Design learning experiences that help roles across your organization more intentionally collaborate to facilitate better customer experiences.
As it relates to business, using the terminology “learning design” may result in more confusion than clarity around what we are ultimately attempting to do. The knowledge sharing we are facilitating across organizations is really only significant if it results in better experiences for employees and customers.
Personally, I am extremely analytical in nature and I love to learn for the sake of learning. However, when it comes to learning for my professional development, my learning objectives are much more driven by my desire to show up and be an asset on my teams:
- How can I immediately apply the knowledge, system, tool or practice shared in a course, quick reference guide, short video, podcast to be more effective and efficient at doing a specific task?
- How will it help me be more influential at communicating my point of view to my teams?
- How effective is this learning asset at modeling how I can apply specific behaviors and actions in my day-to-day work?
- When I’m about to enter a meeting, is there a resource I can easily access to quickly remind me of how to apply what was shared?
To minimize confusion about what we are attempting to do for our target audience maybe we should call what we are attempting to do: Performance Support Design. At first thought, it may seem unnecessary to clarify to others what you are attempting to do. However, making a clear distinction between learning and performance support is particularly important to operationalize an organizational learning strategy.
If you are not very careful, you will find the performance support assets you are creating are heavily focused on benefits and features of your products and services with only a small emphasis on what delivering a good client experience looks and feels like.
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Performance support resources should help individuals and teams clearly see how different internal roles are working together to deliver desired customer experiences. In many ways, our attempts to organize and tailor resources to specific target audiences have inadvertently contributed to sustaining functional silos. Now our challenge is to breakthrough the silos by implementing learning and instructional strategies that facilitate cross-functional constructive dialogue.