It’s that time of year when most learning leaders tackle their strategic planning for the learning function.  The clients I work with tend to fall into one of two categories: they approach strategic planning with hope and excitement, or they are cautious about tackling what is perceived to be an overwhelming task.  In either case, my role is not to build the plan for them but rather to help them navigate the planning process, challenge their status quo, and support them as they make difficult tradeoff decisions.  Then, I cheer for them when they crystallize the plan.  While it is a mentally taxing facilitation session for me and them, it is one of the most rewarding!

As I reflect on the recent planning sessions working with clients, I wanted to share seven tips to consider as you embark on your strategic planning:

1. Involve Your Team: If your department is large enough to have directors and managers, include them.  Also include anyone on your team who has specific knowledge or responsibility that is important to have in the discussions.  Anyone invited to a working session needs to bring their A-game-- tell them that. I’d shy away from inviting your whole team unless it is small (five people or less).  The extended team should be involved but probably not at the beginning; while you don’t want to make decisions in a bubble, too many voices can make it difficult to create a good plan.  If you want a scan of the current state and what the team envisions for the future, send out a short survey to everyone and collate the results – it's a great way to start the live planning session.
2. Anchor to the Business Objectives: Whether it’s the entire organization or a single business unit you serve, find out the business objectives and strategic initiatives, then align to them.  Put them on a slide and refer to them as you go through the planning process to ensure that your plan not only supports the business but enables the business to achieve the results it has declared.
3. Ruthlessly Prioritize: This is a tough one and it is the time when I challenge clients the most.  Once priorities and tactics are identified, a prioritization activity should occur to determine which ones will be included in the plan.  This is tough, because we tend to think that everything is important.  It may very well be.  However, there’s a limit to our time, resources, and budget.  In many cases, learning teams are ‘building the plane while flying it’.  Ideally, your prioritization yields a mix of quick wins, near-term, and long-term tactics.  Reach out to me if you’d like a copy of our Prioritization Activity to use with your team; just be prepared to moderate with tough love!
4. Consider Learning Team Capabilities and Gaps to Address: As you identify priorities and tactics, think about the current capabilities of you and your team.  Does your team have what it will take to implement the plan?  If not, team capabilities must be part of your strategic plan.  For example, imagine that you desire better alignment to the business objectives, yet the training team has been acting as reactive “order takers” at your organization. To address this gap in communicating with business partners to understand needs, the team will need up-skilling in a capability: in this case, performance consulting.
5. Cut the Training Jargon: Ever see a business leader’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about personalized learner journeys, blended learning, or gamification?  While near and dear to us, you’ll want to minimize using terms like these, as the strategic plan should be understandable to anyone in the organization who reads it. 
6. Market Your Plan: Now that you’ve avoided the training jargon, prepare a focused and visually appealing “walk-around deck” so you can communicate your plan with your team, key stakeholders, and even your learners.  Take the time to proof the deck and consider graphic support needs.  Then, set up time to talk with everyone about it.  Make sure you think about any questions or objections that may arise and give thoughtful answers.
7. Create a Workable Plan: Sounds like common sense, right?  I’ve seen learning organizations stumble here.  They create a plan that is too complicated to execute, overfilled with tactics, or lacking in clear timelines.  Make sure to list out each tactic with a description, resources needed, a specific start and end date, and the people responsible for implementation.  A note about timelines: try to be more specific than “complete in Q4”.  It’s important to project the timing of your plan in detail, so you can overlay its different tactics and see where there may be too many things happening at once.  Remember, you are probably building that plane while you are flying it.
8. Consider the Culture: Is your organization an enterprising new startup? A large global biotech? Is the organization risk adverse or welcoming of new innovations?  Imagine the looks on the faces of the business as they hear about your plan.  The culture can serve as your guideposts for creating a realistic plan that everyone can rally around.

The learning function is often thought of as the opposite of strategic, and in fact, many elements of what we do are tactical.  A solid strategic plan can help you and your learning team incorporate strategy into your work and better serve as strategic business partners.  Now it’s time to tackle that plan; I’m cheering for you!

The post Seven tips to ensure your strategic planning is a success  appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Sue Iannone

For any learning and development (L&D) program, training managers and directors will create learning objectives.  These objectives articulate the discreet things that learners should be able to do after participating in a program.  Learning objectives are extremely important, but they’re only part of the story.

Ultimately, L&D efforts are about driving behavior change in the field, so behavioral objectives are just as important.  Unfortunately, learning professionals often fail to develop behavioral objectives.  In this article, we describe the differences between learning objectives and behavioral objectives.  We also explain how they should work together to drive business results.

Learning Objectives

As mentioned above, learning objectives articulate the key things that learners should be able to do after completing a given training program or learning experience.  L&D professionals usually take great care to properly write these objectives for a given learning resource or training course, as well as for units within a  course

Each learning objective relates to a specific capability or skill and is expressed using an action verb.  For example, after completing a course, learners should be able to:

1. Describe the mechanisms that underlie disease X
2. List common treatments for disease X
3. Articulate the mechanism of action for drug Y
4. Handle the most common customer objection to prescribing drug Y.

Learning objectives can relate to “lower order” (e.g., knowledge-based) thinking skills as well as higher-order (e.g., evaluation-based) thinking skills.  L&D professionals the world over are familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy, which arranges the “action verbs” for learning objectives into various levels, from lower-order to higher-order.  Figure 1 shows this taxonomy.

Behavioral Objectives

Behavioral objectives articulate the specific behaviors that learners are supposed to exhibit in the field after completing a training program.  To perform a desired behavior, a learner might need to absorb and master numerous individual pieces of knowledge and multiple skills.  So, while a single behavioral objective might have only one or two learning objectives, a behavioral objective may often have many discreet learning objectives embedded within it.  Another way to look at it is this:  Behavioral objectives can focus at the “macro” level while learning objectives focus at the “micro” level.

Putting it All Together

Ultimately, we create training programs and learning experiences because we need to achieve some business result.  If you find yourself getting hyper-focused on only the learning objectives, it may be time to take a step back and ask yourself:  What is the business objective which needs to be met?  What are the associated behaviors required to meet this business objective?  To guide program development, L&D pros must:

1. Articulate the desired business result(s).
2. Determine which behaviors will deliver the desired business results, then develop the behavioral objectives.
3. Develop discreet learning objectives for each behavioral objective.

Below is a hypothetical example of how these three components relate to one another.  Note that multiple desired behaviors might be needed to achieve the business result.  We have limited it to one desired behavior in each example, just to keep it simple.

Desired Business Result:  Increase the number of “product X” prescriptions written for new patients.

For Sales Representatives:

• Desired Behavior 1: Articulate the unmet need for patients suffering from disease Y to healthcare providers.
• Learning Objectives for Behavior 1: List the hallmarks of disease Y; Describe the burden of disease for patients suffering from disease Y; Relate patient dissatisfaction with current treatment options

For Field Reimbursement Managers:

• Desired Behavior 1: Remove reimbursement barriers that may impact a new patient’s ability to access product X.
• Learning Objectives for Behavior 1: Identify the most common access challenges encountered by new patients and office staff; Recognize common problems related to billing and coding; Recognize common problems related to prior authorizations; Describe the fulfillment pathway for product X

From all this, one thing becomes crystal clear:  Learning objectives are important, but they may be only part of the story.  They are a vital component in a cascade of things that begins with the desired business result(s), moves through the behavioral and learning objectives, and then culminates in effective program design.  All learning professionals create learning objectives, but the BEST learning professionals consider the business need and the desired behaviors.  Adopting this approach is one key to becoming a true performance consultant!

The post Behavioral Objectives vs. Learning Objectives appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Nathan Pienkowski

In recent years, a lot of ink has been spilled regarding the idea of the “Modern Learner.”  In this article, we discuss whether the so-called “Modern Learner” is really that much different from any other learner.  The answer is yes…and no…and that has implications for Learning and Development (L&D) professionals.  Let’s dig a little deeper.

What is the Modern Learner?

Basically, our concept of the Modern Learner is as follows:

In the western world today, people are highly distracted by cell phones, televisions, computers, tablets and a host of other things.  Individual tools—such as the cell phone—contain many distractions within themselves, such as e-mails, texts, social media, web browsers, and more.

As a result, learners today have become conditioned to think differently, interact with the world differently, and have different expectations regarding how they learn.  By extension, it’s hard to get their attention (and even harder to hold it), they want their information delivered in easily digestible “bite-sized” chunks, and they don’t want to immerse themselves in long-form training that requires concentration for extended periods.

That’s the concept, and L&D professionals have taken it to heart, working to develop learning programs that cater to the needs and expectations of the modern learners.  But, is it right?  Does it make sense to apply it in all cases?

The Modern Learner Concept:  It’s true, but…

It is true that, in general, westerners today exhibit the characteristics of the modern learner.  It’s important to remember that these characteristics (shorter attention span, limited desire to concentrate, need for instant gratification and frequent rewards, highly visual approach to learning, etc.) are the result of psychological conditioning and not any physical changes.  Modern learners’ brains are biologically no different from those that were learning things back in the 1850s, for example.

The mechanisms through which people learn are biologically-based and fundamental to humans.  They change at the rate of evolution so, in other words, very slowly.

However, the psychological conditioning evident in modern learners is real, and L&D professionals deal with that in numerous ways.  For example, they might apply microlearning techniques, breaking learning content into small chunks that require very little time on an individual basis.  L&D pros might also use gamification, often enabled by mobile technology, to help make learning more experiential.

A host of techniques like the ones above can be deployed to reach modern learners.  This is good.  But, it is possible to get too much of a good thing, as these techniques are not appropriate in all cases.  In fact, there are times when they can be counter-productive.

Too often, we are asked to apply these techniques because the training leader believes “that’s how training is done these days.”  The idea is that learning always needs to be broken into small, discreet chunks or that mobile technology needs to be leveraged, and so on.  That idea is wrong, so let’s see when it’s appropriate to cater to modern learners vs. when it’s not.

When (and When Not) to Cater to the “Modern Learner”

Generally, training techniques that cater to the Modern Learner concept are best used when the training needs to:

• Explain concepts
• Impart bits of information or easily learned skills that are relatively discreet or independent from one another
• Reinforce more complex learnings that were delivered during other training (i.e. performance support)

For example, we once had a customer that needed to train its sales force to use a range of new functions within its customer relationship management (CRM) system.  Most of these functions were independent of one another and relatively easy to learn by themselves.

So, we created a series of very short modules, one for each “skill.”  In addition, we created a game for each skill that encouraged competition between sales reps and enabled them to practice.  In this case, chunking the information into smaller pieces—and leveraging tech-driven games—was just the ticket.

In other cases, catering to the Modern Learner concept is not appropriate.  For example, it’s not usually appropriate when training learners on complex skills, which themselves are often amalgamations of multiple interrelated sub-skills.

Modern Learner-oriented approaches are useful as reinforcement or for performance support in some of these cases.  But, the fact remains that learning complex skills requires attention, concentration, time, and practice.  One doesn’t typically learn to be a great sales rep by going through a series of short e-modules.  It’s tough to train a manager on how to have difficult conversations with subordinates via these approaches, either.  Effectively having those conversations requires a complex array of interrelated skills that need to be imparted and practiced.  Sorry, Modern Learners, sometimes you just have to put the phone down and concentrate.

Applying the Modern Learner concept in the wrong situations will, at best, provide a sub-optimal result.  In some cases, it can also cost more for less.  Sometimes, training vendors are all-to-willing to create a series of short e-modules because it’s the “cool” thing to do, rather than a more appropriate form of training for a given situation.  The irony is, the “cool” thing to do can cost more money for less total training time and less impact.

Summing Up

So, the key takeaways of all this are as follows:

• Modern westerners typically exhibit “Modern Learner” characteristics.
• These characteristics are the result of psychological conditioning, but learners’ biology has not changed a bit.
• Techniques for reaching Modern Leaners can be effective, but they must be used when appropriate.
• In general, these techniques are appropriate when imparting bits of knowledge (or skills) that are relatively independent of one another.
• They are less appropriate for complex skills training.

Good luck out there!

The post Are “Modern Learners” Really That Different? appeared first on Bull City Blue.