Creating an ecosystem within a learning organization

One year ago today the organization I work for held it's collective breath as we flipped the switch and moved to a new Human Resources and Learning Management system. For the first time the two were connected together; employees find themselves in both systems with the same hierarchical structures and activities. We didn't lose anyone, we didn't lose any payroll entries! All in all it was generally a success. For the first time, we have the opportunity to connect people, learning, performance, and compensation. 

So what have we learned and what do we still need to learn or grow into?

First, as a conservative organization, we are slowly learning how to make the systems work together from the 'people development' perspective. We, like all organizations, have made mistakes in believing that a new technology is 'the' answer to whatever misses or issues with learning offerings. This is the case here as well. 

Technology alone isn't the answer to making a system work. We are continuing to hear (and starting to hear anew from some) that the system (the LMS, the performance management system, etc) isn't solving problems because the systems are.. fill in the blank. True. All of it. To make the system work, you as a human need to do that work to connect your people and their activities and use the technology to record their activities. The technology isn't the system; the people are the system and the technology is a tool.

Second, we have to think more about how the real life activities of individuals contributes to their development as much as the formal learning systems we've put in place. As I've mentioned earlier, workplace learning is more than simply plunking people down into a classroom or having them complete projects for their development. Workplace learning is developing an environment (eLearning Guild and others would call is an ecosystem) where formal, informal and accidental learning is made available to help employees get better at their roles, find a place in the community that is the organization, and move the organization's goals forward. This is more than structuring classrooms, eLearning, on-the-job activities, mentoring, and performance tools for an individual. This is about purposefully creating a community from the employees' perspectives and creating spaces where opportunities to grow, connect and practice are available. Technology systems can help provide locations and structures, but they can't create environments - organizations have to do that on purpose.

Finally, I think the team I worked with has started to learn about the strength and power of saying 'no' to things that aren't a fit to the technology. We've started to learn that there is strength in considering the differences between what we can do and what we should do. A technology system has purpose-built functionality and we are learning to work collaboratively with our partners and vendors to find ways to work within the technology and find new technologies to support requirements that our learning partners have which don't fit with this system. We aren't ignoring or MacGuyvering the system; we are finding new ways to help our learning partners accomplish their goals. So we are learning too!

This shift in technology, in design thinking for building a learning ecosystem, and the literal move of millions of pieces of data has made quite a year. We birthed the baby and now it's sleeping through the night. Next year it will grow and develop; I hope we can keep up!

Shifting design thinking to true workplace learning

Over the past year I have been helping people make a huge paradigm shift from delivering learning in web portals and through other singular delivery channels to a more blended approach to learning design and delivery. While doing this conversion I have been struck by the level of repetition within learning programs and the embracing of whatever trend or fad seemed to have popped up on the usual national industry sites for that year. It was almost like looking through the strata of earth to see each major shift in learning design. The one enduring thing about the learning I've seen though is the consistent misstep of applying pedagogy instead of androgogy to learning design and delivery.

Most people, including our clients, remember learning as 'school'; whichever level they last completed. This means that most of our clients remember going to college or university, sitting through lectures with slides, textbooks, and what seemed like trick tests. Now add to that the ID's desire to make the learning 'fun' and the inundation of the tool and media people to use the latest and greatest gadget or delivery mechanism. What do you get? Well, what I saw was a well-intentioned and repetitive content dump or overly simplified activity set that missed the mark of what workplace learning is.

Workplace learning is not about 'sheep dip' or 'death by Power Point' (sorry Microsoft) or 'fun and games'. Workplace learning is about knowing who your learner is, where they are working every day, and what they have to work with to complete their tasks and meet their goals. It doesn't mean individualized learning for every person in the company or not blending a variety of tools, methods and activities to provide variety to the learning; but it also doesn't mean building for the sake of building either.

To really make the shift from what you remember learning was to what workplace learning really is, you need to build a profile of your learner. I've seen (and used) Empathy maps (Dave Gray has a great one), character profiles, 'day in the life' narratives and other tools. Building and seeing these first allows you, the learning professional, to connect with the target audience. It also allows the learning to be protected from the enthusiasm of the subject matter expert's desire to teach the learner everything, and allows the business to see the value in application of the learning.

Building a profile of how the worker gets to work and what their goals are in doing their job also allows you as the learning professional to get a sense of how much time and what priorities drive everyday decisions. I have built training for forklift drivers, sales professionals, high school principals and leaders of giant companies. I don't know how to do those jobs, but as a learning professional, knowing how they do those jobs, what kind of time they have, and what helps and hurts their accomplishments helps me choose the delivery method, quantity and variety of learning that I choose to build. It also helps me help my sponsor (the management or other group actually paying for the learning) understand how to situate the new task or concept that the learning is supposed to deliver. 

So is what you remember about high school or college or university wrong in the way that it taught you? I don't know. What I do know though is that my working experience was nothing like any of those (even when I taught in a college!) so the way you learn can't be either.