These are my live-blogged notes from a concurrent session at his week’s ATD Core 4 happening this week in New Orleans. Forgive any typos or incoherencies.
Building a Smarter
Learning Ecosystem
Intermingling networks….
The components that make up your org’s ecosystem is
different than another org’s ecosystem. (the nature of the organization and the
way that work is done).
Getting out of the training bubble – taking a holistic look
at all of the things that impact how we learn.
A lot of L&D teams think they “own learning.” Hah!
Instead, lets look at all the ways we can support learning
in all the ways that it happens.
Shifting from a content focused mentality to a world focused
on creating an immersive experience.
6 Steps to building a
smarter learning ecosystem:
#1: Diagnose your Get
a greater understanding of your organization
Resources: What are the tools people are using to do their
job? Maybe it’s something you can leverage.
Information: how does info move through this organization?
Where are people going to get the information and how does that information
flow?
#2: Map Your Learning
Ecosystem
How are we supporting learning? What are we prioritizing?
What’s the foundation of our learning ecosystem? Is it the
formal stuff? Are you using performance support?
- Formal
- Informal
- Manager support
- Shared knowledge
- Reinforcement
- Performance support
How available are these resources to individuals? (Formal
training is NOT readily available and yet that’s the foundation/priority. And
yet the things that are readily available aren’t being prioritized and are
actually left of the table. So not doing much beyond the training. They didn’t
have an AFTER the training – which is what people say REALLY matters – the
transfer and the sustain piece.
So what should the
learning ecosystem look like?
Put the most available ones (e.g., shared knowledge) at the
foundation. Put our priority on the things that are most available: at the base
= shared knowledge – and then going up: performance support, continued
reinforcement, management support, on-demand training, formal training.
Also take into account criticality – what happens if this
goes wrong? If a person can’t do this on the job, what happens? Will you lose a
customer? Will someone get hurt? Those things might need a more formal
structure.
Think about criticality, content, motivation, behaviors.
Make a shift: “I don’t care if people can learn; I care if
they can do their job.”
3. Identify your
tactics
Your tactics for shared knowledge and performance support
may be different from mine.
Shared Knowledge:
the foundation for everything in learning.
The reality of everyday problem solving is GOOGLE.
They left behind their SharePoint and built a WIKI – a single
source repository – it’s searchable and it looks like Wikipedia, which everyone
uses. (this was their approach)
Introduced the idea of curation…
Go out and find all the team
members who are making those extremely useful job aids and PowerPoints.
Gave these peoples admin access to the wiki…
People get concerned about sharing knowledge publicly. But
here’s the thing – it’s already happening across cubicle walls, in break rooms,
etc. So the wrong stuff is being shared, but you don’t know about it. When you
put it on a shared system, that wrong info can be corrected.
In 2.5 years their Wiki went from 500 initial pages to
70,000 pages.
Performance Support:
how do people get help? When they don’t know what to do, how do they get help?
How do you leverage the power of the crowd in the wiki
environment? Use the comment capability – let people ask questions – and then
go prowling around and answer the questions. Initially used Community Managers.
And over time, the Community Managers were no longer necessary.
Continued
Reinforcement
Remember: AFTER the training is what really matters.
Reinforcement came from an options system -- users logged in once a day for 3 minutes – short videos, questions – adapted
to what the employee was doing – if you were supporting this program, you got
content targeted to that role. We gave people the option to do this – but
average is people logging in 3 x a week – 75%. (Axonify does this)
Management Support:
The most important person is the front-line manager. They
own the day – what you have time for, etc.
How do we enable managers – as part of their existing job –
help their team members do their jobs better?
Provide the manager with actionable data about their
employees. Who was leveraging the resources we were providing? A dashboard of
data…
Behavior observation – how do you know if people are doing
their job well? Enable a simple observation form. As part of the managers job (e.g.,
listening to calls in a call center) – give them a form to document when they
see good and bad behaviors. So managers are now feeding an insane amount of
data about performance.
Turn managers into data thieves. (and to help them coach
more effectively)
(This tool was made available – not required.)
On the backend, JD’s team would monitor the data – who’s
participating, etc. – and then just share the list (here’s who’s participating
a lot – and send that to senior leaders. No one wants to be the bottom of that
list!)
On-Demand Training
Moving up the ladder to the more structured stuff.
Dump all the old bad training content in your LMS. Clean it
out so the old stuff can’t be discovered.
All the way they were serving up content aligned to the
behaviors they were trying to drive.
Wanted to get into video to provide more structured learning
opps. Took people with credibility on
specific content – took videos of them and uploaded them to the video. E.g., a
12 video playlist of people talking about how to support new students learn the
first week (so hearing directly from the top performers).
Formal Training
Don’t stop classroom training. Instead, make everything that
gets done in formal training better because of the infrastructure you’ve put in
place. (everything was searchable, easily found, and you could ask questions) –
so when asking people to do elearning or ILT, that time could be more valuable
and concise.
4. Apply Your
Framework
Objective to create a consistent way to help people (e.g.,
when new programs are released, this is how we do it) – make learning a
predictable/consistent thing.
Continuous Learning
experience:
Inputs: Did events, online content, experience, messaging
At the foundation was the community of knowledge (employees
could grab info as they needed it).
And they could feed that back into the community – knowledge
growth.
Then a reinforcement aspect to make sure you’ve retained
that info. They leveraged games and rewards and points. How do you leverage
motivation?
Analytics – getting meaningful data. Enabling manager
feedback.
And ultimately tying everything back to business results.
Create a consistent experience so the user/learner
understands how they’re being supported.
If you’re trying to solve for a low criticality problem – the
learning professional recognizes the base tactics: shared knowledge/performance
support.
Let’s say it’s a safety/compliance issue. Might leverage
different layers of the ecosystem.
Leverage the right layers and the right tactics.
- Define business goal
- Determine criticality
- Establish context
- Define performance objectives
- Identify layers
- Identify tactics
- And only THEN do you build content
First ask, “what information is already out there about
this?” If the answer was none, they wrote a wiki page. If the answer was “well,
this junk”, then they fixed it. That often solved the business problem.
#6 Get started
Talk ecosystem
Think person first, employee second
Run a diagnostic – look at the organization and the context
in which you’re supporting performance
Map your learning ecosystem – are you off balance? What do
you need to change?
Identify your tactics (for JD it was a wiki; for you it
might be something else)
Start small; think BIG.
Escape the training bubble – get outside the typical toolbox
and mindset.
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