[reflection] Experience Management System, anyone?

In a previous reflection, I shared my 2 eurocent on the LMS (dead or alive!) debate. For this one, let’s move up in the food chain. The central thought of this reflection is:

what if we got as good at managing experience as we are at managing learning?

- We got learning operations under control
The LMS has done a tremendous job on the operational side of training. We now have a system that we can use to set up, deliver and track training interventions. Most corporate employees can access their learning history, which contains all learning activities undertaken, the time spent on them, pass rates when applicable, developmental comments from teachers or coaches, completion status, skills linked to the training intervention, etc. Most employees do not have a similar ‘work history’ portlet at their disposal that tracks the time they spent applying their skills, the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) reached, feedback received, completion status, lessons learned, etc. I’m not saying there’s nothing in the talent suite that tracks performance, on the contrary. But it doesn’t get to the same levels of maturity and it doesn’t serve competence building in any decent way. Hence the obvious question: what if we were as good managing experience as we were at managing training?



- The state of the art
I’m not claiming we don’t manage experience or we don’t have tools or processes in place to do so. I’m just saying we do it in a reduced way (for stick or carrot performance ratings), limiting or sometimes hindering the development potential that comes with properly managing experience. Some companies have excellent point solutions and programs to let their employees grow through experience (eg stretch programs, reverse mentoring opportunities, rotation programs,...), but they often lack integration within the overall competence picture.



-- Performance management and what it mostly is reduced to
I dare you to have a look at the Google Image Search results for performance management. You’ll see tens and tens of variations on the same scheme (sometimes even trademarked). Managing experience gets reduced to rating performance against goals. Someone (hopefully in collaboration with the employee) sets goals, the deviations from the goals are documented one year later, and that leads to action in the form of remediation or rewards. Some people don’t even get this much. A JobAt survey in 2010 (only in Dutch) tells us only 8 in 10 employees get appraisals in Flanders. The state of the art is that once a year most people get a performance ‘number’ that is heavily biased because of the underlying evaluation (bonus, money!, in short supply, the evaluations need to fit a curve), and biased towards recent events. Managers and employees perform this ritual, both dreading it. 

-- Project based corporations and the cult of the wicker man
At project based organisations (eg consultancy firms, most IT service companies, etc), there’s more than the yearly appraisal talk. On paper it looks very good that professionals get a project assessment at the end of every project for the role they played in it. On paper, as documented by ISO, CMMI or other quality assurance mechanisms, every project evens leaves a trail of lessons learned, thus serving future projects and organizational learning. The truth of the matter is that project based cultures suffer from the cult of the wicker man. A project starts, gets carried out, and then it is done. And I mean really done. The team gets dissolved, flies off to other projects and start those up from the ground. At the project end, all is burnt. The lessons learned document is reduced to a formality, and gets stored/buried in a repository. Project assessments are hastily done, because the end of the project is a time of stress where lots remain to be done against a ticking clock. It still beats having only a yearly assessment, but there’s unfulfilled potential here.

-- How to prevent experience
Some current best practises in the corporate world even prevent proper experience building and growing through sufficient experience. Salaries for example can only go up, as can hierarchical level or skills. That is fine if we assume we will carry out one job role in our career, and keep growing in it. The truth of the matter today is we have a series of mini-careers, and will need reskilling. Let me illustrate with consultancy firms. They place a cost per hour on the head of their consultants. This cost per hour reflects their level of maturity and market value. It is what clients have to pay for them, at minimum. It starts low as that reflects their junior status. The issue is that people get ONE number on their head, as if they had only one skill. And that number only goes up. That number probably reflects competence level in one particular domain, but how are they ever going to get experience in new domain with a high overall number on their head? They are not good enough to be sold at the high price so they won’t get to start building experience. (Up or out...) This practise even has the side-effect that reskilling people will overly rely on training activities. The training will need to bring them to a level high enough to start out as an expert just to justify their hourly rate! The sensible thing would be to bring people with training activities to the (junior) start position level, from where they can grow through experience.







- The case for better experience management
So why is the above state of the art just not good enough? We need to do better because we are now dealing with competent people in the network age (the world has gone smaller, flatter, faster, more spiky and ultimately more volatile). We need to do better because properly leveraging experience yields more than training. And we need to do better because of the bad things that happen when we’re not.



-- Not fit for today
In the network age you can’t wait a year to get feedback. In the network age knowledge professionals are increasingly self-reliant, and require instant feedback to function. Once a year is not enough, and only feedback from your hierarchical superior is too narrow (besides, what does he still know about your daily changing field?). As professionals are self-reliant, goals that cascade down the chain tend not to be very effective once they reach the workfloor. (See this article from Bersin on that very topic.)
Professionals need feedback on how they are doing almost real time, and unrelated to appraisal.

-- It is probably far more important for competence development than the training interventions we do
Experience gets us further than training. So they say the magic number is 20/80 (or 70/20/10). Only about 20% of learning is formal training, some of that other 80% is through informal ways, often within the context of the job.



--- People prefer experience or simulated experience
Here’s a result of a worldwide sales training program. Participants clearly value work-based development activities best. It brings them the most.

(Source: Global Sales School survey)


--- Ebbinghaus forgetting curve
If people learn and can’t apply, they forget. It is how our brain was meant to function. Not linking training to practise is waste. Making people remember with all kinds of recalls without actually applying is waste too, it's brain pollution.

--- Body of knowledge gets formed mostly on the job
As this graph from the Lisbon council shows, the body of knowledge we build really kicks off through experience on the job.

--- Experience sticks better
In the interview series 'we are the competent people', one of the questions is "Describe moments where you grew the most in a particular competence domain". (Go ahead, answer this one for yourself.) I'll bet you did not answer with a learning intervention, but with a project experience you had. Most people will answer the above question with a strong memory of 'real work'. It sticks better.


--- Experience yields more trust in competence than learning activities
For the book, I did a survey amongst learning and HR professionals as to score the evidence given on a certain competence domain. The 'do' evidence scores consistently higher than the 'learn' evidence.





-- People won’t sit on their hands
Bad things will happen when your firm cannot provide people an environment to perform what they are good at. I remember talking to an HR director mentioning his people leaving because they heard someone from the outside had been hired to fill a position they had been training to get ready for. The HR director just did not have any clue or way to find that out... Oopsiedaisy. When people don't find a context to apply their skills for real, people leave or remain frustrated. All the more reason to track this.








- We need to move beyond stick and carrots performance management
So we come back to the central question: what if we were as effective at managing experience as we are today at managing training interventions? I don’t have a blueprint of how an Experience Management System has to look like. But here is the dream should we have one:



-- The EMS still allows for performance evaluation, but is not limited to that. I would very much like new-style goals set as in games: you have a long term mission within your job role, and achieve them via short term tasks that are performed in a team.
-- There is a personal dashboard

• That shows me how I’m doing in my tasks/mission/job role. Similar to the Signals learning dashboard, it shows how I’m doing in my job, based on all-round evaluations by my clients, peers, superiors, coaches, etc. When I’m not doing as well as I should or would like to, I get suggestions. On the other hand, when I’m doing really well I get encouraged to share that with others.
• That lists what I’m currently good at and what I want to become good at.
• That shows me the most recent feedback I’ve gotten and allows me to ask particular people for feedback on my work and development goals. We grow with quality feedback.
• That lists my experience history including lessons learned, in an easily retrievable way, and allows me to share selected parts with others
• That suggests ‘next’ assignments I’m (almost) ready for or potential stretch assignments, upcoming job rotation opportunities, internal vacancies or openings in the extended ecosystem of the company

-- The EMS allows to rapidly assemble an ideal project team based on previous, proven experience and people ready for the job. Experienced people (rather than educated people) are easy to locate.
-- The EMS enforces a ‘pauze’ button in the worklife. We don’t learn from experience as much as we learn by reflecting on experience. The EMS is a system approach that makes us pauze and reflect. (As someone said: learning is a by-product of work. I suspect it was Jay who said that.)
-- The EMS allows other people to give feedback on my performance
-- And above all, this data is MY data, I can take it in a portable format to my next employer



What do you dream? What’s your 2 cents?