#eLAPC ?? | Ep. 28 | Why You Should Run L&D Like a Business with TYLER BERNARDY

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Enhanced Transcript

Clint Clarkson: Welcome to the eLearning Alchemist podcast.

I'm your host, Clint Clarkson and today we're going to be talking about running L&D like a business. Our guest is Tyler Bernardi, who is an instructional designer and founder of We Learnovate. Their focus is development for engineers and other technical roles. Tyler's background is in auto-manufacturing and that's where he's worked as an instructional designer. I'm going to pass it over to Tyler.

Tyler, why don't you tell us a little bit about your origin story, how you got started in L&D and got to where you are today.

Tyler Bernardy: Hey, Clint, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I started off with a Bachelor's in Engineering Education. From there, like most of us, I accidentally fell into L&D and worked an internship somewhat doing instructional design. After graduating, they hired me in the same role as a full-time instructional designer. It's been a great experience. I have been really learning on the go and I've really started to get this down.

CC: Right on. We're excited to have you here today as well. The topic of today's podcast is why you should run L&D like a business. That title in itself implies that we're not currently running L&D like a business, so what are we running it like now and why should we change it?

TB: I would say now, in a lot of places, not to completely generalize, but L&D is ran like a stereotypical old-school University. We look at our processes, our traditions, and our standards as this high and mighty power that we focus on following and put a lot of weight behind. Sometimes looking at it, if you can't do exactly what we want, we're not going to work with you. By shifting our mindset like this, we really can focus on the benefit of all our learners, and really provide the most benefit for those learners and for the organization for the value and cost.

CC: Would you say that our focus as a department, and I am generalizing, I'm okay with that, is on following the rules of learning versus serving the business we're supposed to be serving? 

TB: Yeah, definitely. I see that way too much where we love our learners, we love L&D, and we sometimes focus a little too much on those areas and not really on the business and providing the maximum value we possibly can.

...we love our learners, we love L&D, and we sometimes focus a little too much on those areas and not really on the business and providing the maximum value we possibly can.

CC: When you speak about this concept, it sounds like you're not just talking about work practices, but also mindset. Is that a fair assessment? If so, what role does mindset play in running L&D like a business?

TB: I'd say the biggest mindset shift that we need to look at, is to become familiar with your core business, what your company does, how your company makes money, what are your company's concerns, and what its competitors doing. If us in L&D can look at it from that perspective and that mindset, it really helps us to understand why the business makes the decisions that they do.

CC: Is there a gap of understanding there? Do you believe L&D team members understand the business they serve well enough?

TB: Generally, I would say no. I think we look at it from our perspective and background in L&D. We can see the benefit that L&D can bring, but fail to see why the business might be asking us to cut costs, or why they might want something faster and not have our full development process time to do something.

CC: I think that's part of the mindset is that we come out of university or we happenstance our way into a role in L&D. We almost get this arrogance about being the experts at L&D. We might believe that is sufficient for us to be able to perform our roles, and we shouldn't have to go to the business and learn about the business, or be part of the business.

How do we shift that mindset? Is that something that the business itself needs to drive? Is that something that learning leadership needs to drive? Is that possibly something that needs to be embedded at the university and workshop levels of the education system for instructional designers currently?

TB: I'm going to say all the above. I think it can definitely start by learning leaders pushing that. I think a lot of those in business leadership, if learning leaders come to them and say, "Hey, I want to learn about your concerns. I want to learn about your goals," I think they'll be welcomed with open arms. If it starts with learning leadership, it can definitely make its way through an organization and then down through workshops and those types of activities.

CC: You might have said that a bit more politely than I might. Learning leaders in my mind, when they show up on the front door of the executives and say, "We need to understand the business better. How should we do that? We want to contribute more to the business. How should we do that?" The senior leaders of most businesses would say, "Thank you, it's about time. This is what we've been asking for for years." Not only would we be open arms, it would be, "Thank you, finally. This is what we need."

TB: If we look at it from the mindset of how can L&D help the organization achieve its goals? It's going to change the entire outlook of L&D and how we can impact our business.

If we look at it from the mindset of how can L&D help the organization achieve its goals? It's going to change the entire outlook of L&D and how we can impact our business.

CC: Yeah, for sure. It's so easy to overcomplicate that and to think that there's more to it. Simply asking that question and stating that as the goal, there's a lot of power in that. One of the things that we talked about in preparation for this podcast was the notion of the minimum viable product or MVP. Can you talk a bit about the concept of MVP, and then more specifically about how taking an MVP approach would help learning teams treat L&D more like a business?

TB: MVP is basically doing the minimum work or the minimum activity to achieve your targeted goals. For example, looking at it from a civil engineer's perspective, who's trying to design a pedestrian bridge. They will design that for pedestrians and factor in support for people to walk on it. They're not going to design it to hold a loaded semi-truck. That's called over-engineering and they would have spent way too much money and resources developing that, which wasn't necessary.

CC: A lot of our learning products are certainly over-engineered. If we pursue MVP, is there a risk that we're actually degrading the quality of the learning?

TB: There definitely is a risk there. The MVP approach is not about cutting corners. The goal of it is to increase the overall value for the organization and the benefit for the learners. If you have $100, you can spend all $100 and have the best course ever made, you know, buzzers, flashing lights, interactive. On the other hand, if you spend $70 on it, maybe you can get 90% of the benefit, and use the other $30 somewhere else. You're still providing even more benefit that way, than putting it all into the one best product possible.

CC: Yeah, it sort of falls under that Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. What are the 20% of activities that get us 80% of the result? We certainly don't look at that enough in L&D. One of the things that concerns me when we start talking about MVP is that we actually answer the question, how do we deliver this content as quickly as possible and with the least amount of effort? That's not what we are talking about here. It's the minimum viable product that we can produce to achieve the goal that is stated by the learning.

So minimum viable product doesn't mean just take a whole bunch of text and bullet points and drop them on slides because you can do that the fastest and it's the cheapest. It's what type of eLearning course or what type of in-class training or what type of micro-learning are we going to use to achieve the stated goal of the learning. Part of that goal is keeping learner engagement, so it doesn't mean just stripping out all of the graphics and stripping out all of the interaction. It means, let's not waste a bunch of time on interactions that don't actually get us closer to achieving the goal.

TB: I love what you said there, that the goal is to achieve the targeted goals or achieve what you set out to do and do the minimum work to still achieve those goals. Definitely, we cannot forget about learner interactions. If we put out start putting out eLearning that's the minimum possible, which is just text on slides clicking a next button, then we've gotten zero value for no matter how much we spent on it.

CC: Yeah, the viability of the minimum viable product is.

L&D has this arrogance is the word that comes to mind about projects that are foisted on them at the last minute. I've certainly been there and I've certainly been frustrated by this, but I feel like we sometimes get a small bit of joy out of being able to tell the business story about your luck, you should have come sooner this request is unreasonable. This really isn't a business mindset.

We both own companies that develop learning products. If our customers showed up at our door, and we said, "Yeah sorry, we can't do anything for you" every time we didn't like what their request was, we'd be out of business in a hurry. It's really not taking a business mindset. We definitely can't build a 60 minute eLearning course in a couple of days, at least not anything of any quality. What approach should L&D professionals take when these types of situations come up?

TB: This is one of my biggest pet peeves in L&D is usually an internal customer come to us say, "Hey, can you do this?" and we say, "No, we don't have time you should have came sooner." I think the biggest thing in this situation is this really important to focus on working with our customer, internal or external, and determine what is the deadline? Why is that the deadline? What could we possibly achieve within the deadline, maybe instead of a 60 minute eLearning course, we put out a five minute intro that hits the key points and then follow up with some job aids. So it's really important to accommodate and work with those customers or those clients to make sure that we do meet their goals, while maximizing value to the organization within our timeframe.

CC: Yeah, there's something about that isn't there? We don't like to define the parameters and then ask what can we do by then? If we need something by Monday, maybe there's a regulatory change or something's happened inside the organization and we need learning to happen right now because people need to be informed. The default on this is often to just send out a memo because we can type a memo that quick, but there is a lot more that we can do in a very short period of time. It doesn't seem like L&D is really interested in that. If we're not interested in that, it would seem we're not actually interested in helping the business we just want to do what we want to do.

TB: That goes back to our are amazing processes that we have, like ADDIE, SAM, and agile, or whatever your business does. Those should be adaptable and make sure that we're fitting our process into the needs of our customer. We need to make sure that we can meet their goals in their time frame while doing a good job from our L&D perspective. 

CC: What about budget? We think of running L&D like a business, well your business has profit and that's the goal of the business. L&D doesn't necessarily have that metric to say we are being successful or we're not being successful. What should L&D be using to make that assessment?

TB: I think it goes back to the value you're providing for any given budget. Even if in some situations, it might not be possible or ideal to measure some business output, if you can, that's the best situations to tie business outputs to your L&D budget. There's some way to acknowledge what value providing and make sure that you, your business, unit leaders understand that value. That goes back to that mindset shift of focusing on your core business and your company's core business and being able to show I have developed this training. Here are your concerns that I addressed with that. Even if you can't prove that you showed some benefit, statistically. 

CC: I love the way that you just framed that up because we have become obsessed with that. About five years ago, we were really dialed in on ROI. Every conference session had content around ROI. This certainly isn't to down talk the work that Jack and Patti Phillips have done around ROI because the ROI is a fantastic measure and there are a lot of situations in which we should use it, but there are times when getting the data is either too complicated or too expensive to justify doing it.

When we're in that situation, we should define that at the start of the project and then at the end of the project, we still need to report on it. We still need to have that conversation and say, "This is how you said you believe this training is going to influence the organization and here's the training completed. Here's what we can at least report from a knowledge acquisition perspective." Those two things are lined up. We've made that bet and let's see what the felt impact is because when we talk about running it like a business, people hear business and they think numbers. It doesn't always have to necessarily be numbers. Sometimes it's about just framing up the conversation the right way and understanding what the bet was when you decided to implement training in the first place.

TB: Yeah, exactly. When you first met with your core business leaders, maybe they share their big concern there, maybe a production managers concern is run rate and it's lagging. He has the data on why run rate is lagging. So from an L&D perspective, we can highlight those things and say, we can't prove to you that we're impacting this, but here's our training, here are these concerns of yours that are all in this training. 

CC: So in your experience working in the auto manufacturing industry, you've obviously been exposed to some kind of continuous improvement methodologies, Lean, TPS, Six Sigma. What have you learned by working inside a business that uses those methodologies and how does it apply to learning?

TB: The biggest thing is, if you understand their methodologies and can use those words when you're presenting about some L&D initiative, they will definitely appreciate hearing that and it will increase their opinion of you and what you're saying as far as L&D's function.

Wrap Up

CC: Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. I think that there's a lot of credibility that is built simply by using the language of the business. In fact, for this podcast, I think in the very first episode, maybe the second, I talked about that the importance of speaking the language of your business, so that you build credibility and the business understands that you understand them and that they believe that you are directing your efforts at their organization. It is one thing to say, "We're focused on the organization, we want to make a difference to the organization." It's really tough to believe that if your leaders don't believe you understand the organization, so I think that's a great way to describe it. Let's wrap this up Tyler. How can people reach you and how can they find We Learnovate.

TB: I'm on LinkedIn at Tyler Bernardy and We Learnovate at welearnovate.com. 

CC: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for doing this day.

TB: Thanks Clint. It's been great to be here.

Clint Clarkson, CTDP is just another victim who accidentally stumbled down the rabbit hole of corporate learning and development. He is the Founder & Managing Partner of eLearning Alchemy, a custom eLearning development firm. While he’s known for being upbeat, positive, and enthusiastic, Clint is still easily offended by comic-sans, bullet points, and the excessive use of buzzwords. Connect with Clint on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.