Chapter 2

Down the Rabbit Hole

Shift Your Mindset Before Shifting Your Strategy

Are you ready for whatever comes next?

That probably sounds like an unfair question. No one really knows what’s coming next. Even the most well-informed plans get sidetracked by unexpected events. One day, you’re focused on a big product release. The next, you’re dealing with a sudden regulatory change. It’s L&D’s job to help people always be ready for whatever’s coming down the pike. That’s what makes this profession so exciting . . . and so frustrating!

Disruption has long been a major influence on L&D because it’s a never-ending workplace reality. It is inescapable in every industry, and it’s only accelerating. According to Accenture’s 2019 Breaking Through Disruption report, 71 percent of the 10,000 companies analyzed were either in the middle or on the brink of significant disruption. And that’s before disruption fundamentally changed people’s relationships with work in 2020. Companies are just now getting a clear picture of their current challenges. Only 6 percent are highly confident in their ability to foresee and respond to future disruption, according to Accenture’s Business Futures 2021 Report.

Some industries are often thought of as more susceptible to disruption than others. Consider the way e-commerce has shaken the foundations of the retail business since the mid-2000s. Fleeting stability is now a common feeling in many organizations, regardless of their industry, scale, or market penetration. Just ask Blockbuster, Pets.com, Kodak, and MySpace, all of whom were, at one point or another, dominant players in their spaces. There is no such thing as a disruption-proof company.

Disruption affects everyone within an organization, but it can feel different depending on where you sit. For executives, it feels like stock price volatility and extra pressure from the board of directors. For management, it feels like cost reductions, priority adjustments, and a constant demand to get more done with fewer resources. On the frontline, it feels like employment uncertainty, overwhelming workloads, and unanswered questions. I’ve always found myself stuck right in the middle as an L&D pro. We’re expected to help stakeholders execute their changing mandates while also supporting employees by providing the why and how. Rarely do we have all the answers. However, there’s one thing we know for sure:

The Coyote Conundrum

Do you feel like you’re always chasing the next thing as an L&D pro?

It’s our job to make sure other people can effectively do theirs, but knowledge and skill expectations are moving targets. I’ve always compared L&D to a certain cartoon coyote who’s spent his entire on-screen existence trying to catch a certain cartoon bird (their names have been redacted because I want Warner Bros. to let me watch the next Batman movie). The coyote has a plan. He has the best ACME-brand tools. But the same thing always happens at the end of every episode. The coyote falls off a cliff and gets nailed in the head with an anvil. Talk about adding insult to injury!

Has your job ever made you feel just like the coyote? You had a great plan. It was blessed by every stakeholder and executive. You were ready to implement it when all the sudden . . . the world changed. Your Very Important Project was suddenly no longer very important. And then you’re right back at the beginning of the episode, chasing the organization’s next big priority.

This is just the way business works today. Change is inevitable. We can’t stop it. Our only choice is to embrace and adapt to it. We must think differently about how we do our jobs within the context of a perpetually changing workplace. We must step back and rethink the role L&D should play in enabling organizational transformation. Luckily, we can look to the coyote for another important lesson!

Why has the coyote been so unsuccessful for so long? His problem is simple: He’s hungry. On paper, it makes sense to go after the obvious solution: the bird right in front of him. But that’s his real mistake! He never should have started chasing the bird at all. He was never going to catch it, no matter how many tools he threw at the problem. Instead, he should have paused, taken a step back, and reassessed both the problem and his own capabilities. He should have found a new way to solve the problem. He should have become a professional painter.

What?!

The coyote is pretty bad at everything he does. However, he does possess one stand-out skill. Remember how he would often paint the opening of a fake tunnel on a rock in an attempt to trick the bird into slamming head-first into it, rendering it unconscious and easier to catch? Unfortunately, the fake tunnel always turned into a real tunnel, allowing the bird to speed right through and evade capture. That’s it! That’s what the coyote missed! The dude had the skill to paint fake tunnels that turn into real tunnels! He should have applied this skill to secure a few sweet government infrastructure contracts, rapidly increasing his personal wealth and making sure he never had to chase down his dinner ever again.

This must be the most ridiculous section of any L&D book ever written. But there is a valuable point to be learned from my cartoonish observation. L&D cannot keep up with the pace of change if we keep applying the same old strategies. Instead, we must step back and reevaluate our methods. We must ask hard questions, challenge our assumptions, and find new ways to apply our skills. What do we really do? And how does this relate to what people really need to perform at their best in today’s workplace?

A Crisis of Purpose

What do you call your L&D department?

I’ve been witness to some spectacular wordsmithing over the years. My first L&D role was in “Operations Training.” Simple. Straightforward. Then, we changed our name to “Operations, Learning, and Development” because we did more than just training. Later on, I was part of “Support Training and Multimedia Projects” or STAMP for short. I’ve been a chief learning architect, principle learning strategist, learning experience designer, and talent development director. I’ve made up most of my own titles, and yet I still can’t explain what I do for a living to people outside this profession.

There’s a reason you’ve never met an accountant who refers to themself as an “evidentiary actuarial inquisitor.” Their profession has a clear purpose. Everyone understands the role they play within an organization, and they play that role consistently. People outside finance may not understand exactly what they do, but they acknowledge their purpose and respect their value. Accountants don’t need to over-inflate their job titles or department names to get their point across. How would your stakeholders answer the question, “What does L&D do?” Would their answer match your own? Would it highlight the full value you believe your team brings to the organization?

L&D is a unique profession. Everyone has an opinion on how we do what we do. People went to school and completed job training, so they believe they know what works. Accountants are left alone to account, but L&D pros are told to provide a 90-minute instructor-led course based on a 300-slide PowerPoint presentation next Thursday. It’s not fair, but it’s our reality. An easy way to compensate is to change our team names and job titles. We use terms like learning experience architect to remind people that we’re experts in this stuff. Unfortunately, credibility has little to do with names. Right now, the four most valuable public companies in the world are named after a fruit (Apple), a portmanteau (Microsoft), a rainforest (Amazon), and letters (Alphabet). Identity is derived from value, not vice-versa. We must shift our mindsets if we want to become vital, respected contributors.

The Modern Learning Mindset

I spent a lot of time in 2020 and 2021 speaking with HR and L&D professionals around the world. I wanted to understand how they were helping people get through the changes caused by the pandemic. I met with managers, influencers, analysts, and practitioners in retail, hospitality, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, grocery, telecommunications, and professional services. Unsurprisingly, I found that no one was prepared for this level of disruption.

However, I noticed that some organizations were handling the situation a little better than others. They seemed to respond to changes more quickly and kept their businesses moving forward and their employees safe and productive. They had rapidly adopted new practices, such as remote work, e-commerce, and home delivery. They worked in different industries. They applied different tools and strategies. But they all had one thing in common: mindset. Every standout organization was in the process of adopting what I call a modern learning mindset prior to the onset of the pandemic. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were setting themselves up to face the ultimate workplace disruption.

What exactly is a modern learning mindset? Well, modern is an odd term because it’s a perpetually moving target. What’s modern today will be antiquated tomorrow. This is why the term so accurately describes the mindset L&D pros must adopt in today’s workplace. Our strategies must be grounded by the desire to overcome the sudden and violent impact of change. Our tools and tactics will evolve over time, but the fundamental principles that inform “the way we do things” must be durable and disruption-ready. These principles must inform our most important decisions, including technology purchases, solution design, and skill development. Every L&D team must apply the six principles that have helped exemplary organizations “sur-thrive” during a time of unprecedented change.

Principle 1. Make Learning an Essential Part of the Work(flow)

Time is the biggest obstacle to learning—full stop. LinkedIn Learning reiterated this point when they found that executives and managers agree that getting employees to make time for learning is the number one challenge for talent development (LinkedIn 2018). This is especially true in frontline workspaces, such as contact centers, manufacturing facilities, and retail stores, where employees are heavily scheduled and cannot make time for focused development. Regardless of industry or role, people already have too much to do and not enough time to do it. How can they possibly fit classroom sessions and online courses into their schedules?

L&D teams that acknowledge this reality adopt strategies that fit within the flow of work. Microlearning has become a popular tactic because it helps L&D deliver short, focused training activities that are easier to consume during a busy workday. Of course, making content shorter doesn’t mean people will automatically want to consume it. L&D must go beyond the idea of “learning in the flow of work” and build the business case for making learning part of the work itself. A modern learning mindset requires that organizations hold people accountable for learning just as they do for performance. They prioritize knowledge and skill development and continuously make the necessary investments to ensure people have time to dedicate to learning. They also recognize people for their efforts to develop themselves as well as supporting the development of others.

Principle 2. Take Advantage of the Full Ecosystem

How often do the people you support access your LMS? Once per month? Once per quarter? Only when they’re chased down to complete compliance training? L&D’s potential impact is artificially limited by our reliance on our own tools. Most people don’t have to use a learning platform to do their jobs. This is why it takes so much poking and prodding to increase engagement . . . and way too much clicking for the user after they do log in.

People use a wide variety of tools to do their jobs. Retail associates use points of sale (POS) and handheld scanners. Professional salespeople use iPads and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Delivery drivers use smartphones and navigation devices. A modern learning mindset pushes L&D to leverage the full range of tools, tactics, and systems available within the workflow to help people improve their performance. Why ask a deli worker to leave their position and walk to the back of the grocery store to access online content via a desktop computer in the office if the tablet they use in the department is fully capable of hosting the same training?

Principle 3. Apply Data to Accelerate Decision Making

Stakeholders have dictated my L&D priorities for most of my career. Even when I was able to decide which solutions to build, I was still playing the role of order-taker. To level the playing field and become a true business partner, I had to get ahead of the change and find ways to proactively identify knowledge and skills gaps within my audience. I had to get better with data so I could generate my own insights and address performance issues before they negatively affected my organizations. Improving data practices also helps L&D continuously assess the effectiveness of our solutions and adjust our strategies to maximize results.

L&D cannot move forward until we fix our measurement problem. Traditional models and approaches just don’t work. If they did, we’d have stopped talking about this topic 30 years ago. Satisfaction surveys and test scores cannot help you identify and prioritize your organization’s learning needs. This is why 69 percent of companies say that the inability to measure learning impact represents a challenge to achieving critical learning outcomes (Brandon Hall Group 2019). To adopt a modern learning mindset, L&D must prioritize measurement and solidify its data collection, analysis, and application practices.

Principle 4. Provide a Personal Experience at Scale

The audience-to-L&D ratio rarely works in our favor. Even well-resourced teams with more than 300 L&D pros usually support distributed audiences made up of 200,000 or more people across multiple brands and lines of business. Our ability to provide each person with the right support is overwhelmed by the size, scale, and complexity of our organizations. As a result, we apply generalized solutions and off-the-shelf courses that are intended to be one-size-fits-all but are in reality wrong-size-fits-none.

A modern learning mindset is grounded in the belief that everyone—regardless of role, background, status, tenure, or location—needs and deserves right-fit support so they can do their best work every day. To get there, L&D must rethink our strategies and overcome the challenge of scale to provide personalized solutions that meet each individual where they are in their development. This is a difficult problem to solve, but it’s definitely possible thanks to modern data and technology practices.

Principle 5. Drive Clear Business Impact

If you cannot determine the impact of a learning solution, there is no point in delivering it. Impact can mean a lot of different things in the workplace. Increasing sales revenue is an impact. Decreasing injury rates is an impact. Maintaining regulatory compliance is an impact. Increasing employee satisfaction is an impact. Learning, however, is not an impact. It’s a potential means to achieve one.

People don’t go to work to learn. They go to work to do. A modern learning mindset requires L&D to align our strategies with this reality and focus on how we affect performance outcomes. If we can’t identify a measurable result—specifically how a solution will help people do their jobs better or enable the organization to achieve its goals—then we shouldn’t waste our resources on the topic because we’ll never be able to determine if it was worth it.

Principle 6. Foster Persistent Organizational Agility

How long does it take your L&D team to deploy a solution? The answer likely varies based on the intended audience and solution format. It takes a lot less time to develop a job aid for one department compared to building a full-fledged training program for an entire organization. That’s the point. L&D must have the mechanisms in place to rapidly deploy right-size solutions at the speed stakeholders require. If the company announced a major process change today, could you get the necessary information in the hands of your employees by tomorrow?

Every organization has a learning culture. It’s not something you build. It’s something you foster. The problem is that many organizations have paid very little attention to their learning cultures. A modern learning mindset is L&D’s key to reinvigorating this culture. It reestablishes the connection between learning and agility. It helps the organization transform more quickly and effectively because people are enabled to do the same.

Where Do You Stand?

Do you have a modern learning mindset? What about your L&D peers? Your stakeholders? The people you support? Do they consider learning a critical workplace strategy, or is it just a box that has to be checked so they can move along to more important things? We’ll explore tactics you can apply to influence people throughout your organization to think differently about the role of learning in the workplace in later chapters. For now, use the questionnaire in Table 2-1 to conduct an honest assessment of your team’s learning mindset.

Conduct this assessment with your L&D peers as well as a selection of your stakeholders. This will show how well aligned your organization is (or is not) with regards to the purpose and value of learning. Every organization is in a different place when it comes to building a modern learning ecosystem, but the first step is always the same. To start the shift from order-taker to performance partner, L&D must be willing to acknowledge that we’ve been focused on the wrong things for far too long.

The Reskilling Paradox

I’ve been keeping a secret from you until this point: This book isn’t actually about learning. It’s about helping people keep up with change. You’ve certainly heard the phrase “the only thing constant in life is change” used to rally people around a big strategic shift. It may be an overused platitude, but it’s also true. Thanks, Heraclitus!

L&D’s mission must shift from a focus on learning to providing the support needed to help people do and be their best—today and tomorrow. This means we must become experts in our ability to help people navigate their way through change. We are a critical nexus in the workplace. We act as a conduit between those who know (management, subject matter experts, regulators) and those who need (employees, partners, students). Often, changes are routine and predictable, such as a new product release or annual compliance certification. But sometimes, they’re sudden and unwieldy, such as a global health crisis. Regardless of the size or speed of change, one thing is always true: It’s our job to prepare others so they can do their best work despite the change.

As we’ve already established, an organization can only transform as fast as its people can learn. Companies leave themselves open to added risk when they fail to prioritize and invest in learning and development. If the business is expected to evolve continuously to remain competitive, then the people within the business must always be learning. However, this is often the opposite of how organizations operate, especially during times of significant change. I’ve witnessed this firsthand over and over again. As times get tough, priorities shift, and budgets tighten, L&D and HR programs get cut. Managers push back by telling you that people don’t have time for learning. Sure, this mindset may provide short-term boosts in operational capacity. But it has also contributed to one of the biggest problems in the global workplace: the skills gap.

Here’s a set of obligatory stats related to the skills gap that you’ve probably seen before:

•  65 percent of organizations reported significant gaps in critical skill areas in 2020 according to the Fosway Group’s report The Reskilling Revolution.

•  94 percent of business leaders expect employees to pick up new skills on the job according to The Future of Jobs Report 2020 from the World Economic Forum.

•  17 percent of executives say their workers are very ready to adapt, reskill, and assume new roles according to Deloitte’s 2021 Human Capital Trends Report.

•  46 percent of employees say their organizations reduced upskilling and reskilling opportunities during the pandemic according to Degreed’s The State of Skills 2021.

•  41 percent of frontline employees say their companies offer any kind of future-focused skill development training.

How do these observations relate to the shortcomings in learning investment?

1. Organizations need people with new and in-demand skills to remain competitive.

2. Management knows they don’t have enough of those people.

3. Management cuts back on skill development opportunities during times of change.

Good luck figuring this one out, L&D!

Closing the Right Gap

Imagine you came home to find your basement flooding. What is the first thing you would do?

a) Grab a bucket and start bailing.

b) Shut off the broken pipe.

c) Call a plumber.

B is the obviously correct answer. It’s basic cause and effect. To overcome the effect (soggy belongings), you must identify and address the cause (busted plumbing). If you get distracted by the outcome and ignore the cause, you’ll end up with an involuntary indoor swimming pool. This same problem is happening in the workplace when it comes to the skills conversation.

Managers have always expected people to possess the skills needed to do their jobs correctly. However, these skill requirements are constantly changing as organizations evolve. Some skills, such as core human behaviors like decision-making and collaboration, are more durable while others, such as those related to specific processes and technologies, are more perishable. This is why L&D exists and why we build volumes of content to help people learn how to do their jobs. So, if everyone already knows that skills are very important in the workplace, why are we suddenly talking about a massive skills gap?

We’re looking at this issue from the wrong perspective. In fact, there is no skills gap. Yes, I know what the World Economic Forum said, and they are absolutely correct. Organizations don’t have enough people with the right skills. But here’s the thing: They never did. Unless you’re the organization that’s causing the disruption and creating the demand for a particular skill, you’re always chasing. However, until recently, a combination of formal education, traditional job training, and practical experience was enough to develop the required skills. Now, the pace of change is just too fast. Universities aren’t teaching the skills businesses need because they weren’t important or didn’t even exist a few years ago. People are expected to perform right out of the gate and therefore don’t have time to figure things out on their own. Workplace training can take weeks or months to implement and then adds even more disruption to an already-overwhelmed operation.

The perceived skills gap is the effect. Water has been rushing into our basements for years, and the level is just now starting to rise over our heads. In this metaphor, the cause (broken pipe) is the opportunity gap (Figure 2-1). Organizations have failed to recognize the critical nature of learning as a key driver of business strategy for too long. Now, we’re all dealing with the repercussions.

Opportunity gap may be a new term for you, but it’s actually an amalgamation of several all-too-familiar challenges:

•  The mindset gap represents how the organization, including everyone from frontline employees to senior management, views the role of learning within the workplace (which we discussed earlier). Is learning seen as a critical business capability or just a series of boxes people are required to check?

•  The priority gap reflects how the organization does or does not prioritize learning as part of the everyday workflow. Are people permitted the time, capacity, and autonomy to focus on their development, or does this always get sidelined by the next business priority?

•  The inclusion gap refers to how effectively everyone—regardless of role, tenure, background, demographic, status, education, or location—is included in an organization’s learning strategy. Does every person have consistent access to meaningful growth opportunities, or is development limited to select groups?

•  The reality gap explores how well L&D understands the day-to-day context of the people we support and our willingness to shift learning strategy accordingly. Do you build training that can be experienced during the limited time available in a busy workday, or do people have to adjust how they do their jobs to fit training in?

•  The digital gap measures how consistently and effectively the organization invests in the technology needed to scale meaningful learning and support opportunities to the entire workforce. Can people access the resources they need to do their best work using the tools available within the workflow, including their personal devices if applicable?

Just like skills, these challenges are far from new. However, they are usually discussed in isolation, without consideration for the way they collectively create gaps in the employee experience, limit skill development, and reduce organizational agility.

The bad news is that we’re still talking about systemic issues that have plagued workplace learning for decades. The good news: Adopting a modern mindset is the first step to finally bridging the opportunity gap. Now, it’s time to introduce the framework that will help you take the next step toward architecting a disruption-ready learning ecosystem.