What is Lean L&D?

If you’re an L&D professional who needs to deliver value quickly with limited resources, cares about having a real impact and putting learners first, and wants to do less admin work and more human work, read on...

My L&D team has been acting like a lean startup for 10 months now. We support an employee population that’s more than a thousand times larger than us. So far, we’re delivering lots of value given our limited resources.

I thought I would document our approach and share it. Maybe you can steal a few ideas. Maybe you can share some ideas to help us improve.

Here goes.

The asymmetric challenge

A few years ago I led a large, customer-driven, performance consulting team serving the learning needs of an organization with thousands of employees.

We had transformed ourselves from self-professed L&D “order takers” into trusted advisors who delivered performance improvements through deep analysis and creative learning design.

It would have made David James and Guy Wallace proud ;-)

That was February 2020.

Then COVID hit, chaos reigned, and tough decisions had to be made.

After things stabilized, we found ourselves in a very different situation: a 2-person team trying to support the learning needs of 2,500 employees.

As cliche as it sounds, it really did feel like being a startup inside a large corporation. To address this asymmetric challenge, I had to dig into my past as a Lean Startup coach.

What is Lean Startup?

Startups have few people and limited resources. Every day and every dollar are precious. They need to move fast, learn fast, and spend little.

The first order of business is to find a problem that (a) lots of people have and (b) those people will pay money to solve. Then they must build and deliver a solution to that problem at a fair and profitable price.

This is a learning problem par excellance.

A startup can’t be all things to all people. It must find a hungry audience and focus on an important problem this audience has. No boiling the ocean here.

A startup can’t just build a giant product over long time period, then release it and hope they got it right. This is too risky—if they are wrong they go bust.

Instead the startup must quickly build little pieces of the solution and put it front of real customers, learn from that, then adjust and keep building. It must ship value as often as possible. And it must be in constant conversation with its audience.

In a nutshell, Lean Startup methodology is about hyper focus and rapid experimentation.

So I asked myself what it might look like to apply those principles to how we run L&D? Might they help 2 people deliver value to 2,500?

Here’s what we did…

What does Lean L&D look like?

It started by talking with people (i.e. our customers) all the time in order to find a big problem worth solving. If you have enough conversations, certain issues will come up again and again. Whether it’s a performance challenge, a knowledge gap, or a clumsy process, we would start to hone in on a problem L&D could solve that might impact the business. For the sake of this narrative, let’s call it #TheProblem. At this point #TheProblem was just a hunch.

With this hunch, we would bring 5-10 customers (i.e. people experiencing #TheProblem) together to talk about #TheProblem, share their stories, and explore context: where it’s happening, why it’s happening, how they’re currently trying to solve it. Not only was this useful for the L&D team—it was a relief for our customers: by hearing the similar challenges of others, they realized they’re not alone. These are the small beginnings of a learning community.

With these customer insights, we would go off and curate some resources that could be of immediate value. We’d go through our trusted sources for quality content on #TheProblem, and do plenty of Internet research to find some new ones that passed muster. These would be packed into an email that felt a lot like a newsletter and sent around to the beta group we had spoken to in the meetup.

Using some marketing automation tools, we would take those same resources and build an email drip campaign. Anyone else we encounter who is dealing with #TheProblem could now be enrolled in that campaign and get some immediate value.

Now we have an MVP for #TheProblem. Total time: about a week. Total cost: a couple days of free internet searches and a bit of copywriting.

With an MVP in place we would start looking for a more substantive solution. Perhaps a more structured workshop that would last half a day or more. We would do some vendor research and identify one or two offerings we wanted to try.

Before committing to a vendor, we would go back to our beta group, which has now grown to about 20 people based on word of mouth and that MVP I just mentioned. We would pitch the vendor offering to this beta group—clearly indicating the time commitment—and ask them to sign up for the offering, get their manager’s sign off, and block out their calendar. Asking for these commitments was a more reliable test of interest then simply asking, “Would you like to take this workshop?”

If we hit a certain minimum number of signups, then—and only then—would we go back to the vendor and sign a contract to pilot the offering. We would then run the workshop and capture some marketing assets in the process… video clips of the session, testimonials from attendees, etc.

Assuming the workshop went well, we would then build a marketing page for this offering on an internal SharePoint site. The copy would position the offering using the language and context we’d gathered from our employees. We would include the videos and testimonials we’d gathered during the initial pilot.

Then we’d promote the offering far and wide using multiple channels. We’d cast a wide net with an article through our corporate comms team. We’d ask the beta group to tell their colleagues or give us recommended names of people we could promote to. We also started a monthly newsletter on #TheProblem and could promote it that way as well.

Behind this marketing page we built an automated signup flow. Once prospects viewed the site and decided this offering was worth their time, they were taken to an MS Form where they had to answer questions about why they were interested in the training and how they expected it to help them in their current role. This triggered a whole series of automated actions… collecting applicant data in a spreadsheet, alerting managers who could provide support and recognition, alerting us to help gauge interest and, if needed, adjust our marketing efforts, etc.

We had now validated a performance challenge within the organization and developed two proven offerings: a drip campaign of resources that could provide instant value whenever someone “raised their hand” for help, and a more engaging workshop that dives deeper on the topic and builds greater skills. We’d also activated a community around that topic so people could support and develop each other.

Our current model

The above narrative is a synthesis of many attempts to understand and solve #TheProblem. It wasn’t that smooth at first. (If only!) But after running this process a few times we’ve built an ecosystem that helps us run the lean process above rather consistently. This ecosystem includes:

• Evergreen challenges. These are the #TheProblems we solve. I call them evergreen because they affect a wide number of people and are not likely to go away completely. This is how we gain focus and avoid boiling the ocean.
• Newsletters. These are monthly emails that go to a mailing list we are constantly growing. Each is focused on one of our evergreen challenges, so they are a proxy for the number of people across the organization who have a need around that topic.
• Meetups. For each challenge we hold regular meetings anyone can join. It’s a “lean coffee” model, so the basic structure is for customers to share the issues they’re struggling with and then help each other solve them. Interestingly, we’ve found people value the social connection of these meetings as much or more than the technical solutions they discover. Community and social learning matter.
• Forums. These are asynchronous chat groups (we use MS Teams) formed around each of our evergreen challenges where people can ask and answer questions and we can share resources and upcoming events.
• Workshops. Like the offering described above, these are the more in depth solutions related to our evergreen challenges. They are the products in our portfolio, so to speak.
• Courses. We don’t have many of these, but these are learning experiences designed to unfold over weeks and months. They are as much about building community and culture as they are about addressing a learning need.

These different offerings work together to help us sense and respond to various learner needs (i.e. performance needs) as they arise and evolve.

• Meetups are where we sense new issues and explore the language and context of the problems.
• Newsletters are where we share relevant resources, promote events and offerings, and test demand.
• Forums are where we often promote early offerings and find “beta testers”; they function like asynchronous meetups.

These act like a funnel towards our workshops and offerings, with the idea that each component should offer value to our customers, not merely be a marketing channel.

Key ideas behind Lean L&D

A lot of the above will sound familiar if you’ve been using frameworks like Agile, Scrum, or Design Thinking. I’m certainly not claiming to have invented any of the above approaches. But it’s been working for us and I felt like it was worth sharing with other learning professionals.

If you want to start tinkering with “Lean L&D” I recommend the following principles:

1. Act like a business. Think deeply about who your customers are and the problems they’re trying to solve. Then look at the systems that help you generate and deliver solutions to those problems, and think about offerings that meet different “price points” in terms of time, which is the currency of workplace learning.
2. Find evergreen problems. A business built for a fad is one that won’t last. Seek out those challenges that cut across many parts of the business and which are endemic to the organization. Then fall in love with solving those problems.
3. Leverage technology. Technology can amplify your reach and remove mundane tasks from your todo list. Automate as much of your marketing and administration as possible with tools like Power Automate, Zapier, IFTTT, etc. so you can spend more time on the creative, intuitive, human tasks that make a difference. We use a learning platform called Looop, without which most of what I described above would not be possible… or at least would be a huge pain in the neck.
4. Elevate the role of marketing. If you build it, they will NOT come. You must tell them. Again and again and again. Find and build channels for reaching different customer segments and look for ways to establish a regular dialog that you can leverage when you have something valuable and relevant to share.
5. Build community. Expertise in all manner of skills is scattered across your organization. Help bring people together around topics of mutual interest. And never forget that they are adults who solve complicated problems in their everyday lives. Put these competent adults with similar challenges in the same space and watch them solve their own problems together.
6. Retro all the things. Never stop measuring, reflecting, and iterating on what you’re doing. Your portfolio of offerings should be in a state of perpetual beta. Everything you do should be an experiment with a hypothesis that can bring you further insight on your customers, their problems, and your solutions.

The above is just the beginning of my exploration of this approach. I’ll try and publish more ideas and talk more about what’s working and where we’re getting stuck.

I genuinely hope you’ll share your own thoughts and reactions. Does the above seem reasonable? Feasible? What stands out as potentially useful? What seems unlikely to work? Have you tried any of the above? If so, how’d it go?

Your feedback is a gift. Don’t hold back!

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