I just finished reading an amazing book, “Chase the Lion”, by Mark Batterson, where the focus is largely examining change…personal change to be exact. But the same principles he addresses are very relevant for shifting thinking in an organization. The thinking I firmly believe we need to change is how we attempt to build sustained […]
Tag: learning continuum
Leading Change to full adoption implies that we not only manage Change to deployment, we must continue to lead Change through implementation…and beyond to the desired goal of full adoption.
We were eating lunch on a Wednesday when the elevator music was disrupted with an urgent announcement, “This is a code yellow alert – Repeat – This is a code yellow alert!” My colleagues all went to the laminated cards that hung around our necks The appropriate response needed to be timely; needed to trigger agility, and needed to be acted upon flawlessly. Or, as in my example…some knucklehead just spilled something that could kill us all…so run like hell…NOW! That was perfect EPS.
When Einstein defined insanity as “Continuing to do what we’ve always done and expecting different results”, he was on the money. We continue to train with hopes that some form it…some technology enhanced venue of it…some exotic blend of it…is going to produce sustained capability that produces tangible business outcomes. Does training contribute to results? Sure it does, but does it sustain them? No, it cannot. It was never chartered nor was it scoped to do so.
A question many of us have sought to answer…or maybe “predict an ETA”…came up in one of my networking groups this morning. “When you do you know that the Learning & Development function in your organization is fully developed?” The answer to this may be as impossible to define as it is to nail Jell-O to the wall. Methinks being fully developed, means being in a constant state of “evolution” with a minimum of resistance to change.
Deployment gets you to the end-of-training celebration party and the three-bite shrimp, the balloons, the creepy clowns, and the face painting. A frightfully high percentage of system knowledge packed into the heads and hearts of learners evaporates [unreinforced knowledge retention loss] almost before all the confetti is swept up from the gala celebration. Then comes something called GoLive, and heads and hearts that were “certified as ready”, struggle with crippled recall knowledge; some users settling for feelings of success when they can remember enough to sign-on to SAP or the EMR the first time. Now our learners are in their downstream, post-training environment called the work context. Now they are outside of the scope and charter of most training organizations. Now they are most dangerous. As Satchel Paige said, “It’s not what you don’t know that can hurt you; it’s what you think you know that just ain’t so!”
When we strip away products & services and the marketing glitz & glitter, what is left that sustains [or not] the viability of a business? My vote goes to – the workforce. Even if we do not strip these things away, I still feel strongly that the workforce is at the root of a successful sustainable business. Obviously, there are other external factors like the state of the economy, cost and availability of money, and other environmental drivers and restrainers, but even including them, the pressures and demands on the business to survive, much less flourish, still is largely dependent on the effectiveness of the workforce. Why then do we insist on training them where direct business impact is not part of the outcome?
There’s no denying, that for some businesses LMSs are essential, but they cannot singularly represent holistic technology solutions that hope to sustain dynamic learning ecosystems. Any learning technology solution [LMS or not] should support continuous learning and workforce performance in the “work context”. Establishing learning continuum methodology is foundational to both clarify and plot implementation road maps that define discrete technology solutions. Doing anything less is equivalent to re-arranging deck furniture on the Titanic.
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 […]