COVER STORY
Coach Your Way to E-Learning Success

IF YOU WANT E-LEARNING TO ACHIEVE ITS POTENTIAL IN YOUR ORGANIZATION, TAKE SOME TIPS FROM YOGI BERRA. NO KIDDING.
Fall 2004
By Lance Dublin
Elearning!

The manager of a major-league baseball team is called upon to play many roles — tactician, problem-solver, psychologist, psychiatrist, strategist and philosopher. Genius comes in unlikely packages, and for my money the big-league manager who did it all best was none other than Yogi Berra.

During his playing career, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Yogi was an all-star
catcher for the New York Yankees. As a manager, he accomplished an amazing feat by
becoming the first manager in more than 40 years to win pennants in different leagues: with the Yankees in the American League in 1964 and with the New York Mets in the National League in 1973.

Developing an effective e-learning strategy for an organization calls for all of the skills,
talents, and insights that a big-league manager must possess. Since Yogi Berra is best
known for his one-of-a-kind observations about life, I suggest we could do worse than to start with some of Yogi’s insights when trying to understand our challenges and choices, and to map a course that will ensure success.

“WHEN YOU COME TO A FORK IN THE ROAD, TAKE IT!”

Organizations trying to get a handle on e-learning face a multitude of choices.
Internet or intranets? Synchronous or asynchronous? Blended or entirely “e”?
Virtual or live? Instructor-led or selfpaced? Courses or job aids? Use hosted technology or keep it in-house? LMS or LCMS? The choices go on and on. Some are fundamental, with implications for how learning will operate across the board. Many are (or ought to be) situational, depending on particular learning needs.

It’s hard to separate fact from fiction, leading edge from bleeding edge, myth from reality. Therefore, organizations often make decisions just for the sake of having made a decision. They don’t reflect a strategy of any kind. The road taken is often just the one that is best sold (or the easiest to sell), the cheapest in up-front costs, or the fork we happen to wander onto by happenstance.

Organizations that are successful proceed differently. They pause and, if necessary,
stop. They collect information. They think. They reflect. They analyze. They follow
a process.

Strategy development is as much an art as a science. Since every organization is truly different, strategy development cannot follow a one-size-fits-all model. And an effective strategy is unlikely to result from following a straight road in a linear way. Instead it must be an iterative process, recognizing that there be will twists and turns, side excursions, and bumps along the way.

In fact, most organizations have already started down the elearning road, and many will need to double back. That means pain—but not as much pain as you’ll experience stumbling ahead on a blind path to nowhere. Knowing what steps are involved in building an effective e-learning strategy, and making sure to complete each one, will allow your organization to be clear about where you’re going and how you will get there.

STEP 1: DISCOVER
“THIS IS LIKE DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN.”
It’s imperative that your e-learning strategy be in direct and clear alignment with your overall business or organization strategy. To do this, you need to undertake a discovery process to understand how your organization works and what’s important to it today as well as how it will work and what will be important in the future. In other words, you need to get down to basics, and revisit some old ground.

Do you clearly understand your organization’s vision, its goals, and its purpose? I’m talking about the real ones, not necessarily the vision statement hanging on the lobby wall. Learn about its key business drivers (i.e., cost reduction, innovation, service, product selection) and what is important to senior management— in their language.

If you are spearheading the development of an e-learning strategy, you need to take on many roles. You need to act as a cultural anthropologist, with your own organization representing your fieldwork. You need to act as a business consultant to analyze the ways in which your organization’s business processes, technology, management systems, people capabilities, and culture work together. You need to think like an MBA to identify the critical initiatives that make up your organization’s business strategy. And you need the perspective of a CXO to understand the organization’s learning and performance requirements, and to know what learning initiatives, technology-enabled and otherwise, are currently in place.

Once you’re done looking at your organization as it exists today, step back and think about what it may look like in the future. This is the fun part because no one knows for sure what the future will look like; your speculation may be as good as anyone else’s.

What will the key goals be in three or five years?
What will be the business drivers and the critical initiatives?
What might the corporate culture look like, and what will need to change?

Now let your mind roam freely to imagine what role e-learning will play in all this. How will it support and enable the organization’s performance?
Remember, the best way to know the future is to create it.

STEP 2. ENVISION
“IT’S PRETTY FAR, BUT IT DOESN’T SEEM LIKE IT.”
A compelling vision is needed to generate support and enthusiasm for the future that you imagine. The vision needs to be tangible, understandable, and accessible. You’ll need to find words, images, and metaphors to inspire and motivate. Good examples have included “On-time Performance,” “Right Knowledge: Right Time, Right Place, Right Way,” and “Learning at the Speed of Work.”

To create a vision that will be compelling in your organization, think about the attributes or characteristics of the future you are envisioning. Is it “convenient,” “responsive,” “flexible,” “fast,” “easy,” “broad,” “focused’? What do you want to communicate? What do you want your colleagues to expect?

STEP 3. ANALYZE
“SLUMP? I AIN’T IN NO SLUMP. I JUST AIN’T HITTIN.”
Analyzing the gaps between where your business is today and where it needs to be in the future is critical to setting your priorities. Specific gaps will be different in each organization, but general categories to consider include: culture, technology, governance and leadership, processes and systems, and content. First, identify the gaps. Then seek to understand the issues that created them or the factors that contribute to them. Put on your business-consultant hat. Talk with people. Conduct focus groups. Analyze reports and data.

STEP 4. UNDERSTAND
“I KNEW I WAS GOING TO TAKE THE WRONG TRAIN, SO I LEFT EARLY.”
The choices confronting e-learning initiatives continue to proliferate. New suppliers appear. New products and services come to market. New tools and technologies become available. This means your own learning challenges never stop.

Meet with suppliers. Read. Surf the web. Go to conferences. Explore. It’s important to understand what your choices are and to make informed decisions that not only work for today but are aligned with your vision of the future.

A note of caution: Be careful not to let your past define your future. Maybe your current goal is to replace a lot of classroom training courses with e-courses. But “courses” of any kind may not be all that your e-learning future holds. Based on your organization’s work in the discovery step to understand the future requirements of your organization, what do you need to think about to make that future a reality? Will it include “mobile learning” that makes use of handheld devices? Knowledge management? More forms of performance support? Better performance tools?

Answer those questions and you will be better prepared to decide what tools, technologies, and services will be required. But your organization’s work isn’t done in this step until you also understand the tradeoffs of your choices. Complete a SWOT analysis to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each major choice. Don’t just take anyone’s word for it—not vendors, not colleagues, not “experts,” not friends. Do your own due diligence.

STEP 5. DEFINE
“YOU’VE GOT TO BE VERY CAREFUL IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU’RE GOING, BECAUSE YOU MIGHT NOT GET THERE.”
An effective e-learning strategy must be based on a scaleable architecture that enables you to meet your organization’s needs today and in the future. That architecture will encompass three distinct phases or stages: efficiency, effectiveness, and value creation. If your IT Department has been doing its job, this has been their approach as well. So visit with them. Take them to lunch. Review their strategy.

Typically, the initial focus of your elearning strategy will be efficiency, with the emphasis on saving time and money. You’ll probably be looking for ways to deliver existing classroom courses in a blended or e-learning format simply because this is faster and cheaper.

Next you need to focus on being more effective, ensuring that learning is tied to business needs and metrics, and that it makes a business impact. Look for ways to improve your e-learning and blended programs by extending your use of current technology (e.g., chat, bulletin boards, search functions) and applying newer concepts (communities of practice, knowledge management, content management).

In the final stage of the evolution of your e-learning strategy, the focus will be on how to leverage learning to create value in your organization, to ensure competitive advantage, and to do things that were never considered possible before.

STEP 6. ENLIST
“IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO GET A CONVERSATION GOING. EVERYBODY WAS TALKING TOO MUCH.”
No strategy or vision sells itself. To be successful, you will need to enlist the active support of senior decision-makers and key influencers. To do that, you’ll have to develop a business case, written in business language and referring to business values, that explains how the organization will benefit from your strategy. Since you must build a consensus among key stakeholders, you’ll also need to develop a marketing plan to make sure your strategy is well understood.

The good news is that you can draw on the marketing resources inside your organization to help you structure this plan. Marketing is marketing. You’ll have to provide the thoughts and the content, but your internal marketing experts can help you create the plan itself.

STEP 7. PLAN
“HOW CAN YOU THINK AND HIT AT THE SAME TIME?”

No strategy or vision implements itself. E-learning represents a change that will ripple through your organization, and change is always a big deal to adults. When you change something as fundamental as the process of learning in an organization, it isn’t only the technology that changes along with it. Management systems and structures, competencies, and culture also need to change. Your choice is whether to try to manage these changes proactively, just let them happen and manage them retroactively, or try to ignore them completely.

Critical to success will be the development of an implementation strategy to ensure that your organization is ready, willing, and able to embrace elearning. The implementation strategy must consider both individuals and the organization as a whole. Yes, learners count. But so do a lot of other stakeholders, such as C-level executives, middle and line managers, and human resources/training staff.

Add up all these people and you get a big number. Fortunately, however, research tells us it takes only 5 percent of each stakeholder group to embrace your strategy for it to eventually become imbedded in the organization. And once you get 20 percent of each stakeholder group supporting your e-learning efforts, the momentum increases tremendously. Your implementation becomes virtually unstoppable.

To effectively implement e-learning you will also need both a change-communications plan and a marketing-communications plan. The marketing plan lays out a process to inform all of your stakeholders about the vision and mission for your elearning initiative.

The change-communications plan supports your change-management efforts. It must help and encourage the learners and other stakeholders as they move through the three phases of change adoption: awareness, engagement, and involvement. For each of these phases, the plan must present specific activities, messages, and timing for each key stakeholder group.

STEP 8. IMPLEMENT
“IT AIN’T OVER TILL IT’S OVER.”

The process usually described under the single heading of “implementation” is really a threestage affair. The first stage is completing the installation—making sure all of the components of your e-learning initiative work. That’s the easiest part. The next two stages—implementation and integration—are the hard ones.

You know you’ve succeeded at the installation stage when your e-learning programs run error-free on whatever systems you’re using to deliver them.You know you’ve succeeded at implementation when your learners are actually using the e-learning courses or resources that you’ve provided. But you haven’t succeeded at integration until your elearning is “invisible.”That means you are no longer preoccupied with the technology, and you aren’t even talking about “e-learning” because it is just another part of the business process. It has been absorbed into the fabric of your organizational culture.

STEP 9. LEARN
“YOU CAN OBSERVE A LOT JUST BY WATCHIN’.”

Your organization’s work does not stop with the installation, implementation or even integration of your e-learning strategy. You will have to be in a continual cycle of learning-planning-developing-implementing- supporting-learning.

Almost as soon as you’ve done the implementation of Version 1.0 of your e-learning strategy, you should begin preparing for Version 2.0—all the while working within the organization to sustain the initial momentum. This is then repeated with Version 3.0, and so on.

Think of your e-learning strategy as if it were organizational software in a continual process of improvement and refinement. Plan regular reviews and conduct “tune-ups” to find opportunities to improve strategic performance. The approach has worked for Microsoft, and it will work for you.

“IN BASEBALL, YOU DON’T KNOW NOTHIN’.”
Obviously developing an effective elearning strategy is a lot of work. And you’ll be operating much of the time in uncharted territory. But it is worth the effort. And frankly, you may have no alternative, since e-learning is no longer considered optional by most organizations.

E-learning has the potential not only to make your current learning processes more efficient and more effective but also to literally transform the performance of your workforce and your organization as a whole. That potential can only be achieved, however, with an effective strategy. It’s time to step up to the plate.

Lance Dublin is CEO of Lance Dublin Consulting of San Francisco and a nationally recognized authority on the implementation of new learning and performance technologies. www.lancedublin.com.

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