I’ve just enjoyed reading this blog by Larry Miller, on creating Lean Management, Cultures and structures. Lean has always appealed to me, as one way of getting high performance from individuals by creating high performance environments around individuals. So that any individual cannot be anything other than a high performing individual.
Of course the history of high performance is littered with many more failed than successful attempts. After all, the only way to do this is to get the entire system tuned and aligned; and just like a formula 1 racing car, a small change at the back can completely destabilise the front. Especially if there is some part of the system that you cannot affordably measure and design or evolve.
Organisational learning and transfer has been just such a part. Yes, with a lot of time and money you could measure and design it. So very few did, and no-one was able to, for example, create even a basic quality control chart of the business impact across every single training.
Given how manufacturing and management processes have evolved over the past decades, and how effective, for example Lean now is in enhancing topline results, it’s high time the same was done for organisational L&D. With the Transferlogix system you now can, up to and including having a control chart of the Return on Investment across all trainings.
Making sure any training you run does develop capability in participants to do afterwards what the job needs them to do; seems like a foundation of lean people development!
Tip of the day: how can you tell if a new training is what you need? …… Run the LTSI immediately after the training and check how high the content validity score is. You will both see, immediately, if what you’re training is not what you need; and you will get clear guidance on how to improve the score. If you don’t run the full LTSI, ask participants a week after the training:
- What have you used on the job so far from the training?
- What have you not used?
One company one of us has been in contact with has just cancelled a contract for a training to improve teamwork after one year; it took them that long to find out that what was being delivered was totally irrelevant to what the teams needed. Had they run an LTSI immediately after the first training they would have known a year ago. Known that the training had no benefit