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Agile L&D can help us get the things we’ve always wanted!
Better learning engagement. More business problems solved. Greater L&D impact and buy-in.
Natal Dank’s latest book, Agile L&D, gives you the playbook for doing it in practice!
She joined us on L&D Disrupt to share some truly practical advice.
0:00 What is Agile L&D?
7:47 Delivering value early and often
15:52 Being product-led
22:25 Practical ways to be product-led
26:55 Human-centered design
31:53 Practical ways to be human-centric
33:47 Effective experimentation
40:38 Audience Q&A
"The idea is we need to know what is value? Who is our customer? Generally the people who find it valuable. And how do you get the evidence that they find that valuable?”
“And then how do you use that as evidence of how to build the next stage in your solution? So we're incrementally delivering value through to our customer slice by slice.
“The other key point around that is to get, to get that done and to respond and adapt to our customer. We want all the skills that's needed in the team to get the job done because that means you can, you know, respond and adapt quickly to your customer needs.”
"The people over process one is really interesting. I talked about the 25-box matrix in this organisation I was working in tipping me over the edge.
"And it was because there were five levels of performance, but then the organisation said, why don't we do five levels of talent and have 25 boxes...
"Then this whole process started to develop about getting people to use all the boxes of the 25 matrix, and we had lost the purpose of why we started these conversations..."
Which was to answer questions like:
“Agile is ultimately about solving complex problems… the argument is that we now live and work in a more complex world. We face problems that we haven't experienced before, but also there's no clear cause and effect.
“So there are multiple ways you can solve problems. And there's often multiple problems in a big complex business challenge.”
"So unpacking that, making it into much more achievable, manageable chunks and ruthlessly prioritising, because again, you can't do everything, and you definitely can't do it all at the start or at the same time.
"So, first of all, what is the problem you're solving? What's the most important problem or sub-problem to start with?
"And then how do you deliver something of value to start progressing, to get a result?"
“In a commercial environment, products deliver value by solving problems or a shared problem for a group of people.
“So what we're doing is we're taking that concept of product experience. How do you design your whole organisation around delivering that product experience to your end customer?
“And we're taking that into the employee experience. So if we start to see the employee experience as our product, yes, made up of component parts of onboarding, career development, rewards, progression, promotion, and even leaving.
“But ultimately the whole thing is our product and the way that we know it's delivering value is it solves problems.”
“Too often, I come across L&D and people teams embarking on an experiment to prove their hypothesis is right, rather than readying themselves to simply observe and learn from the results.
“When experimenting, it’s often the data you don’t expect or the people who choose not to use the product or participate in the programme that you learn the most from.”
Here's a quick summary of the experimentation process, taken from Agile L&D:
Aim – the overall purpose of the experiment.
Assumption – the supposition you’re exploring through the experiment.
Hypothesis – what are you testing and what do you think will happen as a result? For example, if you do X, then Y percent of users will do Z.
Method – step-by-step outline of the experiment, including duration, resources, variables, and people involved.
Measurement – what data needs to be collected and assessed in the experiment to determine the result?
Post-experiment recommendations – what are the recommended next steps based on the outcome, the data collected, and insights learnt?
“Not jumping to that solution, but spending time thinking about the challenge, breaking it down, thinking about the impact on the organisation, and thinking about the value.
“So I've done a lot of sessions where we look at business challenges from needing to develop leaders through to future ready skills, through to building more collaborative network teams.
“And again, all of those topics are really big, but spending time on: Why would we focus on this? Why would we solve it? What would be the value to the business bottom line, the end customer and the employee?
“And being able to do some storytelling around that and engage your stakeholders around that diagnostic, because once you've done that, you will have, I think, much better partnership in then moving towards a solution.”
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