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For the past 40 years, Dr. Robert Brinkerhoff has been recognised internationally as one of the leading authorities on learning effectiveness and the evaluation of learning impact. Creator of the Success Case Method, his work has shifted the conversation away from the purely descriptive data of Phillips and Kirkpatrick towards a more rounded view of understanding impact.

 

Robert Brinkerhoff’s latest work, in partnership with Promote International, is designed to provide L&D practitioners with a framework to build programmes that deliver impact. Based on his research over the past 40 years, High Performance Learning Journeys (HPLJ’s) have been designed with learning professionals in mind. Their aim is to transform training interventions from events into rich journeys that deliver desired performance, tangible results and measurable business impact. A process or ‘learning journey’ approach combines formal training with participants’ working reality and shifts the focus from “gaining knowledge” to performance.

 

 

hpc has been partnering with Promote International for the past two years, utilising their online learning transfer platform. hpc’s Kevin Hannigan explains why the Promote Learning Transfer platform is a key element of their offering:

“We partner with Promote and leverage their platform to enhance the impact of our programmes. Increasingly, we are working with our clients to broaden the scope of our programmes beyond the learning environment and to include a real emphasis on the performance environment. The platform enables us to track the application of learning to real life situations and integrates concepts and practice along with social learning and coach feedback.”

 

The certified programme is gaining ground in assisting L&D professionals to reshape traditional training events into more beneficial learning journeys that are more measurable and impactful.

 

Last year, Fergal O’Connor and Hilary Anderson of hpc travelled to Stockholm to undertake the HPLJ certification with Robert Brinkerhoff and the Promote International team. This HPLJ programme is designed to assist L&D professionals reshape traditional training events into more beneficial learning journeys that are measurable and impactful. While the Promote platform complements the HPLJ approach, the HPLJ approach is sufficiently robust to use on any programme without a digital platform.

 

 

Since his accreditation in Stockholm, hpc’s Fergal O’Connor observes the impact of the HPLJ approach on clients:

“The HPLJ approach is strengthening hpc’s existing ethos of developing solutions that are aligned to a central business need and instilling organisational and personal responsibility to keep the transfer of learning alive.”

 

“We’ve applied it to our existing design and delivery standards and clients are benefitting from the behavioural change that occurs when learning is applied to real life ‘moments that matter’ across participant roles.”

 

Mark Gussetti of Promote International adds,

 

“hpc’s Fergal O’Connor and Hilary Anderson are the first and currently the only Irish based professionals who have received the accolade of being HPLJ certified.”

 

hpc’s work of combining the latest research and insights, along with a powerful process to apply the learning in a performance environment, is increasing the impact our clients are having on their business.

hpc’s Kevin Hannigan explores why Learning and Development Professionals should look to other professions for insights into how they might transform their practice.

Last year’s IITD conference looked at the future world of work, the rise of AI, and the rapid disruption of industries. We now largely accept that to survive in “the new normal” we need to prepare people to learn and to change at an extraordinary rate.

 

 

These circumstances provide L&D professionals with an extraordinary opportunity to take their ‘seat at the table’ and support organisational transformation. Unfortunately, many L&D functions are struggling to justify their worth to the business.

 

 

Is this a failure of senior leadership to grasp our worth and impact on the organisation or should we bear some of the blame? In our rush to push out training, have we inadvertently focused on events rather than
performance.

 

 

If we do want to take our seat at the table, what will it take to shift from designing ‘learning events’ to creating ecosystems and experiences that increase performance? We think that the answer may lie in taking inspiration from other professions to craft new ways of thinking about our work.

 

 

These 5 ideas won’t solve all our woes, but they will play an important part in enabling this change and, in the process, future-proofing your career:

 

BUILD LIKE AN ARCHITECT

 

The Roman architect Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, De Architectura, asserted that there were three principles of good architecture:

 

• Firmatis (Durability) – it should stand up robustly and remain in good condition.

• Utilitas (Utility) – it should be useful and function well for the people using it.

• Venustatis (Beauty) – it should delight people and raise their spirits.

 

 

These three principles could equally be applied to Learning and Development.

Durability – are our programmes based on robust evidence and sound research?

Utility – Just as architects believe that “form follows function”, we too should choose the most appropriate tools, inputs and supports to create a learning environment that influences behaviour, experience and performance.

Beauty – Great architecture is influenced by its surroundings – would the Eiffel Tower work as well in a high-rise city like New York? In a similar way, our learning and development strategy and each intervention should reflect the environment in which they were created and our organisational strategy.

 

 

CREATE LIKE A DESIGNER

 

Great design makes us want to engage with a product or service. The iPhone changed the world not just because of its combination of technologies but also because its design made us want to engage with it. Many businesses and social organisations now embed design thinking throughout entire organisational policies and practices to be more constructive and innovative. Stanford University’s D-School’s ‘5 stages of Design Thinking’ raise some interesting questions for us:

 

 

Stage 1 – Empathise – Have we spent time observing our audience in their environment (as opposed to focus groups)?

Stage 2 – Define – Have we segmented our audience properly; defining their pain points, challenges and understanding their incentives to change? (see marketing above)

Stage 3 – Ideate – Have we considered new approaches and tools or that a training programme isn’t the correct approach?

Stage 4 – Prototype – Designers build quickly, fail fast and learn from the process.

Stage 5 – Test – Sometimes, the only way to trial something is to build it and seek feedback. Great designers build, test and learn from feedback.

 

 

ENGAGE LIKE A MARKETEER

 

If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. Marketeers understand that people engage with brands and that brands convey meaning, emotion and purpose. If you think about your function as a brand, how would people describe it? Is it a brand that they want to engage with? Do they trust your brand in the same way that Irish people voted the Credit Union as the most trusted brand in the country?

 

Marketeers also understand their audience and continually segment their customers to understand their needs. This segmentation extends beyond needs analysis to include:

 

• Communicating with different stakeholders through different channels and with different messages;

• Developing new offerings based on both horizontal and vertical segments;

• Differentiated investment in different segments; and

• Analysing data based on segments.

 

 

SOLVE LIKE A HACKER

 

Hacking can have negative connotations particularly as it relates to criminally “hacking” databases and secure servers. However, the original meaning of the term referred to ‘a desire to solve a problem using playful cleverness and creativity’. Indeed, people like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux identify themselves as hackers. Hacking is about being outcome driven and using anything and everything around you to achieve your goal. Rather than seeing every problem as a nail and smashing it with the ‘hammer’ of formal training, hacking implies that we expand our toolkit and consider all available options to achieve the results we require.

 

 

Even better, if like a marketeer you understand your audience, you’ll recognise their current tools, processes and practice, so you can build a solution into and aligned with their workflow.

 

 

MEASURE LIKE A SCIENTIST

 

Sixty years on, Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation has cornered the market on evaluation in L&D. That’s unfortunate because it’s largely tied to the event-based model of training we’re trying to relegate to history. Worse, it’s ‘reaction’ level runs counter to the reality of learning whereby learner happiness after training has little correlation to actual learning.

 

We need to develop an evidence-based approach to decision making, leveraging data to justify targeted investment in L&D. We need to be curious about our impact and look across the organisation for potential evidence of impact. This means us becoming more comfortable with data and measurement and engaging with data from other functions.

If you really want to get value from your core values, you need them to resonate across the organisation. They can’t be just aspirational, beautifully crafted words in an annual report, or an excuse for a marketing launch: they need to mean as much to the person driving the forklift, as they do to the leadership team. As learning professionals, we all know this: we’re well versed in the arguments for building a shared sense of purpose, a common culture, and a meaningful set of values.

 

But the elephant in the room is that, too often, an organisation’s core values are anything but meaningful to the people who matter most.

 

In a Deloitte Survey, half of employees thought that “clearly defined values and beliefs” contributed to their company’s success. But that means one in two employees didn’t.

 

In the most extreme cases, the problem is not just that employees don’t see the value in the values; it is that they have strong feelings of negativity and cynicism towards them. This is particularly the case in companies which have been through more than one cycle of rolling out a new set of corporate values, usually preceded by a change in leadership. The reaction from employees, understandably perhaps, is ‘here we go again’ and ‘what does this have to do with me?’

 

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Patrick M. Lencioni cites the example of the CEO of a financial services company, who kicked off a management conference with an announcement about a new set of values. The announcement was accompanied by a slick video with a rousing soundtrack and stock footage of famous athletes, intercut with employees waving awkwardly at the camera. When the video finished, the CEO asked the assembled managers if they wanted to see it again, and he was met with a loud “No!”

 

That audible groan of dismay will be familiar to many of us who have been responsible for starting a conversation about values. So what’s to be done about it?

 

At hpc, we take the approach that values should be thought of in a three layer structure, which sit one above the other: ‘they’, ‘we’ and ‘me’.

 

Often, values are seen by employees as something that concerns the management team, shareholders or the media – it’s something ‘they’ devised, and something ‘they’ talk about, with no real connection to us or our daily lives.

 

The challenge for organisations is to encourage employees to think about how ‘we’ implement those values in our roles, how they matter to ‘us’, and ultimately, why they matter to ‘me’. 

 

We kickstart this process by bringing groups together across the organisation, and asking people to think first about the company’s values in the context of the things that they do really well. It can be as straightforward as choosing a value, and asking how it comes to life in their part of the organisation.

 

The process doesn’t have to involve anything more complex than a flipchart and a few markers – but the results can be astonishing. Focusing on the positive gives employees a tremendous sense of ownership, encouragement and self-regard. Once this conversation begins to open up, the biggest challenge can be getting employees to stop talking.

 

The second step is to look at the things that are not being done so well, and run counter to the organisation’s values. Because they have focused on excellence first, employees typically feel more empowered to talk about the areas where the values are not being lived.

 

The third question is what can be done to address these areas. And just like that, we’ve moved values from being something ‘they’ talk about to something ‘we’ do every day, to something that can drive ‘me’ in my work and something that ‘I’ can actively contribute to.

 

It is a powerful process, and one that is effective not just in newer organisations, but even in longer-established ones.

 

Storytelling is an important part of the conversation too: it needs to involve examples of values being lived well and less well both inside and outside the organisation.

 

When we’re asked why values matter, we sometimes share the story once shared with us by an acquaintance who went to pitch for the retention of a contract from an important client. The client told her that a competitor had just been in and had been badmouthing her company. In the interests of fairness, the client offered her the opportunity to respond.

 

She thought about it for a moment, and then – feeling that no matter how much she’d like to set the record straight, engaging in slagging off a competitor was at odds with her company’s values—she declined and said she’d prefer to talk about her proposal.

 

Two weeks later, the call came. The client said her company’s proposal was more expensive – but what followed wasn’t the rejection she was expecting. He’d been impressed by her integrity, he said, and he felt confident she would be just as discreet if she was ever asked about his organisation. She stayed true to her organisation’s values and her own—and retained the contract.

 

Having a real, meaningful set of values that are lived by every individual in the organisation should be the goal for every company. The good news is that getting there might just be easier than you thought.

 

Author – Justin Kinnear, Senior Facilitator, hpc.