North Pole Knowledge Transfer Goes LEAN!

Dear Maverick Pals,

Santa here. Todd is busy with year-end things and asked me to write this post for him. Normally, I’d say “are you kidding?” but things are running so smoothly at the North Pole I actually have some free time.

Why is it going so well? It’s simple. This year we retooled how we transfer and share knowledge and expertise.

Back in the days of wooden trains and dolls, it was easy. The elves hammered away and hummed their elf song, the reindeer pulled the sleigh and Mrs. Claus baked cookies.

Today, we’ve got Chinese suppliers sending us XBox chipsets. The new crop of Gen Y elves are making even the Bumble scratch his head. Mrs. Claus spent so much time trying to manage all the emails flying around that the cookies burned.

And to top things off, the reindeer were badgering me to turbo-charge the sleigh. “Pimp your ride” were Dasher’s exact words, and things almost came to blows until Mrs. Claus realized he was saying “ride” not “wife.”

Everything was getting so complicated, I hauled everyone into a classroom and tried to get a whole lot of teaching done. You can imagine how that went. Three weeks later, no one could remember the difference between a gift box and a soldering iron.

Finally, in desperation, I called Todd and his posse of Mavericks, and oh Donner what a difference!

They showed us how to implement LEAN Knowledge Transfer:

• We discovered that Elves are readers. So we put all our instructions online, made them searchable and rated them with DIGG technology. Now, the Gen Y newbies easily find the exact information they need right away.
• Since Mrs. Claus loves her laptop even more than kids love sitting on my lap, we had her set up Ning social networking sites where our suppliers, elves, and reindeer can all share what they know.
• We've got the reindeer training for hairpin turns on a virtual reality simulation. You should see them fly now. WOW!
• The Mavs even got me using mentoring techniques with the kids. When little Johnnie told me he wanted the Wii, I knew to repeat this back to him and good thing, too! I thought he was saying he had to "wee"; I almost jumped up and threw him off my lap.

LEAN Knowledge Transfer is great. We’ve saved tons of classroom training money and are getting so much done that I’m planning to take Mrs. Claus to the Cayman Islands for a quick 'test flight' right before Christmas. (If they have Wi-Fi, that is.)

Check out LEAN Knowledge Transfer and see what it can do for your own organization.

Happy holidays! And as Todd always says, “Let’s Ride!” (I prefer "On Dasher! On Dancer!...")

Santa, 
Chairman and CEO
North Pole Global Enterprises, Inc.

A Pound of Training Please

Tamara Greenleaf, our VP Marketing, came into the office today exclaiming "You won't believe the on-boarding nightmare that happened at the grocery store yesterday!"

She went to the deli counter where the manager took her order for a half-pound of sliced turkey, turned to an obvious new employee and proceeded to explain how to process it, in lengthy detail. When the manager turned back to her, she started to give him her next order. He put up a hand, stopped her in mid-sentence and said: "I'm training a new employee. I need for you to give your order to him directly." Not 'Do you have time to help me train a new employee?', but 'Tough luck. You're today's guinea pig.'

Tamara and the manager then stood there and waited. And waited some more, while Newbie struggled with the slicer, the scale and the wrapping paper. By the time Newbie handed it to her, with a very nice smile, she was so annoyed she said "Nothing else, thank you." So the Newbie got trained, but the store lost about $15 worth of additional business in the process.

Is this store insane? During these tougher economic times customers are watching every dollar and easily influenced NOT to spend. You can't let training get in the way of good customer service and potential sales. And you don't have to.

Before your trainees hit the floor, make sure they have the basic skills necessary. Role playing and having them walk you through different scenarios are effective ways to test their knowledge and have them practice before directly engaging with customers. And for goodness sakes, you must intervene when your Newbie is struggling and the customer is bearing the brunt.

Have similar stories to this one? Send it to me, I'll post it on-line, and we'll gnash our teeth and have a good laugh together.

Power Tool or Cool Toy?

As the creator of LEAN knowledge transfer, and as someone who helps companies decide what new learning technologies to adopt, I have a simple litmus test whenever someone shows me the latest and greatest training technology: Do the money, time and resources required actually deliver significant measurable improvements in business performance?

In short, is it a power tool? Or a cool toy?

Last night I went to a SUN Microsystems event where they rolled out their Darkstar and Wonderland products for creating virtual worlds for gaming and training. One of the reasons SUN developed this technology was to facilitate collaboration among their highly-distributed workforce. Did you know that more than 50% of SUN’s employees work from home? Wow.

Productive collaboration between far-flung employees, tech partners and customers is a huge challenge today. And it’s great to see companies like SUN creating new technologies for doing this. At the event, I saw a lot of enthusiastic people, great eye candy and (although I’m no expert) a sound underlying technology. Darkstar and Wonderland should definitely be on your short list of products to consider, especially since they’re open source!

But they haven’t quite convinced me that VR is a viable knowledge transfer tool for the majority of companies and situations. Why not? Because the benefits don’t yet justify the considerable development costs. Does collaboration in a virtual world deliver significantly better results than a simple, inexpensive video conference using desktop sharing? Don’t know as no results were presented.

And the vast majority of development costs (like 90% in some cases) goes into creating the virtual walls, windows with views, furniture, plants and avatars. Not necessarily creating situations and interactions that help people master content which translates into better business performance.

As an aside, I feel compelled to say emphatically “STOP creating virtual worlds that just mirror the same old institutions we have now!” We’re bored as hell sitting in real classrooms. Why would we be any less bored sitting in a virtual one that has the same desks, white boards, etc.?

Now let me be clear. I’m not anti-VR. I like flying around in Second Life as much as the next guy. And simulations CAN be powerful training tools. I've seen excellent ones in the mining industry, where truck drivers can learn to handle a fully-loaded 300-ton haul truck down a rainy slope at night in total safety. The simulator is a truck cab with big flat screen displays and the program mimics the physics of the truck and environment. You feel like you're driving a truck and, when you get in a real one for the first time, you've partially developed muscle memory. Amazing! The payback is huge from an capital equipment utilization, productivity and safety point of view. The benefits clearly outweigh the development costs.

VR creation costs are falling fast with open source technologies, better development tools and outsourcing. So, we’re going to see more and more VR applications with impressive graphics and abilities. Sales training. Leadership training. Safety training. Remember the bottom line is “Power tool or cool toy? Do the money, time and resources required actually deliver significant measurable improvements in business performance over less complex methods like mentoring and social media?” Ask for, no, DEMAND data.

A Great Thanksgiving Email

A recent email I received (lightly edited to protect the innocent)...

Todd, you've ruined me. I just sat through a class and all I could think about (thanks to you!) was how totally ineffective it was.

The PowerPoint slides were worthless. The information could have been covered in less than 5 minutes, but really wasn't worth covering at all. An e-learning session would've at least been consistent throughout the organization. And I could've quickly clicked through the slides at my own speed.

I think of all the other poor co-workers who will have to go through this and come out with nothing to show for it, but a checked box in some training database. We are currently behind in our staffing needs and we can't onboard people fast enough because of our inadequate training program. I now know why you decided to focus on improving knowledge transfer; it can have a huge impact on an organization.

Hey, this as a huge success (even though the sender is clearly frustrated). When people start to look critically at knowledge transfer at their organizations, they'll see all the waste and inefficiency. Then, we can start to turn the 'training ship' in the right direction. Or sink it and build a new one.