The Learning Value of Opportunity

Do you stop at a red light while driving?

Have you ever held the door open for someone?

These are motivationally-based actions - Our motivation for stopping at a red light is our own safety, and of course, we always want to do the right thing, so we hold doors open. These motivations are powerful, and deeply developed. Which leads me to the other half of opportunity, motivation.

Motivation is the key to learning.

With that, let's start on "opportunity", a topic I promised to discuss in my last blog post, but sadly neglected.

Opportunity for learning is much more than simply fitting pieces of a learning solution together. When there is an opportunity for learning, there is inevitably motivation behind it. The opportunity to engage with learners and create a learning solution to help an organization is nothing without the motivation of others behind it: The combination of motivation and opportunity takes institutionalized learning from a fad that a company might try once to a regular process that improves employee morale and corporate standard stewardship.

There are a number of distance and e-learning courses that deal with on-boarding, required information for new hires to do their jobs: Everything from where the photocopiers are to the process behind performance evaluations, health and safety measures and legal compliance standards in an organization. These are necessary, and many organizations see them, particularly the latter two as an exercise in risk-management, so the information is presented in as cut-and-dried a manner as possible to clearly delineate that the organization has fulfilled its legal requirements in training its employees.

I worked with Company X, involved in the oil and gas industry, whose representatives decided that they wanted their learning solution to change corporate culture to value health and safety above all other priorities. It was their health and safety metrics that ensured they received contracts for work; a safe company reflects well on its stakeholders and prospective clients, after all. As a result, a number of different stakeholders from various levels of the organization were invested in the look, feel, and sound of their learning solution: They didn't just want to take the opportunity to provide learning to their employees and stakeholders, they were motivated to make a change to the organization. In this case, as important as performance metrics are, the real change comes from a shift in the corporate culture to embrace safety regulations holistically throughout the organization.

In the first few organization-wide run-throughs of their LMS-mounted learning solution, there weren't many organizational ripples, and the frustration mounted. Until one of the learning solution administrators saw a new hire who took the course taping a number of electrical cords to the floor, and putting brightly-coloured strips of tape 6" away from the cords themselves. When asked, the employee responded "In the safety course, they point out the importance of putting a hand or foot near obstacles so you're aware of where they are. The bright tape is there so people can put a toe on it and know where the tape is."

A small measure, perhaps. To me it was a clear indicator that the lessons learned were swimming upstream, so to speak.

Learning solutions can fill gaps in an organization's knowledge, that's what they do well. They can also motivate change in a company from the ground up, fostered from the top down. With the right motivation and the right opportunity, there is very little that a concerned group of individuals cannot accomplish.