On December 16th, 2010, a team spanning the Cultural Observatory, Harvard, Encyclopedia Britannica, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Google published a paper describing the Culturomics approach online in the journal Science, and at the same time launched the world's first real-time culturomic browser on Google Labs.www.culturomics.org

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What’s fascinating about this field of study is that through data crunching, we can identify how society and human behavior is changing over the years. For instance, in the last 20 years in pop music, more artists are referring to themselves (me, my, I) than they have in the past. 

The ongoing study referred to in the above website has also determined that the English language is 70% larger than it was just 50 years ago! Over 8,000 words were added in the year 2000 alone. Why does that concern us trainers? It’s just one more example of how what people “know to be true” is in constant flux and changing rapidly. It should make you stop, at least for a moment, to ponder if “creating training” is really a smart move.

Perhaps it’s smarter to harness the informal ways that training occurs in the workplace. Perhaps it’s smart to teach people to fish than to provide them with the fish. In other words, perhaps it’s time we concentrate on creating training processes and less on creating training content.