Living up to the Promise of elearning: CLOSING THE LEARNING-DOING GAP A FAILED PROMISE Hard to believe that it s been almost 20 years since the term elearning entered the corporate learning lexicon. And just in the last five years, the velocity at which new solutions have entered the market has gone through the roof. We now have the ability deploy video, virtual role-plays, and learning nuggets. We can connect people socially, upload user generated content, and track and rate content. So with all of this innovation, our customers --that is, our organization s leadership team--should be thrilled. Right? Wrong! They re not thrilled. elearning has a bad smell in a lot of organizations. Even with all of this change and innovation, executives see huge gaps in their organizations abilities to meet their skills development needs. Deloitte s Global Human Capital Trends research found that only 40 percent of respondents rated their organizations as ready or very ready in learning and development in 2015. And a 2014 McKinsey survey amplified this concern, finding that only slightly over half of the 1400 executives described their capability building programs as somewhat effective or better. We have the tools, but we re not having enough impact. Have people really improved their performance? Have we moved the needle on business metrics in the workplace? Have we had any impact on actual outcomes? So how can we do better? 1
OUTCOMES VS CONTENT Part of the problem might be that we ve been focusing on the wrong things. We love our content. Content is KING right? Learning & Development experts know, however, that content does not equate to results. Sure, good content needs to be part of the equation. But if we want to have the level of impact our business leaders seek and we would love to provide, we need a change. We must go beyond providing great content to instead take responsibility for providing demonstrated outcomes. If we start with outcomes we focus on the most important content, we go beyond principles and facts and information to application and use cases, we focus the training experience and not just on learning but on learning and doing. 2
BEYOND LEARNING TO APPLYING So how have other functional areas handled this challenge? Let s go to the Marketing team for some inspiration. John Wanamaker s famous quote sums up how marketing demonstrated its value back in the day: Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don t know which half. In short, not very well. The essence of this quote is that marketers threw content into the market and hoped for a result. Today s marketing executives would scream scream bloody murder if their team gave them that kind of visibility into results. Today they don t just hope. Instead, they judge value by hard metrics like cost of client acquisition, net promoter score, and conversion rates. In short, marketers have learned to identify concrete outcomes. In turn, they have tailored their activities to systematically generate those outcomes in more and more efficient ways. Marketers have learned to organize staged multimodal campaigns that lead customers through an integrated experience that drives the outcomes they seek. account. It s led us in a variety of directions such as using technology to support structured learning journeys, wiring in deliberate practice, and tying an employee s manager often the missing ingredient to successful employee development back into the process. Our work has been centered on a particularly tough problem where the learning-doing gap is often wide: creating better management development for new front-line managers. Our goal is that before participants are done, they demonstrate successful performance in the field with their team. We want to make sure that people can actually DO what we need them to do to be successful managers. So what does it look like? Let s take a peek. Along the way I ll talk about the concepts behind what we re doing and share the technology we re using to support this journey. As you read, think about your own blended programs. What can you do with the tools you have to create a program that will get the outcomes you re after? Can we take a lesson? Over the past year at Kineo, we ve been focusing on how to design and build better blended training programs that take outcomes into A traditional training mindset might focus on simply putting good content out there and then hoping for the best. We call this managing activities. To move beyond this to managing outcomes can represent quite a mindshift. 3
A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE To make this shift, we take advantage of what we call Proficiency Journeys. We believe that people typically develop proficiency in a new area through a repeatable sequence (shown in the figure below). FROM TO We will train you You will demonstrate proficiency We re in charge You and your manager are accountable. We manage the system. You will participate in a list of activities You will work through a complete change journey We hope you use what you learn You will apply your new skills as a pivotal step built into the journey We will judge performance by giving you a test You and your manager will rate your actual performance on the job We re not that clear what happens after training We report out on a balanced scorecard of results 4
STRUCTURE OF A PROFICIENCY JOURNEY Accordingly, we have designed our approach even down to the learning platform to not just be able to give learners some training but instead be able to take learners through Proficiency Journeys. WELCOME Review a 10-minute overview to prepare you to jump into the journey. 1 ASSESS YOURSELF Summarize your strengths and weaknesses in the competency by completing a 10-15 question self-assessment. DISCUSS PROGRESS Share your findings, ask questions and outline your plan for applying what you ve learned back on the job. ASSESS YOUR DISTANCE GAINED Revisit your rating on your overall ability to perform the skill on the job. And reflect on how well the journey has helped you. 3 5 7 2 4 6 8 GATHER INPUT Conduct some quick data-gathering with your team members to help you focus how you ll work through the journey. LEARN Immerse yourself in case-based elearning and supporting guides to learn a practical and effective framework for how to apply the competency. PRACTICE Put your new skills to use on the job. Prepare yourself, practice, and reflect on the lessons you ve learned. REVIEW Share your experiences and questions from practice with your manager. Discuss your distance gained results. And together decide whether you would like to do more work on this competency or push ahead to the next journey. 5
We have designed so that they systematically guide participants through activities that go well beyond providing content to include opportunities for reflective moments, selfdiagnosis and ratings, critical check-ins and support from the individual s manager, and, of course, deliberate practice in the real-world. Our platform provides structure to the journey with check-points, reflective activities, as well as content-delivery. Let s look at an example. Imagine you have a shift manager on your team, Sue. Recently, Sue has been getting complaints from her team members that they just don t know what she expects from them after she has given them new work. Sue sits down with her manager and decides to improve her ability to set expectations by going through the structured journey we ve creating around improving feedback. As Sue works through the journey, she goes through each of these stages. Our platform (we use Totara, an open source LMS), provides structure to the journey with check-points, reflective activities, as well as content-delivery. 6
Here s how the journey unfolds for Sue PREPARE: GET INPUT: As she engages herself in problem solving, Sue polls some of her team members about what works well and what does not when she sets expectations with them. She thinks about when others have set expectations for her and reflects on what worked and didn t work. Sue is deeply engaging herself as she gets a real picture of what her challenges are and hears first hand from her team about what she can improve. She records her thoughts in the system. PREPARE: ASSESS STARTING POINT: Now that Sue has done an initial analysis by polling her team members, she does a self-assessment to document her starting point. By first engaging and then diagnosing, Sue determines that her key issue is that she simply doesn t know what a good set of expectations looks like. LEARN: TAKE TRAINING: We ve created some great learning content to go along with this particular journey. Using Adapt, an open-source responsive elearning framework, Sue learns about giving feedback through practical case studies and examples. (Note that in many training programs theses days, this is the only step that organizations typically do.) LEARN: CHECK-IN: We believe that an individual s manager is a critical piece and far too often, the missing piece in employee development. So we ve built key check-ins with Sue s manager. We provide the manager with talking points to structure her conversation with Sue, and ask that the manager records notes about the conversation right in the system. As each step in the process is well-documented, we ve created a trail of accountability and a true record of Sue s progress. APPLY: PRACTICE: Now it s on to application. Here, we want Sue to practice her new skills in the real-world, with her team. We call this deliberate practice. Sue records her experiments in the system and can practice as many times as needed. We provide practice guides to help Sue put these skills to work in the real-world. This is not simulation, but real practice. REFLECT: ASSESS DISTANCE GAINED: Next up, Sue is ready to assess how far she s come. Have her skills improved along the way? What has she learned? The difference in the data from her starting point to where she is now is calculated as distance gained and becomes a key metric for management to look at in order to determine whether outcomes are being realized. By making results visible, we re pushing into the world of tracking true outcomes. This is what senior management really cares about. REFLECT: CHECK-IN: Finally, Sue has another check-in with her manager. This conversation ties it all together, providing an opportunity for additional coaching and sharing of insights. 7
As we ve implemented this program in the real-world, we ve found that both parties find these check-ins meaningful and that the time they spend together exceeds our expectations. We provide tools and guides to structure the practice exercises and the coaching conversations. We expect a typical content journey, like the feedback journey Sue took, to take about a month. We ve moved beyond the single learning event, to design a process that takes time and mirrors how people acquire new knowledge, try it out through practice, and reflect upon what they ve learned to improve their skills. We now have a record of this journey in the learning portal, which we can use to report back to management. One thing to note about this approach the content is there, but it s not the whole experience, right? We ve not just built a single event. We ve built a process that ensures that content gets applied and that improved outcomes result. We ve built in accountability and follow-up with the learner s manager, the most essential part of any employee s development process. We ve built reflective moments and self-assessments to allow the learner to document where they are now and build on that understanding. We ve built a process that ensures that content gets applied and that improved outcomes result. 8
All too often, we don t cross the learningdoing gap because it s been expensive to manage the required activities. Of course, we re not the first to use such a structure. However, we have mostly seen them only in programs that are hard to scale, specifically pricey executive leadership or high potential programs. These are programs where organizations have typically committed to extensive manual effort behind the scenes to manage setting up check-ins and accumulating data and then sharing it out. One way to think about this approach is that it simply provides a scalable and costeffective way to drive outcomes similar to what we sometimes do in our most costly programs. All too often, we don t cross the learning-doing gap because it s been expensive to manage the required activities. What we ve built into our system is a repeatable way to take the kind of accountability and application that you currently can only afford to put into your most expensive programs and make it affordable for all your programs. We think it s a better mousetrap. A better way to help people learn. What do you say? Is this something you could build into your own programs using the technology you have today? What do you see as the hurdles to putting something like this in place? If you want to talk more about this, please reach out to us at info@mplus.kineo. com. We d be delighted to give you a tour of our new program, ManagementPlus, and help you think about putting these concepts to work in your organization. 9
PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE Is your organization ready to see the change that can be made in how you develop tomorrow s leaders when you: Shift the perspective from event to journey Create a structured journey from engage to assess for your managers to follow. Wire in deliberate practice Design the opportunity for learners to practice their new skills on the job and provide the structure for debriefing afterward. Build a partnership between each participant and their manager Create support and guidance for the managers of learners so they can become part of the development plan. Make progress concrete and visible Provide a scorecard of impact measures so that results can be visible to the rest of the organization. CONTACT KINEO TODAY 10