Having worked with CCL (Center for Creative Leadership) in both Russia and Kazakhstan, who were the originators of the 70-20-10 meme for corporate learning & development many years ago (sometimes written 70\/20\/10 or even 70:20:10), and also being a researcher by training, it isn\u2019t difficult to find out what the 70-20-10 originally meant and was based upon.<\/p>\n
Because I believe it is still widely misunderstood and even misused. And I\u2019ve also realised that my conclusions from 70-20-10, are sometimes different from many people I come across who use it.<\/p>\n
A recent example being the senior HR Manager who told me (and everyone else) that \u2018All training courses should be 70-20-10\u2019. (It turned out he thought that only 10% of a training course should be sitting and listening in the classroom and the rest should be interactive, in itself not necessarily a bad thing. Although he also believed that e-learning and reading books were part of the 20% rather than the 10%).<\/p>\n
Maybe he was extreme in his misconceptions. But as I wrote above, even people I have met who do understand the concept sometimes draw conclusions different to mine. For example, that it means classical training is not useful in developing leaders.<\/p>\n
So to start, what did the original proponents of 70-20-10 actually do and say?<\/p>\n
It was back in the 1980s, and as part of a course on tools for developing effective executives, 191 currently successful senior leaders in different (often global) companies from different countries, were asked where they thought they had learned the skills and competences that led to their success. 616 key learning events were collected (I said I was originally a researcher!) which were collated into 16 categories. 16 is too many to be useful in practice so they were regrouped into 5 distinct sources: learning from challenging assignments, other people, coursework (classical training), adverse situations and personal experiences (outside work). As the idea was to have tools that could be used for development, adverse situations and personal experiences were omitted (25% of the key learning events, so extremely important, but not exactly easy to build into a course), leaving three.<\/p>\n
And to make it easy to remember and use, it was rounded off to:<\/p>\n
Since then a number of other studies, in different countries, companies, levels and groups all give similar sorts of results, reinforcing the general ideas behind the numbers.<\/p>\n
So what are my learnings and conclusions?<\/p>\n
So I think 70-20-10 is a still a great meme after all these years, and we can still learn a lot from it, if used properly!<\/p>\n
It reminds us that:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Having worked with CCL (Center for Creative Leadership) in both Russia and Kazakhstan, who were the originators of the 70-20-10 meme for corporate learning & development many years ago (sometimes written 70\/20\/10 or even 70:20:10), and also being a researcher by training, it isn\u2019t difficult to find out what the 70-20-10 originally meant and was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,5,16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coaching","category-corporate-universities","category-hr-management","category-talent-management","category-workshops-training"],"yoast_head":"\n