training & development
learning organizations and businesses undergoing transforma-tional
change: “Disruption today has revealed profound shifts in
how corporate learning must think about development.” Baltzley
said, “The future of leadership is agility. Not only the resilience to
handle many changes, but the agility to let go of the past and pivot
to new ways of thinking and working. It was important, it’s now at
the top of the list.”
And there’s another catch: corporate learning itself is not
immune from change – it is facing disruptions of its own. In
addition, the landscape of learning technologies has radically re-shaped
over the past few years to include new categories such as
learning experience, program experience, microlearning platforms
and more, according to Josh Bersin in a Forbes article. Unlike the
old categories focused on process automation and content dis-tribution,
new learner-first technologies emphasize engagement
and collaboration.
Some argue that learning is the most important solution to the
challenges of digital disruption. In his recent book, Thank You for
Being Late, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes
that we have entered a new “Age of Accelerations,” pointing to
Moore’s Law – the theory postulated by Intel co-founder Gordon
Moore that computational processing power doubles every two
years – as a core foundation of technology-accelerated change in
our world.
After explaining the profound impact of exponential process-ing
power, he argues that speeding humanity’s capacity to learn is
fundamental to our ability to keep pace with the accelerating rate
of technology-driven change. Friedman writes that for millennia,
technology advanced slowly and steadily, and people had plenty of
time to adapt.
For example, it took hundreds of years for the longbow to
advance from initial development to military use in Europe.
But, thanks to Moore’s Law, technological change is happening
much faster and is beginning to outstrip our ability to adapt. For
his book, Friedman interviews Eric (Astro) Teller, the leader of
Google X, who posits that the solution to speeding human adapt-ability
to rapid, technology-driven change is 90 per cent about
“optimizing for learning.”
Increasing our capacity to learn as continuous, lifelong learners
is the best way for us to keep up with accelerating change, in life
and in business. And the new technologies and modalities of the
disrupted learning sphere are enabling organizations to adapt to a
changing world faster.
FROM DISRUPTED TO DISRUPTOR
A great example of modern learning changing the game for a dig-itally
disrupted business comes from Microsoft. The company
realized the disruptive potential of cloud and mobile technologies
– both to its business and its customers. When Satya Nadella
became CEO a few years ago, he challenged the company to be
“mobile-first, cloud-first.” Microsoft’s sales and marketing readi-ness
team knew that its sales professionals faced a steep learning
curve as their customer changed from an IT buyer to a busi-ness
buyer, and their offering changed from on-premise software
to cloud solutions. The team envisioned the solution as a “cloud
mini-MBA” series of MOOC-like learning experiences to help
sales professionals master the essentials of selling cloud solutions
to C-suite customers. The corporate MOOCs came into being in
partnership with elite global business schools such as INSEAD,
Wharton, London Business School and Kellogg, with course
content tailored to the specific needs of Microsoft sales profes-sionals,
and enabling them to apply their learning to specific
customer situations.
The response was, and remains several years into the program,
phenomenal. Over 80 per cent completion rates across rigorous
business school courses; rich collaboration evidenced by high
in-course discussion forum and peer review engagement; robust
sales professional readiness scores as high as any other modal-ity
including face-to-face events; and business results exactly the
kind you want to see from a sales program: increased sales and
deals won, directly attributed to the learning from the courses.
All this from programs that, due to workload and sales cycles, are
entirely voluntary.
Microsoft could tell after the pilot run that they were on to
something, so they kept pushing the MOOC modality to expand
the social and peer-to-peer learning aspects even more, and today
they are running online courses on highly varied topics: business
strategy and financial acumen, business value negotiation, high-performance
mindset, marketing, and yes, digital disruption!
The lesson to be learned for other organizations is that push-ing
the envelope with online modalities and tailoring them to
your audience can help organizations lead disruption, rather than
be disrupted.
ENABLING STRATEGIC TRANSFORMATION
AT SCALE
Think of your organization as a pyramid. At the very top is the
C-suite, strategies are devised, executive leadership programs are
launched and culture initiatives are incubated – often intended
to stave off the impacts of digital disruption. But what happens
to these efforts outside of episodic leadership retreats? Too often
they fail to make an impact across an organization and enter the
graveyard of failed corporate initiatives. One reason they aren’t
successful is that while these critical initiatives are high-touch at
the top of the house, cascading them throughout an organization
is an after-thought at best. But what if everyone at every level of an
SOFT SKILLS ARE CRITICAL TO EFFECTIVELY LEADING
RESPONSES TO BUSINESS DISRUPTION.
38 ❚ SEPTEMBER 2018 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL
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