The Future Business of Learning for Suppliers

Last month Tony Karrer wrote an very insightful piece on his eLearning Technology blog about the Business of Learning. The post and the discussion underneath it are well worth reading.

Tony equated the challenges of the learning industry to those of the publishing industry. Publishers have been going through a very tough time over the past few years. Even before the current economic turmoil, publishers were seeing their customers and advertising revenues bleed away to the multitude of new communication channels that has arrived as part of the tidal wave of Internet services.

The business models that sustained publishers from the 18th to the early 21st century are no longer valid. The world has changed, and it will keep changing rather than returning to previous states. The old models that supported the growth of the publishing industry for more than 200 years are not going to sustain it again once the global economy has shaken off its current problems and returned to some form of stability. Publishing needs to look for new ways to sustain itself, new business models and new ways of publishing. It has no other option.

The same applies to the Learning industry. In fact, I wonder whether we’ll even call it a ‘learning industry’ in a few years time. Jay Cross posted a comment under Tony’s article pointing out that a number of us in the TogetherLearn team have been discussing this issue and that we agree that ‘learning’ may have outlived its usefulness as a term. I don’t know what the ‘learning industry’ will be called in the future, but its focus will certainly be a lot wider than what is generally seen in today’s world as ‘learning and development’, let alone ‘training'.

With this in mind we need to focus on new ways of learning to support our organisations’ new ways of working.

This is where the data Tony Karrer presented is both interesting and revealing. He references The Masie Barometer which provides a late-March 2009 snapshot of learning & development in a range of organisations – 77% of respondents based in the USA.

THE MASIE BAROMETER and CIPD 2009 SURVEY

It is useful to look at the Masie Learning Resources Barometer data alongside the UK CIPD data gathered a few months earlier. There are, unsurprisingly, plenty of similarities.

When the CIPD asked the survey question “how would you describe the economic/funding circumstances facing your organisation in the past 12 months?” 85% of private sector organisations responded with either ‘decreased’ or ‘stayed the same’. When looking forward to 2009, the outlook was about the same – 86%.

The Masie figure is 88%. The correlation between these two sets of data is high.

Looking at the CIPD 2009 projections we get a slightly more optimistic view with between 10% and 19% of (mainly L&D) respondents suggesting that funding will increase. The 9% variation is across sectors – public, private and voluntary & community.

Analysing these figures I think they support the fact that L&D people may be - underneath it all - optimistic types and maybe those that work in the voluntary and community sector are the most optimistic of us all. Either that or they just can’t bear to face reality ..

With these trends in mind it's hard not to agree with Tony Karrer when he says that the type of training we’d call ‘traditional’ is on an overall downward trend along with traditional publishing. And that it’s unlikely to return to the past status quo when the global economy picks up.

THE FUTURE BUSINESS OF LEARNING

The future business of Learning (or whatever name we finally settle on) lies in providing organisations with the tools, techniques and environments to support them in building employee capability and performance in an increasing range of areas. It certainly doesn’t lie in the provision of ' training'. Traditional training may have a role in the picture going forward, sometimes, but it will certainly be only a minor role.

The ‘Learning Tree’ Syndrome

Which is why I’m not surprised with Tony identifying Learning Tree International as an example of training companies that are currently being hit hard – quarterly revenue from last year down from $47m to $30.5m and running at a loss.

Learning Tree is a perfect example of a ‘traditional’ training company that has not altered its business model in light of a world changing around it. Although it now offers it’s AnyWare remote courses – allowing virtual attendance at classrooms in its education centres - which is probably marginally less useful than actually attending the face-to-face version (you don’t get the best bits - the coffee and lunch) the company has steadfastly refused to change its model to reflect the new world.

I recall meeting with senior Learning Tree executives 5 years ago when I was chief learning officer at Reuters (an organisation that knows a little bit about the need to respond to changing circumstances and has done so pretty well over the past decade). The Learning Tree people told me at that time that they weren’t planning to introduce any ‘new’ approaches to their training provision. We could have their face-to-face courses or nothing. On the back of that information we chose to go our separate ways and Reuters teamed up with other training suppliers that offered blended solutions, virtual labs, online technical libraries, performance support/business process guidance and other more flexible approaches to building capability that were more closely built into employees daily workflow. The latter were a better fit for our learning strategy and offered far more value in terms of impact and ‘bang-for-buck’ than 3, 4 and 5-day stand-alone courses.

‘new ways of learning for new ways of working’

What organisations need to look to achieve from their relationships with training/learning suppliers and from their own internal learning teams are new ways of doing things that work in 21st century contexts, in the same way that the publishers need to look at new ways of providing their services. This in turn means learning suppliers need to embrace new approaches and tools, new ways of helping individuals, managers and organisations to work better, smarter and faster and achieve more.

This change will require CLOs and senior L&D executives to review how, and whether, they continue engagement with traditional training suppliers going forward. If they do, they will need to be absolutely sure that each supplier is providing real value.

REVIEWING YOUR TRAINING SUPPLIERS AS 'FIT-FOR-PURPOSE'

Some organisations have very rigorous mechanisms in place to manage their training/learning supplier base. But most don’t. However, if learning and development departments are going to operate efficiently and effectively, and provide real value to their organisation, they simply must do this.

When I joined Reuters in 2001 I did something that hadn’t been done in the organisation before. I analysed the training supplier base in considerable detail – spreadsheets and spreadsheets of analysis. For a workforce of around 18,000 employees I discovered we had engaged with 3,025 separate suppliers of training or training-related services over the previous 18 months. That’s equivalent to one training supplier for every 6 employees! The thought that any ‘vendor relationship management’ could occur with this number of suppliers was laughable.

I am sure that if you walked into many organisations today you would find the same situation. It’s crazy, but it happens more often than you think.

However, this situation also presents great opportunities for consolidation and for reducing management overhead and costs associated with training and development, and also for controlling quality. If you're starting from here there are some potential big wins.

When I presented the fact of the 3,025 suppliers to the chief operating officer at Reuters he was as incredulous as I was with the situation. He pointed out that the company had a single supplier for all PCs and laptops, one or two others for the company’s networking kit, and in other purchasing categories we had just a few carefully-selected suppliers. Yet we had more than 3,000 for our training. What was going on here?

The COO said to me “OK. how many training suppliers should we have?” I really didn’t have an answer, but I knew it was certainly a lot less than 3,025 for our size of workforce despite the fact that we were spread across 92 countries. So I replied “let’s strike out the zero in the middle and I think we’ll be at about the correct level” – 325. So that's what I was targeted to achieve.

Training/Learning Vendor Rationalisation

Working with some very competent procurement/sourcing colleagues we created a simple approach for reviewing and rationalising our supplier base. Over time we reduced the supplier number to less than 500, a six-fold reduction from where we started out. Not quite 325, but close to it.

This, in essence, is what was done.

Each supplier was allocated to a category:

1. Strategic Suppliers – those who were so embedded into the ‘DNA’ of the organisation that there would be serious disruption if we wished to end a relationship with them. Additionally, they:
· had the ability to offer services on a global basis
· provided a critical service aligned with our business strategy
· had a strong cultural fit with our organisation
And that included supporting the move to the 70:20:10 approach we had adopted, an increase in learning provision underpinned by technology, and increased ‘informal’ learning support.

2. Preferred Suppliers – those that offered a number of best-in-class solutions that represented excellent value-for-money but could not, or did not, offer global solutions except by jumping on an aeroplane at the client's expense.

3. Approved Suppliers - those that met a defined level of service provision and value for money, but their services were limited and not strategically significant to the business. These suppliers were engaged with on a transactional ad-hoc or as required basis.

4. Non-Approved Suppliers – this was by far the largest category. After evaluation it was decided they didn’t fit into any of the other three categories. Most were small local suppliers offering non-specialist training that replicated the offerings of the strategic and preferred suppliers. Many had never previously been through a quality assessment.

Following the vendor rationalisation process there were a small number of strategic suppliers, more preferred suppliers, a long ‘tail’ of approved suppliers and an even longer one of non-approved suppliers who were excluded from bidding for further work with the company. We then worked to consolidate as much of the work carried out by Approved Suppliers up to Preferred Suppliers and, in doing so, remove some of the ‘tail’ of approved suppliers.

It was a long and tedious process that took several years, but it was largely successful, producing not just a reduced number of vendors, but greater alignment of the remaining vendors with our strategic direction. I think that every organisation could benefit from going through this process.

Making Your L&D Department Meaningful & Relevant

Many Learning & Development managers spend a lot of their time thinking about ways in which they can make their departments more effective and provide real value to the organisation. The question is usually ‘what can I do to ensure that the CEO or Director views L&D as a strategic business tool and not another also-ran support function’.

It’s a good question to ask.

There’s no silver bullet solution for increasing the impact and the profile of L&D. However, there are some key areas that are worth focusing on and some basic principles that can be applied.

Below I’ve listed five basic actions that every L&D and HR leader should take if they want to raise both the impact and profile of their Training/Learning & Development operations.

Action 1. Get Your Governance Model Right and Align L&D with Organisational Strategy
It’s amazing how few L&D departments have developed both an explicit L&D vision/strategy and a governance model to drive that strategy. Two years ago the CIPD survey in the UK indicated that only 56% of organisations had a written L&D strategy. Fewer had

The UK CIPD’s 2009 annual survey published in April also indicated that biggest change anticipated by L&D managers over the next five years is a closer integration of learning and development activity with business strategy (65%). However, there is no indication how this will be achieved and my guess is that many L&D managers are at a loss to know where to start. And any L&D department that takes 5 years to do this is likely to be dead meat well before then …

A good starting point in L&D governance is to establish a solid model that ties L&D activities tightly into business priorities (that’s vital for the second action, below). Governance isn’t necessarily tied to structure. Many different L&D organisational structures work just so long the body responsible driving the vision/strategy is totally focused on organisational objectives and priorities. To achieve this, the L&D Governance Board (or whatever you choose to call it) needs to be strongly represented by senior business leaders. They’re the people who should be making decisions about L&D priorities, not HR, not L&D. They’re the key stakeholders and the people who are responsible for executing the overall organisational strategy so they should know where priorities lie.

The diagram below provides a good model for establishing a governance structure. It is 3-tiered.

The top tier provides overall direction, formulates and drives the strategy. Ideally it consists of about 10 members with most being senior business leaders (EVP or Head of Department level) who have a stake in ensuring L&D delivers what the organisation needs. Ideally this board is chaired by the CEO or Director of the organisation but, if not, then the CFO, COO or HR Director. The key here is to ensure that HR/L&D is not over-represented. They should be a minority on the board.

The second tier ties the various business units into overall strategy. They feed data/information/perspectives up to the Strategic Board so it can make its decisions and, in turn, take Strategic Board decisions and work out how to execute them – how to prioritise L&D resources to best effect and how they can maximise ‘bang for buck’. Again these Councils (or whatever you choose to call them) need to be driven by senior managers, not by HR/L&D if you want to maximise alignment, impact and results from L&D activities.

Action 2. Actively Enrol Managers
Even outside the overall governance of L&D, managers in the line of business need to be L&D’s best friends. There’s a couple of simple reasons for this.

[a] Most employee development is in their hands, whether they appreciate that fact or not. The vast majority of learning occurs under their watch in the workplace. The estimates are that around 70-90% of employee learning and development occurs there. Not only that, but research results from the Corporate Executive Board show that a manager’s actions such setting clear objectives and explaining how they plan to measure performance have far greater impact on employee performance than any amount of change in skill and knowledge level (19.8% improvement for the former versus 6.7% improvement for the latter).

The 3 manager actions with greatest impact:
i. Explain performance evaluation standards. (i.e. set clear objectives and tell people how their performance will be measured)

ii. Ensure projects provide learning. (i.e. provide the opportunity to reflect and learn from tasks and projects)

iii. Provide experiences that develop. (i.e. provide opportunities for employees to take on new challenges and experiences)

Corporate Executive Board/Learning & Development Roundtable

[b] Anything L&D does will need to be supported by managers if it is to have any impact at all. Apparent performance improvement demonstrated in a formal learning environment (either classroom or ‘e’) has absolutely no relation to performance improvement in the workplace unless what’s learned formally is reinforced almost immediately by plenty of practice and, preferably, by supported practice. Managers need to be involved in this ‘post-training reinforcement’ as well as in any course or programme planning. In many cases this simply doesn’t happen and any value that may have come form a workshop, programme or eLearning course disappears without trace. And people wonder why…

Action 3. Embrace Innovation
Any L&D manager who is not casting a critical eye over everything their operation does and is not continually looking for better ways to make an impact should needs to re-evaluate their position.

Innovation leads to business value creation. Not always, but unless the L&D department is innovating it will never find the things that will drive business value. There’s plenty of evidence that the vast majority of L&D functions are still working ‘in the red’ as regards the cost/value calculation.

The world of L&D is moving in Internet time. Leading L&D thinkers and practitioners realise that learning is not about running courses and programmes. There’s enough evidence to prove that the majority of formal learning/training activities have no impact on employee, team and organisational performance at all. L&D needs to step away from all that ‘busy work’.

L&D managers need to understand that their job should be focused on working with their stakeholders to provide the tools and environments, the opportunities, and the networks to help foster a culture that will lead to ‘real learning’ and performance improvement – changed behaviour in the light of experience. If they stick to dedicating most of their time to designing learning events they are unlikely to be adding real value.

Every L&D department should have an explicit approach to innovation. Whether it is expressed as a group dedicated to innovation – a lab-type environment where new ideas and approaches can be tested without the stigma of failure (there are no successes without some failures), or whether the L&D department simply focuses on developing a culture of innovation across the entire group. It doesn’t really matter what the approach, just so long as there is one…

Action 4. Employ Technology, but do so wisely
Technology has changed almost every aspect of life. Yet much of what is done in the name of L&D is still similar to as it has been for 100 years.

eLearning has gained a foothold, but a lot of eLearning is simply the course paradigm moved wholesale into electronic format with identical structure to former classroom courses – aims, course objectives, sections, topics, lots of content, little engagement, rare attempts at collaborative or learner-directed approaches unless you consider the opportunity to follow branching trees as ‘learner directed’..

Yet there is an absolute wealth of tools to help L&D people raise their game by using technology. Just have a look at Jane Hart’s Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies site, She has more than 3,000 tools listed in her Learning Tools Directory, with more than 2,000 of them being free to use. Everything from podcasting tools, wiki tools, social networking tools, screencasting and conferencing tools, blogging tools and so on.

I wouldn’t suggest that every L&D manager dives headlong into a bucket of learning technology tools, but if you want to provide a better service and change the way you’ve always been supporting learning you'll need technology to help you do it. There’s sure to be something out there that will work for you. And it’s likely to be free or at least very inexpensive.

Action 5. Hire or Develop the right L&D Capabilities and Attitudes
The fifth action required to make L&D meaningful and relevant is to ensure you have the right capabilities and attitudes in your team. Only then will you be in a position to lead your organisation to develop a true learning culture.

You will need people in your team who can work as effective internal consultants, engaging with stakeholders and carrying out root cause analysis to help solve business problems. Don’t assume that someone who has experience in conducting training needs analysis has the right skills for this important job. This requires real consultancy skills, and the ability to work with business managers to understand whether training can even impact the problem (which, mostly, it can’t). These people need to have the skill and the acumen to guide often insistent managers away from a training solution when the root cause analysis indicates that the problem is due to something other than lack or knowledge or skill (which, mostly, it is).

And don’t be persuaded that an HR business partner can do this job for you. They can’t. I’ve yet to see an HR Business Partner who has a good understanding of the performance consulting process and had a good grasp of what works in adult learning.It requires specialist L&D skills and a basic L&D module in your HR qualification isn't going to equip you to do the job properly.

If you don’t have these consultative capabilities in-house, then you may be better hiring in external experts until you can either hire or build your own in-house capability. These people are your key ‘front-line’ troops. Every time they revert to order-taking, they will be inhibiting you from adding real value and tying you up in ‘busy work’ of no real value.

You may, of course, also need some of your team to be involved in developing and delivering courses and programmes, but this will be a shrinking number as the world moves away from the less effective model of learning ‘events’ and further into workplace supported learning processes. All of these team members should have a good grasp of ‘the art of the possible’ and the potential for use of technology.

In Summary
Every L&D department has the opportunity step up and add real strategic business value rather than continue to act as a support function and an also-ran. There’s a great opportunity for L&D to become a meaningful, relevant and indispensable part of the organisation in many more instances than currently exist.

However, without taking actions such as those discussed above it’s unlikely that they’ll make the transition. If they don’t, then the future is bleak for them. When economic times are tough, the lens is focused on areas that are not paying their way and contributing value.

I can see some CEOs, CFOs and Directors simply pulling the plug on their L&D departments and handing the budget off to others who they think will put it to better use.

When it's just so obvious NOT to train it's painful to watch it happen

The amount of time, effort and money wasted on formal ILT training prior to rollout or upgrade of enterprise platforms (particularly ERM and CRM) and other new software systems is really quite amazing.

Some managers and L&D people just don’t seem to get it.

It reminds me of the remarkable insight of the author Aldous Huxley when he said “I see the best, but it’s the worse that I pursue”

The evidence has been around for a long time that formal training on detailed task and process-based activities in advance of the need to carry out the task or use the process is essentially useless.

The logic and evidence both point to the fact that the “we’re rolling out a new system, so we’ve got to train them all” approach employed by many (read ‘most’) organisations, and offered as a service by training suppliers across the globe, is both inefficient and fundamentally ineffective.

You might as well throw the money spent on these activities out the window. Actually, a better option would be to spend the diminishing L&D budget on approaches that do work. Not only would new rollouts and upgrades come into use more smoothly, but am prepared to bet that it would leave budget over to use for other things, or to take as savings (perish the thought!)

Even if you’ve never been involved in training for rollout and upgrade and then finding that users demand re-training or simply call the help desk as soon as go-live happens, it helps to be aware of some fundamental truths about this flawed model.

Truth 1: Too much information for any human to remember

Most pre go-live training is delivered through ILT or eLearning and is content-heavy. The instructional designers and SMEs feel the need to cover every possibly eventuality and load courses with scenarios, examples and other ‘just-in-case’ content.

I have seen multiple PowerPoint decks of 200-300 slides delivered over 2-3 days for CRM upgrades. Few humans can recall this amount of information for later use, or even a fraction of it. Maybe if they have photographic memories they can, but designing for photographic memories is not really a sensible strategy. The rest of us just park most of what we do remember at the end of the session in the ‘clear out overnight’ part of our brains.

And all those expensively-produced User Guides are simply a waste of the Earth’s limited natural resources. They tend to be too detailed, linear, full of grabs of screens that the user will never refer to, impossible to navigate, and the last thing people reach for when they need help in using a new system. They are far more likely to reach for the phone and call the Help Desk. Training User Guides are quintessentially shelfware. Usually the only time someone picks user guides off the shelf is to throw them in a bin (hopefully one marked ‘recycling’) during a clear-out or an office move.

Truth 2: Too much time between the training and use

Embedding knowledge in short-term memory and long-term memory are two very different processes. Even the information that can been recalled immediately after training - and that’s likely to be minimal – will be lost if it isn’t reinforced through practice within a few hours.

Practice and reinforcement are required for the neurological processes of conversion to long-term memory to occur - chemicals in the brain such as seratonin, cyclic AMP, and specific binding proteins do that job.

Do you think Tiger Woods’ brain retained the details of how to arrange his body to hit a ball 400 yards without practice and reinforcement?

Truth 3: Post-Training Drop-Off

Harold Stolovitch & Erica Keeps carried out some very interesting research on desired vs. actual knowledge acquisition and performance improvement. The work uncovered some important observations.

The graph above shows the results. During the training event, following an initial dip - the ‘typing/golf pro dip’ – where performance drops as new ways of carrying out tasks are tried out, knowledge and performance then improve to the end of the training session. The individual walks out the door knowing more and being able to perform better than when they started the training.

Then the problems start.

The drop-off following the training event (called ‘post-training re-adjustment by Stolovitch and Keeps) can kick-in very quickly, possibly in a matter of hours. You finish a day’s training course, go home, sleep, and by the next morning a lot of what you had ‘learned’ has been cleaned out of your short-term memory. Bingo!

Then next day you get back to work and try to implement what you learned in the class. The trouble is, you can’t remember exactly what to do, you don’t have any support (that trainer who you called over to prompt you when you went through the exercises in class yesterday isn’t there), so you try a few things, find they don’t work (unless you’re lucky) and then you simply go back to doing what you did previously....

The result?

Performance improvement = zero
Value added by the training = zero
Return on investment = zero

Upwards - Following the Dotted Line

The only way knowledge retention and performance can follow the dotted line upwards is if plenty of reinforcement and practice immediately follows the training. Even better if this is accompanied by some form of support – from line managers setting goals and monitoring performance, from SMEs providing on-demand advice and support, or even from learning professionals providing workplace coaching.

An even better (and certainly cheaper) option is simply to cut out the training and replace it with a support environment from the start

Where Performance Support Trumps Training

There are some very good ePSS (electronic Performance Support Systems) or BPG (Business Process Guidance) tools available now. They are economic and generally straightforward to implement and trump training every time for following defined processes found in ERP and CRM systems and other software products

Just Like a GPS System

ePSS/BPG tools provide context-sensitive help at the point-of-need and “act like a GPS system rather than a roadmap” as Davis Frenkel , CEO of Panviva Inc., the company that produces the very impressive SupportPoint BPG tool, explains. “When you’re learning to follow a process, you just want to know the next 2-3 steps you need to take. You don’t want to have to remember the entire 20-30 process steps and all the options”, Frenkel says. I think he’s absolutely right and it’s a good analogy.

A GPS tells you that you need to ‘turn left at the next intersection’ or ‘take a right turn then keep straight ahead’. It instructs incrementally, and doesn’t tell you every turn on the journey when you set out.

When there’s no access to GPS and the driver has to revert to a map (and doesn’t have a flesh-and-blood GPS sitting beside them reading the map and instructing in increments) they will tend to read and memorise just the next 2-4 turns on the journey and then re-read the map to get the next set of instructions. Job done, destination reached.

So why don’t many organisations and L&D folk wake up to the failings of using the wrong approaches to achieve their required outcomes?

Why are millions of $/£/€/¥ spent every year training employees on using enterprise systems in this way when there’s evidence to prove that it simply doesn’t work?

Accountability for Business Results

UK politicians have been in the spotlight over the past few weeks with their creative use of the parliamentary allowance scheme. “Flipping” was one common way that some found to maximise their allowance income. This involved declaring one of their homes - either in their constituency or in London closer to the House of Commons - as their main residence, then claiming all manner of expenses against their second home. Then they’d “flip” and claim expenses on the other house. This was a really neat, if totally immoral and possibly illegal, way to spend taxpayers’ money. Now they’re being found out and punished.

L&D departments have been '”flipping” for years. In some organisations they are moved from being embedded in HR to reporting into the business line and back again on a regular basis. Some also “flip” between local and global accountability as well.

Most L&D “flipping” is an attempt to ensure a better workforce development service to the organisation.

In fact, there’s no right answer – some L&D departments sit in HR and deliver a great service to the business lines, some don’t. Equally, some L&D departments sitting in the business do a great job and others don’t. There’s no structural silver bullet out there.

ACCOUNTABILITY – THE SILVER BULLET

The silver bullet, however, lies in two accountabilities. Firstly, L&D’s ability to be accountable for business results (or organisational results if you’re in a public sector or not-for-profit organisation). Secondly, there’s an equal need for L&D to be accountable for the efficiency and effectiveness of it’s services. If an L&D department is using sub-optimal approaches, flying ILT trainers around the world to deliver content-heavy classes for example, or is developing expensive media-rich eLearning programmes that only small numbers of employees need to use, it will likely be failing to deliver on these two requirements respectively.

A strategic approach (from both top-down and bottom-up) is needed and get both business accountability and an efficient and effective L&D operation in place. The diagram below is an attempt to break out the high-level parts in these accountabilities. [1] standardising; [2] globalising; [3] integrating; [4] aligning; [5] optimising. Focus on these will result in greater likelihood in L&D being able to deliver a service that brings value to the entire organisation.

ALIGNING L&D WITH ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY

AUTONOMY vs STRATIGIC ALIGNMENT

I spent most of my 8 years as CLO at Reuters involved in L&D transformation in one way or another. One tool I found very useful in planning a structure that would work for the organisation was the ‘C’ curve for an accountability-oriented L&D framework. The Global HR Director at Reuters and I developed this ‘C’ curve for L&D to help us make the initial changes.

We used the ‘C’ curve model to define the journey needed to build an L&D function that was accountable for business results, whose operation was closely aligned with the company’s overall strategy, that embedded the ‘efficiency & effectiveness’ mantra but - at the same time - where the component parts of L&D could have some autonomy to operate and make decisions locally.

This ultimately resulted in a federated organisational structure – a small core L&D team sitting in the corporate HR centre managing the overall strategy, alignment, standards, infrastructure etc. while the majority of L&D resources (and their budgets) sat in the various business lines delivering operational L&D services to their stakeholders. L&D was held together by a central governance board (mostly senior business managers, but chaired by the HR Director), and functional reporting lines for each of the Heads of Learning (every major business unit had one) into the CLO (my role).

The ‘C’ curve below shows the steps that were taken to move to an accountability oriented structure that worked for us.

Ideally organisations want to move from [1], where pieces of the L&D puzzle are operating autonomously without being strategically aligned, to [4] where they still have a level of autonomy, but are strategically aligned.

Many organisations are still living with [1] and don’t really know how to move away from having a gaggle of un-coordinated L&D/Training groups who are all doing their own ‘thing’ and often competing internally.

The ‘C curve model is a mechanism for making that move.

It’s highly unlikely that a 1->4 move is achievable without the intermediate [2] and [3] steps. That’s the way found it at Reuters. We first needed to bring all the L&D resources (or as many as we could put our arms around) into the corporate centre’s zone of influence – at [2] – and put the ‘twin pillars’ of standards and infrastructure in place. This meant removing the previous autonomy for the sake of alignment. Then we established a solid governance model [3]. Only then could we return autonomy to the groups by restructuring as a federated service, creating the functional Heads of Learning role and moving most of the L&D people into the various business lines.

The result was a structure that worked for the company. Operational L&D was aligned with the business. Business managers chose how to deploy their L&D resources, how to prioritise their L&D budgets etc. At the same time, corporate HR maintained overview of L&D and ensured that strategy, standards and infrastructure services were consistent across the organisation.

As I said, there’s no structural silver bullet, but this model can be very useful as a means to get both alignment and accountability.

When the Game's Up

Last month I was asked to give my thoughts on the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) 2009 Annual Learning & Development Survey.

One thing became clear when I examined the CIPD data. It was that many L&D professionals (in the UK at least) seem to lack the innovation necessary to push the profession forward to become a leader rather than a follower.

Of course there are exceptions but based on the data in the 2009 Survey L&D is simply not doing enough.

The survey results suggests that the majority of time is still spent in designing and delivering instructor-led courses and curricula.

This should be a real worry to everyone involved in the profession because that game’s well-and-truly up, and has been for some time.

Training/L&D is a big business. In 2007 organisations in the US spent $134.39 billion (that’s right BILLION) on employee learning and development (reported in the 2008 ASTD ‘State of the Industry’ publication). Yet studies have shown that only a small % of this spend actually results in improved performance in the workplace – the Baldwin, Ford & Weissbein studies estimate that not more than 10% of spend transfers to the job.

Yet if the CIPD data is to be believed, over the past 2 years (when the budget pressure has really been on) only 39% of UK organisations have introduced or extended the use of eLearning – for which I think we can read ‘technology-supported learning’ as a whole.

And conversely, the time L&D staff spend ‘delivering courses/time in a training facility’ is still a staggering 46% – down just 3% from the previous year. An additional 46% of time is spent in the overall management/planning of L&D activities.

This means that many Training/L&D staff only plan, develop and deliver ILT training and have no time to do anything else.

What’s happening here?

Well, for a start, only 7% of the L&D Survey respondents thought that eLearning was one of the most effective practices, and only 27% viewed on-the-job training as the most effective L&D practice.

So even L&D professionals haven’t done their research and reading. They are not champions of ‘new world’ approaches.

There’s enough evidence now to show that Instructor-Led Training is not effective as an approach for the majority of employee development. ILT may be helpful for some change management and big-picture ‘concept’ development, but it is demonstrably the least effective and certainly the least efficient approach for most learning that’s required.

The millions of $ / £ / € / ¥ spent on ILT for systems and process training, for instance, are 100% waste of time and money. This training is invariably content-heavy and people can’t retain what they’ve been taught for more than a few hours unless they have the chance to put it into practice in the workplace(which they invariably can’t as the training is carried out pre-rollout/pre-upgrade).

We’d be better off giving our employees the money we spend for training them in classrooms on CRM and ERM systems and letting them go to the pub to spend it themselves – we’d all get better value through a more engaged and less stressed workforce.
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If you would like to read a report of my presentation that appeared in PEOPLE MANAGEMENT you’ll find it HERE

The CIPD’s summary of the 2009 Survey can be found HERE.

Technorati Tags: L&D,performance,eLearning,ILT,value of learning

What Does a 21st Century L&D Department Look Like?

A month ago, on April 21, Jay Cross at learntrends co-ordinated a round-the-globe series of online conversations on how learning can impact performance in organisations. Starting on the US West Coast and ending somewhere east of New Zealand, these virtual conversations opened up a whole Pandora’s Box of issues around the challenges and opportunities that learning & development faces if it is to really have an impact of organisational effectiveness.

Jay’s reflections on the event are worth reading.

NEW ROLES FOR LEARNING PROFESSIONALS

Ellen Wagner, Curt Bonk and I spent our 30 minutes facilitating a discussion on the topic of ‘New Roles for Learning Professionals’. Going back through my notes and the archive of the (very animated) chat/discussion that took place, some clear threads emerged on the types of capabilities that a 21st century L&D department need to have.

Here are some of the core capabilities identified:

1. consulting / coaching acumen (as well as learning acumen) that is focused on performance problems and outcomes. The ability to engage with senior (and not-so-senior) line managers to identify the root cause of performance problems, and not simply focus on learning.

2. the ability to ‘speak business’. An understanding of business goals is the ‘so what’ in learning. Everyone in L&D should be able to read and draw conclusions from a balance sheet and P&L account and understand the business drivers that line managers are focused on.

3. a good grasp of technology – across-the-board - but especially emerging technologies, and how they can fit into learning solutions

4. adult learning – an understanding of how adults learn in the workplace, and ‘what works’ in organisational learning.

Along with these, another set of attributes such as: ‘empathy, ’ listening’, ‘tolerance for ambiguity’, ‘basic communication ability’ were identified as essential by participants.

Harold Jarache also made the important point that ‘attitude trumps skills’ for a learning professional. We’ve known that in a more general sense for years – many of us have used the axiom ‘hire for attitude’ when we’re recruiting. I certainly have found it has served me well. I can’t think of any situation where I’ve hired on the basis of attitude where I would have done otherwise in retrospect.

INNOVATION – THE OXYGEN OF L&D

One one other vital high-level capability every L&D practitioner needs to have in spades is the ability and, even more importantly the desire, to innovate. Innovation in designing new approaches and solutions to solve performance problems is the oxygen for L&D. It’s not vitally important whether the innovation involves technology or not – although technology does offer some huge opportunities for solving business problems and we’re just plain stupid if we ignore them – but an L&D department that fails to demonstrate that it continues to be innovative is one that’s quickly becoming irrelevant as a strategic business tool. Such L&D departments deserve to have their funding redirected elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: L&D department,performance,L&D innovation,L&D capability

70 years on and still relevant: The Sabre-Toothed Future

This first post is a long one. I certainly expect my regular jottings to be more succinct. But I thought it a good starting point for a new blog about performance, learning and productivity.

In early 1939 McGraw-Hill published a profound little book that should be on the reading list of everyone involved in learning and training today. Copies can still be found in dusty bookstores and even on Amazon at times.

Selling at $1, this book was a light satire on education and educators that carried a heavy, and still very relevant, message. It’s called ‘The Saber-Toothed Curriculum’. ‘Saber’ rather than ‘Sabre’ because it was published in the USA and written by one Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin PhD. Benjamin was described in a contemporary report about the publication by no less than Time Magazine as “the tousle-haired director of the College of Education of University of Colorado, onetime cowboy, fisherman, soldier, who can roll two cigarettes at once”.

So Benjamin was a man of some skills that I aspire to.

Benjamin initially only admitted to writing the foreword to the book, as it was allegedly the text of a series of lectures on the history of Palaeolithic education delivered by a fictitious Professor J. Abner Peddiwell while he drank tequila daisies in a Tijuana bar. Professor Peddiwell described the three fundamentals taught to youngsters in the Palaeolithic curriculum. These were: 1) fish-grabbing-with-the-bare-hands; 2) horse-clubbing; and 3) saber-tooth-tiger-scaring-with-fire.

Below I’ve recounted (and adapted) some of Professor Peddiwell’s lecture because I think we can learn from it when we reflect what’s happening in the training and development world. It tells us about the need for the  world of education, L&D and training to adapt, to leave ineffective practices behind, and to always look to innovation and stay in front of the curve.

Underlying the story is the message that a lot of things that are done in the name of ‘learning’ are of little if any use – and are sometimes even counter-productive.

The story also tells us that some of the views held by the wise old men that Peddiwell was poking fun at have merit – even if they held the views for the wrong reasons. They thought that formal education/training should stick to teaching high-level principles, as the details are likely to change and become irrelevant. Of course they are right.

However, sometimes even the principles also change. In our current times it’s almost a certainty they will do so, and probably sooner than most of us think …
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NEW-FIST-HAMMER-MAKER – THE STORY OF AN INNOVATOR

Professor Peddiwell described the first great educational theorist and practitioner, a man named New-Fist-Hammer-Maker. New-Fist was a man of thoughtful action in spite of the fact that there was very little to think deeply about in his environment. He made a name for himself by producing a very fine version of the pear-shaped chipped-stone tool anthropologists call the coup-de-poing, or fist-hammer. New-Fist was pretty handy with other weapon production as well and his fire-using techniques were patterns of precision and simplicity. (I’m sure he would have been recruited by Steve Jobs to work at Apple had he been around today).

Anyway, New-Fist knew how to do things his community needed to get done and he had the energy and the drive to go ahead and do them. By virtue of these characteristics Hammer-Fist was what was called ‘an educated man’.

However, he was also a thinker (education and thinking, then as now, were not necessarily bedfellows). When the others in his community gorged themselves on the proceeds of a successful hunt and vegetated in a dull stupor for days after (not unlike recent behaviours seen in financial centres around the world following successful short-selling or credit swap coups), New-Fist ate a little less heartedly, slept a little less stupidly, and got up a little earlier than his tribe. He woke early to sit and think.

This thinking led New-Fist to catch glimpses of the way in which life could be made a little better for his community. By virtue of this thinking, he became a not only an educated man, but a dangerous man as well.

His thinking led New-Fist to hit upon the concept of a conscious, systematic education. He’d been watching the (Gen Y) children play at the entrance of the cave.  New-Fist noted that they seemed to have no purpose other than the immediate pleasure in the activity itself. He compared the children’s’ activity with that of the adults in the community. The children played for fun. The adults worked for the security and enrichment of their lives. The children protected themselves from boredom; the adults protected themselves from danger.

New-Fist thought “if only I could get these children to do the things that will give more and better food, shelter, clothing and security I would be helping the tribe have a better life”. The children, when they grow up, will have more meat to eat, more skins to keep them warm, better caves to sleep in, and less danger from the striped death with curving white teeth that prowls at night ...

Having set his educational goals, New-Fist proceeded to construct a curriculum for teaching them.

His first curriculum subject was fish-grabbing-with-the-bare-hands. The tribe had always caught fish in the big pool around the river bend in this way.

The tribe also caught little woolly horses by clubbing them. Woolly horse meat was one of the staples in their diet. So woolly-horse-clubbing became the second curriculum subject.

Finally, old New-Fist introduced his coup-de-grace, sabre-toothed-tiger-scaring-with-fire. The tribe had always scared away the ‘striped death’ with fire sticks.

New-Fist then put his curriculum into action.

However, he ran into some opposition. Some of the more conservative tribal elders took exception to the contents of New-Fist’s curriculum. Some maintained that New-Fist was going against the natural order of things. However, New-Fist won out and fish-grabbing-with-the-bare-hands, woolly-horse-clubbing and sabre-toothed-tiger-scaring-with-fire led them into the brave new world.

DEALING WITH CHANGE

However a new Ice Age approached (and it was going to have nearly as great an impact as the invention of the Internet several millennia later). As the glacier came down from the north, the river silted up and it was impossible to see into the muddy water to catch fish with bare hands. Moreover for some years the fish had been getting more timid, agile and intelligent. The stupid, clumsy, brave fish had all been caught years ago. Only the fish with superior intelligence and agility were left. These smart fish hid under the boulders and in the depths of the muddy stream. No matter how good a man’s fish-grabbing-with-the-bare-hands education had been, he couldn’t grab fish when he couldn’t find fish to grab.

The water from the approaching glacier also made the ground damper. The Woolly Horses went east to the dry ground. Their place was taken by little antelope who were far too speedy for the tribe to catch to club to death. Even the best educated Horse-Clubbers, with the best clubbing techniques, returned empty-handed. You can’t club horses when there are no horses to club.

Finally to complete the disruption of their Palaeolithic life and education a new dampness in the air gave the Sabre-Toothed tigers pneumonia, and they died. In their place New-Fist’s tribe had to face a new, more ferocious danger in the glacial bears that took their place. And glacial bears weren’t afraid of fire…..

So tiger-scaring, horse-clubbing and fish-catching simply became academic exercises for the tribe.... things had moved on.

Some of the younger men of the New-Fist breed forgot what they had been taught in their formal training, began to think in a radical and practical manner and developed new ways to catch fish (one even developed a NET - a NETWORK wouldn’t be far away, I’m sure). Others developed new ways to catch horses by bending young trees over and hanging noose vines on them. Another young man forgot what he had been taught and dug a big pit to catch the bears in.

They practices these new approaches, refined them, and were always ready to try a newer, more efficient or effective approach.

And they shared their new learning with their colleagues through their conversations, so the new practices became widespread. “These new activities of net-making, snare-setting, and pit-digging are indispensable to modern existence”, they said. "Why can't they be taught formally?"

However, the wise elders replied:

“What have practical activities got to do with school and training? Anyway, the curriculum is too full to add any more….”

“Moreover, the things we teach our people are not for any direct practical purposes. We don’t teach fish-grabbing to catch fish. We teach it to develop a generalised agility which can never be developed by mere training. Education is timeless. It is something that endures through changing conditions like a solid rock, standing firmly in the middle of a raging torrent.”

The young men persisted a little in their questioning. "Fish-net-making and using, antelope-snare construction and operation, and bear-catching and killing”, they pointed out "require intelligence and skills - things we claim to develop in our training. They are also activities we need to know about. Why can't we teach them?"

But most of the tribe, and particularly the wise old men who controlled the education system, smiled indulgently at this suggestion. "That wouldn't be education" they said. "It would be mere training".