Corporate L&D struggles with 'buy-in' because it lacks a narrative

"Narrative strategy is a 21st century skill."

Tom Critchlow

"Narrative (noun) - a story or a description of a series of events."

Corporate 'L&D' teams continue to struggle with 'buy-in' because they continue to struggle with narrative.

This is now mission critical because optimising instructional design tactics is not enough to build leverage and affect the organisational culture. 

So, the L&D team needs to forge a new, compelling, actionable vision of the different future it seeks for the organisation. It then needs to tell this story in every interaction and through every deliverable. 

Some inputs into the new, compelling, actionable vision of the different future the L&D function seeks for the organisation might include:

"This is how our business uniquely creates value for our customers today..."

"This is what's changing in our market and for our customers and why. This will impact the way our business creates value because..."

"This context means we must re-frame how we think about 'learning' in our business - towards it enabling us to adapt faster, grow more sustainably and support our people better."

"These (insert mindsets / capabilities / skills) our currently scarce in our market - so deliberately developing them would be a clear differentiator for our business."

"Our people face new and increasing complex challenges every day - and we don't currently have the capabilities we need to help them to solve them."

"So we need to develop the right kind of learning environment here - where people see learning as part of their everyday work, rather than something that's separate. This now needs to be the focus of the L&D function - rather than 'delivering' and 'tracking' information."

"Our traditional focus on codifying fixed skills in long term training programmes is a now drag on our impact on performance and culture. As an L&D team we need to re-prioritise to enabling people to find the new people, new connections and new experiences that will unlock their unique contributions."

"This shift in our focus is critical - to retaining, attracting and inspiring the very best people because their expectations of our support for their values, their goals and their mastery are growing all the time."

"Today most of our investments in 'L&D' are based on maintaining control and scaling what we already know. We need to re-balance this focus on standardisation with creating more space for people to define 'what's next for this business?'."

"Many of our leaders are bystanders and / or paying lip-service to their responsibilities as role models, enablers and accelerators of the learning organisation we all need to develop if we are to thrive in an uncertain future."

Without a 'narrative strategy' and the right approach to engage and spread this, the L&D function risks remaining as a fixed overhead delivery tool. 

The opportunity to step forward and lead with context and empathy, and with new ideas based around clear diagnosis seems like an opportunity not to be missed?

Dynamic organisational learning strategy for mid sized businesses

www.jocelynconsultingltd.co.uk