Friday, March 30, 2018

Signal to Noise: What Cambridge Analytica Taught Us

When a company can be brought down through one indiscriminate
 act it becomes increasingly important to embed ethical behavior
Ultimately, it is the individual (an employee at any level) who is responsible for assessing knowledge and how that may or may not affect business prospects, company credibility, industry disruption and ever changing customer preferences in any company. As businesses continue to flatten their hierarchy and employees are becoming more educated they have put decision making in more and varied hands within their organizations.  

Gone are the days that senior management sat at the top of a company hierarchy and made decisions about the company’s future (of course - there are still a few dinosaurs out there that manage from the top down.)Today, resilient forward thinking companies empower all levels of employees to consider and evaluate potential agents of change. Employees are more educated, they tend to enter fields of work that drive their interests and as a result, they are able to research, identify and consider new and alternative strategies more readily.

Take for example, the recent Facebook data leak engineered by Cambridge Analytica where Christopher Wylie claims, the company he worked for, improperly harvested Facebook data from some 50 million users in order to help seal victories for the Trump campaign. While Wylie was simply named as a contractor by Cambridge Analytica , he was still able to influence the direction and fortunes of this company without being integrated into the management hierarchy of the company. His research and unique viewpoint created a new means of utilizing data.

This can be cautionary tale, really a tale of two possibilities depending on how you evaluate knowledge and the process you have in place. The first possibility, we have already covered but let’s look at another opportunity that presented itself to Mr. Wylie. He pitched his services to the Liberal caucus research office and the Liberals signed a contract with Wylie in 2016 and he launched a pilot project. After seeing what Wylie had to offer, the party chose not to proceed further with the project. We are assuming that the techniques are similar in both instances, with Cambridge Analytica and with the Liberal Party Caucus.

I can’t provide a lot of insight into Cambridge Analytica’s process for evaluating knowledge, but one can guess that the evaluation parameters are far less onerous and opportunities are largely evaluated based on profitability rather than credibility, as was not the case with the Liberal Party Caucus.

Most tool sets and strategies available to business in this relatively new category of assessing and evaluating new ideas and strategies use tools such as the Balanced Scoreboard which analyses profit, customer experience, goals and innovation - or alternatively, the Success Case Method that primarily promotes the use of a field trail to evaluate effectiveness and outcomes. Regardless of the process, most of these options are designed for companies with larger infrastructure. Small business has a much more difficult time of it given the lack of resources and the need to innovate.

Embedding ethical culture in companies is becoming an increasingly important component of an organizations’ s life-cycle. When a company can be brought down through one indiscriminate act it becomes increasingly important to embed ethical behavior to ensure that all levels of management understand, promote and communicate ethical tenants and benefits when evaluating opportunities.

An article in Financial Management Magazine provides us with some interesting insight into the process about how effective embedding ethical behavior is- in today's decisions making. This study was conducted in 2017 and it explores the importance of upholding ethical standards. The study indicates that there are differences in demographics in how fraud, corruptions and unethical behavior is viewed by differences age categories.

While Christopher Wylie had a pang of quilt in the aftermath as he surveyed the damage his initiative wrought, clearly the management of Cambridge Analytica did not –even when they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. If your company is built to succeed now and greed (the gentrified term of course is profit) is the defining architect of the company vision - then embedding ethical standards all levels is not your concern. But if you are building for long term growth you need to consider developing strategies that raise awareness among employees and their role in preventing financial, reputation, or regulatory damage to the organization when considering new and transformative business initiatives.









Tuesday, March 6, 2018

How We Learn: Storage & Retrieval Strength

" Learning is rooted very much in the mind’s ability  to 

extrapolate a broad range information linked to external stimulus..."

A common thread that affects learning and our comprehension is “How We Learn”. Funny, isn’t it - that this is perhaps the single most important factor in developing learning programs –yet it is the least understood and often least considered aspect of skill development and behavioural change.

 Learning programs, and in particular eLearning programs demand that an individual focus on a set of learning objectives we have set out for that learner. We seek to entrench comprehension and change behaviour through such learning programs. Most learning strategies within organizations and corporations are based on cost and availability of resources with little concern for long term implementation strategies and a need to validate learning.  Effective eLearning involves understanding how our brain works to store, recall and apply knowledge. If we don’t understand how that takes place and how we can best create an environment that will allow this to happen, how can we hope people will apply what they have learned.

Traditional classrooms and their learning strategies are built on historical experiences in organized learning regimens and do not create a connection between learning and understanding. The foundational learning strategies we currently use in most of our business learning environments date back to the 19th century. Experiential learning or the classroom based learning in a one to many environment is the primary means of teaching/learning.
This strategy is entrenched in teachers and learners who focus on a learning formula that suggests: creating a link between memorization, repetition and application equals comprehension and learned skills. It is my contention, based on the existing data sets resulting from many learning studies, that there is significant evidence that this is not the most effective way to teach or learn, however, it may be the cheapest. I wonder of cheaper is better if nothing is learned?

Learning is rooted very much in the mind’s ability to extrapolate a broad range information linked to external stimulus, thus creating links in our ability to store, recall and apply knowledge based on how that knowledge gets embedded.  Creating unique environments, delivering a message in a memorable way and allowing the learner to learn in a way that suites their abilities and capacity to paramount to learning. Check out the Godden & Baddeley study on the effects of context cues on recall.

Robert Bjork of UCLA and his wife, Elizabeth Ligon Bjork also of UCLA can be said to have developed the theory of “Forget To Learn” in the 80’s. The principle theory is this “Any memory has two strengths, a storage strength and a retrieval strength.”  

How We Learn”, author, Benedict Carey, tells us that storage strength is just that, a measure of how well learned something is. It builds up steadily with studying and more sharply with use.”   He goes on to say, “According to Bjorks theory, storage strength can increase but never decrease”…and, “The brain holds onto only what is relevant, useful or interesting - or maybe so in the future.”   Casey tells us that “Retrieval strength…is a measure of how easily a nugget of information comes to mind. It too, increases with studying and with use.”
Retrieval strength can be a matter of how quickly we can bring things to mind, while storage strength is a matter of how familiar something might be. ELearning is affected by this learning philosophy. If an eLearning program, for example has 6 modules, and each is about 45 minutes long which we take only once, than the storage strength and retrieval strength are both low.

How do we improve on this? Each module can be followed up with questions. This serves as repetition of content and improves retrieval. Adding case studies and interactive scenarios helps improve storage strength as we apply and use the knowledge. We can further improve storage and retrieval with follow up meetings and one-on-one sessions that extend our learning of the concept, by creating a series of demands on our memory that recall and apply the principles learned.

Spreading out the learning process over a longer period of time, changing the delivery medium and varying the time and place in which we learn are all hall marks of eLearning. This creates an environment where the knowledge can become more embedded in our memory, improving our storage and retrieval strength and allowing us to recall information more readily. This is especially true if we continue to follow up and extend the learning process through a variety of additional learning opportunities. These complementary learning opportunities that complement eLearning can be simple and low cost including; group meetings, one-on-one simulations, learner surveys, reading assignments, learner feedback, follow up evaluation of implementation strategies, etc.  

ELearning is an ideal medium for knowledge transfer, but on its own it’s is far less effective. Learning strategies, that use eLearning as the primary learning medium, delivered over longer periods while including multiple learning opportunities and multiple mediums create the best outcomes.