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.)
Steven Forth
CEO, LeveragePoint Innovations Inc.
