training, development, and organizational effectiveness

It depends.  For every topic that we know is complex, there are between five and a dozen situations in which a making the decision depends: on other work, who’s involved, kinds of funds available, strategic plans, whether accounting systems make it easy or difficult, where accountability lies.

For many of these situations, the list of variables is long.  But they define the way the most experienced folks make good decisions.  Not all of the variates are clear; not all of conclusions are consistent.  Still more interesting, is that there may be an additional, undefined set of variables guiding some high stakes decisions.  Somewhere there is a decision-maker who has reserved the final decision, sometimes because one or more of those variables are constantly changing, for financial or strategic reasons.  By the time everyone learned those decision-making principles, they would have changed.  They cannot be made plain.  For the time being, the way those decisions are made belongs to a few decision-makers.

Our experts also told us that their day-to-day work presents few big challenges.  That is, few challenges that training can touch: workload, additional reporting demands, more variety and complexity in sources of revenue, shorter revenue cycles.  In other words, the business is changing steadily and the pace seems to have picked up.  This is the setting for all those complex decision-making situations.

So as I design the program that experts told me would help address their needs, my team will focus on decision-making.  We will focus on defining situations in which “it depends” applies.  Here’s what good decisions seem to rely on:

• What is the situation?  (Recognizing characteristics; identifying the issues)
• What are my options, from best to worst?  (Recognizing regulation that applies and risks that may result)
• Who is responsible?  (Identify who bears the risk and responsibility; determine how to communicate the situation to elicit quick and prudent action)
• What is the best set of principles I can use in the face of ambiguity to bring prudence, reasonableness, and consistency to the decision
• If an executive decision-maker has the last word in the situation, how can I work with him or her to get that decision made?

What kind of decision-making activities have you used to help experienced people frame mental models for clearer, more consistent decision-making?

The plan is always better than the reality.  In my last post, I promised to tell you how we’d convert the tentative and investigate their resistance.  But you have to start with a plan.  Here’s ours.

First, we’re going to ask experienced, senior people from the target audience to attend working meetings with me and their partners in other departments.  “Partners” isn’t a term in common currency here, but I mean people who are part of the chain of events in any transaction or process – the people who are most likely to be effected by each other’s work.

Before the meetings, me and my stakeholders will do our best to identify critical topics.  We’ll know we’ve got them when we have a set of concrete examples of situations which, if not recognized and passed on without recognizing how to make key decisions, can turn into administrative messes and create risk. [Read more →]

I went to a great meeting yesterday.  Okay, yes, that’ s really my life: a meeting can be a great thing. A group of leaders questioned the validity of training I’m developing.  Polite shots across the bow, honestly.  Now we’re in interesting waters!

The large assembly – sixteen people – is a working group set up to address issues in an area of concern in our organization.  They come from varied roles and departments.  Among them through, imagine marketing and sales, or sales and operations.

"Thank you for the feedback!"

If you recognize how different those perspectives are, then imagine something similar here.  The differences in work… [Read more →]

The demand has been there for a long time.  Now that the curriculum is coming to fruition, the constant question is, “What more can we do?”

For weeks, this has looked like a question that has a right answer, one that I didn’t like.  Neither did the managers I work with.  We saw risk and resistance to accelerating the rollout.  We knew that patient repetition of the program would overcome both.  When my boss and I got the request to do more and to do it faster again last week, we sat down to discover whether there was an argument “pro” and a plan we could live with.  Together, we had a little breakthrough that looks obvious now.  I want butts in seats.

If you work in learning and development you know that butts in seats is the lowest measure of training.  But training is not a flea bath that eradicates mistakes or shortfalls in skills.

The breakthrough?  More butts in seats allows us to address the next real need: without reinforcement, the effect of training steadily deteriorates.  The organization needs to show meaningful effort to provide skill and knowledge for crucial financial and compliance responsibilities.  Check.  But afterward?  Training professionals are often left to hope for the best.

All at once, the argument was clear.  By speeding up and delivering this program often, we lay a solid foundation for future skill development.  and free ourselves to address the needs for support and follow up on the job.   This is no small need in our very distributed and independent-minded organization.  For the people who will benefit most from this new curriculum, management may be indirect, matrixed, variable, or a combination of these three.  In fact, many of the people in our target roles manage their own team.

The learners need the follow-up support at least as much as they need the foundational training.  More butts in seats means we can build the reinforcing training.  Instead of hoping for the best, we can stem the deterioration of skill and knowledge by design.

Rising to the Corporate Education Challenge.

“The core principle is alignment: explicitly ensuring that all corporate learning is tailored to match strategic business priorities. As they find ways to do this, these companies are redefining the role that corporate learning plays in their companies. ”

In strategy + business via Donald Clark and twitter

You know you’re onto something when you start encountering resistance.  But like stubbing your toe in the dark, after the swearing, the first question is, “What is that?”

Resistance is normal

If what you’re doing is going against the grain of  “how we do things here,” you’re challenging the corporate culture.  That stony thing in the dark is, in fact, the way the organization makes decisions, or the way it takes up and digests new initiatives, or some other norm that had not come to light yet.  If it’s culture, you need to recognize that it’s a firm object.  No matter how wacky it appears to your newcomer’s eyes, you won’t change it quickly.  You may not change it at all.

Even after a year with the organization, I’m new.  Most of my colleagues have been around for a number of years.  That means [Read more →]

Thanks to some insoluable WordPress upgrade kink, this blog starts again today.  I’ll be ranging more widely across the work I do, the tools I’m using, and the challenges of change that appear to be on the horizon.  All while trying to avoid telling stories on others that impugn them or their work.  Because the thing is, we’ll all trying to do something good in the work we do.

I’m an experiment

About a month ago, I eased into a new job at my “company.”  I had been designing and developing a comprehensive curriculum for broad training audience under the direction of a cross functional group.  (That work goes live in January.)  Or, many masters, one clear audience.  The new job makes me a training and communications manager in one of the departments that sponsored that curriculum.  Or, few masters, many audiences.

To my knowledge, though there are hundreds of departments here and 10,000 employees, ours is the only department with someone in my role.  I have one eye on training needs internally and the other on needs among our internal partners and clients.  It’s a complex business, and half of the overall revenue comes through our door.  A lot of the work calls for sophisticated decision-making in gray areas of policy.

What am I looking forward to?  Everything.  What strikes me as challenging?  Everything.  Because we’re not building a training function, we’re changing the way people think about training.  So what I, and my boss, supporters, and forward thinking colleagues have to prove is, “Is it worth it?”