The Learning and Performance Post-Pandemic Abyss: How Shall We Recover?
I am more than excited to see the challenges learning and performance (L&P) practitioners face these days and the innovative solutions they propose. Perusing the Learning Ideas Conference 2023 sessions, I see topics like Socially Enabled Intelligent Chatbots, Inclusiveness, Responsible Design, and even The Cringeworthy in Online Learning. They evoke memories of difficult projects that reaped rewards and/or caused profound despair, but always informed us of the many trajectories in which L&P is heading. I would love to think that such endeavors are systematically addressed with tried-and-true methods, toward unequivocally successful outcomes. I also dream of whiskey springs and comfortable airline economy seats that smell like root beer. The grand L&P experiment is, in reality, more trial-and-error than not.
Consider the Cheshire cat: “I’m not crazy. My reality is just different than yours,” “How do you run from what is inside your head,” “I knew who I was this morning, but I have changed a few times since then,” and “Not all who wander are lost.” But I especially love “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” To be sure, it’s not always as severe as a blind person on a park bench manipulating a Rubik’s Cube and, each time, turning to a sighted friend beside him, each time asking “Is this it? Is this it? Is this it?” But there is a kind of blindness that manifests in not knowing what the consequences of technological solutions will be. But practitioners choose to take (mostly) calculated risks to make a difference. They are celebrated because success is only distinguished from failure by those with the fortitude to weather just one more failure and press on.
Indeed, L&P is in a war against reality that only imagination can conquer. We need to suspend our deep-seated views of the world, challenge status quo rubrics of L&P, and find a natural place in which technology can truly make a difference. As much as the pandemic fostered innovations in remote and hybrid learning, it also led to organizations retreating from past perspectives, like “L&P is a business imperative.” For many organizations devastated by the pandemic, survival shifted focus to advanced data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. There are now plenty of visual analysis tools (versus those that actually require you to know something about data science) and “intelligent” chatbots. The problem is that these things have not only changed the world of work, but it has also changed us. Indeed, in ways that obscure our thinking about what might truly be the next best thing in L&P. In many respects, L&P has become persona non grata as business is restored to 2019 levels. *Sigh.* So many opportunities for world-class performance success are lost to that kind of thinking.
Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends for 2023 do not include what is most important to L&P and hence organizational performance. It’s all about protecting, sustaining, and promoting things like the Digital Immune System. As they are only peripherally beneficial to L&P, they miss the mark. “When we design new things to address [learning and performance] challenges in the world, the world, in turn, designs us,” said Donald Norman recently. It can change our point of view for the worse. L&P requires a fresh transformational pedagogy, a framework that is more humanity centered. Not to the exclusion of the latest technology, but to foster a more direct approach to fixing what is most broken around learning and performance. And we need fresh strategies for restoring the status of L&P to front-and-center.
Imagine my surprise when I perused the entire 2023 TLIC agenda and found colleagues who are addressing those very issues. I wrote about my catharsis when I participated in the conference live last year after almost three years of isolation. As highly as I regard technical acumen, it was the humanity of face-to-face collaboration that raised my spirits and those of colleagues around me. You could feel the excitement.
It's time to get busy rethinking how we conquer L&P challenges, from obtain budgets to corralling mindshare and reappropriating technologies that are fit to purpose—and all such artifacts, electronic or otherwise—and which make us smart and strive to perform. Lest we spiral toward navel gazing. To this end, I am giddy with anticipation for what’s in store this coming June at TLIC in NYC. You should come.
