Creating more business value from learning initiatives

How to connect your learning initiatives to a strong business rational of maximising engagement and return on investment.

With Openfield, we operate at the intersection between transformation consulting and capability building. While some might question the relationship between these pillars, my recent experience has confirmed that organisational transformation and learning are intrinsically linked. Organisational change requires that people adopt new ways of working, thinking and being. They need to develop new skills, mindsets and postures. When they do, new possibilities emerge in terms of governance, business models, and strategy. Transformation and learning go hand in hand in a mutually re-enforcing dynamic!

Let’s examine that articulation between transformation and learning.

Common approaches to organisational change are proven and effective: start from a transformation intent, define the capability gap to achieve the desired state, and then design and deliver some learning journeys in order to bridge the skills, cultural and behavioural gaps.

In this context, the ‘why’ of transformation is crystal clear, which makes it easy to design and deploy a learning program related to change. People need to take ownership of their own learning and for that, they need to develop a clear rational for investing time and effort in ‘changing’. What will those new skills enable me to do? What problem will they help me solve? In what way will they advance my career? If this isn’t clear to them, the need to learn will not be compelling — the learning ‘seeds’ will be sown on shallow soil and nothing will grow.

But what if the ‘why’ isn’t clear?

Unlike in one’s personal life, learning is not a purpose in itself in many organisations — it’s a means to an end. And the clearer the connection between the business goal and the training, the more attention you generate and greater the retention of learning . The challenge here is to surface (or create) a clear connection between the business objectives and the learning objectives. If your learning initiative isn’t part of a broader transformation project, clarify the way in which it will create value for the organisation. Look for existing business projects that could be used as learning vehicles and leverage their pre-existing business legitimacy; after all, they have been approved and funded!!! Using those projects as learning prototypes and design on-the-job learning mechanisms like courses, coaching or mentoring that will combine capability building and business value creation. That way, the learning is fully contextualised and the pull from the learners is strong.

To illustrate the point, let me draw three examples from recent engagements.

• A global insurance company making a shift towards a much more decentralised model; devolving more responsibilities to markets and cutting multiple middle management layers at HQ and in the regions. The transformation was supported by a global training program focusing on collaboration and empowerment.
• A government agency making a shift towards citizen centricity from service design & delivery to policy shaping. The transformation was supported by a training program focusing on co-design.
• A software vendor aiming to reposition their value proposition and enter the consulting business to become a trusted advisor for their clients. The transformation was support by a training program focusing on collaborative design.

In each of those cases, the transformational intent was verbalised by my client touch-point and this intent informed the brief for the design of the training program. The learning objectives were explicitly set in service of a transformation agenda.

Nevertheless, the first two programs were largely considered successful while the third one, in plain contrast, didn’t deliver the expected outcome and the feedback from participants was relatively poor. Given that the content was similar and the trainers were the same, it led me to wonder about the differences in context that could explain such variance.

My conclusion is that the maturity and sponsorship of the transformation intent is what made the difference in terms of learning impact. Let me explain why!

In the first two cases, the transformation intent was clearly articulated and multiple initiatives such as organisation re-design or cultural change were in motion. The sponsorship for the transformation was strong and embodied at the highest level of the organisation. There was a clear articulation between transformation intent, capability gap and learning objectives. Concretely, the transformation was funded, sponsored at CEO level, and on the way ; the learning initiative was launched as a project within that program, and the sessions included some activities to connect learning objectives to transformational goal or organisational priorities. For the participants, the rational for investing time in training was compelling and the leaders created a context that encouraged and rewarded the new practices. This context created space for a healthy push and pull dynamic, between sponsors and trainers — who wanted to transmit knowledge and practices — and teams — who wanted to learn new skills to embrace the change.

In the third case, the context seemed similar at first sight but there were nuances that made a difference. The transformational intent was sponsored by a charismatic leader in a non-executive role but no business initiative was approved let alone started in service of that intent. Her tactic consisted in using learning as a lever to increase awareness on the potential benefits of adopting a co-design mindset and gain broader buy-in for a more structured transformation. She believed that by inviting enough key stakeholders to an ‘amazing training’, they would see the potential of ‘new ways of doing things’ and develop an appetite for transformation. I got to believe that too and did my best to make it work.

But… it didn’t work! Both the push and the pull were too weak to create any momentum.

What happened?

While the main sponsor had secured some support at executive level, there were enough senior detractors or sceptics in the room to cast a doubt on the overall relevance of the training. During the training sessions, the participants struggled to relate the topics that were being discussed with the business objectives they were expected to achieve. The difficulty to connect the content to their own business challenges led most of them to disengage. In addition, the participants had been curated primarily from the perspective of increasing the readiness for transformation rather than genuine upskilling. The diversity of profiles and levels of seniority, which would have been an asset from an engagement perspective, made it even harder to create a dynamic from a learning perspective.

Despite our efforts with the client, the combination of those factors largely contributed to a downward spiral achieving neither the engagement nor the learning objectives.

From this experience, I take away a series of questions the related to maturity and sponsorship of the transformation program when designing a bespoke learning journey:

1. What is the business intent we are contributing to and how is it sponsored internally?

2. Who sponsors the capability building intent and what are the learning objectives?

3. How strong is the articulation between the business and learning objectives?

4. In the portfolio of the organisation, which approved or soon-to-be approved projects would be the best to prototype on-the-job learning mechanisms?

5. Who are the key stakeholders that need to be on-board to use those real-life — and potentially strategic — projects as learning vehicles?

6. What learning journey and supporting mechanisms do we need to put in place around the project teams to achieve the learning objectives while securing — ideally increasing — the business value?

As you explore these questions, ensure that you can tick the following boxes in order to maximise learning, engagement and business-level outcomes:

• There is a clear and unambiguous sponsorship for the business intent.
• The capability gap to achieve the business intent is understood and there is an agreement beyond L&D teams to close this gap.
• The key stakeholders in L&D and in the business are supportive of a contextualised project-based approach to learning.

To paraphrase Donella Meadows in the last pages of Thinking in Systems, “Don’t maximize parts of the systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole”. Explore the context around your learning initiative — the leadership, the business priorities, the level of strategic alignment, etc. — and co-design your approach and format accordingly, together with the key business stakeholders to blend into their agenda.