How does organization-wide digital transformation impact learning?
What is the problem? What does it take to design, implement and engage with learning that has impact in technology-rich environments? Before you click away from this article, no, I do not mean technology-rich learning environments. Post-COVID, much has been written about different modalities, different online tools and varied virtual learning environments. We, in learning roles and functions, pay a lot of attention to that sort of digital. We can pay less attention to the impact on learning of how the strategic vision and performance of the organization is increasingly dependent on digital technology. How does organizationwide digital transformation impact learning?
What is digital transformation?
Let’s start by looking at what we mean by digital transformation. The word “transformation” suggests it has a start and an end, whereas wise Harvard Business Review commentary describes it as a journey.
We can categorize digital transformation in different ways. HBR’s four pillars talk of modernizing current IT, digitizing business processes/operations, digital marketing and new ventures. An alternative is to think of digital technology as adding value through increasing efficiency, aiding collaboration and enhancing products and services. Others might say digital transformation is built on data, as data has the power to disrupt.
Central to all definitions is the move away from IT as a cost center to digital technology as a profit center that drives sustainable competitive advantage. Once here, you move to digital capability (the skills, behaviors and mindsets) that support the use of digital technology as a driver of business value, realize these are scarce, and so transition into using learning to increase digital capability in the organization.
Organizations with a mature learning culture can then monitor how their employee value proposition improves when digital capability learning opportunities are part of their attraction and retention strategy.
If you are not investing in digital capability, then your digital maturity will fail to keep up with the sector, let alone lead it. Ask yourself: What is your organization’s capacity to continually move forward with digital transformation, when that means a digital transformation perspective on everything an organization does?
Haven’t we always linked learning to business value?
Why might a chief learning officer’s role alter because of digital transformation? Learning has always driven performance, hence the Kirkpatrick model, the Learning Transfer Evaluation Model, or Value of Learning Transfer — what is so different in the digital era?
Shorter-lived perishable skills
For CLOs, a crucial trend is the increasing speed at which technical skills perish. Indeed, recent wisdom has involved debating whether the preferred and most valuable skill is the willingness and ability to learn and how formal the learning should be. A banking client recently told me that they often prefer to hire bedroom coders rather than graduates of computing, because they adapt and self-manage what and how they learn to match business needs. Learning becomes work like never before.
A crucial risk of creating well-designed content to engage a time-poor technical employee is how quickly it becomes out-of-date. Should education evolve to a broader base that teaches learners to self-manage their own careers? And, should it be able to understand and even predict what they need to learn in order to improve business and generate hunger for more learning? Is technology-based career management, enhanced through learning, the solution to the speed of change?
Career self-management
As much as it might be ideal for people to self-manage their careers, it is unlikely that enough people naturally exist. For many employees, the perishability of skills makes them feel vulnerable. Technical skills mastery that is sought after, and fought for, is too easily lost in a flash. Suddenly, the normal L&D paradigm of learning opportunities taking people out of a safe zone into a stretch zone — whilst avoiding the panic zone — becomes more difficult to manage as the panic zone becomes too much of a natural habitat for too many learners.
Panic can set in, not only in those with perishable technical skills that require constant upskilling, but also those whose job roles disappeared and they now need to reskill into technical roles. Their vulnerability as their professional identity radically changes is logically emotionally high.
Reskilling or upskilling often needs to be supported by understanding how individuals’ personal transformation is part of an essential and difficult digital transformation, giving purpose to the personal journey. It also needs to include aspects of well-being and resilience, learning to learn and overt training in how to establish new relationships with people to use the new professional identity effectively and efficiently.
Career self-management needs to be taught and nurtured. It cannot be assumed as happening alongside learning. Yet, historically, traditionally career management has not been on a CLO’s agenda, for fear of staff leaving for another job.
Durable skills
What about durable skills as part of career and capability management in digitally transforming companies? Durable skills aid business partnering by promoting and enabling that (so vital to digital transformation) mash-up of technical and business. The risk here is that technical staff needing communication skills, emotional intelligence, presenting skills or stakeholder management skills, can struggle if they are taught these skills in the same way as business staff.
Technical roles tend to have a larger percentage of neurodiverse staff where emotions can manifest in different ways. Technical staff with high levels of analytical capability can find working with business staff frustrating as they consider social norms and practices, such as onboarding politically important stakeholders with varying interpretations, as important as rational analysis. Technical staff need to be taught durable (often also known as soft, human or critical) skills in a different way from business staff, just as business staff need to understand technology in a different way from technical staff.
Role of action and mindsets
Another risk is the knowledge-action gap in digital transformation, which has been carefully researched by MIT. It is one thing to know about digital transformation, it is another to act. Staff tend to wait for others to act before they join in.
Adopting a growth mindset reduces that knowledge-action gap. A growth mindset means staff seek out and lean into new digital initiatives and line managers support such behaviours. Changing mindsets is a relatively new agenda in L&D, and a tricky one when combined with that sense of personal vulnerability around the change digital transformation brings. Who has not felt vulnerable in the face of new technology whether technically advanced (in a now legacy system)? Or a business member of staff using Power BI rather than familiar spreadsheets?
Innovation for digital transformation
To avoid dismissing the role of digital learning environments, I do uphold that we spend way too long thinking that modality is distinct and not to be conflated with the role of the learner, their vulnerability and changes in professional identity. Given their vulnerability profile, given their ability or inability to self-manage their career, given their specific organization’s next steps in their digital journey, different modalities and digital learning formats might work less or more.
Let’s look at some examples. A self-paced “Essentials of Digital Transformation” course might suit the C-suite as they are motivated to check their base level of understanding before entering the more exposed environment of social upskilling around digital transformation.
For software engineers, open communities can serve their needs, as learning from peers and sharing with peers is considered the norm. Given the challenge of implementing the promise of agility, learning design can mean coaching face-to-face in groups combined with individual coaching.
When working with teams that include both technical and business staff, relationship-based, discursive approaches using storytelling and conversation analysis to look at how new shared and purposeful meaning is created over time, can be powerful. Learning design, the availability of the learner away from work and budget can affect modality choice. Modality can open new learning designs.
Call to action for CLOs
Digital transformation for CLOs needs to mean not just how technologies change learning design, engagement and impact. CLOs also need to design learning that leans into digital transformation, moving learning center stage, following in the footsteps of how technology moved from a cost to a profit driver.
Given the personal vulnerabilities of employees — whose active involvement is required to make digital transformation a success — looking at different motivations to learn, based on different roles and examining how those roles add business value in the digital age, is critical to CLO’s presence, profile and productivity.