Towards the ending of last year I started writing a couple of posts on learning strategy focusing on what I call the six strategy questions, which are questions that can be used to gather information to create a learning strategy. I specifically wrote about strategy because I strongly believe that a simple and aligned strategy to the organisation's goals is crucial for learning and development functions. After all the goal of learning and development is to support the organisation to achieve its strategic objectives using learning as a supportive resource. I am still on that journey and while I have written a couple of posts in 2016 on the same topic, I want to take a different approach over the next couple of days which I hope will allow me to write about creating a learning and development strategy in a simpler and clearer way. I love reading stories and I have discovered that I learn more from stories that any other way. Hence I love reading biographies and have managed to collect a number of business and Christian biographies. So I want to use a story approach to describe how to use the six strategy questions to create a learning and development strategy. These posts will really be summary stories as I am currently in the process of writing a story-based ebook on the subject. So let me lay a foundation for my learning strategy story.
Meet Larry who is the main character in the story. Larry is a new learning and development manager at a non-profit organisation. This is his first managerial role and he is not quite sure what his first step should be as a learning and development manager, though he discussed some of his plans at the interview. His team consists of two learning and development advisors, Louise and Saheed. Larry's mentor is Brian, who was his former manager when they both worked in a financial services company in the private sector. Brian now runs his own digital learning design firm. He was the one who convinced Larry to go for the job.
But Larry has a challenge, he is meeting with the leadership team at his new company soon, and they will want to know what his first action and longer term plan for the company is. He has some ideas, but he's decided to have a meeting with Brian to see if he can help. What will Brian tell Larry? And what will Larry tell the leadership team? We will find out in the next post.
