Informal learning and the future.

Nick Shackleton-Jones. Manager, Online & Informal Learning, BBC.

The word ‘learning’ has come to mean two different kinds of things: firstly, learning - the natural and normal cognitive mechanisms by which we (and other creatures develop) and secondly ‘learning’ which describes a historical peculiarity of human culture, involving classrooms, courses and so forth.

Learning has very little to do with ‘learning’ – we might occasionally learn whilst on a course, but this is often more by accident than design. However, in recent years organisations have begun to refer to this distinction as ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’ learning – although in practice this is often confusing, since ‘informal learning’ generally just refers to the ways in which we normally learn (e.g. learning by trial and error, observation, reference) whereas ‘formal learning’ is often simply a reference to cultural norms (colleges, trainers etc.).

In case you feel that the distinctions that I am drawing are largely rhetorical, consider the diagrams below. The first depicts a pattern of learning familiar since the 19^th century (Ebbinghaus, 1885) and typical of formal learning situations. The second diagram shows a very different pattern – the way in which we learn normally when for example, we find ourselves in a new job or a different country. This is ‘informal’ learning.

Given this, it’s very exciting that recently the learning community is starting to question the role of informal learning in what they do, because it suggests a renaissance of learning - the possibility that we might really, for the first time, begin to question, understand and get involved in mainstream learning - the everyday ways in which individuals develop.

But before we look at this, it’s worth considering why it is that many ‘learning’ professionals have had so little to do with learning for so long and why they are suddenly so interested now.

Several years ago I attended a conference in Amsterdam and was introduced to a modest piece of research into learning within organisations. The speaker explained, politely, that their research suggested that in the average organisation approximately 15% of the learning can be attributed to the formal mechanisms (traditionally those organised by the Training & Development department) and roughly 85% to informal learning. In other words: ‘the learning organisation doesn’t really require much input from training departments and to date no-one has really noticed’. It struck me as an explosive finding at the time, and since that time I have watched one aspect of informal learning – online referencing – grow so dramatically that these days I sometimes wonder if in future there will be any role for formal learning at all. Today, not only can I google most things, but in many cases I can actually get better stuff in my search results than I might if I were to book on a classroom course (try the TED site, ‘you suck at Photoshop’ or Professor Lewin’s MIT physics lectures¹).

But this might present a confusing picture – after all aren’t some of those ‘informal’ learning opportunities merely recycled formal learning: lecture notes online, videos of classroom sessions etc.?

Because drawing a distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ learning often leads to further confusion, an example is probably a better starting point:

Imagine that your organisation wishes to replace all its desktop PCs with Macs. The formal approach would be to roll out an extensive training programme, probably with online and classroom components. By contrast imagine that you simply turn up at work one day to find that your PC is gone and in its place is a Mac. You can readily picture the ways in which you might respond to this challenge – trial and error, swapping findings with colleagues, looking things up - but my guess is that by the end of the day you would have figured out how to do the really important things.

Now I’m not suggesting that this is how all training should be conducted (although it seems roughly 85% of organisational learning currently is) – but it does highlight some of the distinctive features of informal learning: challenges and importance.

As a first approximation to how people learn, they learn in response to challenges or where the thing to be learned is important. You only need to watch an episode of ‘The Apprentice’ to see how quickly people learn in response to a challenge which they clearly consider important.

By contrast, with formal learning there is often no immediate challenge and the imminent importance to learners is low (although senior people may feel differently). This may sound like common sense, but the answer to the question ‘what is important?’ is not as obvious as one might imagine.

At the heart of informal learning lies a mechanism that has been almost entirely overlooked: emotion. Predominantly it has been overlooked because scientific studies of learning and memory tend to see emotion as an extraneous factor to be excluded – but even a cursory review of the memorable events of your own past will reveal that emotion is the one thing they all have in common, each human memory is ‘coated’ in emotional markers. So it’s not entirely accurate to remark that memory works primarily on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis: I might give an interesting presentation at a learning conference, but if I suddenly start to cough up blood mid-way through my powerpoints, you will probably remember that for the rest of your life - whether you want to or not. Even the use of this written example is likely to stick in your memory.

It’s true that memory and learning are not the same thing, but since memory is a prerequisite for learning, an understanding of memory is a good place to start. Picture your memories as rather like a peach: the hard ‘data’ at the core is clad in rich emotional metadata – and it is this emotional metadata that determines what we remember, how we remember and how we process and compare information.

Sometimes we bring the emotional context to very dry data ourselves (when, for example, I scour the internet forums, desperate to find a way to recover a file from a corrupted hard drive) and other times it is brought to us (“I remember this one teacher….”). It’s interesting to note that when we really want to learn – when learning is really important to us – the format scarcely matters at all.

Although people have been aware of this feature for a while - we all appreciate that amusing or shocking things stick in our memories - the application and sophistication of the mechanism have largely eluded us. But emotional encoding of information is a tremendously complex matter – recent research, for example, has shown that groups of ‘mirror neurons’ ensure that our brains automatically echo the emotional states of people we are attending to. The emotional flags that accompany information will therefore include others’ emotional states as well as our own internal state – an enthusiastic teacher passes on this enthusiasm along with whatever it is they have to say. In short, whether or not something is important and will be learned is determined primarily by emotional cues.

This is not simply a matter of being entertaining in the classroom (although for many good trainers this has always been a core part of the challenge) or even effective ‘storytelling’ (after all, a story is only as good as its emotional dimension), neither is it merely a case of ‘emotional intelligence’. Instead, informal learning has implications for learning strategy and for the approaches that we adopt within this strategy. I would like to suggest one of each:

Approach: we should stop building/delivering courses – at least in the traditional sense. We all know that the vast majority of information delivered in this format is lost, and in a world where people increasingly prefer referencing over learning this makes less and less sense. The key challenge for a trainer is change learners’ behaviour in terms of when to stop and refer. With this in mind, the suggested alternative is an awareness + resource format. An awareness module should be primarily emotive in nature – it might be based around simulation/role-plays or compelling stories, for example – and it should creates emotional ‘flags’ in the learner’s memory - cues to stop and refer. We have used this approach in courses such as ‘Working with Children’ and ‘Risk Awareness’ for example – but it can be just as effective with equipment installation training.

We should accept that effective dissemination of information includes a personal/emotional element - and capitalise on this: a CEO’s blog is far more likely to have an impact than an internal communication, especially if it seems to come from the heart.

Strategy: it is often the case that informal learning is a learning organisation’s ‘bottom-up’ learning mechanism (where we learn from peers), by contrast to the formal ‘top-down’ learning mechanisms which often form part of induction, compliance or change management initiatives. The diagram below represents a first attempt at picturing an integrated learning approach, which contains both formal and informal learning interventions.

The top tier represents more traditional formal learning interventions, such as trainer-led sessions or online courses. Even at this level informal learning can be integrated in the ways suggested above: by tending towards ‘awareness modules’ which highlight the key points at which people should refer, and identify sources of reference. This tier is most likely to reflect training delivered as part of change management or compliance initiatives.

The middle tier represents ‘de-centralised’ initiatives that can be run in partnership with more local areas of the business. In the case of online development this might mean the introduction of rapid development tools and processes which allow training professionals to work with subject-matter experts within the business units to develop learning content and resources collaboratively – typically for smaller interest groups and in shorter timescales. In terms of live training, this might reflect more of a partnership approach with local areas – assisting knowledge workers to run workshops, seminars, or allowing experts to work on attachment to learning and development.

The very bottom level represents, to some extent, the submerged part of the iceberg (or the ‘dark matter’ of learning organisations, depending on which metaphor you prefer). The vast majority of activity in your learning organisation already resides here, and it is the areas where L&D departments are least likely to be involved, but there are ways in which they can begin to facilitate and contribute to this tier – by maintaining a wiki system, by contributing to and supporting blogs, by facilitating knowledge-sharing. The L&D department may also facilitate job swaps or ‘project time’ where individuals are allocated work time to develop bright ideas. The central question here is how these kinds of contribution to organisational learning can be tracked and quantified. At present, it seems likely that if businesses are serious about understanding their own ‘learning organisations’, then they might have to (yet again) reconsider their ROI models – which to date place the focus squarely on formal learning interventions. One interesting option might be to adopt a ‘sampling’ methodology – aligned with detailed process maps – in which at every stage of the process individuals are asked ‘how did you learn to do that?’

In conclusion, understanding informal learning presents learning and development with an important challenge: be a part of the learning organisation, or risk drifting apart from it.