Product Description

Most learning on the job is informal. This book offers advice on how to support, nurture, and leverage informal learning and helps trainers to go beyond their typical classes and programs in order to widen and deepen heir reach. The author reminds us that we live in a new, radically different, constantly changing, and often distracting workplace. He guides us through the plethora of digital learning tools that workers are now accessing through their computers, PDAs, and cell phones.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #264346 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"I was an unlikely candidate to buy into Jay Cross′s theory that formal learning is largely ineffective. But my curiosity got the better of me, and I found myself totally engrossed in his out–of–the–ordinary thinking on learning." (T+D Magazine, February 2007)

Review
"I was an unlikely candidate to buy into Jay Cross′s theory that formal learning is largely ineffective. But my curiosity got the better of me, and I found myself totally engrossed in his out–of–the–ordinary thinking on learning." (T+D Magazine, February 2007)

From the Back Cover
Advance Praise for Informal Learning

"The key to the twenty–first century will be in learning how to leverage informal learning for us all. Jay provides us with an evocative road map to how we can do this."
—John Seely Brown, coauthor, Social Life of Information, and former chief scientist, Xerox Corp.

"Informal learning is the perfect theme for exploring the next wave of our field. Jay Cross continues to push our thinking on the transformational forces of knowledge, learning, and performance. A must read!"
—Elliott Masie, founder, The MASIE Center′s Learning CONSORTIUM

"In an outsourced, automated age, informal learning has become the key to high performance and personal fulfillment. And now Jay Cross has written the very best primer on this woefully neglected topic. This is a book for both sides of your brain!"
—Daniel H. Pink, author, A Whole New Mind

"Jay Cross provides an important challenge for us all—to move our focus from the classroom to the workplace, and in doing so, reframe what we do in ways that much more closely reflect how people actually learn and perform on the job. Informal Learning has profound implications for how we—from trainers to chief learning officers and from frontline business managers to executives—must rethink our ideas and practices, not in some distant future, but right now."
—Marc J. Rosenberg, management consultant, and author, Beyond E–Learning

"This book shows how informal learning experiences connect us with information, help us share ideas, and obtain new perspectives, and even help us create new knowledge together."
—Ellen Wagner, director, Worldwide eLearning, Adobe Systems

"The one sentence from this book that hit me like a train: ′Most corporations invest their training budget where it will have the least impact.′ Wow. In an era of demanding ROI, shrinking budgets, and the insistence to do more with less, think of the impact that informal learning could have if it could truly focus learning and efforts for maximum impact."
—Mark Oehlert, learning strategy architect, Booz Allen Hamilton

Customer Reviews

The Power and Value of "A Natural Way of Learning"

As is frequently the situation, I read this book in combination with another, Return on Learning, in which Donald Vanthournout and his associates on Accenture's Capability Development team explain how their firm achieved an ROI of 353% on its commitment to enterprise learning. I highly recommend both Return on Learning and this book and, if possible, read in combination. In the Introduction, Jay Cross makes a number of crisp assertions, several of which are certain to generate controversy. For example, "Workers learn more in the coffee room than in the classroom." Rather than take this out of context, I continue the excerpt: "They discover how to do their jobs through informal learning: asking the person in the next cubicle, trial and error, calling the help desk, working with people in the know, and joining the conversation. This is natural learning - learning from others when you feel the need to do so." So far, no pyrotechnics. Cross continues: "Training programs, workshops, and schools get the lion's share of the corporate budget for developing talent, despite the fact that...," and then, "this formal learning has almost no impact on job performance. And informal learning, the major source of knowledge transfer and innovation, is left to chance."

Presumably several of those who read this review agree with Cross (as do I) that the value of formal learning tends to be exaggerated when, in fact, much of it has little (if any) enduring impact; and, that the value of informal learning tends to be underestimated when, in fact, the extent to which an organization achieves its objectives (whatever they may be) is determined almost entirely by how effectively those involved (at all levels and in all areas) communicate, cooperate, and collaborate (i.e. the Three Cs) on what must be done to achieve those objectives. For those in need of a single source to guide and inform their design and implementation of a knowledge exchange program that maximizes the Three Cs, Cross has written it.

Here are a few of the key points he makes throughout his narrative:

"Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. Informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route."

Comment: That said, all organizations need traffic control, once the ultimate destination has been selected.

"Formal learning takes place in classrooms; informal learning happens in learnscapes, that is, a learning ecology. It's learning without borders."

Comment: That said, it seems reasonable to expect productive and beneficial application of what is learned to avoid what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton aptly characterize as a "knowing-doing gap." Cross duly notes, "Executives don't care about learning; they care about execution."

Meanwhile, we are well-advised to keep in mind what Peter Drucker observed in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."

"It's not who you know that's important; it's who those others know."

Comment: Obviously, ever-expanding networks of contacts is very important. Those we know can connect us with those they know. We are also obliged to reciprocate.

"Most training is built atop the pessimistic assumption that trainees are deficient, and training is the cure for what's broken."

Comment: I agree. However, there are formal training programs now available as well as superb instructors to conduct them that can substantially improve various skills that include reading, reasoning, writing, public speaking, decision-making, problem-solving, and situation analysis.

"Created long before knowledge work was invented, accounting values intangibles such as human capital at zero and counts training as an expense instead of an investment."

Comment: In most organizations, that is true but thanks to Peter Drucker, Howard Gardner, Peter Senge, Thomas Davenport, and others, the situation is changing (albeit too slowly) and recently published books such as this one and Return on Learning will accelerate the transition to enlightenment at the governing board senior-management levels.

Years ago, after a substantial tuition increase at Harvard had enraged many parents, then president Derek Bok responded with a suggestion: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

"Imagine having an in-house learning and information environment as rich as the Internet. You'd have blogs, search, syndication, podcasts, mash-ups, and more. You'd also have a platform just about everyone already knows how to use."

Comment: And imagine such an environment that also provides formal training programs that strengthen various skills (i.e. those relevant to learning, communication, management, and leadership) of all who share that environment so that each can take full advantage of all the opportunities available. What about the bottom-line? "Management must assign enterprise-level accountability for learning." Cross is dead-on: Without proper governance, there would be chaos. Is Cross recommending a balance of learning with work? No. "As work and learning become one, good learning and good work become synonymous."

Don't stop there. Why not establish and then sustain outstanding learning that occurs both formally and informally? In that event, outstanding learning and outstanding performance become synonymous.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the aforementioned Return on Learning. Also, John Hager and Paul Halliday's Recovering Informal Learning: Wisdom, Judgement and Community as well as Corporate Agility: A Revolutionary Model for Competing in a Flat World co-authored by Charles E. Grantham, James P. Ware, and Cory Williamson, Kevan Hall's Speed Lead: Faster, Simpler Ways to Manage People, Projects and Teams in Complex Companies, Dean R. Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.