When you strategize, you design a plan to help you achieve a specific goal or set of goals. Sometimes you’ll know the obstacles that will come your way as you follow your plan to achieve that specific goal or set of goals, and sometimes you won’t. And sometimes your preconceived notions about your plan will be accurate before you set out to achieve your goal or set of goals, and sometimes they won’t be.
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Overall, strategies can be limiting to L&D initiatives and can cause more harm than good if they are ill-designed and when they leave no room for real-time and instantaneous adjustments or improvement—especially in a modern workplace that’s full of rapid technological innovation and where change is inevitable and not an anomaly.
On the other hand, when you follow a more agile approach, you’re better able to adapt to changes and handle obstacles that come up in real time. But sometimes, you might lose sight of your specific L&D initiatives’ goals or might not fully understand your motivations for doing one thing instead of another if you don’t have a clear plan (or strategy) to reach those goals in place at the very beginning.
Experts and research indicate that L&D professionals need to adopt more agile approaches. But what is the best way to make sure more agile L&D approaches remain compatible with existing well-thought-out L&D strategies? Is it possible to have more agile L&D initiatives while also following an L&D strategy?
The answer is yes. But you must first have the right elements in place for a more agile approach to L&D. And you must understand what to strategize, as well as what not to strategize, if you want your more agile L&D initiatives to be successful.
Here are the elements you need for a more agile approach to L&D:
- Mobile learning and cloud-based technologies—such technologies provide you with real-time analytics, automation, and personalization that are critical to more agile L&D approaches.
- Social learning outlets and platforms—such platforms will permit learners to learn from one another and adapt their own approaches according to information they share and learn on a rolling basis.
- Enhanced and transparent communications, as well as empowered and engaged employees—agile approaches demand more transparent and not top-down hierarchical communications.
(For more insight, read “5 Things You Need to Develop a More Agile Workforce” and “4 Ways L&D Departments Are Becoming More Agile.”)
Essentially, as you strategize your L&D initiatives, make sure that each initiative is iterative and contains smaller pieces of an overarching plan that is constantly accounting for changes that occur with and inside your technologies and platforms and across your industry or organization, as well as those changes that your learners themselves experience. Succinctly put, your L&D strategy itself must account for more agile L&D initiatives.
Overall, as you strategize your L&D initiatives, remember to let your technologies and platforms implement and manage your agile approaches for you, to emphasize human interactions over stale documented processes, to encourage constant and open collaboration, and to constantly look for ways to respond to changes over following incongruous plans or documented approaches.