The Final Word
by Andrew Mayo

This is my 100th column to appear in the Training Journal, or TJ as we are now known. and it will be the last Final Word from me, as I pass over to a fresh contributor.

It is a time for reflection on what has been happening over the last eight years. It so happens that the first annual CIPD survey of training and development took place eight years ago and I looked this up, together with the latest one, to see what research tells us has changed. The answer is not very much. Interestingly, both surveys reported that on-the-job learning was considered the most effective way to learn - a subject that happened to be the one I took for my first-ever article. The main change is the greater familiarity and understanding of how technology can help us - and it has perhaps now found its place.

More interesting perhaps are our own learning journeys, and here we all have a personal story. I made a list of the areas where I now thought very differently from eight years ago, and it was a long list! I will just share a small number of these insights.

Throughout these years I have worked in 'executive education'. I have learned that most executives get considerable personal gain from these experiences - self insight, networks, prestige, collegiate fun and edutainment - but the benefits for their organisations are often limited. If the investment were more integrated with organisational change objectives, this expensive investment could so easily be turned into a powerful force. To do this, the business school experience needs to be part of a more multi- component-learning programme. And this is what the term 'blended learning' now means to me - where a classroom event (or several) form part of a series of learning 'assignments', some individual and some collective, which make up a programme that takes us round the learning cycle enough times for true learning to take place.

In my specialist areas - strategy and measurement - I have realised how much two processes contribute to learning. One is writing - which necessitates research and systematic clear thinking - and I encourage readers to do this for TJ and others. The second is through 'teaching', or, as I would rather say, 'leading a dialogue with others'. Through these, I have learned to make a clear distinction between what is ‘people related’ for the organisation (human capital management), and what is more internally focused on the professional function. The general umbrellas of 'HR strategy' and 'HR metrics' just cause confusion.

I have also been trying to learn over this period about the nature of 'partnership' with business managers. This rather over-used term comes, of course, from the work of Professor Dave Ulrich, who has transformed the HR function's view of itself over the last ten years. He is universally acclaimed as the leading global guru of HR, not just for one contribution but for his continuous and tireless concern for the function and its importance.

It prompts me to ask: where is the acknowledged guru for L&D? There have been many in the past who have shaped my thinking: Kirkpatrick and Philips on evaluation; Kolb, Honey and Mumford on the learning cycle and learning styles; Argyris on second- and third-loop learning; Senge, Garrett and Burgoyne on the learning organisation; Revans on action learning; Schein on careers and culture; Clutterbuck and Megginson on coaching. But Ulrich put HR at the centre of the business. It is often forgotten that Kaplan and Norton, in devising their balanced scorecard, put learning and innovation (not box-filling people measures) as one of the four sets of drivers of business strategy and performance. They could see how truly strategic learning is.

My final reminiscence takes me back to 1999/2000 when 13 people, including Peter Honey and myself, composed and published a pamphlet called the Declaration of Learning - a Call to Action. This was a series of assertions and observations about learning from the level of society to the individual (still downloadable from the Reading Room on www.peterhoney.com). In its introduction it said:

Learning can be the most vital, engaging and enjoyable aspect of our personal and collective experience. Equally, learning can be difficult and the source of much of our pain and failure. The ability to learn about learning and to harness the learning process is the key to our ability to survive in a complex and unpredictable world.

Every generation has to learn for itself. As for me, there is a lot of learning still to be done. I look forward to lots of it coming from TJ.

This article was published in the October 2007 issue of Training Journal and is reproduced with kind permission. If you would like any further information please contact the author via this page.