Link #28 🌱🌿🌳 Learning Ops
Link #28 🌱🌿🌳 Learning Ops
Series: Links between L&D, strategy and value creation. Part 4
Recently, I've had a nice conversation with Liz Ștefan, the host of the L&D Spotlight podcast. Here's the part where we discussed about the Learning Ops concept (min. 14:18 in the podcast episode).
Explore the other parts in the series here.
Liz: Ok, I've never heard this distinction made before. I also never considered that there might be a distinction. So I think I get what you're saying. Let me ask you something in a slightly different way just to validate my understanding. Could you say that that goal of an L&D professional could, to a certain extent, be similar to the goal of a doctor? Meaning: an L&D professional would help the organization establish healthy learning behaviors to the point they are no longer needed, in a way. Meaning people will become autonomous in being L&D practitioners, for example.
Bülent: Yes, it's one scenario that might play out. And I played a bit with the idea of Learning Ops. Like Design Ops. As an analogy, Design Ops is this small team of Design professionals who organize and enable the whole organization to be Design practitioners.
For example, I'm a sales person and I need to design an offer. Because that offer needs to be designed. Not only visually, but as elements that might resonate with the customer. And these Design Ops teams, they create design systems, they create all the infrastructure, templates, this is what to use when you need job aids, things like this.
And similarly, we could think about Learning Ops as this team of professionals who invest and are up-to-date, they understand the L&D practices, theories, technologies, strengths, everything. And leverage all these insights to enable the whole organization. So they can help colleagues that are not in L&D to be autonomous learners, continuous learners and not necessarily rely on this deprecated, I might say, paradigm of: Ok, we are organizing things for our colleagues. Because organizing, as an activity, is not a differentiator.
People can organize themselves. And I've seen this in countless occasions in the companies I've worked with. For example, people wanted to share about a specific technology. Instead of: Ok, let us find a trainer, let us find an expert, maybe you could help those people naturally gather and organize themselves over a lunch, a sharing session, a brown bag session. Maybe you could enable those behaviors and amplify that kind of self-organization around topics of interest.
Or if you have some internal communities, for example around parenting, or eating healthy, you might want to enable the internal community builders that are not necessarily the L&D people in the organization, to be able to engage the community, to be able to organize themselves, to be able to bring some external guests, to create value for their colleagues.
As a professional, as an individual, if you connect with the value of the things that you are creating, and not with these historical ways of creating these types of value, it offers freedom to be able to see some other perspectives.
If we want to encourage more learning, more development in the organization, to encourage this learning culture, the way in which we are traditionally organizing doing all the learning needs assessments, synthesizing the needs assessments and, based on this, finding some vendors to address those, and then making sure we measure the various learning interventions and so on. This is a way.
But it doesn't necessarily have to be the only way of creating value in this L&D space.
Explore the other parts in the series.
As a strategic adviser and lifelong learner, Bülent Duagi works with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with better strategic thinking - which usually translates to:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.
