How can a chief learning officer hope to make informed judgments in this continually expanding networked environment that’s flowing ever faster, spreading power among its members and producing outsized impacts in unpredictable ways? What to do?
One cherished industrial age concept that is proving particularly difficult to let go of is return on investment (ROI). But like Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles, old-school ROI’s day in the sun is waning. In an environment of continuous flow and interaction, there’s a need to consider an emerging metric: return on investment in interaction (ROII). The working definition of ROII is the observable development of capacity and capability to create economic values out of intangibles.
Consultants and smart-aleck MBAs will tell you if you want to sell a big project internally, you’ve got to talk ROI. It’s the language senior managers understand. Being fluent in ROI talk addresses the “hard” tangible returns stemming from an investment in a specific project or capacity. It is supposedly the secret handshake that gets you to the inner circle of those who control budget dollars.
Let’s look at what ROI was, how it needs to be changed and how to recapture its original intent in the network era, in which continuous learning and knowledge work are becoming inseparable. As Steven Forth of the LeveragePoint division of the Monitor Group puts it, “Too many people who talk about the ROI of learning are focused on being precisely wrong rather than directionally correct.”
Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.
The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.
The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.
Understandably, seasoned executives, chief learning officers among them, are having a devil of a time shifting from the industrial age mindset of logic, certainty and bounded constraints to the network gestalt of interaction, self-organization, unpredictability and fewer limits to potential. The pressure is constantly on to meet quarter-to-quarter revenue and earnings targets that in turn accentuate the need to take decisions that support achieving those targets. At the same time, we are shifting into an era in which knowledge work and learning occur where re-engineered business processes collide with a participative and interactive ecology of information flows.
典範轉移（Paradigm shift）又稱範式轉移，這個名詞最早出現於美國科學史及科學哲學家湯瑪斯·孔恩（Thomas Samuel Kuhn）的代表作之一《科學革命的結構》（The Structure of Scientific Revolutions，1962年）裡。這個名詞用來描述在科學範疇裡，一種在基本理論上從根本假設的改變。這種改變，後來亦被應用於各種其他學科方面的鉅大轉變。 典範轉移的例子：免費報紙的出現、寬頻上網的普及、BT技術的出現
