How to design your learning organisation around your learners.

When talking to organisations about learning they tend to say things that sound like:

‘We’d like to provide a better learning experience but we implemented [insert LMS here]’

Or

‘We’d like to do something like that, but we’re not very advanced’

It always feels to me as though these conversations miss the point: no technology will deliver a great learning experience by itself – and in fact you can deliver a great learning experience with no technology. The secret is to put the learner at the heart of the process. Yes, this may sound like common sense – but in fact I have yet to find an organisation that does this wholeheartedly. The sorts of things that prevent them doing this are:

•        Regulatory pressure
•        Conventional Instructional Design
•        An ‘order-taking’ mentality
•        Traditional Training Needs Analysis
•        Top-down thinking
•        The wrong L&D capabilities
•        The need to justify LMS investments

As a consequence it’s actually near impossible for businesses to build the kind of learning organisations they would like to have.

So what would an ideal model look like? The sketch above is an outline answer - it's all about working bottom-up. It suggests the following:

• Start by mapping the desired employee experience, identifying the role that learning & performance support will play. For example you might focus on new starters or first-level leaders. Develop detailed user-journeys by working with members of the target group.
• Use a user-centered learning design process (we recommend the 5Di) to develop the resources and experiences that will best support performance and development.
• Consider options for delivering these resources/experiences. These may be free solutions (such as Slack, WhatsApp) or third-party solutions. Delivery options may not require any new technology (e.g. smartphones or checklists). If you need to procure a solution, evaluate them against their ability to deliver the intended employee experience that you have defined (rather than simply a functional specification). Ensure that the supplier is contractually required to deliver the target UX.
• Build your capabilities around the experiences and resources that you will be required to design and support. For example, you may need digital product managers (for an induction platform), content producers (for short-form video or infographics), graphic designers, marketing professionals (for running campaigns) coaches and actors (for experience design).
• Align your learning organisation with the company strategy, identifying stakeholders who can provide inputs to your ongoing revision or products and services. (These organisational concerns are inputs to the ‘Define’ stage of the 5Di).

Put simply, a lot of organisations fail because they operate in a top-down fashion - they say ‘What’s our strategy? Ok, now let’s build some programmes.’ This also sounds like common-sense but in practice this form of ‘business alignment’ effectively kills the learning organisation, resulting in the all-too-familiar ‘content-dumping’ (push-based) activity and widespread skepticism regarding the value of L&D.

If instead we work from the ‘bottom-up’ - focusing on the needs of employees, and on helping them get the job done, (i.e. applying design-thinking) the elements of engagement, productivity and strategic alignment fall into place.