How embracing Agile can improve your L&D practice

Embracing agile to improve your L&D practice is key.

A couple of years ago I introduced Agile ways of working with within my Digital Learning Team with mixed degrees of success. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with Agile and this new learner centred approach which sees teams deliver solutions in small regular chunks and then iterate based on feedback from learners. I’m currently running two Agile squads redeveloping our whole communication skills offer.

Agile ways of working were a feature of the Learning technologies conference this year – more and more teams and organisations appear to be adopting a more product based approach to developing their solutions and aiming to fail fast and test and learn through iterative cycles of product development.

So I was excited to hear about the launch of Natal Dank’s new book, Agile L&D. I was fortunate enough to also catch her webinar with Hive Learning yesterday too.

So here’s my take on some of the key advantages adopting Agile holds for L&D teams.

Welcome to the promised land

There’s been so many false dawns, flashes in the pan, which have promised industry wide change creating a new paradigm for the Learning industry. But they never really amounted to much. So what if we look to borrow something we know works from another industry? Maybe something designed specifically to help handle large complex and ever changing projects? Say hello to Agile.

For as long as I’ve been in L&D we’ve always known of the ADDIE model, we’ve always parroted the importance of diligently undertaken analysis before jumping to solution. But in practice it never really felt like it measured up – much of the analysis felt performative, like a choreographed dance with your key stakeholders where you meet with them and then just deliver the same thing again, the thing that’s always worked (though you’d struggle to prove it in anyway other than tenuous anecdotes from Happy sheets), or the thing that they expect you to deliver.

I’ve known and experienced far too many projects where people have set out with a pre-conceived notion of the solution that’s needed, usually because they’ve done this before, or because a director has said this is what they want, and so have set out to merely validate their biases and confirm the preferred course of action. 

One of the core behaviours I demand of my teams when working with Agility is to not hold your own ideas too tightly. We all have favourites, things we really believe in and want to use even when they may not be the right solution this time. It’s on us to be open to the possibility that our favourite approach isn’t the right one to solve this particular problem. 

Authors are often advised to kill their darlings, those characters that offer little in terms of plot development but who the writer feels an affinity and affection for. It’s the same for when ruthlessly prioritising creating the most impactful solution, you must be prepared to go where the data and insight takes you, and not simply try to retrofit your findings to meet your own preferred solution. In essence, letting go of our ideas which we hold dear for the sake of creating a product which actually solves a specific problem.

Agile L&D brings with it a need for proper research routed in science, creating and testing hypothesise through experimentation which in turn helps reduce and mitigate the individual biases and preferences of the L&D Team by focusing on gathering data which tests their hypothesis.

What’s proposed here isn’t new. But it’s more joined up and better packaged than before, and what’s more, as any marketer will tell you, timing is everything, and the time is definitely right now. We live and operate in complex and ambiguous times, it just so happens that Agile came about to help teams navigate complex and ever changing projects. It almost feels like it’s mean to be doesn’t it?

Focusing on impact solves our age old evaluation problem

Agile L&D also promises much when it comes to solving one of our age old problems – evaluation. The relentless focus on impact, from prioritising projects based on their impact to the importance of delivering impact forces us down the route of really understanding what the data is telling us and focusing on moving that needle rather than simply making people happy for a day, it’s now about making people happy for longer by solving their problems, which in term proves our worth to the wider business and the senior leaders.

Gathering data to increase our understanding of, and ability to articulate, the business problems we’re attempting to solve sets us up to go deeper in our evaluation than ever before. The same metrics we use to identify the problem in the first place provide us with a clear path to measuring the subsequent impact of our interventions. In doing so we’re able to move away from our obsession with popularity contests and substandard measures of success and impact like content views or engagement scores.

Better still we’re finally able to articulate the value our solutions bring to the organisation in a way which demonstrates a level of business acumen which runs far deeper than just making people happy.

Delivering value early