With the digital transformation of learning continuing to drive success at some of the world’s leading companies, Piers Lea, LEO Learning’s Chief Strategy Officer, discusses its revolutionary potential.
As part of Towards Maturity’s recent Transformation Curve report launch, news wire service Learning News interviewed LEO Learning’s Piers Lea. During the video interview, Piers was asked for his take on several topical issues facing L&D today, including:
- The way technology is affecting L&D
- What the learning revolution means
- How LEO Learning is helping clients solve problems related to digital learning
- The power of blends to deliver behaviour transformation
- Why L&D needs a seat at the boardroom table
Below are some of the highlights from the interview.
What does the learning revolution mean?
“The challenge right now is one of significant change occurring in in all aspects of business and government. Everything is going faster and, at the same time, everything is becoming more complex. If you set that in a world where a lot of organisations are globalising, it means that the way you help people keep up at work has to change quite significantly.”
What is Learning Technologies Group providing for clients?
“The kind of problems that we solve for our clients are, first of all, about how you strategically approach the use of learning technology and learning innovation. We’re trying to then map the capability and capacity that we have in the organisation quite precisely to the strategic goals of the clients.”
“What that means is that we have to be able to meet organisations where they are, because what’s a learning revolution for one organisation will be completely different from another.”
“One of the things we’re trying to do at LTG is to bring together a group of organisations and people who are the top experts in their particular area. What we’ve seen is that to deliver great learning blends, and in order to be able to meet the requirements to make organisations agile, you need great expertise. For example, if you’re going to put in a game or something to do with gamification you need absolutely top game designers. Hence the reason why we have PRELOADED in the group.”
“If you’re looking at how you’re putting in systems and helping people to be able to innovate in terms of learning programme design, you need the tools to be able to do that. That’s where [cloud-based authoring tool] gomo comes in. This requires huge numbers of different kinds of skills.”
The significance of measuring the business impact of learning
“What you need is the body of evidence to say, ‘this whole industry and this whole way of working is making an actual difference inside the organisation you work for. What [Towards Maturity’s] Laura Overton and the team have done is to build a longitudinal study over many years. This gives us an incredible insight into what is actually needed, what the state of play is and how our organisations are making progress or not.
“One of the efforts that we’re trying to make is to create strategies, which means that learning becomes part of the DNA of the organisation. It isn’t something which is separate. In order to do that, and for businesses to realise that’s a good thing to do, you need to be able to measure the business impact of it, so that management and line management become sure that the time that they’re investing, and all the tools that they’re investing in, is giving them a business performance return.
“If that strategy isn’t in place and it isn’t really clear how you do things, then my question is, ‘how can anybody act and perform with impact?’ It’s just a needed item and yet it seems to be missing in so many organisations.”
To view the full interview, click below.