Who is in the best position to determine what an individual needs to learn?  I’ll give you a moment to think about it…………….  The correct answer is……………. the individual him or herself.  It’s not the organization or some other type of external entity.  The individual may lean on advice and feedback from others in the process of determining their specific needs, but at the end of the day, that individual is in the best position to identify what they need. 

The days of relatively heavy-handed learning practices where one’s learning curriculum was dictated to them by the organization, often largely disconnected from the individual’s specific needs, must be abandoned in the past.  That’s not to say that learning didn’t take place with that type of approach, only that it was usually through serendipity--that the class that one attended happened to match up with one’s need for learning at that same point in time. 

On average, only 50% of knowledge that is acquired is actually retained 12 months later if it is not applied immediately after learning it[i].  Subsequently, when people are required to attend a class on something simply because it is being offered (vs. being needed by the individual), a significant amount of the time and energy spent by the individual and the organization ends up being wasted.

The good news is that the practice of organizational learning and development is heading in the right direction.  Many organizations have conceptually bought in to the concept of “learner-centric” or “learner-driven” learning.  In fact, the field has been heading in that direction for a little while now.  Think about the advent and growth of “e-Learning” over the last couple of decades.  The main driver was to provide learning closer to the point of need.  A valiant effort, but where “e-Learning” falls short is the lack of opportunity for contextualized learning.  With e-Learning, the context for the learning is still defined by the module (vs. the individual’s need).

Enter people-first learning, which is the practice of people connecting with other people to get their learning needs met before turning to other resources such as an e-Learning database.  By connecting with other people, rich dialogue occurs around the specific learning needs of the learner.  The knowledge shared can be highly contextualized. 

Similar to the quandary with e-Learning, organizations only got it partly right when they started to implement formalized mentoring programs.  They were facilitating a process that allowed learners to connect with people first (a darn good idea!).  Where they often got it wrong was in choosing the person that each individual learner should meet with.  In other words, they controlled the match between mentor and mentee/protégé.  Who’s to say that the person selected by the organization was the right person to meet the specific learning needs of that individual?  Sometimes, our old friend Serendipity would step in and relationships would work, but there were plenty that didn’t.  So, what you had was people-first, but not people-centric learning.

The marriage of people-centric with people-first is our objective here at Triple Creek.  We call it mentoring, or more specifically Open Mentoring.  It’s the most concise way to describe what it is that we are doing for the organizations with which we work.  That said, we don’t care if our clients call it Open Mentoring, or if they even use the term “mentoring” for that matter.   Call it Knowledge Connections or Structured Social Learning.  From our perspective, it’s not about branding; it’s about results, and if we can help create open, enterprise-level learning environments driven by both people-centric and people-first philosophies, well, then we’re happy because we know that our clients will impact their learning culture in ways they never have before. 

[i] Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, August 2004.”The Business Case For Knowledge Management” Eugene F. Yelden,  Synrad, Inc., James A. Albers, Pacific Lutheran University