I think 80/20 is “roughly right”, which is likely good enough for most business executives. I have not seen ANY evidence to indicate that 70-20-10 is anything but good natured guessing from well intentioned practitioners.

Great article Nick,

Alan

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I regard you as an enlightened, thoughtful practitioner of education applied in the corporate world. I have read this blog and am writing in comment.

I believe your assessment of Jarche’s second and third “potholes” is spot on. I share your admonition of Peter Senge (Fifth Discipline (organizational learning), “Organizations don’t learn.” and your assertion “People learn.” I would expand it to people learn from other people. Mentoring would be a useful topic for exploration in a future blog/article. In fact, you might have here the beginning of a series on workplace learning.

Your statement about organizational memory is a relevant, appropriate clarifying follow-on. You could–and should–go off and discuss the crucial nature of organizational memory in another blog/article. Without careful, continuous attention to organizational memory–the collective, captured and applied learning of individuals–the adage about those who ignore history are destined to repeat its mistakes is verified.

Regarding the 80:20/70:20:10 “mantra”, I would offer that searching for its educational-related application probably is not worth the time. I suggest it is simply the application of what is known as the Pareto Principle/Pareto’s Law–Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, 1906–(the 80:20–actually, mathematically it is 82:18– Rule/the Law of the Vital Few) to this arena. Pareto’s Law is such a commonly used rule-of-thumb in business, it makes sense to me that it got applied to learning.

I hope you will continue to make observations like these; perhaps work them into presentations both at HDS and in public.

Sources cited in Jay Cross, Informal Learning, Appendix B (p. 243):

Marcia Connor 2005 75% informal
Bureau of Labor Stats 1996 70% informal
Raybould 2000 85-90% on the job
Dobbs 2000 Ed Dev Center Newton Mass. 1997 70% on job informal
Lloyd 2000 75% informal
eLearning Guild 2005 70% informal
NALL OISE (University of Toronto) 1998 70% informal; from lead researcher, David Livingston, “The major conclusion from this survey is that our organized systems of schooling and continuing education and training are like big ships floating in a sea of informal learning. If these education and training ships do not pay increasing attention to the massive amount of outside informal learning, many of them are likely to sink into Titanic irrelevancy.”