Today most of us need to learn as part of our jobs. And we
don’t do our jobs by ourselves, but as part of teams that are frequently
geographically distributed. So it is natural that learning, eLearning and
various forms of collaboration and social networking are important themes in today’s
enterprise. Virtually all companies, including LeveragePoint and its clients,
struggle to find ways to activate new capabilities, embed them in work, and
evolve them in the context of what actually drives results.
Unfortunately, we have seen that in most cases eLearning
alone does not work much better than conventional training. Blended learning
(the combination of various conventional and on-line modes) was touted as the
savior a few years ago, and in some cases you can get better results by
supporting various modes of learning: face-to-face seminars, webinars, eLearning
courses, coaches and mentors. There is some evidence that blended learning,
when supported in the field, does lead to better results as these Japanese and
US studies suggest. But in our interactions with marketing executives at
leading B2B and B2C firms we find there are going struggles to transfer learning
into the workplace, an experience that appears to be common.
One response has been to shift the emphasis away from formal
training to a reliance on informal training, often delivered through social
media tools like blogs, wikis and even Twitter. It is often claimed that most
learning in an organization, as much as 75%, comes through informal learning
and that increasing the effectiveness of informal learning will be the most
effective way to impact an organization. The problem with this is, of course,
that the learning is informal and is often poorly aligned with the goals of the
organization.
Is there another way, an approach that blends the discipline
of formal approaches with the immediacy and (perceived) relevance of the
informal? At LeveragePoint, we believe the solution lies in bringing together
learning with working. In a way, this is a return to the old paradigm of action
learning, where people learn while doing but are guided while they are doing
and are asked to reflect on the results of their actions.
LeveragePoint’s applications, such as LeveragePoint for
Value Management, are used to help people execute marketing and sales
frameworks that lead to new insights into customer behaviors and give them the
tools to influence these behaviors. Examples are the use of value models by
marketing to craft meaningful value messages that can be used by sales, and
then feedback from sales on the relevance of the marketers data and the
effectiveness of the messages.
These applications frequently include new concepts and
learning is required. To support this learning, we provide learning resources,
but more importantly, we help people learn by working with coaches and their
peers. Learning, collaboration and data are presented in as part of an
integrated experience and in the context of actually working through a
framework to create a usable business product, such as a brand plan, a value
model or a set of scenarios. The general approach is sketched in Figure 1: Blending Learning, Collaboration & Data
With Business Framework Execution.
We have now had an opportunity to implement a number of
these solutions at Fortune 500 companies in a variety of industries. The
results are surprisingly consistent. Most users begin by looking at work done
by their peers and often proceed by modifying and borrowing (working by “Save
As”) or proceed directly to do the work themselves. This generally accounts for
70-80% of initial use. This does not mean that people do not use the learning
resources. More than half of them eventually do, and if the integration is well
designed (we are getting better at this) they often engage in the learning
without being aware they are doing so. The general pattern of results is shown
in Figure 2: Preferred Entry Points. Confidentiality restrictions prevent us
from publishing more granular data.
Collaboration is also critical to adoption and we suspect performance.
LeveragePoint provides a number of explicit forms of collaboration. Users can
(and do) comment on all of the following:
- The steps of the framework – Does the framework
itself make sense, is it well organized, are the right data and learning
resources available?
- Work done at each step – Teams doing the work
and observers all comment on the actual work done.
- Outputs – For example, in LeveragePoint for
Value Management: Sales, sales people can comment on and rate the value
packages created by marketing, giving sales an important and often missing
feedback loop to marketing and marketing insight into what is actually
happening in the field.
- Save As – Using another team’s work or a best
practice example is perhaps the most common mode of collaboration in the
enterprise (well, that and e-mail). We provide traceability so that one can see
all of the different versions created. (There is an ongoing debate as to
whether “Save As” behavior promotes or stifles creativity, the jury is still
out on this, but at least with LeveragePoint one can trace the evolution of
documents.)
eWorking, the blending of learning,
collaboration and data in the context of actually doing work, is an emerging
paradigm that will eclipse eLearning for most business purposes. It may not be
relevant for certification style learning, and there are always cases where
people need to learn by going deeper, but in today’s fast-changing workplace
learning needs to be in the context of actually doing work.Steven Forth
CEO, LeveragePoint Innovations Inc.
