Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 37)

“ erfect speed is being there.” Some may remember that somewhat enigmatic, Zen-like phrase as a bit of wisdom from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book by Richard Bach that was, perhaps surprisingly, a best-seller for several years in the early 1970s. It’s a fable about a young seagull who loves to ﬂy but who becomes frustrated at the fact that, no matter how good a ﬂyer he becomes, it still takes time to get from point A to point B. What would the alternative be? Perfect speed: the ability to instantaneously transport yourself to a new destination. Organizations and their people live in the real world, of course, not in novels and not in the “higher plane of existence,” where Jonathan the seagull ultimately discovers how to achieve his goal. But the same frustration and a similar goal exists for today’s executives: “It takes too much time to move my organization from where it is now to where it needs to be to stay competitive. How can we get there faster?” Getting people thinking and acting in new ways is the primary drag on an organization’s perfect speed. At least that has been the traditional business mindset. Set a strategic goal; move the people. Set a new strategic goal; move the people again. Is there a better way? Can organizations — and the talent and learning professionals whose primary charge it is to “move the people” — become more agile? Today we are seeing new developments in the way the learning function is organized and managed, as well as speciﬁc innovations that are helping people stay more in lockstep with their businesses — helping them understand strategic goals and get there faster. Even more promising is the opportunity to tap into good thinking on an organization’s frontline so that, when an organization gets from point A to point B, many of its people will already be there. If perfect speed remains an unreachable goal, a number of learning executives are helping their companies become, at the least, “more perfect.” P have moved on to a new strategy or reﬁned it in ways that make the training less relevant. But because the training represents a considerable investment, chances are high that it will be implemented anyway. The result is that you have people who are well-trained to solve yesterday’s problems and a learning function that makes an organization less agile, not more so. Here, recent developments in rapid e-learning have shown great promise in getting people what they need to meet today’s challenges instead of yesterday’s. Embedding podcasts, audio and video in PowerPoint presentations, or even something as simple as sending an e-mail series, are ways to reﬂect current thinking in training deliverables and get them to people faster. What’s truly important about rapid development, however, is as much in the mindset as the techniques or deliverables. The rapid e-learning trend owes much to the IT world, where a certain tolerance for what we might call a “90 percent solution” has existed for some time. Not sure you’ve gotten all the bugs out of a product? Release it anyway and slap a “beta” label on it. For example, who would even remember or care anymore that the wildly popular Google Maps software, for example, was released as a beta product? Or have you got a security and encryption protocol that is helpful but admittedly not the answer for every security attack? Call it “Pretty Good Privacy” and get it out there anyway. “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” Voltaire once wrote. If you can get “pretty good” learning experiences out to your people quickly, you can help your entire organization become more agile. Similarly, if you can get a wiki or blog series started around a topic that is on the minds of a critical workforce such as sales or service, the group thinking is naturally going to push toward a new solution or approach. It may not be perfect, but chances are it will be good enough to take people to the next level of thinking and performance. Rapid Instructor-Led Training Rapid development also can apply to instructor-led sessions, a form of training which, properly applied, is gaining renewed respect in the corporate learning community. Indeed, a frequently heard comment from CLOs is the recognition that e-learning didn’t replace classroom training but helped us understand better where and when instructor-led training (ILT) is important to the overall learning experience. This has been an important insight at Health Care Service Corp. (HCSC), a mutual reserve including Blue Cross plans of Illinois, Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. According to Mary Jo Burfeind, vice president of internal operations, learning and talent for HCSC, “What Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • December 2008 • www.clomedia.com Speeding Up the Development Process Traditional training approaches, for all their good intentions, often end up unintentionally impeding an organization’s ability to be agile. I describe this as the “rubber band effect.” The executive team sets the corporate strategy and then looks to the training department to develop the capabilities in people so the strategy can be executed. Well, that takes time. One end of the organizational rubber band moves ahead and then has to wait for the other end to snap forward. By the time the supporting training program is in place, the organization may 37 http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial The Future of Learning CLO Profile Learning Opportunities Embedded in Social Networking ManTech Leverages Knowledge Management Approaches for Social Networking Agility Training for the Learning Organization Creating an Agile Organization With Learning 2.0 2008 Learning In Practice Awards Corporate Social Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute? Union Fenosa Corporate University: How CSR Education Impacted the Bottom Line Training in the 21st Century: Everything Old Is New Again Zions Bancorp.: Connecting the Dots Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

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