Learning Conversations

Lots of organisations are looking through their corporate boundaries and realising that the world outside is changing - and fast!

Whereas fifteen years ago mobile phones were still quite new, now they are ubiquitous. Being constantly in touch and available has become the norm, so much so that people have to announce that they are going "offline"

The Internet has taken over from the High Street as the place where people shop and communicate. And now distance and national borders are really no barrier. Our networks of trusted suppliers and contacts are geographically dispersed; often to the extent that we don't even know where they are located.

When I was a child, when I needed to find something out for school homework, I'd turn to our set of Everyman's Encyclopaedia or take a trip to our local library. My own children now have the collected knowledge of the world at their fingertips. The skills they need to interpret and use it are far more advanced than anything I had to do.

Organisations that have direct contact with real people (ie. not business to business organisations) know that expectations have changed, and have had to change their sales, marketing and delivery processes to reflect them. These organisations tend to be the ones that have realised they also need to change the way they deal with people inside the corporate boundary.

These changes are particularly pertinent to learning and development, which is the cross-over point between internal communications and operations. We have to constantly reassess how we are working to remain relevant.

However, too many times, we simply pick up on the latest buzzword for the year and create a strategy to reflect it. So we end up with elearning strategies, social learning strategies and mobile learning strategies; all sitting separate to our core operation which continues delivering classroom-based training...

I wonder how many organisations, if asked, would be able to describe their learning strategy? How many would be able to show how their Learning & Development teams directly make a difference to the ongoing success of the organisation? How many would be able to show, by reference to research (not psycho-babble and hype), how their approaches to learning will actually help people to learn? How many would even know what they meant by "learning" in their particular context? And why is that particular "learning" needed anyway?

When I was working in schools, I came across many policy documents around homework, special educational needs, health and safety, report writing, learning styles (please don't start me on that!) etc, but only once did I find a school that had explicitly described its approach to learning.

What did it include?

1. A statement of the school's aims
2. The quality indicators that would be used
3. Examples of good practice
4. What we know from neuro-science about the brain and learning

So, what should you consider in a corporate learning strategy?

1. Your stakeholders
2. What you're trying to achieve and how you will know whether you've achieved it
3. Engagement approach with your stakeholders
4. What we know about learning from research
5. The role of managers
6. The role of the l&d professional
7. Your approach to trying new ideas
8. Your approach to communicating and rolling out new ideas
9. The technology toolkit that is available. This will keep changing, but it will need to be in a controlled manner

Each of these is worth a post on their own - that's the plan.