Quinnsights: Working Smarter

Have you ever heard or been told that you should be workingsmarter? Working smarter is a commonphrase, but it is often undefined. Just what does it mean?

Working smarter is a new interpretation of eLearning that’sbigger than just courses on the web or a phone. And it’s key to a strategicfocus for learning executives.

It’s clear that the world is changing, and practices of thepast will no longer suffice. Organizations need to be more agile,adapting faster. This means that it’s not only about the things you know how todo—and doing them—but also about doing new things. Smart things. So how do weget there?

There are two basic situations: when we’re doing what weknow we need to do, and when we need to deal with a new situation. For theformer, it’s about doing the best preparation possible, and that includes thebest learning design and the appropriate use of tools to augment our thinking.For the latter, when troubleshooting, problem-solving, designing, and more, wemay not know the answer when we start. So, besides performing optimally, theother half is continuously learning.

Several ideas here are key. Research on cognitive science(the field investigating how we think and learn) points to several frameworksthat give us leverage. We need to look at findings in situated cognition,distributed cognition, and social cognition. These elements align to help usunderstand not only how to work smarter, but also how to help others do so.

Situated cognition is the result of looking at our behavior and recognizing thatwhat is observed is not what we thought. The formal logical reasoning we usedto believe characterized our thinking isn’t what empirical investigation hasdocumented. Instead, we tend to be very biased by the current context. We alsohave systematic flaws in our thinking. Thus, it becomes very important not onlyto prepare in ways that will transfer across contexts, but also to providesupport to help maintain focus on the important elements.

Given that our mental architecture has systematic flaws, theopportunity to use analog or digital tools to overcome them is important. And distributed cognition kicks in here. Distributed cognition recognizes that our thinkingisn’t just in our heads, but is also distributed across our tools andrepresentations. We use representations like spreadsheets and diagrams tocapture our thinking as we negotiate it. We share these representations andprovide feedback, or increasingly use distributed ones to collaborate.

We also use cognitive prostheses to augment the gaps in ourcognition. We use tools like checklists, lookup tables, flowcharts, and more tohelp us be systematic in ways our brains aren’t naturally. Making theseavailable when and where needed, using digital technologies and contextualawareness, is increasingly possible and useful.

Our cognition is also distributed across others. That’s thepoint of social cognition; we get better outcomes when we tap into the power of people. Asthe saying goes: The room is smarter than the smartest person in the room. Atleast when you manage the process right. We need to find ways to get the bestoutcomes out of people, and this comes from finding ways to work together—atleast at the right times and in the right ways.

It’s about communication and collaboration. We want peopleto feel free to share their own work and help others. We’re finding tools thatallow us to represent and track the development of our ideas, even when we’reworking proximally. And it’s about how to work together in the best ways. Forinstance: We know that we should let people ponder a question or the issuealone before we get together and share our ideas. We also know we should makesure all voices are heard. We can structure tools or processes to support this.

Working smarter is about two things, then. First, it’s aboutunderstanding best practices based on what the research says. This includeslearning design, performance support, and tapping into the power of people.There are rich understandings in these areas that we could be putting intopractice (and too often are not).

Next, we should be using technology to augment those bestpractices—and our work in general. We use digital technology, but not as wellas we could. We’re not tapping into the latest possibilities and developing andsupporting our uses of these. We still see idiosyncratic uses of collaborativetechnologies, for instance, and a lack of awareness of the associatedpractices.

Our organizations can, and should, be working smarter. Iwill suggest that this is a role we should be adopting. Not just training, butdesigning solutions and facilitating the uptake with awareness and coaching. Arole that is core to organizational effectiveness is on the table. Are yousmart enough to take up the challenge?

This is the first edition of my new monthlycolumn for LearningSolutions. The focus will be on workingsmarter and aligning technology with individual and organizational cognition. Iwill cover topics such as ecosystems, measurement, and learning design.Practicing what I preach about collaboration, I also hope you’ll suggest topicsyou’d like to see addressed! Send your ideas to [email protected].