Embrace Disruptions To Drive Innovation
Planning for success enhances your VUCA plan so that you have back-up plans and a playbook to take quick and decisive action when confronted with VUCA forces. The concept is to prepare enough in advance that you are not completely blindsided and rendered helpless, no matter what is thrown at you.
Moving beyond the disappointment and fear of disruptive events and looking for innovative solutions instead is key to surviving the VUCA environment and thriving. Creative approaches such as lateral thinking can help L&D and training professionals to follow through with alternate solutions beyond the next most obvious step. It often takes chaos to force organizations out-of-the-box into being innovative. By continually cultivating innovation, organizations, L&D, and training professionals can develop skills to enable survival beyond such disruptions.
Partner For Success: Collaborate With SME, Peers, Learners
Given the varied skills, content, and competencies determined to be essential for any organization, L&D professionals often depend on SME’s (subject matter experts) to aid in training delivery. By also developing peers (even from other functional areas) as well as being learners themselves, L&D can expand the organization’s capacity for development and training. Those who are charged with content delivery are often the ones who gain the most understanding as they learn by teaching others.
Companies track mission-critical content outside of their LMS and move it to systems that help them run the businesses, which requires learning and operations teams to form critical partnerships.
-The Future of Learning: Top Five Trends for 2020, Jeff Carr, Forbes Human Resources Council, March 2020
Design And Delivery
Meet On Their Turf
When you plan for a VUCA environment, keep in mind that learners are more dispersed geographically, work varying shifts, are in different time zones, different cultures, and with differing technology environments. Forbes finds that “Employees just want to get work done and do it right. In a recent study by CEB (a division of Gartner), 57% of employees expect Just-in-Time learning to ensure they’re proficient in their jobs.”
Vary Modalities
In identifying optimal delivery modes for content, also consider learning styles and preferences of the target audience. Best practices of classroom training – using activities to engage as many aspects of the brain (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) – remain key to virtual delivery as well. Most platforms provide options for the use of break out rooms, use of whiteboards, polling, quizzes, and other audience engagement. Target the use of any platform for the optimal learning experience given the content to be delivered and the nature of the learners.
Accountability In A Virtual World
What does skills demonstration look like? Consider centralized tracking with KSM -Knowledge Management System and/or an LMS - Learning Management System.
Organizations with a high risk for safety incidents must manage all learning events systematically. With the expansion of many businesses across regional, national, and global boundaries, just maintaining records critical to tracking training completion can become a challenge. As the training industry and providers offer an increased number and variety of compliance training programs, they have incorporated an ability to assign courses for employees and to track completion. Enhanced Learning Management Systems allow learners to provide content and to add activities. Pass/fail rates, times to complete, and device optimization can further improve the user's learning experience.
In the rapidly evolving world of adaptations, many industries are now moving to the addition of AI (Artificial Intelligence) to incorporate ‘system learning’ and data analytics to determine what learning events are the most effective, and leverage best practices.
Learn More About Planning With A VUCA Model In Mind
The L&D industry is always evolving. Download the eBook What Should Learning & Development Professionals Be Preparing For Next and find out how the VUCA model can help you and your organization.
