Digital Transformation

What Japanese companies need to know about ecommerce in Europe

I was browsing in a second-hand bookshop in my neighbourhood recently – with some difficulty as most of the floor was covered in boxes of newly purchased books. This led to a conversation with the owner about he managed his stock. I said I supposed that he put online the stock that he did not have room to display. He replied he did not have a website – he had tried to use e-commerce during the pandemic but it proved to be unprofitable.

He found he could not compete with Amazon and Amazon’s second book arm, Abe Books, in terms of search engine rankings. He could sell his books via Abe Books, but there is fierce price competition and if the book is not rare, the margins are very small.

As I write this, I am watching a British online art auction. Almost all British art and antique auctions are now online, since the pandemic forced them to switch – and these auctions are now consolidated on a website called saleroom.com, which also has auctions from continental Europe and the USA. Buyers have returned to the auction room in person too – and I would certainly prefer to see art and antiques in person before bidding. For signed art by known artists with known provenance, it is of course less of a risk.

On the other hand, a son of a friend of mine has become very rich selling online, even though his products are cheap, no-brand, highly commoditised products – for example lint removers – and are manufactured in China. The secret to his success is his total obsession with data – even when he is on holiday he is checking sales volumes and competitor prices and ratings and tweaking his pricing and his social media advertising.

Many B2C companies in the UK have become entirely online, with no physical retail presence. This is partly because the overheads, particularly energy costs, have shot up recently, as well as labour shortages. But the most successful b2c online businesses started with a physical shop, to establish their brand.

It’s no surprise then that one of the most cited barriers for Japanese companies in a recent JETRO survey, particularly small-medium sized businesses, to growing their e-commerce sales in Europe, is their lack of brand recognition. For Japanese companies who are already selling overseas via e-commerce, the second largest concern after lack of information about overseas markets is the difficulty in increasing brand awareness overseas – even for the larger companies.

Over 20% of the Japanese companies in the JETRO survey wanted to expand their e-commerce sales to Europe. If physical presence in Europe is not possible, then the digital first solution would be to hire a European specialist marketing agency. If you have the budget and a strong brand, they can run advertising and social media campaigns for you. For smaller budgets, or a commoditized or B2B product, then a smaller local agency can recommend specialist consolidated EC websites, analyse your sales and marketing data and make recommendations on pricing and product positioning.

This article by Pernille Rudlin first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in May 2023

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Saving Britain’s SMEs

I was dismayed to find that the Japanese restaurant in the London station I regularly use to eat at before catching my train, or to buy a bento, has started closing at 6pm, and is for takeaways only. A change in fire and safety regulations had caused it to close down for a month, and only reopen in a limited way.

The previous day I ate at another Japanese restaurant, in Slough, a town an hour west of London. It had changed hands since my last visit, and is now run by Filipinos. The staff at the hotel I was staying in mostly seemed to be Filipino too. Five years ago, such hotel staff were usually East European, but now Brexit has ended freedom of movement of labour, we are seeing more and more Asian and African nationals coming to Britain to work.

I was surprised at all these changes – but the man behind the counter at the London Japanese restaurant told me this was not a recent development. This made me realise that I had not visited them as regularly as in the past. I am not travelling so often as much of my training is now online, so people working from home, or in other countries can join the sessions.

As a result, I am busier than I have been for many years, but other British small-medium size enterprises (employing up to 249 people) are facing a tough time at the moment. A recent survey showed their confidence is the lowest it has been since the start of the pandemic. They don’t have the resources, especially after the pandemic, to cope with changes in regulations, labour supply, trade with the EU or rising energy prices.

The UK’s SMEs employ 60% of the British workforce– the same percentage as in Japan. Like Japan, the UK’s SMEs have had various kinds of government support through the pandemic and now for the energy crisis. But the government’s energy bill support will halve after March.

As a consequence of this, and the train strikes, the hospitality and retail sectors are particularly gloomy. The strikes are, I hope, a short term problem, but in the longer term, SMEs are having to rethink their business.

I sense a return to face to face happening – both at work and socially. Companies want staff to meet each other, for morale and team building and people want to socialize. But this might happen outside the big cities, rather than forcing everyone to commute in.

The local authority in my region wants to implement 20 minute neighbourhoods – communities where people can walk to and from – within twenty minutes – shops, restaurants, schools and healthcare. Perhaps the Japanese restaurant in the London station will return to its roots. I first ate there when it started in Brighton, a town an hour south of London. I am sure it will be welcomed back by the increasing numbers of hybrid workers living there.

This article by Pernille Rudlin first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in March 2023

A second winter of discontent for Britain

Britain is going through another “winter of discontent”, of multiple strikes. The description comes from a soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Richard III and has been used whenever social or political unrest coincides with dark, cold, wet British winters.

I remember the last, most famous “winter of discontent”, of 1978/9, when there were widespread strikes against government imposed wage restrictions. It was a year or so after my family returned from five years in Japan. Britain felt very inconvenient and full of conflict after the smooth-running life we had in Japan.

One of the positive impacts that Japanese companies such as Nissan and Toyota had on the UK in the 1980s was to introduce multi-skilling and one company union representation in return for more secure jobs with better working conditions. Many other companies adopted these practices and for decades we had far fewer strikes and disputes.

It feels like we have regressed back to the 1970s. This time the disputes are primarily about pay but also changes to working practices, and a worry that these will lead (or have led) to worsening working conditions and insecure employment.

For example, the rail union is concerned that driver-only trains, where the driver has to operate the doors as well as drive the train, will lead to compulsory redundancies. The rail management are saying that there will still be staff on the train, but they will be able to focus more on passenger safety and ticket inspection, if they do not have to operate the doors as well.

I recently travelled into London on an airport bus (because the trains were on strike) and observed the driver of the bus having to load everyone’s suitcases, check everyone’s tickets and then drive the bus. All tickets had a QR code, but he was checking them manually. Although the digital ticketing system could tell him where passengers were going and where passengers needed to be picked up, he still double-checked our itineraries with us. It seemed to me he was having to do too much, without supporting technology, so missed the fact that one passenger had booked a different bus, and he also placed some of the suitcases in the wrong part of the luggage hold.

A recent exposé of the UK warehouse of a large online fashion chain revealed similar problems. Employees had a heavy monitor strapped to their wrists telling them where they had to go next. The monitor would also alert managers when an employee was not hitting their targets. Yet the employees were having to walk the equivalent of a half marathon during a gruelling 12-hour shift. This is despite the fact that there are robots which can do a similar job, as I saw in a vast Honda warehouse in Belgium, nearly 30 years’ ago.

British technology investment has been very short term, focused on cutting labour costs rather than looking at how technology can be used to improve people’s working lives. I hope Japan’s digital transformation fares better, and that again Britain can learn from it.

This article by Pernille Rudlin first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in January 2023

The value of reconnecting

Looking back over 2022, I realise this has been a year of reconnecting, both personally and for work, as no doubt it has been for people all over the world. It has made me realise that while I enjoy my own company, I need to be able to connect face to face to others, to feel self-worth and vitality.

My family and friends live all around the world, and I had kept in touch with them, through Facebook and email, even before the pandemic. This year, visiting them in person for the first time in several years, I saw a big difference in wellbeing between those who are living near family, and have made friends in their community and those who moved away from friends and did not make any new friends. For the latter, now their family has grown up and moved away, they told me they feel not only lonely, but that they are living a worthless, selfish life.

In my work, too, there is no doubt that face to face training is preferable to online. It is hard, even if participants keep their webcam on, to gauge whether what I am saying is helping them and also to gain insights from them.

This need to collaborate to add value at work is apparent from research that has been done on executives in top global companies, by the IT Services Marketing Association. It shows that over 70% of executives are more interested than before the pandemic in collaborating with their IT suppliers to innovate and digitally transform their companies. The Japanese executives stood out as having an even higher interest in supplier collaboration than the global average.

This is presumably a legacy of Japan’s more group-oriented culture, and the ecosystems that have built up in Japan’s supply chains over the years. In more individualistic cultures such as Britain and the USA, suppliers and customers have been less collaborative and are more antagonistic towards each other.

One of the friends I reconnected with this year, a German film director I had not seen in 20 years, has made a film about a seaside community near where I live in the UK, during the 2019 Brexit negotiations. The film followed a group of dancers, comedians, singers and magicians who put on a variety show throughout the summer, and also a crab fisherman.

Although the performers were all British, they lived an internationally connected life and two of them moved to Spain as a consequence of Brexit. The crab fisherman worked by himself. His son did not want to follow him into the business. He said he had voted to leave the EU, because he felt the UK should not integrate with Europe on social or political issues.

My German friend is convinced that Britain has begun to realise that going it alone is not good for our wellbeing and is predicting that Britain will want to re-join the EU soon. I am not so sure, but I hope he is right.

This article by Pernille Rudlin first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in December 2022

Hitachi expands “job type” system to cover all employees, domestic + overseas

Hitachi has been heading in the direction of unifying its Japan and ex-Japan human resources systems for some years now, so switching all Japan-hired staff to the more Western style “job type” system, away from seniority based promotion, was to be expected. But it is nonetheless a radical step for one of Japan’s biggest companies. If other Japanese companies are able to follow suit, this would help remove one of the most significant hidden barriers to non-Japanese and other “diverse” people being able to rise to more senior roles in the headquarters.

Most Japanese multinationals make a distinction between “proper” staff – hired in Japan, straight from university, with no job descriptions, on a general track which is influenced by seniority and the promise of lifetime employment and possibility to reach the very top of the company – and “contract” staff – those with job descriptions who are usually hired mid-career and have no job security or prospects of promotion. Those employees hired outside Japan are seen as being in the latter category.

Fujitsu has applied the “job type” system to 90% of its Japanese employees from April 2022. NEC is introducing the system to its senior management from April 2023 and expanding to the rest of the Japan hired staff from 2024. NTT finished introducing it to all management staff in 2021/2.

In Hitachi‘s case it became a necessity to do this, because of its major overseas acquisitions of ABB power grids and GlobalLogic, bringing in more than 100,000 overseas employees into the group. As of October 2022 the ratio of non-Japanese in Hitachi’s board of directors was 18% and the company aims to increase this to 30% in the mid to long term.

It’s not surprising that it is Japan’s technology and IT companies that are pioneering this. Such a move is an important precondition for digital transformation – it will make it easier to hire specialists such as AI engineers and data scientists, who would expect higher remuneration than would be available under the old generalist track, seniority based system.

Mitsubishi Corporation – dealing with the Black Ship of digital transformation

Miura Hiroaki, the General Manager of Mitsubishi Corporation’s IT department (and formerly in charge of IT in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region), has a series in the Nikkei Business magazine on digital transformation at Mitsubishi Corporation. He joined Mitsubishi Corporation in 1996 and like me, was trained as a new member of staff to pick up the group fixed line phone within two rings and answer it correctly – with the team name, not your own. “Fixed-line phones were not just a means of communication, but also played a part in employee education and guidance. The mentality of abolishing this was unthinkable” he says. But Mitsubishi Corporation did, in 2019.

The only way to deal with the anger that followed the abolition of fixed line phones was to build trust, he explains. He remembered what one of his mentors had told him about building trust – to take someone’s feelings seriously, and to laugh together. So he listened patiently to all the anger, which gradually dissipated.

As well as remembering the words of his mentor, he also found revisiting Prince Shotoku’s 17 article constitution, drafted in the 7th century, useful. He sees the statement in it that “harmony is valuable” as being misinterpreted by him and others in Japanese society – that people should try to understand the other person’s point of view, without arguments. Instead, it proposes the idea that “we should always build solid trust so that we can argue with each other in times of crisis”. Miura’s view is that Japan has suffered as a national power in the 1990s and 2000s from not discussing important issues enough.

IT departments should be at the forefront of change and debate, but “the reality is Japanese corporate IT departments are being overwhelmed by having to maintain obsolete systems, suffering from a shortage of human resources, and being driven into a difficult position in terms of their relationships with employees.”

Miura also found Mitsubishi’s corporate principles an important touchstone, and driving force for change – social contribution, fair play, and a global perspective. They have more absolute value, he argues, than just blindly adopting global standards. Bezo’s view that “good intentions don’t work, mechanisms do”, are not appropriate for Japanese companies. Mitsubishi Corporation’s predecessors faced up to and adapted to the disruptive Black Ships of Western globalization before, in the Meiji Era, and will do so again.

Japanese digital transformation in Europe

The digital transformation being undertaken by so many Japanese companies is beginning to have an impact on their European operations. One of my longstanding clients has notified me that their European HR and Learning & Development function in the UK has been outsourced to a company in India and the UK staff have been made redundant. I suspect this is not just happening in Europe but globally, as the company has divested many of its subsidiaries and is keen to consolidate and digitize the administrative functions of the remaining businesses.

Several other UK subsidiaries of Japanese companies which had a regional coordination or regional sales function have transferred these functions to EU based subsidiaries. This was partly in response to Brexit, but it has also provided an opportunity to restructure their businesses. Some have become branches of Japan HQ or of the EU subsidiary, and still retain regional coordination functions and staff, funded by management service fees.

Those that have continued as incorporated subsidiaries have found that although their turnover has dropped, their profitability has improved, partly due to the reduction in headcount but also because they are able to focus on their UK business, without having to carry the costs for coordinating across the region.

I have seen the same influences improving the profitability of my own business this year. A few years’ ago, I transferred my EU business to my German partner, so I no longer have to bear the costs and complexity of coordinating it. This and implementing some new, user friendly, cloud-based accounting software meant that I didn’t need to pay for a bookkeeper to come in once a month.

The pandemic pushed much of my training delivery online, permanently, which has meant it can reach a wider audience, so the contract sizes are larger than before. My main overheads are now software and IT related, not travel expenses or paying locally based subcontractors.

Costs have also come down because I stopped my membership of various networking groups – partly because during the pandemic there were no in-person networking events to go to, but also because I was getting enough business from existing customers or through online enquiries, so there was no need to find new leads.

From my experience of working in or for Japanese multinationals over the past 30 years, I suspect that these changes will prove to be cyclical. Individual subsidiaries will start to ignore the global outsourced administrative functions and quietly build up their own local capability again. Then to avoid duplication of costs, a regional function will be revived.

My overheads are beginning to increase too. I’ve started renting an office, as I find my home office is too distracting, and it is good for my physical and mental wellbeing to walk to work. I may even re-join some networking groups, because after all, the point of digital transformation is not just to cut costs, but to innovate. And that is best done by meeting new people, in person, who have fresh perspectives.

This article by Pernille Rudlin first appeared in the Teikoku Databank News in September 2022

Ukraine – winning the digital communication war

A week before Russia invaded Ukraine, I received an email from two Ukrainians working for a Japanese technology company in Lviv, enquiring about the training I do, and asking for a meeting. I was aware even then of rising tensions in the region, but thought it best to respond as I would normally do, and we arranged an online meeting for the next week.

Unsurprisingly, the meeting was cancelled. When I replied to their cancellation email by asking them what we could do to help, they said “keep telling people what is happening here.” They had already grasped the importance of communication in 21^st century warfare.

I have to confess I had not paid much attention to what was happening in Ukraine up until then in terms of my own business. I had been aware of the Maidan uprising and the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, especially as I knew that the brother of the Ukrainian HR manager at one of my Japanese clients had been fighting in the Ukrainian army.

I assumed Japanese investment in Ukraine would be limited, and mostly automotive related, but the contact from the Japanese technology company alerted me to the fact that there was a technology cluster in Lviv, with many IT related companies and technology start-ups. Indeed Hitachi, through their recent acquisition of American software engineering services provider GlobalLogic, turned out to have over 7,000 employees in Ukraine.

The reasons for this boom in IT related services in Ukraine become clear on reading the latest JETRO survey of Japanese companies in Europe. This showed that Japanese corporate interest in investing in digital transformation technology is second only to their interest in investing in carbon reduction technology in Europe.

37% of Japanese companies in Europe are already using digital technologies. This rises to over 50% in the case of Japanese companies in central and Eastern Europe, where it is possible to find digitally skilled employees at a lower cost than in the West.

The impact of a digitally sophisticated population is certainly being felt in the current war. Not only have Russian websites been hacked, but it seems to us in Western Europe that Ukraine is winning the social media communication war at least. In between the harrowing footage of bombing and killing, we have been in awe of the dark humour and cheerful bravery in the videos Ukrainians are sharing of their farmers removing tanks with tractors and mines with their bare hands, while still smoking a cigarette.

The communication skills of Ukrainians and in particular their President Zelensky, help Europeans, with our own memories of wars, dictators and invasions, to empathise with them. In the UK, one of our TV channels has been showing the comedy series that Zelensky appeared in, as a history teacher who was elected President. The storyline shows how he won popular support, after one of his young students filmed his passionate and swear laden anti-corruption speech on their smartphone and posted it on Facebook.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 13th April 2022

Learning from lockdown: What entertainment at a distance taught me about teaching at a distance

I’ve often felt that what I do as a trainer was similar to a stand-up comedy routine. Not so much that I try to make people laugh (although I do) but that I use the same tricks of the trade as a stand-up comedian – a core idea running through, the seemingly irrelevant anecdote that ends up making a key point, the call back at the end that reassures me and the audience they’ve been paying attention. I know I’ve had a good session if I’ve hit my marks – not in the literal meaning of standing in the right spot, but getting the rhythm and timings right, covering all the material, sensing the key messages have chimed with participants.

Watching some of my favourite entertainers cope with social distancing has been illuminating. It has shed light on the dirty secrets of how far entertaining or teaching at a distance can replace getting together in germ filled rooms.

The five dirty secrets of education and entertainment

I knew, but had not articulated, these dirty secrets to myself. I have struggled for around 20 years to make online learning and knowledge sharing work, believing it to be the future, but at the same time I kept having misgivings.

One of my favourite stand-up comedians, Stewart Lee, toured a show a couple of years ago called Content Provider – the brutal digital term for entertainers and teachers. As Lee pointed out in that show, the main way entertainers make money these days is by going on tour delivering the content in person, not from digital or hard copy sales. TV can be a steady earner of course, but Lee was never mainstream enough to attract consistently big bucks. He even supplements the revenue from tickets by buying up second-hand copies of his CDs and DVDs from charity shops and eBay and selling them in person at a profit in the auditorium after the show.

But, as he acknowledged in his most recent show, touring is exhausting, particularly as you get older. My fellow trainer in Germany in a recent Zoom call said she felt more relaxed than she had in some time, despite the lockdown, because she no longer had to travel so much for work. It’s not just the physical but also the mental exhaustion – you wonder if the same old shtick is going to cut it anymore.

So our training team is now discussing what the best way is to deliver our content, without so much travel, resilient to any social distancing, but still make money and stay fresh. Which is why we need to confront the dirty secrets head on.

My recent career has been in providing training to adult learners, but I come from a globally extensive, long line of teachers of all age groups. From talking with them about their experiences, I’m pretty sure that most of these dirty secrets apply to children’s education too.

The good news is that there are plenty of technologies when teaching or entertaining online that we are being forced to adopt which are worth continuing with even after we can all be in the same room again. The future is going to be a blend of online and offline presence.

The biggest dirty secret is that it actually costs quite a lot in terms of effort, time and therefore money to create good learning and entertainment that works at a distance. And yet the expectation is that it should be cheaper.

Why distance costs so much is due to the other dirty secrets:

1. We feed off an audience

This is why teachers are struggling to respond to the current crisis. They know that just slapping up slides online with your notes, or teaching a normal lesson via a webcam and providing a recording of it will not create effective learning experiences. But they don’t have the time to do much else.

The issue is not just participant engagement, but that bouncing off an audience is where teachers and entertainers get their energy from. You can spot when an audience is not engaged when you are in a room with them, and adjust accordingly.

When TV entertainers like John Oliver or Stephen Colbert initially tried to do their shows without live audiences, the result was very flat. You could see the desperation in their eyes. It was easier for team chat shows that transmitted live like Channel 4’s The Last Leg. They had already made use of Twitter in real time pre-COVID-19 to get audience suggestions and jokes from beyond the studio, so they made even more use of this to spark off their own interactions in the studio.

Even non-live shows are finding ways to use online tools to engage with their audiences – Graham Norton’s Red Chair stories are now delivered by audience members from their own homes, via their webcams. Many comedy chat shows have found that doing short interviews via webconferencing with celebrities, in their pyjamas, with pets, kids and other props, showing human frailties, can recreate at least some of the warmth and humour they crave.

For teachers and trainers the most obvious online tool to create engagement is polling. Polls can make sure people are paying attention, but also create a connection between participants and give the host a flavour of the needs and views of the audience. Webcams, Q&A and chat functions all help put the life back in to webinars – and yes, why not bring in props and pets too.

If you are creating learning that people consume in their own time, it still needs to be interactive – I’ve incorporated polls, quizzes and self-assessments into our online learning modules.

2. But they’re not that into you

If you haven’t got a live audience you can interact with, you need to keep it short, and break it up. Graham Norton’s TV chat show used to be 45 minutes long pre-Covid, but is now a tightly edited 30 minutes of a monologue, a brief interview, some music, funny clips and the Red Chair.

I view the online equivalent of our 3-hour classroom-based training course as being a 1.5 hour webinar – and I put a break in half way just as I would for a classroom based session. Similarly, our 6 hour, one day course can be delivered as two 1.5 hour webinars on separate occasions. The online modules can be taken in the meantime, allowing the second webinar to be more of a review and discussion.

It’s generally considered that 45 minutes is the maximum you can expect an adult to pay attention. I’d assume it’s even less for children and for those of us who are used to consuming social media in short videos and 280 character chunks.

But schools do seem very wedded to the idea that a lesson should take 35 to 45 minutes and that it’s an important life skill that children stay still and quiet for this time. I really resented being called into school to be told off for the fact that my son refused to sit nicely on the story mat for half an hour aged 5 or that he’d yell out the answer to a question without waiting until the teacher called on him. My suggestions that it was unreasonable to expect children of that age to stay still without some kind of interactivity, and that they would be better off asking open ended rather than factual questions did not go down well. But then I regularly got thrown out of my Japanese school aged 7 for talking in class. Japanese schools are even more one-way information teaching machines than British schools. Ironically, my son’s school reports now complain that he’s too quiet.

So 10-20 minutes for an online “class” is surely more realistic than expecting children to sit through a teacher talking on a webcam on Microsoft Teams for 40 minutes. This seems to be what my husband and his fellow teachers are now doing – everyone logs in, the teacher asks how they are and has a chat, explains the assignment and then lets everyone log out again and do the assignment in their own time. Getting them to hand the assignment in seems to be a whole other problem, however.

Realising that my audience is not that into me either, I recently re-edited all our online e-learning content so no video/screencast that I have narrated is more than 10 minutes where possible. The most popular YouTube video I have narrated is “Japanese Business Mysteries explained in 5 minutes”, so I will be doing more of those in the future.

3. They are paying for the certificate, not for the love of knowledge

But that brings me to the third dirty secret. Not only are they not that into you, they’re not that into your content either. They’re either learning because it’s compulsory or to impress their employers. If they’re school children or students, the main motivator is passing the exam.

This is where the analogy with entertainment ends, I suppose – we consume entertainment for insights, emotions and to know we are not alone. There is no certificate for this but therefore there is a limit to how much a person will pay to be entertained, and they are always looking for ways to get their kicks for free. Which is why I sympathised when Stewart Lee confiscated a mobile phone from an audience member trying to film his routine at the last gig of his I went to.

Teachers at my son’s school have been dutifully setting further reading, challenging maths problems and suggesting resources to prepare for university for the year group affected by the cancellation of the UK national A level exams. Only work before March 18^th will count towards the final grade, to ensure that children who are not able to access online learning are not penalised.

Despite the teachers’ efforts, I believe most engagement from that year group is through an app that one of them developed which automates logging in to Microsoft Teams – and occasionally they edit the message so it looks personal.

The only pure online training courses that sell are the ones that relate to compliance and are compulsory, or certify that you have acquired IT skills. This is the kind of knowledge acquisition that can be proved through online multiple-choice tests or online exercises. These courses generate a certificate for the learner and lots of lovely data on the company’s Learning Management System, to show what percentage of staff have taken the courses, passed the tests or said their work efficiency has improved, and then they can generate some kind of Return on Investment on training budgets to keep the CFO happy.

Individual learners are willing to pay for a certificate they can add to their CVs but otherwise expect content to be free. Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have a very high dropout rate. Coursera, an online learning platform mainly for university courses, has a business model based on exactly this understanding of the learner mentality. The University of Tokyo course on Japanese art and literature I took was free but they send you guilt provoking emails if you don’t complete each module within a certain time. If you want a certificate of passing and completion which you can load onto your LinkedIn profile, you have to pay. And so, although I took the course for the love of acquiring knowledge – reader, I paid.

4. It’s the stupid technology, stupid

Coursera have done a great job of making the user interface as easy as possible. This is where some of the benefits of being online come in. So long as firewalls and bandwidth do not intervene, it should mean greater accessibility to knowledge for people all around the world. Coursera videos are no more than 10 minutes long, each with a short quiz at the end to make sure you were paying attention. As well as the slides and a video of the professor giving the lecture, there is a transcript with a cursor indicating where the professor has got to in the lecture underneath the video. So if you haven’t quite understood, or your attention wandered, you can check back, rewind and pass the test.

Non-native speakers of English have been far more enthusiastic about e-learning and webinars than native speakers, in my experience. They like the multiple ways to absorb the information – slides, transcripts, aurally and offline. Native English speakers can help during live webinars by summarising key points in the chat function. The host also has far more control over shutting up domineering fluent speakers and making sure the shyer people are brought into the conversation – including through private chat if they’d rather not speak out publicly.

But – not everyone has the technology, bandwidth or budget to participate equally. Teachers at my husband’s well-funded private school have apparently broken down in tears from spending hours marking work online, only to see it disappear into the ether.

Maybe it’s their fault for not backing up, maybe the school has terrible connectivity, who knows. But it brings it home that things must be a hundred times worse for schools and homes where good technology and connectivity is just not affordable or people don’t have the technological knowhow to find solutions.

I realise this article may attract a lot of snark from specialists who have been studying interactive learning design for years, and know way more than I do about how to design learning paths and interfaces. In my defence, I did actually manage a team of people with that knowledge and AI programming skills, way back in the day. Our aim was to get away from directed learning and move towards self-directed learning. That is still my goal.

I attended various learning technology conferences too – where all too often a seminar entitled “making xml work in a corporate learning environment” or some such would end in a spectacular technology fail and blue screens all round. So yes, properly designed learning experiences are available online, but we are still a long way from the user or the technology being smart enough.

5. Fear of eating ourselves

This is the deepest darkest dirty secret. We worry that if we do too good a job with online content and the technology does improve enough, we will no longer be needed. Teachers and entertainers want to be needed, even loved – and this is what we get paid for. This is known in business as self-cannibalization – making a cheaper version of your product or service, which then kills your lifeline.

But we should not despair, there are reasons why eating yourself doesn’t work.

The social experience

If audiences can get the same experience from a CD, DVD or book, why do they continue to go to gigs, concerts, shows? Partly it’s the social experience – the thrill of being in a crowd of people who are going through the same emotions. The closest I have seen during lockdown to recreating the social experience of a concert is TimsTwitterListeningParty – where Tim Burgess of the 1990s group The Charlatans sets an album for everyone to listen to and tweet about in real time – but the real joy is that the original artist also tweets about the making of the record or photos of the band, in synchronicity to each track being listened to.

It’s also for the social experience that people still want to attend classes, despite moaning about being away from their real work. Even if children say they hate school, they want to be with their friends – and it’s usually because of a bad experience of being with others, such as bullying, that makes them hate school the most, rather than the teaching. And of course the teacher can do a lot to set the tone and clamp down on bullying.

Squirrel!

Preferring to be in a room with others in order to learn is also an acknowledgement that if you’re not trapped in a class, you are very likely going to get distracted.

Also, in the corporate world, I have found that even when I was on the receiving end of poor-quality training, just being away from the desk and having time to reflect had a value in its own right.

The best concerts, exhibitions or plays are where you feel fully immersed – “lost in another world.” It’s not so easy to do that at home where daily chores and worries intrude.

Applicability

A close second to being bullied as a reason for hating school is that it’s “boring and pointless”. In other words, children cannot see how what they are learning applies to their own life.

Many of the TV shows that have done well in the UK during lockdown are ones which allow us to live vicariously (and maybe thereby learn about) cultural experiences – Race around the World, The Repair Shop, or Grayson Perry’s Art Club

But not all teachers or subjects translate well to video, and learners still need to be able to interact with the teacher so that they can understand how to apply the knowledge to their individual situation. You can give individual attention and co-create online, but again numbers need to be limited to about the same as a classroom size, to allow proper 1:1 interaction.

Authenticity

The audience or learner wants authenticity – they can spot a mile off when a teacher or entertainer is phoning it in. This is why a lot of e-learning is so dry – actors voicing narratives about how to be a leader just do not resonate. The most popular YouTube videos are where the person is narrating in real time as they play a game. The first video that came up when I was searching for help on how to cut my son’s hair was a hairdresser in a barber shop cutting hair while explaining his technique.

We insist at Japan Intercultural Consulting that all our facilitators have authentic experience of working in Japanese organisations and also have lived in the counterpart culture. We also encourage our facilitators to tell stories from their own experiences during the training. Our participants need to feel that we have “been in your shoes”. But the only way we can be sure this happens is to interact with participants, to understand their experiences.

Apprenticeship

Parents are struggling trying to do home schooling and work at the same time. Schools were invented partly so people could go to work. Before universal education, only rich people could afford home tutoring, which then perpetuated the professional elite path of going to university to become a lawyer or clergyman.

The only way to work from home and teach your children at the same time if you are not rich enough to afford a home tutor is to teach them through the work you are doing. This was how craftsmen in the past educated their children – they were apprenticed to their parent or to another “master”. The modern-day equivalent would be getting your children to alphabetize your files, or helping you design a spreadsheet for your sales data – or in my case, getting them to edit and add subtitles to my videos.

Japanese companies are still resistant to classroom-based learning and even more so to working remotely, particularly for soft skills. The reason for this is that most Japanese companies are family style in mentality – learning is done through apprenticeship and on the job learning.

Extreme cleaning

I admit I already loved Tidying up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, but it wasn’t just because it added to my Japanese cultural expertise – my obsession with TV decluttering shows stretches back to House Doctor in the 1990s and lockdown has impelled me to binge watch Call the Cleaners. There is something very cathartic and inspiring about watching other people confront their fears and phobias, purge and then move on with their lives, and this is what I needed to do with online learning.

Although we may have a sick feeling in our stomachs about the threat of technology, teachers and trainers will never have to eat themselves. So long as we are authentic and know what we are talking about, then we can help the learner apply the knowledge for themselves, and recreate experiences. We can set scientific experiments, maths problems and history essays to be done away from the classroom, in the knowledge that they need a teacher to guide them and check the result.

If, like now, we can only teach online, then rather than trying to dump a mass of information online or learn how to build an interactive module, we should focus on creating good offline assignments that guide the learner as they explore, apply their new knowledge and recreate experiences for themselves. But learner numbers will be limited if this is to be supervised and checked properly. Ultimately, the cost per learner in terms of time and salaries is not going to be much cheaper than a classroom-based experience if the assignment is well framed and resources are properly curated.

A teacher or entertainer in a germ-infested room full of people is still the most cost effective and emotionally impactful way of transmitting knowledge, insight and experience. Our enforced isolation as teachers and entertainers should be a time to declutter, focus on what sparks joy and maybe add one or two new gadgets into the freed-up space.

Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2024-11-29.

Category: Digital Transformation

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