Turning Point - Brief Article

Training & Development, May, 2001

A few years ago, when this magazine turned 50, we published a photo of a 1941 training session at a steel plant in Baltimore. The most striking thing about the photo was and is how little training has changed in 60 years. It shows a flipchart, rows of students, and the teacher up front. What has really changed?

Nothing, and yet everything. At this point you probably think I'm going to round up the usual suspects--technology and capital--and declare them responsible for today's changes in corporate learning. But you would be mistaken. They matter, of course, but there's something more Darwinian going on. Though the classroom ritual has changed little, the field itself has evolved remarkably over the decades. By trial and error, and sometimes through infatuation and disillusionment, the training profession has forced survival-of-the-fittest approaches from such varied sources as behaviorism, civil rights, management theory, systems theory, chaos theory, and countless other influences.

Taking its own advice, the field has demonstrated the characteristics of a healthy organization by travelling various feedback spirals to a state of continuous learning about itself. In this trip around the spiral, training professionals have come face to face with technology, a force that has stopped many in their tracks.

Will autopoesis win out? That's the principle that says that an organism's deepest motivation is to continually renew itself in a way that maintains its own inner nature. Could this be one of those evolutionary turning points when the organism will adapt or die out? Consider the sad case of the Lycopods, a very early plant form that failed to develop seed-making ability. No seeds, no progeny, no future.

It's easy to write about change but difficult to show. We show change in T D magazine with coverage of new thinking and profiles of the field's pioneers (see "Training's New Guard" in this issue). But to really make the point, we've renamed and redesigned the magazine as one more outward sign of the transformation going on in learning. We believe it's time to turn the page.

Patricia A. Galagan

Editor-in-Chief