My boss Peter is a moron. In fact, according to the Peter Principle (PP), all bosses are incompetent. The PP, now in its 40th anniversary edition, was a best seller when it was first published. A satiric treatise on workplace incompetence, it touched a nerve with readers because it was so funny. And so true. According to the PP, in a workplace hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Workers are promoted so long as they work competently. Eventually they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent, where they garner the ubiquitous comment: “My manager is a moron”.

How to combat the Peter Principle in your organization?

Don’t Promote People

When people do their jobs well, Dr. Peter argued, society can't leave well enough alone. We ask for more and more until we ask too much. Then these individuals—promoted to positions in which they are doomed to fail—start using a bag of tricks to mask their incompetence. They distract us from their crummy work with giant desks, replace action with incomprehensible acronyms, blame others for failure, cheat to create the illusion of progress. Rather than promoting people who a do a good job to be a bad manager of others, let them get on with what they are good at.

Don’t Let Bad Managers Hire People

Hiring others to disguise one’s incompetence simple multiplies incompetence. Stop the madness. Do not trust managers to staffing, intervene. Make your managers earn the right to hire by first proving they can manage projects and people. Hiring more minions to mask a manager’s mishaps will always misfire.

Praise Do-It-Yourselfers

Everyone loves someone who can fix stuff. Celebrate people who fix stuff, sell stuff, build stuff, run stuff – but don’t promote them. Give them incentives to reward good work. Make an example out of good performance. Perhaps the late Ray Kroc is the right role model here. One of his first steps in building the McDonald's empire was to run his own outlet—he cooked, cleaned bathrooms, picked up the trash. The focus on doing ordinary things well was, he believed, key to McDonald's success.

Recognize Competence

If an employee seems to be performing superhuman feats, the perception is probably wrong. Look for actual competence. Consider how Captain Sullenberger explained his astounding emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in New York's Hudson River last year. "I know I speak for the entire crew when I tell you we were simply doing the jobs we were trained to do," he said. As Dr. Peter might have observed, there were no pretenders, blowhards, or shared delusions that day, just the deftly coordinated actions of people who had not reached their level of incompetence.

Q&A on being a facilitator of three days of conversation with 400 European citizen representatives (Europe Direct’s Annual General Meeting: #AGM2011).

Q: How can we engage citizens in the European project?

A: Discussion.

Dialogue is the best way to navigate the complexities of multifaceted issues. Talking through topics offers an inclusive way to collaborate and elevates the diverse voices needed to stimulate thoughts, deepen meaning and enrich insights. Counter to the twitter-logic and too-busy-attitudes, sitting down with others is still the best way to come together around tough questions.

Q: How can a 400 person conversation be efficient?

A: Engagement.

When the masses decide they want it, they get it. So the question is not about how to make people have a certain type of discussion, the real question is how to set the tone for dialogue and to launch a question that will light up conversation. In the case of #AGM2011, the atmosphere was created by letting people first discuss (in 100 groups of four) their shared experiences around their current pursuits in citizen engagement. Then, upon that foundation we started discussions and exchanges about bigger shared questions. The momentum was then carried forward by handing over the rest of the time to the group to decide on the breakout session agenda – in a matter of minutes, the group declared twenty topics which were announced; participants then voted with their feet to join the sessions they felt most pertinent.

Q: Why do people like this open approach?

A: Inspiration.

By handing the keys over to the audience, no one can sit in the back seat and offer only critiques. Everyone is driving, deciding the direction and arriving at the destination.  Each of us, are inspired by something different – the sea, music, art, challenge… but all of us want to be in control of our own destiny; none of want to suffer through listening to subjects of little interest. Session such as the #AGM2011, which leverage massive simultaneous dialogue leap frog conventional seminars by letting individuals inspire themselves, choose their destination and set their own path. Facilitating such a session is about setting the conditions for freedom and trusting that people are resourceful and responsible.

Q: How do you evaluate the success of a conversation?

A: Results.

Like in any program, in the end we compared our objectives to our outcomes. We wanted stronger networks, we got them. We wanted to explore key issues, we did so. We wanted innovative solutions, we got them. The difference was in the amount of simultaneous and diverse paths that we took; rather than a top-down schedule of speakers, we turned the conference on it’s head, making the participants the speakers, and the leaders the listeners. In this way, everyone who participated offered what only they could offer, and got exactly what they needed.

Facebook + “How to…” Thinking = the New Social Learning

According to Bandura’s old model of Social Learning, people learn through observing others’ behavior, attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviors. “Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

The new Social Learning lives at the crossroads of social media, online collaboration, communities of interest and shared quests for knowledge.

We have already experienced it when we googled “How to do ….” and found a teenager explaining it on youtube, an academic’s writing on wikipedia and a forum of people who all have the same question on their mind. But what if we used this model to formalize an organization’s approach to training?

Set up Social Learning in organizations with Jeffer’s 4x4: four key elements, and four questions for each.

Strategic Intent

• Where are we going?
• What do you want to accomplish?
• Who are our sponsors?
• What will success look like?

The Platform

• What technical platform will you set up or use?
• How will we generate initial interest?
• Who can get a visually compelling brief posted?
• Who will moderate the online forums?

Power to the People

• Are you fine with letting the people decide?
• Will you endorse or compensate the champions?
• Could you pull in external experts or interest groups?
• How does the activity fit into job roles, performance reviews, careers?

Keeping it Real

• How can you include face-to-face, live events?
• Are there ways to incorporate outputs of live events into the forums?
• What is the balance of time between people events and online events?
• How can you encourage self-organizing, pop-up, face-to-face group events?

The old Social Learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, and environmental influences.

The new Social Learning relies on people’s innate curiosity, platforms for exchange, and constant answering of the question, “how will I …?”.

People learn more when they know why the topic is important, what to expect and how the process will run. Common sense. Inspirational training is about creating a memorable experience for people – no matter how it is done, trainers need to first cover the Why and the What.

Why

As reasonable as it may seem, if the learner knows “why” he or she is supposed to learn something and the reason makes sense to—is valued by—the learner, the probability of learning increases. The trainer’s job is to make the learner ready to take in new information. The key is to show what’s in it for the learner.

Research in which different learner groups received instruction with and without a meaningful “why” produced different learning results. In the research studies, “why” is frequently represented by the terms “expectancy value” or “task value,” referring to what the learners perceive investing in the learning effort offers them. Groups with strong rationales that convincingly explained how the learners would benefit from the instruction paid closer attention and retained what they had learned more accurately. This appeared to be true regardless of the type of learner. The clearer and more meaningful the “why” offered, the better and more long lasting the learning.

What

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up someplace else.” This is true also of learning. Have you ever been in a class in which the presenter wandered aimlessly through the material? You sat there trying to figure out where this person was heading, and felt lost. Research on learning demonstrates the value of clarifying to the learners what it is they will be able to do by the end of the lesson, module, or course. Such early information acts as a set of guideposts or a map. The clearer and more meaningful it is for the learners, the higher the probability they will learn it.

However, this should not be confused with provision of specific instructional objectives at the front end of a course when the objectives may be meaningless to the learners. Studies done on “specific instructional objectives,” their use, and their placement in instruction had confusing and contradictory results.

Adapted from Telling Ain’t Training, from www.astd.org, which just launched a second edition.