My Vision of Learning & Development

My biggest challenge, is that people have skulls.

Yes, you heard me.

If people were floating brains, and you could see what's in their brains, and you would have less of a need for a traditional L&D department, especially in medium-sized organisations.

Why?

Because the answers are most often already in people's brains. The only issue, is that they're hidden in there.

With floating brains, if an employee had a question, they would see the answer in another employee walking by, talk to this person, and get the answer.

This is, in essence, the perfect learning environment, and it tackles two aspects: transparency & collaboration.

The premise is simple: in large organisations, most answers and best practices are already there. Sometimes, they're already implemented. They're just sporadically known and implemented.

Perhaps one office, one team, or one employee is actively engaged in the solution. Perhaps your answer is in New Mexico, but you live in London.

So, how do you reach the level of the floating brains?

Mingling

The first step is to encourage mingling. People should talk across teams, across hierarchical lines, and across everything you can think of.

If people don't mingle, you end up with knowledge asymmetries - some teams will know, while others won't.

Of course, some companies try to tackle this issue by having a top-down centralised sharing of knowledge - such as a company town hall.

However, the issue here is that it is impossible to share all the necessary knowledge during a town hall. It's like having a very slow internet connection and trying to share a large file. What you need, is a whole network.

Enabling

It's one thing to mingle, but we want to be able to share and exchange.

For this, I see two main points.

First, a culture of sharing. This means not being afraid to speak one's mind, not having hierarchical or egotistic structures, and value candor in our ways of talking. It should be made clear that everybody can and should learn from everybody.

Second, having a forum, or a variety of forums. It's great to enable mingling, but we want to ideally have the mingling in places where people can exchange. This can be as simple as having areas to sit in the corridor. It can also mean more formal forums such as large organised discussions on a topic selected by the audience.

Accessing

In large organisations, you want to capture the knowledge exchanged from all the mingling and enabling, and reshare it in a digestible format.

You will always have blind spots, and you won't be able to share all the learning. Therefore, we should have a single and simple way for people to tap into the learning occurring across the organisation.

For this to happen, I see three prerequisites.

First, you need a watchtower - someone looking on a bird-eye view over the organisations and its priorities. This person would be listening to as much of the conversations and discussions as possible, and extract the relevant, summarised discussions.

Second, you will have formal and informal ways for any employee to submit learnings. This could be via strategy discussions, or simply via a special learning email address. If the watchtower didn't capture the best practices, this would give another round.

Third, you'd have a knowledge gatekeeper. The knowledge gatekeeper prioritises, and filters through the learning, only extracting and sharing the most relevant, scalable and valuable pieces of learnings.

This ends up creating a 'single source of truth' that can be referred to.

Capturing Attention

Now, you may have created the environment above, but what if some employees still aren't paying attention?

Oftentimes, I hear about the dangers of 'duplicating efforts' in L&D. I couldn't disagree more. You need to duplicate efforts. You can't afford to have one effort when introducing information to thousands of employees.

As with marketing, you should have several touch points, and different 'if-missed' entries.

This does not mean that you should recreate the piece of learning you want to enable, but it does mean that there should be different channels leading to it.

To continue on the marketing analogy, you would have only one website, but you'd be trying to capture people's attention via YouTube ads, emails, retargeting on Google ads, and social media.

You can't afford to have a single communication, which can be easily missed.

You should have several communications, leading to a single source.

Floating Brains

I like the floating brain analogy, and I am excited by the challenge it embodies (or unskullies).

Learning is quite literally what makes us competitive.

In today's world, slow learning is going to be detrimental. Rarely can we afford a struggling uptake in new practices and technologies.

How do you make sure that the flow of information is indeed flowing? How do you pour the information? Do you pour it on top, or do you flood the bottom, hoping that some of the water gets sucked up as with hanging pieces of tissue?

This is, for the time being, going to be the challenges I will be thinking about.

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