MWL Newsletter No 37

News and articles about Modern Workplace Learning (MWL) selected by Jane Hart for the week
22-28 October 2017.


From around the Web

Surgeons Are Using Social Media to Share and Learn New Skills  Christopher G. Myers, Yusef Kudsi and Amir A. Ghaferi, 27 October 2017

“Learning from others’ experiences is an important aspect of professional development in surgery. That’s why academic surgical departments across the globe hold weekly Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conferences that gather surgeons together to review particular cases and share ideas for improving their practice … Research has even found that surgeons in solo practice, with less opportunity to interact with their peers, scored lower on the American Board of Surgeons Maintenance of Certification examination (MOCEX) than surgeons in group practice — unless they reported engaging more often in socializing and speaking with other colleagues. Yet, as the field of surgery has grown — both in number of surgeons, and in their dispersion across countries — surgeons are less able to rely on casual hallway conversations, conferences, or other informal knowledge sharing strategies to learn from each other and stay sufficiently up to date with new techniques or practices … Enter social media. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have emerged as powerful tools for keeping surgeons connected.”


All management is change management  Robert H Schaeffer, Harvard Business Review, 26 October 2017

“Today’s change management movement has arisen in response to the difficulty companies have had in making constant, rapid improvement a routine aspect of work. Efforts to overcome this have led to the bifurcation of organizational life into ordinary times and change management times. As an increasing number of people take on the role and mindset of the change management professional, instead of striving to make innovation and improvement routine, they naturally encourage the treatment of change as something special. Managers start to view change as an extraordinary event that must be dealt with using change management techniques and special skills. And then it’s easy for people to become resistant to change.

What needs to change is that thinking. Leaders should view change not as an occasional disruptor but as the very essence of the management job.”


You Could Be Damaging Your Career If You Like To Tell Stories In Your Presentations, New Data Shows Mark Murphy, Forbes, 26 October 2017

“For the past few years, hordes of putative experts have encouraged business presenters to employ more storytelling and less data. ‘Data is boring,’ they say, ‘but when you tell a good a story, people get emotionally involved and connected.’  ..  What you can see from the chart is that in IT, Finance, and Operations, more people actually prefer data to stories. So if you’re trying to convince people, especially executives, in those areas, you should seriously rethink the whole storytelling approach.”


From the MWL Magazine

How to become a Modern Professional Learner

In the modern workplace there is no longer such a thing as a job for a life – only a life of jobs – so it’s up to everyone to continuously update their knowledge, skills and productivity and become an independent modern professional learner.

 


MWL Workshop

Designing, Delivering and Managing Modern Learning Experiences for the Workplace

6 November – 22 December 2017

There will always be a need for a L&D department to organise learning events and activities – but these just need to be more relevant and appealing for appealing for today’s workforce.  This 7-week online workshop will help you consider a number of ways to design, deliver and manage modern learning experiences.

 


Jane Hart
Director, Centre for Modern Workplace Learning

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