Alex's L&D Thoughts: How to Pilot New Solutions in a Low-risk, High-reward Way

Trying new things is the lifeblood of growth and discovery. It's how you find new solutions to old problems or ways to solve new problems that come up. This is no less true in learning & development.

I've been speaking with L&D Directors and other experts in the learning space for the past six weeks. Almost all of them have told me some combination of the following:

• they hate their learning management system (LMS)
• they have more than one LMS
• they're on the market for a new LMS that can do something their current or former one can't

The reasons vary. In some cases, they've inherited an LMS they dislike. Or the LMS was purchased or is "owned" by a different business unit with a very different use case, so their hands are tied. Sometimes they're locked into a relationship with an LMS vendor that isn't very responsive to support requests (which is especially brutal if the product is buggy or requires a lot of customer support to make the most of it). Or few employees use it.

Despite these concerns, there's a lot of inertia when it comes to doing things a certain way, and in many places, the LMS continues to play a key role in the L&D professional's arsenal.

For example, as your company grows, learning needs increase throughout the business; you create custom learning programs to address those needs, and then you need a place to house your content & trainings and for your employees to access the material—as well as for you to administer and manage your users and ideally measure progress. So you get an LMS.

Another scenario is that have a large company with thousands of employees and many learning spokes: new hire training, sales rep onboarding, customer service training, product training, vendor/external partner education, leadership development, and so on. Each of these learning programs has its own specialized content and learning deliverables. Also, different members of your team are responsible for different pieces; the Sales Enablement Manager might be responsible for sales trainings, the Customer Success or Technical Services Manager for customer-facing reps and product trainings, and the Learning Director for talent development, performance management, and leadership training. Each of them needs a mission control for the content they own and to track engagement and the effectiveness of those programs. When learning gets complicated, an LMS becomes an obvious hub to manage that complexity.

But LMSes, I'm learning, are very expensive and typically very underutilized.

I spoke with a contact at a company in which every employee has a license to their LMS, yet people are so busy that they rarely log into it. That wasn't too much of a surprise because the figures I've seen so far range from 11%-25% for percentage of employees that use their company's LMS or learning portals. In a company paying for hundreds of licenses, that's just a few dozen learners using a system that likely took hundreds of hours' worth of time to populate with custom trainings. (If you're using an eLearning marketplace for video content in addition to the LMS, you spend less time creating content, but your total costs skyrocket.)

When I hear stories like these, one question I have is, "If their LMS isn't working for them or isn't being used, why not try something new?"

I'm in sales. I know that the answer comes down to risk and inertia. There's always a chance that the new approach won't work either, and doing something new requires taking on change—and change is expensive in time and money, both of which are precious and scarce!

Be that as it may, the problem of expensive systems that don't achieve their intended results isn't going away. There's also no reward without risk, and growth often does come from periods of change. So my advice to L&D professionals who are not getting value out of their current learning management system is to consider the upsides of trying something new, such as a specialized learning retention tool.

One place you can start is by identifying a place within your organization that meets the following criteria:

1. is relatively small (maybe 10-15% of your workforce)
2. has a compelling need to learn and to show results visibly
3. would champion a new solution if that solution ends up working well

The first criteria will keep your costs manageable: you'll spend far less on a pilot program than on an org-wide rollout, and you'll be nimbler and faster as you experiment with the new solution. If it doesn't work, you won't break the bank; if it does work, you'll have an easier time going back to the well with a data-justified case.

The second criteria will help you select a business unit that has a legitimate learning need; this isn't experimenting for its own sake, rather it's trying something new to solve a problem or meet a need that genuinely exists. Also, there should be enough riding on the program that you and others will have a vested interest in giving it a real go, because let's face it—everyone's busy and time is limited, so if you're going to tackle a new solution, the incentives should be aligned in such a way that end users will be willing to use it, managers will be willing to reinforce new habits and behaviors, and your administrative team will want to measure its effectiveness to compare against the old approach. One obvious example is new employee orientation program. Another is if you're rolling out a brand new leadership development training. The best thing that can happen is that you say, "Hey, we tried X, and X was a resounding success—let's do more of that elsewhere in the org" OR "You know, we tried X, and we all tried our best to make it work, but it wasn't the right solution and now we know that—so let's try Y or go back to an earlier solution."

Finally, the third criteria makes it easier for your solution to expand throughout your business if things do go well, and with less overhead to boot. Happy customers are one thing. Happy, vocal customers that tell others about the product is even better. The same is true within your org. If you select a team that will champion this new approach to other business units, your life will be easier and your impact will be amplified in the long run.

Learning & Development organizations face a lot of pressure to meet a lot of learning needs throughout their business. It's important to assess which solutions you currently have that are not working for you, and if it's worth it to try a new approach as part of or in place of the old one. By making room to experiment in a way that reduces costs and maximizes reward-to-risk, L&D orgs can be forces of innovation, deliver content in more effective ways, and discover new ways to help their businesses and employees thrive.

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Thanks for reading ALDT! If you have questions or comments, please leave a note below or send me a message -> [email protected].

Enjoyed this? Here's the next one: Alex's L&D Thoughts: Learning is Use-It-or-Lose It, and What to Do About It.