Creating a Learning Program Vision
Why is it so difficult to create a learning program vision?
Currently, I am working with my team to established standards in program management. Our first stop on this journey is Program Strategy. We are working on the high-level components of establishing a program strategy while working through case study scenarios that will help us to design our own strategies for each of our learning programs.
As I was reflecting on program strategy, I thought about the programs that I have had an opportunity to work in. Some of them went through the rigorous process of working with stakeholders, determining a program vision, and aligning learning objectives to that vision. Other programs operated at a healthy rate without ever establishing that over-arcing vision, and yet, even others failed immediately without that bigger picture to reference back to. My question to the team was around this later part, and I thought it would be good to get some other perspectives as well that I may use within our upcoming workshops as we establish our program strategies.
In your experience, what has been the benefit of establishing a clear program vision prior to designing the objectives and course content? What challenges do you constantly find yourself overcoming when working on this vision? Let me know your thoughts!
Soapbox warning. :) Program vision should be evergreen (or close to it). Sometimes it's easy and obvious to define a program vision, and you may have implicitly done so without ever writing it down... I'm looking at you, onboarding programs. "We want to onboard employees who ramp up to productivity quickly." Duh. Other programs take more time and care to define their visions because your stakeholders may harbor some divergent and strongly held opinions. Regardless of how easy and obvious or how headache-inducing and hair-splitting the process of building a vision it, defining your vision helps you overcome future disagreements and changes in the business conditions. When building learning program visions, I've had the best success when I've based my program vision off of my business partners' vision. They need to know where they need to go so that we can build a learning/development vision that lives in the context of that vision. If my stakeholders don't have their own vision for their part of the business, I encourage them to do so. "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." When building the learning vision, I think it's helpful to borrow from positioning in marketing: Any individual product’s positioning lives in the context of the master brand (e.g. Ford/Chevy). Most people spend time thinking on products (Ford/Chevy trucks). We should think about how products live within the brand. Product positioning should build the master brand. If people are talking at the product level, you will never succeed at the master brand. Products need to feed master brand, not fight it. People are familiar with the Ford/Chevy as being dependable vehicles. Ford/Chevy trucks are a subset of that brand. Sure, they can market the trucks as tough and rugged. But at the end of the day, that brand of the "tough, rugged truck" builds and supports the overall Ford/Chevy brand of providing dependable vehicles. Our learning programs and their associated visions need to reinforce our business partners' visions. As we build programs, we'll have various courses within them. If you focus only on the courses and the objectives you need right now, you miss the opportunity to be adaptable to future needs. Having a program vision has given me the flexibility to sunset courses that no longer meet our needs and bring in new classes that align with the vision and meet the business needs without hurting KPIs or my relationships with my stakeholders.
Hey Shaun, interesting question. As I was reading your article, I was asking myself how to determine the difference between objective of a program and vision of a program? How do you define "vision" in this context?