Picture your team six months from now. Everyone’s busy. Business projects are moving. Learning and development projects are being delivered. Yet somehow, the learning initiatives you launched with such hope have quietly faded. Not because they were bad ideas, but because something wasn’t quite right.
This is the pattern I see repeatedly when working with L&D teams. They create brilliant learning experiences – beautifully blended, expertly designed, fantastically executed – yet struggle to gain traction with impact, with learning culture, with engagement. The issue isn’t the quality of their work. It’s that they’re building on unstable ground.
Strategy is your map. Without it, teams are like boats bobbing around in open water – all rowing furiously, but in different directions. Some head towards customers, others chase the horizon, still others circle aimlessly. Everyone’s busy, but are they effective? With a clear strategy, those same boats form a purposeful flotilla, moving together as an organised, orderly, connected engine, moving symbiotically as one.
What makes the difference between strategies that succeed and those that don’t? In my experience, three foundational elements must be in place before any learning initiative can truly take hold: Environment, Permission, and Culture. I call this framework EPC, and it’s detailed in Chapter 10 of The Learning and Development Handbook. In your context, there may be other specific areas to address, but EPC is where I always start.
Let’s look at each in turn.
Environment
Where and how people will have a learning experience is often overlooked. Learning Designers create amazing learning experiences, beautifully blended, expertly spaced across time yet typically deliver them in hotel conference rooms with strip lighting and no windows. These are not the spaces learners usually work within. Learning in alien spaces leaves all the application and sense-making with the learner when they return to their workplace. That is a lot of cerebral load. Or designers create online learning, yet don’t consider if their learners have access to tech, or the digital know-how to partake, or even the quiet spaces to concentrate and consume. Expecting busy staff to watch a video or listen to a podcast in a noisy open office will leave you wondering why the intended behaviour change doesn’t manifest.
Thinking about both the physical environment where learning takes place and the digital environment in which learning is created and consumed within are both critical for people development to succeed. Human beings are hugely impacted by our environment. Imagine taking a relaxing holiday in a noisy, busy shopping centre – hardly the right environment for a recharge. Remember the emotions on the day your teacher said let’s go outside to learn; that emotion is still with you decades later. Consider how green spaces and blue skies relax the brain and let the thoughts and kairos moments flow. Environment is a make or break in learning.
Permission
Do we even need to consider permission in this day and age? People are adults and make thousands of choices every day. They are trusted at work to perform, aren’t they? Surely it’s overkill to have to explicitly permit people to learn? Sadly, it is not. People do what they are paid to do. Often trust is implied but not always felt. Learning is not seen as part of staff activities; it is ‘extra-curricular’, requiring additional discretionary effort, and therefore it is expendable on their ‘to-do’ list. As Learning Designers and L&D professionals, don’t doubt that you need to get buy-in from managers to get learning into the workstack; this is explicit permission to staff that learning IS the work. We need to ensure that learners know they have permission to engage in a learning experience. We want senior leaders walking behind people who are watching the latest TED Talk on their work computer to stop and praise them for learning, not make the learner feel they need to quickly shut their tab and pretend to do something else. In a sea of competing priorities, explicit permission to learn can be the difference between it happening and it not.
Culture
When we have a foundation built on a sound learning environment and express permission to learn, we can build a learning culture on top of it. I often see L&Ders doing great work on learning culture. They think carefully about curating relevant, engaging, learning experiences. They have senior stakeholder support. They think carefully about outcomes and activities. These are all great things, yet the learning doesn’t land. Nobody partakes. Nobody cares. Invariably, it is because they have not built on a solid foundation of key building blocks of the right environment and the right permission.
In your cultural context, you may have additional areas other than EPC to address in your foundation, for example, a regulatory body or a union. As ever with L&D, context is king. By addressing your foundational principles, when you build your map, your learning strategy, you know your boats will all be rowing in unison.
If you are looking at your learning strategy and have never thought about this stuff, and more besides, you may benefit from a structured way of approaching that work alongside a thinking partner with years of experience. This is where Learning Uncut can help you.
Ready to lay strong foundations for your learning strategy?
If you’re ready to lay strong foundations for your learning strategy, let’s talk. Book a complimentary call to explore how we can help you build the environment, permission and culture to lay strong foundations.
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