Are your learning and development teams asking these questions?

How do learning & development teams decide what’s on the agenda? Well, from my experience, some teams are brilliant, using trackable metrics to measure what works well, what doesn’t and what else is needed.

Other teams, though, aren’t as on the ball. And if that’s you, that’s okay; awareness of much-needed change is always the first step. So, in this post, you’ll find some practical tips on what we (learning and development experts) would ask if we were in your shoes.

Firstly, let's have some context. At Laughology, we’re often told about some deep, underlying cultural issues that impact the organisations we deliver to. We discuss a whole realm of avenues of learning to help solve the problems. Then we hear that golden line, “We’re looking to do this in an hour.”

By all means, when used in the right way, short bursts of learning can be brilliantly insightful and useful. But delivering a true cultural shift? Unlikely.

The reason Laughology exists is because we’re needed to either fix an issue or proactively prevent one. We’re problem-solving. It’s not quite sudoku, but it’s problem-solving nonetheless. With the fear of sounding like your old science teacher, the first thing to do is define the problem.

How to define the problem

Every day, I have calls with L&D teams and leaders. These are, on one hand, sales calls - a chance for me to say stuff I hope resonates. More importantly, though, they’re also planning calls. To ascertain what’s needed, my questions require some thinking from my co-caller to answer. So, is it the case that I’m asking questions the L&D teams aren’t asking themselves?

I always open with a very vague and open question: “What’s the situation?”

The response is always lots of symptoms and stories, which are sometimes funny yet often exasperating. You see, L&D teams frequently recognise the symptoms of why training is needed but can’t diagnose the root cause.

This certainly isn’t because of a lack of talent. It’s because they’re often too close to see the big picture sometimes - the wood for the proverbial trees, if you will. That’s where the next round of probing questions comes into play:

• What is your ideal outcome?
• What have you tried previously? What worked? What didn’t?
• Is this symptom business-wide or in isolated pockets?
• What are you hearing?
• What’s your vision?

Dig, dig, dig. Ask ‘why?’. Challenge. Listen to understand. Listen to fix - even if it can sometimes feel detrimental.

Horses for courses

Once we understand the direction of training travel, we start to plan the route. We can deliver anything from short 45-minute keynotes to 12-month training programmes - horses for courses and all that malarky.

It’s common for us to be asked to do things (in our opinion) the wrong way. For example, we might deliver a lunch and learn about unconscious bias, and then the box on the training matrix for inclusion gets ticked. We have an ethical question to ask: do we say no to these sessions, or do we view it as ‘some training is better than none’?

We believe that every person in every workplace deserves access to quality resources and training opportunities. We know a different training plan might work, so we challenge the decision-makers and try to get them to think differently about their development plans. There are always ways to improve, right?

I’m feeling lazy, but this might help you

I’m inherently lazy, but that’s not why I suggest you ask yourself these questions before coming to me. It’s actually because I hope they’ll help shift your mindset further toward being solution-focused.

But remember the questions listed earlier are just prompts and suggestions. The digging and challenging of you and your teams is where you’ll truly find your answers.

The last thing I want you to think from my ramblings is that I don’t want to have these conversations with you. I’d love to. I’d like to think I could help facilitate these questions and bring a different, independent viewpoint to the conversation. 

So please keep ringing me - except you, Laura; please stop calling me!

If you would like to speak to Doug about your learning and development needs, he would love to hear from you - unless you’re Laura, obvs. Contact him - doug@laughology.co.uk.