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Dave Beck

While the advantages of VR training may seem obvious, your program objectives must be tied to organizational goals to demonstrate value and prove its ability to deliver ROI.

Measuring VR Training Success

“Being physically near one another does not make a group a team, nor does reporting to the same supervisor. What makes a team is task or emotional interdependence.” —Edgar H. ScheinOn January 26, the organization development profession experienced the loss of Edgar H. Schein at the age of 94.Schein, a well-established researcher and consultant on organizational learning, culture, and development, process consultation, and career dynamics, had a profound impact on so many during his illustrious career as an author, professor emeritus at MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-founder of the Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute with son Peter Schein. Tributes on LinkedIn honored Schein as one of the greatest minds in organizational culture, a giant of OD, and a pioneer in organizational culture and leadership.During his career, Schein consulted for major corporations such as Apple, General Foods, and Citibank. He authored more than 20 papers and books, including Career Dynamics (1978); Career Anchors (1986); Process Consultation: Its Role in Organization Development (1988); The Corporate Culture Survival Guide (1999); Process Consultation Revisited (1999); DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation (2004); Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help (2011); Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster (2016); and Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust (2018).“Edgar Schein played a major role in founding and advancing five different fields of knowledge and practice: organizational psychology, organization development, organizational culture, group process consultation, and career development,” wrote Steve Piersanti, founder of Berrett-Koehler Publishers and senior editor. “Few people have approached the scope of contribution that Edgar Schein had to our understanding of organizations and people’s behavior and development in social systems.”The Association for Talent Development honored Schein with its 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award in Learning and Performance. Described by ATD as “one of the founders of organizational psychology and a pioneer in the study of organizational cultures,” the award was bestowed to Schein for his work in organization development, process consultation, and career management and development.“Schein was instrumental in giving a voice to the field of organizational development as it was emerging,” according to the commendation presented at the time. “He, along with Richard Beckhard and Warren Bennis, saw the need to capture the thinking of the rapidly growing new field.” Schein co-authored, with Beckhard and Bennis, the Addison-Wesley Series on Organization Development, a box set that included Schein’s classic Process Consultation book.Many in the industry echoed similar sentiments.“As a profession, we are blessed with idea icons whose insights shape our world today. Ed Schein was one of the best. His idea legacy will endure for generations to come,” said Dave Ulrich, a university professor, author, speaker, management coach, and management consultant.Elaine Biech, president of ebb associates, remembered, “Although Career Anchors may be the underlying product that brought him the most recognition, his eyes always lit up when he was talking about organizational culture within OD.”Biech invited Schein to write a chapter, based on his book Humble Consulting, for an upcoming ATD consultant’s handbook that Biech is spearheading. “He and I were in the process (with the help of Berrett-Koehler) of clarifying exactly what would be in the book. In fact, we corresponded the evening before his death,” Biech explained. “He was excited to tell me that the fifth edition of Career Anchors was coming out at the end of March. That so epitomizes the Dr. Ed Schein I knew … contributing to the profession until his last breath.”

In Memoriam: Edgar H. Schein

I'm sure many of you will have come across Elgg before. For those that haven't, Elgg is an open-source engine that allows you to create your own Social Network. Founded in 2004 by Dave Tosh and Ben Werdmuller, Elgg was often pitched as a Social Network for education - perhaps the first foray into the world of 'online' Social Learning, some time before the phrase entered popular parlance.Dave Tosh has since moved to pastures new (as has Werdmuller) but I thought it would be interesting to touch base with Dave to talk about those early days before Social Learning became the phrase du jour...Ben Betts: When you were in the process of creating Elgg, did the phrase 'social learning' crop up or was it yet to emerge as a theme in education?Dave Tosh: I can't remember anyone talking about social learning back in 2004 when Elgg started. Blogging was just beginning to come on the radar, which did introduce some 'social' aspects but it was not referred to as social learning.BB: Which segments of the marketplace were quickest to adopt Elgg when you launched?DT: Education was the first group to experiment with Elgg, however, it was when things moved out of the Edu arena that groups became willing to pay for customisation which was the business model and ultimately dictated the future path.BB: In persuading your early adopters was there much focus on the command and control mechanisms within Elgg? Were people scared of how users might abuse a social system?DT: This was one of the major stumbling blocks when people tried Elgg. It was very deliberate that there were no roles and permissions. A student was on the same level as an educator as we tried to create a space where the individual (regardless of position) could control who to collaborate with and who got access to their content. This caused confusion and it was a constant battle to get people to try and forget (for the purpose of a trial) about the top-down, course centric, constraints imposed by the LMS platforms of the time in order to experiment with a platform that was bottom up, user controlled, and experience centric.There were other concerns raised when we visited the US around kids using the privacy options to plan attacks on the school and the school then being accountable due to provided them with the online platform for this.BB: In your opinion, is Social Learning a fad, a passing trend, or a sea change in the way we learn online?DT: I don't know enough about 'social learning' to comment. For me personally, learning is not a solitary pursuit. I feel the informal aspect of the learning process plays a crucial role in moving from the retention of fact to a real/deep understanding. This is something Elgg tried to address: it was not about access to course notes or course work submission but instead capturing and fostering the reflection that many students and researchers do in the cafe or pub after lectures as this was often, at least for me, when the grounding of understanding happened; in those informal discussions.BB: If you could have kept just one feature in Elgg for social networking, what would it have been?DT: This is a tough question as different components were important to different people. Some liked the group blogging component, others the fine-grain access controls - it was dependant on context. I guess if I had to choose, I would have kept, and focused more on, the aggregation side of things to make it easier for people to use their own tools but still participate in the community.BB: You open-sourced Elgg; was this a commercial or idealistic decision?DT: Elgg started out as a simple proof-of-concept - there was no business/commercial thinking involved at that time - so the decision to go open source was based on encouraging others to help build out the concept.BB: Finally, do you have any tips for how to engage and grow an online social learning community?DT: I am not sure about a social learning community. Regarding online communities in general, I would never underestimate the importance of having an engaged community; the community is everything. This is one of the biggest lessons I learnt during my Elgg days.About Dave:Dave Tosh is passionate about technology, in particular the web, and its potential for creating new learning opportunities for us all. Dave co-founded Elgg and is now to be found experimenting on a couple of ideas around information accuracy.