LEARNING JOURNEYS

My own experience in learning Neuro-Semantics has been indeed a rich one.?Learning new concepts, learning from others, learning by doing,?applying, and practicing with someone else aside to receive feedback from,?has made my learning journey pleasant and effective. At the same time, I do learn from other sources and experiences, and thus, I share them now from a?different perspective.

The concept behind “learning journeys” resembles a trip experience.?Visiting new places, experiencing new cultures, new ways of doing things,?meeting new people, playing with new concepts, acquiring new visions,?sharing, and learning in a collaborative, safe, and friendly environment.?In addition, learning journeys are used as a change management tool for?culture change.

Industrial Providers Inc. sells industrial consuming products such as?drills, welding materials, lathes, automation devices, metal cutting laser?equipment and all kinds of related products.?They use those thick printed?catalogs as well as virtual ones for their users.?John Garrick, one of the nine sales managers, tells us that the sales force limits their work on picking up orders. Nothing beyond this point. “We don’t need 90 salesmen for this”, he said.

John shared how the new virtual world, increasing international competitors, lower prices ---mainly from Asia--- a growing customer service and a quicker delivery demand is driving them crazy.??They feel frustrated and desperate struggling to reach their sales quotas.?Something had to be done.?Weeks later, they decided to re-train the sales force with a whole new sales and customer care approach.?This is when they decided to embark in a learning journey to provoke change

1) Discovery phase:?we dove-in into the company’s way to do business, sales, and ways of approaching their clients. We interviewed several executives and salespeople to see, hear and sense what was going on, what the problem was, where they were then and where they wanted to be.?Well-formed?outcome (WFO) questions were made to pinpoint their wanted results, with a?clear description of deliveries, plan, resources needed, metrics, indicators, monitoring to produce the business impact desired.?So, we ended up with a list of behaviors to be acquired by the?sales force, such as bonding and rapport, up-front agreements, search for the customer needs through questioning, customer service orientation, among others.?A bunch of static words needed detailing, so we worked on operational definitions.?Beyond that, we had to describe the levels of domain for each behavior using the Neuro-Semantic Benchmarking Model.

2) Learning and instructional design phase: their learning trip had to be well planned. What places needed to be visited, what kind of learning experiences had to be offered, to produce what behaviors, and to be able to accomplish the wanted results. We just had to think on the overall employee’s experience in this journey, get their buy-in and make change happen

What do we want the salespeople to think? What frames would help? What should they hear? What should they feel???What should they do? Leonard Shapiro, an old sea wolf in this industry just got it: “We are here to help our customers to solve their problems”, “they ought to see us as their allies and partners”, “they really battle to lower their costs, increase productivity and maintain and improve their quality…so we are there to help”. This new approach made them feel more secure and gave them new hope.??“At the end we do not sell anything, we help our customers to solve their challenges and thus, we make business along the way”, Leonard concluded.

3) Learning journey phase: the sales force will embark on a learning journey experience that will facilitate change.?Why should they go anyway? They found that “big why” by watching Bill Brown, their CEO on the screen. He explained how things were in Industrial Providers Inc, how the global markets were behaving, what challenges were they facing and made it clear the need for change.?Along with this spark, a well communication plan was delivered through the company.?Tickets just flew away and everyone declared being on-board.

So, where do we start??First tour, a ninety-minute master class delivered by subject matter experts designed to?offer a quick and thorough view of each place to visit, and what learning experiences were to be delivered.?After it, they had to experience the new “to-be” culture by?a series of training workshops designed to deliver experiential learning and?deliberate practice.?The final format was a series of four-hour workshops delivering the critical learning experiences to 15 to 20?participant’s average per group, every four weeks.

Wait, we need a tour guide to enhance and facilitate our embedding into this new culture, right? You got it. Coaches were appointed for each participant to offer one-on-one sessions to help “mind-to-muscle” the new behaviors and thus, use them in their daily selling agendas. After each workshop and in-between the next one, coaching sessions would take place. Clarify understanding, build meaning, identify and overcome obstacles, reinforce the why’s, review the “what’s-in-it-for-me”, the what, the how’s, to achieve what, and the ``how do we know this is working”, were the kind of conversations sustained.

Who is coming along on our trip??How do we ensure we are all going in the right direction? Meeting new people and learning from them, besides it is fun, is making everyone’s travel appealing and pleasant.?So, now that we are together, let us integrate a learning community led by a mentor-coach selected?among the salespeople.?Mostly a more experienced salesman who would?assist and mentor the participants in their journey.?Experiencing this new way of selling and?approaching their customers was challenging for more than one, so sharing their thoughts, expressing their feelings, their concrete experiences stepping into these new behaviors, gave participants the chance to overcome obstacles and gain self-confidence.

What about the maps? The tour-guides? The dos and don’ts???The manuals? The tutorials? They were all available in virtual means. Besides these resources, some other platforms were there for their use and dominance as selling leverages such as LinkedIn; and a very complete e-learning trainings such as “Time management”, “Project management”, “Customer Service management” and the tutorials to sign-in and use the corporate selling platforms, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Is everyone happy traveling through this journey??Let’s check it out. First check, reaction evaluation. What was your experience in each place visited? Was it meaningful? Was it fun??Did you learn what you expected? Second checkpoint:?what do you remember out of your learning experience? What were the main take-a-aways? What did you learn? Third checkpoint: Are you able to apply what you've learned? Are you applying for it??To what degree? Fourth checkpoint:?Is all these producing the business results expected? Are we selling more? Are our clients happier?

4) Reality check phase:?This trip was intended to make change happen.?We are back home unpacking, organizing our photos, videos, and souvenirs. We are remembering with joy our whole traveling experience. This phase is the time for checking numbers.?We started with a concrete number of customers. How many customers do we have now? We were supposed to change the way we approach our clients. How and in what degree that change is accomplished? What is working? What is not working? What needs troubleshooting?

Learning Journeys provide a broad vision of the full trip, the change?desired, provide an easy structure to visualize the places to visit, the?learning efforts needed and an excellent way of diving-in and meta-detail each?of the trip experiences for the sake of behavioral and cultural change.