Reimagining Learning and Development function

As the world rapidly goes virtual and ecosystems become more competitive, what are the implications for Learning & Development (L&D) function? The strategies they have been following so far, will they be equally effective in time to come. This piece tries to evaluate the role of Learning & Development function in the dynamically changing environment.

Traditionally, Learning & Development function is seen as an enabler for business and has focused on imparting skills needed to the workforce. The model largely has been to develop the training content in-house to cater to business needs and deliver it. This model has nearly served the purpose. But is it future ready?

As the organizations grapple with fast changing demand patterns, sweeping changes in technology landscape, black swan events and innovations and challenges coming from unexpected quarters, will this traditional Learning & Development model hold good in future or is it likely to crumble to dust?

Leaving that rhetorical question unanswered, I posit that Learning & Development function need to reimagine the approach to get the organization future ready. And this transformation needs to encompass all aspects including L&D need identification, provisioning L&D training content, training delivery and assessing training effectiveness.

Traditionally, L&D need identification has been through a push model in which the line manager identifies training needs for the employees. This makes line manager’s diligence and rigor in identifying the training needs, a key point of failure of efficacy of the edifice of Learning & Development. Time has come to pivot to a democratized pull model where organizations establish a minima of learning hours and link them to performance management. This needs to be buttressed with competencies defined transparently for vertical and lateral career pathways. This will allow employees to identify the competencies they need to develop/strengthen to progress on their desired career path. Further, Learning & Development function needs to reposition itself into Business Performance partner working with stakeholders at all levels in the organization to identify skills to get organization future ready. This will entail having an eagle eyes view on competitors, players in adjacent industries and leading organizations in other industries to continuously scan the environment and identify what and how are they evolving their skills and capabilities.

Learning & Development functions of most organization have traditionally adopted the model of owning the training content which is cheaper but is sub-optimal from a quality standpoint as the quality largely gets determined by the quality of the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts). Time has come to Uber-ize and pivot to a model in which Learning & Development function instead of owning the training content, facilitates access to the learning market place. A continuous evaluation of the learning market places will ensure that the employees have access to the best in class learnings and organizational capability is not a limiting factor in growing skills.

Further, training delivery is largely episodic driven largely by classroom and online training sessions. The delivery needs to change to continuous. The key to achieve this is to understand and predict learner’s behavior. Learning & Development functions need to leverage latest technology to understand and predict learner’s behavior - how are they access and process learning, and use that understanding to personalize learning. As a very basic level, it would mean a developing technology driven dynamic learning path for each of the roles and making recommendations and role specific learning paths for the employees to guide them through their learning journeys. It also needs to ensure that the in-house expertise gets harvested and shared with the larger organization. It could be incentivizing SMEs to share expertise through blogs, videos or calls OR leveraging Social for encouraging interaction and Social learning like setting up Role based micro-communities to share knowledge, ask for help and so on. Gamification techniques need to be used to ensure that learning stays fun and adequate incentives (not all monetary) are created for people to share their expertise and handhold others on their learning paths.

Making sure that the learning is also cross functional and not siloed, is imperative to grow leaders for tomorrow and employees not ending up with a blinkered vision.

It will also be important to learn from other industries through talks by thought leaders from different industries. This experience sharing could open the window to the employees to get a peek into how other industries are solving their problems in different ways and could help widen the horizons of the employees. Over a period of time, it would enable employees to have Eureka moments to adapt these solutions to their own industry.

It will be extremely important to Intersperse the trainings with exposure/ experiences/ application. Last but definitely not the least, Learning & Development functions, in the avatar of Business Performance partners, are best placed to facilitate collaborative innovations by holding innovations Jams to harness the collective wisdom of the organization to identify challenges, opportunities and solutions.

Tyranny of 5%

Tyranny of 5%

Innovators and visionaries start the organizations while managers shoulder the onerous responsibility of running it aground!! Sounds unfair but look at it this way. Any organization starts with innovator or visionary coming up with an idea that solves a need through some product or service. Over a period of time it develops scale. Scene 2, enters the manager who is supposed to manage the scale. Alas the poor guy does what he knows best. Puts a strait-jacket around the organization, develops standard uniform policies, procedures, HR Systems including performance therefore, ensuring that only standardized/inflexible way of working is accepted or encouraged in the organization. And any non-conformists who cannot adapt are free to figure out what they want to do but only outside of the organization!!!!

Soon the poor manager realizes that this approach will work in a static world but as luck would have it, today is different from yesterday and tomorrow will be way different from today, and all this because of a guy called Change. To make this worse, this Change fellow cares a damn about how he is perceived. Like it or not he is there to stay. So the manager accepts the writing on the wall and realizes that he and the organization too needs to change to get along with this Change fellow. With the self-imposed constraint of the strait-jacket, the only way manager responds to change is through incrementalism.. Yeah, the same 5% improvement year or year that figures in all performance goals. After all it ties in with what managers know and have done all along. They encourage this incrementalism as way of life across the organization and even through the industry bodies that they now pervade. Appraisal system, promotion systems, they all are modified to ensure that only incrementalists grow in the organization.

All this would work well if the innovators would also “realize” that all the varied needs that this world could possibly have, are met and stop innovating. But these troublesome people don’t. And soon comes a disruptive innovation that changes the landscape as managers have known it. Clients start demanding something that their organization is not positioned to deliver with their incrementalism and strait-jacket. But our indefatigable manager cannot be counted out so soon, so he throws in innovation as one of the goals to his strait-jacketed employee and expects customers to now stay!!

Poor employee wonders where to find time for innovation with strait-jacket of billable hours and 5% tightening and are lukewarm to the idea. And then something totally inexplicable (at least to manager) happens: customers start leaving first in a trickle and then in a deluge. Manager soon finds root cause of this in the employee and the cost of benefits and starts a project to cut both in an incremental manner.

It shows the impact on the balance sheet in the mid-term and managers and the board celebrate the victory of incrementalism. Thousands of options are offered to the righteous victor on quarterly basis leading to the transformation of “means” to end goal. “Rightsizing” becomes another incrementalist goal. Apart from the employee, nobody realizes that the core problem of customers leaving, is still there but amidst the celebration, nobody is noticing the elephant in the room. With proverbial Damocles’ sword hanging on his neck, employee too leaves for greener pastures. Few more quarters pass and balance sheet on steroid starts looking uglier and uglier. Analysts start asking tough questions and manager realizes that incrementalism has run its course in this organization, he then simply packs his tools of trade and leaves for another organization looking to build scale. And the Karmic cycle continues!!

Innovation Paradigm

I have always wondered how it was for the losing civilization when two civilizations at opposite side of the cusp of technological innovation collided. How did the Stone Age tribe cope with the first conflict it had with a tribe that had moved to Bronze Age? How did the Bronze Age kingdom cope with the first conflict it had with a kingdom that had moved to Iron Age? I had the ring side view of it as I completed a book ‘By Right of Conquest’ - by G.A. Henty. It is a historical fiction woven around Spanish conquest of Aztecs in 16^th century. Few hundred Spanish equipped with superior modern armaments like canons, guns, chain mail armour and cavalry overwhelmed multitude of Aztecs who were armed with wooden clubs, bows/arrows and spears and saddled with a dogmatic emperor.

My first reaction as I finished the book was to thank god that our civilization no longer faces such situation. But a moment later, a wave of realization hit me. A realization that this conflict is becoming more “continuous” with passage of time. Such battles are being fought more often, and are more secular in their impact and the only thing that has changed is the rapidity at which these battles are coming our way; thereby, reducing the reaction time of participants and the fact that they may have turned bloodless but the outcome is the same – Merciless decimation!!!

Few years back Blockbuster video rental chain had successfully transitioned to DVD era, Motorola and Nokia in succession used to be the king of hill as far as mobile handset were concerned, Sun Microsystems was an acronym for innovation and Yahoo was pioneer in web search and file sharing.

Look around, all of them have lost ground badly and have either vanished or naysayers are having field day predicting their doom. What went wrong for these organizations? How did they lose the plot?

The answer is simple, they could not innovate and keep step with the changing times. So next million dollar question is why these organizations failed to innovate? Was it because leadership of these organizations was any less focused on innovation? I do not think so, the leadership of these organizations wanted innovation as much as any other organizations but it did not happen for them. And the issue lies in the existing model of innovation and quite frankly pervades most of the organizations.

Notwithstanding the pep talk it receives from leaders, innovation has remained preserve of select few. Because they have earned their stripes, select senior leaders or Product Managers decide the focus areas, priorities and funding for most of the organizations. But are they best placed/equipped to make right calls? The pace at which demand, competitive and technological landscape is changing; the person making these calls should have her ears to the ground, eyes on customer and competitors. If this is right criteria, then frontline employees dealing with customers who are closest to the changes in technology will be my bet to drive innovation agenda of any organization.

But it takes a great deal of humility, courage and leap of faith for a senior leader to acknowledge that what worked for him in past is not the winning trick anymore and a frontline employee may be having the key now. Once that psychological chasm is crossed the next challenge is to equip the frontline employee with paraphernalia to innovate and that is where leaders need to put the money where their mouth is.

With the maddening focus on improving utilization, most of the frontline employees find it difficult to make time to sit back, and analyze if there is a better way to solve the business problem.  Select few, who come up with an innovative idea have only Line manager to turn to for maturing the idea and more often than not, for line manager, today’s deliverables are bigger priority than tomorrow. Few ideas that survive the random selection filters of Line managers and leadership, get executed.

Successful leaders democratize the model of innovation, devote organizational resources (read time and incubators) and establish a market place of ideas to ensure survival of fittest and align compensation philosophy to support this democratized model.

This democratization can be achieved by -

1.       Allowing employees to devote chunk of their time to develop an idea they believe in,

2.       Setting  up innovation labs that would help employees mature the ideas without scrutiny of line managers,

3.       Establishing market places for ideas where ideas could get listed and employees could support these ideas by investing their time (by working on ideas generated by others). Ideas that receive poor response would die a natural death.

This democratization of innovation model would ensure improved engagement of employees, larger supply of ideas and better selection methodology with a robust incubation of ideas that are backed not by executives but by people who are closer to the tide of technology and demand.

Critsit Management

 

A lot of friends keep reaching out to bounce off their approach, take my advice (for what it is worth) on the issues they face during Critsits. I did some Googling and did not come across any good resources that offer any pointers to critsit related issues. Given this, yours truly set about developing an approach (URL below) that people could lean on during critsits.

I will not repeat the stuff in the slide pack but will try to touch upon other pertinent aspects. Critsit is an emotional cesspool for all involved. It will be worthwhile to understand typical characters that are involved and their position in Critsit. Very often critisit is a result of bad planning/poor design and given the construct of corporate world, the team responsible for design is separate from the execution team that often is the first team to get buffeted by critsit. Let’s look at some of the players involved, their position and likely behavior. When you are involved in a critsit, keep your antennas on, keep looking for these characters and plan your approach to these characters accordingly.

Lion – This role is the sponsor, generally sits high up in the hierarchy. His position is that he has been distracted from the BAU responsibilities (read perks of the position) and forced by this critisit to divert his valuable time and energy in hearing out minions droning about stuff that Lion neither understands nor cares. What Lion is looking for a quick turnaround, to be able to be seen as taking decisive action and in control of the situation. He is least bothered about right/wrong and fair/unfair. He would go with advice of people he trusts (read nincompoops).

Hyenas – This is the role that was involved/responsible for planning/design and in ideal situation must be the first head to roll. But this is not how corporates work. Hyenas are a worried lot and rightly so. They know that it is their mess that has blown up and somebody else is cleaning up. They are worried that someday this cat may get out of the bag. So it is the hyenas who would come across as most proactive, seen as most helpful chaps offering help & guidance (read consulting services) to the person/team cleaning up the mess. Make no mistake folks. Hyenas are least bothered in getting a resolution. Their objective is to keep the execution team involved in resolving the critsit as long as possible while schmoozing up to nincompoops who have ears of Lion. And when the lion loses patience, Hyenas point their fingers in direction of the scapegoat. Nincompoops are only too glad to have found out the source of evil that needs slaying and offer the scapegoat to lion.

Nincompoop –Nincompoop is a person who has accomplished all that he was born for (which incidentally may not be a lot). He hangs on to the Lion and is good with sucking up and snarling down. A Nincompoop would definitely have a good collection of powerpoints that he collated during his corporate journey and is least competent in all the things that he is working on. But enough negatives and let’s look at strengths of nincompoop. He feels strongly about whatever is a priority for lion and is extremely focused on developing dashboards for leadership. Bad news is that nincompoop may not know a lot about the subject matter but then he is not supposed to.

Rest of the jungle – Bystanders who are watching the drama with interest. They know whodunit, they also know how this will play out, they will keep away from the action but their principal interest is to find out who will end up being the scapegoat.

Deer – This generally is the execution team who is doubling up and cleaning the mess and is lucky to get the insightful advice and help from Hyenas, guidance from Nincompoops and on top of it is also preparing the dashboards for Lion. This is also the team that is getting most of the heat for still not being able to affect a turnaround despite the best of efforts from Hyenas and Nincompoops. Each review, Deer will come back with heaps of actions (emerging from sound advices from Hyenas and Nincompoops) and loads of gyan on how their poor execution skills led to failure of previously advised actions. Only advise I would offer to Deer is, one of you is going to be the scapegoat, getting frustrated and giving it back to Hyenas and Nincompoops will be the sure shot way of ending as a scapegoat. So resist the temptation, grin and work harder. And keep repeating the mantra of one team one dream. And remember if you repeat a lie many times, you will start believing it.

Judas – As name suggest, he is one of the Deer who will act as part of one team one dream charade while sucking up to some Hyenas and helping them shortlist the scapegoat. Easiest way to identify Judas is to look for Deer who often brings the messages from Hyenas. Once the scapegoat cleans the mess and is sacrificed, Judas will stand up and perform the ceremony of closing the critsit and enjoy the leftovers from victory spoils.

Scapegoat – Deer who did all the hard work, cleared the shit and got shafted. If you are the one, don’t mop around. It will only sap your positive energy. Don’t think about Hyenas and Nincompoops, there is no dearth of such people. The ones you met were not the first ones and would not be the last ones you would meet. So update your resume and try not to be a Scapegoat or Hyena or Nincompoop when the next critsit comes your way.

Above gyan is to forewarn Deer about how it generally plays out. But deer need not lose heart and consider critsit as a lost cause. Try to beat Hyenas in building bridges with Nincompoops, lean on the attached toolkit to resolve critsit asap and last but not the least, apart from taking action, come across as a person who is reaching out, open to inputs and taking action.

Closing this post with quote from Bhagvad Gita

"tasmad asaktah satatam karyam karma samacara asakto hy acaran karma param apnoti purushah"

Therefore, without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for by working without attachment one attains the Supreme.

Critsit Management Toolkit

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jvshPnOQ2l3CQVKn5mYfsMfScHQoC6pWJhjT9k7w2YM/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

Future of Innovation

Even at the risk of eating a humble pie (few years down the line), yours truly is going to take a shot at how Innovation model in organization would evolve.

Current model of innovation in organizations is same as Software products industry - some 15 years back. Proprietary products used to rule the roost, siloed products that did not talk to each other used to dot the IT landscape with very limited choice to customers. Customers and competition forced the players to change to an open, inter-operable products.

Innovation culture in organizations today is not very different. Innovation DNA varies amongst locations of same organization. More often, adoption or penetration is Top driven and is not outcome oriented. Given the internalized model of innovation, it is constrained by participation only from poorly incentivized employee population.  No wonder the output of existing innovation model is inconsistent, with limited upside and sub-optimal.

As I see it, Innovation model will go social in a boundary less manner. Organizations would lay bare their problem areas through social platforms inviting rest of the world to look into their Augean stables and suggest innovative solutions to the problems and I expect that startup eco-system will be leading this charge. This would make the innovation model “Open” in which varied eco-systems are talking to each other by dissecting the problem and debating the possible solutions. This model is more optimal as problem is now in front of larger participant universe that is better incentivized (than employees) to solve the problem and walk away with glory.

The challenge this model presents is that once the optimal solution is identified, it is available for entire world to see, analyze, customize and implement. Woe betide the organization whose execution engine is slow to respond!! More on that but on another day!!