Revolution Roadmap: Assess

Last week, I wrote about a process to follow in moving forward on the L&D  Revolution. The first step is  Assess,  and I’ve been thinking about what that means.   So here, let me lay out some preliminary thoughts.

The first level are the broad categories.  As I’m talking about aligning with how we think, work, and learn, those are the three top areas where I feel we fail to recognize what’s known about cognition, individually and together. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m looking at how we use technology to facilitate productivity in ways specifically focused on helping people learn. But let me be clear, here I’m talking about the big picture of learning – problem-solving, design, research, innovation, etc – as they call fall under the category of things we don’t know the answer to when we begin.

I started with how we think. Too often we don’t put information in the world when we can, yet we know that all our thinking isn’t in our head.  So we can ask :

• Are you using performance consulting?
• Are you taking responsibility for resource development?
• Are you ensuring  the information architecture for resources  is  user-focused?

The next area is working, and here the revelation is that the best outcomes come from people working together.  Creative friction, when done in consonance with how we work together best, is where the best solutions and the best new ideas will come from. So you can look at:

• Are people communicating?
• Are people collaborating?
• Do you  have in place a learning culture?

Finally,  with learning, as the area most familiar to L&D, we need to look at whether we’re applying what’s known about making learning work.  We should start with Serious eLearning, but we can go farther.  Things to look at include:

• Are  you practicing  deeper learning design?
• Are you  designing  engagement into learning?
• Are you developing  meta-learning?

In addition to each of these areas, there are cross-category issues.  Things to look at for each include:

• Do you have infrastructure?
• What are you measuring?

All of these areas have nuances underneath, but at the top level these strike me as the core categories of questions.  This is working down to  a finer grain than I  looked at in the book (c.f. Figure 8.1), though that was a good start at evaluating where one is.

I’m convinced that the first step for change is to understand where you are (before the next step, Learn, about where you could be).  I’ve yet to see many organizations that are in full swing here, and I have persistently made the case that the status quo isn’t sufficient.  So, are you ready to take the first step to assess where you are?