Learning that Leads to Results

Get Clear on the Impact, Identify the Change and Get Surgical…

We all want to make a positive difference as we go through life, I don’t think there's anyone who gets up in the morning and thinks to themselves: "I want to make things harder for the people around me" (ok maybe there are one or two but I’m sure they’re in the minority).

That said, we’ll often lose sight of a really key word when we've got our Learning and Development Design head on. All of a sudden it becomes about the course, the content or the experience and we lose sight of what actually what matters most…the impact.

Cathy Moore has written a great book on Action Mapping and how it's impacting instructional design, but for those of you who are short on time (aren’t we all), here are a few practical tips to carry with you next time you’re presented with a learning need.

1.      Get clear on the Impact – it might sound backwards and in fact, it is, intentionally. Before you get anywhere near design, find out about the business metric driving the request. Find out what success looks like. Three…Six…Twelve months from now what revenue number do you need to have seen increase, what saving to you need to have made?

 So many learning organizations start with content and then struggle to connect it to an ROI, more often than not that’s because the result the business needed to see wasn’t really, truly pulled apart which will then give you clarity on step 2.

2.      Identify the CHANGE in behaviour – if people are already doing it don’t spend time, money and resources training it. Not only will you fail to make a clear impact but you’ll likely lose your key audience along the way – the learner. Ask yourself, when was the last time you went on to Google/YouTube/Pinterest to look for something you learnt when you were 5 and have been doing your whole life…never, you wouldn’t do it, it’d be illogical.

Take the same approach to your learning content. Once you know the impact the business needs you to have focused on the behavioural change you need to see in people. Once you do that the buy-in and results will be far bigger and easier to see. Not only that but you won’t have to chase people with a big stick to get them to learn as you will actually be teaching them something they DON’T know. It’s here, you can start to really leverage the people you have in the business, and the leaders on the front line. One of my favorite questions to ask a front-line manager is “if you had a magic wand and you could get your team to do one thing differently what would it be”, I guarantee they will always know, whether it’s greeting every customer as they walk in to the store or following one specific step in that SOP there’s always something.

3.      Get Surgical – you’ll never see a good Emergency Room Surgeon doing things for the fun of it, adding a tweak here or nick there. For them it is about life and death, what is the fastest way to make a difference. Take the same approach to learning, every second you have you people’s attention is important, there are countless studies out there telling us peoples attention span is shortening (if you’ve made it this far in this article I count myself lucky), back in 2015 Bersin by Deloitte pinpointed 8 minutes a day as all people would dedicate to learning, that’s about as much time as it takes to make a few cups of coffee, and that was 3 years ago.

Once again, use your SME’s, it doesn’t always have to be L&D coming up with all the answers and solutions, in fact, more often than not it isn’t. Find out about the critical challenges that people face on a day to day basis and when you are creating scenarios to assess and train people use real ones. Find out what people are doing that’s both right and wrong and use that to deliver your learning messages.

If you’d like to continue the conversation please feel free to reach out, you can get me here on LinkedIn or at [email protected]