NO BANDAIDS TIME WASTERS or EDUTAINMENT

NO...NO...& NO

After spending more than a decade crafting and leading employee Learning and Development programs, I've frankly gotten fed up with the lack of sustainable growth and change outcomes of a majority of them. The problem often isn't with the valuable Mindsets and Skillsets education the organization chooses to provide, nor with most of the Subject Matter Experts (SME) who deliver them.

The issues lay with the old, worn out, and ineffective status quo workplace systems and cultural frameworks in place within each one. This translates into rigid attitudes and impossible expectations that combined create obstacles to actual lasting employee learning adoption and retention, compounded by the lack of transparent modeling and support from all levels of titled management and leadership professionals throughout the workplace to make learning "sticky."

The COVID pandemic compounded the situation, when employee training moved online, and an entire industry of instructional design tools and programs exploded with the intention to profit financially from a false Return on Investment (ROI) promise they gave that online-only courses were better and cheaper means of delivery.

I'd been leading onsite courses (with post-training follow up) for years prior to the pandemic, and immediately had to adapt. And while I appreciate the reach of online-only training and its budget-friendly selling points, I witnessed almost right away how much real learning suffers with packaged remote learning and isolated students.

I'd already experienced the fallacy of this ROI premise when I completed both Psychology and Organizational Leadership BA degrees from Arizona State University via remote delivery. Semesters were squeezed into half the length of a traditional time frame; often the courses were taught to ace the tests and not true knowledge embodiment; and lack of in-person engagement in favor of forum discussion "interaction" by necessity lacked the dimension and nuances of in-class conversations and debates with fellow students and their professors. We couldn't learn from the stories and lived experiences of one another like we do when we share the same physical space with fellow students and teachers.

So much information came at us quickly, and moved in and out of our short term and working memory so fast that broad retention was impossible. And while I worked hard to earn Summa Cum Laude GPA achievements for each degree, the structure and pace of ASU's online degree programs simply couldn't facilitate the embodied long-term knowledge I'd experienced from when I began my college education on campus in the same room with fellow students and teachers.

What we see now is workplace L&D professionals having to accommodate the employee learning needs of an organization within the insistence they be delivered mostly online and often without whole organizational buy-in. Because attentions spans have become so short, many courses offered are:

> "one and done" without the essential weeks-long follow up required for actual learning; time and money is wasted; and blame for "failure" is placed in the wrong areas

> "gamification" was created to "edutain" easily bored and distracted employees

> very little reading is assigned because people read less and are so addicted to social media they claim they just "don't have time" to read something more than a few paragraphs of text

> the fake "interaction and engagement" of chat windows that flies by so fast in webinars that few comments are responded to, and attention is drawn away from the person leading the class

and possibly the worst:

>"bandaids" are offered instead of deep investigation into addressing root causes of problems, and the sometimes difficult yet necessary solutions

>"elephants in the room" are intentionally ignored because of what I stated at the top of this page: ineffective status quo workplace systems and cultural frameworks in place that translate into rigid attitudes and impossible expectations - and the refusal for every stakeholder to take responsibility for the issues and problems they are causing that they expect one training to magically solve - and then place blame externally for the requested subject itself (!) "not working" (and the SME delivering it), and a learning environment and expected ROI that are simply doomed to fail.

BOTTOM LINE:

All of this doesn't consider the COI (Costs of Inaction) if an organization doesn't provide L&D programs intentionally crafted for lasting impact and what they cost in terms of time, attention, and money an honest ROI by ALL involved to commit to in order for the outcomes to be successful and sustainable.

Maybe they'll "raise employee awareness" with a one-off class or webinar on any broadly valuable Mindset or Skillset upgrade, but awareness without corresponding actions harm everyone in the long run, wasting precious resources while remaining stuck in the "same old same old" ways of thinking and doing.

You get what you invest - or don't invest in all of these areas, and continuing to do the same things with the same old status quo systems and cultural frameworks expecting different results is truly insane.

I refuse to work with any organization that wants what can't work, and continues to play small.

NO ... NO ... & NO

ANOTHER BIG QUESTION:

Do you have both the humility and courage to Play Big ...
and dare to do things differently?

If so, I have some more questions for you.