From Information to Impact

By Clark Quinn

What is learning and development (L&D) focused on? Too often I hear, and see in practice, ‘content’. And, that’s the wrong answer. So, what should we be focusing on? Performance. Impact. Making a dent in organizational needs. What does that mean? And what does it take?

Information can be useful. To the right person, at the right time, it can meet a performance support need. For instance, we can help individuals overcome numerous cognitive deficits. We can provide structured access to large quantities of arbitrary information that we aren’t likely to remember. We can help us remember to do all the steps every time, rather than thinking we’ve done so because we did so several times earlier in the day. We can also support complex calculations. The list goes on.

Let’s be clear, we’re talking organized information. Maybe even interactive. That is, the information solutions are designed to meet the contextual need: our cognitive stance in the moment, the nature of the ambient environment, and more. We can, and should, ensure that we’ve got all the tools available to help our people succeed. However, that’s not all we need, and that hasn’t been our core focus.

Information is for ‘in the moment’ help. We also should have prepared people with the ‘in the head’ skills. That’s what training is for, and largely what L&D does. Yet, too often we do it wrong. We mass learning up into ‘events’. There’s considerable information, and insufficient practice. Then, we let people walk away without thinking how the learning will continue to be supported. Not surprisingly, there’s little impact of what we do, and it dissipates quickly.

This likely isn’t new to you, but it’s important to reiterate. We have to continue to fight against the pressures to produce ‘content’, let alone more efficiently. It’s not as easy as it should be, unfortunately. Too many stakeholders don’t understand learning; they’ve been to school, and think that’s what learning is. NOT! Yet we get subject matter experts who, because of that and the fact that they don’t have conscious access to their expertise, think they know what people need. We get executives who believe learning should look like classrooms. Most importantly, because they’re not experts in learning, and are mired in an old belief that we’re formally reasoning beings, they can think that information presentation is equivalent to behavior change.

So, what can we do? There are several steps we need to undertake, consistently and persistently. First, we need to educate ourselves. We need to ensure we understand, and can articulate, what good learning looks like. We should also be equipped with multiple forms of argument: the science and data, anecdotes and stories (ideally from competitors), and finally we need to be prepared to ask folks about how they learned. Then we can present the argument, or arguments, that are appropriate for the stakeholder we’re trying to inform.

We also need to practice what we preach. First, we shouldn’t build courses when there are better solutions. Then, when formal learning is the answer, we should do it right. When faced with skill shift requirements, we need to build courses that have sufficient practice and minimal content. Our focus should be courses that are targeted at specific performance gaps, designed to address those gaps, and then evaluated to ascertain that they are, indeed, remedying the situation. We need to ensure that these courses do have an impact, evaluating the outcomes and iterating. The goal is to demonstrate that we’re actually having business impact, not just assuming a good outcome.

This suggests that we also need to educate the industry. Good practice is to make it easy to do the right things, and hard to do the wrong things. Right now, our tools tend to support doing ‘content’, not practice. Our vendors have to be pushed to stop producing tools that make it easy to take ‘content’ (slide decks, documents, videos, etc) and push it to the learner with a knowledge quiz. Instead, we need tools that make it easy to create meaningful assessment, and hard to focus on knowledge. We need tools that are focused on long term behavior change, including follow-ups and data collection. Yes, we can use the existing tools to do this, but it feels like an uphill battle instead of natural.

Our industry has stumbled along, relying on faith in our processes instead of active evaluation of our impact. That’s wrong, and, ultimately, it’s going to have to change. Ideally, that change comes from within. I’m inclined to believe that it’s better that we’re proactive rather than the Chief Financial Officer finally asking for proof that the L&D spending is having an impact, and we’re unable to deliver. As companies push for more savings, the ineffectiveness of our endeavors will necessarily become a focus.

At core, we need to be clear about when knowledge matters, and when skills do. Then, we need to make sure we’re aligning our efforts to each. In particular, we’re sadly underwhelming in the skill development area, despite that being the core focus of most of our effort. We’re a community, and just as communities should be self-repairing and self-improving, so to should ours be. Let’s lift our game. We can use the focus of change management here, for instance having a vision, steps to get there, evangelizing, support for people making the change, and recognition for those who have. Right now, we have a core of folks who are helping point the right way, and people are beginning to pay attention. Let’s support that by looking for all the inputs we can to make things better, assist people in implementing them, and celebrating the good outcomes.