When adults need to learn something new, they either welcome training/coaching/consulting opportunities – or they shy away from them. There’s not much middle ground.

When we look at the facts about formal learning, it’s no wonder there’s a divide like this. Whether we happen to be people who enjoy it – or not – formal training, coaching and consulting just don’t seem to improve people’s real-world performance of most things. Real life situations have so many more variables in them than even the most engaging workshops or simulations. People have a hard time translating great new information into great new performance.

The training, coaching, or consulting outcomes we set are often poorly realized because once we’ve transferred our “expertise,” we and the other parties move on. We go back to the real world. This means we’re no longer shoulder-to-shoulder with each other. Then, when clients run into problem situations in the real world – and need some brief, over-the-shoulder support for skilfully applying new principles or routines we’ve suggested – we’re not around. And they fail. The sad part us that clients are often too busy to take time to learn from their failures. So, even if they’ve mastered an acronym that enables them to recite by heart the new principles, new information, or new routines we shared, their performance doesn’t change much. Rats.

Besides hanging our heads or complaining, what can we do about this?

I suggest we make more frequent use of free virtual meeting tools to support clients in “informal” learning environments.

There must be hundreds of ways we can do this! This morning, here are a half-dozen ways I can think of right off the top of my head. I bet you can come up with a half-dozen more!

1. When someone is learning to use a particular piece of software or a complex website, you can do a quick desktop share to demonstrate, specifically, how you use the program or what you find most useful about a particular website. (You could also make a quick screencast and share it asynchronously, if you can’t get together in real-time and share some back-and-forth dialogue while you’re “showing and telling.”)

2. Skip the lectures and the production of accompanying “manuals” and simply publish process “checklists.” Then offer a series of short, conversational virtual meetings to explain/expand the process steps. Be sure to allow sufficient time for the back-and-forth people need to master the sequencing of new routines. Also be sure to allow for time to talk about what’s important to them about making changes to their habits. Everyone needs to establish their own sense of the meaning and purpose – to them – for changing things.

3. Develop a regular 30-minute “mentoring” meeting and use it to troubleshoot specific documents, images, videos, or other “evidence” that a mentee doesn’t know how to respond to as effectively as s/he would like. Call this meeting “Coffee with Susan (or Mike)” and schedule it for the same time every week or two weeks so both mentor and mentee can count on enjoying a cup of coffee while they get smarter about something tricky.

4. Host regular 8-minute virtual brainstorming routines to help clients, coworkers, teammates find new ways to solve specific real-world business problems. Invite the person with the problem to take 3 minutes to describe what it is that has him/her stuck. Turn the description of the situation into a simple question and ask the person with the problem to type that question onto the whiteboard. Then take 5 minutes for everyone participating in the VM to type their ideas onto the whiteboard as quickly as they can think of them. (Or open a Google Document and use it to capture everyone’s responses.) No evaluating, no discussion. No analysis. Just use one – or more – whiteboards to capture ideas as quickly as people spit them out.

Brainstorming works best when there’s little or no cross-talk permitted. Just “popcorn” the ideas aloud and capture the words in text. When 5 minutes is up, quit. Just let the person with the problem take the offerings offline and decide later how to use them. Stop promptly after 5 minutes and let someone else take a turn. Or come back later if you’re in a hurry. Online brainstorming can be a fun and creative “break” that people look forward to if you set a ground rule that you’re going to get in, do it, and get out – without belaboring anything.

5. Create a WIKI or a project team space (using vYew or Wiggio or Basecamp) where people can share their thoughts whenever they have time (asynchronously) and also at a regularly scheduled private live virtual meeting (synchronously).

Give everyone permission to add whatever they like to the online space. Ask a team member who’s not a control freak to “manage” the space so that it doesn’t get too cluttered. (But it’s important not to worry too much about the working-studio-look, either.) Active project spaces are great for just capturing and holding documents, photos, videos and links that people are finding useful and posting them quickly where others can find and use them in their work. It can be helpful to use part of your weekly (online) team meeting to “tour” the project space together and “survey” the riches. Take 5 minutes to hear from whoever parked things in the space during the week to say a few words about what they think is so valuable about the items that they added them to the workspace. If others agree they’re finding something useful, it stays. If not, it goes. Simple housekeeping.

6. Use virtual meetings for OJT (on job training). Set up a rotating schedule of short briefings that trainees/learners can attend. Use short videos or PDF text files to display content that can and will be repeated, but use the whiteboard and text chat and VOIP tools in the virtual meeting space to briefly discuss questions and concerns that come up for trainees/learners as they watch the video and/or read the text file.

Making changes or improving performance requires adults to master new information, new principles and new routines. But learning while we’re working also requires us to create and absorb the purpose of new routines so that we can make the most effective non-routine choices when unexpected or unplanned circumstances occur.

Scheduling a deliberate series of short online meetings based on various OJT learning topics allows trainers, coaches, and consultants to support both formal and informal change processes over the whole span of time it takes people to make lasting changes.

What are some ways YOU could use virtual meetings to support adult learners, clients, and co-workers in their ongoing ‘informal’ change processes?

You don’t have to write a dissertation about it. Just popcorn your ideas out below as comments. Why not use this space to do a little ‘informal’ learning right out in public?

After all, a blog is nothing more than an asynchronous meeting of the minds. N’est-ce-pas?