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In an post this past spring, I opined that we  do have to change.  One obvious related question is what that change would look like.  What would an effective L&D unit be doing, and what would the employee/manager/exec experience be?  This is a longer topic, but here’re some initial thoughts that I really would welcome your thoughts on.

I see employees experiencing less ‘training’.  As I’ve said, effective training is expensive when done properly, and should be used only when significant skill shifts are needed.  It should only be for proprietary approaches, otherwise you should use others’ materials.  And it only is for upskilling new employees (and only when needed), or when a significant change is happening.

I’d expect to see more performance support, easily accessible via user-centric portals and search and delivered when and where needed.  Similarly social would play a much more central role, arguably our first recourse.  Employees would be tightly coupled to their work teams, and more loosely coupled to their communities of practice.  Teams would be diverse and flexible, and group work would be the norm.

Resources would be sometimes created, sometimes crowd-sourced within (or without) the organization, and sometimes curated.  Much curation would happen by individual in communities monitoring the larger network, individuals in teams bringing in relevant elements from their communities, and sharing back reflections and outcomes that inform the community while communities would share back to the larger network.  This is the vision of the Coherent Organization.

Managers would be playing a leadership and mentoring & coaching role rather than a directive role. They’d be looking to share the vision of goals and rationale, and then supporting performance aligned towards this goal. Executives would be aligning manager visions with organizational goals, monitoring performance, and facilitating infrastructure to support effective communication and cooperation, and well as establishing and maintaining a learning organization culture.

The L&D unit would need to be monitoring the effectiveness of communication and collaboration, management, and leadership, as well as experimenting with new tools to support the work.  The L&D unit becomes responsible for the learning to learn skills, the learning and performance tools, and the corporate culture.

If organizations are to successfully couple optimal execution with continual innovation, particularly in times of increasing change and decreasing resources, the mechanisms for success transcend training.  Providing support when needed, and leveraging the power of people will be key.  Does this make sense?  Next step: how do you get there?

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The other meme from the retreat event  last weekend was the notion of leadership for complexity.   A few of us decided to workshop a topic around performance, leadership, and technology.   We realized technology was only a means to an end, and the real issue was how to move organizations to optimal performance (e.g. the Coherent Organization).

We talked through how things are moving from complicated to complex (and how important it is to recognize the difference), and that organizations need to receive the wake-up call and start moving forward.   Using the Cynefin model, the value will not come from the simple (which should be automated) nor the complicated (which can be outsourced), but from dealing with the complex (and chaotic).   This won’t come from training and top down management. As I’ve said before, optimal execution will only be the cost of entry, and the differentiator (and hence the value) will be continual evaluation. And that comes from a creative and collaborative workforce.   The issue really is to recognize the need to seize new directions, and then execute the change.

One concern was whether we were talking evolution or revolution.   Rather than taking an either or, I was inclined to think that you needed revolutionary thinking (I like Kathy Sierra’s  take on this), but that you fundamentally can’t revolutionize an organization short of total replacement (“blood on the streets” as one colleague gleefully put it :).   I reckoned a committed change initiative to the place the revolutionary thinking pointed was what was needed.

The issue, then, is the vision and guidance to get there.   What’s needed is leadership that can lead the organization to be able to leverage complexity for success.   This will be about equipping and empowering people to work together on shared goals: sharing, commenting, contributing, collaborating, and more.   It will be inherently experimental in an ongoing way.

What that means practically is an exercise I (and we) are continually working on, but we’ve coalesced on the top-level frameworks to form the basis of tools, and what’s needed are some organizations to co-develop the solutions.   Design-based research] if you will. So who’s up for working on the path to the future?

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From a conversation with my ITA colleagues, talking about the (self-imposed) death of L&D that Charles wrote about, Jane wondered what we might do if we were starting from scratch.  I decided to take this on, thinking about an org that was already in operation, with it’s goals, processes, and practices, and what I might do if I were to come in and get it going (with the support of the executive team to do what I thought was right).

My initial step would be to establish a social media system, supporting conversations and collaboration on work teams and communities of practice.  I’d make sure that folks could establish dialogs, work together on documents, and share files, quick pointers, and more fully developed thoughts. They’d also be able to both create and share media, video, audio, and screencasts.  I’d want to have some folks supporting the development of the use of this capability, in a performance consulting  or performance strategist role.

Associated with this would be a big emphasis on transparency in communication, with the overall mission of the org percolating all the way through, and emphasizing the part each role plays in the overall picture.  Another emphasis would be on developing individual capability for self-learning.

My second step would be to set up a mechanism to support portals organized around work tasks (not by org silo), where media, files, and conversations around topics could happen.  The goal is to have tools ‘to hand’ as well as people.  Thus, any created job aids would be appropriately located. Again, with a performance strategy focus. This is related to the first point.

Finally, I’d consider formal learning to supplement the informal learning, in places where it demonstrably would add value, with a view to minimizing the use of this except where a sound business case could be made that the time spent was aligned to key business indicator, and that developing this skill was the necessary approach.  And, perhaps, on ways to effectively take advantage of the systems indicated above.  However, a longer term approach than the ‘event’ model would be used.  I’d want to track activity, not just content and assessment.  Compliance and onboarding, typically roles for formal learning, would have a different look than currently.

I’d supplement this with mobile access, and ultimately start looking for ways to add contextual support.  I’d be looking for  business impact across the board. I’d probably structure this as a performance unit, and ensure that the staff are trained to look at the full suite of opportunities to improve performance including social, and consider the emotional side – motivation, anxiety, and confidence – as well as the cognitive.

This is all hypothetical, of course, but I think it’s illustrative of a different way of approaching this.  I think that the way things are going: changing faster, dealing with more ambiguity ,and requiring more ingenuity and innovation, require a different approach than the assess, prepare, rollout model.    The focus increasingly is on supporting people meeting their needs, instead of attempting to meet their needs.   Organizations have to be more nimble, and this approach starts there and works back, instead of the other way around.

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