Have we taken the red pill?

So a brilliant post I read recently talked about the fact that in a crisis, humans need to have things to look forward to, so having always been an optimist myself, am I too early to start thinking about what happens when ‘all this has blown over’?

The first thing I keep thinking is that the world has changed, irrevocably. We are doing things as a new normal that would have been unthinkable 10 days ago.

• Employers are trusting that we can work from home without being monitored for 8 hours a day (albeit that trust has been forced on them)
• We are all using Zoom, WhatsApp, Skype, Teams and Hangouts as a matter of course – and yes all those meetings could really have been emails!
• We are working out with Joe Wicks from our lounges (nearly 1,000,000 of us live online synchronously, including my boys!)
• We are having virtual drinks with friends.

And we are finding new ways of learning online from Carol Vordeman's maths for kids to LinkedIn Learning offering huge numbers of online courses for free.So, here’s the question. When all this has blown over, are we going to go back to the same old ways we did things? Specifically, in L&D, will our exposure to these new and interesting ways of doing things and the creative solutions we have found mean that we can never go back to the way we were before. Have we taken the red pill?

I think I have. As an L&D leader my default position was the face-to-face workshop in a training centre or nice hotel. And there were damn good reasons for that:

• My thinking was limited!
• People won’t find the time to learn unless we put them in a room together. Err….?
• I could measure and prove the benefit of my learning (in reality, I could measure bums on seats, report a 4 out 5 and that the sandwiches were a bit dry!)
• It’s good for people to meet their colleagues from different parts of the business face-to-face so they can build a network, you can’t do that virtually. Err….?
• It felt good to hold the attention of a room for two days and go home reading the happy sheets with the instant glow of feedback and knowledge that I was great it was a job well done!

The second thing I have been thinking is that online learning is just too ‘flat’, too one-dimensional, too … dull. And I think much of it just bounces off of us. Where’s the bit that gets me thinking, acting, reacting, behaving, doing; where can I practice these skills, right now? A “Check Your Learning” questionnaire doesn’t check your learning; your short-term memory maybe. 

For us who have spent years helping people develop management/leadership/ communication/engagement/motivational skills, we know that we need to do something with that learning, particularly when it’s about person-to-person interaction skills – we need somewhere and someone to practice with. We need to build confidence that we can do it this new way. We don’t get confidence from watching someone on a screen do it badly and then, with some miraculous transformation, suddenly do it ‘right’.

So, what are we going to do in the brave new world that will be 2021? Are we all going to breathe a sigh of relief that it has all “blown over”, book up every available seminar room at the local Holiday Inn and go right back to doing what we were doing? Or will the red pill have taken effect and will we start asking ourselves

• Why am I spending 70% of my L&D budget on floorspace in hotels?
• Why am I expecting people to drive (fly) across the country (globe) to attend two days training? Oh my god the carbon footprint!!
• How can we get even more from virtual group learning than we got from being in the same room together? Not just trying to replicate, but thinking differently to do it even better, more efficiently.

Because if we aren’t asking ourselves those questions, our colleagues and those that hold the purse strings most definitely will be.

So, here are a few things that I think we have to do differently:

• Team coaching/facilitation online – From building rapport, through team processes, managing challenge, ensuring all voices are heard, and solving problems creatively together
• Enabling people to practice skills in a safe space online and get objective feedback
• Handing over control of content to our non-L&D colleagues. What makes us think that we know what the best content is?
• Thinking like the BBC and moving seamlessly between synchronous and asynchronous content.

I would love to know what else you think we have taken the red pill on and should never go back to doing the same ever again.