We are NOT going Back to the Future

On the 30th March 2020 I wrote an article entitled “Have we taken the red pill?” No one read it. Perhaps, The Matrix reference didn’t land, perhaps it was a poor article, perhaps it was too soon and everyone was still processing what was going on. But in my defence, I do now think we have all taken the red pill. We are not going back (when can you ever, unless you are Marty!). We have all adopted different ways of working, socialising, supporting and living. And whatever our future holds, how we do things in 2022 will be very different to how we did things in 2018.

In this article I want to put my views out there about what I think has fundamentally changed for learning and performance improvement in the workplace, and what we are never going to do the same again.

We were forced to try new things and they worked

• All staff will now work from home. “But how will I know they are working if I can’t see them?” Oh, hang on. Productivity didn’t dive off a cliff. People can be trusted (Shocker!). Managers had to learn to engage and lead differently. The outcome? It was a challenge, but we achieved it
• Workshops and interactive/creative meetings can work on Zoom/Teams. “But we need to be in the same space to be creative and learn from each other.” Oh, hang on. Zoom has breakout rooms. You can use whiteboards online. People can maintain their attention in a two-hour online session pretty much the same as in a room. Yes, it’s been difficult sometimes. There has been much talk of Zoom fatigue (and there was much talk about meeting fatigue in 2019!). The outcome? Anyone who has run online workshops in 2020/21 has finished them thinking “Well, that worked much better than I expected.” And even “I think that was better than when we do it face-to-face.”

What these things mean for 2022 and beyond (I will not use the phrase with two N’s!) is that our ways of thinking about working, learning and performance are not constrained by the way we had traditionally done things. “What we need is a training course on …” and “So, we will have a one-day workshop at the Holiday Inn on …” are no longer the default starting points. And I, for one, am ecstatic about that.

If you can’t wait to get back into that training room and stand at the front with your PowerPoint, flip-chart and juggling balls, then you should probably stop reading now. Because if we go back to that, we have learned nothing, and if L&D people have learned nothing then that is a helluva indictment!

L&D and Performance Improvement must be different in the future

1. Start from a new perspective

The course is not the solution. Think, Nick Shackleton-Jones’s “resources, not courses”. Think, “What do I want to be different?” Think, “How do we measure and prove the behaviour change?” Think performance consulting, not learning.

I have started saying that I don’t really care if people learn anything, what I care about is that their performance changes; that they can do more/better/faster. This felt almost sacrilegious to my L&D ‘upbringing’ when I first started saying it, but it shifted my thinking and made me focus on outcomes not ‘delivering learning’.

2. Stop content-dumping

I remember once watching an e-learning team celebrating with cake and balloons. I asked them what they were celebrating and they told me that they had reached “10,000 pieces of content on the LMS!”. I could not understand why this was a good thing then and now even less. Why recreate the internet on your intranet (LMS)?

What do we do in real life when we need to find out how to do something? Google, YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook communities and groups. In real life, all these resources are superb for answering questions and learning new things; whether that’s cooking BBQ ribs, building a shed, recommendations for hairdressers, or what that warning light means on my car dashboard.

In work, these resources are also brilliant. Want to know how to give great feedback? You’ll find it on YouTube. Want a structure for managing a project? Google it. A recommendation for the best tool for running creative online sessions? Ask your Facebook L&D community.

Who searches their LMS?

Yes, great strides have been made to make e-learning content more engaging (ask yourself, why is that necessary?). Yes, good LMS/LXP systems have social learning embedded. Yes, we can curate ‘good content’ (although who are we to decide that?).

But even so, 10,000 pieces of content isn’t the internet.

3. Use face-to-face time valuably

That means it should be a content/theory/model- free zone! Despite what I have said above about content on LMS’s, we all have it, so let’s use it. This means that the workshop time should be devoted to experiences to improve skills, not teaching knowledge.

When our default was a day in a workshop, we filled it. When we are freed from that thinking, we can think about the different elements – theory, content, discussion, sharing, practice and reflection – that can change behaviour and use the variety of media available to us to make that work effectively.

To us at Practice Room Online, face-to-face time should be devoted to practice, feedback, and reflection, because (for soft skills) you can’t do that on your own. You can’t learn to swim from a book and you can’t learn to present from a mirror.

Practice needs to be:

• deliberate – ie taking the time for it and that time being focused on getting better at something, not delivering an outcome,
• focused - being clear on what you want to achieve,
•  requires feedback - to raise awareness and gauge progress to your goal, and
• it also needs to be done in a safe space, where you can make mistakes and learn from them, not worry about how it might look to the people that matter.

We have an amazing opportunity to re-imagine and re-work how learning and performance improvement is done at work, let’s not miss what we have learned and let ourselves slip back into what felt comfortable for us in 2018!