At first glance Change Management (CM) and Change Leadership (CL) may be considered interchangeable and simply more jargon used to confuse a familiar concept. Stay with me on this post as there is a significant difference when the end-game is the desire to create full adoption and sustained capability of any Change initiative.
Tag: performer support
At the recent Learning Solutions 2014 conference in Orlando, the Guild added another concurrent conference to the venue – Ecosystems 2014. Amazingly, at an additional cost there were over 200 participants attend the extra breakout sessions. While there were more questions surface than answers, it was clear that the concept of addressing the Learning & Performance environment as an ecosystem was a hit…and more questions than answers.
Do you ever get the feeling that the Training side of our organizations is delivering a message nobody on the Operations side of the business is hearing? What comes to mind is an old Gary Larson cartoon where a pet owner is speaking to his pet dog and saying, “Blah blah blah, blah-ba-ba-blah sit, blah blah treat blah blah bah…etc.” The dog was only hearing what really mattered to him. Could it be our Training message is more HR-speak than business-impact-relevant?
After watching the Winter Olympics, I am once again ready to plop my fanny in a bobsled and plunge down an icy gutter at ninety miles per hour. What a rush that must be! Besides living in southern Indiana and the only icy gutters hang on my house, I am so far from a state of readiness that the only outcome from the bobsled plunge would be certain injury or possibly death by impact. How many times do we put our workforce through hours of training and consider them to be at a state of readiness to take a “business plunge” that, while not death-defying, is placing real tangible business value at risk?
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AGILE Is As AGILE Does
It’s Sunday morning, and I’m in Orlando at the front end of the Learning 2013 conference once again. Elliott Masie and his Consortium have a knack for putting on a good conference every November for learning and development professionals, and I anticipate this year’s conference being no exception. As with earlier conferences that I’ve spoken at this year, there is once again a lot of buzz around the concept of AGILE. AGILE what? That is a key question to ask because from what I’m seeing, not all AGILE instructional design approaches are scoped equally when it comes to learning and performance solutions.
Implementing Embedded Performance Support [EPS] can be as daunting a task as eating an entire elephant. Not sure I’d ever want to eat an elephant, but if I did, it would be one bite at a time versus scarfing down the whole thing. One bite at a time rings true for implementing EPS as well. Keep in mind that EPS is not a technology [though technology may well be part of the effort]; EPS is a discipline.
In my current role, I work in a virtual environment that is strategically located between corn and soy beans in the rolling hills of southeastern Indiana. Driving narrow, rural country roads to breakfast at the local truck stop this morning, I encountered numerous other pick-up trucks. Yes, I drive one too, but no rifle rack, nor is there a confederate flag in the back window. You might be asking yourself what any of this has to do with Performer Support. Answer: Plenty
Can I safely say we agree that task-level execution and business results do not happen during training? That seems a reasonable statement to me. We can certainly simulate task execution during training, but the simulated environment is structured and controlled and no harm is done when a learner screws up. Even when done well enough to pass the training, no business results are generated. However, when the learner graduates from training and simulations and becomes a performer there is no safety net, and flawless execution within the workflow has real business risks hanging in the balance.
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 and I snatched for the laminated cards that hung around our necks and determined that a “code yellow” meant there was a hazardous materials spill in the building and we were to evacuate immediately. We did. No one was injured. We had the perfect EPS application available to us at the right time.
Last week [October 25th] I had the distinct privilege of sitting in on the Tin Can API break-out session that was presented by Aaron Silvers of ADL. I’m not sure of his exact title, but his role was in a leadership capacity on the Tin Can API project. His business card says “the Beard”…and while that was accurate, I still don’t know his real title. Given ADL was also the birth mother of SCORM, I walked in and sat down with a preconception or two that this was SCORM in a new dress. Wow, was I wrong!