On specialist roles

Warning: this post contains a lot about my favourite sport (rugby union).

About half my lifetime ago, probably even less, if you had unloaded a rugby union team off a coach in front of me, I'd have had a pretty good chance of identifying the position of every player without needing to see the numbers on their backs.

Don't believe me? Watch me. Rugby is in my blood.

• Anybody with cauliflower ears is pretty certain to be a forward (# 1 to 8), and will be involved in the scrum. Let's look at them first.
• Those two Sherman tanks are almost certainly the props, (# 1 and 3). They will be the ones who prop up the hooker (more of him next) in the front row of the scrum. Don't expect much speed from them, but don't get in their way, either. They will charge right over you. Or through you. The one with two cauliflower ears is the tighthead. The one with only one cauliflower ear is the loosehead.
• That square block of a man with no neck and a crazy glint in his eye, is the hooker (#2, known in the US as 'hook'). He has got to be a bit nuts (not unlike the guy who counters instinct to fling himself into the path of an oncoming hockey puck) - he gets picked up by the two biggest guys on the team and shoved face first into a pack of 8 opposing beefcakes bent on destruction.
• Those two giants? Well, they'll be the locks (#4 and 5). They also form part of the scrum, hence their heft, but they are also great jumpers who will try to win the ball during lineouts.
• Those two slightly shorter guys, with the great musculature are probably the flankers, (#6 and 7), aka wing forwards. They'll be pretty quick on their feet, but not the fastest by a long shot. They'll probably be first away from the scrum when the ball comes out.
• But hang on. We still have one big guy here. Well, he'll be the eighth man (#8, obviously enough). A bit like the running back in American football. He is quite often also tall and fairly quick for a big guy, and will be off after the flankers when the scrum breaks up. He'll be one of the first on the scene when there's a ruck.
• Now we come to the littlest guy on the team. In days gone by, this guy could be really titchy. But quick and slippery, like a wet bar of soap. This is your scrum half. This is a guy with a real rugby brain. He sees the bigger picture. He gets the ball from the forwards to the backs (where the speed is). Every time there is a scrum, a ruck or a maul, a good scrum half will be right there. He gets the ball out and feeds it to the team whippets, who come next.
• Those lean guys, built like 100m sprinters? Those are your wings. #11 is your left wing, #14 on the right. These guys can run like the wind, and have an awesome side-step. These are the guys to whom to the scrum half will be looking to pass the ball, because they have the best chance of outrunning the opposition and making it to the try line. If you were picking yourself a dance partner for the prom, these were the guys to go for - they'd be the best on their feet... and they're often the best looking guys on the team, anyway!
• The guys who are most difficult to classify on appearances alone (for me, at any rate) are #10, 12, 13 and 15. You'll know they're not forwards, because they're not so beefy. They might even be as good looking as the wings. They look as if they could be pretty quick, too. They are, in numerical order, the fly half, the two centres and the full back.
  

But, as I said, that was a while back. These days, it isn't so easy to tell. I guess the most standout moment of confusion for me was when Jonah Lomu first burst onto the scene. He was built like a brick outhouse, but was said to run the 100m in 10 seconds flat. I watched him run. I believe it. At 6' 5", he looked like a lock, but he played wing. In his early career, he was pretty unstoppable. He could keep running, with several opponents attached to his waist, he could side-step like a dancer, and could execute a hand-off second to none. He was a contradiction. No. He was several contradictions. He could do it all.

These days, the back line seems to have beefed up. The forwards are often deceptively quick. The scrum half (with a few notable exceptions, such as Ireland's Peter Stringer) is no longer diminutive. Increasingly, team members play out of position to cover for one another.

Is it such a stretch to say that this is what I think has happened, or is beginning to happen in some cases, in the workplace?

People have become adept at using the technology that used to be the province of the IT team. Individuals collaborate without needing to be instructed by their managers to do so, or with whom to do so. People have identified experts within different arenas within the business and are quite happy to go to them for help rather than approach the L&D team.

It takes one set of skills to train a rugby team of uni-disciplinary specialists, it takes an entirely different mindset to train a team full of players prepared to have a go anywhere on the field, should that prove necessary.

In the same way, I reckon we need to be looking to the skill sets traditionally required by management and the L&D team, and consider how different these need to be going forward, with a bunch of people far more comfortable at thinking on the fly and adapting to changed parameters as necessary.

Downes on change

This article by Stephen Downes in the Huffington Post is getting a lot of exposure. He explores personal learning environments, networks and knowledge (PLENK).

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know exactly who Stephen is. The problem is, while there are pockets of people who are familiar with his work and actively engage in the debate sparked by his posts, there are great swathes of people who should be thinking along the lines that Stephen addresses, but don't... and have no idea who he is, either. As a result, they continue to churn out the same old same old.

The expression goes, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. These days, with change and progress being as fast as it is, I think if you do what you've always done, the best you can possibly hope for is what you've always got, but even that will be a stretch.

Hopefully, articles like this will take the ideas into the mainstream.

You could have knocked me over with a feather!

So there I was in this pre-conference workshop at Online Educa. I wasn't the oldest person in the room, but I was certainly helping to raise the average age.

We were talking about how to meet the learning needs of an increasingly digitally literate workforce. One woman expressed the view that our generation wasn't going to be able to achieve this. That we would have to leave it to the next generation. She also seemed to feel that it would have to wait until things had slowed down a bit, so that L&D could catch up.

She wasn't talking to me. She was talking to the panel and I was not a member, but I felt compelled to answer. No doubt this was both poor conference etiquette and poor manners, but I couldn't hold my tongue.

I asked how she thought the next generation would have it any easier, since they will in their turn be followed by younger people who are more comfortable using technologies that have yet to be invented. She was confident that their current literacy would enable them to make the shift. I'm not so sure. Every generation - in fact, I don't even want to use the word 'generation' since it implies a bigger timeframe than is the reality in my experience - will see the tools with which they are familiar rendered obsolete by new inventions. We don't know what hasn't been invented yet and it may be as different from web 2.0 (and 3.0 and 4.0) as 2.0 is from 1.0. We don't know that it will be any easier for our kids to learn the future technologies than it has been for us to learn these ones.

I am also pretty certain that the rate of progress and change is not going to slow down. In fact, I suspect quite the opposite will be the case.

I find it odd that, surrounded by people whose mothers may well be my age, I am often the most 'radical' person - or at least one of the most radical people - in the room.

How can this be the case? Perhaps I am the one who is deluded.

Time will tell.

The transitory nature of media

I am gaining whole tranches of new followers on Twitter, lately, from some of the most surprising quarters: two rugby organisations (neither of them South African, Go amabokkebokke!), a South African chef, a few art-related folks, several get-rich-quick punters (which I instantly block - such people are driven by motives I find deeply unsettling), and so on.

One new follower I gained today is called oohdotcom and this is their blog. Their latest post is a fascinating account of a young man known only as RJ who is referred to as the curator of a rather unusual museum. In fact, his museum is the East End of London itself. His exhibits are examples of urban art/grafitti, and he conducts regular tours. I strongly recommend that you read the whole post, it is very interesting.

But to me, it speaks of the short lifespan of so much of what we deal with today. Everything is transitory. Everything is beta (even alpha?). Some of the work that RJ shows is of a very high standard - work by artists who have exhibited in more traditional galleries. But RJ has to keep on his toes, because, at any moment, an 'exhibit' might be painted over or defaced. New material appears all the time, and disappears again, just as quickly.

It's quick. And getting quicker.

Got to dash. Things to do!

Fixing what ain't broke

A short while ago, Hasbro forced the removal of a Facebook application called Scrabulous. I made my views known at the time. Since then, we addicts have had to look for other ways to scratch that itch.

There is an online version of Scrabble (not sure if that link will work, since it goes to an app within Facebook), but it's most unsatisfactory. It's clunky. The interface is bleagh. It's not available in the USA and Canada. And it doesn't notify you when it's your turn to play.

The other option is called Wordscraper (once again the link may not work). But things keep changing. First, it was the board layout that was both different and changeable, as a result of which some fairly mediocre words could rack up stupendous scores. There also seems to be an attempt to go all 2.0 on us, since you have the power to design your own board layout. I don't like this bit. I like the rules of a game to be constant, so that I can hone my skills within those constraints. I would hate to head out onto the squash court to find that my opponent has been allowed to redesign the court for the game, and I am faced with a completely different layout from that I am accustomed to playing on.

The distribution of the letters is different, as are the points values of many of the letters. When you have known all your life that there are 12 Es in a game, and that a Q is worth 10 points, it is disconcerting to run out of Es when only nine of them are on the board, and to see your opponent score 12 points for playing a Q.

The most recent change, which has got my most regular opponent and me grinding our teeth is that we suddenly find ourselves faced with racks containing 8 letters, rather than the usual 7. You would think that would open up a whole range of additional possibilities, but we have found otherwise. I have heard snippets of research (which I admit that I have never followed up) that the human mind tends to work well with visual groups of seven. I have no idea if this is the case or if this the reason Scrabble's 7 letter-racks work so well. What I do know, is that, trying to play a 'bingo' (making a word with all the letters on your rack, for a 50-point bonus) with 8 letters is far more difficult than with seven - and I have yet to manage it. We are playing much lower scoring words than usual.

Now, I suspect that the problem here is that the designers of the app are trying to stay one step ahead of a copyright/patent breach. When we're designing learning solutions, what's our excuse? Do we keep changing things, too - just for the sake of making them different, for keeping the user on his/her toes?

Do we have a valid reason for delivering this module in a different format and using different navigation than we used for the last one? If the answer is yes, good on yer! If the answer is 'well um', I'd suggest putting yourself in the user's shoes and revisiting the overhaul. Whose interests are you serving?

Regular readers of this blog know that I am all in favour of changing the way we do things, if we find a more efficient approach, and that I have no patience with 'this is the way it's always been done'. But equally, change just for the sake of change, just to be different, isn't really helpful to anyone.

Inculcating values

"Mom, will you shave all my hair off?"

"Good grief. Are you sure?"

"Yes. I've decided to do it for charity."

"Which charity?"

"The Bobby Moore fund in aid of bowel cancer. Johnny's Mom just passed her 5 year all clear."

"Okay. I'll do it. On one condition. I get to keep the longest lock and one of those gorgeous corkscrew curls that suddenly pop out from nowhere."

So, after four years of growing it, my son has decided (seemingly out of the blue) to shave his head on a #2 setting. The big snip takes place on Saturday 8 November. There is a Facebook group, should you wish to join and contribute. If you're a UK based FB friend of mine, you have already been invited.

I shall be heartbroken to see those locks go - especially since I shall be the one wielding the clippers - but I am prouder than I can say. I tried to persuade him to let me style it into something trendy, but he is adamant that, when you do something for charity, it has to be extreme and it has to be a sacrifice. Rendering yourself bald at the beginning of winter strikes me as ticking both those boxes!

Moving house: a plethora of change management analogies

We have just moved house, and the whole way through the (painful) process, I was constantly reminded of my day job - not necessarily the things that I do, but the things that my clients do that mean that they need someone like me to come in and do my thang. All the following notwithstanding, I love my new house (even if it doesn't boast a back garden like Janet's - did you only post those photos on your Facebook page, Janet?)

In no particular order...

In the build up to the move, there was the whole business of selling one house and buying another. We had realised that our home was no longer fit for purpose, so we went on a hunt for a new one. We prequalified the available products/houses based on spec and then went and had a look at a few likely candidates. We didn't go for the first one we liked.

We dealt with mountains of red tape, and spent an awful lot of money on this that and the other small thing that needed to be taken care of.

The relationships with the other parties varied: our buyers were difficult, cantankerous and obstructive. They dragged their heels and kept us guessing. They were rude to the estate agents. Our seller was lovely. The house was the first one his wife and he had bought together when they married straight out of university. They had designed the extensions themselves. Both their children had known no other home. It was hard for them to let go, which we understood perfectly, having gone through that ourselves with our first house in Cape Town. He came personally to hand over the keys, rather than letting the estate agents handle it, and he introduced us to the neighbours.

There were submerged hiccups:

• We couldn't figure out how to open one of the kitchen cupboards until my husband discovered a hidden safety catch of a type unfamiliar to us
  
• Here and there, there are issues that need our attention - mostly decorative, but one or two structural
  
• The fit isn't perfect - I don't have enough cupboard space in the kitchen, and our large 3 seater sofa won't fit through the door into the house (it's been relegated to the garage... an almost new, expensive leather sofa... sigh!)

We're going to need to make a few additional purchases to adapt to the new environment:

• We don't have enough curtains
• There isn't a place suitable for our current bookshelves, which means we now have to decide whether to buy new ones or have custom-built shelves installed (perhaps I should get the Downes in!)
• Our elder son has been unable to switch schools so close to the end of this, the last year of his compulsory education (a big exam year), so we have had to find him lodgings in the town we have just left. I am NOT happy about that :o( I would prefer to find him a lift with a commuter, but we have had no responses to our appeal
  
• The dining room table in our last house was built in, and bar counter height, which means we have no table and a host of chairs of the wrong height

On the day of the move, our buyers wanted to take delivery of the keys before we had even had a chance to empty the house of our belongings. They became quite threatening.

We still haven't figured out how to control the boiler so that we have hot water and heating when we need it and none when we don't

We are surrounded by boxes. We often face the knowledge that an item needed right now is "here, somewhere" but the schlepp of having to unpack several boxes to find it is more than we have the stomach for, so we either go without or, in extreme cases, go out an buy a new one.

The estate agent who sold our house phoned today to ask me for the code for the burglar alarm. When I saw his number displayed on my phone's screen, my belly flip-flopped. I had thought the whole process was behind us. It was a minor query, but it reminded me that there is always at least one last thing.

The whole process cost us more than we had anticipated. We expected to be slightly to the good after equity on the last house was paid out. We are not. We are slightly to the bad, in fact.

I have been strongly tempted to simply opt for take-aways and heat-and-eats, so that we can focus on unpacking boxes, but our younger son suffers from anxiety, so we need things to develop a feel of life-as-usual as quickly as possible. This has meant being disciplined about dealing with slightly unfamiliar surroundings and being prepared for things to take slightly longer than usual.

Since we sold our house in Cape Town 10 years ago, we have moved house 7 times. We have noticed that, each time, we seem to plan less and just fly by the seat of our pants. This is because we know by now what things need to be done, and we simply do them as the situation arises. We don't spend hours sweating over the prep - we just get on with it. However, when we were new to the whole business, we definitely needed some guidance from those who had been through it before. We drew up a checklist of the things that needed to be thought about and resolved, so that we could minimise the things that got overlooked.

Oh, and on the subject of our new home town, I can't pass up the opportunity to link to this site about the history of the town. Contrast that with this. I know which one I prefer!

Just to finish, I would like to make one point unrelated to learning, knowledge and/or change management:

One evening a couple of weeks back, I was sitting with a group of people, when someone remarked that I looked tired and stressed. I was about to trot out the cliche that moving house is supposedly as stressful as losing a loved one. Unusually for me, I engaged brain before opening mouth, and I remembered just in time that the young man sitting next to me had lost his mother just days before. I looked at this grieving lad and got a healthy dose of perspective: Moving house, on a par with the death of a loved one? No, it flipping isn't!