Earlier this month (March 17, to be exact), there was aninteresting article by John Boudreau in the HarvardBusiness Review: “Work in the Future Will Fall into These 4 Categories.” Boudreau argues that fiveforces are shaping the future nature of “work” today. In this article, I am going to very brieflysummarize the impact of these, introduce some concepts of the types oflearning, and suggest how this combination presents a significant challenge tous in the learning field.
Four types of work
Depending on the degree to which three of these five forces(changing social and organizational arrangements, demographics within yourorganization, and the effects of always-connected technology) have “democratized”your workplace, and the degree to which the other two (technology andautomation) are impacting the work ecosystem, Boudreau sees work as resolvinginto four different types. These range from what we might think of astraditional full-time employment, with familiar variations including part-time,contract and flexible arrangements, to project- and contract-based structures.Within each type, there will be additional differentiation driven by the levelof technological empowerment present.
I recommend taking the time to read the article (it’s short,and there’s an excellent summary graphic). It does seem to me that work rightnow, today, falls into thosecategories. As novelist William Gibson has said, the future is already here; it’sjust not evenly distributed. In fact, all four types of work could conceivablyexist within different divisions or business units across an enterprise.
This is important to those of us in the learning businessbecause these forces and these variations in the structure of work and theworkplace have everything to do with how we do our work in Learning and Development (L&D)—indeed, with thenature of that work. In the stable, traditional organization, it is easy tosimply go ahead with more traditional formal “training” activity and toanticipate that everyday “workplace” learning will take care of what the formaldoes not cover. But as workplace democratization and technological empowermentincrease, they will disrupt old ways of dealing with learning and developmentneeds more and more.
Types of learning
Why is this important? There are several reasons to beconcerned about disruption in addition to the obvious ones. For example, it’salready challenging for employees today to keep up with the learning that theyabsolutely must do in order to do their jobs (“We Are Losing the Race Between Learning and Technology: What to Do About It,” Learning Solutions Magazine, January 18,2016). How much worse will this get in those cases that Boudreau, in that HBRarticle, describes as “uber empowered,” when “an accelerated cycle oftechnology advancement and more democratic work arrangements fuel one another”?
One element that we in L&D will have to incorporate intoour thinking is the types of learning. Not learning styles—learning types.These involve skills that employees, from maintenance and production toprofessionals to executives, will need to develop in order to function inenvironments that are turbocharged, reimagined, and uber-empowered. Dealingwith these environments, and with change, takes three types of learning at boththe individual and organizational levels.
The first two types were characterized by the psychologistChris Argyris and the philosopher Donald Schön as single-loop and double-loop learning. In their work together, they identified twoconditions under which learning takes place. One of these happens when anorganization achieves what it intended—the outcome matches the plan. The othercondition occurs when a mismatch between intention and outcome is identifiedand corrected.
Single-loop learning takes place when a person or anorganization creates a match between intent and outcome, or when a personchanges an action in order to correct a mismatch. In other words, someone asks,“Are we doing this right?” Double-loop learning happens when the assumptionsthat led to the intention and the action are challenged and the action changedso that the outcome is correct. In this case, the question is, “Are we doingthe right thing?”
The third type of learning is sometimes called “triple-loop learning”or “deutero-learning,”first articulated by anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In triple-loop learning,which is transformative, the question is, “How do we know the right thing todo?” This involves questioning and changing of values, norms, and socialstructures underlying or governing problem-framing, goals, assumptions, andaction. Triple-loop learning is “learning about learning.”
