospectives. This nudges the managers towards embedding the new approach within their team work culture.

There is also a portal of resources on the organisation's intranet that includes planning templates. A community of practice is then built around the managers sharing what they are doing and how, as a group, they are solving problems.

After a period of time, each manager sits in on another manager running a retrospective and gives feedback. This practice is an opportunity for knowledge sharing and the data can be used as part of the evaluation process. At this stage the self survey is run again to see how the program has affected team-based continuous learning in the organisation.

The 70:20:10 concept is a journey not a destination

 

The 70:20:10 concept is flexible and its adoption lays a pathway for a different way of learning in the workplace. Previously I’ve talked about a mature approach to 70:20:10, where learning is at the core of what an organisation does. Getting to this stage is more of a journey than a destination; just as you feel like you have developed a mature approach to one aspect of the model you will see (and should be seeing) areas where it can be improved and refined. I hope the ideas in this eBook have helped you along your 70:20:10 journey.