In the heat, we feel our skin, the burn or gooseflesh of it, how it holds in what wants to explode. We feel the barrier between the outside and inside, the crawling manifestation of body. We feel how our skin serves us, sweet and prickly bulbs of sweat that rise and fall, rivers that find the caverns the outside world can see, but only you can feel. Skin that puckers and glistens, skin that releases salt like ancient lakes and we feel the mineral as it crystalizes upon us. The skin tells us that we are whole, that we own every inch of our bodies, that we are all exposed and burning on the outside. We feel our skin, its softness, how it lives on its own and plugs into our minds without us. skin that cooks, burns, itches, cracks, warns us about our own weakness and eventual destruction. We feel our skin that wants to cool, to strip itself away from the body, that has a sense of wandering, a sense of leaving, disintegrating even as it’s absolutely anchored to everything within.

January, 2022 has been a month of “quitting” for me — or, more specifically, of choosing one thing over another. Thanks to a great Glennon Doyle Podcast, “We Can Do Hard Things,” I recently learned that the root of the word “quit” is actually from the Latin quitus, which means “calm, resting,” but also “free”. I’ve really been struggling, actually for years, to “quit” some things from this “releasing” perspective — the struggle of choosing myself (my needs, my boundaries, my relationships, my desires, my dreams/ goals) over someone or something else. That’s been my journey, my challenge. I think it is true for an overwhelming number of us. That struggle for clarity, though, has been daunting — to identify the difference between “quitting and being a failure” and “quitting and being authentically ‘free’ of something I don’t want to inhabit any longer.” My goal is to release the things that I authentically don’t want as part of my life and to embrace the things I choose to keep doing, keep having, keep inhabiting.

My “quitting” is not just theoretical or spiritual: I’ve really quit some big stuff this month! I’ve resigned from a really great job at a pretty cool company because I’m choosing my family, health, and personal goals over a steady paycheck and corporate sense of “belonging.” (More about this later, I’m sure!) I’ve quit alcohol for the month, participating in “Dry January” to re-evaluate my relationship with alcohol and its role in my life. I’ve quit a significant but toxic relationship that’s been taking pieces of my power for about 23 years (not with my spouse, just FYI, but with someone who crossed a sacred boundary and from whom I need to release). This purging and re-focusing has led me to think about my value and the influences, choices, and people I’ve chosen to have in my life. I started to think even more granularly about these small pieces — singular influences and relationships and identity “markers” that contribute to who I am and who I’m not, authentically, inside of myself.

So I’m setting out to explore who I am WITHOUT specific aspects of my life and reflect on these weekly in writing here. I expect some of these will take more than one reflection, like “Who am I without a traditional job and a steady paycheck?” That’s a big one for me that will require some unpacking. I hope to explore things that currently give me strength and power, like “Who am I without my poetry?” or “Who am I without my community activism?” as a way to identify what these things bring to me and why I should continue to be grateful for them. I’d love to explain some more abstract things, maybe emotions, like “Who am I without shame?” or “Who am I without anxiety?”

It’s cool if I’m on this journey alone, and it would be even cooler if people want to join the experiment. I plan to share this on Facebook and maybe some other platforms (if I can figure them out) just in case people want to join me on this exploration. I will chose “withouts” as I go and share them, and I’d love suggestions in the off chance that anyone else is playing along. I want to balance not overthinking with going deep enough to mean something. I want to validate that this is hard and messy. I want to stop myself from thinking that this is self-indulgent (cause that’s where my inner critic goes immediately). I want to be curious. I hope to keep going as long as it feels like a useful experiment!

I’m lucky enough not only to be a new leader but also to lead a new team of relatively inexperienced curriculum developers. While I realize other new managers will likely inherit existing teams, team members, and/or processes, I had the opportunity to build my own team and processes from the ground up (within an existing structure, though). Faced with several challenges along the way, I’ve used those challenges to build a sketch of a framework of several key priorities to managing an ID/ CD team that I hope to build into a series here.

Our team mission is “Learning Impact,” a mission we created collaboratively in one of our very first team meetings. This mission has served to drive our team priorities both downward (within the team) and upward (through executive leadership and the way we communicate with others). I understand that other organizations are likely set up differently and might not have the same priorities, but reading these elements and deciding what would work/ not work is a good place to start, and it is definitely something I wish I had when I was getting started!

Here is an overview of those key priorities that has helped to drive our learning impact. I hope to expand on each in future posts:

Overall Team Management and Project Management

This is a huge and very important priority for an ID/CD team manager. It overlaps with other priorities, of course, but should be a critical focus of every one managing a team who creates learning-focused deliverables. Some teams and team members will be responsible for creating their own project plans, and others will collaborate with project managers to define and deliver on tasks. Regardless of where that oneness falls, a manager’s job is to monitor the progress of his/her team members, enforce accountability to deadlines, and empower or enable team members when necessary.

People Development

This was a big focus for me as I inherited several brand new instructional designers, so I spent the first year of my team’s existence teaching best practices, facilitating and allowing others to facilitate workshops on tools and processes, and overall developing the skills and abilities of the team members based on performance and deliverable quality, etc. Others moving into a management position may have less people development to do, but there is always SOME people development that needs to go on. Some areas within which managers can focus their team members’ development is: tool knowledge and usage, writing and editing skills, design and development skills, template creation, innovative ID/CD approaches, mobile development, learning style research and application, gamification techniques, assessment development skills, project management, time/attention management, quality review improvement and presentation skills improvement to name a few. Depending on your team, several of these will stand out to you as must-develops. My team, for example, primarily lives in Manila, so focusing on the writing and review skills is a big win. Developing these skills first is a key to our growth.

Course and Curriculum Marketing

While this may not apply to all teams — perhaps you have a marketing team who promotes your courses for you, or perhaps you are customer facing and others handle this part of business — but making sure people know about the courses you’re creating as well as how to access them is a step new managers can easily overlook. In fact, when I started my team, I assumed that the marketing piece was handled systematically, but as I became more involved in the organization, I realized that the marketing was a great opportunity that had been overlooked. Understanding how to communicate course releases to learners often takes some time and research, and there are often those really “plugged in” members of the organization who know everything about everything. The better you can understand your organization’s communication pathways, the better off you will be in marketing your new courses and curricula. It takes time and effort to build that communication plan and plug it into every project plan moving forward.

Education

You might be one of the lucky few to land in the middle of an organization with amazing learning culture — every SME knows how to interact with you and your team, the value of learning objectives is indisputable, and everyone values the role you play in educating customers or internal employees. Learning is King/Queen! Congratulations! In my experience, these organizations are rare. More often than not, as a manager of a team whose primary role is to educate other employees or customers on topics, tools, and processes, you also have to educate your peers, stakeholders, SMEs, project managers, and often even your leadership about best practices in instructional design or curriculum development. This means that you have the opportunity to create a learning culture by educating your own organization or the groups around you about the value of learning. In my organization, for example, we have Program Managers who work directly with stakeholders to identify their learning needs. A key to our success is helping Program Managers understand what we do and why we do it in order to better serve the needs of those stakeholders. In a perfect world, everyone speaks the same language, understands the project cycle of an e-learning project, and gives you reviews when and how you need them. If we don’t live in this perfect world, we can do our best to create it.

Team Marketing and Outreach

This topic clearly has overlap with Marketing and Education, but it drives towards the same goal of transparency and impact. Often, sales training teams are already plugged in to their key stakeholders because the nature of their roles is so integral. If you train internally, though, outreach is a key component of keeping your pipeline full. Creating a learning culture takes deliberate engagement with leaders within and outside of your organization, and creating the value proposition that your team has to offer is an important part of this outreach. Do others need help developing their learning strategy? Can you or your team ask the right questions at the right time to get stakeholders interested in your services? Building these relationships is a key to team success and continued team demand. The sustained collaboration between your team and other teams will ultimately lead to maximum productivity and demand.

Process

This is the last but certainly not the least. In fact, developing and supporting internal and external processes that allow your team to scale, consistently meet quality expectations and deadlines, and overall add value to your organization is a key to all of the other items above. You may be using the old ADDIE model standby or you may be exploring Agile methodology or SAM. Either way, defining and clearly communicating these processes to your team members as well as invested stakeholders and leaders will grease the wheels when projects start flowing in. Your process documentation could include the following:

What tools are you using and how?

How do you communicate with your stakeholders?

Do you have templates for emails and PPTs for key meetings?

How do you plan to drive project deadlines with your team members: Task lists? Weekly check-ins?

There are dozens of other questions you can ask depending on your team’s needs, objectives, and mission. For me, promoting open and transparent communication as a key objective has made the other processes flow much better. Empowering team members, for example, to develop the internal review process and tools and then communicate with others what that process is has led to successful adoption of the process. An empowered team will lead to a powerful team who people trust to get the job done.

I hope to explore these topics in more detail in future posts. Is there a topic in particular that you’d like to learn more about?

I’ve seen it many times: a subject matter expert provides thorough and informative content that does its best to explain something — a process, a tool, an initiative. Each point consistently strives to convey knowledge. It’s a great place to start. But often this is where content development ends and storyboarding or course development begins. There are multiple challenges posed by moving so quickly from raw content to learning material creation, including potential failure to define the problem and execute on problem solving. As a curriculum developer or instructional designer, you are also missing a prime opportunity to restructure content into a better flow for learner consumption.

The main problem, though, of not thinking critically about how to approach the content is the missed opportunity to truly engage the learner. However, by taking the time to tie the learner’s experience — the context of the learning experience itself — to the content, the content will be that more impactful to the learners. When learners are able to see how the content ties to them, their experience, their job performance, their potential for future success, they are more likely to “buy in” to the learning experience and engage fully in it.

Let’s consider the example of a mid-sized company rolling out a new ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning tool. As an approach to training your employees to use the system, you could provide tool-based content on exactly what button to press to accomplish what goal. Your overall goal could be to ensure your employees gain product knowledge of the new ERP tool. OR you could consider learning impact as part of your learning strategy — as a measure for success. Like Bell Hooks taught us, engaging our learners makes them active participants, which means that they are more likely to learn and understand the content because they have skin in the game. Why not tell a story with your ERP training? Why not build in the value proposition for your learners right up front and allow the story of your learning experience to be how much more successful the learner will be if he/she learns and executes the operations in the ERP system successfully? Why not tie accomplishments in learning to accomplishments in the job role?

Relating the content of training to the work people do as well as building in the value proposition for the learner (Who cares?) takes more time and a good deal of critical thought. It takes work to understand your learners, what work they do, and a deeper strategic understanding of why you are implementing the learning strategy you are implementing. It’s not a stretch, though, to entice folks in an accounting department currently working in spreadsheets that an ERP will streamline their processes, better organize their data, and potentially provide them with more robust reports much, much faster. This means that they can spend less time on spreadsheets and more time doing other things in their jobs that they enjoy — reading that leadership development book or finally getting that certification they have been putting off.

The “assembly line” approach that Hooks references is alive and well in Learning and development. Often, we’re just scrambling to get something out the door to stop the hemorrhaging or to fill a gap that is having a detrimental business impact. Implementing that extra step to design the learning experience with the learner’s value proposition in mind will not only stop the bleeding but improve the learner’s ability to absorb and execute on the learning material. When they have a better understanding of why they should care about the content — when it’s clear how learning this new thing will make them better at their job — we optimize learner impact and set ourselves in a much better position to succeed as learning professionals.

Learning Strategy

Managing a team of Learning Strategists

Thinking differently about failure

Giving Learning a seat at the table

In a few recent conversations at networking events, I’ve had a chance to reflect on my experience of moving from academia to corporate learning and what that means to the idea of learning impact. The comparison is an interesting one to me. I spent the first decade or so of my career in academia, boots on the ground teaching college-level English and writing classes with learners and other educators. I had the opportunity to see the impact that my learning experiences (i.e. classroom teaching, presentations, exercises, resources) had on the students, face to face. I watched their growth over the course of a semester, and in some cases, when a student took more than one of my classes, over a series of semesters. I listened to their feedback when things were difficult, and gave them the support they needed to accept those challenges. I heard them when they expressed that this activity and that presentation weren’t working. I could also see what worked and didn’t work based on performance and tweak accordingly, but it often was based on instinct and less on actual data. This built the foundation of my understanding of curriculum — how to arrange smaller pieces of “learning” to build up to a crescendo of a performance-based deliverable, which was often a final exam, paper or project. Contrary to popular behavior in academia, I always strove to give out ALL great grades. I knew that if I had succeeded in building a good curriculum, the deliverables would be high quality. This was my measure for success. I used these measures to adjust, but there was very little accountability to a bigger entity to understand these impacts; they mostly existed in my own little microcosm of the classes I was teaching. I mostly used my gut and observation skills to assess, tweak, and redeliver.

Underlying that structure, though, was, and arguably still is, a basic assumption in academia: learning is valuable. While some of academia is clearly driven by research and publications, the core operates out of the basic assumption that the work we do to educate students is necessary, valuable, and makes an impact. It was a safe place to experiment and grow, fail forward and feel supported in that effort. We did our best to be better teachers, thus hoping to make a better impact on our students and prepare them for the challenges they will face once outside of school. But as teachers, we did not have to prove that the work we were doing was meaningful or was worth “funding;” this was a given. My focus as an educator was to educate — to build the curriculum, interact with students to enable them, offer them the resources the needed, challenge them, help them make connections, and prepare them for more challenges ahead.

In early 2010, I made a change to corporate learning. I was mostly delighted that such a thing existed because of the lack of jobs in academia for qualified teachers. But I wasn’t expecting what I was about to face: the business of learning takes nothing for granted.

In my first corporate learning position at Accenture, I was asked to create a business case and ROI for the curriculum I was creating. It was an international curriculum to help instructional designers overseas acquire better English and writing skills, but it was an internal training program that would require funding. It was the first time I’d been asked to quantify the value of learning and make a case that learning was important. I was dumbfounded to think that such a thing was necessary — of course learning is important! Of course it has an impact! (Don’t get me wrong — Accenture has an amazing culture of learning — probably one of the best I’ve seen. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have even conceived of this program and hired me to create it.) Quantifying the value of learning and connecting that value to business would prove to be both a great challenge and great opportunity.

Over the past (nearly) decade as a curriculum developer, and now a manager of a team of learning strategists, I’ve grown to appreciate and even elevate the intersection of business and learning. Business does great work to make learning relevant by demanding that it prove its value — quantify its impact when it matters most. While most executives understand fundamentally that learning is valuable, they challenge those of us in the field to do the work of proving it. As learning professionals, determining a measure of success for each project is the only way to quantify this impact and prove (or disprove to adjust) the value of each learning experience.

This is why learning strategy is such an important element in the business of learning. Breaking down the activity of “teaching” into project and business elements allows for careful thought about the approach to solve the problem. Approaching the business problem strategically, identifying a measure (or multiple measures) for success, and then determining an approach to solve that problem and achieving that measure (not to mention just measuring it in general — wow!) gives clarity to the impact of learning so it’s not just something we assume is valuable but something we can prove is making an impact.

While the assumption of learning impact in academia offers safety and a certain freedom that corporate learning does not, corporate learning and learning strategy from a business perspective offers a deeper look into measures for success and impact that can be quantified and proven. Using these metrics and building them into a feedback loop (the E of ADDIE of you’d like) offers more clarity into the impact of those elements when the time comes to readjust.

Developing a Learning strategy requires the following skills-in-action:

• Listen and Understand. In instructional design and course development, this is always an important skill. When developing a learning strategy, it’s important to have an open mind: approaching the beginning, middle, and end of the project with healthy curiosity.
• Think Critically. I dare say that the best learning stratigests are the smartest, most thoughtful stratigests. They think at least four or five steps ahead of themselves AND ahead of the project(s).
• Ask the right (and sometimes the wrong) questions. Sometimes things move so fast and furiously in business and educational environments that we think we don’t have enough “space” to ask questions. I argue, though, that you have to make space for questions — good questions and bad questions — and the answers that follow.
• Understand the existing systems in play. This is a big one, and this is why being a Leanring consultant (outside coming in) can be a more challenging gig than working in-house within an organization (inside staying inside). I’ve done both, and they both have unique challenges, but systems and strategy go essentially hand in hand. Sometimes the strength or dysfunction of a system isn’t obvious upon first glance, and such attributes can really make or break a Learning strategy. Taking time to understand each key system as well as how they combine holistically (think big-picture) is a make-or-break skill in action.
• Open yourself (and your team) to uncovering new problems and solving them. Uncovering new problems should be looked at positively, not negatively, especially if they can be “rolled” into the learning solution. Often, problems are systemic (another great argument for understanding systems before you unveil your strategy), and unearthing the intricacies and roots of one problem will lead, like a grove of canyon trees, to another problem.
• Think outside of the Learning box. Sometimes an effective Learning strategy involves other groups or parallel strategies. A critical business problem could include the development of a new financial process in addition to a Learning strategy, and the effectiveness of both could be reliant upon the other (think: symbiosis).
• Over-communicate. More often than not, teams and systems of teams are lacking an effective communication process or system, especially as it relates to projects and strategies. Another beginning, middle, and end mindset to get into is to err on the side of overcommunication. While actually reading emails, attending meetings, and saying what you authentically think about things may feel uncomfortable at first, all research points to the fact that effective communication leads to successful project and strategy lifecycles.
• Never lose end-sight of the Learner. When new problems erupt, existing systems are being examined, and holistic temperatures are being taken in order to develop a strategy, it’s easy (and in certain moments, even necessary) to lose sight of the learner. It’s hard when the lens has been focused, unfocused, or used as a filter to magnify sunlight and create a fire, but the end-game is to educate an audience about something in order to sole a business problem.