Doing what you’ve always done gets you what you’ve always got.
– Albert Einstein-ish
Over the the past 25 years, I have worked with countless corporations across the globe to try and produce significant returns on their investment in employee learning. My primary focus has been on the “factories” that select, build and deliver learning to the organization. Learning & Development departments are notoriously inefficient and ineffective at driving performance despite budgets that would make many of us weep with jealousy. Through my work with clients and my “Running Training like a Business 2.0” blog, I have attempted to bring the same techniques that drive customer value for startups into L&D organizations in companies of all sizes. And while change comes slowly in this area, it is my belief that the way we design, develop, and manage the product offers the biggest opportunity to deliver exponentially higher value to employers and learners.
In these pages you will find the core belief that our field took a wrong turn. Adult learning, gradually moved away from the science and core purpose of learning, to form its own Galapagos Island disconnected from adjacent and complimentary fields. The current field, barely adequate for the homogeneous learners and static knowledge it once served is simply outmatched in a world of individuals facing rapidly changing wicked problems. This site does not purport to offer tweaks, tricks or modifications to the industry’s current approach to learning solutions. Rather, this site captures and offers a radical new approach to how we view and approach learning. In these posts are ideas, concepts, approaches and frameworks that build off what we know, not what has always been done.
The good news is that the answers are out there. I hope that by posting my thoughts for peer review, we can start an overdue dialogue. Learning is too important to our future to do anything else.
NOTE: I have left a few of the posts from the last 10 years of this blog. I also don’t throw out my old notebooks. Old ideas occasionally bear fruit, frequently spark new ones and always keep you humble.
Learning Hacks 