Onlignment Archive

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

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 flexible.
Flexibility is an important element in the vision for a transformed l&d. What it implies is more control for l&d’s customers – the employees of an organisation. Adults expect to have control over what they learn, when and where and will increasingly demand it. They expect it because they have grown accustomed to finding whatever information they need at the click of a mouse from Google, YouTube and Wikipedia. Synchronous learning (that takes place with others, at a specific time, perhaps in a virtual classroom) can be powerful, but it is certainly not flexible. It means you have have to compromise on when you learn in order to suit others. Similarly, face-to-face learning can add a great deal of value when used for the right purposes, but is highly inflexible. Being face-to-face means you have to compromise on where you learn in order to suit others.
Flexibility can take many forms. For the learner it can mean:

• Controlling what you learn and to what level: So much traditional training is one-size fits all. Everybody starts and ends at the same place, regardless of need. But every learner is different in terms of their prior knowledge and goals, and it is not rocket science to organise training in a modular fashion. Providing this sort of flexibility is not always practical, but it should at least be an aim.
• Controlling how you learn: This is a tricky one, because there has been a lot of nonsense talked about learning styles and how different we are in how we like to learn, yet we are actually much more alike than we are different and it is usually uneconomical to offer training in alternative forms. However, there are sometimes obstacles that get in the way of learners taking advantage of a particular form of learning (disabilities, access to technology, inability to travel, etc.) and providing alternatives can be beneficial, if not compulsory.
• Controlling when you learn and at what pace: By and large, learners would prefer not to have to wait to learn something which is important to their work. They’d also like to control when they learn, for how long, how fast and how slow. Having to conform to someone else’s timetable is always going to be a compromise solution.
• Controlling where you learn: Having to travel to a central location for training is sometimes necessary, but is typically an expensive and time-consuming activity. If you can avoid it you should. It also makes sense to provide learners with the opportunity to continue their learning when they are on the move, so they can take advantage of the inevitable dead times on trains, in airports and hotel rooms.

Of course it can be extremely difficult to provide all this flexibility without impacting heavily on our other objectives of scalability and economy – we have to strike the right balance. But flexibility is a worthwhile target to have in mind and you can make big strides in this direction by creating more modular interventions, with a greater use of self-paced components, and by delivering online when possible.
Coming next: The vision: 5. Learning and development that is engaging