Chief Learning Officer - January 2008 - (Page 40)

human capital in practice: Capital One: Experiences in Innovation Corinne Miller Understanding that the potential to innovate lies in every organization, Capital One has a history of demonstrating an ability to innovatively plan and conduct work. However, since its client base was growing at a significant rate annually, the company had to be even more innovative in creating new products and identifying cost efficiencies. New ideas were required to carry the business into a new reality and grow Capital One’s reputation as an industry leader. By making innovation a key initiative, the company challenged itself to build a culture that looked for new and better ways to do business. To accomplish this, they needed to add new and proven processes and tools to their innovation toolbox. Partnering with SolutionPeople, they designed a customized innovation training program. The program was structured to teach innovative processes through action learning focused on real business challenges in creative spaces. The underlying goal was not to conduct a traditional training program but rather a memorable experience they called the “innovation experience.” This was designed to be dynamic, creative, multisensory and engaging. Content was balanced between learning and fun, and physical and virtual experiences. The training focused on teaching simple tools and processes that could be replicated in tackling future challenges. Working together, teammates forged stronger relationships committed to building cultures that foster innovative thinking. Eight teams participated in the innovation experience. To begin, each team was led through one-day accelerated innovation training workshops that provided an introduction to key processes and tools and created an environment for team building and interaction. During the initial event, participants discovered their thinking styles through an interactive exercise. This information was used by individuals to drive more whole-brained thinking through the use of tools and techniques. It also was used throughout the process to build diverse-thinking teams. They followed up with two-day workshops that focused teams on specific business challenges, providing the time, tools and settings to explore those challenges in greater depth. Teams generated an average of 848 investigative questions describing the needs surrounding the challenges. These were prioritized to the top 30, which were then used to generate ideas by using creativity tools. An average of 1,883 ideas emerged. Each team created a list of eight to 10 critical evaluation criteria and used these criteria to select 10 to 20 solutions. Participants found that the more focused the challenge questions, the better the quality of the results. Teams developed comprehensive strategy programs, devised systems for capturing more customer data and created communication plans. Teams also left with a common sense of direction for taking action on their challenges. Ideally, teams who targeted $5 million to $10 million in increased revenue, $2 million to $3 million in cost savings or $2 billion to $4 billion in customer account growth had the most developed solutions and actions to execute. From a learning perspective, the teams indicated a 75 percent increase in their knowledge of innovation and a 30 percent increase in their ability to use innovative processes and tools. On a scale from 0 to 5, the participants rated the overall value of the innovation experience at 4.14. From a business impact perspective, the participants indicated more than $500 million resulted in new revenues and cost efficiencies and over $1 billion in new customer accounts. As a result, Capital One continues to use the processes and tools learned through the innovation experience program. In the case of investigation, evaluation and activation skills, nurture can play a significant role. However, creativity is a combination of thinking styles, cognitive development, environmental influences and life experiences. While training and tools can improve creativity, various findings agree that “nurture” cannot create a creative person. The goal is to be “whole brained.” People are typically a mix of thinking styles: investigator, creator, evaluator and activator. While one of the four styles may be more dominant, most times there are at least one to two others in the mix that influence thinking style to a lesser degree. Recalling that learning has three dimensions: education, relationships (feedback, coaching, collaboration) and experience, the learning function has the unique ability to enable innovation from a number of vantage points, including individual skills, team skills and manager skills. Action Learning While educational solutions can include classroom-based training, e-learning, books, articles, Web sites, conferences or workshops, actionlearning workshops — in which people engage in actual innovating around a real goal, challenge or problem statement — provide some of the best learning for fostering innovation. What might that workshop look like? Beginning with a brief interactive-thinking assessment exercise allows participants to identify their thinking styles. With this information in hand, diverse-thinking subteams can be formed, and people can later learn both individual and team techniques to increase their whole-brain thinking throughout the innovation process. The workshop can be divided into the four stages with time allocations for each, dependent on the complexity and depth desired. In each stage, question banks are utilized to guide the participants through divergent exercises, with the goal of generating and developing lots of ideas. The results of these divergent exercises all come together at the end of each stage, when a convergent exercise is used to identify the most productive ideas from that stage, which will become the basis for the next stage. Stage 1: Investigate Needs: Participants use a question bank of “investigate” questions that brings them through a series of divergent exercises to generate lots of ideas, concluded by a convergent exercise to filter the ideas and hone in on top needs that will be used in the next stage for ideation. January 2008 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 40 http://www.clomedia.com

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Chief Learning Officer - January 2008 Editor’s Letter Table of Contents Imperatives Selling up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five Environment Sips of Knowledge at E. & J. Gallo Winery CLO Profile Productivity UST Global: Opening Employees’ Eyes to New Learning Tactics Applying CRM Concepts to E-Learning Human Capital Capital One: Experiences in Innovation Learning Solutions Macy’s: Using Feedback to Develop One Leader at a Time Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - January 2008

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