Handout
for
Learning
and
Skills
Group


What Would Andrew Do?

How to sell senior management on the value of learning. (Cross)

Excerpts
The
Metrics
Cycle


There’s no cookie-cutter formula for applying metrics, but there is an underlying

process. Generally, you’ll follow these five steps to identify, agree upon, assess, and
use metrics. This is not rocket science. It’s the same process you already use to
accomplish a lot of things in life. Let’s briefly consider each step.

1. State Desired Outcome. Results do not exist inside the training

department. In fact, results do not exist within the business. Results come
from outside the business. Imagine a no-nonsense businessperson, say,
Andrew Carnegie. If you can explain yourself to Andrew, you’ve mastered this
step.

2. Agree How To Measure. The only valid metrics for corporate learning are
business metrics. Examples are increased sales, shorter time-to-market,
fewer rejects, and lower costs. How do you decide what measures to apply?
You don’t: that’s the responsibility of your business sponsor, the person who
signs the checks. Together you agree on what’s to be done and how you’ll

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 measure success or failure. Once you’ve settled on the project and its
metrics, get it in writing.

3. Execute Project(s). The projects could be training and/or an incentive

bonus plan and/or more advertising. Training programs are often part of a
larger scheme, and it’s fruitless to try to isolate them. In fact, savvy training
directors look for major corporate initiatives they can hitchhike a ride on. Go
with the flow, don’t fight it.

4. Assess Results. You must evaluate the impact of your efforts with the
measures you set up back in step 2. In other words, you are not allowed to
mimic Charlie Brown, who would shoot an arrow and then paint the target
around it. Why stick with the measures you came up with before? Because
that’s how to maintain credibility with your sponsor. You can bring up
unforeseen outcomes or anecdotal evidence, so long as you follow up on
those original methods first.

5. Begin Anew. The only thing worse than learning from experience is not
learning from experience. Your post-mortem on the completed project should
include a section titled “What to do better next time.” This is where you start
the cycle anew.

6. All my examples are drawn from business. That is the focus of this particular
effort. Many of the same techniques work well in government and education
as well, but those are not my areas of expertise.

What
Makes
an
Effective
Executive?
(Drucker)


· They asked, "What needs to be done?"

· They asked, "What is right for the enterprise?"
· They developed action plans.
· They took responsibility for decisions.
· They took responsibility for communicating.
· They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.
· They ran productive meetings.
· They thought and said "we" rather than "I."

Talking
with
Your
Sponsor


Executives focus on one thing: execution. You need to figure out what your sponsor
hopes to execute.

You get his or her take on the firm’s near term objectives, to suggest what you plan
to do to meet them, and to agree on how success or failure will be measured. This
step is not optional.

Tell your sponsor you want to understand her business objectives. Be a performance
consultant. Act like it’s a different game than the one you usually play.

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  Subtract ten points each time you say learner, learning object, instructional
design, blended, program, instructor, content, or asynchronous.

 Add ten points each time you say reduce time to market, improve
productivity, speed up cycle time, streamline the way we do business, serve
customers better, slash costs, improve partner relationships and knowledge,
increase market share, etc.

 Add ten more points each time you personalize what’s above: reduce our time
to market, improve our productivity, speed up our cycle time, etc.

Got it? Your challenge is to find out how your sponsor sees her corporate and unit
objectives. You need to know enough to make concrete recommendations.

What’s
in
it
for
me?


(ASTD/IBM)

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4
The
players
and
their
needs


(Cross)

Time
Matters


While training directors may have different objectives from CEOs, everyone in
today’s business world shares one need: they want it all now. Benefits you don’t see
for two years are hardly benefits at all. Given enough time, a million monkeys at a
million terminals could develop your entire curriculum, complete with Flash
animations and a repository of SCORM-compliant objects. Nobody’s got time to wait.

The appropriate time metric for most eLearning is time-to-proficiency. How long will
it be until your people are performing competently? By competent, I mean able to
meet or exceed the expectations of customers, be they internal or external to the
organization.

Time-to-proficiency depends on a multitude of factors. Before the first learner enters

the system comes prep time:

· Time to assess needs and specify solutions

· Time to hire or train development staff
· Time to create new lessons or re-purpose existing ones
· Time to implement technical infrastructure
· Time to make sure all the parts work together
· Time to publish, often a combination of print, CD, and web

Then there’s time spent learning.

· Time to access the lessons

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 · Time in self study
· Time in practice
· Time for proficiency testing
· Time for reinforcement

Timing is perpetually traded off with breadth and cost. A Fortune 100 company can
justify investing years to develop its in-house corporate university.

Push
and
Pull


Organizational learning tends to be mostly push or mostly pull. Push is the sort of
learning you encountered in school, where authorities selected the curriculum and
lessons were imposed on you. Pull describes the way you learn from Google or
discovered how to kiss a lover. With pull learning, you select what you want to learn
and how you want to learn it.

Pull learning is more cost-effective. It doesn’t require as much in the way of control
mechanisms, structure, and outside assistance. Furthermore, lessons learned
through pull are more likely to stick because they’re relevant to perceived need,
delivered when required, and usually reinforced with immediate application. Pull
learning delivers more bang for the buck.

Organizations that increase the ratio of pull to push can lower their overall
investment in learning without sacrificing results. Given the greater payback of pull
learning, the objective is to achieve greater results while spending less.

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Why am I advocating cutting the overall spend? Because it’s an easier concept to
sell. Managers have been skeptical of the value of training for decades. One hopes
that the lure of the Holy Grail of achieving more from less is an offer they can’t
refuse.

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Evaluating
the
payback
of
Learnscapes


Return
on
Investment
in
Interaction


(Cross & Husband)

The focus in this new world of work is to do what’s important and involve those who
know what’s important, why it’s important and what they know (or know how to find
out) about a problem or issue.

So, to begin measuring increases in productivity and value in a networked social

computing environment, we propose the concept of Return on Investment in
Interaction (ROII), which we have derived from the principles of Metcalfe’s Law of
Networks.

Let’s define some core assumptions about ROII :

[Link] flows of information are the raw material of an organization’s value

creation and overall performance.
[Link] flows are carried by links, alerts, RSS feeds, search engines,
aggregation and filtering of content, etc.
[Link] leading vendors’ productivity platforms now feature collaborative social
networking and computing,
[Link] platforms’ architectures facilitate purposeful cross-silo communications
and exchange.

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 Social networking pioneer Valdis Krebs has outlined four generic metrics that are
becoming widely accepted as leading to observable, tangible, measurable outputs:

(Footnote: Krebs, V., “Measuring the value of social computing in social networks”,
The Network Weaver blog, June 29,2008)

1. Increase in size of network

2. Increase in internal network connectivity
3. Increase in connection to valuable 3rd parties
4. Increase in number of projects

Dimensions
of
Today’s
Learning
Process


(Cross, Learnscaping)

Business context Network effects Learning

Core/context Dense interconnections Informal
Object orientation Accelerating cycle time Adaptation
Bottom-up Interdependence Becoming
Customer voice Volatility Know-who
Unpredictable Long tail Drip feed
Incessant change Ambient findability Need-driven
Services/intangibles Signal:noise Performance support
Worldview Knowledge Internet values
Emergence Collective intelligence Connections
Illusion of control Socially-constructed Openness
Holistic Context-bound Transparency
Perpetual beta Breakdown of disciplines Authenticity
Everything flows Group phenomenon Interactivity
All is connected Social intelligence Loosely coupled
Process Cognitive breakthroughs Interoperability

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Profit
and
Loss
Example


Imagine that my roadside stand sells $100 worth of lemonade and my total expenses
were $20 I spend on lemons, sugar, and paint for my sign. Fill in the blanks:

Lemonade Stand Results

Profit = ________________

Margin = ________________

Revenue = ________________

Cost = ________________

Cash flow = ________________

Earnings = ________________

Price/earnings ratio = ________________

ROI = ________________

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Industrial-age problems
Check any that apply to your organization

Substandard revenue
 Sales are declining, customers are postponing decisions
 Sales force cannot express benefits of new products
 Sellers unaware of industry conditions and competition
 Friction in relationships with distributors
 Our partners are not well informed
 Sales and marketing are on different planets
 Arms-length relationships with customers

Deficient service
 Response time to customers is substandard
 After-sales inquiries are bogging down our call centers
 800 numbers and phone trees are driving customers away
 Service is inconvenient for customers, not 24/7
 We don’t learn from our customers
 Not building customer loyalty
 Customer and prospects are confused, frustrated

Inefficiency and bureaucracy

 Deluged by internal email
 Can’t find the right person in a hurry
 People don’t know who knows what
 Can’t the right information when you need it
 Project coordination is tedious and things fall through the cracks
 Re-invent the same documents and processes over and over again
 Departments squabble more often than they collaborate
 Don’t learn from the people who join us from competitors
 Execs can’t get a read of progress or lack thereof
 Documentation is dated, versions confuse

Unenthusiastic, sluggish staff

 Recruiting is harder than ever
 Some do the minimum to get by
 People are not innovators and don’t keep up
 Our know-how is walking out the door due to retirement and turnover
 People are glum because of the economy, an industry slump, whatever
 Turnover is too high
 When good people leave, we never see or hear from them again
 No time for experimentation or prototyping

Underdeveloped organization
 Difficult to collaborate inside the corporate firewall
 Difficult to collaborate outside the corporate firewall
 People prefer to work solo than on teams
 Takes too long for new hires to become productive
 Analysis paralysis
 “Wait and see” attitude = missed opportunities

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 Culture clash, as if we are two organizations with different priorities

Suboptimal execution
 Not everyone is on the same page
 Our people don’t know our history, values, culture
 Set in our ways, reluctant to change
 Not moving fast enough to stay ahead of competitors
 Functional silos thwart process improvement
 Still acting like two separate organizations long after the merger
 Hard to find out where we are as an organization
 Teams don’t talk about the trends and force that drive our business
 Don’t reflect on the lessons of our successes and failures
 Don’t take advantage of our collective intelligence

Not learning
 We are falling behind
 Not prepared for onslaught of digital natives
 Training can’t keep pace with the business
 Learning systems are outgrowth of classroom
 Training administration, creation, and delivery cost too much
 Managers hoard information
 Not learning fast enough to keep up with the needs of our business

References


ASTD/IBM Strategic Value of Learning Research Report. 2006. Sugrue, Brenda;

O’Driscoll, Tony; and Vona, Mary Kay.

Cross, Jay. 2009. What Would Andrew Do? How to sell senior management on the
value of organizational learning. Internet Time Press. $19.99 from [Link]

Cross, Jay. 2009. Working Smarter: Boosting Brainpower for Fun and Profit. $14 on
Amazon.

Cross, Jay. 2008. Learnscaping: Getting Things Done in Organizations. Internet Time
Press. $25 from [Link]

Cross, Jay and Husband, Jon. Return on Investment in Interaction, Not Your Father’s
ROI. Chief Learning Officer magazine. To be pubished July 2009.

Drucker, Peter. What Makes an Effective Executive, Harvard Business Review, Vol.
82, No. 6, June 2004.

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