Trina Hoefling Untethered

I’ve been trying to post about the financial hell and how I’ve never seen anything quite like this, but haven’t quite hit the right way to approach the blog. I have seen big dips over the last 25 years of working with businesses. Without handing out consultant speak and giving a mini-lesson on systems theory and Peter Senge,  big corporate swings – over corrections that bleed the lifeblood of the company – resemble corporate anorexia. I won’t bother to tell the stories I’ve seen, and been brought in to help fix later.

This current reality is unprecedented, and I’m in fear sometimes, too. Would love to say I’m not, and most of the time I am more positive than hopeless, but this is real. ALL my newer clients have put holds or dropped projects from the budgets. (So I have time on my calendar, folks! Take advantage of it and contact me! lol). Kind of hard to stay in denial when it hits my work. My best asset is a long history of doing good work and seeing many ups and downs. But back to Corporate America.

Wanting to cut, and cut hard, is understandable but still dangerous. Get on a budget, yes. Delay optional new initiatives, maybe so.   Historically, though, a couple years after these big swings, the cuts usually end up costing more than if the company used the time to improve and get more lean but NOT go into big sweeping layoffs. These “swing” businesses spend more money to recoup the lost talent and, averaged, have saved nothing. And this behavior doesn’t factor in the cost to the people impacted, either. My friend and colleague Lisa Jackson has said it as well as it could be said, so I will relinquish the blog mike to her, and ask that you read Lisa’s posting.

Find her at http://blog.jacksonandschmidt.com.  I’m sure she would welcome comments as much as I would.

I just got back from a Sun Microsystem demonstration  co-sponsored with the Colorado Gaming Association. We were there to explore Sun’s tools that bring gaming and virtual worlds to corporate training. The audience was sprinkled with techs and programmers, though was targeted to corporate trainers. Since I write, train and coach people in virtual work and collaborating across boundaries, I definitely wanted to be there with the thought leaders on the technical application side of the world.

I noticed something in the room that was palpable.

The capabilities demonstrated were solid, impressive, and the presentation (and presenter) good. Yet, en masse- the audience fell into a couple camps with a pretty wide berth between them. The passionate and wonderful geeks who shared vocabulary, and the rest of the room. Mike, our passionate leader, made a good effort to translate to the nontechnical folk in the room, but it didn’t work. The tools work great and are at the beginning of what will fast unfold in the open source world of Java, but the talking about the tool…

The trainers in the room were lost when the technical vocabulary overwhelmed. Connected, interested, giving up a night with their families committed to bringing collaborative virtual training to their organizations, but definitely not tracking the vocabulary. The programmers get it. Use it. Adapt it.

I loved the conversation and watched the respect and genuine attempts to bridge the gap, but they really do speak 2 different languages. They can connect, but it’s with effort.

At least that’s what I noticed. What can we do to better translate so that business really can build the kind of affordable and triumphant virtual team work and training environments that are available? I know at GroupONE Solutions we are  moving more of our collaboration and virtual team training to Just-In-Time modules that can be team train or self-paced, synch or asynch. I’ve wanted to do this for years, but customers have still been  committed to classroom training. As more teams become virtual and geographically dispersed, as travel budgets stay tight, and as onboarding happens through rolling entry…. the time has come for virtual training to be another equally viable option.

It seems to me it’s also time to up the design and engagement quality of much self-paced online instruction. The tools are here, including Sun’s Project Darkstar and Project Sun and others. But will nontechnical users easily migrate into the virtual world? Didn’t see it in that room tonight. It’s too bad, because it’s easier to use than ever.

What do you think? Do you agree that there remains a digital divide within the computer-savvy population? Developers and nondevelopers? Geoffrey Moore nailed it when he wrote Crossing the Chasm. There is a huge gap between early adopters and early majority users who are progressive but more cautious.

What I saw tonight, though, was a little different. I saw an invitation to dialogue and partner, on both sides. But at least some of the nontechnical audience members who most want and need simple and engaging virtual training solutions got lost in the vocabulary.

I got lost in the vocabulary, and I’m more familiar with the virtual world and collaborative software space.

What do you think? How do we bridge that gap? I ask because I’m curious, because I know a whole lot of people in that room want to find ways to work together, and because, honestly, I want to make sure any content conversion I do with GroupONE’s virtual work training and other solutions meets the needs of all who need it.

It’s exciting stuff… if only it weren’t so hard to teach us old dogs new tricks….