Training Industry Magazine - November/December 2016 - 53

development to current roles, future role
needs, and internal career direction. They
recognize that learning efforts must align
with specific performance expectations.

3) Become a Valued Business Partner
Lean learning professionals are not
passive. They refuse to wait for a need,
but rather, become proactive seeking
out opportunities that contribute to the
continuous improvement process. They
discover potential learning opportunities
by first understanding the businessperformance relationship.
Lean learning professionals investigate
their organization's strategic goals
beginning with the mission and vision.
They follow the flow of performance
objectives
cascading
from
the
mission through to each primary

LEARNING'S MORTAL ENEMY: DISRUPTIONS
Money is not a leader's preoccupation. Leaders are
concerned with how supporting business roles, like
L&D, integrate into primary, profit-driven activities.
This is about ensuring that learning efforts minimize
process disruptions.
Technological advances allow L&D to drive high-impact
learning with minimal process disruptions. Applying
technology to any learning effort, however, is more than
shoving a square peg into a round hole and hoping it
works. You must adapt lean learning thinking by:
Being Relevant
Employees don't need to know everything. Drop
all of the fluff and get to the point. Lean learning
identifies only relevant learning content and
matches relevant skills with learner needs.
Being Real-Time
Constant change is a reality, and employees and leaders
must adapt to demands quickly. Lean learning is about
selecting and applying appropriate technology to deliver
precise learning in a timely and efficient manner.
Being Ready
Lean learning is a proactive process. Learning
professionals actively investigate where their efforts
offer the most business value, and they never turn
their back on past process. Rather, they actively
revisit existing learning applications to discover
opportunities to improve.

operational activity. Lean learning
professionals identify key performance
indicators (KPIs), accessing, studying
and leveraging their organization's
performance framework. Then by
speaking with business unit managers,
they focus on the performance pain
points among those KPIs.
These steps identify cause and effect
performance relationships, ensuring
that the learning approach they apply
correlates to improving performance and
managing internal change. Effectively,
lean learning professionals become an
operationally proactive business partner
rather than remaining functionally passive.

4) Identify and Leverage Existing Processes
Lean learning professionals never
purposefully reinvent the wheel.
They recognize that their best efforts
occur through identifying what works
and leverages these activities and
experiences toward other possible
business applications. Lean learning is
truly about resourceful innovativeness
and adaptation.
Traditional learning professionals often
claim that they already do this. But what
many don't realize is that it's more than
simply taking a learning intervention for
one process and applying it to another.
This traditional learning approach may
capitalize on economies of scale but it
remains highly ineffective. It is also the
approach that business leaders view
disparagingly because it lacks business
impact and relevance.
Learning professionals may champion
that their efforts are efficient doing this
but driving down cost per participant for a
learning activity is not lean. Lean learning
professionals deliberately do things to
ensure learning efforts provide relevant
process results while maximizing existing
resources. They actively monitor current
offerings to determine what is effective
and identify areas of improvement. They
then map how to adapt existing offerings
to new process applications, improving
upon the previous iteration.

T R A I N I N G I N DUSTR Y MA GAZ INE - TRENDS201 7 I WWW.TRAI NINGINDU S T RY . C OM/ MAGAZ I NE

NEXT LEAN LEARNING STEPS
The manifestation of lean learning
methodologies is recent and something
that business leaders consider essential to
organizational sustainability. Lean learning
is not well documented, primarily because
leaders don't see learning in isolation but
rather as an integral component to the
lean process.
Your journey toward lean learning is to
stop being learning myopic and open up to
business. Before your learning efforts can
contribute to business objectives, you must
know what the business is about. Become
business and operationally literate.
The next step is learning about the lean
process. Discover that lean is not simply
about eliminating waste, but rather,
creating processes that require less human
effort and time to make products and
services, reducing costs and with fewer
defects, compared to traditional business
systems. From this simple description it
is abundantly clear that lean offers L&D a
leading role and many opportunities to
drive change and improve operational
performance. L&D's time is now. Don't
miss your business calling.

Ajay M. Pangarkar, CTDP, CPA, CMA,
and
Teresa
Kirkwood,
CTDP,
are
founders of CentralKnowledge.com and
LearningSourceonline.com. They are renowned
employee
performance
management
experts and three-time authors most recently
publishing, "The Trainer's Balanced Scorecard."
Email Ajay and Teresa.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - November/December 2016