Raytheon Symposium 2017

Training & Learning in a Changing World

Executive Summary

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It’s almost become commonplace now – that business today exists in an increasingly VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world. But while the acronym has merit for describing a world that is no longer business as usual – for those who have to work in this environment, particularly L&D professionals, this is a concept that needs much more clarity.

That’s why Raytheon Professional Services, in partnership with CorporateLeaders, recently hosted its 5th Raytheon Symposium, focusing on this topic, with top experts from the world of business, academia and coaching.

Held in two locations – in Frankfurt and London during September 2017 – delegates convened to hear, discuss and share from each other how the VUCA environment is impacting them. This report is the summary of both these inspiring and thought-provoking events.

Training & Learning in a Changing World

“Over 50% of Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 do not exist anymore. This is a huge cause for concern and mostly due to companies not being able to keep up with changing times. These changing times are altering the way companies operate at all levels and managing L&D and training is just getting more challenging to meet the needs of companies.”

Jesper Lillelund, Director, CorporateLeaders

Ulrich Lenz, Professor and Dean of Faculty Business Psychology at the University of Applied Management, in Ismaning, Germany, kicked things off with a stark message – “I have 25 years’ of leadership experience – but so what?” he said. “When the DNA of business is changing so fast, all that matters is the speed at which we adapt and learn. Past experience does not guide us as much as it did.”

From a learning and development perspective, Ulrich argued the VUCA acronym should not be a symbol of confusion, but be used to signpost what organisations really need to do – that the V (volatility) should instruct L&D leaders to boost the agility of organisations; that the U (uncertainty) should remind them to remove uncertainty and replace it with analytics; that the C (complexity) should be banished in favour of learning loops (not linear learning), while the A (ambiguity) should cause L&D leaders to always seek new answers.

L&D leaders must look ‘outside-in’

Although he accepted it involves L&D leaders rethinking their strategic position, he said the fact the VUCA concept actually originated from the military – where the US Army needed to respond ever-faster to Al Qaida – proves it’s possible. But to really succeed at this he argued L&D leaders must look ‘outside-in’ – and redesign learning from the customers’ perspective. He said: “We have to learn what the customer wants and work backwards.” However, he also said this will only be effective if another piece of the jigsaw is tackled too – data transparency – that is L&D leaders giving everyone in the organisation access to the information they need rather than trying to control the flow of it.”

It’s this ‘letting go’, that Susan Goldsworthy, CEO of Goldswolf Sarl & Associates (and award winning author and former Olympic finalist), picked up on in London, with her distinct neuroscience/sporting perspective. She explained how people have certain needs – acceptance and achievement, but that because people also carry fear of rejection and failure, they may resist change. She says: “Organisations need to create a climate where people feel it’s safe for them to take risks. Organisations can provide all the learning they want, but if people can’t come back to a secure base to practice and apply what they have learnt real-time, it won’t work.” She added: “A secure base leadership environment creates a care and dare mindset for continuous learning, and to be truly effective in organisations, it needs to start at the top.”

“When the DNA of business is changing so fast, all that matters is the speed at which we adapt and learn.”

Ulrich Lenz, Professor and Dean of Faculty Business Psychology, University of Applied Management

Challenges and Opportunities for L&D in a VUCA World

From risk aversion to team learning

Susan said L&D leaders must encourage employees to involve themselves in learning – as it’s together that they can explore what they need to do differently, and therefore be more committed to and more effective at change. It is also important to involve people and to give them choice within a given frame, in order to drive engagement. Creating a secure-base environment, where people feel psychologically safe to take risks is essential to this process. Ulrich also echoed this, supporting the creation of innovation labs in organisations. “These incubators encourage teams that have creative learning ideas to pitch them to business leaders for financial support,” he said. “We have to talk about the risk aversion culture we have in our organisations and replace it with team learning. Here there is complete transparency of project status and complete transparency of the data. From here, we can then ask ‘what does this team need to learn?’, and this may differ from what another team learns.”

What will become more commonplace said Ulrich are concepts such as near-the-job–learning and self-directed learning. This will challenge how L&D leaders have historically decided what people should learn. “The L&D department will have to consult individuals about their self-directed learning,” he said. What was clear, is that the task ahead may sound scary; and it may sound like a recipe for chaos, but that’s just the point. VUCA is all about chaos, and trying to manage it. Both Ulrich and Susan agreed that to deal with chaos, organisations have to fight it with what they might see (at first) as chaos themselves, but will arguably see is the most productive and dynamic way to respond to changing times.

“A secure base leadership environment creates a care and dare mindset for continuous learning, and to be truly effective in organisations, it needs to start at the top.”

Susan Goldsworthy, CEO of Goldswolf Sarl & Associates - Award Winning Author and Former Olympic Finalist

Challenging the status-quo

Given both presentations challenged the current learning status-quo, it was not surprising that they raised a number of questions. “It’s a hard process giving people responsibility for their own learning,” conceded Ulrich in response to a question about how staff still expect learning to be spoon-fed to them. “It’s about changing culture, creating trust,” he said. His advice was to start projects amongst those most willing to give it a go first.

Something both speakers generated questions around was whether the need for speed and self directed learning exposed organisations to more risk. One delegate questioned whether leaders needed to themselves be more open about their own learning mistakes, to create the culture of trust and security for others to take risks. “The new attitude should be exploring what works best, and what does not,” said Ulrich. “We need shared leadership,” he added. “Please note though, shared leadership is not delegation. What it does mean is that you now have a leadership cake, and when you cut a piece off it, it’s no longer yours. Your part is now leading a smaller cake.”

London delegates asked about how self-learning was impacted by generational differences, and Susan was clear that as long as people feel ‘connected’ to the business, and have a sense of psychological safety at work, that matters more than any age differences. Creating environments that celebrate the learning from both successes and failures ensures that people feel ‘free’ to learn and grow. As Ulrich concluded: “In a VUCA world, the important point is that everyone does learning and problem solving together, with consideration of power, of micro-politics and other influences that hinder or support the solution of the problem. VUCA is really about how we change culture.”

From chaos should come calm, but what best brings calmness? According to David Letts, President of Raytheon Professional Services and Steve Thompson, Director Business Development EMEA at Raytheon Professional Services, the answer can be looked at through music – specifically jazz versus classical. But while beats and bars might not immediately seem related to this symposium’s content, in an entertaining departure from the academic/scientific presentations before them, both delivered a unique insight into how music and VUCA can actually both yield good comparisons and be helpful for L&D professionals.

“Classical music follows a script,” began David. “It’s led by conductors. They control who comes in and out.” What is quite different is jazz, said Steve, in his version of the same speech. “Jazz is more free, it’s a conversation. Although the musicians still follow a beat, people improvise; it’s a lot freer.”

Accommodate improvisation

If it’s not already obvious, the link between VUCA, jazz and L&D, said both, is beautifully simple – that if organisations follow the business beat – one that has the same ebb and flow of jazz, but still has an underlying, unifying score (or culture), then performance can be raised.

“Like jazz, learners today need to go their slightly different ways, but still stay within an overall framework,” emphasised Steve. “So our challenge as L&D professionals is to provide that framework, from which they can learn.”

This means, supported David, that organisations need to be able to accommodate improvisation. “The truth of the matter is that we already know how most people already get the sort of information they want, and when they want it. They ‘Google’ stuff, or they ‘YouTube’ it, and the solution(s) to a problem come up.” He added: “Everyone wants this same freedom to go off and seek the answers they need on their own, and organisations need to let them do it. But, at this point, the critical issue is, do we, as L&D professionals, have a strategy for managing it?”

“Like jazz, learners today need to go their slightly different ways, but still stay within an overall framework.”

Steve Thompson, Director Business Development EMEA, Raytheon Professional Services

Creating Learning Flexibility While Following the Business Beat

Align learning to business through micro-learning

Both argued learning narratives need to change, with the role for L&D leaders being how much access they give people to information, and deciding if it is useful or not. “To build the beat we have to know what is important to the learner from a business perspective,” said David. “This is really about being more in touch with the needs of the organisation. We then have to rethink curriculum design, delivery and deployment.”

When all these considerations are thought through, the answer that should present itself is ‘micro-learning,’ said Steve: “People’s attention spans are shortening – from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 in 2016. Given workers can spend 20% of their time looking for supporting resources, the power of micro-learning is clear: it supports focused, one-learning-objective needs, and can be delivered on any device. Not only is it shorter (2-3 minutes each), but partly because of this, micro learning can help long-term retention go up, by as much as 80%.”

Both told delegates micro learning was the next big area Raytheon Professional Services is getting involved with. “Remember, it’s not a substitute for an LMS, but it is a way of giving organisations a framework, and a conversation around it to encourage employees to access more bite-sized learning when they want and need it,” said David. In other words, let the music find its own way: “The idea here is the concept of the portal where the learner – the performer – is the one spotting and accessing whatever they need,” he said. “My suggestion going forward is this: If you [L&D leaders] want to stay in synch with your audience then you’re the ones that are going to have to adapt.”

“To build the beat we have to know what is important to the learner from a business perspective. This is really about being more in touch with the needs of the organisation. We then have to rethink curriculum design, delivery and deployment.”

David Letts, President, Raytheon Professional Services

Turning staff into voluntary learners

Following an end-of-talk applause befitting any musical performance, the London audience was tasked with identifying what they could apply to their business and what lessons they had learned themselves.

Clearly delegates felt inspired, but they were also aware micro learning will present its own new challenges. One delegate was concerned about bottlenecks in demand for learning, while there were discussions about potential large upfront investment that will only show ROI slowly. A small minority were also worried about the lack of direction micro learning could bring. “People often don’t know what they need to learn,” said one delegate, wanting to know where oversight from L&D professionals comes in. Others however were much enthused about how it could turn staff into voluntary learners, where they pull for content rather than it being pushed to them. “The more confident people get, the more popular the good stuff is, and the bad stuff simply goes – which is surely no bad thing,” argued one.

“The more confident people get, the more popular the good stuff is, and the bad stuff simply goes – which is surely no bad thing.”

L&D Executive

With theories and concepts about the VUCA world completed, the stage was set for two heavy-hitting L&D professionals, both of whom explained exactly what volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity meant to them. In London was Aimee O’Malley, Global Learning and Development Business Partner at Google, while in Frankfurt was Jerry Pico, Senior Learning Programme Manager at Allianz. Each had very different solutions, but equally shared the same message: it’s all about future proofing organisations.

“VUCA is very real for us,” argued Google’s Aimee, who told delegates one of the ways Google manages

change is (counter-intuitive though it may sound), by no longer skilling people up for particular roles. So what did she mean? “The pace of change is such that we can no longer guarantee that the job we hire people into now will even exist in two, three, four years’ time,” she explained. “So, we’d be forever playing catch-up. The only way to get ahead is by actually shifting our learning strategy to be about teaching mindsets rather than skills.”

By hiring people who are self-learners (and changing her recruitment demands so that these people are more likely to join the business), she said it’s one of the ways she can feel comfortable people will up-skill for themselves (and by default, the business).

Restructuring the role of L&D

To achieve this, Google has taken some tough decisions about the very role of the L&D function; for instance restructuring it from being directly aligned to business groups, to it being much more nimble, going to where the business needs it most. “It’s not been easy, because it’s meant we’re less embedded with some business groups that we knew very well,” she said. “But it has allowed us to be able to work more like learning consultants and advise the parts of the business that really need our help, regardless of reporting lines.”

Other measures include open-sourcing many of their programmes, and at the same time, being brave enough to syphon off training that wasn’t working (called ‘sun-setting’).

Another key philosophy has been to have employees lead training themselves (85% of Google’s learning is done by Googlers for Googlers); which also means treading carefully around what the role of actual L&D people now is. She said: “L&D teams have had to accept that we can’t do everything in a rapidly changing world. So in order to allow ourselves the bandwidth to do the high-value work, we have to become comfortable with letting the businesses do more themselves. This is hard, because it means sometimes lower-value work can end up being ‘good’ rather than ‘excellent’, without direct L&D involvement. But we’ve got to be okay with that, if it means our time is freed up to be more strategic.”

“The pace of change is such that we can no longer guarantee that the job we hire people into now will even exist in two, three, four years’ time.”

Aimee O’Malley, Global Learning and Development Business Partner, Google

Programme and Content Curation in Times of Complexity

“The company’s senior executives, who are functional experts, determine which skills and competencies the technical experts in the field need to have in order to be effective in their daily jobs.”

Jerry Pico, Senior Learning Programme Manager, Allianz

Programme and Content Curation in Times of Complexity

Using experts to drive content needs

At Allianz, the strategy outlined was somewhat different. “The way we approach our curriculum development is top-down,” explained Jerry. “The company’s senior executives, who are functional experts, determine which skills and competencies the technical experts (in underwriting, pricing and portfolio management) in the field need to have in order to be effective in their daily jobs.” Then we as learning experts design the learning objectives and curricula required to develop these capabilities.

However, because VUCA for this business means dealing with greater and greater levels of complexity and competition as a result of changing regulations and market disruptions, Allianz’s learning strategy has been for its functional academies to continually refresh their programmes by “bringing together experts from both the country organisations and the group centre to collaboratively review and revise all of their content to ensure its timely relevance to the job.” This approach comes in parallel with a cultural change programme that also emphasises constant renewal, which now means, for example, that 80% of employees in these technical areas of the firm are required to meet accreditation standards.

“As a final step to ensure the quality of its programmes, our Academy partners with a well-established external institution to independently certify that the learning methodologies we employ are didactically sound, and that the learning is as state-of-the-art as possible.”

VUCA being what it is, both speakers admitted all of this is still very complicated, that it’s still work in progress, and that even they are still not sure they’re doing everything right all of the time. However, as Aimee pointed out, by at least concentrating on what she calls ‘landings not launches’ – i.e. trying to land training hard so that it impacts behaviour, she feels she has a chance of staying in front. Jerry added: “We struggle with how close we ourselves need to be to the technical content, and when we need to bring in the functional experts.”

There’s a Chinese proverb many people might have heard of which says ‘tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; but involve me and I’ll understand.’ Google and Allianz both subscribe to this, but it was Lars Meinel, VP Global Head of L&D and People Performance at Atos, who took Frankfurt delegates through his own specific employee-involvement project – ‘Ambition 2019’ – which is its vision for how HR and the L&D function needs to respond to the VUCA world in the next three years.

Importance of modular content

The need is great. Some 65% of children in school today will end up doing jobs that don’t exist today when they finish school. The good news, said Lars, for L&D leaders thinking about self-directed learning, is that millennials definitely want more involvement (i.e. not be passive consumers), and they want their work experiences to be mostly online. Both these trends, he said, bode well for dealing with learning in the VUCA world. “The key thing we’ve noticed is that content needs to be much more modular and far less heavy so it’s easy for people to adjust to,”

“The key thing we’ve noticed is that content needs to be much more modular and far less heavy so it’s easy for people to adjust to.”

Lars Meinel, VP Global Head of L&D and People Performance, Atos

Applying Adaptive Learning for Corporate and Individual Impact

he said. “Our solution has been to end up with four L&D pillars – these are company strategy (setting the frame); making it people-centric so accessing content from one place; making it based on learner’s needs - adaptive learning; and being multi-channel. He says: “When staff today have a much more limited window for consuming learning, you need to make sure that the time they do use is effective.”

Micro-learning works on complex subjects

The result is designing training courses that adapt to people as they consume it, based on an IT platform with lots of different algorithms. The training only finishes when people can demonstrate mastery of the learning, and it will always take learners to the next piece they have to learn. But the major question is surely does having all these micro-learning outcomes for different people really work? According to Lars it definitely does. “In our pilots, we’ve shown that not only can we reduce a traditional 70 minute training course to an average of 37 minutes long, but, the majority of our people liked it very much.” He added: “Learners have said they’re able to understand relatively complex subjects and that it really helps them in their work.”

These results, he says, has given him the confidence to introduce adaptive e-learning on a global scale. “We are currently ramping up a team of instructional designers and we are building up a training centre in India as we speak,” he said. He added: “It’s key for us to innovate and improve. I’ve given each of my team members in the leadership team a personal objective to come up with new ideas and it’s why we’re

investigating other areas like interactive video.” He said: “Success in learning is for me an equation with three factors: Purpose, Content and Engagement. All three need to be on a high level to create sustainable learning success. The purpose is mainly derived from the company strategy. The content needs to be relevant and high quality, and the learner needs to be engaged and intrinsically motivated in order to really learn something.”

“Learning and development professionals should be performance consultants instead of always suggesting learning as the solution.”

L&D Executive

With such a varied mixture of presentations – covering key L&D questions from theory right through to implementation, there was understandably no shortage of questions from delegates.

A critical concern raised by both the London and Frankfurt audiences was how to convince upper management of all the issues they’d just heard about during the day (and then also convincing them not to worry about so-called ‘open learning’ social platforms like YouTube.) “Then there’s the issue of different starting points, different cultures,” said one. Many even wanted to know whether it was still best to use traditional learning solutions. But after this, there was clear acceptance from L&D leaders that they need to deal with speed of change. “We often have a training methodology, but by the time it’s rolled-out, the business has moved on,” confided one.

Solutions for addressing this raised issues around whether L&D leaders should simply provide content, or curate it. “There is a balance we clearly have to look for, between individual learning, and then how we manage it,” said one. He added: “I don’t think there are any real definitive answers yet.” One suggestion was to use curators for compliance-learning, then providing staff the freedom to consume other learning after that. But some attendees thought this would then make life difficult when trying to create and measure employee’s development paths. “We [as L&D leaders] clearly need to develop ourselves,” suggested one delegate. “Learning and

Convincing Management about the Issues

development professionals should be performance consultants instead of always suggesting learning as the solution.”

Some believed organisations must themselves change their cultures first – before they can ever hope to change their learning. It led others to believe that focus really needs to return to what drives people to want to learn in the first place.

But it was possibly this discussion that really excited delegates. “Learning aligned with the company strategy is key,” observed one. It was arguably this that perfectly summed up how L&D must change in our VUCA landscape – yes, they need more speed; yes they need learning to have greater alignment; but making sure employers tap into the motivations and learning desires of their employees – that’s also the holy grail many want to seek.

“Learning aligned with the company strategy is key, particularly when operating in a VUCA world.”

L&D Executive

Raytheon Professional Services (RPS) is a global leader in training services and training outsourcing. For more than 90 years, in 125 countries and almost 30 languages, RPS has helped organisations transform the way they provide learning across the enterprise. A proven leader in the design, development, administration and delivery of performance-driven training solutions that align employees, customers, suppliers, franchises and other partners with key business goals and mission objectives. Our global footprint and scale make us unique among learning solutions providers, and enables us to rapidly deploy established tools, processes and experience for our clients to accelerate the success of their training solutions.

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