Our Existential Imperatives

Innovation and change are outpacing learnability worldwide, just as global warming threatens our planet. To put this into perspective:

1. It took humans millions of years to achieve first flight, but just 68 years to go from first flight to first successful Mars landing.
2. Scientists predict Earth will warm approximately 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit in the coming century. The current record for Earth warming 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit is 5,000 years.
3. The US Patent and Trademark office¹, granted 30,000 patents in 1979 and 167,000 in 2019 for a 40-year total of 3.2 million patents. At the current production rate, they’ll grant 40 MILLION patents by 2059.
4. All new products are prototyped, optimized, and initially produced manually before they can be automated. 40 million new patents will create 40 million new manual workers.
5. For the first time in history, innovation and change is outpacing learnability. 

This unprecedented global threat and rate of change sets up 2 interdependent, “Existential Imperatives” for the training and learning industry, TLI. They are:

Existential Imperative #1 – Stop global warming

Global warming is killing our planet. The longer it takes to curb global warming, the less likely we are to succeed. 

The entire TLI must engage immediately. This includes practitioners, conference organizers, professional organizations, and all businesses. Opportunities to collaborate, share data, and share plans must be developed along with creative ways to drive participation and accountability. Opportunities include:

• Professional organizations and conference organizers can host climate-focused conferences, workshops, and planning sessions. They can also create, share, and administer information repositories and host climate protection competitions.
• Employers can:
  • Mandate and reward carbon reduction
  • Prioritize interventions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions like workflow learning and videoconferencing
  • Start carbon pricing policies to encourage green decision making
  • Collaborate with other TLI entities to establish benchmarks and targets
• Individuals can encourage their employers, professional organizations, and families to engage.

Climate protection will require the TLI to understand its carbon footprint. The Internet can help by providing free access to carbon footprint calculators². The Center for Climate and Energy Issues³ provides ways to reduce carbon emissions.

There is much we can do, much we are uniquely qualified to do, and much we must do.

Existential Imperative #2 – Adapt to meet the new challenges

As currently configured, the TLI is incapable of leading a climate protection initiative. To remedy this, it must:

1. Be truthful. Only truth can expedite change. To be truthful we must immediately stop:
   1. Promoting training and learning as “all-in-one” solutions. Inferring a training program alone can improve performance is unprincipled.
   2. Equating training, learning, and performance.Training and learning cannot guarantee performance. Using training and learning data to prove performance improvement is misleading.
   3. Overlooking memorization. Training enables memorization, not performance. Things that cannot be memorized, cannot be learned. Training things that cannot be memorized is deceitful.
   4. Espousing universal learnability.Some things are “unlearnable,” including, work processes with too many steps to memorize, infrequently performed processes, and processes with steps that change too frequently. Pretending training will enable performance of unlearnable processes is a fantasy.
   5. Hiding the forgetting factor.Learners forget up to 60% of training content within an hour⁴. Not disclosing this to prospective training clients is selective omission.
   6. Espousing learning must precede performance.Nobody needs a furniture assembly class before assembling IKEA furniture. Prescribing training when tasks can only be performed by following step-by-step instructions is egregious.

2. Become a “Performance Improvement Industry,” PII.A PII takes responsibility and accountability for performance, not just training and learning. Saying “We trained 80,000 people,” “The average test score on our climate program was 80%,” or “80% of employees read the book” means nothing to a dying planet. We must be able state things like; 

“After using our Electronic Performance Support System to deploy Process A, workers performed Step N perfectly, 2,000 times over 1 week, saved .77 tons of carbon emissions, and 600 minutes. Annual savings will be 40 tons of emissions or $2,400 in carbon credits and $15,600 in labor. Our intervention cost $1,385 and the return on investment will be $811,200 in labor costs, plus $124,800 carbon credits, minus $1,000 service fees for a total of $935,000 annually.”

Making honest, data-supported statements like this will require the TLI to become data savvy.

1. Enable, assure, and continuously improve performance with little to no process training or learning. Training and learning alone cannot enable, assure, or continuously improve performance. Ending global warming will require the PII to:  a) Enable unlearnable processes to be performed by at least 40 million manual workers who cannot safely, efficiently, or aseptically access computers, hand held devices, or printed aids as they work, b) Assure every step of every process is perfectly performed every time, and c) Continuously improve performance across both worker and work systems.
2. Model desired behaviors.The TLI must reduce its own carbon footprint. This can be done by:
   1. Benchmarking the climate impact of performance improvement interventions and TLI activities
   2. Requiring and rewarding climate protection actions
   3. Giving preference to performance enablement, assurance, and continuous improvement interventions that cut greenhouse gas emissions
   4. Track both worker performance data and carbon emissions data

Surviving global warming will require everyone’s action. Our platform truly is burning, and it’s time to jump.