That was the brief from a client. A client who had these challenges…..

• Getting our people into a training room isn’t working as well as it used to. Feedback from our people and the business is that too much time is being spent in a training room.
• We’re encouraging our people to spend more time out of the office and in our customer’s space, where it really counts, and we still must develop them.
• We’ve got factory people. Taking them off the floor for any time stretches our operational effectiveness.
• Our people don’t all have access to laptops and desktops (what are desktops?)
• The economy is not what it used to be. We need to find more economical ways to deliver more innovative and better quality learning to our people

As 2017 rolled on, we were given similar briefs from another 2 clients. In delivering on these projects, we set some goals of our own….

• We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We didn’t want to build yet another platform for people to install, learn or download.
• We didn’t want to do that because when you do that people resist. People reject. People don’t engage. Who wants another app (we have so many) to get something done? We wanted to use platforms that were already well adopted, where people didn’t need to learn how to navigate or what to do.
• To keep costs down we were determined to find platforms that were free and were highly efficient with data (this is South Africa and data is not yet abundant or cheap).
• We were only going to do mobile. If it wasn’t mobile, we weren’t going near it.

We went with two different platforms. One Web based and the other Bot based.

I’m not writing this to illustrate how successful we’ve been (we’ve had some fabulous successes). We had to learn a lot during 2017. And what we’ve learned we’re really proud of. We’ve gone a distance others still have to go. Moving people’s paradigms around how they consume Learning and Development isn’t an easy task when it’s been done in one particular way since the beginning of time. You need to work harder than you think to invite engagement that relies on on a mindset of self-learning.

We’re grateful to the many ‘critics’ we invited to give us feedback. They were brutal at times, but with each correction we kept building a better experience for our audience.

During 2017 we had a glimpse of the L&D future. There’s plenty to be excited about. There’s plenty of change ahead. And don’t be surprised to find a Bot creeping closer and closer to the centre of your Learning and Development programme in the next year or two.

The post How we’re using Bots to change how we do Learning and Development appeared first on Calidascope.

How do you foster innovation across a continent of 54 countries, where more than 2,000 languages are spoken by a billion people?

Great question. And yes, how do you indeed, I thought to myself? The answer to a question like that is worth zillions in any currency of your choice. It’s a similar question to one that’s lived with me for the longest time.

I’ve watched companies I’ve worked with, read about companies I haven’t, and I’ve had hours long conversations about companies who spend much resource, time, energy and currency ensuring they design and execute the best innovation processes possible. There’s much pride to be had in announcing to the world, that you’ve got the ultimate innovation process on the planet.

Garbage In Garbage Out

However, building the galaxy’s ultimate innovation process is only one part of the solution. There’s a true-ism in the world of technology, often represented by an acronym…. GIGO. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. Google defines it like so…

used to express the idea that in computing and other fields, incorrect or poor-quality input will produce faulty output

It isn’t difficult to understand. If you don’t have great quality creativity and thinking going into your innovation process, then you can’t expect to get great quality innovation, thoughts and ideas coming out of the other side. It puzzles me that the majority of innovation initiatives I’ve seen and read about, never speak of, nor do they pay attention to increasing the quality of the input. It’s almost as if they’ve been convinced by whomever is selling the innovation process (there’s definitely a consultant involved) that the process will magically produce the goods they’re hoping for.

I suppose that may be true for the first round. There’s a chance that there are some good ideas floating around that are looking for someone to grab hold of and execute. But what happens when you repeat the process in year two? Where is the next crop of great innovation coming from? You’ve used up whatever good quality thinking might have been inside your organisation during the first execution?

Building Your Creative Muscle

You improve the input of any innovation process by improving the creative quality of your people. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to become an artist or a painter or a dancer. Improving creativity doesn’t require everyone to become a creative. Back to Google for a definition of ‘creativity’:

the use of imagination or original ideas to create something

Creativity is a muscle. It’s something you can develop when you practice using it. And to practice using it requires you to engage your imagination more often. This of course is the challenge business has. Business doesn’t like imagination much. Business likes cold hard facts and figures. They like things you can measure, things you can manage, things you can tweak and make more efficient. Imagination doesn’t deliver on those requirements very easily.

How Measurement Gets In The Way

I remember once having an opportunity to sell a process, to improve general creativity, to a large Insurance Company. I even brought props along for the panel to test out and try. I admit, I was a little naive in my expectation that they’d obviously ‘get it’ if they could experience what I was talking about. I knew I was not going to be successful when they began to ask about measurement and outcomes. How does one accurately measure the improved use of imagination? Very simply, one does not.

This is why companies spend money building innovation processes that have a start, an end and a bunch of points in between…. because they can measure them, and write reports and when people ask what they spent the money on, they have numbers to justify the expense. Jobs are safe, even though innovation is a little disappointing, but there’s always next year.

Improving the quality of someone’s creativity and imagination doesn’t offer those same benefits of measure. It’s less about measurement and more about trusting that when people engage their imagination the only possible outcome is improved creativity. What else can it be?

Business has a way to go in the area of improved creativity within their organisations. Mindsets will need to shift. What is measured and why, must be re-worked. Better quality input must be seen as more important than a well structured process.

By the way, the answer to the question at the beginning of this post, the question posed by the article I said I’d read?

How do you foster innovation across a continent of 54 countries, where more than 2,000 languages are spoken by a billion people?

Apparently it’s as easy as,

Well, you put together a partnership between a leading business school and an unusual telecommunications company. Then run a competition for the best new business idea using digital technology, and bring the finalists together at a reclaimed industrial site in a township outside Cape Town.

Who knew innovation across a continent was that easy? Like I said, business has a long way to go.

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