Designing learning in a 70/20/10 world

http://www.line.co.uk/viewpoints/designing-
learning-in-a-702010-world/
Posted by John Helmer - December 14, 2010

John Helmer, reviews the 70/20/10 model and highlights its

adoption within organisations.
McCall, Eichinger and Lombard’s 70/20/10 model has been highly influential in spreading
awareness of the importance of informal learning, and is now becoming something of a
touchstone for organisational development. But have some people got a bit carried away with it?
Has what started out as a useful observation about how people learn been deployed too
proscriptively in some quarters, leading to its use as a strategy in itself?
Last month, senior learning and development professionals from a number of corporate and
public sector organisations met together at the LINE London Forum to discuss this and other
issues in Learning Design. In an age where we recognise that 90% of learning is informal, what
is the proper role for Learning Design?

Which way learning design?

There has been a ferment of debate and discussion about Learning Design over the last five years
or so in e-learning. Much of the heat and energy in that debate went initially into questioning the
academic and theoretical underpinnings of instructional techniques, and incorporating new
insights from the field of brain science.
Regrettably this also led to some pop-science snake-oil selling of the type which has long been
too prevalent in the training industry, and which proper scientists have taken to referring to as
‘neurotrash’. However the focus on design has surely led to a quality improvement in the
effectiveness of online learning over all. There is now plentiful evidence to show that, in the
right hands, well-designed e-learning can achieve outstanding business results.
At a higher level of granularity, perhaps, over the same period there has been a growing interest
in the role of informal learning, and a sense that rooting our enquiry too narrowly in how best
to structure self-paced online courses (the 10% of formal training interventions) risks
overlooking the greater value that technology innovation can bring to the business of educating
and developing people, looked at in the round.
70/20/10 has been a critical concept within this growing awareness, and one that has helped to
widen the focus of the e-learning industry. For some it has severed as a rallying call – even a
battlecry: in the inimitable words of Jay Cross, ‘kill the courses, shut down the training
department’. Whether or not this sort of talk strikes real fear into the hearts of training managers,
it is certainly true that those practitioners who are willing to embrace change have, perhaps
unsurprisingly, experienced a degree of confusion about what (if any) should be their role in this
new world of informal learning.
Our own Steve Ash wandered into this conceptual Beirut himself this summer when in a blog
post he contrasted the unreality of a lot of the presentations at the Learning & Skills Group event
with the actual state of practice in most organisations. We know he spoke for a lot of people in
saying this, but the reaction was strident to say the least.
Having planted this stake in the ground, it behoves LINE as an organisation to be active in
sharing the practical, pragmatic work that is going on within client organisations to realise the
implications of the 70/20/10 model.
Dimensions of Learning
Andrew Joly, Design Director at LINE, gave a presentation on this subject that went beyond
simply reporting successes, to elaborating a practical approach based on 70/20/10 that LINE calls
‘Learning Architectures’.

In a nutshell, the model asserts that 70% of learning and

development takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving;
20% of the time development comes from relationships with other people through informal or
formal feedback, mentoring, or coaching; while 10% of learning and development comes from
formal training or education.
The basis of LINE’s approach lies in a definition of the role of design in the 70/20/10 world that
Andrew summed up thus:
• Strongly support the 70% learning
• Develop and exploit the power of the 20%
• Design the 10% within the clear context of the other 90%
So how does this work in practice? Well, in the absence of a course to give structure to the
learner’s experience, design must work with three dimensions of learning (see diagram).
X axis – Learning Content
Expert designed asynchronous content to meet results-focused requirements, including:
• Rapid Nuggets
• ‘Traditional’ e-learning
• Show-me/Try-me
• Scenarios
• Simulations
• Games
• Documents
• Assessment tools
• Quizzes/Profilers
• Video/Audio
Y axis – Live Learning & Tools
Networked & Informal knowledge systems to support person-to-person, applied, on-the-job,
volatile learning & knowledge, including:
• webinars
• virtual Classrooms
• online meeting tools
• email
• forums
• blogs
• wikis
• rating
• social networking tools
• voting and ranking tools
Z axis – Learning Journeys
The vital dimension. Without this, informal learning can too easily be a rag-bag of different,
unassociated elements that do not provide a coherent learner experience. Activities on this axis
are what bring these elements together to provide a direction and a narrative, through awareness,
communications, refreshers, networks, and tools to drive learning to unconscious behaviour.
They might include:
• communications campaigns
 • awareness/teasers
• champions & mentors
• pre & post learning
• formal learning
• action learning groups
• events & road shows
• refreshers
• top-ups
Within any given client situation, sector or knowledge domain, the particular way in which
activities along these three dimensions are configured to produce a successful outcome is
characterised within LINE as a Learning Architecture.
Andrew gave the example of the Maliens campaign, centred on email best practice, which for
one client brought about a saving of 26 minutes per person per day (see slide below).

Formal learning? Forget about it

Nick Shackleton-Jones, a well-known and respected figure on the conference circuit with a
background in psychology, was LINE’s honoured guest at this Forum event. His presentation
added to and complemented this picture of the balance between formal and informal learning that
has to be struck by today’s L&D professionals.
He began by asking the other delegates about their memories of school. Tales of eccentric or
inspirational teachers ensued, and the irksome nature of exams and homework. The point of the
exercise was to demonstrate that to each of these memories – not many of which actually
concerned core curriculum content, tellingly – adhered some strong emotion, whether it be
irritation, fascination or fear, and it provided the cue for Nick to introduce the Affective Context
model, on which he draws in his work a really interesting short video explaining this can be seen
on Nick’s blog. To put it briefly, in order to remain in memory, an experience has to be
‘wrapped’ in a layer of emotion, which gives it an affective context.
The role of the educator, therefore, is to encourage people to care – by connecting with people at
an emotional level.
Without this affective context, what we learn soon vanishes from memory, at a predictable rate
as observed by Ebbinghaus in his famous ‘forgetting curve’. Nick contrasted this with the steep
learning curve we go through when we really need to acquire new information – when we go to a
new job, or school, for instance, where most of what we learn is informal.
He suggested that people will learn informally around the subject areas that most interest them,
while the most uninspiring, mandated areas of training are the most important areas in which to
supply exciting, highly engaging formal learning interventions that connect on an emotional
level: ‘It’s not about getting a body of information across: it’s more about making people care
enough to engage and change their behaviour’.
Roundtable Discussion
A lively and wide-ranging discussion ensued on issues raised in the two presentations which
covered more ground than we could do justice to here, so I’ll restrict myself to summarising a
few of the points made specifically on the subject of the 70/20/10 model and informal learning:
• 70/20/10 has become a mantra in some organisations and there was a groundswell of
worry that it can occasionally be used to justify training budget cuts
• In other hands it is a powerful engagement tool for talking to top management about
issues of people development within the organisation
• Why are we hearing so much about 70/20/10 now? Perhaps it is symptomatic of a wider
social change going on in organisations and a move from a purely transactional approach
to training towards something more transformational
• One aspect of this change is that people can no longer be assumed to learn from their
bosses in the same way they once did – often in fact it is the other way round, as
evidenced by the phenomenon of ‘reverse mentoring’, where a top executive will be
buddied up with a recent graduate to learn some new online skills
• This new world requires new skills for L&D, many of which may lie close to marketing
(bearing in mind that the practice of marketing, too, is in the process of a big change as a
result of the same demographic and social forces)
• Learning professionals have to become experts in motivating and incentivising learners,
and to find ways of protecting learners’ time to explore and learn informally
• This debate, however, also exposes large cultural differences between different business
sectors and geographical territories – for instance, learners within very directive cultures
will always do mandated learning but resist the call to use social media