It's About Learning

For a learning theorist and Professor there are few things more invigorating than working with a group of highly motivated learners. My long time colleague and friend Dr. Craig Montgomerie often asks me to join his online Athabasca University class MDDE 610: Survey of Current Educational Technology Applications to provide his students the opportunity engage with a professional like myself who has extensive experience in promoting the use of Educational Technology.

In the MDDE webinar for November 3, 2015 titled Leading learning and technological change we focused on the most difficult challenges in any organizational change — dealing with an organization’s culture and implementing strategies that require a cultural shift. Through examining a case study of the ACU Connected Mobile Learning Initiative we explored how addressing the following four key principles increase your chances of success significantly:

Start with Why
Identify and engage key influencers
Install an effective execution strategy
Enlist and empower self-differentiated leaders

We also analyzed how ignoring even one of these principles can contribute to failure and how these principles are currently being used in the BCIT School of Health Sciences Future of Learning initiative.

Webinar slide deck – MDDE 610 Nov 2015.pdf

The following resources were mentioned or briefly discussed in the webinar and can be used to gain a deeper understanding:

The Head Won’t Go Where the Heart Hasn’t Been
This post stresses that:
If you really want to bring about change in people then you need to appeal their hearts and not to their heads. The sharing of more information or engaging in more rational discourse on its own doesn’t appear to help people to make significant change but an appeal to values, attitudes, and feelings first can motivate people toward making changes.

People who like this stuff…like this stuff
Includes a short annotation and links the books Start with Why (Simon Sinek), Influencer, Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX) and Freidmen’s Failure of Nerve.

Connected The Movie by the ACU Connected Initiative
Link to the ACU Connected mobile movie that started and provided the fundamental Why or vision for Mobile Learning at ACU.

Additional resources on Change and Innovation:

“Toxic culture is like carbon monoxide: you don’t see or smell it but you wake up dead! Senior pastors do a lot of good things, but they fail to understand the impact of the existing organizational culture on their new, exciting vision for the church. It is like changing the engine on a sports car to make it faster, but it’s spinning its wheels in the mud. Or to use a different metaphor, they try to transplant a heart into a patient whose body rejected the foreign organ. No matter how perfect the new heart is, the patient had no chance at all unless the body accepted it.

Culture — not vision or strategy — is the most powerful factor in any organization. It determines the receptivity of staff and volunteers to new ideas, unleashes or dampens creativity, builds or erodes enthusiasm, and creates a sense of pride or deep discouragement about working or being involved there.”

Sam Chand author of Cracking Your Church’s Culture Code: Seven Keys to Unleashing Vision and Inspiration (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series) points out that culture not only trumps vision but once you understand that it is the most powerful factor in an organization that new shinny vision will not be realized until steps are taken to bring about cultural change.

To get at the heart of where your organization culture is at Chand recommends examining the answers to the following questions:

http://cl.publicaster.com/SocialMedia.aspx?pubids=8365%7C326%7C7&digest=wXBoVOSSDDd8%2FT9GWFliCQ&sysid=1&1=1QA&2=CLK

The Pastors Coach – Culture Trumps Vision, By: Dr. Sam Chand via kwout

Chand also recommends forming an informal group to examine these and related questions. Identifying just how toxic your organization culture is a crucial first step, but you will still need to create the circumstances that will bring about the changes needed to move your organization culture to a better place. Unfortunately, this takes time and if an organization’s competitive advantage is its small size and ability to respond to new opportunities then a toxic culture will neutralize this competitive advantage. Furthermore, a toxic resistance to change may mean that it is too late for this particular organization. Seth Godin the author of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us encourages leaders to recognize when it is too late and it is time to move on.

This can be a very tough pill to swallow for the people within the organization, but we all know it is often much more cost effective to build from scratch than it is to renovate. We are seeing the demise of many organizations across many industries so before we blame the economy, market, government or other external factors perhaps we need to take a closer look at the organization itself and, in particular, its culture.

The solution to this problem is to not let the culture get to the point where it is toxic. This requires balance of compassion, character, strength of conviction and sound leadership skills. Unfortunately, as Edwin H. Friedman points out in his book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, there is a severe shortage of character and nerve in our society. In a rapidly changing world that is being projected forward by one disruptive innovation after another the difference between an organization surviving or thriving may be this strength of leadership and the ability to foster the circumstances that contribute to a strong, vibrant culture that motivates people to collaborate, serve and be and do their very best. What type of culture do you have in your organization and what are you doing about it?