January 22, 2009 - 13:40, by Dostalek, Kevin
Early in my career I was a technical trainer and then later a training manager for a staff of 8-10. I was recently reminded of some of the lessons I both learned and tried to teach back then and wanted to get them down electronically before I forget about them for another 10 years. Edu-Chaos is the first one of these that comes to mind.
As I got to teach groups of various sizes and backgrounds (all adults though), I noticed that some classes were dull and boring with little interactivity while others were full of chatterboxes and egotists that could quickly get away from you and turn the class to chaos. What I discovered was there was a narrow place just on the edge of chaos that was the perfect context for pedigogical flow.
Good learning nearly always involves a feeling of discovery rather than acquisition. The best teaching creates an efficient context for this.
As I tried to explain this place to my fellow trainers and we brainstormed techniques for geting a class into this state and keeping it there for long periods, the phrase "edge of chaos" was shorthanded into a new term of mine: Edu-Chaos
The idea is that you want to increase levels of interactivity and "stuff going on" within the class so that each learner has a "place" they can go where they feel most comfortable and can learn the most. This goes beyond interactions just between the trainer and the students, but must also be between the students themselves as that is where they can discover problems and work them out in a way that will be memorable for them. Again
another tweet from Kathy:
Good teachers set us up for success, but they should ALSO set us up for strategic failures. When things work as expected, we remember less.
So increased interactivity can be achieved through many facilitation techniques. At all costs we want to get out of the "lecture" style of teaching. In cases where that is necessary, just the basic use of pattern interuptors can go a long way. However, to really increase the level of chaos (interactivity) usually more drastic measures are needed. This is especially true in mid-sized classes where most of the students don't know each other (like in a public class setting).
One of my strategies for this that worked out very well is to intersperse periods in the class where small groups of students on working on diverse activities all at the same time, which are designed to teach the same thing, but in very different ways. I found that people would tend to migrate to the activities that were most interesting to them and best fit their mode of learning. While some liked "switching stations" to get better coverage, I didn't force them to "rotate". After these periods though, I did ask for feedback about each activity from those that participated in each so that the rest of the class could get a flair for what they may have missed.
This type of facilitated learning activity because of it's nature almost always brought the class to that "edge of chaos" just due to the fact that there was so much going on at once. As a trainer, it is our responsibility to insure that we, as a class, don't cross that fine line and fall over the edge into chaos. This was most likely to happen in large groups where most of the people know each other (like a corporate training setting).
One of my trainers had a great method for reeling a class back in (he liked to be a lot closer to the "edge" that I ever did). What he would do is walk around to help/observe the different groups and if he felt the class was teetering on crossing the chaos line, he'd casually leave his coffee cup somewhere in the room and about a minute later shout "STOP! EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING! ... WHERE IS MY COFFEE CUP? OH YOU HAVE IT AGAIN. THANKS. CARRY ON." This, of course, always got a laugh, but I was amazed at how effectively this little interuption would setting the class back down and back onto task. I tried this a couple times myself, without nearly the positive effect- so basically, you need to find techniques and methods that compliment your own unique personality.
So to summarize this Edu-Chaos concept, here's my graphical depiction:
My goal now is to figure out how much of this is just good classroom management, and what from it can be applied to other settings, such as smaller facilitated meetings, or even un-facilitated meetings. Certainly the ideas from Lencioni's
Death by Meeting come to mind. Just increasing drama within a meeting with a little chaos could be healthy.
January 6, 2009 - 16:24, by Dostalek, Kevin
While the trends of last year in the Corporate Portal and Enterprise Content Management areas continue, many are predicting that Business Intelligence will be 2009's hot business system push. This makes sense, especially in these tough economic times as companies are finding it even more important to make good decisions (because you may not get as many chances). Certainly
my company is seeing an upswing in BI related projects and with many of the new toolsets available today, these projects are finally within the financial reach of small and medium sized businesses.
However, the main problem that we often run into is that a BI solution is always limited by the quality of data that is behind it, and many of these mid-sized companies just don't have the data infrastructure to produce what they need without spending a lot of money on that first. In these companies much of the business insight is still locked within their employee's heads, or at least require their expert interpretations to make reasonable decisions based upon them. That's well and good for the data analysts, but in this web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 world we live in, we want to engage ALL possible intellectual capital to solve our problems.
I just want to remind everyone that there is indeed a way of tapping into this immense goldmine of crowd wisdom by using an Enterprise Prediction Market. These are by no means new, but as with the afore-mentioned technologies it's only been in the last couple years that they have become relatively inexpensive enough for the small-medium sized businesses. This is a great way of producing real crowd-sourced insight into business intelligence for decision making. It also has a great side effect of engaging your employees (or extended-enterprise, or customers) and giving them a voice (and maybe even having a little fun!)
The way they work is simple. You present a "market" or "stock" (or in some cases a "bet") and let your user group openly trade (buy/sell) these based on their expert knowledge and strategic intuition (more on SI in a future post). The market prices rise and fall based on the laws of supply and demand which allow you to develop an insight picture based on a diverse group of opinions. There have been many studies done that show crowds almost always produce more accurate predictions that individuals or small groups. The chart below shows just how close to perfect one particular prediction market did when looking across the board at all "markets" (questions) they had posed.
The main reason I'm so high on prediction markets right now is I see them providing the following benefits:
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They leverage what you already have (intellectual capital) - no data scrubbing required :)
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They are an entre into more sophisticated employee engagement systems such as idea markets. These can be difficult to implement if your culture is not geared up for them, but predication markets give the employee base and the decision makers a taste of the participation culture, while still maintaining some control.
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I believe gaming and game theory is the next HUGE wave in business, and this type of system certainly has that flavor as well.
So where to start? Well, if you want a jump off point, there is a great post (and in fact an entire blog) that I recommend: A (long) review of prediction market software. If you just want to jump in and see one of these in action I highly recommend taking a look at Inkling. I really like Inkling because they have done a great job at making the whole "trading" thing much simpler (by using plain English instead of stock market terms, using a Market Maker so you don't have to worry about volume, and having a very slick streamlined interface). You can participate in a market almost immediately from their site for free (or create your own pilot market, free for 45 days).