For twenty years or so I've been attending learning conferences where someone will carp on about how important business alignment is. It's the 101 of conference speeches. It's the sound of training pleading to be taken seriously.
Well, business alignment is killing you, and I'd like to explain why.
Imagine for a second that you said 'to hell with business alignment - we're actually going to go out there and help people'. Imagine that you interviewed leaders and salespeople in your business and discovered that they wanted their teams to be more engaged and their sales figures to be higher, respectively. Imagine for the sake of argument that you built a system that catalogues the things that motivate people in teams and systematically reminds leaders to address them. Imagine you built a gamified product knowledge system. What if engagement and productivity increased as a result? What if sales figures improved? Do you really think the business would complain?
Now imagine a team of corporate Morris-dancers, practised in the art of jumping about and waving sticks. This year the business priority is innovation. So they come up with a special 'innovation' dance and go on tour.
I think that businesses are more likely to be sceptical about training's ability to deliver results, than whether it is aligned.
Obsessing over alignment is a distraction that prevents people from obsessing instead over what they can do to really improve individual performance. A fixation that prevents people aligning with the learner. You won't achieve business alignment unless you start with learner alignment.
The distinction boils down to process: if your process is identifying business priorities and then pushing related content and courses at people, then almost certainly you are Morris-dancing. If your process starts with understanding people working in your business, then figuring out what you can do to help them perform - then you have a shot at business alignment.
Of course understanding the problem you're trying to solve is important (as set out in the 5Di model below), but you won't solve it unless you start with the learner.
Hi Nick,
ReplyDeleteI remember attending a 'team day' with the wider HR function of a Healthcare Insurance provider that I worked for a few years ago.
During the course of the day I responded to a question (can't remember what it was) along the lines of "I believe that we should be more reactive as opposed to proactive". A colleague sought to correct me as they thought I'd got it the wrong way around.
"No" I said, "I did mean reactive as opposed to proactive".
Here's why...
In the short time I'd been in the role, I'd been involved in 2 kinds of work.
1) The reactive type i.e. responding to emails and calls from people asking for help.
2) The proactive type i.e. large scale 'top down' projects, system/process implementations.
By far there had been a greater and more 'instant' business benefit by taking the proactive, 'responsive' approach.
I'm not suggesting that there isn't a long-term value to be had from the more business-aligned, strategic activities - but I fear that the current fashion of 'aligning' everything can and does get in the way of helping people at the coal face.