A master plan for L&D in 2020: humanising your learning

No notes for slide

Met Gary last year as part of the Barclays supplier panel
Early conversations very different to other engagements we’ve had
Both supplier and organisation at a crossroads in application of learning technology
Joint vision to radically change direction to keep pace with the modern learner
An honest story of our parallel journey to survive in a challenging world
Gary will open our story

Speaker Notes:
Not here to tell you how to run your Learning Function
True story about how we have radically changed our approach to our role within the business, not because we are great thought leaders in the industry, but because we were in danger of becoming extinct
2 seminal moments of feedback for meMy Son My Boss
The DDL experience we turned downWe knew best v users loved new approach

Speaker notes:
Choice respond or dieRemain in our bubble of being a really great learning function who responds to its businesses needs (could have done this for another year or so)or Redefine our purpose so we became a disruptive force with and for our business, the team that leads innovation rather than follows neatly behind?
Rhetorical Q – Where are you and your learning team on this Spectrum?

We need to know who is with us
Are you sitting on a comfort blanket or on an innovation quest?
30 seconds to respond

https://www.polleverywhere.com/free_text_polls/emU6q9Gfcdv0l5Y

I’ll give a similar story of the push for a different type of service from us as a learning supplier
Quote from Withnail and I, end of the 60s, being a hippie is no longer cool
Digital agencies have moved into our world and are winning awards for innovative solutions
Not constrained by trad instructional design - creating solutions based on emotional impact
Customers far more savvy about trends, ahead of the game, know what the modern learner needs
For MC, playing safe would be very risky, could not afford to deliver safe solutions against higher expectations
We needed new clothes for a new audience - as for Barclays we simply had to respond

Speaker notes:
We needed to turn the mirror on ourselves as leaders of a learning function.

We asked ourselves the question which you might be considering - what does all this mean for me as a learning professional, what skills will we need for the future?

Required us to up-skill ourselves
Find new partners inside and outside of learning to help us with our thinking – we were novices in this digital and innovation lark
A willingness to tackle the historical problems which previously fell into the too hard bucket such as Poor UX due to traditional LMS restrictionsMandatory TrainingSystems training etcAnd how do we adopt these fantastic Marketing techniques such as Gamification, Social Learning, Campaign Approaches into our proposition without them just becoming the next new shiny thing

We thought long and hard about our survival in this new world
We needed to broaden our skill base to embrace a much richer variety of digital learning innovations
How could we work in partnership with a new breed of internal learning designer?
How could we create technical innovations that embraced the very best that learning technology can deliver?
How does the drive for campaign driven learning change the service we need to provide?
It was also clear the campaign based learning required marketing skill to knit the components together over time

Speaker notes:
So suddenly rather than being passive, a pervasive culture was forming where our people felt engaged and excited about the prospect of innovating the way we would deliver learning in the future. However my observation was whilst everyone understands the implications of the Digital revolution we were struggling with the enormity and complexity of the agenda “where do we start” and therefore in order to make sense of this I penned the Gamification strategy outlined in Mind Clicks paper, which set out a overview of our core principles we could anchor our thinking to.

In short whilst the world is changing rapidly our motivators remain the same, but the way we experience them has changed
Piano – Game playing example

Pop by stand 5 (Mind Click) to pick up a free hard copy of the strategic gamification with Barclays paper (giving out 100 free copies)

Some eye opening stats on the modern learner.
How limited they are in the amount of learning time available to them.
What knowledge they need in their heads, compared to what they can find on the fly.
Some insight as to how gamification can be mapped to learning in the workplace.
Introduce user experience design/ empathic design

Speaker notes:

Having determined our Gamification strategy what did we actually do?
Spent time studying our Users and determining what our Experience principles need to be for the future
Inspiring – We want our users to see the value in what they are engaging with, to be sophisticated in the way we nudge them towards their goalsTo have a future orientated optimistic narrative around learning
Credible Expert – We have to make our experience relevant, too often our users our passive in the whole process of learning as we continually push content to themWe also want our users to be rewarded appropriately for their engagement
Tomorrow – We want a platform which is innovative and progressive versus our traditional LMS
Surprising – This is about delighting our users and making the experience feel personalised to them
Simple – We want users to find the whole experience to be easy, you can actually find what you want quickly and simply!
Entertainment – We have to inspire people to want to learn and to do this you have to be creative and get into the entertainment business

Speaker notes:
Secondly we had to drop our long held beliefs about how we operated
This was hard for us as we had traditionally built to a Gold standard end point, trouble is by the time we eventually came to market our solutions were out of date and irrelevant
We learnt from Digital Companies about how they build their solutions as an iterative process
Agreeing an MVP and work in sprints
And Test, Test and Test again
The joy though comes from the process, no endless waiting for agreement, instead a creative journey which involves our customers and stakeholders, which grows and build through its different iterations.

So where are we now

Through talking to Gary,
Rapid prototyping maps very well to a more agile process we have used
Very effective for game design, many iterations required
Group brainstorm
Play it on paper
Split design, learning and technical dev into 3 parallel streams
Sprints then come out of each parallel stream
All leading to a rapid prototype

Speaker notes:
We have been at this for about a year now
We are about to launch our new secondary platform which embodies the core principles from our paper including eco centres, Rapid Design Content, badges, notifications, trophies and Leaderboards.
This is only iteration 1, we are now considering how this can be used for Social and Campaign learning, as well as how we plug in the more sophisticated E-Learning and Game Style interventions
And interestingly when we started all of this we were told it couldn’t work because of IT infrastructure, Security, Compliance etc however what we found was once we started to show our stakeholders what could be done the weight of energy for change was such that suddenly we were introduced to the folk who could help us overcome these challenges.Why …. Because it is absolutely aligned and actually helping to lead our Businesses Massive Transformational Purpose

A joint summary on how learning functions HAVE to evolve to survive
This impacts internal teams and suppliers
It is disrespectful to our learners to not appreciate how their world is changing
Look inwardly at what you do and your role in supporting modern learners
Find partners internal and external who share the same mind set
Together, conceive bold plans that push your organisations forward
Cut through complexity and design simple, elegant solutions for human beings

Thanks and come over a get a copy of the whitepaper