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"In 2021, success will be measured by how well we can target the right learning opportunities," says Joanna Miller, learning and development lead at Asana. "We need to curate them at the right depth, at the right time in the employee journey-all in service of helping employees filter options to make the right choices to drive their growth forward."

L&D leaders are faced with the challenge of delivering a wide range of employee learning experiences that are personalized, fuel career growth, and help retain great talent. To deliver these outcomes, leaders need to be smart with their time, leverage key cross-functional partnerships, and dial into innovative ways to increase learning opportunities at every level.

We'll explore the top five learning trends in 2021 with the leaders at Zoom, Asana, Fivetran, Intercom, and The People Piece.

1. Customizable Content Templates Are on the Rise

"The focus has shifted to curating and moderating learning content rather than creating them from scratch," says Eve Bulman Murphy, senior manager of people development at Intercom. "We're moving toward building agile learning experiences that can be pulled apart and customized based on functions, levels, geographies, and more."

L&D leaders are curating high-quality, customizable content they can purchase from a content marketplace, modify to meet specific organizational needs, and deploy rapidly, which allows them to save time and resources by picking an approved, standardized off-the-shelf content that individual teams can personalize into learning experiences that are hyper-specialized for role, skill level, learner preference, or branding.

2. The Understated Power of Peer Learning

Peer learning (also known as peer-to-peer learning or collaborative learning) can be the most effective way to engage learners and deepen their knowledge around the training. Through discussion groups, peer coaching, or action learning groups, learners will hone their problem-solving skills as well as learn how to actively listen to diverse opinions and provide and receive constructive feedback-skills that are critical for success in the workplace.

In addition to cultivating soft skills, peer learning also gives participants a chance to be in the spotlight to share their skills, be seen as a leader or changemaker, and help create training content for the program. "You can basically create a mini field army to evangelize your program-and it all starts with giving them a platform to teach and showcase their skills," says Rich Adams, sales enablement manager at Zoom.

3. Emerging Conversations on Learning Science

Learning science is an up-and-coming interdisciplinary field that studies how we learn and ways to effectively curate, deliver, and measure effective learning methodologies and outcomes. By combining foundational elements like cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and data science, learning science is the key to understanding learning at its core.

"Learning starts at the brain," says Mikayla Posk, an industrial-organizational psychologist at The People Piece. "There are ways that we can hijack the brain to get control over how fast and well we learn a new piece of information." For L&D professionals, understanding how the brain acquires and successfully retains information is key to developing learning strategies to set their learners up for success and maximize training ROI.

4. Microlearning and Learner Engagement

At Fivetran, Mike Faber, director of learning and development, stresses the importance of using microlearning strategies to make training more palatable and engaging. By delivering bite-sized bursts of content, learners are able to focus better and boost knowledge retention.

At your next live classroom training, Mike recommends "rolling out activities every three to five minutes-whether it's a chat, an exchange, poll, video-to enrich the learning experience." This gives opportunities for learners to absorb the training content in a different way to reinforce learning. Gamification and microassessments also allow learners to check their progress toward their training goals.

5. The New L&D Frontier: Edutainment

It's no secret that remote work has made it challenging to hold learner attention. "That's why engagement is so critical for L&D," says Faber. "It's not good enough to take classroom learning and plop it into a virtual environment. Instead, use this opportunity to incorporate edutainment into your learning programs."

Edutainment blends education and entertainment to create fun and meaningful learning experiences. For training, it's about developing content that learners enjoy enough to visit regularly and immerse themselves in the learning journey because that's what it takes to learn effectively. Edutainment activities can be crucial to more effectively and quickly reinforcing learning and develop learning competencies.

Learn more about how these L&D leaders are leveraging WorkRamp to deliver amazing employee learning experiences.

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The Future of L&D: 5 Learning Trends for 2021

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"In 2021, success will be measured by how well we can target the right learning opportunities," says Joanna Miller, learning and development lead at Asana. "We need to curate them at the right depth, at the right time in the employee journey-all in service of helping employees filter options to make the right choices to drive their growth forward."

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The only person you can truly change is yourself.

That's the most important realization I've had, in both my career and my personal life. And it arrived at a time of great frustration, which means it arrived at the perfect moment.

I'd just started my role as Chief People Officer at Red Hat, and my mind was full of what I just knew were brilliant ideas for improving the company. I was explaining them to anyone and everyone. I believed in them. I was enthusiastic about them.

But I got the sense that not everyone was buying into them, and I felt deflated.

I wondered: Why not? Couldn't they see how good these ideas were? Couldn't they see how much better these ideas would make their lives?

That's when a colleague pointed out how much energy I was wasting by trying to accomplish something I couldn't ever really be sure I'd achieve: change everybody's mind.

That wasn't an easy thing for someone like me to hear. I'm a reformed ENTJ-leaning lawyer by training (now into ENFJ). In the legal world, arguments exist to be won. Conversations are exercises in persuasion. One party wins by making the more convincing case.

But now I was a People leader in an open organization-a role quite different than a lawyer in a law firm. And I could clearly see it would require me to reframe my worldview.

"If I want this outcome so badly and I'm not getting it," I said to myself, "then the only thing I can do is change what I'm doing. I can't change other people. But I can change myself." (Let's not forget what Einstein said about doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.)

It sounds so simple. But at that difficult moment in my career and in my life, it was a revelation.

If you're struggling repeatedly with the same issues, problems, or obstacles, then the only lever you can truly pull for a guaranteed effect is to act differently yourself. You can try manipulation. You can try politics. You can try to kowtow. You can try all those tactics, and while each might produce a small victory here or there, the one tried and true step for achieving success that you have at your disposal is to alter your mindset and take a new approach.

Rather than approach every interaction as an opportunity to convince someone I'm right, I'm now much more likely to stand in a position of curiosity when interacting with others, a position of learning fueled by a desire to comprehend and appreciate multiple perspectives. Every person is an iceberg-there's so much more beneath the surface than we can ever discern at first glance-and every conversation is an opportunity to dive deeper below that surface.

I'm also much more conscious of my motivations for engaging others. Understanding that I shouldn't simply be aiming to change others' minds means I'm more likely to begin standing for someone else's success. I'm more likely to stop and ask myself "Am I giving this feedback because I'm trying to impose my opinions or preferences on others, or am I doing it to help someone become more successful?"

And I'm much less likely to get in my own way. When I realized that so much of my frustration was the result of trying to do something that was impossible-get people to see and do everything my way-I could recognize that I was often the source of my own aggravation. I was projecting my own discomfort with change onto others, misconstruing them as villains and the source of stress that really wasn't there.

So I made changes. "Help me understand," I said. "Tell me what you're thinking. How do you see this?" And as a result, I became a more effective leader in our open organization.

Ultimately, we are all responsible for our own mindsets, our own well-being, and our own worldviews. No one can decide for us how we feel about something. And validation from others-like seeing them totally convinced of our deeply held truths and parroting them back to us-is not the kind of external validation that will make us happy. The Book of Joy relates the Dalai Lama's belief that "if we can discover our role in creating the situations that upset us, we are able to reduce our feelings of frustration and anger. Also, when we are able to recognize that the other person has their own fears and hurts, their own fragile and human perspective, then we have a chance of escaping from the normal reflex of anger."

If something is frustrating you, start to address it where you know you can succeed: yourself. Because in the end, that's the only person you can truly change.

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What I gained by admitting I can't change other people

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The only person you can truly change is yourself. That's the most important realization I've had, in both my career and my personal life.

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Reflective Practices

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Reflective practice is the ability to reflect on one’s actions so as to take a critical stance or attitude towards one’s own practice and that of one’s peers, engaging in a process of continuous adaptation and learning.[1][2] According to one definition it involves “paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight”.[3] A key rationale for reflective practice is that experience alone does not necessarily lead to learning; deliberate reflection on experience is essential.[4][5]

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Launching health innovations: 8 battlegrounds

The Health & Life Sciences industry faces 8 crucial innovation battlegrounds that you will need to tackle in order to strive for growth.

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Board of Innovation - Business Design & Innovation Strategy Firm

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Launching health innovations: 8 battlegrounds The Health & Life Sciences industry faces 8 crucial innovation battlegrounds that you will need to tackle in order to strive for growth.

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Accommodating all Learning Styles

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These are the two axes of professional design and engineering.
Did you produce within the constraints? Did you deliver measurable results?
That's it.

Good design doesn't exceed the available resources and produces measurable change against the agreed upon objectives.

Great design is better than good design because it uses fewer resources and/or creates even better results.

If you need to build a bridge, yes, of course you could build one out of unobtainium and even an amateur could build one that can't carry truck traffic, but a professional engineer eagerly accepts the constraints she signed up for and insists on measuring just how much wear and tear the bridge can actually handle.

Direct marketing, curriculum design, product testing, movie-making-they all live within the axes of constraints and performance.

They just opened the long-awaited Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport, previously one of the worst major airports in the world. And while it's shiny, the failures of engineering and design are everywhere. At 6 am, the line for the ladies room is 20 people long. The space constraints can't be eased (constraints enable architecture) but the throughput would have been easy to measure at the blueprint stage. This part of the billion-dollar facility had just one job, and it failed.

The same is true for the design of the simple coffee stand. It doesn't require a breakthrough in retail engineering to create an espresso bar that can serve grumpy pre-caffeinated travelers with speed and grace. But despite the hard work of the tradespeople who followed the plans, the plans themselves were defective. The outcome of their poor design decisions is obvious to anyone looking at the line of 30 people.

Forward motion happens when we see the best practices of our craft and exceed them. The privilege of design and engineering comes with the responsibility to be measured, and to redo our work when it doesn't measure up.

"Give me constraints" and "Measure my performance" are rarely heard, except when talented and passionate designers go to work.

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These are the two axes of professional design and engineering. Did you produce within the constraints? Did you deliver measurable results? That's it. Good design doesn't exceed the available resources and produces measurable change against the agreed upon objectives. Great design is better than good design because it uses fewer resources and/or creates even better results.

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The real meaning of purpose...

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Here's how to make the most of it.

Luci Gutiérrez

"It's not true that no one needs you anymore."

These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of "I wish I was dead."

Again, the woman: "Oh, stop saying that."
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I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but couldn't help it. I listened with morbid fascination, forming an image of the man in my head as they talked. I imagined someone who had worked hard all his life in relative obscurity, someone with unfulfilled dreams-perhaps of the degree he never attained, the career he never pursued, the company he never started.

At the end of the flight, as the lights switched on, I finally got a look at the desolate man. I was shocked. I recognized him-he was, and still is, world-famous. Then in his mid‑80s, he was beloved as a hero for his courage, patriotism, and accomplishments many decades ago.

As he walked up the aisle of the plane behind me, other passengers greeted him with veneration. Standing at the door of the cockpit, the pilot stopped him and said, "Sir, I have admired you since I was a little boy." The older man-apparently wishing for death just a few minutes earlier-beamed with pride at the recognition of his past glories.

For selfish reasons, I couldn't get the cognitive dissonance of that scene out of my mind. It was the summer of 2015, shortly after my 51st birthday. I was not world-famous like the man on the plane, but my professional life was going very well. I was the president of a flourishing Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. I had written some best-selling books. People came to my speeches. My columns were published in The New York Times.

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But I had started to wonder: Can I really keep this going? I work like a maniac. But even if I stayed at it 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at some point my career would slow and stop. And when it did, what then? Would I one day be looking back wistfully and wishing I were dead? Was there anything I could do, starting now, to give myself a shot at avoiding misery-and maybe even achieve happiness-when the music inevitably stops?

Though these questions were personal, I decided to approach them as the social scientist I am, treating them as a research project. It felt unnatural-like a surgeon taking out his own appendix. But I plunged ahead, and for the past four years, I have been on a quest to figure out how to turn my eventual professional decline from a matter of dread into an opportunity for progress.

Here's what I've found.

The field of "happiness studies" has boomed over the past two decades, and a consensus has developed about well-being as we advance through life. In The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institution scholar and an Atlantic contributing editor, reviews the strong evidence suggesting that the happiness of most adults declines through their 30s and 40s, then bottoms out in their early 50s. Nothing about this pattern is set in stone, of course. But the data seem eerily consistent with my experience: My 40s and early 50s were not an especially happy period of my life, notwithstanding my professional fortunes.

So what can people expect after that, based on the data? The news is mixed. Almost all studies of happiness over the life span show that, in wealthier countries, most people's contentment starts to increase again in their 50s, until age 70 or so. That is where things get less predictable, however. After 70, some people stay steady in happiness; others get happier until death. Others-men in particular-see their happiness plummet. Indeed, depression and suicide rates for men increase after age 75.

Luci Gutiérrez

This last group would seem to include the hero on the plane. A few researchers have looked at this cohort to understand what drives their unhappiness. It is, in a word, irrelevance. In 2007, a team of academic researchers at UCLA and Princeton analyzed data on more than 1,000 older adults. Their findings, published in the Journal of Gerontology, showed that senior citizens who rarely or never "felt useful" were nearly three times as likely as those who frequently felt useful to develop a mild disability, and were more than three times as likely to have died during the course of the study.

One might think that gifted and accomplished people, such as the man on the plane, would be less susceptible than others to this sense of irrelevance; after all, accomplishment is a well-documented source of happiness. If current accomplishment brings happiness, then shouldn't the memory of that accomplishment provide some happiness as well?

Maybe not. Though the literature on this question is sparse, giftedness and achievements early in life do not appear to provide an insurance policy against suffering later on. In 1999, Carole Holahan and Charles Holahan, psychologists at the University of Texas, published an influential paper in The International Journal of Aging and Human Development that looked at hundreds of older adults who early in life had been identified as highly gifted. The Holahans' conclusion: "Learning at a younger age of membership in a study of intellectual giftedness was related to ... less favorable psychological well-being at age eighty."

This study may simply be showing that it's hard to live up to high expectations, and that telling your kid she is a genius is not necessarily good parenting. (The Holahans surmise that the children identified as gifted might have made intellectual ability more central to their self-appraisal, creating "unrealistic expectations for success" and causing them to fail to "take into account the many other life influences on success and recognition.") However, abundant evidence suggests that the waning of ability in people of high accomplishment is especially brutal psychologically. Consider professional athletes, many of whom struggle profoundly after their sports career ends. Tragic examples abound, involving depression, addiction, or suicide; unhappiness in retired athletes may even be the norm, at least temporarily. A study published in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology in 2003, which charted the life satisfaction of former Olympic athletes, found that they generally struggled with a low sense of personal control when they first stopped competing.

Recently, I asked Dominique Dawes, a former Olympic gold-medal gymnast, how normal life felt after competing and winning at the highest levels. She told me that she is happy, but that the adjustment wasn't easy-and still isn't, even though she won her last Olympic medal in 2000. "My Olympic self would ruin my marriage and leave my kids feeling inadequate," she told me, because it is so demanding and hard-driving. "Living life as if every day is an Olympics only makes those around me miserable."

Why might former elite performers have such a hard time? No academic research has yet proved this, but I strongly suspect that the memory of remarkable ability, if that is the source of one's self-worth, might, for some, provide an invidious contrast to a later, less remarkable life. "Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy," Alex Dias Ribeiro, a former Formula 1 race-car driver, once wrote. "For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line. His destiny is to die of bitterness or to search for more success in other careers and to go on living from success to success until he falls dead. In this case, there will not be life after success."

Call it the Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation: the idea that the agony of professional oblivion is directly related to the height of professional prestige previously achieved, and to one's emotional attachment to that prestige. Problems related to achieving professional success might appear to be a pretty good species of problem to have; even raising this issue risks seeming precious. But if you reach professional heights and are deeply invested in being high up, you can suffer mightily when you inevitably fall. That's the man on the plane. Maybe that will be you, too. And, without significant intervention, I suspect it will be me.

The Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation can help explain the many cases of people who have done work of world-historical significance yet wind up feeling like failures. Take Charles Darwin, who was just 22 when he set out on his five-year voyage aboard the Beagle in 1831. Returning at 27, he was celebrated throughout Europe for his discoveries in botany and zoology, and for his early theories of evolution. Over the next 30 years, Darwin took enormous pride in sitting atop the celebrity-scientist pecking order, developing his theories and publishing them as books and essays-the most famous being On the Origin of Species, in 1859.

But as Darwin progressed into his 50s, he stagnated; he hit a wall in his research. At the same time an Austrian monk by the name of Gregor Mendel discovered what Darwin needed to continue his work: the theory of genetic inheritance. Unfortunately, Mendel's work was published in an obscure academic journal and Darwin never saw it-and in any case, Darwin did not have the mathematical ability to understand it. From then on he made little progress. Depressed in his later years, he wrote to a close friend, "I have not the heart or strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy."

Presumably, Darwin would be pleasantly surprised to learn how his fame grew after his death, in 1882. From what he could see when he was old, however, the world had passed him by, and he had become irrelevant. That could have been Darwin on the plane behind me that night.

It also could have been a younger version of me, because I have had precocious experience with professional decline.

As a child, I had just one goal: to be the world's greatest French-horn player. I worked at it slavishly, practicing hours a day, seeking out the best teachers, and playing in any ensemble I could find. I had pictures of famous horn players on my bedroom wall for inspiration. And for a while, I thought my dream might come true. At 19, I left college to take a job playing professionally in a touring chamber-music ensemble. My plan was to keep rising through the classical-music ranks, joining a top symphony orchestra in a few years or maybe even becoming a soloist-the most exalted job a classical musician can hold.

But then, in my early 20s, a strange thing happened: I started getting worse. To this day, I have no idea why. My technique began to suffer, and I had no explanation for it. Nothing helped. I visited great teachers and practiced more, but I couldn't get back to where I had been. Pieces that had been easy to play became hard; pieces that had been hard became impossible.

Perhaps the worst moment in my young but flailing career came at age 22, when I was performing at Carnegie Hall. While delivering a short speech about the music I was about to play, I stepped forward, lost my footing, and fell off the stage into the audience. On the way home from the concert, I mused darkly that the experience was surely a message from God.

But I sputtered along for nine more years. I took a position in the City Orchestra of Barcelona, where I increased my practicing but my playing gradually deteriorated. Eventually I found a job teaching at a small music conservatory in Florida, hoping for a magical turnaround that never materialized. Realizing that maybe I ought to hedge my bets, I went back to college via distance learning, and earned my bachelor's degree shortly before my 30th birthday. I secretly continued my studies at night, earning a master's degree in economics a year later. Finally I had to admit defeat: I was never going to turn around my faltering musical career. So at 31 I gave up, abandoning my musical aspirations entirely, to pursue a doctorate in public policy.

Life goes on, right? Sort of. After finishing my studies, I became a university professor, a job I enjoyed. But I still thought every day about my beloved first vocation. Even now, I regularly dream that I am onstage, and wake to remember that my childhood aspirations are now only phantasms.

I am lucky to have accepted my decline at a young enough age that I could redirect my life into a new line of work. Still, to this day, the sting of that early decline makes these words difficult to write. I vowed to myself that it wouldn't ever happen again.

Will it happen again? In some professions, early decline is inescapable. No one expects an Olympic athlete to remain competitive until age 60. But in many physically nondemanding occupations, we implicitly reject the inevitability of decline before very old age. Sure, our quads and hamstrings may weaken a little as we age. But as long as we retain our marbles, our quality of work as a writer, lawyer, executive, or entrepreneur should remain high up to the very end, right? Many people think so. I recently met a man a bit older than I am who told me he planned to "push it until the wheels came off." In effect, he planned to stay at the very top of his game by any means necessary, and then keel over.

But the odds are he won't be able to. The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.

Luci Gutiérrez

According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world's leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that.

The specific timing of peak and decline vary somewhat depending on the field. Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, has spent years studying when people are most likely to make prizewinning scientific discoveries and develop key inventions. His findings can be summarized by this little ditty:

Age is, of course, a fever chill
that every physicist must fear.
He's better dead than living still
when once he's past his thirtieth year.

The author of those gloomy lines? Paul Dirac, a winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Dirac overstates the point, but only a little. Looking at major inventors and Nobel winners going back more than a century, Jones has found that the most common age for producing a magnum opus is the late 30s. He has shown that the likelihood of a major discovery increases steadily through one's 20s and 30s and then declines through one's 40s, 50s, and 60s. Are there outliers? Of course. But the likelihood of producing a major innovation at age 70 is approximately what it was at age 20-almost nonexistent.

Much of literary achievement follows a similar pattern. Simonton has shown that poets peak in their early 40s. Novelists generally take a little longer. When Martin Hill Ortiz, a poet and novelist, collected data on New York Times fiction best sellers from 1960 to 2015, he found that authors were likeliest to reach the No. 1 spot in their 40s and 50s. Despite the famous productivity of a few novelists well into old age, Ortiz shows a steep drop-off in the chance of writing a best seller after the age of 70. (Some nonfiction writers-especially historians-peak later, as we shall see in a minute.)

Entrepreneurs peak and decline earlier, on average. After earning fame and fortune in their 20s, many tech entrepreneurs are in creative decline by age 30. In 2014, the Harvard Business Review reported that founders of enterprises valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists tend to cluster in the 20-to-34 age range. Subsequent research has found that the clustering might be slightly later, but all studies in this area have found that the majority of successful start-ups have founders under age 50.

This research concerns people at the very top of professions that are atypical. But the basic finding appears to apply more broadly. Scholars at Boston College's Center for Retirement Research studied a wide variety of jobs and found considerable susceptibility to age-related decline in fields ranging from policing to nursing. Other research has found that the best-performing home-plate umpires in Major League Baseball have 18 years less experience and are 23 years younger than the worst-performing umpires (who are 56.1 years old, on average). Among air traffic controllers, the age-related decline is so sharp-and the potential consequences of decline-related errors so dire-that the mandatory retirement age is 56.

In sum, if your profession requires mental processing speed or significant analytic capabilities-the kind of profession most college graduates occupy-noticeable decline is probably going to set in earlier than you imagine.

Sorry.

If decline not only is inevitable but also happens earlier than most of us expect, what should we do when it comes for us?

Whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to becoming successful. The shelves are packed with titles like The Science of Getting Rich and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There is no section marked "Managing Your Professional Decline."

But some people have managed their declines well. Consider the case of Johann Sebastian Bach. Born in 1685 to a long line of prominent musicians in central Germany, Bach quickly distinguished himself as a musical genius. In his 65 years, he published more than 1,000 compositions for all the available instrumentations of his day.

Early in his career, Bach was considered an astoundingly gifted organist and improviser. Commissions rolled in; royalty sought him out; young composers emulated his style. He enjoyed real prestige.

But it didn't last-in no small part because his career was overtaken by musical trends ushered in by, among others, his own son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, known as C.P.E. to the generations that followed. The fifth of Bach's 20 children, C.P.E. exhibited the musical gifts his father had. He mastered the baroque idiom, but he was more fascinated with a new "classical" style of music, which was taking Europe by storm. As classical music displaced baroque, C.P.E.'s prestige boomed while his father's music became passé.

Luci Gutiérrez

Bach easily could have become embittered, like Darwin. Instead, he chose to redesign his life, moving from innovator to instructor. He spent a good deal of his last 10 years writing The Art of Fugue, not a famous or popular work in his time, but one intended to teach the techniques of the baroque to his children and students-and, as unlikely as it seemed at the time, to any future generations that might be interested. In his later years, he lived a quieter life as a teacher and a family man.

What's the difference between Bach and Darwin? Both were preternaturally gifted and widely known early in life. Both attained permanent fame posthumously. Where they differed was in their approach to the midlife fade. When Darwin fell behind as an innovator, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sad inactivity. When Bach fell behind, he reinvented himself as a master instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, and-though less famous than he once had been-respected.

The lesson for you and me, especially after 50: Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin.

How does one do that?

A potential answer lies in the work of the British psychologist Raymond Cattell, who in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems-what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one's 30s and 40s. This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.

Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom. Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one's 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.

Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later. For example, Dean Keith Simonton has found that poets-highly fluid in their creativity-tend to have produced half their lifetime creative output by age 40 or so. Historians-who rely on a crystallized stock of knowledge-don't reach this milestone until about 60.

Here's a practical lesson we can extract from all this: No matter what mix of intelligence your field requires, you can always endeavor to weight your career away from innovation and toward the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life.

Like what? As Bach demonstrated, teaching is an ability that decays very late in life, a principal exception to the general pattern of professional decline over time. A study in The Journal of Higher Education showed that the oldest college professors in disciplines requiring a large store of fixed knowledge, specifically the humanities, tended to get evaluated most positively by students. This probably explains the professional longevity of college professors, three-quarters of whom plan to retire after age 65-more than half of them after 70, and some 15 percent of them after 80. (The average American retires at 61.) One day, during my first year as a professor, I asked a colleague in his late 60s whether he'd ever considered retiring. He laughed, and told me he was more likely to leave his office horizontally than vertically.

Our dean might have chuckled ruefully at this-college administrators complain that research productivity among tenured faculty drops off significantly in the last decades of their career. Older professors take up budget slots that could otherwise be used to hire young scholars hungry to do cutting-edge research. But perhaps therein lies an opportunity: If older faculty members can shift the balance of their work from research to teaching without loss of professional prestige, younger faculty members can take on more research.

Patterns like this match what I've seen as the head of a think tank full of scholars of all ages. There are many exceptions, but the most profound insights tend to come from those in their 30s and early 40s. The best synthesizers and explainers of complicated ideas-that is, the best teachers-tend to be in their mid-60s or older, some of them well into their 80s.

That older people, with their stores of wisdom, should be the most successful teachers seems almost cosmically right. No matter what our profession, as we age we can dedicate ourselves to sharing knowledge in some meaningful way.

A few years ago, I saw a cartoon of a man on his deathbed saying, "I wish I'd bought more crap." It has always amazed me that many wealthy people keep working to increase their wealth, amassing far more money than they could possibly spend or even usefully bequeath. One day I asked a wealthy friend why this is so. Many people who have gotten rich know how to measure their self-worth only in pecuniary terms, he explained, so they stay on the hamster wheel, year after year. They believe that at some point, they will finally accumulate enough to feel truly successful, happy, and therefore ready to die.

This is a mistake, and not a benign one. Most Eastern philosophy warns that focusing on acquisition leads to attachment and vanity, which derail the search for happiness by obscuring one's essential nature. As we grow older, we shouldn't acquire more, but rather strip things away to find our true selves-and thus, peace.

At some point, writing one more book will not add to my life satisfaction; it will merely stave off the end of my book-writing career. The canvas of my life will have another brushstroke that, if I am being forthright, others will barely notice, and will certainly not appreciate very much. The same will be true for most other markers of my success.

What I need to do, in effect, is stop seeing my life as a canvas to fill, and start seeing it more as a block of marble to chip away at and shape something out of. I need a reverse bucket list. My goal for each year of the rest of my life should be to throw out things, obligations, and relationships until I can clearly see my refined self in its best form.

And that self is ... who, exactly?

Luci Gutiérrez

Last year, the search for an answer to this question took me deep into the South Indian countryside, to a town called Palakkad, near the border between the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. I was there to meet the guru Sri Nochur Venkataraman, known as Acharya ("Teacher") to his disciples. Acharya is a quiet, humble man dedicated to helping people attain enlightenment; he has no interest in Western techies looking for fresh start-up ideas or burnouts trying to escape the religious traditions they were raised in. Satisfied that I was neither of those things, he agreed to talk with me.

I told him my conundrum: Many people of achievement suffer as they age, because they lose their abilities, gained over many years of hard work. Is this suffering inescapable, like a cosmic joke on the proud? Or is there a loophole somewhere-a way around the suffering?

Acharya answered elliptically, explaining an ancient Hindu teaching about the stages of life, or ashramas. The first is Brahmacharya, the period of youth and young adulthood dedicated to learning. The second is Grihastha, when a person builds a career, accumulates wealth, and creates a family. In this second stage, the philosophers find one of life's most common traps: People become attached to earthly rewards-money, power, sex, prestige-and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime.

The antidote to these worldly temptations is Vanaprastha, the third ashrama, whose name comes from two Sanskrit words meaning "retiring" and "into the forest." This is the stage, usually starting around age 50, in which we purposefully focus less on professional ambition, and become more and more devoted to spirituality, service, and wisdom. This doesn't mean that you need to stop working when you turn 50-something few people can afford to do-only that your life goals should adjust.

Vanaprastha is a time for study and training for the last stage of life, Sannyasa, which should be totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment. In times past, some Hindu men would leave their family in old age, take holy vows, and spend the rest of their life at the feet of masters, praying and studying. Even if sitting in a cave at age 75 isn't your ambition, the point should still be clear: As we age, we should resist the conventional lures of success in order to focus on more transcendentally important things.

I told Acharya the story about the man on the plane. He listened carefully, and thought for a minute. "He failed to leave Grihastha," he told me. "He was addicted to the rewards of the world." He explained that the man's self-worth was probably still anchored in the memories of professional successes many years earlier, his ongoing recognition purely derivative of long-lost skills. Any glory today was a mere shadow of past glories. Meanwhile, he'd completely skipped the spiritual development of Vanaprastha, and was now missing out on the bliss of Sannyasa.

There is a message in this for those of us suffering from the Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation. Say you are a hard-charging, type-A lawyer, executive, entrepreneur, or-hypothetically, of course-president of a think tank. From early adulthood to middle age, your foot is on the gas, professionally. Living by your wits-by your fluid intelligence-you seek the material rewards of success, you attain a lot of them, and you are deeply attached to them. But the wisdom of Hindu philosophy-and indeed the wisdom of many philosophical traditions-suggests that you should be prepared to walk away from these rewards before you feel ready. Even if you're at the height of your professional prestige, you probably need to scale back your career ambitions in order to scale up your metaphysical ones.

When the New York Times columnist David Brooks talks about the difference between "résumé virtues" and "eulogy virtues," he's effectively putting the ashramas in a practical context. Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual, and require no comparison. Your eulogy virtues are what you would want people to talk about at your funeral. As in He was kind and deeply spiritual, not He made senior vice president at an astonishingly young age and had a lot of frequent-flier miles.

You won't be around to hear the eulogy, but the point Brooks makes is that we live the most fulfilling life-especially once we reach midlife-by pursuing the virtues that are most meaningful to us.

I suspect that my own terror of professional decline is rooted in a fear of death-a fear that, even if it is not conscious, motivates me to act as if death will never come by denying any degradation in my résumé virtues. This denial is destructive, because it leads me to ignore the eulogy virtues that bring me the greatest joy.

How can I overcome this tendency? The Buddha recommends, of all things, corpse meditation: Many Theravada Buddhist monasteries in Thailand and Sri Lanka display photos of corpses in various states of decomposition for the monks to contemplate. "This body, too," students are taught to say about their own body, "such is its nature, such is its future, such is its unavoidable fate." At first this seems morbid. But its logic is grounded in psychological principles-and it's not an exclusively Eastern idea. "To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us," Michel de Montaigne wrote in the 16th century, "let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death."

Psychologists call this desensitization, in which repeated exposure to something repellent or frightening makes it seem ordinary, prosaic, not scary. And for death, it works. In 2017, a team of researchers at several American universities recruited volunteers to imagine they were terminally ill or on death row, and then to write blog posts about either their imagined feelings or their would-be final words. The researchers then compared these expressions with the writings and last words of people who were actually dying or facing capital punishment. The results, published in Psychological Science, were stark: The words of the people merely imagining their imminent death were three times as negative as those of the people actually facing death-suggesting that, counterintuitively, death is scarier when it is theoretical and remote than when it is a concrete reality closing in.

For most people, actively contemplating our demise so that it is present and real (rather than avoiding the thought of it via the mindless pursuit of worldly success) can make death less frightening; embracing death reminds us that everything is temporary, and can make each day of life more meaningful. "Death destroys a man," E. M. Forster wrote, but "the idea of Death saves him."

Decline is inevitable, and it occurs earlier than almost any of us wants to believe. But misery is not inevitable. Accepting the natural cadence of our abilities sets up the possibility of transcendence, because it allows the shifting of attention to higher spiritual and life priorities.

But such a shift demands more than mere platitudes. I embarked on my research with the goal of producing a tangible road map to guide me during the remaining years of my life. This has yielded four specific commitments.
JUMP
The biggest mistake professionally successful people make is attempting to sustain peak accomplishment indefinitely, trying to make use of the kind of fluid intelligence that begins fading relatively early in life. This is impossible. The key is to enjoy accomplishments for what they are in the moment, and to walk away perhaps before I am completely ready-but on my own terms.

So: I've resigned my job as president of the American Enterprise Institute, effective right about the time this essay is published. While I have not detected deterioration in my performance, it was only a matter of time. Like many executive positions, the job is heavily reliant on fluid intelligence. Also, I wanted freedom from the consuming responsibilities of that job, to have time for more spiritual pursuits. In truth, this decision wasn't entirely about me. I love my institution and have seen many others like it suffer when a chief executive lingered too long.

Luci Gutiérrez

Leaving something you love can feel a bit like a part of you is dying. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a concept called bardo, which is a state of existence between death and rebirth-"like a moment when you step toward the edge of a precipice," as a famous Buddhist teacher puts it. I am letting go of a professional life that answers the question Who am I?

I am extremely fortunate to have the means and opportunity to be able to walk away from a job. Many people cannot afford to do that. But you don't necessarily have to quit your job; what's important is striving to detach progressively from the most obvious earthly rewards-power, fame and status, money-even if you continue to work or advance a career. The real trick is walking into the next stage of life, Vanaprastha, to conduct the study and training that prepare us for fulfillment in life's final stage.
SERVE
Time is limited, and professional ambition crowds out things that ultimately matter more. To move from résumé virtues to eulogy virtues is to move from activities focused on the self to activities focused on others. This is not easy for me; I am a naturally egotistical person. But I have to face the fact that the costs of catering to selfishness are ruinous-and I now work every day to fight this tendency.

Fortunately, an effort to serve others can play to our strengths as we age. Remember, people whose work focuses on teaching or mentorship, broadly defined, peak later in life. I am thus moving to a phase in my career in which I can dedicate myself fully to sharing ideas in service of others, primarily by teaching at a university. My hope is that my most fruitful years lie ahead.
WORSHIP
Because I've talked a lot about various religious and spiritual traditions-and emphasized the pitfalls of overinvestment in career success-readers might naturally conclude that I am making a Manichaean separation between the worlds of worship and work, and suggesting that the emphasis be on worship. That is not my intention. I do strongly recommend that each person explore his or her spiritual self-I plan to dedicate a good part of the rest of my life to the practice of my own faith, Roman Catholicism. But this is not incompatible with work; on the contrary, if we can detach ourselves from worldly attachments and redirect our efforts toward the enrichment and teaching of others, work itself can become a transcendental pursuit.

"The aim and final end of all music," Bach once said, "should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul." Whatever your metaphysical convictions, refreshment of the soul can be the aim of your work, like Bach's.

Bach finished each of his manuscripts with the words S oli Deo gloria-"Glory to God alone." He failed, however, to write these words on his last manuscript, "Contrapunctus 14," from The Art of Fugue, which abruptly stops mid-measure. His son C.P.E. added these words to the score: " Über dieser Fuge ... ist der Verfasser gestorben " ("At this point in the fugue ... the composer died"). Bach's life and work merged with his prayers as he breathed his last breath. This is my aspiration.
CONNECT
Throughout this essay, I have focused on the effect that the waning of my work prowess will have on my happiness. But an abundance of research strongly suggests that happiness-not just in later years but across the life span-is tied directly to the health and plentifulness of one's relationships. Pushing work out of its position of preeminence-sooner rather than later-to make space for deeper relationships can provide a bulwark against the angst of professional decline.

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Dedicating more time to relationships, and less to work, is not inconsistent with continued achievement. "He is like a tree planted by streams of water," the Book of Psalms says of the righteous person, "yielding its fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither, and who prospers in all he does." Think of an aspen tree. To live a life of extraordinary accomplishment is-like the tree-to grow alone, reach majestic heights alone, and die alone. Right?

Wrong. The aspen tree is an excellent metaphor for a successful person-but not, it turns out, for its solitary majesty. Above the ground, it may appear solitary. Yet each individual tree is part of an enormous root system, which is together one plant. In fact, an aspen is one of the largest living organisms in the world; a single grove in Utah, called Pando, spans 106 acres and weighs an estimated 13 million pounds.

The secret to bearing my decline-to enjoying it-is to become more conscious of the roots linking me to others. If I have properly developed the bonds of love among my family and friends, my own withering will be more than offset by blooming in others.

When I talk about this personal research project I've been pursuing, people usually ask: Whatever happened to the hero on the plane?

I think about him a lot. He's still famous, popping up in the news from time to time. Early on, when I saw a story about him, I would feel a flash of something like pity-which I now realize was really only a refracted sense of terror about my own future. Poor guy really meant I'm screwed.

But as my grasp of the principles laid out in this essay has deepened, my fear has declined proportionately. My feeling toward the man on the plane is now one of gratitude for what he taught me. I hope that he can find the peace and joy he is inadvertently helping me attain.

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Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think

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Here's how to make the most of it. "It's not true that no one needs you anymore." These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet.

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User Experience Design

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What is User Experience (UX) Design? - updated 2023

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User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users.

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All About the Need:

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The allure of innovation has always been in the chance of finding the next "big thing;" however, businesses often find themselves on the treadmill of relentless innovation as markets mature and technology advances. In addition, innovation has a poor track record of delivering commercial success for businesses. Often, the value of the innovation requires a broader system of products and services for the true benefit of experience to be available to consumers.

Great customer experience is both a necessity and an advantage as competition for customers intensifies. Unfortunately those that use this to their advantage are often the nimble start-ups who emerge free from legacy constraints. They can often set the bar higher than many pre-existing businesses will be able to meet.

Yet the growing complexity of operating in the omni-channel world where the customer relationship is always on, makes understanding - let alone improving and existing customer experience a challenge for all. The journey a customer has with a business typically crosses multiple functions and managers. Customers often wind up dealing with a headless beast of experiences with inefficient communication and too many businesses make the mistake of assuming that superficial design efforts can fix the problems.

The age of image as brand is closing and fixing the experience at the 11th hour through brilliant design cannot create value that doesn't exist. Businesses must accept the limitations of placing blind-faith in innovation and brand and focus on keeping customers engaged, without sacrificing the quality of the experience, while developing new products and grow into new markets.

The key is to understand that engaging customers in experiences they find value in. Innovation, brand, and customer experience all support this goal, but they aren't the end-goals in and of themselves.

The successful businesses will be the ones that learn to navigate the most efficient course, keep the passengers happiest, build faster engines, all while keeping the plane in the air. They will use a new playbook that begins with understanding the strategic role of experience and how to use it to design products, services and customer interactions accordingly.

This playbook has a name: experience design. It's based on a simple idea that everything a business does should be based on the following assumptions:

An engaged customer is worth more than a loyal customer

Engagement comes from meeting expectations, which means being relevant, which means providing value

It's more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, so figure out how to grow value for existing customers while they still are customers.

Experience design is not a checklist, a recipe, or a series of maneuvers; it is a way of thinking. It uses brand as a compass for identifying differentiated value and experience. It considers how products, services, and solutions play a role in delivering value over time and how this must be accounted for even in the early phases of innovation or the product design process. It considers all stages of the customer journey as opportunities to provide value and further engage customers. And it brings the concept of time to the table as a way of exploring options, innovation, implications, and interdependencies.

Experience design doesn't replace innovation. It complements the efforts. Innovation should augment and extend the current portfolio and brand. Innovation for existing products, services, and customer experiences is low hanging fruit and doesn't require hiring innovation consultants. It starts with visibility into how you act and then fixing problems and enhancing strengths.

Deeper innovation efforts can begin by looking at the interface between what is changing at the limits of value you provide and the emerging needs of your customer, since you will use value to drive adoption. And innovation can't occur in a vacuum. It's never too soon to start planning for how a new product or service integrates along the lifetime of the customer relationship.

Experience design doesn't replace brand strategy, but pushes beyond the traditional approach of defining brands. It advocates using the concept behind the brand as a way to identify and define value for customers in ways that can be differentiated in the way that products and services deliver value. And this becomes the purpose and intent of the business - to deliver products, services, and experiences that deliver the value that the brand represents, as a way of giving the brand meaning.

But it also means measuring that value from the customer's perspective, and continually investigating new areas of value that are natural extensions for the brand. When you look at the world in this way, it becomes easier and more natural to proactively identify gaps between what a customer may need or expect, and what they are likely to get. And this can also become a framework for ongoing evaluation and modeling change as new products and services are considered.

Experience design provides a way for the business and the designer to both discuss objectives and options. It creates a way for business to invite design to the table earlier, and understand how design can help solve problems. And it also helps businesses rethink how they engage design partners in ways that are more likely to produce success with less risk.

It's time to start the conversation about how the integrated view of experience design can change how we pose and solve the problems ahead.
Patrick Newbery is Principal at Method.

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Experience Design: When Innovation Isn't Enough

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The allure of innovation has always been in the chance of finding the next "big thing;" however, businesses often find themselves on the treadmill of relentless innovation as markets mature and technology advances. In addition, innovation has a poor track record of delivering commercial success for businesses.

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"Alive at Work"

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If you've ever felt bored or less than inspired at work, Dan Cable, professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, has good news: Your problem is biological, not motivational. Sure, that may sound a bit alarming at first, but the scientific explanation is rather simple-as is the solution. Tune in as Dan shares three easy ways to reactivate a crucial part of our brain called the seeking system so we can feel more motivated, more purposeful, and more alive at work.
Links mentioned in this episode:

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#270: Dan Cable-Alive at Work | EntreLeadership

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If you've ever felt bored or less than inspired at work, Dan Cable, professor of organizational behavior at the London Business School, has good news: Your problem is biological, not motivational. Sure, that may sound a bit alarming at first, but the scientific explanation is rather simple-as is the solution.

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The Positive Method

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Communities of Practice - "new insights often arise at the boundary"

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You are a claims processor working for a large insurance company. You are good at what you do, but although you know where your paycheck comes from, the corporation remains mostly an abstraction for you. The group you actually work for is a small community of people who share your working conditions. It is with this group that you learn the intricacies of your job, explore the meaning of your work, construct an image of the company, and develop a sense of yourself as a worker.

You are an engineer working on two projects within your business unit. These are demanding projects, and you give them your best. You respect your teammates and are accountable to your project managers. But when you face a problem that stretches your knowledge, you turn to people like Jake, Sylvia, and Robert. Even though they work on their own projects in other business units, they are your real colleagues. You all go back many years. They understand the issues you face and will explore new ideas with you. And even Julie, who now works for one of your suppliers, is only a phone call away. These are the people with whom you can discuss the latest developments in the field and troubleshoot each other's most difficult design challenges. If only you had more time for these kinds of interactions.

You are a CEO and, of course, you are responsible for the company as a whole. You take care of the "big picture." But you have to admit that for you, too, the company is mostly an abstraction: names, numbers, processes, strategies, markets, spread-sheets. Sure, you occasionally take tours of the facilities, but on a day-to-day basis, you live among your peers - your direct reports with whom you interact in running the company, some board members, and other executives with whom you play golf and discuss a variety of issues.

We frequently say that people are an organization's most important resource. Yet we seldom understand this truism in terms of the communities through which individuals develop and share the capacity to create and use knowledge. Even when people work for large organizations, they learn through their participation in more specific communities made up of people with whom they interact on a regular basis. These "communities of practice" are mostly informal and distinct from organizational units (see "Communities of Practice" on p. 1).

Although we recognize knowledge as a key source of competitive advantage in the business world, we still have little understanding of how to create and leverage it in practice. Traditional knowledge management approaches attempt to capture existing knowledge within formal systems, such as databases. Yet systematically addressing the kind of dynamic "knowing" that makes a difference in practice requires the participation of people who are fully engaged in the process of creating, refining, communicating, and using knowledge. Thus, communities of practice are a company's most versatile and dynamic knowledge resource and form the basis of an organization's ability to know and learn.

Defining Communities of Practice

Communities of practice are everywhere. We all belong to a number of them - at work, at school, at home, in our hobbies. Some have a name; some don't. We are core members of some, and belong to others more peripherally. You may be a member of a band, or you may just come to rehearsals to hang around with the group. You may lead a group of consultants who specialize in telecommunication strategies, or you may only stay in touch to keep informed about developments in the field. Or you may have just joined a community and are still trying to find your place in it. Whatever form our participation takes, most of us are familiar with the experience of belonging to a community of practice.

Members of a community are informally bound by what they do together - from participating in lunch-time discussions to solving difficult problems-and by what they have learned through their mutual engagement in these activities. A community of practice is thus different from a community of interest or a geographical community, neither of which implies a shared practice. A community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:

What it is about: its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members

How it functions: the relationships of mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity

What capability it has produced: the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.

Communities of practice also move through various stages of development characterized by different levels of interaction among the members and different kinds of activities (see "Stages of Development" on p. 3).

Communities of practice develop around things that matter to people. As a result, their practices reflect the members' own understanding of what is important. Even when a community's actions conform to an external mandate, it is the community - not the mandate - that produces the practice. In this sense, communities of practice are self-organizing systems.

Communities of Practice in Organizations

Communities of practice exist in any organization. They can be found:

Within businesses: Communities of practice arise as people address recurring sets of problems together. So, claims processors within an office form communities of practice to deal with the constant flow of information they need to process. By participating in such a communal memory, they can do the job without having to remember everything themselves.

Across business units: Important knowledge is often distributed in different business units. People who work in cross-functional teams thus form communities of practice to keep in touch with their peers in various parts of the company and maintain their expertise. When communities of practice cut across business units, they can develop strategic perspectives that transcend individual product lines. For instance, a community of practice may propose a plan for equipment purchases that no one business unit could have come up with on its own

Across company boundaries: In some cases, communities of practice become useful by crossing organizational boundaries. For instance, in fast-moving industries, engineers who work for suppliers and buyers alike may form a community of practice to keep up with constant technological changes.Communities of practice are not a new kind of organizational unit; rather, they are a different cut on the organization's structure - one that emphasizes the learning that people have done together rather than the unit they report to, the project they are working on, or the people they know. Communities of practice differ from other kinds of groups found in organizations in the way they define their enterprise, exist over time, and set their boundaries:

A community of practice is different from a business or functional unit in that it defines itself in the doing, as members develop among themselves their own understanding of what their practice is about. This living process results in a much richer definition than a mere institutional charter. As a consequence, the boundaries of a community of practice are more flexible than those of an organizational unit. The membership involves whoever participates in and contributes to the practice. People can participate in different ways and to different degrees. This permeable periphery creates many opportunities for learning, as outsiders and newcomers learn the practice in concrete terms, and as core members gain new insights from contacts with less-engaged participants.

A community of practice is different from a team in that the shared learning and interest of its members are what keep it together. It is defined by knowledge rather than by task, and it exists because participation has value to its members. It does not appear the minute a project is started and does not disappear with the end of a task. It takes a while to come into being and may live long after a project is completed or an official team has disbanded.

A community of practice is different from a network in the sense that it is "about" something; it is not just a set of relationships. It has an identity as a community, and thus shapes the identities of its members. A community of practice exists because it produces a shared practice as members engage in a collective process of learning.People belong to communities of practice at the same time as they belong to other organizational structures. In their business units, they shape the organization. In their teams, they take care of projects. In their networks, they form relationships. And in their communities of practice, they develop the knowledge that lets them do these other tasks. This informal fabric of communities and shared practices makes the official organization effective and, indeed, possible.
Communities of practice have different relationships with the official organization. The table "Community's Relationship to Official Organization" on p. 4 shows different degrees of institutional involvement, but it does not imply that some relationships are better or more advanced than others. Rather, these distinctions are useful because they draw attention to the issues that can arise in the interaction between the community of practice and the organization as a whole.

The Importance to Organizations

Communities of practice are important to the functioning of any organization, but they become crucial to those that recognize knowledge as a key asset. From this perspective, an effective organization comprises a constellation of interconnected communities of practice, each dealing with specific aspects of the company's competencies - from the peculiarities of a long-standing client, to manufacturing safety, to technical inventions. Knowledge is created, shared, organized, revised, and passed on within and among these communities. In a deep sense, it is by these communities that knowledge is "owned" in practice.

Communities of practice fulfill a number of functions with respect to the creation, accumulation, and diffusion of knowledge in an organization:

They are nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information. Because members have a shared understanding, they know what is relevant to communicate and how to present information in useful ways. As a consequence, a community of practice that spreads throughout an organization is an ideal channel for moving information - such as best practices, tips, or feedback across organizational boundaries.

They can retain knowledge in "living" ways, unlike a database or a manual. Even when they routinize certain tasks and processes, they can do so in a manner that responds to local circumstances and thus is useful to practitioners. Communities of practice preserve the tacit aspects of knowledge that formal systems cannot capture. For this reason, they are ideal for initiating newcomers into a practice.

They can steward competencies to keep the organization at the cutting edge. Members of these groups discuss novel ideas, work together on problems, and keep up with developments inside and outside a firm. When a community commits to being on the forefront of a field, members distribute responsibility for keeping up with or pushing new developments. This collaborative inquiry makes membership valuable, because people invest their professional identities in being part of a dynamic, forward-looking community

They provide homes for identities. They are not as temporary as teams, and unlike business units, they are organized around what matters to their members. Identity is important because, in a sea of information, it helps us sort out what we pay attention to, what we participate in, and what we stay away from. Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations. Consider the annual "computer drop" at a semiconductor company that designs both analog and digital circuits. The computer drop became a ritual by which the analog community asserted its identity. Once a year, their hero would climb the highest building on the company's campus and drop a computer, to the great satisfaction of his peers in the analog gang. The corporate world is full of these displays of identity, which manifest themselves in the jargon people use, the clothes they wear, and the remarks they make. If companies want to benefit from people's creativity, they must support communities as a way to help them develop their identities.Communities of practice structure an organization's learning potential in two ways: through the knowledge they develop at their core and through interactions at their boundaries. Like any asset, these communities can become liabilities if their own expertise becomes insular. It is therefore important to make sure that there is enough activity at their boundaries to renew learning. For while the core is the center of expertise, radically new insights often arise at the boundary. Communities of practice truly become organizational assets when their core and their boundaries are active in complementary ways. To develop the capacity to create and retain knowledge, organizations need to build institutional and technological infrastructures that do not dismiss or impede these communities, but rather recognize, support, and leverage them.

Developing and Nurturing Communities of Practice

Just because communities of practice arise naturally does not mean that organizations can't do anything to influence their development. Most communities of practice exist whether or not the organization recognizes them. Many are best left alone - some might actually wither under the institutional spotlight. And some may need to be carefully seeded and nurtured. But a good number will benefit from some attention, as long as this attention does not smother their self-organizing drive.

Whether these communities arise spontaneously or come together through seeding and nurturing, their development ultimately depends on internal leadership. Certainly, in order to legitimize the community as a place for sharing and creating knowledge, recognized experts need to be involved in some way, even if they don't do much of the work. But internal leadership can take many forms:

The inspirational leadership provided by thought leaders and recognized experts

The day-to-day leadership provided by those who organize activities

The classificatory leadership provided by those who collect and organize information in order to document practices

The interpersonal leadership provided by those who weave the social fabric

The boundary leadership provided by those who connect the community to other communities

The institutional leadership provided by those who maintain links with other organizational constituencies, in particular the official hierarchy

The cutting-edge leadership provided by those who lead "out-of-the-box" initiatives

These roles may be formal or informal, and may be concentrated in a core group or more widely distributed. But in all cases, leadership must have intrinsic legitimacy in the community. To be effective, therefore, managers and others must work with communities of practice from the inside rather than merely attempt to design them or manipulate them from the outside. Nurturing communities of practice in organizations includes:

Legitimizing Participation. Organizations can support communities of practice by recognizing the work of sustaining them; by giving members the time to participate in activities; and by creating an environment in which the value they bring is acknowledged. To this end, it is important to have an institutional discourse that includes this dimension of organizational life. Merely introducing the term "communities of practice" into an organization's vocabulary can have a positive effect by giving people an opportunity to talk about how their participation in these groups contributes to the organization as a whole.

Negotiating Their Strategic Context. In what Richard McDermott calls "double-knit organizations," people work in teams for projects but belong to longer-lived communities of practice for maintaining their expertise. The value of team-based projects that deliver tangible products is easily recognized, but it is also easy to overlook the potential cost of their short-term focus. The learning that communities of practice share is just as critical, but its longer-term value is more subtle to appreciate. Organizations must therefore develop a clear sense of how knowledge is linked to business strategies and use this understanding to help communities of practice articulate their strategic value. This involves a process of negotiation that goes both ways. It includes understanding what knowledge - and therefore what practices - a given strategy requires. Conversely, it also includes paying attention to what emergent communities of practice indicate with regard to potential strategic directions.

Being Attuned to Real Practices. To be successful, organizations must leverage existing practices. For instance, when the customer service function of a large corporation decided to combine service, sales, and repairs under the same 800 number, researchers from the Institute for Research on Learning discovered that people were already learning from each other on the job while answering phone calls. IRL then instituted a learning strategy for combining the three functions that took advantage of this existing practice. By leveraging what they were already doing, workers achieved competency in the three areas much faster than they would have through traditional training. More generally, the knowledge that companies need is usually already present in some form, and the best place to start is to foster the formation of communities of practice that leverage the potential that already exists.

Fine-tuning the Organization. Many elements in an organizational environment can foster or inhibit communities of practice, including management interest, reward systems, work processes, corporate culture, and company policies. These factors rarely determine whether people form communities of practice, but they can facilitate or hinder participation. For example, issues of compensation and recognition often come up. Because communities of practice must be self-organizing to learn effectively and because participation must be intrinsically self-sustaining, it is tricky to use reward systems as a way to manipulate behavior in or micro-manage the community. But organizations shouldn't ignore the issue of reward and recognition altogether. Rather, they need to adapt reward systems to support participation in learning communities; for instance, by including community activities and leadership in performance review discussions. Managers also need to make sure that existing compensation systems do not inadvertently penalize the work involved in building communities.

Providing Support. resources, such as outside experts, travel, meeting facilities, and communications technology. A company-wide team assigned to nurture community development can help address these needs. This team typically Communities of practice are mostly self-sufficient, but they can benefit from some

provides guidance and resources

helps communities connect their agenda to business strategies

encourages them to move forward and remain focused on the cutting edge

ensures they include all the right people

helps them link to other communities

Such a team can also help identify and eliminate barriers to participation in the structure or culture of the overall organization; for instance, conflicts between short-term demands on people's time and the need to participate in learning communities. In addition, just the existence of such a team sends the message that the organization values the work and initiative of communities of practice.

The Art of Balancing Design and Emergence

Communities of practice do not usually require heavy institutional infrastructures, but their members do need time and space to collaborate. These communities do not require much management, but they can use leadership. They self-organize, but they flourish when their learning fits with their organizational environment. The art is to help such communities find resources and connections without overwhelming them with organizational meddling. This need for balance reflects the following paradox: No community can fully design the learning of another; but conversely, no community can fully design its own learning.

Acknowledgments: This article reflects ideas and text co-created for presentations with my colleagues Richard McDermott of McDermott & Co., George Por of the Community Intelligence Labs, Bill Snyder of the Social Capital Group, and Susan Stucky of the Institute for Research on Learning. Thanks to all of them for their personal and intellectual companionship.
Etienne Wenger, PhD, is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of learning theory and its application to business. A pioneer of the "community of practice" research and author of Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), he helps organizations apply these ideas through consulting, workshops, and public speaking.

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Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System - The Systems Thinker

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ou are a claims processor working for a large insurance company. You are good at what you do, but although you know where your paycheck comes from, the corporation remains mostly an abstraction for you. The group you actually work for is a small community of people who share your working conditions.

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Storytelling - to make an impact

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In 2019, I'm blogging about 12 of the best lessons I've learned, many of them the hard way. This is the fourth of the series.
My first career was in journalism, which at its heart is storytelling. A good journalist observes, asks questions and collects facts, then shapes the story of what it all means and why we should care. I eventually left journalism, but the skill of telling stories turned out to be essential to every job that followed, whether I was working in marketing (the story that persuades), teaching executives (the story that educates) or managing a company (the story that drives an organization).

Storytelling has been the key to unlocking everything of consequence -- understanding, influence and innovation.

Maria Popova, the great writer, blogger, literary and cultural critic puts it this way: "A great storyteller... helps people figure out not only what matters in the world, but also why it matters. A great storyteller dances up the ladder of understanding, from information to knowledge to wisdom."

That dance is one we should all seek to master, because humans are wired for story. Our sense of identity revolves around the stories we tell ourselves. Our sense of community derives from our shared stories. And our sense of the world develops from narrative patterns.

We couldn't make it through the day without stories. They allow us to navigate information without being crushed by cognitive overload. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio notes of our evolution, "The problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, enforceable - in a word, of how to make it stick - was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution - storytelling is something brains do, naturally and explicitly... It should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures."

Our brain is explicitly designed to search for stories - a beginning, a middle and an end - and rewards us for detecting their patterns with a shot of dopamine. In his book Brain Rules, John Medina writes, "Dopamine greatly aids memory and information processing, you could say it creates a Post It note that reads, 'Remember this.'"

Stories not only help us process information and remember important things, but they also spark our emotions. When we hear a story, we see it in our minds as if we're experiencing it ourselves. Specialized brain cells fire in synchrony as we feel what those in the story feel. Aptly called "mirror neurons," these brain structures may be the source of human empathy.

I've heard storytelling dismissed as "soft," or somehow inferior to data and facts. But I am asserting that we can't fully internalize data and facts without story. Stories open the mind and awaken the heart so data and facts are absorbed. Together, they persuade. You need both to be compelling and credible.

A good story is therefore essential, but it's not easy to tell one. When we seek to convey not only information but knowledge and wisdom - the dance up the ladder that a story requires - we are challenged to elevate our thinking. "I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one," said the great writer Flannery O'Connor. Exactly. It all seems clear until we start the telling. If you find yourself struggling to communicate, it's because you don't yet know your story.

To tell a good story - for whatever purpose - know the audience, set the stage with context, show the stakes and take people along on a journey to a larger point. That journey should be interesting. Give it a human face. Show that all is not as it seems. Highlight the change at work - cause vs. effect, problem vs. solution, trajectory to resolution.

If you're stuck, it's likely in one of these areas. Maybe you're unsure of the audience and what they need to hear. Maybe you need to investigate the context. Maybe you are fuzzy on the stakes that make us care about the story. Maybe you don't know enough about the people involved in your story. Maybe your reasoning is flawed and the facts don't fit the narrative. Or maybe you don't know the purpose or point of it all.

Insist on a good story. It will demand of you that you rise to a level of insight and meaning that will make you a better person, manager and leader. It's easy to bury flimsy thinking in reams of data, lists of activity and PowerPoint slides. A story exposes the heart of the matter - or its absence.

I've seen good stories told in film, books, corporate dashboards, annual reports and on bar stools. The medium doesn't matter. The thinking does.

Good stories are powerful, but sometimes stories are not good. Because story is so potent, it can and will be abused. This happens all too often. Consider the stories you may tell yourself - that you're an imposter or unworthy. Or the stories you ascribe to people's actions that have no basis in reality. Or the stories used to marginalize some groups or mislead others. Stories create blind spots. Because we want a beginning, middle and end, we will insert the missing pieces even where they don't belong. We write stories ahead of time, abandoning curiosity and omitting facts. We will take the stories of our past and believe they predict our futures. Beware these biases. And be wary of very simple stories. If a story is too easy to find or tell, it is most certainly incomplete. Business, life and people are more nuanced than that.

So tell a story, but make it good. And use it for good.

Here are some stories to consider. Tell your foundational story - how did you, your team and your company come to be here? Why do you value what you do? Tell your customer stories - who are you here for? Tell the story of the your products - what pain points do they solve? Tell the story of change - what new story is needed to replace the old story in order to transform? Tell the stories of learning from experiments or mistakes. Tell the story of how your business is doing - what is behind the numbers, and what does that say about what should continue or change?

The story that matters most of all is your story of purpose. If stories propel us up a ladder of understanding, purpose is at the top. It answers the personal question, why are you here? It answers for a team, what's the point of it all? It's what we all want to know, and it's what gets us up in the morning, puts fire in our belly and leads us to greatness. If you don't have that story - or you don't tell that story - you and those around you will be adrift.

You have that story, and the beginnings of many others, within and around you. Find them, tend to them, and tell them. It's at the heart of your job, whatever your calling.

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The skill every leader needs: storytelling

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In 2019, I'm blogging about 12 of the best lessons I've learned, many of them the hard way. This is the fourth of the series.

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eLearning Trends 2019

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Online Learning In 2019 And Trends You Should Be Aware Of

We are almost a calendar quarter down for 2019. And with the number of things that are happening on the learning front, looks like this year will pass in a jiffy. Perhaps, now is a good time to take stock of some eLearning trends that were being talked about taking the eLearning world by storm at the beginning of the year. Let's see which ones sustained the hype and what does that imply for the learning and training domain.

Artificial Intelligence

I am sure this isn't coming as a surprise to most of you. There is a lot of hype about AI in almost every industry, and the learning industry is no exception. From all that we see around in the learning space, looks like AI holds great promise in this year and beyond. It will be an integral part of the NextGen learning systems that are making a shift towards offering personalized learning experiences. Many AI technologies like analytics, machine learning, natural language processing, and chatbots will actually be visible in action this year. And often times, these technologies will be used in conjunction. It will be interesting to see them coming together and intersecting in many ways. IBM's Project Debator [1] is a perfect example of using AI to handle increasingly complex arguments.

Rich Learning Analytics

Our quest to tap into data, organize it, analyze it, make sense of it, and perhaps gain some insights from it ensures that rich learning analytics will be worthwhile to dive into this year. In learning, the adoption of xAPI is allowing organizations to capture way more granular data about learning activities. Every-minute learner activity and the outcome are now trackable. And if this data is available, it can be sliced, diced, and presented in many different ways to surface key insights. For instance, aggregating information like which questions are most students answering incorrectly, which modules are learners spending more time on, and whether learners are interested in the depth or breadth of the topic. Where this gets really interesting is that with xAPI we will actually be able to tie learning to performance measurement.

Microlearning

Microlearning or bite-sized learning, whatever you prefer to call it, is definitely here to stay. Be it videos or courses, the trend for everything short, concise, and at the point-of-need, is becoming all-pervasive. This shift to microlearning is due to the overall makeup of our learners, be it in the corporate world or education. Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly becoming our target audience, and they DO NOT have the time, nor the patience to sit through long courses. Another plausible reason for this shift is the gig economy. In a gig economy, there is high turnover; employees have to get trained quickly, sometimes even on-the-job. Again, there is no time for long training sessions. All this implies that the way we deliver learning will change. It will need to be delivered in short bursts whenever and wherever the learners need it. Organizations are also going to continue leveraging legacy learning content by chunking it into microlearning modules.

Video-Based Learning

There was a time in online learning when you were told to use videos cautiously, for various reasons-bandwidth, devices, and cost. With the advancement in technology and devices, these blockers are non-existent. And that's why we are now seeing a lot of applications of videos in learning. It's as if the horizon of video-based learning has expanded. Simple traditional training videos and animated videos are here to stay. But in addition, technology is enabling L&D teams to incorporate 360-degree immersive videos, interactive videos, and live sales training videos into their training. There are abundant platforms and tools in the market like Vyond, Exaltive, Reheaersal, and Panopto to enable you to create such advanced video solutions.

Augmented And Virtual Reality

AR and VR have already been acknowledged as effective ways to provide highly immersive learning experiences. But just to distinguish between the two, VR immerses the user in a completely virtual environment, whereas Augmented Reality enhances the real-world objects using digitally produced perceptual overlays. VR requires an additional physical unit (Google cardboard, Oculus Rift) whereas AR can use everyday devices, like a tablet or a smartphone, to produce overlay digital interfaces. With technological advances, both these solutions have become more affordable which is why they will be increasingly used to supplement formal training this year. VR will continue to be used for all types of training; right from onboarding and product training, to compliance training and hazardous situation training. And AR will be increasingly used for product training, customer training, augmentation of retail solutions like catalogs or brochures, and more.

Learning Experience Platforms

It was Josh Bersin [2] who first labeled the NextGen learning systems as Learning Experience Platforms(LXP). As described in some of his original articles, "the LXP market exists because the paradigm of the Learning Management System is out of date. People no longer search course catalogs for 'courses' the way the used to, and we need a way to train and learn 'in the flow of work'." This paradigm shift has paved the way for the focus to move from admin-driven systems to learner-centric systems. It is not to say admin is not an important aspect, but focusing on the learner's needs and outcomes is of equal if not greater relevance.

Here are some key features that would comprise these NextGen learning systems:

A Netflix-like interface that provides recommendations based on user profile, activities, preferences, and goals

Multiple content formats including articles, microlearning nuggets, interactive videos, and more

Custom learning paths concluding to logical outcomes

Informal learning reinforcement features like impromptu quizzes, refresher notes, and reminders

Seamless integration with other enterprise systems to tie learning outcomes to overall performance measurement

Seamless experience across multiple devices

Social media like peer-to-peer engagement

Interactivity

Interactivity is not a new trend by any means, but rather a trend that continues to be at the forefront of eLearning year after year. Being on top of all the above learning trends will still be ineffective if all learning objects miss out on the crucial element of interactivity and engagement. Interactivity continues to evolve and take different forms. Be it interactive videos, Virtual Reality, chatbots, microlearning, or LXP, everything revolves around making learning interactive and thereby engaging for better learning outcomes. Speaking of interactivity, you could look at a tool like Raptivity to develop interactive content rapidly without any programming.

Looks like an exciting rest-of-the-year lies in store for the entire learning fraternity. There might be some trends that did not make it to my list. Perhaps you could share some of those from your experience. I would also be keen to know about your expectations for this year. Share your thoughts through comments below.
References:
[1] 7152: Pushing the Frontiers of AI: Project Debater

[2] Learning Experience Platform (LXP) Market Grows Up: Now Too Big To Ignore (https://joshbersin.com/)

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eLearning Trends Set To Transform Online Learning In 2019 - eLearning Industry

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We are almost a calendar quarter down for 2019. And with the number of things that are happening on the learning front, looks like this year will pass in a jiffy. Perhaps, now is a good time to take stock of some eLearning trends that were being talked about taking the eLearning world by storm at the beginning of the year.

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In the Flow & Engagement

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O.C. Tanner develops employee recognition strategies and rewards programs that help companies appreciate people who do great work.

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Learning means...

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Learning Culture Case Study

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3D Video in Learning: accessible substitute for VR

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Maestro | ​How to Use 3D Animation for Training and Selling

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This is the most accessible format of 3D animation and can be used in a variety of ways for training and selling-on its own, in an app, or as part of a motion graphics video.

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Maestro | The 3 Stages of the Learner Success Cycle

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There seem to be a million things vying for our attention during our waking hours. Family, work, friends, and hobbies all require bits of our time, and adding one more thing can be a challenge. So, how do you go about getting headspace with your learners?

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Adult Learning Explained

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Maestro | What is Adult Learning Theory? Andragogy Explained

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The answer to these questions lie in Andragogy, a term coined in the early 1800's as a means of better understanding how adults think. In the following blog, you'll find a general survey of Andragogy as an idea, stopping as necessary to help educate through some of the divergent thoughts and philosophies of adult learning, and, shedding light on how you can achieve better learning in the adults you're teaching.

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Andragogy vs Pedagogy

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10 Principles to Achieve Adult Learning

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10 Principles to Achieve Adult Learning.PNG

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If you're in the education field, you've probably heard of pedagogy. You've probably sat in seminars on the best pedagogy practices. If you're an education student, you've encountered the term multiple times in your classes.

But are you familiar with the term "andragogy"? It's a key term in the education field and should at least be understood by those who value learning.

In this post, we're going to give you a layman's guide to andragogy. We're going to explain what it is, where it came from and its fundamental tenets.

What is andragogy?

Typically, andragogy means the understanding of the science and practice of adult learning. This contrasts to pedagogy, which is the understanding of the science and practice of children learning.

In the Greek, andragogy means "man-leading" while pedagogy means "child-leading."

This is what Blake Seufert writes of andragogy:

Typically the learning is very self directed [e.g. "man-leading"], hands on and not very reliant on an instructor or teacher. Often the learner doesn't have the foundation to build upon and will need to learn other dependant skills and assess gaps in knowledge.

The term "andragogy" was first coined all the way back in 1833 by a German teacher named Alexander Knapp in an effort to categorize and describe Plato's theory of education.

However, the term is most closely associated with Malcolm Knowles, an educator who had a massive impact on the adult-learning field. As Mark K. Smith notes:

In the 1950s he was the Executive Director of the Adult Education Association of the United States of America. He wrote the first major accounts of informal adult education and the history of adult education in the United States. Furthermore, Malcolm Knowles' attempts to develop a distinctive conceptual basis for adult education and learning via the notion of andragogy became very widely discussed and used. He also wrote popular works on self-direction and on groupwork (with his wife Hulda). His work was a significant factor in reorienting adult educators from 'educating people' to 'helping them learn'.

Knowles was convinced that adult learning had to be self-driven. Rather than having education be teacher-centric, adult learning should be centered around the students and teach them the power of self-motivated learning.

Knowles himself said:

This fact makes the task of every leader of adult groups real, specific, and clear: Every adult group, of whatever nature, must become a laboratory of democracy, a place where people may have the experience of learning to live cooperatively. Attitudes and opinions are formed primarily in the study groups, work groups, and play groups with which adults affiliate voluntarily.

What are the key concepts of andragogy?

Knowles initially identified four key pillars of understanding adult learners, then added a fifth later. Those pillars are:

Pillar #1: A Maturing Self-concept

As a person matures from a child to an adult, their self-concept also matures. They move from being dependent on others to being self-driven and independent.

In other words, maturity leads to growing independence and autonomy. Whereas children are fully dependent on others for learning and understanding, adults learn and understand independently.

Knowles described the maturation this way:

...in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes.

Pillar #2: Increasing Experience

In addition to a maturing self-confidence, adults build an increasing reservoir of experience. This increasing experience becomes a deepening resource for their learning. Children, on the other hand, have very little experience and must rely on the experience of others to learn.

In other words, as children mature into adults and gain more experience, certain things become intuitive. Their experience allows them to intuit things that they never would have understood previously.

Pillar #3: An Increasing Readiness To Learn

As an adult moves into various social roles (employee, parent, spouse, citizen, etc.), their readiness to learn becomes oriented toward those roles.

Consider how this plays out in life. As an adult moves into the workforce, they must orient their learning toward the skills necessary for their job. As they become a parent, they suddenly must learn all that's involved in taking care of children. New roles require new knowledge.

Pillar #4: A Shifting Application and Orientation

When a person is young, their application of a subject is postponed and their orientation is subject-centered. For example, when someone takes algebra in 9th grade, they don't normally apply it immediately to real life problems. They must wait until they're older and encounter a need for algebra.

As a person matures, their application of learning becomes immediate and more problem-centered. Adults encounter problems, learn how to solve those problems, and then immediately apply their knowledge to those problems.

Pillar #5: An Internal Motivation To Learn

A child's motivation to learn is typically external. They are required to go to school and will encounter externally enforced consequences if they don't. This changes as they mature into adults.

Adults are motivated to learn internally. They want to grow in self-development. They desire to move up the career ladder and need to acquire new skills. They find themselves facing an unfamiliar problem and need to find a solution. Instead of having education forced on them, adults actually pursue education.

These five pillars provide the foundation for how Knowles understood adult learning and andragogy. Knowles believed that all adult learning must take these five pillars into account and shape the teaching and curriculum accordingly.

What outcomes should andragogy produce?

According to Knowles, adult education should always produce at least seven outcomes.

Outcome #1: A Mature Understanding Of Oneself

Proper adult education helps adults understand themselves clearly and objectively. They learn to grasp their:

As they grow in self-understanding, adults should also increase in self-respect and a passion for continuing growth.

Outcome #2: Acceptance, Respect and Love Toward Others

In addition to increasing self-respect and love, andragogy should lead adults to increasingly accept, respect, and love others. There must be a keen understanding of the difference between people and ideas.

This understanding will give adults the power to thinking critically about ideas without attacking or threatening the people who hold them.

Outcome #3: A Fluid and Dynamic Attitude Toward Life

Every experience is a new opportunity for adults to learn. Additionally, people are always changing, which adults must learn to accept and even embrace.

When combined, this means that adult learning should create a dynamic, even passionate attitude toward life that causes people to embrace every new experience as an opportunity to learn.

Outcome #4: Understanding and Reacting To Causes, Not Symptoms

Typically, when a problem arises, people respond to the symptoms. Proper andragogy should change this.

Rather than only seeing symptoms, adults should be able to see beneath to the actual root causes of the problem. Once they understand the root causes, they can appropriately react.

Outcome #5: Understanding Human Experience

Everyone tends toward recency bias. In other words, people tend to assume that modern equals better and to ignore the past. Andragogy creates a perspective shift. It teaches people to understand, appreciate, and share the ideas, experiences, and traditions of the past. Rather than denigrating the past as irrelevant, it highlights it as essential.

Outcome #6: Understanding Of and Ability To Change Society

Living in a democracy requires that adults be able to understand the society they live in and bring about effective change. Thus, proper adult education educates people on the social order and how that social order is shaped.

Conclusion

Malcolm Knowles played a key role in shaping adult education. He was the first individual to attempt to create a comprehensive theory of adult education and developed that theory throughout this life.

As P. Jarvis commented:

As a teacher, writer and leader in the field, Knowles has been an innovator, responding to the needs of the field as he perceived them and, as such, he has been a key figure in the growth and practice of adult education throughout the Western world this century. Yet above all, it would be perhaps fair to say that both his theory and practice have embodied his own value system and that is contained within his formulations of andragogy.

While the practices of adult education have certainly shifted in the years since Knowles, many of his underlying assumptions still remain in place. For that, the world owes him a debt of gratitude.

Achieve in Andragogy

PGS is all about the adult learner. Our degree programs are specifically designed for andragogy-to empower and inspire working adults to pursue their goals.

About Steve Graham

Steve Graham serves as vice president for marketing, HR business partner and college instructor. He holds graduate degrees in management and higher education. As a life-long learner, he has additional graduate and professional education in executive and professional coaching, health care administration and strategic human resource management. Steve is also the Founder and President of Valiant Coaching & Talent Development, LLC.

He is a certified HR professional with The Society for Human Resource Management, certified coach with the International Coach Federation and a Global Career Development Facilitator. His professional memberships include: The Society for Human Resource Management, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration, Association for Talent Development and International Coach Federation.

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A Simple, Easy To Understand Guide To Andragogy

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If you're in the education field, you've probably heard of pedagogy. You've probably sat in seminars on the best pedagogy practices. If you're an education student, you've encountered the term multiple times in your classes. But are you familiar with the term "andragogy"?

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Laboratory of Democracy

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Adult Learning Theory

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(A)ttention (G)enerate (E)motion (S)pacing
for learning that sticks

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Personalization (Pearson)

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Activate emotional & cognitive

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Soft Skills on the Move Up

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Age of Collaboration

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Info from Bersin_Learning in the Flow of Work

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Adult Learning at its Best