Peer training inside organizations can be very effective

In one organization I was working with, there was a desire to improve overall coding skills. The guys had used some external training sessions, but as most often those were in such a general level, that those didn't give much value to the environment they were working in. We started to think about solutions for the problem.

Team had couple of people who were thought to be gurus, who could easily train the others, but as always, the gurus were also the busiest guys in the organization. Creating a proper training takes lot of time and effort. Anyone who have ever created tailored training sessions, know that it takes at least 5-10 times more time to create the training than keeping it. If the training is for 2 hours, you easily need 10 hours of work on creating it.

So the answer didn't lay on the gurus. We also did have a look for external tailored training, but there wasn't much of a budget prepared for this. And also, the external trainers are never as effective as internal ones. So we decided to try peer training. We decided that everyone in the team needs to keep one session to everyone. At that point, we came up with an idea of taking few valued books of the subject and divided chapters from the book to be the subject areas people had to make their training sessions.

In addition there was created a good template for the training. Template made people to explain the basic theory from the book and then it was made mandatory to bring examples from their own production code as a reference learning for the training.

Exercise was successful. Of course people were hesitant in the beginning, but the feedback after the sessions was good. One of the best ways to learn is to teach. When you have to teach others, you have to know the subject much better than you will ever learn from any training sessions.

This example was from actual coding, but in can easily be taken in to use in different professions. I believe the ability to take learning from a valued book and consider and show the examples from organizations daily life is really beneficial. Experienced external trainers are excellent in keeping the atmosphere and proofing points, but they rarely know enough about the daily life to actually be able to make a change to stick.

I have experience in doing tailored training sessions. I've kept close to 50 sessions during change projects inside companies. Even though I normally know quite much about the companies, the challenges people have and the practicalities, still I've seen that my teachings are much more effective when there is internal experts backing me up.

I highly recommend this practice to all teams. I can guarantee it works. It might work differently than you think, but it will definitely make people to learn and find ways to improve.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review - Mindset:The New Psychology of Success

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is a book about learning. It's a book about how people can learn their whole life when believing in learning and growth.

Book talks about two different kind of mindsets; the fixed mindset, which means believing that talent is given and born, and the growth mindset, believing that people can always learn to be better on everything. Book goes through examples and science behind it from many different views. It looks sports, business and arts. It introduces many good examples of people who are in growth mindset and some who are in fixed mindset.

Book goes through how this mindset difference affects on people's behavior in different challenges and daily routines. It also introduces reasons why people has grown in to either fixed or growth mindset.

Book has its own section for parents, coaches and teachers. I see parents to be most important ones. They can accidentally grow their children easily to fixed mindset with having good intentions to grow to be successful and open for learning. Giving credit for good grades for example can turn against the child, so that they are not taking challenges anymore in the future, since they become afraid of not being good at something. I actually believe this to be true, many of the people who got the best grades at school, haven't taken the challenge anymore at the work life.

I highly recommend this book to everyone who has kids, is a teacher or is a coach. There is lot of proof that genes don't mean everything and everyone really can learn. Also important is to understand that for learners, willingness to learn is more important than the immediate results and grades.

I really liked the book. It was entertaining with many good examples. I've read couple of books about the same subject from different perspectives , so the area starts to be familiar to me. Still I found some good new information from this book. It was entertaining.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Two types of people, people who like to do the things they are good at and then those who don't

Some time ago I heard a phrase that I have been thinking since. It claimed that there are two types of people, those who like to do what they are best at and those who want to do things that they are not good at yet.

So often people are encouraged to find the things they are good at and then keep on working on those skills. This has been seen the best way to succeed, learning a solid skill in something. That's so easy to agree and cope with.

I, on the other hand, have never liked to do things I'm good at. At least, not the very same things, I've already done couple of times. I've always been looking to do things I've never done before or stretch the tasks to whole new level. Then I really have something to learn.

It was relief when I heard presenter stating this phrase in one conference I attended. I finally got the impression that maybe I'm not alone with my thinking. Maybe for some it's natural to try out to handle these new tasks with skills learned from other tasks and not to enjoy using skills you are good at.

For example, I always like playing games with people who are better than me. I don't like losing, but I hate winning an opponent which wasn't really a good one. Same goes with everything, I rather fail couple of times, than succeed with too easy performance.

So don't worry if you don't want to do the things you are good at. I've got so far raising the bar or taking new challenges always when possible. Sometimes I've had to do the stuff I'm good at, but I really like most to do the things I've got lot to learn.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Learning from others

There's something to learn from everyone. Everyone have some skill or practice that they are good at and also some habit or practice that they could do much better. There's learnings in good and bad.

Learning is often in the beginning mimicking others. We first do as others do in same situations. Then some get to the next level on understanding why things are done as they are. For most of the things learning is always mimicking the behavior of others.

It's important not to be stuck with learning only from those who you admire. There's something in every person that should be learned. It's important to keep your senses open. Otherwise you lose many potential learnings.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Experience can't be counted in years

People always talk about experience with years. In job adverts the requirement for a job might be x years doing something specific. The same goes with articles and resumes, everyone is always talking about years of experience. Funny thing is, that years of experience, doesn't really tell anything about experience or expertise.

dictionary.reference.com

Experience is actually learning. Experience means, that someone have learned from what she has experienced doing something. So experience as such includes the actual learning. So it can't be counted in years.

I've seen many people who have history of working years in some area, but still they seem to lack some basic understanding on their area. Experience requires that when you encounter something, one learns from it. So one needs to know how to adapt previously learned experience to the new situation. One needs to know how that situation suits the overall environment in their experience area. This will help them for a better outcome from the situation.

What experience should not mean is that someone will do the things in the same way as they did the last time. That's actually the worst kind of experience there is. This is what I call stubborn experience. People who have used to do the things in, once a good way, does the things all the time the same way. That's not learning at all. That's an experience that should be avoided.

I know years is the only easily measurable unit of experience. It's easy to say that 5 years of experience is better than 1 year. That one most people can agree. But what if there is 3 years compared to 5 years. You can't really tell the difference in which is more competent, can you? Experience in years is not a good measure and no one should ever count on that only.

Don't be fooled or afraid of experience. If you are a recruiter, make sure that one has actually learned something from those years of working in area. If you are someone trying to get a job, make sure the other end understands that you have a learned knowledge in year working in that area. Maybe it would be better to say in CV that " I have x years of continuous learning in the area", instead of just stating that "I have x years of experience in that area".

Today is the best day to learn something new.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Positive disturbance

I've admired now for some weeks one of my new colleagues, who have turned the very basic disturbing phone call question around. He asks in phone calls, that "Is it a good moment for you?" I amongst many others tend to ask the question other way around, " is it a bad moment for you?" The intention with both questions is the same, finding out if other person wants to talk with you or not. Doing it in the first way may just make the moment to be more suitable.

I've known couple of other persons who have this capability to disturb without really disturbing. It's a good asset for person who needs to cooperate a lot with others. It's not only about how you place your words, but it's also about how you present your subject you were disturbing for in the first place. If you still, after disturbing, present your subject as if you would be sorry for disturbing, then the one disturbed can feel annoyed about disturbance. If you continue as if you were entitled for this disturbance because the importance of the subject, then it's less annoying.

Being positive and believing your subject has a positive effect on communication. People tend to be much more receptive and cooperative if you believe what you say is important and worth of the moment other gives to it. The saying: "Don't shoot the messenger" isn't always right. Poor messenger might not get the message through or make the message to be less important that it really is.

Everyone knows how to speak, good communication skills on the other hand is a luxury of a few. That's the reason I try to observe others and learn from their habits, in good and bad. It takes ages to learn to communicate with different audiences and with different technologies.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Forbidding email is not a solution*

There's been news flying around that some companies are abandoning email. Atos Origin for example is going so far that they are forbidding email totally according to Computer world. I've seen many similar news from other sources also, claiming that big bunch of emails are waste. I have to say I second that, majority of emails are waste. There's no question about that. What's worrying me, is the proposed solution to that problem.

In organizations, there's natural demand to communicate clearly to large groups. Often the sender of the message can't be sure whom all would benefit from the information in the message. This causes, that many of the emails have receivers who are not interested about the subject. This then starts to cumulate, when people in the mail chain start to answer and will not drop anyone out from the mail chain, due to they are not sure why the people was there in the first place. From both of these, there comes the waste.

Solution for the waste problem doesn't go away with new tools like social networks, intranet feeds, wiki's and instant messaging chats although the problem does change a bit with these tools. With these people need to themselves tune in to the forums they think are relevant for them. This will cause at the end that people are tuning in to all news sources they think might be relevant for them. This then will cause the same information overflow as with email quite soon. And at the end it might be, that people will use even more time with these new tools than used with traditional email for example.

Don't get me wrong, these new tools, IM, Social Networks, Wiki's and whatever are really essential for any company to communicate better. These just will never replace email. There is a need and place for all of these. Problem isn't in any of the tools, but with the people using those. With short and effective trainings, people would learn to use right tools for right communication. There are always subjects that go best with email or social networks and subjects that require more rapid feedback either face to face or with IM.

Also there's the second thing. Tools rarely work when forced. Tools which are irrelevant will die away when there are better ones available. Tools that add value, will find the way to be used. For example forbidding the use of email, will make people angry and frustrated. Offering better tools for communication and letting people to find the benefits themselves, will cut some of the email communication automatically.

The real problem with communication, isn't in any of the tools. Noise is the real problem, not email or any other tool. Learning to cope with noise is a skill that should be taught and learned in all organizations. It's a new skill in a history of mankind, but it's a really important skill for the knowledge workers of today. And noise isn't going away anytime soon, but it will keep increasing, because sharing information is getting easier all the time.

Solution to noise is always changing the behavior of the people, not changing the tools. Offering new tools and ways to use old tools can help with noise, but only if person understands and agrees that noise exists. In modern organizations everyone should learn to cope with noise and at some point also to reduce the noise they are making. And at the end, even noise isn't the real problem, it's the lack of skill to cope with it.

* Title was changed from "Don't blame email for the noise" to the current 1.12.2011

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Learning goes in mysterious ways

I have to tell you about my daughter. I'm amazed about how fast and well 3 year old can learn. I got some hints how it can happen from book The genius in all of us, but still it amazes me. Here's the full story.

Image from http://lekmer.se

So this is all about a game, bingo game to be exact. Rules go so, that there's own board for each player with 5 rows and 5 columns filled with 6 different looking Hello Kitty creatures in random order. On top of each column there's a letter B,I,N,G and O. Then there's 2 dices with one having the letters (B,I,N,G,O) and a joker and other dice have those 6 creatures.

My daughter, 3 years and 7 months currently, is unbelievably fast on checking from rolled dices, whether she has the item on her board or not. When the dices stop rolling, she immediately tells if she has the item on her board or not. Also she takes in to account if the item was filled in previous rounds. She's so fast, that almost every time, I can't believe she could have checked it already and I always check if she was just guessing. But she's never been wrong.

This got me thinking about learning. We've never ever tried to teach her to be fast on this. She has learned that only by playing. I have got to a conclusion that she must have some kind of map of the board in her head that she wouldn't need to look the board to know if it the item is there or not. There's about 10 different board from which we randomly take our own ones, so remembering by heart is somewhat difficult. I've tried tens of times in my head to beat her, to be faster, but I haven't been able. She must use some other technique than I am.

It's so amazing how human beings have such capability to learn to process things in surprising ways. I'm really sure I could have not taught this skill to her, since teaching anything to 3 year old is really hard. Still somehow she has been able to discover this way to process this much faster than anyone else I've seen her play with. I find it fascinating that even such a young person has this capacity in brains to learn to be such a good in something. It's not rocket science by any means, but still it requires special skill to do it. I believe that we all have these hidden capabilities in our brains that we might not ever really learn to take in to use.

Book I mentioned in the beginning, The genius in all of us, tells also about this. With right stimulus's and right circumstances almost everyone can learn special skills. You are not "born with" some skills, but you really can learn. I think that's essential to understand to be able to enjoy learning. It has been proven that young people learn faster, but it doesn't mean that older wouldn't learn at all. This at least gives me hope and happiness while I'm getting older and also seeing my daughter growing and learning new things.
 
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Giving an online training - thoughts on it's challenges

I'm not a full time trainer, but I've been keeping some trainings in different places. Recently I had to give my first training totally online, so that it was only me and my computer using screen sharing with participants. That training was the hardest I've kept so far. There's so many challenges with online trainings which I wasn't aware of. Here's my learning's:

Whole situation seemed really strange. I knew some of the guys online, but there was about half of them I didn't know. It felt absurd to talk alone in my room and try to get people to learn something. For me, it's so much easier to go in front of the crowd and adjust and collaborate with the crowd to get the message through. And by no means it's really easy for me to go in front of the crowd, but it's just so much harder to do it totally online without true connection to the people.

With online training there's almost no connection to the people you are talking to. You don't see their reactions, you can't read from gestures or body languages that are the guys understanding you or would they need some more explanation. Or in the worst case they might be totally bored and they would need something to wake them up.

Also with online communication,  people tend to mute their microphones and you don't even here the slightest sound of laughter, when you try to be funny or you don't hear the moment of silence when they are possibly processing about something controversial or surprising you said. It's just you, your slides and silence. It's truly scary.

You are left with your voice and slides. You can't use your body language and the space to move around, you normally have in face to face trainings. You have to try to use just your voice to get the message trough. It is really hard. I've worked whole my career with multicontinent projects and I'm really used for using online tools and telco's for communication. I still never would have guessed how hard keeping training with these tools is. All the credit for those guys who do this more regularly.

I want to highlight that keeping training is so much different than meetings and presentations via online tools. In meetings and presentations the topic is often better known, there's natural conversation, microphones are open much more and you can hear and feel more about what others are doing. So I'm only talking about the difficulty of online trainings, the other stuff is much easier.

With the experience of two online trainings I'm not a good expert to give any tips how to perform better in those, but here's what I will do differently next time:

• Setting the stage. I will try to get much more people to say something in very beginning. I'll try to get some expectations and knowledge about their competence in the area in question out before I start. That may help collaboration further during training.
• I'm going to change my slides to contain less information. Even with face to face trainings, people tend to be reading the slides when you are talking to them, I can just guess how much they are concentrating on slides when that's all they see. Maybe less data in the slides will help the people to focus on listening. This is just me guessing, but it's worth of trying still.
• I might be looking if there would be some way to get feedback during the training. Maybe vote buttons or some red, yellow, green lights for the users to be able to say when they've heard enough about subject or would like some more explanation. Even it might feel artificial, it could still give important feedback to me, to decide how to progress.

I guess it's obvious that I prefer face to face trainings and I guess everyone else does also. Sometimes still the subject is such small and focused that it's much more convenient to try to keep online training in 1-2 hours, than use many days or weeks to travel to keep face to face training. So I bet it wasn't my last training online.

I always like to try new stuff and learn new skills. This event was actually quite useful learning for me. I learned a lot about the teaching. I noticed many useful things when I was missing some important ways to communicate. From now I'm much more aware on those and I will try to concentrate on using those more wisely when I have the change.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Certificate of this and that

World is full of certificates. Everyone is offering a possibility to get certificate of this and that. These papers don't really count a thing. It doesn't prove that you really have learned something. It just says you have participated and in some cases you might had to even remember something if there was a test on the subject.

I have couple of certificates lying in my drawer, but I keep those safely there, that no one would ever really think I appreciate those. Still many of the courses I've got those certificates from have been valuable. There's been some excellent guys keeping those courses and I've really got the boost on start learning more on those subjects based on those ones. But I couldn't have said after any of those, that now I'm good because I'm certified for this and that .

I'm wondering why those certificates still exist? Are there people and companies who still appreciate those? Do some employers really check from resumes that this guy is certified for this and that, he or she must be good in this. And do some people still think that these certificates ads a value to their future possibilities.

from www.says-it.com

Maybe there are some things in work life that you need to be certified to do before you are allowed to do it. I would definitely want electrician or my doctor to be certified to do their job.The problem is that these are actually degrees, not certificates. Electrician and doctor needs to do hell of a lot of work before getting that diploma, but you can also get a certificate of something with only couple of days of training.

Even a degree doesn't prove that you are good, but you have had to go through at least quite many gating to get that degree. For certificates you need to maybe go through one loose gate. Often having a certificate works actually the opposite way. It tells that these guys are just the beginners because they appreciate the certificate and don't yet realize that real life is the one that counts.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Learning and school, how they connect

Learning is what makes us human. To be able to learn from others, books, tv or anywhere is the most important skill in the world. Learning is discussions with others. Learning is connecting learning's from different sources to one. Learning is about exploring the stuff that interests you to explore even more.

School is often about remembering. Remembering what was talked in the class or lecture, remembering what the books said and remembering what school project was all about. School is about proving that you remember.

Often learning and school are not going hand to hand. There are so many subjects students don't really care about but have to study anyway to get the grades. I'm not actually criticizing that, certain things in life are boring and just have to be done. You need to brush your teeth twice a day and the same way you need to get your grades to get in to the next challenge.

I just want to give an advice to all you students: don't let schools to kill your enthusiasm to learn. Being in a high school, college, university or what ever place, you have once in a life time opportunity to have time to learn. It can be something totally different that your school is about. It can be learning new languages, learning to play guitar, learning to create web pages or learning how people gets motivated. Just use the time you have to learn. You won't have this much time for it before you retire.

I'm speaking from experience. Already in university I lost my passion to learn stuff and after university it took many years to get it back. In university I just did what I had to do to graduate. Then at work, of course I got to know how to do my job, but I'm now talking about learning the extra stuff. Those things that no one is asking you to learn, but you want to learn because of your own interest and because it makes you better person.

Most probably none of students will take this advice seriously. I bet I wouldn't have taken. I used most of the extra time in school times to sports and partying. Everybody just needs to learn from their own mistakes. If I got even one person to think about this, it was worth it.

And if you're not a student anymore, I hope you have your inner desire to learn. You won't have the luxury to use all the time you want for learning. You just have to use your time wiser.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book I hope everyone reads: The genius in all of us

The Genius in All of Us was really a mind boggling experience. It challenges long list of believes on learning, personal capabilities and restrictions and impact of your heritage. Author David Shenk has unbelievably well explained these groundbreaking results of recent findings on genetics.

Idea behind the book is that genes don't affect as much as we commonly believe on our capabilities on doing or learning something. Common misconception is that somebody have "better genes" for that or "people have born with skill" to make something. That just isn't true. Environment, parents, childhood, food, the way our parent lived and especially what we do matter more than just pure genetics.

It's a controversial subject, but it comes with more than 150 pages or references and proof. I read things with open mind and heart, but of course when somebody comes and says that everything you've believed in genetics is not exactly true, it raises some doubts. David has prepared his subject really well with lots and lots of scientific and historical proof and there are lot of easily understandable examples.

I really loved this book. As a dad of two small daughter (9m and 3y) I also felt the responsibility to encourage them to learn and use full potential of themselves without anyone, not me or anyone else saying them that they couldn't do something. But it's not only for parents. This is for everyone who want find out why you shouldn't believe anyone saying that it's in their genes or they're born with it.

I know that after reading this book I'm a different person. This is one of the the books I will remember for a long long time.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

How learning, charity and new technology come together

I run into couple of inspiring services which combines learning and charity type of behavior. They are both taking advantages of Skype. First one is connection native language speakers in Latin America and Africa to people who want to learn French and Spanish and second one is connecting children in India to volunteers who want to help these kids to learn.

The idea behind Glovico is brilliant. Native speakers in countries where hourly wages are smaller than in many western countries can give private language learning lessons. Many in western countries couldn't afford over 40 Eurors (~55 dollars) hourly wages for private language lessons. With this service you can get 5-6 hours with that same amount. Maybe the teaching methods are not the same than in some western countries, but most important thing is that you can talk and chat with native speaking person.

Second service is Solesandsomes. It stands for Self Organizing Learning Environments & Self Organized Mediation Environments. SOLE part is about creating environment where kids can learn anything interesting around the web. SOME part is actually the one I see more inspiring. In that they are connecting volunteers around UK and elsewhere to read stories to children and being mentors for these kids. Original idea was grannies reading fairytales for kids, but it grew to be much more. People are actually helping these kids to learn about life and learning.

There are actually almost countless possibilities for each of us to learn more. There are open universities and lectures you can take for free in the web. For example check Khan Academy for maths learning or Academic Earth for University level education. And I bet there are more.

I think world is really going towards education that is free and available to those who really want to learn.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

You learn less when you are reading with E-reader than with real books

I've always been doubtful with E-Readers. I've tried couple and it's never felt as good as real ones. Now I found out one more reason to keep reading real books. Study revealed that reading with e-readers make you remember less than with normal books.

Here's an daily mail article about it and here's the actual study.

Actual study wasn't at all about e-Readers, but actually about fonts. Fonts that are harder to read like Comic Sans (that one is for all you Comic Sans haters!) and others make people to remember better the actual content of the text. Surprisingly it makes people to less confident that they have learned the content, but actually still people learn better.

It's amazing how our brains and mind works. When reading is harder and you are less confident about your learning, you have learned better. That's a good tip for all book creators. If you want people to remember your thoughts better, you might want to use some bit harder to read font.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

What do you remember from learnings few years back?

When I think about courses I've attended in work life or back in school, I always remember only one or two things for those from those, if even that. Same goes with business books, there's one or two punch lines you remember after few years and that's all. And I'm talking about time frame of years now, not months. When talking about certain processes or technologies which you practice every day this might not be true. For training sessions or books this applies at least for me.

This got me thinking, why trainers and writers don't emphasize this more. In the beginning they could say, here's the catch for this course or book, keep this in mind. Then over and over keep saying the same punch lines.

Maybe it's just hard to decide what are the small things you would like others to remember. All books and courses will of course offer lot more material to deepen the understanding on the subject, but normally there is this one catch. Somebody could perhaps make a study about this one. They could be asking people what they remember on specific book or course from years back.

Everyone who have read legendary Crossing the Chasm from Geoffrey Moore, what do you remember from it? I remember what the chasm meant and then I remember the technology adaptation curve (which I guess wasn't invented on this book). Also I remember there was lot of methodologies for "crossing the chasm", but I don't really remember any details on those. Still I would say Mr. Moore should be happy that I remember even that much. It's much more than other books I've read on that time (maybe 2003).

Of course everything you learn builds your consciousness on the world and different areas. And you can't really say if something was worth of reading or participating only by what you remember from that in couple of years. But still, I think it gives some hint.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen