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George Klett is a member of PwC’s US learning and development leadership team, where he co-leads U.S. firm learning production and curation efforts. He’s also a believer in rapid upskilling and serves as L&D’s digital accelerator champion.

George Klett

June 2019 - ATD Links

Unfortunately, many of us still struggle to articulate the case for curation in a way that is meaningful to our bosses and clients. Curation is inherently about speed to market and represents an opportunity for learning and development professionals

Your Business Needs a Learning Content Curation Strategy

Change management is one of the 23 capabilities in the Talent Development Capability Model and is part of the Impacting Organizational Capability domain.

Change Management Is a Vital Capability for TD Professionals

The article presents information related to the evolution of "Chief Learning Officer" (CLO). The term CLO was coined by Jack Welch for executive trainers. In the article, "A Place at the Top for Trainers," published in the March 1993 issue of the journal, George F. Kimmering wrote that although many organizations don't include a chief training officer (CTO), many workplace trainers are performing CTO-like functions within companies. He wrote that training professionals can take advantage of the opportunities that will come with the organizational learning. But they must be ready to build their skills as chief training officer candidates. In the February 2000 issue of the journal "Training and Development," Dede Bonner in the article "Enter the Chief Knowledge Officer," wrote that CLOs are the leaders of their organization's knowledge management and organizational learning initiatives. Most CLOs are first-generation incumbents, who started their jobs less than three years ago without clearly defined roles, responsibilities and daily activities.

The Rise of the CLO

Is there a point to Walter E. Elliott's "Parable of Mr. Big" (ASTD Journal for November 1958)? Is he warning us against inept, unethical psychologists? Is he alerting us to the presence of malad-justed managers?Here's how I'd paraphrase the par-able. I've

Letter To The Editor January 1959

Presents letters to the editor related to occupational training and development published in the September 1969 issue of 'Training and Development Journal.' Smuggled tape recorders of George S. Odiorne; Zelikoff's article providing quantification to the problem of engineering obsolescence.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR September 1969

In most cases there’s one thing keeping an entrepreneurial venture from making the turn from start-up to a sustainably growing and thriving enterprise: the entrepreneurial founder and leader. The most important contribution learning and development can add to making the turn successfully is getting the entrepreneur out of the way.I’m not saying out of the company, just out of the way of the other people trying to do their jobs. The entrepreneur hired people to do things he or she can’t do alone—to help him or her and the organization scale. The entrepreneur can still lead if he or she can lead differently.Case in pointInstitute B’s Darrell Kopke told me how Peekaboo Beans’ Traci Costa started her company. While Kopke has been on its board, the company has grown from $200K to $5MM in sales. But now Costa is stuck. Kopke says, “She’s becoming the bottleneck.” She has a set of lieutenants that are “supposed to take things off her plate.” But Costa has had a hard time letting go.Kopke is helping Costa make the turn by helping her understand and build three things:context is everythingculture of executiondashboard of salient KPIs.Context is everythingCosta must give her team a “clearly painted picture of the future,” says Kopke, who thinks the CEO of a sustainably growing and thriving enterprise must act as the Chief Why Officer—driving vision, mission, and values. In other words, the Chief Why Office is the “soul” of the organization.This neatly lines up with two important leadership questions:Where to play?What matters and why?Culture of executionCosta and her team must get clear on who does what by when. These need to be founded on the values, vision, and mission.This gives Costa a way to understand what’s happening while keeping her hands out of the day-to-day. Instead of meeting with everyone everyday, Costa is now meeting with her team on Monday to get clear on what’s going to happen and then again on Friday to understand what did happen.Dashboard of salient KPIsKopke makes the point that these KPIs must be more than just financial. They also need to include lead indicators. We heard this from East Coast Wings’ Sam Ballas, as well. He explained how most financial measures are retrospective. You need other measures to get ahead of the curve.This fits with the basics of scaling up a business:Destination planning: Begin with a vision of the value that can be created and what the enterprise must look like to create that value. Next, assess the current state with brutal honesty. Finally, build a plan to bridge the gap.Assemble the resources: Team, advisors, capital, and acquisitions to multiply value creation.Manage the implementation: Cultural change, execution, and your own transformation as a leader.Changing from entrepreneur to executiveThe change from entrepreneurial founder to enterprise executive is not easy.  As executives, founders need to get serious about the art of delegating and “work on the business, not in the business.” They must own the vision and values, build the team, and get out of the way.These leaders can make the change only if they want to make the change. Costa neither had to nor really wanted to make the change and give up control until she saw the organization stagnate, she ran out of time, and she wanted more freedom.Wanting to make the change is the first step, but just the first step. Kopke explains that “ingraining new habits of behavior happens in baby steps.” First Costa moved from ongoing involvement to daily meetings, then to two meetings a week. Eventually she’ll move to weekly meetings or less.Kopke points out the need to keep in mind that “there’s nothing logical about business.” He reminds Costa that all choices are emotional choices that get justified afterwards.Leading teams of different sizesHelp people lead differently as the team grows. What works with a start up team hurts a larger team. Get leaders out of the way when they are in the way and focus them on where they can add real value at the different stages.

L&D's Role in Scaling Up an Entrepreneurial Venture

As things change, training and development needs change—especially when you’re growing. The training and development that teams of less than 10 people need is different than the needs of teams of 10 to 30. Then, teams of more than 30 present additional challenges and opportunities.As teams grow, they need to focus on different components of the BRAVE leadership framework. The BRAVE approach helps leaders build their teams by uniting them around a shared purpose, and it reflects an acronym that stands for behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values and environment.Here’s a quick overview of what each letter means:Behaviors – The actions that make real lasting impact on others.Relationships – The heart of leadership. If you can’t connect, you can’t lead.Attitudes – Encompassing strategic, posture, and culture choices around how to win.Values – The bedrock of a high performing team. Get clear on what really matters and why.Environment – Setting the context for everything else by understanding where you are playing.In our new book First-Time Leader, we apply that framework to teams of different sizes.Smaller teams can adopt a start-up mindsetIf you are training and developing a small team (less than 10 people), it is best to lead with environment and values. Help members assess the competitive landscape to see how they’ll compete, and get clear on the values that will drive future decisions. You can build everything else over time.These teams should play where they can solve someone’s problem. Then help assemble an early team of complementary partners. Not everyone on the team needs to have strategic, operational and organizational strengths. But someone on the team should, and all must buy in to the same values.The key takeaway for developing small teams is to start by focusing on problem solving, values and creating momentum.Treat larger teams like an extended familyOnce the team grows beyond a nuclear family with everyone reporting to one leader, the nature of how the team works changes. At this point, attitude starts to become more important. Help these teams get their strategy set (deciding at what they are going to be best in the world), and use that to guide how to grow the team and which capabilities to add first.With teams of 10 to 30 people or so, the leaders know everyone and can treat them like extended family. Even so, this is the time to implement rudimentary people-management and operating practices.The lesson here is that as the team grows, emphasize differentiation and culture.When working with super large teams, hierarchy is your friendIf the team has more than 30 people, you need to get over your natural abhorrence of hierarchy and begin substituting some organizational and operating processes for the leader’s ability to know everyone on the team. With this size team, lead with relating and delegate appropriately.Work on the organization. Put in place enabling practices to scale, and remember the number 1 job of the leader is to own and reinforce vision and values. This gets ever more important (and complicated) as the organization grows.Next, when developing teams with more than 30 people work on the organization and enabling practices while reinforcing vision and values.Click here to request an executive summary of First-Time Leader.

Why You Must Train and Develop Different Things As Teams Grow

 Innovation and learning are inseparable. By definition, learning is acquiring the ability to do something new, and innovation is the creation and commercialization of something new and different. You can’t have one without the other. Innovative organizations are learning organizations. It’s that simple. In this post, I’ve compiled a relatively long list of brain principles that apply to memory and learning. There are many implications for individuals and teams seeking to accelerate their learning and to drive innovation. Subsequent to the brain principles, I’ve provided a list of suggestions for application of some of these principles. Memory is created when a group of neurons that were activated in an experience are conditioned to subsequently fire together. Remembering occurs when, at a later date, the same group of neurons fire together.Hebb’s Law, which can be stated as “neurons that fire together, wire together,” provides a biological basis for learning.Learning can be defined as internalizing the ability to do something new. The “something new” can be as simple as being able to declare that Madison is the capital of Wisconsin or as difficult as being able to play the Vivaldi violin concerto in G major.To view it simply, we can consider learning and memory to be two sides of the same coin. Learning is acquiring and encoding. Memory is retrieval. Learning is conditioning a group of neurons to simultaneously fire. Memory is having them fire after the initial learning.Memory can be categorized in at least three ways: a) whether or not it’s held consciously and can be articulated, b) the type of information stored, and c) the permanence of the memory.Explicit memory is conscious and something people can declare. We believe that we know what we know, but in fact, we are only aware of our explicit memory.We also have implicit memory, which is transparent to us. It’s what we know, without consciously knowing that we know it. Implicit memory can’t be articulated, but it reveals itself through unconscious bias and also through intuition. Unfortunately, not all of our biases and intuition are correct, and they can cause trouble for us.Our explicit memory is one of two types: episodic memory and semantic memory.Episodic memory is personal. It’s a record of our personal experiences that have been stored. For instance, you may remember how you felt and what you wore on your first day of school. The memory is about the particular experience.Semantic memory is impersonal. It’s a record of facts that we have stored. For instance, you may remember the address of the house you lived in when you were in first grade. The memory is not tied to a particular experience.Our implicit memory takes several forms. One example is kinesthetic memory, or muscle memory, such as knowing how to juggle or to throw a perfect spiral football pass or to ride a bike. You may be able to recall and even describe these things, but once learned, they can be done unconsciously, and most implicit memory occurs subconsciously. Implicit memory guides many of our habits and everyday behaviors.Memory also can be categorized by the permanence of the memory. Long-term memory endures for years or even a lifetime. If you still remember the name of your first grade teacher, you can be confident it’s in long-term memory.Memory that isn’t reinforced degrades and is lost, perhaps within minutes, but certainly over days and weeks. If you look at a class picture from first grade, it’s likely you don’t remember the names of all your classmates, but you did know them when you were six years old. If you had pulled out the picture and rehearsed the names periodically during your grade school years, the names would likely have been consolidated in long-term memory.There’s an element of short-term memory that serves as a mental scratch pad and allows us to hold symbols, patterns, and data long enough for it to be manipulated. When you memorize a phone number just long enough to dial and immediately forget it, you’re using working memory. If you multiply two two-digit numbers in your head, you’re relying on working memory.Unlike long-term memory, working memory is very limited and, for most people, degrades rapidly after five or six bits (or chunks) of information. The limits of working memory is often identified as “7 plus or minus 2,” a reference to findings of Princeton researcher George Miller in the 1950s.Neurological studies indicate that there’s a strong link between working memory and the ability to focus and learn. Working memory may even be a fair proxy for intelligence. Certainly, it is one of the most important enablers of problem solving.Chunking is a way to greatly increase short-term memory. Your brain does this naturally when you’re reading—right now you’re not interpreting each letter in each word. Your brain encodes each word, perhaps groups of words, as one chunk of information.Your ability to focus and pay close attention plays an important role in the encoding of information and enhancing memory.Organizing information so that it fits known and easily understood mental models enhances encoding and memory.Information is also easier to encode if it’s wrapped in context. Stories, for instance, can be valuable for providing context. The context is especially powerful if it’s personal, if you’re part of the story.Long-term memory is created by rehearsing—by practicing—with information that is in short-term memory. Spacing the practice is more effective at consolidating long-term memory. Cramming for a final exam might get you through the exam, but it’s less likely to lead to long-term memory than if you space your study out over the full semester.Information is easier to remember when it’s discovered and given meaning by the learner. You’re likely to better learn information that you discover and organize or repurpose than information that you simply read or hear through lecture.There is no research to support the view that individuals have preferred learning styles and learn better with one style than another, such as auditory learners, tactile learners, visual learners, and so forth. Learning is enhanced by practicing in the same way and under the same circumstances – the same context – in which the actual performance or retrieval will occur.The emotional content of memories largely determines how easily information will be encoded in long-term memory. Strong emotions stick to memories and help anchor them in long-term memory.The first step in creating a memory (and learning) is attention to a stimulus. Attention intensifies our experience and causes neurons associated with the experience to fire repeatedly. The sensory input is routed through the thalamus which manages the flow of input to other brain regions. The prefrontal cortex has executive control of our attention and plays a key role in focusing on the stimulus.Within a fraction of a second of receiving a sensory input, the amygdala assigns an emotional value to it and triggers an emotional response, which supports attention. Strong emotional content is associated with the stimulus and sticks with it as it is encoded in memory. Rehearsal is essential for information to be consolidated in long-term memory, but extremely emotional events will likely be encoded in long-term memory, even without rehearsal.Also within a fraction of a second, stimuli are registered in various cortical areas, primarily (but not exclusively) as follows: visual stimuli in the occipital cortex, auditory stimuli in the temporal lobe, and other body stimuli mostly in the somatosensory cortex on the anterior portion (toward the front) of the parietal cortex. Parts of the frontal lobe manage the flow of information for purposes of manipulating in working memory.The hippocampus is most responsible for the creation of long-term memory. It processes information that outlives working memory by repeatedly firing the cluster of neurons associated with the newly forming memory. This firing strengthens the connection so that, in the future, when one neuron fires, others in the network fire as well. Over time, the hippocampus replays the neural networks representing memories (or approximations of those networks) in various cortical areas where they are consolidated in long-term memory.Sleep appears to be critical to the process of consolidating long-term memories and also to “selective forgetting” that aids in prioritizing the memories that are consolidated long-term.Retrieval of a memory occurs when a cue, some stimulus, ignites the neural pattern that was formed with the memory was created. The effect is that we experience a simulated reliving of the original experience, but the memory is only a reasonable facsimile. Obviously, we don’t actually relive an experience—even when memories are very vivid, we still recognize that it occurred in the past the experience of the memory is different than the original event. Memories are only approximations of the original, and over time memories morph so that what we remember may bear little resemblance to the original, though we’re unable to distinguish between the two. Recommended ActionsDevelop discipline in focused practice and rehearsal. Memorization and rehearsal strengthens working memory and embeds content in long-term memory from where it can be accessed at will and instantaneously. Focus, discipline, attention, rehearsal are building blocks for learning.Reflect on lessons learned and practice verbalizing those lessons by speaking and writing about them in your own words.Be inventive in applying mnemonics to provide cues for retrieval.Organize content into chunks.Space your study, practice, and rehearsals.Visualize content. Create a mental picture that combines elements to be remembered and associates them visually.Attend to your physical condition. Regular exercise and adequate sleep aid memory and learning to a significant degree.

What Managers Should Know About Learning and Memory in the Brain

I have a classmate whom I admire greatly.  He’s a part of our sister cohort at BenU’s Springfield campus, and characteristically he’s almost my antithesis. Although we are very similar in personality type, he’s more planned, rigid, and uncompromising. Qualities that I certainly appreciate on one hand and loathe on the other. Why? Because I am more spontaneous, fluid, and … also uncompromising—but in a very different way. Every so often, we engage in critical debate over the structure of our program, content of class assignments, and other pressing issues in a PhD student’s world. Tonight, we dueled on the subject of dissertation topics.Now, our cohort is a few months ahead of Springfield’s. As a result, I like to think of myself as more of an expert than he is, and I take pleasure in “schooling” him from time to time. However, with his head-strong personality, we often find ourselves on the same playing field at opposite ends of the spectrum. We both entered the program having a good idea of the area that we were most interested in studying. I was resolute on researching high-performance Millennials in the post normal workplace, while he thought to do something oriented more in the HR realm. We thought we had secured our paths, but as we learned more in class, we found that our interests began to broaden.Recently, we both altered our dissertation topics, and he shared with me “BY GEORGE and GREAT SCOTT, I HAVE IT.” I was extremely excited about his change in direction, and I do believe that he has an amazing topic. He also supported me in my alteration as I began to focus on life stage instead of generation to broaden my audience. However, as we began to dissect and question one another’s area of study, I quickly learned that he felt he’d found the topic he’d be sticking with for the next 3 years. To this revelation, I scoffed and shared… “You haven’t even scratched the surface of our field. You can’t possibly be sold already.”I went on to share that my approach was all about letting it come to me. To this revelation, he probably re-pictured me as a flower-loving, tree-hugging, tye dye-wearing hippie OD professional. And, I can see why. But I feel that by allowing myself to absorb information as it comes to me, I have a better opportunity to choose the most relevant topic and research.As we ended our phone call (so that he could enjoy dinner with his girlfriend), I thought to myself, “Is it really either/or?” As I pen this blog post, I believe the answer is really both. While slow and steady may win some races and fast and bumpy may win others, discovering your PhD dissertation topic requires absorption of as much material as possible—but in a limited period of time to ensure decisive work that leaves time to conduct research. After reflecting, I believe that by melding our perspectives together, we will find balance as we soon embark upon our second year of study.From a practitioner’s viewpoint, the lesson in this post is for you to seek win-win situations when working with co-workers and managing up with supervisors. From a scholar’s perspective, your task is to ingest information until you’re 85 percent full and be satisfied enough to make the next jump into your research.

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