Learning Leaders: An Interview with Jane Bozarth

The eLearning Guild named Dr. Jane Bozarth a Guild Master atDevLearn 2013. In presenting the award to Dr. Bozarth, Guild co-founder and CEODavid Holcombe said, “Jane, over thelast four years, has written many articles for Learning SolutionsMagazine, delivered dozens of sessions at our conferences (both onlineand face-to-face events), and contributed to our research reports. Hercontributions go beyond what she’s done for the eLearning Guild, tocontributions for the entire industry. She has written more than a half-dozenbooks that we all buy and read and learn from. She speaks at many otherconferences and shares her ideas through many channels. She is anabsolute social media maven, allday, every day, sharing ideas on social media so other people can learn andgrow and prosper in this field.”

I interviewed Jane on April 8, 2016, about her favoritetopics for articles and presentations, and her thoughts on a couple of thequestions that Guild members often ask.

Bill Brandon (BB): Jane, since 2010,you’ve written 77 articles for LearningSolutions Magazine and you’ve delivered dozens of conference sessions. Whattopic stands out as the one you most enjoy addressing?

Jane Bozarth (JB): I have twoanswers to that, with regard to the column and to conference presentations. It’snot so much a particular single topic—it is more when I hit on something that Irealize will be genuinely useful, particularly to the newer practitioners.

There are an awful lot of people in thisbusiness who came to it through informal means, through a back door, through aside door, through getting recruited. You don’t see that happening with lawyersand accountants. [Laughs.]

So when I hit on something that I realizewill be really helpful, that’s going to help somebody improve their practice, andthat they really probably didn’t get from anybody else, I find that just delightful.And we see that spark hit with the column pretty often—not every time, but alot of times. I get, you know, “light bulb” responses to that. It’s funny,though: The responses are usually in the form of tweets back to me, not so muchin the comments below the column.

Often I would say that my favoritetopics may be about design, but sometimes it’s how you can enact your workbetter. It’s how you can have conversations with management that get listenedto. It’s how you can find new resources, or where there’s research or authors thatcan help you articulate what you’re trying to do, or can help you explain why acourse of action isn’t the right one andwhy we don’t want to have dancing cats on every screen “because it’s engaging.”

I do really enjoy talking about thepossibilities of social learning and the possibilities of seeing learning anddevelopment evolve into more of a partner and facilitator. Because I’ve beenwith government my whole career, I have spent an awful lot of time in thecompliance trench and the mandatory training trench. I just think that when Ihave opportunities to facilitate conversations that are already happening, thatwe can support people who are figuring it out as they go, that we can extendour reach beyond what might have been traditional means. I find that kind of topicvery exciting. The social stuff has more potential. Sometimes audiences want me to say, “Open the PowerPointslide and insert this thing and you’ll have a fabulous interaction slide,” but that’s not really the best.

BB: Is there somethingthat you think nobody is addressing but that someone ought to be?

JB: I think what we’renot addressing is the situation that I started off with: that we have an awful lot of people in this business who have come to this through very informal means, or non-structured means. While I don’t think everyone needs to go off and get a doctorate in this business, I worry now, especially since we’re developing things with such large scale, that we are not developing or vettingpractitioners very well.

Anybody who wanders into this business can set up a blog, and suddenly, they’re regarded as an expert. Peopletend to take that too much at face value. WhileI don’t think what we do is rocketscience most of the time, I do think thatbad advice can do harm. It can make a performer’s life harder, it can hurt jobperformance, or it could create a problemfor the practitioner, maybe get them fired. We need to make sure we are seeing them through to the end of the road.

I worry sometimes in this business, and this is especiallytrue with eLearning, that we have a lotof people designing instruction now whoare never actually, physically near theirlearners. I work in a building withclassroom trainers, and training is goingon around me. There are real humanscoming to take these classes. Even thoughmy work is primarily online, my locationgives me the sense of the human beings atthe other end of the rope. I worry sometimesthat a lot of the folks who are designinginstruction have lost sight of the humanat the end. There is a real performer anda real system out there.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if their stress isn’t managed tomorrow. Maybe itdoesn’t matter if they don’t delegate somethingwell per some leadership course. But it does matter if they don’t disclose a performanceproblem correctly, or they don’t alertmanagement to a harassment issue whenthey should, or they don’t know how to usethe brake on the forklift. I don’t knowthat we always recognize (for all our loftytalk about performance support) that thereis a real human at the other end of ourinstruction—and the performance can have repercussions,either for someone else or for that performeror for the organization. The “brain tumor”piece I wrote [Nuts and Bolts: Performance Matters, or, Guy Walks into a Brain-tumor Clinic] waslargely meant to reflect that—it’s not just one guy taking a course, it’s a whole lot of people, a whole lotof actors, and a system, all of whom are takingdifferent courses and have to come togetherat that one moment and not kill this guy.

BB:What should we call the profession we’re in today? Is it still “learning anddevelopment”? Is it changing to something else?

JB:What we do is about learning everywhere. I don’t know that we need a new name for learning and development. I think we need to define ourselves differently and it needs to be more than lip service. We went through a phase a while back where we were “performance consultants,” and what that meant was, we would have meetings and then tell people what class they needed. [Laughs.] We didn’t really change what we were doing. Now we’d like to think that we are “performance support,” that we are “knowledge management facilitators.” I was in a chatonline yesterday, and someone used a phraselike “knowledge connector.” I would like to see learning and developmentdepartments move more towards enabling and connecting than teaching anddirecting. Whether that means we get a new name, I don’t know.

Now, it is true thatthere are a lot of organizations that don’t have a “learning and development”department. You know, your local coffee shop doesn’t have one. The local guywho owns a storage facility that also does UPS shipping probably doesn’t haveone. It’s when an organization gets to beof a certain size that somebody says, “Oh,we need to get all the new hires togetherand talk to them about their insurance.” Suddenly, L&D emerges from the mist. I don’t think anybody gets up in the morning and says, “Gee, I want to start a business and we have to have a training department.” I don’t think that’s how it happens.

I think we could, in fact, change theparadigm, but there is a need for orientation, and there is compliance stuff. You’ve got truck drivers and you’ve got people operating equipment. When it’s not just your wife and your kids helping you, suddenly you do have workers’ comp issues and you do have safety considerations. It seems like we could look at the roots of that and change it at the root rather than worry about what to call the specialistswho know how to teach employees about these things.

Iwould like to see the trainingdepartment mature beyond “we gotta have complianceand we gotta hurry up.” I would like tosee that paradigm shift begin. I really think we could do that. At the same time, I think it is unrealistic tothink that management is going to let goof the idea of having a training department.I work in HR, and I will promise you, aslong as management—the people who hireand pay L&D—as long as managementthinks learning looks like school, it’s not really going to change very much. They think that it’s like college. They think that people come to a room and they sit in chairs and they are talked to for hours on end andthen they have learned. That will have tochange before the paradigm shifts much. I also think it’s unrealistic to believethat we’re headed to a world where all these ultra-competent employees aregoing to sit around helping each other figure out the health plan. I don’treally see L&D going away entirely,especially in sizable organizations, no matter what the name gets changed to.

There’ssomething else that we need to pay attention to, and that’s the value of thehuman connection. I saw something change 10 years ago, a big change. I was a classroom trainer then. When we started seeing the learning management system [LMS] and the reports andmetrics associated with it, all of a sudden,I heard a bunch of trainers start talkingabout needing to get credit for everything.“We need credit for this,” and “I trainedthis many hours and I trained this manypeople.” We always had a little of that, but it got exponentially worse when the software arrived. Now, when you say you need to help people facilitate conversations, it’s, “How will we track that, how will we record that, how will we document that?” If I say you need to find out where the conversations are happening, you need to help organizations help connect talent, to help people find each other, it’s, “Well, howdo l get credit for that, how do we track that?” It’s putting the cart before the horse. Ihave seen this emerge, and get much, muchworse, in the last decade.

BB:How can a practitioner or a manager in this profession remain relevant in theface of constant change?

JB:I think that people need to be explorers. They need to be willing, especially in our business, to try new technology. The best way to stay relevant that way is to belong to groups. I belong to any number of conversations, for instance, that involve Chad Udell—partly because we see each other constantly, partly because we’re in Twitter conversations and I just see him around in the online community.

I don’tsee Chad in person very often, but people like Chad are talking about new stuff, emerging stuff. Tools I’ve never heard of, apps that they’re building. You need to put yourself in the path of those conversations. Younever know what’s going to be next orwhat’s going to emerge. Find people in whatever social channels you like, whatever proximity you have to them. You need to be in their path. Magazines of course are great, but you need to read beyond your own scope. John Seely Brown calls it “expanding your surface area.” You need to read,not just CLO magazine, TD, or whatever you happen to subscribe to—read beyond.lf you’re interested in social stuff, youneed to be reading some sociology, youneed to be doing some organizational psychology,reading beyond just the walls of L&D.

Giventhe way the future is looking, you would be well advised to read up on artificial intelligence, on automation of jobs and what’s going to be left after all those jobs are automated, and what our workforce is going to look like in 10 yearsor 20 years! Some of the jobs we’re trainingpeople for, we just aren’t going to needthose jobs anymore. What are we going tobe doing? Mostly, you should be keeping your mind open to new conversations. Keep an ear to the ground; don’t letyourself get so dug in to your own littlesilo. Be willing to experiment. Be willing to fail. People say they are overwhelmed bywhat is “out there.” I say, pick somethings that are of interest to you, and keepan eye out for where those things aregoing to go.

BB:Jane, thanks for sharing your thoughts on these important topics!