50 BIG IDEAS TO CHANGE L & D

Our task is to take those 50 ideas to change Learning and Development. Explain how and why we can/have/should make it happen. Alternatively, why they shouldn't. So, the big 50…

1. Make connectivity and sharing a catalyst for all learning.
2. Stop claiming every person will be competent.
3. Have people design their own quality criteria, and develop frameworks to help them understand how.
4. Celebrate learning by celebrating performance.
5. Don’t require people to come to a course.
6. Stop using the words and phrases best practice, and learner engagement.
7. Have a group of successful professionals in your workplace document the 10 most important things they know, and the 10 most important skills. Then compare and contrast them with your workplace standards.
8. Let people use smartphones at any place in work.
9. Mobilise learning by mobilising people in communities they care about.
10. Make any space in the workplace into a learning space.
11. Make learning resources entoirely visible – literally open all your content to everybody.
12. Ditch L&D function “filters”; remove the hurdles like pre-qualification.
13. Be honest when things suck, are boring, or are wastes of time. Stop rationalizing, making excuses, or using confirmation bias.
14. Transform your learning function to a 21st century cultural centre with cutting edge experts, thinking, and support.
15. Stop encouraging people to go on overpriced courses that fail to improve their performance, and that perpetuate a system that stifles innovation and equity.
16. Make your learning function about creativity.
17. Make learning at work about self-discovery, accountability, and how to find and evaluate information people care about.
18. Make your formal support about participation in networks.
19. Support your learning function as a business.
20. Treat the people who learn best like rock stars: Give them reality shows, endorsement deals, and huge contracts.
21. If people underperform, hold them accountable. Find a way to make support meaningful, social, and knowledge-based.
22. Make people accountable to one another, not the L&D function.
23. If we don’t celebrate performance in the the way we do level 1 evaluation sheets, let’s stop being surprised when businesses consider us to be superficial.
24. Review your formal professional systems. Every L&D member is an expert in something. There’s your Personal Development team.
25. L&D – Stop patronizing learning tech like brand fanatics.
26. Don’t set benchmark tests that reward 15% error rates with a pass.
27. Make learning budgets entirely transparent to everyone in your organisation.
28. Throw out test scores forever. Test in the workplace with performance as your yardstick.
29. Stop asking so much of trainers and instructional designers.
30. Help your business understand what training, learning and development are for.
31. Make sure anyone in a L&D function understands what it means manage commercially. 
    
32. Promote learning through networks, not curriculum.
33. Make performance support and the ability to ask the right question at the right time the criteria by which we measure a L&D function.
34. Stop testing to count learning, and measure performance.
35. Rebrand learning the same way Apple has done with computers, Starbucks has coffee, and Nike has jogging.
36. Stop criticising managers for their lack of support for your formal learning interventions.
37. Push the language of learning – learners, pedagogy, etc – out of learning spaces completely.
38. Design complex mentorship and apprenticeship support.
39. Use support based around thinking habits, and the ability to know what’s worth understanding rather than “content.”
40. Create support based on the ability to self-direct and design their own learning pathways.
41. Require Subject Matter Experts to design and deliver learning support.
42. Stop training–this is a push-pull action; instead, promote learning.
43. Use YouTube channels instead of handouts.
44. Eliminate educational language in your learning function – you are not a school (unless you’re a school).
45. Use social media and ESN instead of email.
46. Make learning resources more like app stores with support that excites people –that they want to use.
47. Create support that functions like a playlist, and that browses like Google search results; require people to document their own understanding.
48. Allow people to decide what they do and don’t want to learn; insist only that the learn something to support their performance.
49. Treat the goal of learning as performance.
50. Design your learning function as a think tank to understand and address your business problems.

So what now.  Well, it’s likely that there are certain points on there that you agree with, you disagree with, don’t understand, wish to develop.