Author: Clive Shepherd

In this series of posts, I explore six ways in which learning professionals can realise a transformation in the way that learning and development occurs in their organisations. It builds on the series I posted earlier in the year, in which I set out the six major elements in a vision for change, i.e. learning that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and powerful.
The sixth and last step on the route to transformation is a shift from delivering learning face-to-face to delivery online. There are obvious benefits from learning online in terms of flexibility, as well as savings in terms of time, budget and emissions, but old habits die hard and many learning professionals are finding it hard to make the change.
Of course, not all learning can be brought online while maintaining quality, for example:

• Some interpersonal skills courses require tutors and/or participants to be able to accurately monitor the body language of others.
• Some practical courses require students to interact with equipment in ways that cannot feasibly be simulated online.
• Some courses benefit from the opportunities provided for networking socially.
• Some skills are more authentically practised in the real job environment.

But, as a whole, we tend to exaggerate the extent to which our face-to-face events really need to remain that way. It is worth reflecting on how we consume media in our personal lives. Of the music we listen to, only a small proportion is in a club or concert hall. Of the drama we consume, most is on the TV or in the cinema, not the theatre. Of the sport we watch, the overwhelming majority is on TV. When we do go to a theatre, concert hall or sports stadium, it is a very special event, often one we will remember for a very long time. But for most of us, this is not normal practice.

The benefits

So what effect does pushing the slider from face-to-face to online have on the six elements of our transformation vision?
Aligned: No real impact here.
Economical: There are obvious benefits here, as time and money is saved by removing the need for travel. Learning time also tends to reduce, because there is less of a temptation for course designers to fill a whole day or week with training when the time is not strictly needed.
Scalable: Face-to-face events are constrained in terms of scalability because of the practical limitation of space. Eighty thousand people may have been able to watch the 100m final at the Olympics in London, but hundreds of millions could watch remotely, not only on TV but online. As the providers of massively open online courses have discovered, while a lecture room might be packed to capacity with 100 students, a thousand times more could take part in an online lecture.
Flexible: Online learning is, above all, more flexible because it frees the learner from the constraints of geography. An online learner can access what learning they want, wherever they want, without the time, financial and environmental costs of travel.
Engaging: There is no reason why an online experience should necessarily be less engaging than one which is face-to-face, assuming it is relevant and well-designed, but there is still a certain magic about ‘being there,’ particularly when the opportunities are scarce, e.g. the big game, the farewell tour, the invited audience. You will never quite be able to match this experience in a live online event, but whether this really matters in a learning and development context is debatable.
Powerful: No reason why there should be an impact here.

In summary

If you push the faders on all six strategies, you can maximise every element of your vision, as you can see from the ‘mixer’ below. While some of the strategies have positive and negative consequences, when used in combination the pluses greatly outweigh the minuses and allow you to achieve all your goals.

Coming next: The steps needed to achieve transformation
Looking back: 1. From generic to tailored / 2. From synchronous to asynchronous / 3. From compliance to competence / 4. From top-down to bottom-up / 5. From courses to resources

In this series of posts, I explore six ways in which learning professionals can realise a transformation in the way that learning and development occurs in their organisations. It builds on the series I posted earlier in the year, in which I set out the six major elements in a vision for change, i.e. learning that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and powerful.
The fifth step on the route to transformation is a shift from courses to resources. I’ve borrowed this terminology from Nick Shackleton-Jones. Nick distinguishes between the formal nature of courses, where the focus, he believes, should be on engaging the learner emotionally with the topic and building their confidence to continue to learn independently, and the on-going provision of resources, both human and in the form of content, to support the learner as they continue to learn and apply their new skills.

Why courses are not enough

Courses have, historically, been what l&d does, perhaps even its raison d’être. And they will continue to play an important role, particularly with novices who ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ and when formal confirmation is required that particular learning objectives have been achieved. Courses may take place in a classroom, online, on-job or by some blend of these, but they all typically have objectives, entry criteria, a curriculum, formal content, tuition and assessment. More often than not they also take place at a predetermined time and are ‘pushed’ at a particular population. All of this structure helps an organisation to make sure that certain key interventions do take place in the intended fashion, but does not guarantee success. All too often, courses fail to fulfil their aims:

• They are frequently forced on those who don’t need them.
• Timing is rarely ideal – often they are too early or too late.
• They are often knowledge-focused and, as a result, serve only to overwhelm the learner with new information, without placing this in context.
• They typically provide nowhere near enough opportunities for practice and feedback.
• They make little provision for follow-up once the course has been completed.

The case for resources

There’s nothing wrong with courses as such, it’s just that we place too much attention on them and not enough on what happens afterwards. By and large, we would do well to teach much less and provide much more in the way of support. Courses are for stories, scenarios, simulations and discussions; resources are where you go to find the information you need to follow up on your interest. These resources can take many forms:

• Experts that we can call upon for information.
• Coaches who can help us to analyse our successes and failures and establish our goals.
• Packaged content that can provide us with information and help in diagnosing problems and making decisions.
• Forums and other collaborative tools that allow us to share expertise and solve problems.

The argument for shifting the emphasis from teaching everything formally up-front to teaching the essentials and then providing other information on-demand has strengthened over the past few years:

• We now have a much better understanding of how easy it is to overwhelm novices with information and how little of this information is retained.
• The easy availability of information through search engines and on mobile devices makes it much more practical to provide resources as and when needed.
• Expectations have changed. Employees no longer expect to have to learn large quantities of information up-front, when it can so easily be made available on-demand.

The benefits

So what effect does pushing the slider from courses to resources have on the six elements of our transformation vision?
Aligned: There is nothing about the move from courses to resources that will make an impact here.
Economical: In this respect you should see an improvement, because resources are much more economical to provide than courses.
Scalable: Courses take a lot of time and effort to manage. Resources can be made available to large audiences with little difficulty.
Flexible: Because resources are available on demand, the learner is in complete control over what they access and when.
Engaging: Slimmed-down courses that focus on must-know information and key skills, and which provide plenty of opportunities for practice will be much more engaging. With resources, engagement is not the issue – you only call upon the resource when you need it.
Powerful: Most importantly, the courses and resources combination gets the job done in terms of improved competency on-the-job.
Coming next: Strategies for transformation 6: from face-to-face to online
Looking back: 1. From generic to tailored / 2. From synchronous to asynchronous / 3. From compliance to competence / 4. From top-down to bottom-up

In this series of posts, I explore six ways in which learning professionals can realise a transformation in the way that learning and development occurs in their organisations. It builds on the series I posted earlier in the year, in which I set out the six major elements in a vision for change, i.e. learning that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and powerful.
The fourth step on the route to transformation is a shift from learning and development activities that are directed from the top-down to those that originate from the bottom-up.

Top-down learning

Top-down learning occurs because organisations want their employees to perform effectively and efficiently and they appreciate that this depends, at least in part, on them possessing the appropriate knowledge and skills. Top-down learning is designed to fulfil the employer’s objectives, not the employees’.
Whatever the attractions of a more bottom-up approach (as we shall see), some learning cannot be left to chance. Why? Because employees need basic competencies and they don’t always know what they don’t know, where to look for answers or who to turn to; because requirements change (new policies, products, plans), and because employees must be developed to fill future gaps.
However, it is unrealistic for all learning to be managed on a top-down basis, particularly in those organisations where change is constant and knowledge requirements hard to predict. As most top-down learning requires the direct intervention of subject experts and l&d professionals, resources are clearly going to be limited, so priorities have to be made. Top-down learning is likely to be most valuable for the 20% of knowledge that is needed 80% of the time, and for learning that is most critical in terms of risk to safety, budget or reputation.

Bottom-up learning

Bottom-up learning occurs because employees also want to perform. The exact motivation may vary, from achieving job security to earning more money, gaining recognition or obtaining personal fulfilment, but the route to all these is performing well on the job, and employees know as well as their employers that this depends – again, at least in part – on them acquiring the appropriate knowledge and skills.
Bottom-up learning is managed by employees themselves. It addresses the 80% of knowledge that is needed 20% of the time and is particularly important in those organisations in which there is constant change and fluidity in tasks and goals.
Bottom-up learning is cheaper, more responsive, less controlling, less patronising and altogether more in tune with the times. But it is also less certain, less measurable and less suited to dependent learners who don’t know what they don’t know.
For bottom-up learning to thrive, employees need the motive, the means and the opportunity (just like the perps in the crime novels). They will only have the motive if they are rewarded for effective performance. They will only have the means if employers help them to develop the skills they need to learn independently and provide, where appropriate, the right collaborative software tools (a rich and searchable intranet, forums, wikis, blogs, communities of practice, etc.). They will only have the opportunity if employers are able to foster a culture which encourages self-initiative and does not penalise mistakes.
L&d professionals could do worse in future than to regard bottom-up learning as the default solution, the one on which they rely except when it is obviously unsuitable. For too long, employees have been spoon-fed their education and their training, and have failed to develop as independent learners to the extent that perhaps they should have done. Those now entering the workforce have, in many cases, overcome these barriers and have higher expectations. Provide them with the motive, the means and the opportunities and their capabilities are likely to astound you.

The benefits

So what effect does pushing the slider from top-down to bottom-up have on the six elements of our transformation vision?
Aligned: This particular change should not have a major impact on alignment.
Economical: Some investment might need t0 be made in collaborative tools, but otherwise bottom-up learning requires little or no additional expense.
Scalable: Bottom-up learning is highly scalable because it draws upon the expertise of every employee. In a bottom-up learning culture, everyone is a teacher and everyone a learner; no-one knows everything and everyone knows something.
Flexible: Here is the greatest advantage. Bottom-up learning occurs as and when it is needed; it responds organically to changes in requirements.
Engaging: There’s not likely to be much impact here, except perhaps to the extent that bottom-up learning is likely to be more relevant to current needs.
Powerful: It could be argued that bottom-up learning will be less powerful because it is not so professionally conceived and delivered, but this factor could easily be over-weighed by greater relevance and increased responsiveness.
Coming next: Strategies for transformation 5: from courses to resources
Looking back: 1. From generic to tailored / 2. From synchronous to asynchronous / 3. From compliance to competence

In this series of posts, I explore six ways in which learning professionals can realise a transformation in the way that learning and development occurs in their organisations. It builds on the series I posted earlier in the year, in which I set out the six major elements in a vision for change, i.e. learning that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and powerful.
The third step on the route to transformation is a shift from interventions aimed primarily at ensuring compliance to those that aim to achieve competency. Now every organisation does, to some extent, have to comply with regulations of one sort or another, whether that relates to employment policies, health and safety, the prevention of money laundering, the marketing of pharmaceutical products, and so on. The implications of breaking these regulations – and being found out – can be devastating for an organisation, not only financially, but in terms of public reputation. In extreme cases, executives and others lower down in an organisation could face criminal charges. Not surprising, then, that organisations – sometimes on the insistence of their insurers – take great pains to ensure that infringements are kept to a minimum. An obvious step in achieving this is to ensure everyone involved obtains adequate training.
There are two ways of looking at this sort of training: (1) you can regard it as a simple box-ticking exercise in which employers and employees go through the motions of delivering and receiving training, in order to satisfy regulators and insurers that the job is being done; or (2), you aim to bring about a shift in behaviour such that infringements are very unlikely to occur, because employees believe in the policy and have the necessary knowledge and skill to put it into practice. Option (1) is based on the assumptions that infringements are unlikely, the regulations are a nuisance and that compliance is a necessary evil. Option (2) is founded on the principles that infringements can and do happen, that the regulations are rightly in place to prevent harm to third parties, and that policies are not enough – delivering on these policies requires competence. Quite a difference.

The implications of an approach based on compliance

So what are the dangers of basing your approach to training on simple compliance?

• Executives and learning professionals regard the whole exercise as a box-ticking exercise.
• The training is designed to deliver as much dry and abstract information as possible in the minimum time. Subject-matter experts rather than learning professionals drive the design.
• Knowledge is typically assessed immediately after delivery of the information, invalidating the results. No effort is made to assess whether this information can be applied effectively in context, in other words competence.
• Employees will do the minimum possible to complete the training, focusing all their attention on passing the assessment rather than on gaining useful information that is important for their job.
• On the basis that people resist ‘being changed’, it is possible that the whole process makes them less likely to comply rather than more so.
• E-learning is often used as the means of delivery to minimise costs and take the pressure off trainers who understandably don’t want to deliver training that nobody wants to do. As a result, e-learning becomes synonymous with compliance and bad training generally.

Shifting the emphasis to competence

How would the picture change if a genuine attempt was made to ensure competence?

• Executives and learning professionals would themselves be committed to change and would model the desired behaviour consistently.
• The training would focus on encouraging positive attitudes to the necessary change, providing critically-important information (the rest can be accessed as reference resources), putting principles into context with examples and case studies and, most importantly, providing plenty of opportunities for practice (with supportive feedback).
• Employees are assessed on the basis of their ability to apply what they have learned in context rather than their ability to retain information.
• Management reinforce the desired behaviour when it is put into practice.
• E-learning is used when it is an appropriate medium for delivering elements of what is likely to be a blended solution.

The benefits

So what effect does pushing the slider from compliance to competence have on the six elements of our transformation vision?
Aligned: Courses oriented to building competence can be directly aligned to business needs. This means genuinely complying with the requirements of regulators, not just going through the motions of delivering compliance training.
Economical: Sorry, but competence-based training will cost more to deliver. On the other hand have you factored in the real risk of a billion dollar lawsuit?
Scalable: Again, quality comes at a cost. Simple self-study courses may be  cheaper, but are they really achieving a positive return?
Flexible: To be honest there’s not going to be a lot of change here. If anything, more elaborate blends are going to be less easy to complete than those that concentrate on ticking the boxes. So, no more asking your assistant to click through the screens on your behalf.
Engaging: Relevance drives out resistance. Who’s going to be engaged by a box-ticking exercise?
Powerful: And here’s the bottom line. Competency-based training really will protect you from risk and surely that’s the whole point.
Coming next: Strategies for transformation 4: from top-down to bottom-up
Looking back: 1. From generic to tailored 2. From synchronous to asynchronous

In this series of posts, I explore six ways in which learning professionals can realise a transformation in the way that learning and development occurs in their organisations. It builds on the series I posted earlier in the year, in which I set out the six major elements in a vision for change, i.e. learning that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and powerful.
The second step on the route to transformation is a shift from interventions that are synchronous to those that are asynchronous. In case you’re not familiar with the jargon, ‘synchronous’ learning activities happen in real-time – they are ‘live’. The most obvious examples are classroom courses and on-the-job training sessions, but also in this category we must place the use of the telephone and live online tools, such as instant messaging, Skype and virtual classrooms. The defining characteristic of a synchronous activity is that all the participants have to be available at the same time.
Asynchronous activities, on the other hand, are self-paced; they allow the learner to determine when and for how long they undertake self-study activities or communicate with fellow learners or trainers. Reading a book, watching a video, listening to a podcast, surfing the web or interacting with an e-learning programme are all asynchronous; so is communicating by post, by text messages, by email or through forums, blogs, wikis and social networks.
Like each of the recommendations in this series, the change from synchronous to asynchronous represents a movement of a slider, not a switch on or off. Every organisation is different and needs to find its own balance.

The argument for being synchronous

There is nothing inherently wrong with synchronous communication. It gets things done quickly. It allows a learner to get speedy answers to questions and to obtain quick feedback on their performance. It makes it possible for learners to work together on practical activities such as role-plays. It allows for free-flowing discussions and is altogether more relaxed and sociable.
Synchronous events also act as milestones in a blended solution. Because they are scheduled to happen at a particular date and time, they get blocked out in the diary and are less likely to be put off to another day. They also act as a convenient deadline for activities which are self-paced.
All in all then, it’s good for a proportion of any programme of learning to be synchronous.

So, if it ain’t broke, why try and fix it?

Although synchronous learning events, such as classroom courses, have their benefits, they also have some snags:

• Having to organise dates and times which suit everyone is tiresome and time-consuming. In some situations, in which learners are based in different time zones or have all sorts of existing commitments, it can sometimes prove impossible.
• Waiting for a date and time can hold you up from learning that you want to do right now.
• Synchronous events can be more stressful, because you will often be put under pressure to make quick responses to questions and discussion topics. You also have no control over the pace at which you learn, which is a particular problem if you start with less prior knowledge than your colleagues.
• An important element of learning is reflection and that’s not easy to accomplish when you’re under time pressure.
• Every learner is different in terms of their needs, prior knowledge and preferences. Live events are simply not flexible enough to cope with all these differences.

The benefits

So what effect does pushing the slider from synchronous to asynchronous have on the six elements of our transformation vision?
Aligned: There’s no real change here, because synchronous and asynchronous activities can be equally well-aligned.
Economical: There could be some benefits here, particularly in terms of the amount of time consumed by the learning activity. Generally self-paced learning is quicker, as much as anything because learners can access the material they want and ignore what is less relevant. There’s also the possibility that learners can get faster to competence, because they are not having to wait about before receiving the training they need.
Scalable: Here’s a real plus, because many more people can be learning at the same time.
Flexible: This is an obvious one. The main purpose of increasing the asynchronous component is to improve flexibility.
Engaging: You might lose something here, because live events will, for most people, be more urgent and engaging.
Powerful: Asynchronous events are not inherently more powerful, but having a better balance between synchronous and asynchronous elements is likely to show performance benefits, if for no other reason than learners have more time to reflect.
Coming next: Strategies for transformation 3: from compliance to competence
Looking back: From generic to tailored

In the first post in this series, we expressed a vision for learning and development that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and, above all, powerful in terms of the results it achieves. In this post, we look at the argument for l&d to be powerful.
Clearly, learning interventions are of little or no value to an organisation if they don’t have a positive impact on key performance indicators. There is a clear link here with alignment. For learning interventions to be powerful, they have first to be aligned to the organisation’s current and future needs.
Organisations are not, of course, the only stakeholders in workplace learning, even if they pay the bill. Learning is first and foremost an investment in the learner, the employee. It can also be regarded as an investment by the learner, who must be engaged if learning is to take place at all. A learning activity is powerful for a learner if it helps them to achieve mastery in their particular area of work and to build their confidence so that they find work more fulfilling and enjoyable.
So, what causes one learning intervention to be more powerful than another? Well, we have already established that the process has to start with alignment to the organisation’s and the learners’ requirements, something that will not happen by magic or guesswork. The only way to assess requirements is to consult with all the relevant stakeholders and that’s a time-consuming process.
An intervention also needs to teach the right things. This might seem obvious, but it is perfectly possible for an intervention to do a very effective job of developing the wrong knowledge and skills. For example, let’s say an organisation wants to increase turnover by adopting a new sales process. They could run a wonderful course which transfers efficiently back to the job. But if the process itself is flawed, then the net result may be lower sales not higher.
Thirdly, the intervention needs to be designed and delivered effectively. The research tells us that effective learning is largely down to choosing the right strategies and methods, and then implementing them well. Media choices, such as whether a particular activity or resource is delivered face-to-face or online, are certainly going to have an impact on flexibility, cost and time-efficiency, but will not usually determine whether or not the learning outcomes are achieved (see The No Significant Difference Phenomenon).
Lastly, the power of an intervention will very often depend on the commitment of learners’ managers. Newstrom and Broad found that the positive involvement of managers before and after an intervention was more likely to influence the end result than any actions by trainers and by learners themselves.
Coming next: What we can do to make this vision a reality

In the first post in this series, we expressed a vision for learning and development that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and, above all, powerful in terms of the results it achieves. In this post, we look at the argument for l&d to be engaging.
Learning interventions need to be engaging, because without learner engagement there’s very little chance that any meaningful learning will take place. Engaging interventions attract and maintain interest, they arouse the emotions, they are full of energy. Just like learning should be.
In Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath, the authors make a key distinction between what we think consciously and what our more primitive, emotional system will have us do. They liken the emotional system to an elephant and the intellect to the rider of the elephant. As you can imagine, when you’re trying hard to resist that bar of chocolate or force yourself up out of bed on a cold morning, the rider has a heck of a job keeping the elephant under control and can easily become exhausted in the process.
Engaging the learner is about getting the elephant on board. While the rider may be engaged by the long-term benefits of a learning activity or an intellectual curiosity, the elephant is much more interested in what’s in it for him right now. The prospect of a solution to a real, current problem will definitely do the job, because relevance will always drive out resistance. The elephant may also be motivated by a challenge – perhaps a game which involves some form of competition. Humour may also do the trick, or just plain novelty.
Being engaged can be likened to a state of flow, as described by the psychologist Mihaly Csiksczentmihalyi. He describes this state as follows:
Confronting tasks that we have a chance of completing
Concentration
Clear goals
Immediate feedback
A deep, effortless involvement
A sense of control over one’s actions
A reduced concern for self
Hours pass by in minutes
You may find it a daunting challenge to design and deliver learning interventions that are capable of inducing such a state of mind, but in the right circumstances the motivation to learn can be very strong. As Daniel Pink describes in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, three factors stand out: the desire to direct our own lives; the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. Provide learning opportunities with a clear purpose, a direct relevance to real-world issues and a highly-flexible and learner-centred methodology and you’ll be more than half the way there.
Coming next: The vision: 6. Learning and development that is powerful