Posts

Showing posts from January, 2020

The corporate Learning and Development team is still part of status quo

"Management was designed to solve a very specific problem - how to do things with perfect replicability at ever increasing scale and steadily increasing efficiency.  Now there's a new set of challenges on the horizon. How do you build organisations that are nimble as change itself?" Gary Hamel A late invitation to participate in an " Annual Business Plan " project team remains the holy grail for many corporate L&D teams. A common challenge with these plans is that they remain fundamentally control orientated and reductive by nature. " Annual Business Plans " often share a common vernacular that has been refined over time to meet the expectations of a specific circle of senior people within the organisation. This inevitably runs counter to the more pressing challenge of investing in a new work environment in which everyone can safely participate and learn through their work and relationships. Some examples of this 'red flag' &

3 ways for Learning and Development teams to move on from 'training programme management'

"Bureaucratic interventions are not well equipped to deal with novelty, diversity and complexity. They want to measure things in simplified or condensed ways, develop standardised responses and centralise authority to control and coordinate them." Sidney Dekker I think there are three connected steps that can enable L&D teams to move on from their traditional training programme management role. (If they are choosing to do so in 2020). 1.  Acknowledge and embrace the work of 'L&D' as leadership work. Actively and openly seeking to make change happen in the organisation. 2.  Re-balance their investments (of time, effort, money and relationships) away from the industrial goal of developing compliant workers on behalf of Management. 3.  Re-balance the default focus on education ("school at work") with enabling people to learn through experiences and exposure. Linked to this it's helpful to think about the spread of investment by L&D