Rachel
Burnham writes: At the CIPD ‘Leaders in Learning’ event in
Manchester last week, Andy Lancaster invited a group of L&D professionals
to consider how we might make our learning design process more agile. This kind of agility is about being more
responsive to the needs of our organisations and the learners we work with,
being quicker to develop L&D solutions and perhaps also includes an element
of flexibility in what we produce and certainly in the way we produce it. Here is a link to the Sketchnote I created at
the event.
We began by exploring why there is a need for L&D to
become more agile in the way we approach learning design. This is of course related to the pace of
change in organisations and in the external environment, which requires
organisations to become more agile in order to survive and flourish. I am sure I don’t need to rehearse again the
impact of changes in competition, technology, legislation & regulation,
plus the challenges of responding to an uncertain world in the context of
global markets, austerity in government policies and Brexit.
L&D needs to keep pace with this and be able to
contribute within our organisations to both to enabling individuals to learn
what they need to respond to these changes and also to help individuals and
teams become more able to create this organisational agility. Within L&D, we are often working with
fewer resources to meet growing needs.
There are risks if we keep working in traditional ways, with long
lead-in times to the design of L&D programmes that we will be too slow to
respond to emerging needs within our organisations and/or completely miss out
on meeting some needs. There are risks
both to the effectiveness of our organisation and also the credibility and
future of L&D in this.
Andy shared with us 10 points to help us to move towards
agile learning design. Here are some
further reflections from me on each of these points – I may have paraphrased
the wording of some of these 10 points.
1. Determine business needs as top priority
and respond with urgency
This
is always important in L&D. The
focus of L&D has to be on improving performance in the organisation and
enabling the organisation to better meet its objectives – so I was pleased to
see this coming first in this list.
When we discussed how we could overcome challenges about
changing our way of working to become more agile, the group I was in identified
that focusing on the real ‘pain points in the organisation’ could help to
generate sufficient support, particularly from senior managers and other key
stakeholders to enable us to try this different approach. Nick Shackleton-Jones, in a session on
learning design at this year’s CIPD L&D Show, talked about identifying
‘what bugs people’ ie what do employees find challenging and gets in the way of
them doing their job and then finding ways to address these issues.
2. Think big – start small
When
trying out a different approach it often helps to try out something on a small
scale or using a simpler approach than perhaps you would do normally. This reduces the risk and can make it
possible to get the resources or the ‘go-ahead’ to test out an idea. I like the idea of running lots of small
scale experiments which you learn from rapidly.
This connects to the idea of ‘Working Out Loud’ and testing out ‘half-baked
ideas’ publicly – or at least within
your organisation and quickly getting input from other people to refine and add
to these ideas.
Many years ago, I worked for a small organisation that was
working out how to do preparatory education on leaving home with young people –
a bit like doing health education, but on the subject of housing. We worked as an action learning project and
tried out lots of different approaches to this preparatory education on leaving
home and how to get it integrated into youth work and schools. We
were often trying different approaches simultaneously. As there were only two of us working in the
project across the whole of England and Wales –– one of our ‘rules of thumb’
when testing out an idea was to work with people who were already ‘hot to an
idea’ ie we would search out
volunteers. Once we had tried out an
approach, we would then work with people who were ‘warm’ and who perhaps needed
a bit more support, encouragement or even challenging to try something out.
3. Commit to a speedy development process
This
is about our attitudes, but also about making it happen. It would be worth identifying what causes
the particular hold ups in your organisation.
I also think that clearing space in the diary now to be able to start on
a new project in this different way would be a good starting point.
4. Include learners in the heart of the
design
I want to ask ‘Aren’t we doing this already?’ and of
course we should be, but that doesn’t mean we are. Often we rely on input from other
stakeholders and the voice of learners is overlooked. If you want to explore this further it is
worth looking at Towards Maturity’s work in this area or a recent research
report from Good Practice intriguingly called ‘The Secret Learning Life of Managers’. Both of these pieces of work
go far beyond asking learners what they would like and explore how learners
learn in practice and what they actually do when they are faced with a
challenging task at work. There is a
lot of interest now in developing our understanding of how learners learn effectively
and in particular how they use technology to do this – there is the potential
to develop this understanding much further through the use of learner
analytics.
But this point, also suggests involving learners in
creating their own learning solutions and resources. And so this also links to point 6 below.
5. Curation rather than creation
The widespread availability of digital content in many
different forms – blogs, video ‘how-to’s, infographics, flowcharts & other
diagrams, podcasts (audio files), written guides, sets of FAQs – means that
another change in L&D is to curate content rather than needing to create
all your own content. Curation involves
searching out relevant materials, selecting the most appropriate, explaining
why this has been selected and making this easily available to people who will
find it relevant (everything from simply recommending it in an email, through
to hosting this selection of resources within a digital platform such as a Learning
Management System (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) such as Moodle or
Blackboard).
Curating content and only creating content when it is
specific to your organisation and not available elsewhere, can contribute to agile
design of learning.
If you want to find out more about curation, I would
recommend looking at the work of Martin Couzins and he can be found on Twitter
@martincouzins.
6. Create your own low cost content
The wide spread availability of smart phones and access
to a range of free or low cost digital tools is making it much easier for
L&D professionals to produce all sorts of materials in many different
formats.
This can also be extended to getting learners involved in
creating their own content. This could
be through participation in communities of practice, perhaps an online group on
the organisation’s Enterprise Social Network (something like Slack or Yammer)
or thorough a LinkedIn group or less formal ‘Personal Learning Network’ such as
via people connected through Twitter or some other social network. It could be a colleague creating a useful job
aid in the form of a flowchart explaining a process initially produced just for
their fellow team members. It could be a
short video clip recorded on a smart phone.
The possibilities are pretty much endless.
Not everything needs to be produced to a Hollywood level
of polish and gloss. Something that is
timely and highly relevant to your particular need can have just as much
impact.
7. Scaffolding social collaborative
discussion and learning
This is about using frameworks to provide some support
and structure to help people get started in using these approaches for learning
at work. In a way it is an approach to
providing a half-way house between a traditional highly-structured approach to
a learning programme and a more collaborative approach in which learners have
more input and direction of their own learning. Look out for the work of Julian Stodd if you
would like to find out more – he can be found on Twitter @julianstodd.
8. Don’t be limited by resource
availability
One of the potential barriers to agile learning is that
we limit ourselves, because we focus on resource limitations, whether that is
the availability of rooms, particular trainers or digital resources or
finances. Overcoming the latter was the
focus of a session at this year’s CIPD L&D Show ‘Doing More with Less’ with
Andrew Jacobs and Stella O’Neill – here is
a link to a Storify of the tweets from this session – look out for session E3.
9. Learner access any time, anywhere …
which includes digital
This is perhaps one of the most challenging areas, as it
does require some technical expertise to identify the relevant digital platform
for your organisation and situation. Do
take time to think this through. Take
advice. Think not just about what will
work here and now, but what would have some longevity and be sustainable for
your organisation.
10.Don’t
be a perfectionist – iteratively improve
As
an individual this may be one of the most challenging of these tips – I know I
always want to have any learning programme I’m associated with to be as good as
it possibly can be. However, that can be
at a cost of all the other learning needs that go unmet and the missed
opportunities.
As a
parent, I have found it valuable to allow myself to not worry about being
perfect – I like the concept of the ‘good enough parent’. I have chosen where to place my priorities as
a parent – home cooked food with lots of vegetables and fruit, a bed-time story
every night and lots of hugs, but it does mean that the house is dustier than I
would ideally like! In a similar way, we
may have to rethink our perfectionism in L&D and decide what can be let go.
These
are some of my thoughts on agile learning design. What does this prompt for you? What can you being doing differently?
Rachel
Burnham
11/7/16
Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D
professionals become even more effective.
I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social
media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of
learning on performance.
