Pedagogy and Andragogy

I, at times, land up for my dance classes early. I listen to songs on my Ipod, finish warming up and centering, and am raring to go but there still is some time left before I get in. What do I do?

For the lack of anything better to do, I sometimes peep in and observe what’s happening in class.

I find the Kid’s classes intriguing and amazing. There is only one adult in the room –the instructor. S/he is trying to teach around 30 kids in age bracket of 3-7 years how to dance. I observe the instructor animated, patient, and trying everything under the Sun to teach. I observe the kids doing what they want to do – some listen closely to the instructor and follow her/his instructions, others take a fancy for few particular steps and just keep on doing those steps, some others are looking around for their mummy, and then there are others who seem to be lost in their own world.

While I was observing one such class, Jim and Aparna (2 instructors- names changed to maintain anonymity J ) walked up to me and asked “What are you observing?” I looked at them and asked ‘Do you guys instruct kid’s batches too?’ They nodded.

Aparna said ‘They are the toughest batches to instruct in. I usually am mentally fatigued by the end of such a class. You just don’t know what holds their attention. You might have had a brilliant class today. You try the same thing tomorrow and it fails. You have to improvise from class to class.‘

Jim added ‘I have realized that words have limited impact on these kids. Illustration helps because then they start imitating you. What I do before each class is to figure out what I want the kids to imitate today. I go ahead and demonstrate/illustrate those in class and that seems to work. It is also necessary to make the class fun and play like. Kids love to play!’

We were about 10 minutes into our conversation when a senior colleague from office dropped in. He had come there to pick up his daughters who were there in the kid’s batch. In sometime Jim and Aparna left, and we 2 colleagues started discussing ‘Do adults learn differently and if yes, how?’’.

What do you think? How do adults learn differently from the way children do?

Yes, Malcolm Knowles does talk about andragogy (adult learning) and he does mention that adults learn when it makes sense for them, in the way they want to, and prefer to learn experientially.

But what does our own experience say about the way adults learn. How consequently should instructors change their style?. I have a few observations to make:

• Control is a key word for adults. One corollary of this is ‘We want to know why we are doing something’ which would translate to ‘We want to know how learning would have relevance for us’. Relevance is usually sometime in the near future. For the instructor, this means, the necessity to sensitize adult learners to how learning’s have relevance to their context and how they can use leanings in their work/lives.
• Adults do tend to be judgmental, usually rejecting what doesn’t fit in their world views. Judgment is usually a ‘parental’ characteristic. It is important for an adult to be in ‘adult, rational state of mind’ during the learning process. An instructor has a role to play in making a learner consider new/different ideas.
• It is also necessary to maintain ‘curiosity’ during the learning process – the fun of discovering something new and knowing that something interesting might be up for grabs at the next turn. Curiosity is a ‘free child’ characteristic. This combination of ‘curiosity’ and ‘adult state of mind’ is difficult to simultaneously maintain for adults but necessary for effective learning.
• The part about ‘What holds their attention’ is common for both kids and adults. If a kid is not attentive, s/he would show it. If an adult is not attentive, s/he may still fake attentiveness. I think it’s necessary for instructors to be keyed on whether the group at large is being attentive but if some individuals are not being attentive then the instructor should focus on those who are being attentive and have an offline discussion with the ‘inattentive individuals’.
• All of us require feedback. Feedback tells us whether we are on the right track and gives us the confidence to go ahead. Maybe as adults we prefer primary feedback – we try out something for ourselves and see whether it works. That’s where the emphasis on experiential learning for adults might come from. But that doesn’t mean children don’t need feedback. It is just that they might be okay if a teacher/instructor were to tell them whether they are on the right track or not. As an instructor, we have to figure out ways for adults to get primary feedback during the learning process. ‘I learn something, try it out, see for myself if it works or not, and make changes accordingly.’ Experiential learning is important for adults.

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Sourav

A FRAMEWORK FOR EXPECTED ATTRITION

Since the early 2000s a string of new sectors in India started growing by leaps and bounds- in the early 2000s it was the IT and ITES sector, followed by Insurance, Telecom, Pharmaceuticals, Retail and most recently Infrastructure sectors. A new sector usually ‘buys’ manpower from related sectors, and so was the case with these sunrise industries.

Soon the Indian manufacturing sector started experiencing high employee turnover. This was especially true for supervisory workforce at factories, frontline sales force, and managerial workforce.

My stints during these high attrition periods were in a Sales HR and a Factory HR role. High attrition obviously caused a lot of management concern at Sales and Factory locations. The usual refrain was ‘Attrition levels must go down!’. I agreed with the usual refrains –attrition levels of 30-40% are unsustainable! But I was intrigued by the usual and only solution proposed ‘Let’s pay higher salaries!’. I thought ‘Yes, salaries must be competitive but if employees are poached at 2x or 3x of their present salaries there is precious little you can do about it if the only thing you do is increase salaries. Sooner or later someone would still pay high enough monetary incentive to lure away an employee.’ So finally we did get an appreciation of the non-monetary areas that we needed to focus on too to reduce attrition.

I remember a subsequent month when I was working on creating retention strategies. I was grappling with trying to figure out what should be the goal for our retention efforts. Should we ensure that no one leaves? Is 0 % attrition the ideal retention target? My first reaction was ‘Obviously 0% is not ideal. Think of a living system with absolute retention. The system would sooner or later die.’ What should be a good attrition figure then? Should we fix it at let’s say 8%- this would mean that 7.9% attrition is good but 8.1% attrition is bad? How do we arrive at the figure of 8%?

I had subsequently written an article back in 2006, about how to figure out an ideal attrition figure. I had contested, and still do believe, that 0% attrition is not ideal.

INTRODUCTION

Predicting attrition! – is it possible? To answer this we first need to ask a few basic questions:

• Are we looking at predicting overall attrition or are we looking at a few components of attrition?
• With what degree of accuracy do we want to predict attrition?
• Over what time span do we intend to predict attrition?
• At what level of aggregation – individual/group/organizational level – do we want to predict attrition?

In this note we have made an effort to answer a few of these and more. The emphasis is on attrition which should be reasonably expected. We would try to derive a simple mathematical model for this expected attrition rate and illustrate the same through the means of an example. This model is by no means exact or precise. It is just a useful representation of the reality.

FRAMEWORK

The expected attrition rate can be said to arise thanks to the hierarchal structure in the organization.

Let us take a simple case. Assume that there is a sub system, of an organization, with S+1 number of employees. There are 2 hierarchal levels (Level A & Level B). There are S numbers of employees who are reporting in to a single person D.

Let us assume that on an average an employee takes time T to get promoted from one position to another (for both levels A & B). Now an employee in level B can move up only when D (level A) moves out of that position. D can move out of the position in one of the 2 ways:

• He gets promoted to a higher position. Assuming the same kind of sub-system to be replicated across the organization, the probability of D getting promoted is 1/S
• He moves out of the role.

When one of the employees in level B moves up it is reasonable to assume that the remaining people in that level would move out.

Hence total number of employees in the system = S + 1

Remaining employees = 1 + 1/S

Attrition = S – 1/S

Therefore %age attrition p.a. = (S – 1/S)*100/(S+1).T = 100 * {1-1/S}/T

Example: If the span of control is 4 and the time period is 3 years.

%age expected attrition = 100 * {1-1/4}/3 = 25 %

Now in a real organizational context there would be variables which would come in (e.g.: T may vary from one organizational level to another). But these are variables which can be accounted for and hence we can arrive at an expected attrition level

CONCLUSION

The note tries to come up with a mathematically derived internal attrition benchmark. Therefore there would be an optimum attrition rate, which would be a function of the span of control and the time an employee would be expected to stay in a particular position. Attrition which is either lower or higher than this range may not be desirable from the organization’s point of view.

As these two variables change at different levels in the hierarchy the optimum attrition rate at a particular hierarchical level may be different.

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Sourav

A Note on Behavioural Indicators

Around June 2005, I was in the midst of handling for the first time selection processes independently. Taking an interview was an eye-opening experience.

‘How do you take a hire/no hire decision at the end of an interview?” was the primary question that intrigued me. On the basis of my initial experiences I had written the following note. Today, it still does inform my thoughts and actions.

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Let us divide the requirements of a candidate into 3 categories, viz:

• Knowledge
• Skills
• Attitudes

One may quickly reach the conclusion that I am speaking of competencies out here and consequently of behavioural indicators and Behavioural Events Interviewing (BEI’s). But that isn’t the case. Let me elaborate further.

To answer that question we have to first look at the definition of competencies.

Competencies are the underlying characteristics which are causally related to superior performance.

Hence there is a cause and effect relationship between the identified competencies and superior performance.

There are 3 underlying characteristics:

• Knowledge – what one acquires through learning. Is relatively easier to pick up than the remaining two and once acquired less stable.
• Skills – which one acquires through practice. Hence communication can be termed as a skill (the more you practice the better you become at it!). Hence there has to be an act of doing in it. Skills are tougher to pick up than knowledge but once acquired more stable.
• Attitudes – difficult to acquire but once acquired the most stable.

But the problem with these characteristics is that they are underlying. Let us elaborate this through the renowned iceberg model.

Consider the iceberg as constituting the universal set of competencies. About 9/10^th portion of an iceberg is below the surface of water (the Skills, Attitudes part), whereas only around 1/10^th is above the surface of water (the Knowledge part). Hence the hidden portion constitutes the majority of the iceberg and it also constitutes the:

• Difficult to acquire
• Once acquired, stable

, portion of the iceberg. Hence it constitutes the most important part of the iceberg but then it’s hidden. In a structured interviewing process where one has limited time to reach a conclusion it becomes tough to evaluate a candidate on these hidden aspects directly. Hence there is a requirement to look at indirect indicators of these competencies. This is where the concept of behavioural indicators comes in. One does competency modeling where the differentiating behaviour of superior performers are looked at and hence arrive at the competencies and the consequent behavioural indicators one needs to concentrate on during the interviewing process.

Let us elaborate this through a non work life setting. We would look at a situation which can be commonly understood by one and all. Let me ask you a question:

• Who is a better batsman – Virendra Sehwag or Sachin Tendulkar? Or how does one decide who is the better batsman of the two?

One may say we should look at the batting averages of both of them, or the number of test centuries, or the number of match saving/winning innings, etc. In all of these we are speaking of parameters which are ENDS.

The advantage in this situation is that the ENDS are easily measurable. But assume for once that this wasn’t the case, i.e. – the ENDS weren’t easily measurable, and we had been asked to make a judgement on whose a better batsman. In this case we don’t have the luxury of falling back upon easily measurable ENDS. So how does one get out of this fix? Let me propose a few plausible solutions to you. The basis of the solutions would be – we would look at the BEHAVIOURAL COMPONENTS which go into their batting.

Behavioural indicators	Tendulkar	Sehwag
He reaches out to the pitch of the ball while playing	Yes	No
Demonstration of Hand eye co-ordination	Good	Outstanding
Counterattacks under pressure	Sometimes	Always
Aggressive behaviour on the field	Medium	High

“Due to the lack of concrete END metrics we would arrive at a conclusion of who is a better batsman depending on an evaluation of the above behavioural indicators.”

To a cricket buff, the above analysis would be nothing short of absurd! At the end of the day the results matter. People can have different ways of arriving at them.

Let me throw up one more situation .Sehwag started playing later than Tendulkar. Say the BCCI after having seen Tendulkar play in the earlier part of the 1990’s decided that they want to model every budding cricketer’s behaviour on the basis of the = Tendulkar’s cricketing behaviour. These behaviours would be used as:

1. Selection criteria for selection into the Indian team, and
2. Training youngsters at cricketing camps.

Had this happened, would we have a Sehwag in our midst today? Wouldn’t we have naturally eliminated the possibility of a Sehwag being groomed? By following the above model we would be essentially creating clones within the system – and that would happen because we are trying to get too specific with our specifications, i.e. – we are going down to the behavioural indicator level.

But in an interview process when one is trying to predict future results we rely on these intermediate measures. One may say that they would give reliable results but are the results valid?

Hence the first bone of contention is “Is there only one right way of achieving success?”

We would revert to cricket to explain the second bone of contention too. BEI’s are based on competency models. Competency modeling is supposed to look for “differentiating behaviours” between high performers and others.

Sunil Gavaskar was a renowned batsman of his times. Would he have been successful in the present “one day international’s heavy cricket itinerary? Based on the limited amount of one day internationals he had played we can make a reasonable guess that “his success in one day internationals would have been less than in test match cricket”. This brings us to the second bone of contention with respect to competencies.

Behaviour which leads to success in one kind of setting needn’t necessarily lead to success in a changed environment.

Hence the two problem statements can be framed as:

• In any given situation is there only one way of achieving success?
• Are behaviours, which have been found to be causally related to success in a particular environment, necessarily successful in a changed environment?

“So are we speaking of not using competencies at all?”

The classification of competencies into K, S & A’s per se seems to be fine but further classifying them into behavioral indicators and using these for taking people decisions seems to be flawed.

But how does one then evaluate a candidate on his hidden competencies – the S’s and the A’s?

That’s a question to which even I don’t have an answer right now but trying to reach a conclusion on them through a BEI seems to be the wrong way out.

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(Sometime in 2005)

Later I would come to a conclusion that what you can standardize in a Selection process is ‘What do you Select candidates on?’ and ‘How do you gather data during a Selection process?’ You can have guidelines for Selection/Non-Selection decision making, but these guidelines would support subjective judgment and not replace it.

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Sourav

Need Based Learning and Emergence of Meaning

Some days back a colleague and I were discussing about ‘meaning based learning’. He said he disagreed with this concept; the reasons being:

• Many a times we stumble across something useful.
• The moment we decide that we want to learn something, we close ourselves to other learning’s which might have, otherwise, emerged in the process.

My mind wandered back to something I had heard a few years back. A senior had mentioned that his learning retention used to be better when he learnt something which was of importance to him at that point of time. That was the first time I had heard about ‘meaning based learning’ and it had made sense to me then.

I later read about ‘phenomenology (Donald, Snygg, and Combs)’ which give credence to meaning based learning theory.

I must accept that the concept does make sense. Many a things which have stayed with me over a period of time have had some meaning to me at the point of time at which it got inculcated. So be it MBTI, Transactional Analysis, etc……..these had significant meaning for me at the time I focused on them.

But there also have been things which I have stumbled across in my life which have stayed with me e.g.: What matters more – Youth or Youthfulness? Experience or Capacity for Experience?- these are not things which I aimed for but I stumbled across.

But then, even though I had stumbled across these learning’s, they had relevance for me at that point of time. Hence there was meaning associated with them though I was not necessarily looking around for solutions/learning’s.

So the term should be Need based learning (directed or stumbled across- which has relevance/meaning for us) and this would be different from Meaning/direction Oriented Learning (where Learning is an outcome of only ‘directed’ efforts).

I remember another discussion with a different colleague. He was talking of wanting something to happen (getting fixated to one outcome - which would arise from a fear of waiting for a situation to emerge and consequently being uncomfortable with the unknown outcomes which might emerge) vis-a-vis allowing a situation to emerge.

What I can make out from this is that we need to be keyed on to what are our developmental needs at a point of time, and consciously work on addressing these need but also be open to ‘accidental/stumbled upon learning’. At the same time the our mindset should be ‘let things/learnings emerge’ instead of ‘I need answers quick’. In this way we would avoid a major learning disenabler, Cognitive Dissonance, too.

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Sourav

Being OK with not being OK

A few months ago a colleague asked me if i had a model to depict the challenges a new joiner faces at work. I told him about a framework i used to follow for an induction program I handled in a previous role:

• Program objective: An individual should be in a position to take over independent handling of any role in the function he/she has been hired for at the end of the induction period.
• Program focus: the triad of Learning, Contribution and Relationships and how all 3 need to be worked on.
• Program Principles: How do you facilitate the anxiety associated with learning (getting over the Cognitive Dissonance problem)? ...my statement about “One has to be OK with not being OK for some point of time.” This would allow you not to jump to the first acceptable solution (just because you wanted to get over your learning related anxiety).

This framework, in parts, has been influenced by an understanding of the difference between Orientation and Induction – a difference highlighted to me by a senior colleague in my 1^st year of working.

This is a helpful framework for looking at the program. It comprehensively covers the way the company would look at the program. It also considers a major difficulty which the learner faces in the learning process.

But is that all that is required to ensure an effective induction process?

We say that the role of the learner is paramount in the learning process. If the learner does not want to learn then there is not much a trainer or a facilitator can do about it. I also have usually believed (though lesser nowadays) that all learning is meaning based (Snygg and Comb’s theory - phenomenology).

So can we as a facilitator/process owner create a context through which an individual derives meaning for the learning? The choice to learn or not to learn would still rest with the individual but atleast we would have created a space in which the meaning for the learning may find expression.

Some years back I had read about a learning cycle theory, frequently used in NLP. The theory is about 4 successive stages in learning, viz:

• Unconscious Incompetence
• Conscious Incompetence
• Conscious Competence
• Unconscious Competence

This model has a lot of face validity. When a newcomer comes into the system, he/she is in a stage of unconscious incompetence. How do we facilitate the movement to Conscious Incompetence? (providing a context from which an individual derives meaning for learning). This seems to be the crux of the issue.

I am not sure whether we can tell an individual the meaning. A space has to be created in which an individual reflects/experiences something and consequently derives his/ her own meaning.

How is this space created? Well, that’s where the role of the facilitator comes in.

The consequent challenges would be to provide the resources which allow the individual to work towards Conscious Competence while at the same time anchoring him/her around “It is OKAY, NOT TO BE OKAY for a certain point of time.”

All of these would have to be done with the additional process of anchoring the newcomer towards the importance of the active role of the learner in the whole process – “You can take a horse to the water, you can give the horse enough water to drink, tell the horse that drinking is good for its health, but the choice to drink or not to drink lies with the horse.”

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Sourav

P.S.: Over the last year I have started developing an alternate point of view on meaning based learning. Learning is not necessarily meaning based..You also stumble upon learning!:)