Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Charles Jennings
Internet Time Alliance
Background:
I have been working with the 70:20:10 model for 15 years. I first
encountered the model when examining an innovative leadership
development initiative at Goldman Sachs. The initiative was called the
“Reverse Engineered” Development Plan. Goldmans had set out to
identify critical success factors of individual career development. Output
from the identification exercise aligned with the work of Morgan McCall
and his colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership some 10 years
previously. In turn, McCall’s work reflected the findings of Professor
Allen Tough at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s.
Insights:
This work has provided a number of insights. The FIVE below are
critical:
The numbers are a useful reminder that most learning occurs in the
context of the workplace rather than in formal learning situations and
that learning is highly context dependent. The numbers provide a
framework to support learning as it happens through challenging
experiences, plenty of practice, rich conversations and the opportunity
to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t.
It’s also useful to keep the ratios in the back of our minds to remind
ourselves that learning naturally occurs this way. They’re not some
tight formula that organisations should be targeting.
It’s well worth reading my Internet Time Alliance colleague Jay Cross’s
article about formal/informal learning ratios on his Informal Learning
blog. Jay makes clear something we all know deep down - that learning
is not a binary process – it usually doesn’t happen exclusively formally
or exclusively informally, but mostly part-formally and part-informally.
The mix varies depending on the situation.
The KPMG work with the global food manufacturer, Sara Lee, cited on
the Informal Learning blog, provides a good example of the fact that
the ratios will vary with specific situations and therefore shouldn’t be
taken as a mantra.
One thing I do know from working with many organisations using the
model is that The 70:20:10 framework is an extremely helpful change
agent – for both changing mindsets and changing learning
practices.
There are a large number of tools and techniques that are available to
make this job easier for managers. These need to be an integral part of
any 70:20:10 rollout - from simple techniques to help reflective
learning as part of regular manager-report meetings, to guides,
templates, tools and tips to support experiential learning and learning
through people networks. I wrote about this on my blog (see link)
‘Managers and Mad Hatters: Work That Stretches’.
Charles Jennings