Blurring the Lines of Learning

First, thank you all for the great feedback and comments on my last post. I was hoping people would send more Girl Scout cookies, but perhaps that’s not really a thing on LinkedIn.

I wanted to share one more thought on the concept of learning in the flow of work that I believe helps us see new paradigms in learning: learning in the flow blurs the lines (and that’s a good thing).

I’ve had the opportunity to engage on a lot of learning and leadership development work in the past year. At Deloitte, we utilize a “4E” framework–education, experience, exposure, environment – to categorize work done in the learning and development space. 

But then you introduce learning in the flow of work. As we’ve discussed, learning in the flow blurs the lines. When the learning content is always available, you can have it up with you in whatever environment you work in and put your new knowledge directly into action. Learning in the flow sits at the intersection of our 4 E’s. Is it education, an augmented experience, a new feature of the learner’s environment?  It doesn’t seem to fit nicely into our pre-made buckets.

And that’s good, because integration is the future. By leveraging all aspects of our “4E” framework in each experience, a ‘learning in the flow of work’ approach allows content to impact a learner in multiple ways, maximizing the impact of each module, course, or solution. 

It also begins to blur the lines in another way–between learning and knowledge management. If it’s correctly modularized and always available, your learning content also becomes your organization’s institutional memory. That dual use increases the ROI of your learning investments and should help you in justifying those investments in an era of tight budgets.