I started the day with a Morning Buzz session about management and leadership by Michelle Fanfarillo and Bill Harisson. They are from Intel and told us how they try to connect to the business. At Intel learning is a support organization (as always) resorting under HR so they have to work hard to connect to the business. Intel is huge, 96000 people, 200 plus countries, 15 main sites, 10.000 managers. What they did was to give each HR director of a business group a learning consultant. They also have country organizations with a HR director, they got a learning consultant too. They now are setting up a steering committee in order to have a central point of direction.
This is how they manage their managers. I asked them how they manage the increasing needs of individual learners and they told me that they haven’t figured that out yet. The conclusion was don’t work from learning goals but from organization/business goals. Insure access to the business leaders and use a steering committee.
Internet time alliance, Interactive review of DevLearn
The second session I attended was run by the Internet time alliance. All five of them where there. They did a review of the conference results. They gave their findings, showed interviews with conference attendees and asked the people that attended the session. I made a mind map of it:
But the most important insight was the curation of content.
After this I had a final meeting with my colleagues Chris and Steven, they both had to leave.
I had some meetings in the afternoon. One with David Holcombe (president and CEO of the Elaerning guild) and Heidi Fisk (Executive director) about the possibility of an European Guild conference. Conclusion it will happen, the question is when.
But by far the most exiting meeting was with some people of LINGOs. They now support Ngo’s who work in developing countries. Eric Berg came up with a plan to up the stakes a bit, the new goal is to make knowledge and learning available to anyone in developing countries. I just checked how many people live in developing countries and found the following figure: 5,727,771,964 (give or take a few). This is a mind-blowing initiative. If they pull it of it would be worthy of a Nobel Prize. Imagine if all people have access to learning and they could really develop them selves. It would mean less poverty, less hunger, less war, fewer people dying, more people having to chance to a better life. They formed a steering committee that will work out the plan in further detail and Eric has asked me to be part of that committee. I’m very honored that I can be a part of this great plan and I hope that I can contribute to it. I will be writing more about this initiative in the future. Wow!
I have five hours left before I have to pack my bags and go home. I will try to get some sleep before that. For now preliminary conclusion of DevLearn is: it was a great week!
The Learning 2019 conference
I have been to a ton of learning conferences but this will be my first time at #learning2019. I’m looking forward to it and I’m planning to report on all interesting sessions via this blog.
