Marconi Center - Setting for the "Future of Talent" Think Tank

When we meet in the Fall, it will be at the gorgeous Marconi Center on the edge of Tomales Bay. This is an inlet from the sea which is protected from the full force of the Pacific Ocean by Point Reyes.

The Marconi Center is located in the town of Marshall which is about an hour's drive from San Francsico along the scenic highways of Marin county. This map shows it in relation to the Pacific Ocean at the top.

The Marconi Center is, itself, an unusal place. While it is now owned by the State of California, from about 1912 until 1939 it served as a radio station for ships at sea. Using Marconi's radios, this station allowed ships to send and recive news and information and provided the military with communciations during World War I.

This is a view from the Marconi Center toward Tomales Bay. The vista are lovely and the center is made up of condominium-like townhouses, several free-standing conference buildings and a separate dining area.

Guests sleep in the condos and can share rooms, if desired. There are miles of trails and paths that hug the coast and wind through the trees and gentle hills that surround the center.



A ship idles through the bay. Below, the condos where gusts sleep and beautful lupin flowers which greet visitors to the Pine Lodge meeting rooms where we will be holding our sessions.

Future of Talent

From October 9-11th on Tomales Bay in northern California, I will be hosting, along with Jay Cross, Eileen Clegg, Verna Alee and Christian Dahman, a discussion and brainstorming session on the Future of Talent. These experts, along with about two dozen practitioners from the corporate and academic worlds will engage in a series of conversations around talent. The practitioners represent recruiters, trainers and developers, coaches, and knowledge management experts. They will come from some of America's largest corporations and from other countries such as the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and China.

Why are we doing this?

We believe that talent is the only real asset an organization has and it is the only investment that will actually return significant value. We see changes and deficits in the skills workers have, we see an educational system producing people without the skills organizations need the most, we see an exodus of senior talent and expert knowledge from organizations as Baby Boomers retire, and we see a hunger for personal fulfillment and growth that neither academic institutions nor corporations are easing.

We believe that the U.S. and probabaly most of the Western world, is at a tipping point where there are so few skilled and creative workers that organizations are (or soon will be) suffering great talent shortages that lead to lost market share, lower profits and stock value. Recent books such as Tom Malone's "The Future of Work" and Richard Florida's "The Flight of the Creative Class" all underline and reinforce these beliefs.

The Future of Talent Think Tank will be an exploration -- an intellectual journey to discover how true these thoughts are and what can be done to reverse the direction we seem to be heading. The long term purpose is to begin dealing with these changes in a positive way. It is to start crafting purposeful actions to overcome, compensate for or change these trends.

The tangible result of this first session will be a set of findings that will form the core of a website devoted to discussion about these issues. Sponsors will be able to contribute to an ongoing forum and attend sessions each year that will contine the exploration and continue to find ways to develop and keep the talent we need.

If you have an interest in these issues, consider applying to attend. We are limiting the number of attendees to just 24 -- two dozen pioneers who are willing to act as catalysts for the discussions and, hopefully, experimenters with any suggested solutions. We have a few spots open and if you would like to come or learn more, please go to the Future of Talent web site (www.futureoftalent.com) for details.

How is a CU different from a T&D Function?

Three features distinguish a corporate university or learning institute from the normal training and development function.

First of all, the corporate university is not focused on improving the personal skills of individual employees through classes or seminars. Rather than teach presentation skills, time management or other generic skills; a corporate university aims to improve a broader set of skills that will have a measurable impact on corporate goals, or business results or on customer satisfaction.

An example might be developing a curriculum devoted to improving sales. Emphasis would be on analyzing what the weaknesses are and then in designing a set of activities, programs and interventions that would deliver some predetermined results.

The second big difference is that a corporate university aims to have an impact on strategic thinking and decision making at the senior levels of the organization. The corporate university incorporates elements of change management, team effectiveness, negotiation into its programs and activities so that overall organizational capabilities are improved and strengthened. Most training and development functions are tactically focused and have little effect at senior levels.

And finally, the corporate univeristy has an interest in the future and in helping the organization understand and develop appropriate responses to opportunities and threats in the marketplace.

Instead of being reactionary, the best corporate universities anticipate competition and change and help senior management understand and craft ways to take advantage of opportunities or defect challenges.

General Electric’s John F. Welch Leadership Development Center at Crotonville is often used as an example of an effective corporate-based learning institution and for good reason. Crotonville has consistently helped the CEO and his staff to assess market opportunities and challenges and then develop forward-looking curricula to educate management on how to deal with those challenges. Its Workout program helped GE become more nimble and less bureaucratic just as the ability to respond rapidly to market changes became critical to success.

It is unfortunate that many organizations fail to grasp what power they could unleash if they created and gave appropriate resources to a corporate university instead of a training and development function, albeit a great one. The two functions are no more similar than bookkeeping is to financial management. Both essential, but not the same.

Facilitating Collaboration

Eileen Clegg collaborated with me on this book and is a visual journalist, artist, writer and educator. She and I worked together to create a A history map of educational trends. This is an except from an article she wrote on facilitating collaboration that uses the history map to explain the power of thinking and learning using visual imagery.

"This History Map depicts major historical, business, education, and social events of the past 100 years. It was used as a springboard for executives of a multinational telecommunications company to discuss corporate values, employee learning, and corporate ethics. One of the effects was to uncover “memes” (the social equivalent of genes - succinct repeatable statements that diffuse throughout an organization) explaining identity and goals to employees, customers and shareholders.






The social and psychological components of visual communication can be leveraged to facilitate collaboration. In her book, Vizability, Kristina Hooper Woolsey wrote about how graphics function within a group that is striving to work effectively together:
“Collaborative drawings have a neutral quality that can be very effective. By focusing on a drawing, people tend to concentrate on ideas on the table, rather than the different personalities and social dynamics involved. They also keep discussion focused on specifics rather than on vague and nebulous generalities.”
Often people on the same team believe they share the same goals but lack a shared framework. Progress is impeded due to clashes of assumptions that have not been expressed. A visual process to identify embedded assumptions, underlying principles and motivations moves everyone on to the page, creating a shared context before defining the goal and steps to reach it.

David Sibbet, founder of The Grove Consultants International, who has been using visuals as a strategic tool for 30 years, describes graphic facilitation as “public listening.” Participants in a meeting immediately see their ideas captured and reframed – making it possible for them to clarify their thoughts. The image can then be diffused for others to respond and elaborate upon the idea.

Organizations increasingly are using group graphics as a “high touch technology” that works on a meta-level to develop a shared focus. Visual storytellers may use a landscape background as a way to bring people together to a familiar-looking “place” – literally “grounding” them. Similarly, history maps can show “where we’ve been” and “where we’re going.” Facilitators can use time-lines and arrows to show forward movement.

The Agility Factor
In a time of rapid and extreme change, there is little time for traditional process. There is no longer enough cycle time for an executive decision to go through training and education departments to bring employees up to speed. Rather we are in an era that demands just-in-time, relevant information. That changes the definition of what it means “to learn.” It has been suggested that the best definition of learning today is “constructive interaction with change.” The “Agility Factor” describes the process of moving ideas quickly through a company and continually improving upon them.

Visuals are one item in the toolbox for quickly conveying context and content in a form conducive to ongoing change. Simple art forms and shapes communicate movement, change, and impermanence. They invite people to tweak, develop, and improve upon ideas. There is a wide spectrum of visual communication approaches – from The Grove’s templates, designed to help people in corporations conduct their own strategic visioning, to highly individual visual interpretations by people who synthesize and amplify information in idiosyncratic art forms as they record it. The list of approaches is growing: graphic recording, graphic facilitation, reflective graphics, mindscaping, visual thinking, information architecture, scribing, visual synthesis, graphic translation, group graphics, interactive graphics, ideation specialists, communication graphics, visual storytelling, visual journalism, integrative graphics.

Although artistic talent may enhance presentational graphics, visual communication is above all functional – on-the-fly, unpolished, and transient, particularly during conversational phases. Sometimes called “primitive art” or “tertiary art,” it is a visual snapshot of what is known at the moment – when a CEO first describes a proposed change, when an expert describes a new approach, when executives add their input to a vision, when groups respond to a proposal, when ideas are disseminated.

Photographs, audio clips, and power points can be part of an evolving web package – continually being updated and improved upon as the cycle of communication continues.

To learn more about this or to contact Eileen, click here.

Action and Experiential Learning

As you can tell from reading these various posts, I am a believer in learning by doing. I haven't had a "class" in blogging nor have I ever taken a computer class; but I do experiment, read, ask others, and continuously try new things.

David Kolb was one of the first to write formally about experiential learning, and his definition of it is simple: “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.”

If you reflect on Kolb's model (below) and on how you most likely really learn anything, it becomes harder and harder to defend an educational process that relies so completely on theory, reading, and learning facts.

The First lesson: Learning How to Learn

“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune


This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty anyone in the corporate university, education, or training arena has to face. Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, and many other fears.

Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge and in the process learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.

Our organizations reflect us as well. Only a few are true learning organizations – ones that can invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. It remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.

Ikea also, as well as Starbucks and a handful of other organizations have developed the skills and trust to perpetually learn.

What the organizational development professionals and corporate university experts need to do is to better understand how they do this. I don’t think we have a very good understanding of how to teach a person (or an organization) to learn – which is, as Herbert says, the first lesson of all.

Human Capital Management and the Learning Process

There has been a lot of talk lately about human capital management. No one seems to have created a commonly accepted definition of HCM. Some of the definitions I have seen are quite broad and encompass all the elements that have an influence on people in organizations. Other definitions are narrower and focus on hiring, or performance management or on a few of these.

SAS defines HCM as "Organizational insight to drive effective strategies." I like that definition but it doesn't give me any clue as to what the elements are that might lead to effectiveness.

Others define it as strategies and/or tools for finding, attracting, assessing, developing, managing, and retaining top talent. This is fine but how is it different from Hr?

In the eyes of a CEO, HCM has to be defined as the processes and tools that increase profits, innovation or improve the effectiveness of the organization. HCM is not necessarily dependent on technology, although it would be hard to do without it.

Yesterday Hank Stringer of Hire.com and I did a half-day seminar for the Conference Board on this topic for about 20 executives from a variety of organizations across the country. It was interesting to see how varied their definitons and concepts about HCM were. It was also facinating to see how hard all of us struggle to articulate and define our worlds - professional and personal.

A lot of learning is about defining and creating frameworks to place actions, technologies or whatever into some sort of cognitive order. What Hank and I did was help these very intelligent executives construct a framework that let them see relationships and interdependencies. This led to several AHAs and a deeper understanding of what they need to do. I am hopeful they will say they "learned" a lot.