"If you just want someone to reflect what you say, it is far more cost effective to replace a senior manager with a full-length mirror." Rishad Tobaccowala Three key opportunities for L&D leaders in 2021: Re-positioning 'L&D' as an organisational priority Connecting insights and foresight to sharpen leaders' focus and prioritisation Developing new commitment and engagement with and from leaders Aligning 'learning' directly to business strategy and the ability to compete in complexity Linking the value of 'learning' to organisational development and culture change Helping the whole organisation to take responsibility for continual learning. Becoming more confident in the commercial context Understanding the commercial context within which the organisation seeks to create value Understanding and connecting brand and business goals - and the trade offs being made Understanding the business model, the organisational model and the management mod...

"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 creat...

"The first step in changing a culture is to understand how a leaders' thinking currently drives the system and how, therefore it currently drives performance." Vanguard Consulting There is a deeply entrenched three-way standoff between the untapped opportunity for businesses to embrace continual learning, the fears that prevent (many) leaders from committing to this and the way the role of the 'L&D' function is positioned.  Having worked in and around this phenomenon for a number of years, I reflect that there are cognitive biases at play - for both leaders and their L&D teams. Here's my list of examples: 'Status quo bias' - The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also 'loss aversion' and 'system justification').  'System justification' - The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometime...

"Creating the conditions for personal agency and authority requires dismantling machineries of compulsion and hierarchical authority. Once workers have discovered their own guiding star, they will organise themselves to grow the capabilities they need..." Carol Sanford What you might mean when you say " learning culture ": "We have a catalogue of training courses." "We provide a wide range of ' learning resources '." "We have centralised our ' learning offer ' on a technology platform." "We are committed to helping more people consume more of our ' learning content '." "We have defined what we need people to know - in order to 'execute' in their role." "We provide the ' learning solutions ' to our ' business problems '." "We have a structured process to validate and prioritise requests for interventions." "We have a consistent and standardised a...

"People who suffer most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it. Fear and desperation narrow people's vision... we seek familiarity and order over uncomfortable truths." Adam Grant 20 limiting beliefs in corporate Learning and Development functions: "We don't have permission to change the organisation." "Our work is way downstream of 'Business Strategy'." "Learning design standards will compensate for a lack of explicit learning strategy." "' Solutions ' are always the answer." "We are judged on our tactics." "' Business as usual' is a success measure." "Learning technologies will change the status of the L&D function." "We are an information delivery function." "We need certainty in order to make progress." "We need to give people what they want." "We don't have ...

"The reason why we don't see the source of our problems is that the means by which we try to solve them is the source." David Bohm The ' Top 5 challenges for L&D leaders ' - based on responses from folks planning to attend the 2021 annual Learning & Performance Institute 'Learning Live' conference: 1. "Digital transformation of learning." 2. "Building a learning and coaching culture." 3. "Supporting learning 'in the flow of work'." 4. "Leadership and management development." 5. "Driving employee engagement." There are some perennial runners on this list of " Challenges " (symptoms?) - which in my opinion are all connected . If we can acknowledge that sustainable business models are no longer based on centralised control - enabled through optimising efficiency and standardisation. If we can agree that an individual's expectation of 'work', an employer, a 'boss' a...

"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth."  John F. Kennedy 1. Business and work have changed. The role and priorities for workplace learning need to reflect and accelerate these shifts. 2. Businesses struggle with change and adaptability - and learning is the  best enabler and accelerator for these goals. 3. Most corporate L&D investments are focused on making things stay the same . This is a huge risk to growth. 4. Most corporate L&D investments aren't focused on what will be most valuable and differentiating for the business. 5. It's impossible to have a truly diverse organisation without a commitment to continual learning, reflection and growth.  6. Continuing to separate the ' thinkers ' from the ' doers ' inside a business is commercial suicide. 7. Work is moving from (just) completing tasks to creating value - which means that to grow organisations need to invest in enabling inquiry, new questions and bringing th...

"You must learn a new way to think before you can learn a new way to be." Marianne Williamson What matters most to the business? What matter most to the L&D team? What differentiates the business from the competition? What differentiates our approach to enabling learning? How are the L&D team enabling change? How do we define 'learning' around here? Who benefits most from this approach? How can the business learn faster? What are the barriers? What do we need to unlearn? What would happen if the L&D team did nothing new this year? I help organisations connect their investment in learning to new culture, growth and results  www.jocelynconsultingltd.co.uk

"When helping clients do new things, your job is to fight the status quo. New things don't come from fitting in." Tom Critchlow Question 1 - Where will your business need to learn faster  - and what are the barriers? Question 2 - Which unique capabilities will differentiate you beyond the pandemic - and how are you deliberately accelerating these? Question 3 - How much of your sustainable growth now depends on your business executing what you already know faster / cheaper, versus adapting and learning new things? I connect corporate learning to culture, growth and results www.jocelynconsultingltd.co.uk

"The reason why we don't see the source of our problems is that the means by which we try to solve them are the source." David Bohm A shout out to a tweet from the always inspirational John Cutler on this blog... I’ve used these questions before giving L&D teams advice: Is there a ‘learning strategy’? Is it reasonable? Is the strategy explicitly or implicitly communicated? Is the structure of the L&D team aligned with the strategy? Sometimes you get lucky. There’s a reasonable learning strategy. A reasonable structure. The key issue is to make the strategy explicit . The hardest to unpack is actually an implicit, not-great strategy with a tightly coupled (“optimised”) structure… An interesting situation is when the learning strategy is in flux... The L&D structure is aligned around the “old” strategy. Which was implicit. The new strategy is understood at a high level, but the details are murky. This is SO confusing. It is uncomfortable. To start ... is it a le...

"The status quo of organised learning benefits those who benefit from the status quo." Beth Salyers Three reflections on my experience of annual L&D investment planning: 1. Most corporate learning strategies are built around control and looking backwards 2. L&D leaders rarely (if ever) describe the trade offs they are making when deciding on an investment plan 3. Even in 'sophisticated' organisations most learning strategies are a collection of to-do lists Two questions to help you reflect on whether your L&D function is playing on 'defence' or 'offence': 1. How much of your L&D investment is currently driven by? - The business reacting to external events? - Cost reduction initiatives? - Digitisation of existing business processes? - 'Standardisation' projects? - Compliance audit risks? 2. What proportion of your L&D priorities are enabled through these strategy choices? - Standardising fixed skills for individual roles? - E...

"The only thing more difficult than starting something new in an organisation is stopping something old." Russell Ackoff What the organisation needs to agree - before you can reinvent the L&D function: 1. What's our market context? Is this changing? If so - why? 2. As a business how are we specifically going to differentiate? 3. Is our business model based on increasing optimisation and efficiency? 4. How much of the value we create for customers comes from known, established work and process? Will this change as we look forward? 5. Is our future success dependant on enabling people to execute standardised, repeatable processes? 6. What are the features of 'future readiness' for this business? (e.g. beliefs, mindset, capabilities, culture(s))  7. How much time and resources will we need to invest in identifying new opportunities and new possibilities? 8. How fast is our expectation and definition of a "high performer" changing? 9. Where do we n...