Feeding the Curiosity

“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”   Albert Einstein

A study by Korn Ferry, the world’s largest executive search firm, referenced in today’s WSJ asked the question what is the most important characteristic in a CEO. The answer was learning agility. The Journal asked Garry Burnison, the CEO of Korn Ferry, what exactly is learning agility. Interestingly, he stated that it “comes down to people’s willingness to grow, to learn, to have an insatiable curiosity. He went on to share the importance to an organization of innovation and a workforce that is “incredibly curious”. The article goes on to underscore the importance to an organization of having employees that are curious, can learn, can adapt and can innovate. Not really new stuff and to anyone who has been remotely involved in learning and development this will all seem like elementary logic.

It led me to think about what organizations are doing to inspire and feed their employee’s curiosity. Outside of the work place I would argue that our curiosity is actually being over-inspired and over-feed. It is all too easy to Google away and learn just about anything. We can easily lose track of time as our curiosities are fed through Facebook, LinkedIn and other social platforms. However, what do we see in the workplace? Few organizations have used technology to inspire, motivate, and turn on the curiosity of their employees. Sure they may have made their employee handbook available online but is that the limit of possibilities. I think not.

The time is overdue for organizations to think about the development of their workforce in new and different ways. The notion of training simply being delivered at a specific time, in a specific place, to a group of learners all at the same time is out of step with today’s world.

To feed the curiosity of the workforce, and to reap the undeniable rewards of a more agile, innovative, and adaptive organization, we have to re-architect, rethink, and redesign how training and development is enabled. We have to undergo the transformation from developing and delivering training events to architecting and enabling learning journeys. Learning journeys that leverage technology to offer individualized training when it is required, where it required. Technology that enables simple and effective collaboration, sharing and exploration between individuals across the organization.

It’s time to harness the power of technology, rethink corporate training, and feed the curiosity of the workforce.

Creating Powerful Virtual Learning Experiences

REGISTER

Thursday, February 5, 2015 10:00:00 AM PST – 11:00:00 AM PST

In the last five to ten years the way we live, work, and play has massively changed. Thanks to technology we now live our lives in a far more connected way in which we can communicate, collaborate, coordinate and gain access to information in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. Yet we are still to really harness the power of technology in the corporate learning world. Although there are some notable standouts, we still see eLearning and webinars that are far from the vision of highly engaging and effective learning experiences.

In this session Martyn Lewis from 3GS will explore the counter-intuitive reasons that are often responsible for less than effective virtual learning, and will share best practices and approaches for architecting powerful virtual learning experiences. He will share the formula for being able to successfully leverage technology to deliver virtual learning programs that are not only engaging but lead to superior business results over the traditional ILT classroom.

In this session you will learn:

• Why most attempts to deliver virtual learning leave a lot to be desired
• The true key to gaining learner engagement
• 7 techniques we can adopt from the broadcast media
• The 3 biggest mistakes when developing virtual learning programs
• How to effectively blend asynchronous and live virtual for powerful results
• What we can do in the virtual world that we could not do in the classroom, and how this enables highly impactful results

Participants will also be able to qualify for a giveaway (value $12,000) from 3GS of a one-day workshop where 3GS will share more of its methodology and work with a corporate learning team to apply these principles to one of their own learning programs.