Sunday morning I stumbled over a post in one of the community groups I follow on LinkedIn. The question put to the community asked about the use of performance support. The author referenced hearing a lot of buzz lately about performance support, but there was not much evidence of success stories short of application to computer systems training. I had to agree, and I believe there is a purely business reason for that – it is called protecting competitive business advantage.
Competency. Urgency to perform flawlessly. Business risk. Sustainability. Pick whichever one of these strikes your fancy, but they all speak to what we hope effective training will deliver – avoid – and/or create in our workforce – meaningful and legitimate outcomes all. Unfortunately, we cannot realize these outcomes from the classroom or because of on-line training; rather they manifest downstream from our training efforts – in the work context. Are we spending our time, resources, and energy in the right place? I am not convinced we are, and as a result, human performance will not be widely sustainable.
I like the concept of “re-thinking” training organizations based in HR, and I say this from personal work history primarily based in the training space over the last thirty plus years. The blended perspective I have comes from working both inside and outside of HR in training organizations. I found them to have a very different focus.
Certainly, this title may sound like blasphemy to some of us in the training business. On the other hand, it may be even more of a shock to those who depend upon those of us in the training business to drive improved performance in the organization. Following is a deceptively simple formula and an amusing story that illustrates why a successful training solution may render a false promise of improved performance:
Why are so many LMS owners not happy with their systems – that there seems to be a “disconnect” between what they envisioned they would own after GoLive and what they actually wound up owning. Why is there such a love-hate relationship with technology? Why does someone else always have the better system? Truth is, “better” is a relative term.
Ask any IT professional if they have a repeatable process for Change Management (CM) and you can expect an unequivocal “Yes we do!” as the response, and likely suffer a sideways glance wondering what motivated such a ridiculous question. Take IT out of the equation for a moment and consider a transformational change like continuous learning. Tactical CM is a requirement, but it will not generate enough momentum to bridge the gap between deployment and implementation.This is a perfect example where Change Leadership (CL) is required to expand the scope of shepherding sustainable Change in and across the organization.
Now that title should generate a ripple or two on the pond, especially when I have been so vocal about the need for just such a shift. So…is this post a confession that I have changed my mind? Not quite. Not even. If anything, I am more passionate than ever, but over the years, I […]
I realize this may stretch the pretext of a cute catchphrase, but it seems appropriate this afternoon. The future of learning truly is NOT now because we are not ready for it…nor are we at a state of readiness even if it were now. The catalyst for making this statement about the future of learning […]