Getting Ahead of the Game:
Strategy Beats Reactivity
“Crisis” is a steady state for too many learning teams.
There’s a better way.
Richard Rumelt breaks strategy into three components: diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action.
Your transformation needs all three. Put Learners First can help.
Big Idea
"Urgent" is the enemy of "Important."
I bet most of you wouldn’t like it if someone jumped in front of your child who’s waited patiently for her turn. You might even intervene, depending.
But every time “Urgent but Not Important” comes before “”Important but not urgent” that’s what’s happening.
The only way to Put Learners First is to prioritize based on, well, priorities.
Key Concepts
If you can't say "no," you don't have the power to Put Learners First.
Like it or not, you just can’t do every project someone suggests.
Yes, there are some exceptions. If the CEO suggests you do something, you probably can’t give her a flat “No!” You can, however, ask her if she’s okay with the 100 new employees getting a poor onboarding experience because you have to shift most of the resources away from onboarding to accommodate her request.*
*This might be a good time to be tactful, while still pushing back.
If it's not important, why is it urgent?
Beats the heck out of me.
Next year will be like this year.
On average, next year will be about 80% similar to last year. The Pareto Principle, again.
If it isn’t, you’ll still likely be in a better position than you would have been in had you not spent time strategizing.
An ounce of strategy is worth a pound of reactivity.
The hallmark of good strategy is concentrating your resources on the place where they’ll have the greatest effect. This is only possible when you deploy offensive resources (proactive), not just defensive resources (reactive).
For now, do less.
Frequently, learning teams substitute quantity for quality. They believe it’s better to do something than nothing.
This can have grave consequences as with learning deliverables, there is a threshold that must be passed. Unless a deliverable rises above that threshold it will have no effect at all.
Focusing on quality means agreeing to create less content. For now. In the long run, you’ll be able to do more if the need is there.
Start small and build from there.
Not everything be
Getting Started
As part of the Put Learners First intervention, you’ll receive support on how to take a quick 360 review of what your team does in a year, what requests can be anticipated, and how the unexpected has intervened in the last few years.
That’s the diagnosis. From it, you’ll dbuild guiding policies and take coherent action.
Like everything else, it’s intimidating when you haven’t broken down the steps sufficiently.