Should L&D be renamed the ‘PERFORMANCE Department’?

4 hours agoL&D is a wagon without a horse, with no pulling power or sense of direction. Could a change of focus provide the direction, momentum and horsepower that has been lacking?

Could we rename Learning & Development, as just ‘Performance’, like Marketing, Legal and Finance Departments?  Learning puts too much focus on courses. ‘Development’ is too vague. We must link what we do with measurable outcomes linked to proven performance, productivity and progress.

‘Performance’ puts the individual into the flow of the organisation. we need to foster a work environment where employees feel valued, motivated, and invested in – through their performance, not through a diet of ‘courses’.

A wider perspective seeing learning as performance would link what we do and what needs to be done. The organisation would see results and more sophisticated learning and work solutions related to strategy would emerge.

Linking learning with performance go hand in glove, allowing us to rise above just course delivery into more considered informal and incremental learning, also more performance support, linking inputs with outputs.

Focusing on performance can be challenging and needs a clear causal link between learning initiatives and productivity gains but it can be done.

Of course, we don’t just want ‘faster horses’ as Henry Ford said, we need new different forms of locomotion. The technology of the age is digital and AI. Employees can be more autonomous, self-driven through bottom-up agency.

AI has shown there is an immense thirst among employees for going ahead and doing things faster and better. We use this technology to both learn and get things done, seeing no difference between the two. Learning and doing things faster and better become fused.

In writing something with evidence and import, many use AI to do fast research, write concisely, even critique the proposition. They see AI as a means to an end, the end being solid output.

AI gives us agency to improve ourselves with guidance from the organisation. It fuses learning and productivity, easy to use, fast and motivating. It should be in our domain, our responsibility.

It would also force us to be more data savvy. Forget happy sheets and bums on seats (measures wrong end of learner), let’s get serious with actual evaluative data. AI gives us a data scientist in our pockets – let’s use it.

Of course, AI as just one catalyst for action, there are many others, such as performance support, the wider world of career development, developing strategic skills for future needs and challenges.

The name matters less than the direction of travel. Strategic alignment with organisational goals should be our new goal. It puts an end to those endless discussions about the future of L&D by asking ‘to what problem are we a solution’? We all know it needs to be more performance focused, more relevant, more integrated with the organisation.