Disintermediation: Back to the Future

We must interrupt this Rapid eLearning blog at this time for a brief cliché, a theory, and a little historical perspective. The cliché: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Related to this is the theory of social progress that states that we really corkscrew through life, rather than advance in straight lines or vectors. Inherent in both is the observation that space and time turn back on themselves and that the past becomes relevant anew in changed circumstances. OK, what does this have to do with the future of workplace learning?

In the new circumstances in which we find ourselves (speed it king, knowledge is exploding, budgets are shrinking, etc.), disintermediation of the knowledge sharing process is paramount to success. Hence, the current obsession with Rapid eLearning. That is to say, we must once again create the shortest path between experts and learners to succeed in the marketplace. Once again? Yes, there once was a time when workplace learning was completely disintermediated. That was in the pre-industrial age when craftsmanship was predominant; when learners (apprentices) learned directly from subject matter experts (journey-level crafts people). In the apprenticeship model of learning, the learner, the expert, the learning, and doing the work were highly integrated. And key to success in that period was superior workmanship, not mass execution of repetitive tasks and mass production of identical products.

But that cozy relationship was not to last with the advent of the industrial revolution. The ‘dis-integration’ of work into repetitive tasks and the principle of division of labor were the fuel for industrialism. Since workers were no longer responsible for producing a completed products, but simply performing their tasks, individual responsibility was replaced with management in order to provide needed integration of all the tasks. In order to give workers the skills needed to perform their individual tasks, apprenticeship was replaced by training. And with training came a new group of workers whose job was no longer to actually do work or even manage work, but to instruct others how to do it. Industrial-era scalability required the disintegration of work, the division of labor, and the separation of learning from working.

But “times they are a changing.” Actually, times have already changed and we just need to wake to our new post-industrial reality. The United States has been transformed into the poster child for post-industrialism, and third world societies have been transforming themselves into the industrialists of the our times. Any repetitive tasks related to products that can be exported are being “off-shored” (we are already way beyond simple outsourcing). And what we are left with in our post-industrial economy are the tasks that cannot be readily off-shored. Invention, innovation, creation—in short, knowledge work.

And there’s the rub. We are still clinging to our industrial-era learning model, training, in our post-industrial world. By definition, whatever can be trained will be off-shored. The more efficient the training, the more rapidly the subject of the training can and will be off-shored. Training in a post-industrial economy is a facilitator of the inevitable—the transfer and loss of trainable jobs.
So where does that leave us? Back to the future, where we must once again disintermediate the learning and knowledge sharing process—where we must again unite experts with learners and learning the work with doing the work.

The job is now disseminating new knowledge more quickly so that it can be leveraged by other knowledge workers to facilitate ever-more-rapid innovation, invention, and creation. Today’s successful companies are knowledge factories, not production factories, where the product is knowledge itself. Successful companies of the future will manage their IP (intellectual property) as effectively as their predecessors managed their workers, inventories, and capital. They will be the companies that realize learning is their most essential business process and our job is to improve it.