The blame game is counter-cultural to learning

Beth Kanter wrote a post that set me thinking about blame culture and the making of mistakes. One thing we loudmouths learn early on is that the blame culture is alive and well...and the loudest mouth makes for the easiest scapegoat.

At school I was (as the expression seems to have become) all mouth and no trousers. I talked a good line in rebellion, but I obeyed the rules as if I were on rails. It made no difference. I got into as much trouble as if I were a complete hellcat. Teachers approaching our classroom from down the corridor would hear some kind of kerfuffle and enter the room declaring what my punishment was to be. The fact that I was more often that not frantically trying to finish the homework that had been sidelined by my innumerable co-curricular and extra-curricular activities made not the slightest bit of difference.

This followed me to college, where the matron once grounded me for three weeks for breaking curfew, when I had been stuck in a lift all night at a friend's hostel. No amount of offers of evidence of my innocence would suffice. On another occasion, I was awoken late at night and ordered to her office to be told, "I can hear you from here! I can't get a wink of sleep with all the noise you're making!" I didn't endear myself to her by apologising for snoring and blaming it on catarrh. As I said: all mouth.

My first 'proper' job was a very junior role in the customer service department of a blanket factory, run by a petty tyrant who screamed (no other word will suffice) at people on a daily basis. He was a real piece of work and no-one wanted to be on the humiliating receiving end of one of his tirades. As a consequence, finger-pointing (and outright lying) was a regular feature of the business culture. On one occasion, there was a huge to do, because the distribution list from one of our biggest customers detailed despatch to their various stores in multiples of 14, but the goods - thousands upon thousands of blankets - had been packed in multiples of 12. Mr Tyrant went ballistic and starting tearing strips off people left and right. And of course, the finger-pointing began. The dervish entered my office, already well on his way to bursting a blood vessel and yelling at full volume before he even crossed the threshold.

I wigged out.

I was already known as 'Bof' (bundle of fire) because I had stood up to him (and other members of the senior staff) in the past, so it was not entirely without precedent that I yelled, "That. Is. Enough! Shut up and let me talk!"

I asked him what kind of operation he ran that would put a 21 year old office junior in charge of making senior management decisions about logistics. I pointed out (loudly - and probably colourfully), that there were people a lot higher than me on the food chain, earning more in a week than I did in a month, whose job it was to make these decisions. But because he was such a bully and a tyrant, none of them was prepared to acknowledge having made this mistake, so they just kept pointing fingers until it came to the bottom of the pile and I had no-one to point at. I told him that, if he had spent half the energy on finding a solution as he had on trying to find someone to blame, the blankets could by now have been repackaged and on their way to the client. By this time, there was dead silence in all the neighbouring offices.

To give him his due, he burst out laughing and told me that I had more chutzpah than a shiksa had any right to.

But that spectre follows me even to this day. A couple of years ago, I made a decision that put me in the firing line and, instead of coming to my defence, my manager served my head up on a platter to soothe ruffled feathers higher up the food chain. The mouth is silenced when the head is plattered.

But this is something I have known since before I had wrinkles and greys. It doesn't take wisdom, just common sense:

A blame culture saps energy. It distracts from solution finding. While everyone runs around trying to find out who was to blame, in order to mete out punishment, things cannot move forward.

If, instead, energy is spent on finding a solution, lessons can be learnt, deliveries made, damage controlled, etc. etc. And, in such a culture, it is far more likely that people will acknowledge having screwed up, thus uncovering mistakes before the knock-on effect gets out of hand.

Can we instead work towards a culture of "Oh hell. I screwed up. Can we fix it?"

Please?

In praise of the malcontent

Last night, in a context completely unrelated to the business of learning, my husband made the following observation, "If you don't know what you can have, you'll settle for what you've got."

That remark has stayed with me, and its relevance to just about everything keeps reaffirming itself.

Think about it. If you buy a new pair of boots the very first time you spot them in store A, you might never discover that you could have had them for half the price from store B.

If you don't make enquiries, you may never find out that your student card entitles you to use a certain gym free of charge.

If you're a classroom-based, chalk-and-talk trainer who has never heard of e-learning, or learner-driven learning, or user generated content, or... okay, you get the idea... you'll just keep standing in front of the class, delivering your material to them in as engaging a way as you can, knowing full well that they'll have forgotten most of it by the time they find themselves in a situation in which they need to apply it.

Or maybe you won't.

Maybe you're one of those people who wonders if maybe, perhaps, possibly there isn't another way to do things. Maybe you're one of those people who experiments, who explores, who asks questions. Maybe you'll come to find out that there are other ways to skin this cat.

It seems to me that the essential ingredient is curiosity. And curiosity is not really the province of the contented. The serenely contented person has no interest in what lies behind the doors labelled 'what else?' and 'what if?' It is only the thirsty horse that will drink when led to water. In fact, the thirsty horse will set off to find water.

In my last job, my life was made miserable by a colleague who was utterly unable to conceal his antipathy for me. I'm sure there were many reasons he'd rather have had a slug dropped down his neck than spend time in my company, but the one on which he was the most outspoken was my curiosity. It drove him completely nuts. I thought I was showing interest in things (and people). He thought I was nosy.

The problem is, my nosiness has served me well. It has caused me always to wonder if there isn't another way to do things. It has led me to information that has caused me to re-examine existing practice.

I used to stand up in front of a group of delegates and work my way through the set material (even when I was the one who had set it). Then I wondered if there wasn't a way to make the material more relevant to the delegates, so I started using examples drawn from their daily lives to make my point.

I found that no matter how much the penny dropped in the classroom, it was often MIA when the delegates came to apply the principles. So I wondered if there wasn't anywhere to put examples so that delegates could refer back to them after the fact.

My boss refused to buy me an elearning authoring tool, so I wondered if I could cobble something together using clever tricks with PowerPoint and a cheap screen capture tool. I colluded with the helpdesk to make sure I covered the hottest FAQs.

We didn't have an LMS, so I wondered if I could put the thus-cobbled-together resources somewhere where people could find them, and I found the public folders of Outlook extremely useful!

I didn't enjoy having to plough through materials in a set order using back/next buttons like some kind of mindless sheep. So I wondered if there wasn't a way to make it possible for a user to plot his own route through a resource.

I was unfamiliar with the machinations of a certain application, but needed to include screen capture videos in a learning resource I was designing. I wondered how I might overcome this problem. Would I have to become expert in the application, or was there a more effective way?

These are just a few examples drawn from my own life. Situations in which dissatisfaction and curiosity have combined to send me down a new path.

I don't know what else I can have, but I certainly hope that my reluctance to accept the status quo will drive me to find out.

So to all the malcontents, who are subjected to a hail of criticism for being the squeaky wheel: hail fellow, well met!

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.

unbe-flipping-lievable!

Brain surgery while the patient plays the banjo. No, really!