LH132 Your People Are Fine: It's The System That's Broken with Robin Hoyle

So let's turn to narrowing on what learning has to do with all that.

So you've got a phrase, transfer, not completion.

Yeah.

That will be pretty understandable to most people.

Regular listeners to this podcast will be familiar with the importance people like Paul Matthews, who we've had on about three times, I think, and others place on learning transfer.

He's written a book about it, I think.

It's harder to measure than completion, and therefore more expensive, which may be one of the reasons why people tend not to do it.

I don't really want to litigate that particular why does L&D not measure issue again.

But if we look at the kind of beginning of that process, what difference should this distinction between transfer and completion make to the way we design and deliver training?

I think, first of all, there's this idea, and I've spoken about this a lot, people who've heard me speak will be bored of me saying these things, but basically we measure the things which are easy to measure and accord importance to those numbers, rather than measure the things that are really important.

One of the challenges that we've got with transfer is, you're absolutely right, it is difficult to measure.

But because we are measuring the wrong things, we're measuring completion rates, we're measuring smile sheets, we're measuring whatever it is that's simple for us to measure, course attendance, etc., And we forget, therefore, to design into that learning process for people the workplace transfer component.

We don't have a set of tasks, activities, processes that people need to go through to move from, I'm now aware of what I should be doing to I am now doing what I should be doing.

And that's a gap within the learning design process.

So from an L&D perspective... actually getting to grips with, well, what are people going to do differently at the end of this? And how do we know when they've done it? What support mechanisms are going to be in place when they're in work? And, you know, people talk about workflow learning and all of those sorts of things.

And yes, it's important, but actually it's a discipline.

It's a structure.

And getting people to have clarity about what's expected of them the day after the training intervention is really important.

And then following through on that, ensuring that people are monitoring that, are giving support when it's required, that there are other inputs happening to just keep people on track or to enable them to ask questions and to clarify what they should be doing next if they've got any kind of level of misunderstanding or misapprehension about that.

Those sorts of things are kind of pushed into the too difficult box because we're focused on delivering an event or focused on delivering some digital learning content or focused on ensuring that people have completed things in the LMS.

And the LMS is one of the biggest, you know, crimes in learning and development that we've ever invented, frankly, because what it does is it creates a tech checkbox compliance related approach to the business of learning and development, which is completely 180 degrees away from what it should be.

So we've got a real issue there, which is, yeah, I'll give you a case in point.

We've got a program which is entirely digital.

We supplied it to an organization.

The organization sent their managers through it first because we were then going to do a program around coaching for their managers, how they were going to support their team members to use the same content and to help them apply that content to learning.