If You Don't Know Where You're Going, Any Road Will Take You There: Lessons on e-Learning Strategy from the Chesire Cat
By Lance Dublin

Many of us were brought up with the famous Alice in Wonderland story. We were enthralled and amused, and often quite taken with the antics of the Chesire cat. He seemed so crazy yet made so much sense! Well, I believe the Chesire cat was indeed on to something that has meaning for us today.

Organizations today are faced with many e-learning choices. Synchronous or a-synchronous courses. Blended or self-paced programs.  Courses or job aids.  Hosted or in-house. LMS or LCMS. And, the choices go on and on.  It's often difficult to separate out fact from fiction and myth from reality. Therefore, decisions are often made for decisions sake. The road taken is often just the one that is best sold, the cheapest in cost, or the easiest to get agreement on.  

Successful organizations though take heed of the Chesire cat's insights. They use the following nine-step process to develop an e-learning strategy.  This process ensures they are clear both on where they are going and how they will get there.

These are the nine-steps and a few key points to remember.

Step #1: Discover
It's imperative that your e-learning strategy support the overall business or organization strategy. To do this, you need to discover how your organization works and what's important to it today. And also, how it will work in the future and what will be important to it then.  Think like an MBA and not a trainer.

Step #2. Envision
In order to generate support and enthusiasm, you need to define a compelling vision. 'On-time performance' or 'Right Knowledge at the right time in the right way' are good examples. Please note, cost reduction is not one. Cost reduction is a benefit. But, it does not inspire or excite. Everyone wants things to be as cheap as possible. 

Step #3. Analyze
It's important to analyze the gaps between where your business or organization is today and where it needs to be in the future. In business school this is simply called doing a 'gap analysis'.  Although for each organization what you will look at may be different, general categories include: culture, technology, governance, leadership, content, and systems.

Step #4. Understand
Every day there are more and more choices to choose from. New technologies come to market. New suppliers appear. New tools are available. It's important to understand your choices and make informed decisions that work for today and are aligned with your future directions.

Step #5. Define
You must define your e-learning strategy based on a scaleable architecture in order for it to meet your needs today as well as into the future.  In all likelihood, the initial focus of your strategy will be on being more efficient at what you currently are doing, on saving time and money. You will then be able to focus on being more effective; on ensuring the learning is tied to business needs and metrics, and that it makes a business impact. And, finally, you'll be able to plan on how to leverage learning to create value and ensure competitive advantage.

Step #6. Enlist
No matter how motivating your vision and well thought out your strategy, you will still need to enlist the support of senior decision-makers and key influencers.  You will need to develop a business plan, written in business language, that addresses the business (or service) benefits of your strategy. And, since you most likely will need to build a consensus among key stakeholders, you'll also need to develop a marketing plan to make sure your strategy is well presented and understood.

Step #7. Plan
No strategy implements itself. The truth is quite the opposite. e-learning is a big deal because it represents a change that ripples through an organization. And, change is always a big deal to adults with most of us reacting to it based on only 30% logic and 70% emotion. With e-learning we are changing the process of learning in an organization. And, by definition, the technologies, management systems and structures, competencies and culture will be changed. Our choice then is whether to try to manage these changes, or ignore them and just let them happen.  An effective e-learning implementation strategy is therefore one of the critical success factors.

Step #8. Implement
Getting your e-learning to work -completing the installation - is really only the first stage in being successful. And, is the easiest.  It's the next two stages, implementation and finally integration that are the really difficult ones. You know you've succeeded at installation when you e-learning runs error-free. You know you've succeeded at implementation when your targeted audiences are accessing what you've developed. But, getting to the next stage, integration, is the hardest. You know you've succeeded at this stage when your e-learning is invisible. 

Step #9. Learn
To be successful you need to be in continual and over-lapping cycles of preparing, launching and sustaining. And, within each of these cycles you must be in process of learning - planning - developing - implementing - supporting - learning. Almost as soon as you have done the preparation and launched Version 1.0, you should begin the preparation for Version 2.0. And, in parallel, you need to be working within the organization to sustain the initial momentum. This is then repeated with Version 2.5 or 3.0 and on and on.

Clearly, being successful with e-learning is not magic. There isn't one strategy that fits every business or organization.  e-Learning enables you to not only change your current learning processes to be more efficient and more effective. But also, it enables you to literally transform the performance of your workforce and your organization as a whole. This is big stuff and therefore requires the best thinking from the best people inside and outside your organization. And, it means you need to heed the sage advice of the Chesire cat. Good luck!

Lance Dublin has been an advocate for innovative approaches to learning and change throughout his career.  He went from designing a weeklong 'Experiment in Free Form Education' program in high school to co-founding one of the nations's first fully accredited 'University Without Walls'. Lance is now an independent management consultant based in San Francisco, California. He specializes in corporate learning and change management. His emphasis is in strategy development, program design, and change implementation. He brings to his work more than 30 years' experience in adult education and training, communication and change leadership, and motivation and innovation.  Lance can be reached by email at:  ldublin@pacbell.net or by visiting his website:  www.lancedublin.com.