learning, which is both inflexible and costly. And many organizations have adopted a model

called 70:20:10, and it's basically based on surveys and research that shows that around

about 70% of what people learn to do their jobs well they learn through experience and

practice through doing their jobs. They learn about 20% through other people, through conversations,

through having networks, through knowing the right people to ask the right questions at

the right time, and about 10% of learning in the workplace occurs formally. We've known

for 126 years that the human brain doesn't retain a lot in terms of memory. Hermann Ebbinghaus

did research back in 1885, what is now known as the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, that shows

that any one of us will forget about half of what we've been told within an hour of

being told it unless we have the opportunity to put that into practice within that hour;

and so therefore taking people out of the workplace, putting them through a formal,

structured class. We might even test them and assume that they know what to do because

they pass the test. But put them back in the workplace, and we find that actually performance

doesn't change. The reason that 70:20:10 has been taken up by some of the organizations

is that it overcomes 2 major problems with traditional training approaches. The first

problem is cost. The second problem is timeliness, and organizations now expect the development

of their people to run at the speed of business, and 70:20:10 helps organizations do just that.

A lot of research has been shown that learning is all about context, and if you keep people

in the workflow and provide them with facilities and support the learning, the learning is

much more effective, it's faster, it's cost effective, and efficient and effective. 70:20:10

requires people to think about the tools, practices, and techniques that you're going

to adopt outside of simply distributing information and running formal, structured courses. So

it requires managers to be involved in development because a lot of the 70 and 20--the experiential

part of learning-- has to be supported by managers in the workplace through new experiences,

through the opportunity to practice, through exposure to new roles, new jobs, job swaps,

and so on and so forth. It also opens up whole new channels for learning, so for example,

the use of mobile technology, which is expanding rapidly. One of the questions I'm often asked

is-- if you're looking at a model like 70:20:10, you're obviously going to focus a lot more

on what is called informal learning. And the question I'm often asked is how do we manage

that? And the answer to that is that that's the wrong question. You don't manage it. You

can facilitate it. You can support it. You can help it happen. But actually you can't

manage it. Basically, each of us individually manage our learning, and all we can do in

terms of the 70:20:10 structure, or any model that includes some sort of informal learning

or self-directed learning, is provide people with the right resources at the right time

through the right channel and allow them to get on with it. And you'll never get a learning

organization if you're continually pushing content at people and expecting them to learn.

Learning organizations only emerge once people, individuals start to pull learning when they

need it, where they need it, where it's going to be most effective for them, and when they've

got problems to solve.