How to Succeed in Business (While Really Trying): The Needs for New Institutions of Lifelong Learning

This post begins with an article review about topical trends in I/O Psychology and concludes that new institutions of learning and research are needed to support business.

Article Review

Cascio, W.F. & Aguinis, H. (2008). Research in Industrial and Organizational Psychology From 1963 to 2007: Changes, Choices, and Trends, Journal of Applied Psychology, 93 (#5), 1062-1081.

Primary Conclusion: Industrial Organizational Psychology is at risk of being irreverent to business because it does not focus on the concerns of todays practitioners.  13 areas of research are suggested that are important to practitioners.  These are the 5 areas they list that also interest me:

Research Needs in Business

  1. Leadership development: How might an organization identify and develop ambidextrous leaders who can inspire and motivate both older and younger generations of workers? What approaches to training can help organizational members acquire these leadership skills?
  2. Talent management: In the quest to maximize performance, some argue that talent is most important; others say that management systems enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Can I–O psychology disentangle the relative contributions of people and systems to effective performance?
  3. Culture transformation: How do transformational processes differ in bottom-up versus top-down approaches to culture transformation? Can an existing senior- management team refloat the boat?
  4. Managing change: How can we teach people to embrace change? What is the role of change management in the innovation process? How can leaders accelerate the change-management process?
  5. Increasing diversity: How can we link the broad concept of diversity (e.g., of thought, of approaches to innovation and change, of orientation toward teamwork) to improved performance at the individual, team, and organizational levels?

What’s to be Done

How do we bring this knowledge to light and provide better support to business leaders?  The main suggestions in this article were to make research topics in I/O Psychology more relevant to everyday business, to get academics out into the field with practitioners (business sabbaticals for academics), and to get senior business leaders into academia (academic sabbaticals for business leaders).  I , however, would suggest that academic institutions can not be all things to all people.  Today, because of the need for agile leadership and lifelong learning, new types of learning and research institutions are needed to support businesses. The functional aspects of business networks and communities of practice need to be fully understood and their functional requirements institutionalized.

A Lifelong High Level Learning Platform: Some Initial Thoughts

A friend was involved with a professional network, GPSEG (The Greater Philadelphia Senior Executives Group) in the Philadelphia area.   It is a group for professional networking.  There are approximately 1100 individuals registered with the group.  Membership can connect with other members for coffee meetings and there are many sub-groupings and meetings organized by locale or by industry.  Many people use the group to network for jobs, but they are encouraged to (and many do) remain with the group and continue to network after finding employment.

When describing his activities with the group, the words “learning platform” kept coming to mind as a primary goal and function of his activity.  I don’t really know much about the group and hope to learn more in the future, but just the idea began sparking my imagination.  One of the greatest educational needs for the future is for institutions that can support and actualize adult lifelong learning in ways that is functional for their everyday learning needs. The term “knowledge age” may not be sufficient to the task, but let’s at least say that learning is an imperative for everyone these days.  Prepackaged courses and curriculum will not cut it.  Networked learning is all the rage, but networks have to start and end with people.  It is important that any network be technologically enabled, but it can’t be dominated by IT thinking.  I believe it needs to have a local component and a face to face component that is primary.

This group is billed as senior executives, and I think this is a very good foundation, but I will put on my educational hat and speculate about who else could potential be served a group like this.

High Potentials – A recent Harvard Business Ideacast (Keep Your Top Talent from Defecting) reviewed the work of Jean Martin and Conrad Schmidt who authored the article How to Keep Your Top Talent in HBR (subscription required).  What struck me was their figure that 70% of today’s high performers lack critical attributes essential to their success in future roles.  What a need for education, but its got to be realtime and relevant learning in real contexts.  You can’t have the training department design a course or curriculum to fix this problem.  The learning needs are too diverse and unpredictable. Development is also spoken of in this article as an engaging and motivating force for this group.  Management may not want to expose their top talent to individuals in other organizations, but these authors say that top talent already knows their value and their place in market forces very well.

Entrepreneurs – Most cities have an entrepreneurs development and support organization.  In Cleveland it’s call Jump Start.  This type of organization could serve as a great screener of people who may not have a job history as a senior executive, but would have such potential.  For projects supported by these organizations, a learning platform is exactly the type of support entrepreneurs need as they and their companies grow and develop.  Jumpstart has advisors and networking, but I bet it does not alway function as a true learning platform like I’m envisioning.

Academics – I don’t know exactly how this would shake out, but academics and the higher education business model needs to get out of class and out of the insular world of researching order to work and interact with this type of group.  Academic models need to change and it can only happen with experience and experimentation.

I’m sure there more possibilities I should consider, but I’ll leave it there for now and allow more time for my thoughts to develop.

A Place for Cognitive Tools in Evidence-based Practice

Vygotskian education psychology places a high priority on mediational artifacts or cognitive tools; things like knowledge, concepts, criteria, schemas, etc . . .. These tools act as cognitive mediation and are instrumental to activity as subjects work on an object to produce an outcome.
Activity as Vygotsky's Unit of Analysis

Activity as Vygotsky's Unit of Analysis

I spoke here about how unity of the 3 elements and the central unit of analysis is the activity.  Lets consider an activity example relevant to evidence-based practice.
A clinician (the subject) uses the idea of evidence-based practice (the mediating artifact) to examine routine aspects of their practice (the object) with the goal of changing their practice to improve their patience’s health (the outcome).  If you find that evidence-based changes are not being made in a field, where would you look for a problem?  Many analysis have implied that there is a problem with the subjects, they’re just not using the available evidence or that their knowledge based is deficient.  I would say that it is much more likely that the solution can be found by developing an appropriate mediating artifact that can support clinicians in examining their practice.
This was the focus of Gal’perin, a prominate follower of Vygotsky.  He said that not all (cognitive tools (mediators) are of sufficient quality and that the quality of development (like the development of evidence-based practice) is most dependent on the quality of the cognitive tools.  Specifically, he thought that cognitive tools should be organized around and support the psychological functioning of the subject.    So, what are the psychological functions around which you might organize the concept of evidence-based practice?
  • First, don’t focus on the evidence, focus on the practice and use a tool that brings evidence to a practice focus.  An example might be a checklist used by a surgical team as they prepare for surgery.  The checklist reflects the available evidence and allows the team to bring that evidence to their practice focus, but still allows their cognitive load for addressing important aspect of their practice.
  • Second,  use cognitive tools to organize information and to orient evidence toward action.  A research finding may represent important evidential information, but they are seldom oriented to practice in a way that naturally leads to action.   An example is a network security assessment I developed.  It reflect HIPPA security requirements (the evidence) in a series of 46 questions.  The questions were structured not only to assess security status, to clarify an action plan that would improve the security status.  This again would reduce the cognitive load needed to include an enormous amount of information in a short time span.
Vygotsky developed this idea of mediational tools or cognitive artifacts during the 1920’s, but with the increasing importance of knowledge and other cognitive artifacts, it has never been as relevant or important.  Vygotsky was thinking mainly of children’s development, but his theory is also relevant to adults and their cognitive functioning in their work life.

Professional Networks as Learning Platforms: A Idea for Lifelong Learning

Two related ideas, one on learning in educational settings and one for learning in business.

1. Learning in educational settings should only be considered successful if you both learn how to learn and if you are provided with the resources to learn into the future.  Most post secondary education is organized around courses that have a beginning and an end with a bounded set of knowledge, but this does not square with the idea of lifelong learning and with the learning demands modern society places upon us.  Society is still set up so that first you learn to do and then you are expected to go forth and do, but we are understanding more and more how doing and learning are inexplicability bounded together with one another.  It seems to me that courses should end not with an examination, but with a path forward that points out what you don’t yet know and an introduction to a society where that learning can take place.  A degree should not give you a bounded set of knowledge, but with an introduction to the flexible outlines of a path and the means to pursue that path.

2. Knowledge is more distributed than we have ever acknowledged and knowledge networks are a key in knowledge development.  Business once developed around the idea of a cooperative advantage that comes from locking up and exploiting resources including people and knowledge.  Knowledge’s half life continues to stink daily and I’m not sure that the super smart people really ever existed beyond the hype.  Today’s  business imperative is learning and to do that you must be tapped into broad knowledge and idea flows that only exist in networks.  It’s the idea that we are all smarter together than anyone of us individually and we can actualize this intelligence through networks.  We are not talking mobs and mob mentality, but we are talking networks where the nodes are smart people full of knowledge, ideas and experience.

These ideas are related in this way; if we want our students to have a next generation education, it will require that we put them on a path for lifelong learning, not through courses that never stop, but through learning that is embedded in everyday activities.  That takes a different type of resource then we find in the university system.  The closest thing we have to that resource are professional networks that are set up to function as learning platforms.