Organization Change and Blended Learning
By Ceil Tilney

As the following examples show, the biggest struggle you'll face in implementing blended learning is managing the supporting organization change.

A global technology company I recently worked with, licensed a large online library to support its new competency model, as part of its effort to transform corporate performance through new learning models. In two years, less than 1% of the intended employees had accessed e-learning.

Another client, a large professional services firm, invested over one million dollars in online performance tools to support a 6-week new employee orientation. The program was distributed to fewer than 200 people before it became obsolete.

In contrast, a global medical systems manufacturer whose efforts I supported completed a successful program to convert its classroom-based field service training to a combination of classroom and online training. Following the conversion, the company reported improvements in field service readiness among employees who used the organization's new learning model.

By linking individual and organization development, each of these clients set out to strengthen what Robert Dilworth (1995) calls "the DNA of the learning organization," to integrate learning deeply into work. What set the medical systems manufacturer apart was that it approached blended learning as an organization change project. They applied OD principles - clearly articulated communication strategies, systems thinking, structured change management, and executive commitment - to ensure success.

Blended Learning
"Blended learning" is any combination of content and media that supports the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Examples of blended learning include:

* Classroom instruction plus self-paced web-based training.
* Online instructor-led training (via an interactive online platform like Centra, WebEx, NetMeeting, etc.) combined with offline self-study from books.
* In-person, classroom instruction supplemented by online-enabled, follow-up meetings.

Companies adopt blended learning to use training resources more effectively, to reduce costs associated with training, and to get better business results from each training dollar. But companies that thrive through blended learning go beyond the training-centric benefits.

If knowledge is an organization's oxygen, successful organizations use learning program execution to make knowledge sharing as natural, immediate, and useful as breathing. The result: a more cohesive culture, more rapid acceptance of change, more quickly acquired skills, and, ultimately, more business success.

It's important to recognize the magnitude of organization change that blended learning requires. Traditional learning isolates learners from the workplace where their learning will be applied, often spoon-feeding them predetermined topics, in a predetermined order, lasting a predetermined amount of time. Blended learning asks learners to take charge of their own learning, and that's a big change. The benefit is that a workforce actively engaged in its own learning is a powerful agent of improved corporate performance. Successful blended learning projects include strategies for preparing learners, and their organizations, for this change.

Using new learning models to drive organization change requires planning learning program execution from the beginning. The following sections present a way to approach your strategy for implementing the change required to support blended learning.

1) Identify Who Has to Change

The first step in any good change strategy is identifying who it impacts. While each organization is unique, at least some of the stakeholders will be impacted -- as indicated in the table below:

You may not need an explicit strategy to support the way each group manages the move to blended learning. But you do need to consider how they are likely to react. Assume that even the best program will fail if just one of the stakeholders obstructs deployment.

2) Decide What Each Group Stands to Win and Lose

A convenient way to evaluate the impact that your blended learning program may have on stakeholders is to evaluate what each stakeholder stands to win and lose from the change. This analysis can be informal - your best guess of how stakeholders will perceive the advantages and disadvantages of the new approach. If you expect a lot of resistance, a more exhaustive analysis of wins and losses is in order.

Here's how the analysis of each affected group looked for the medical systems company I mentioned earlier. First, the company estimated how the change in learning might impact each group. Sample list:

The "Advantage" column suggested how to sell the new approach. The "Drawback" column told the learning development team what their learning change management programs absolutely had to address.

3) Develop a Program to Communicate the Wins

After identifying what each stakeholder group stands to win from blended learning, build a communication strategy to inform them of the change and its benefits. The table below presents an example of what a communication strategy can include, based in part on how the medical systems company rolled out its new blended learning solution.

Your company's standard practices for communicating new programs will dictate which elements you choose. In the example above, the blended learning initiative's project manager (PM) took responsibility for making sure the owners of the different communication pieces produced their deliverables on time.

4) Develop a Program to Address the Perceived Drawbacks of Blended Learning

Communicating the advantages of a new program is a relatively straightforward process - most readers will have identified the strategy above as a fairly traditional marketing communication strategy, albeit one which uses a few new media. When it comes to overcoming people's objections, your task is more complex.

For the most part, people's reluctance to embrace blended learning is grounded in valid concerns. Your task is to convince sceptics that you've anticipated their objections, developed strategies for overcoming them, and have a plan to help stakeholders benefit from the new model with few, or none, of the costs. Here's an excerpt from the medical systems company's mitigation strategy for overcoming resistance to blended learning:

Depending on the scope of your blended learning effort, you will encounter more or fewer sources of resistance. So long as you communicate early with each effected team, and so long as they believe that you take their concerns seriously, you can turn the chore of overcoming their objections into an opportunity to win allies to your cause.

5) Engage Stakeholders in Building the Solution

Once you've persuaded stakeholders that your new learning model is worth trying, one more step goes a long way to ensure they'll take action: Identify a way to engage them in building the solution.

A common approach is to engage stakeholders in the solution design via questionnaires, pre-development needs analyses, etc. Unfortunately, these early-stage activities are typically so far removed in time from program deployment that they have little impact on program acceptance.

Instead, put a stakeholder-involvement activity into your project plan no more than two months before the final program launch. The activity could be a pilot, providing stakeholders a chance to interact with a sample of the final results. Or, if that's not feasible, use a tantalizing peek at your program to market it to stakeholders, much as book publishers or record producers or entertainers go on the road to create enthusiasm for their upcoming book, album or film release.

The technology client who had limited success with its off-the-shelf, web-based training did have success in one area: They used stakeholder marketing to execute more effectively on a large, custom performance management initiative in its corporate HR organization.

In this project, the company created online performance support tools to help the high-potential cadre of employees learn to master the new performance management process. The online performance support tools included self-paced, web-based training that high-potentials accessed from the online performance management software the company had also designed.

Since employees were being asked to master the new process, the new online tool, and a new online way of getting training on the tool, the project's management team knew it would be important to prepare employees for success.

The stakeholder marketing they created worked like this:
1. The project team included a small, dynamic piece of online content to introduce the project, and sent that content as an email attachment to stakeholders two months before the project was scheduled to end.
2. Immediately after the marketing email, the HR leadership team went on the road for 6 weeks to introduce the coming changes to the company's performance management process. As part of the presentations they gave in every region, they presented samples of the as-yet-incomplete online learning to illustrate the new program and introduce the learning tools clients would have.
3. While the road show was still in process, the project managers in charge of the learning initiative ran a series of online seminars for the HR leadership in the regions around the world.

The seminars were designed to get feedback from the HR leaders and give them early practice in using the online tools, so that they would feel competent to work with their teams when the full project rolled out. The more important goal was to enlist the HR leadership's support by making them feel part of the process.

The project managers were careful to provide easy-to-use templates so the leadership teams would actually provide feedback. The project managers also communicated to everyone who had attended the seminars what feedback had been received and how they had incorporated it.

The follow-up communication was critical, as it prevented people from feeling that their input had been ignored. It also gave the project managers the chance to solicit feedback on the program overall. When HR leaders provided positive feedback - which the overwhelming majority did - the project team used their support to further enhance the reputation of the program.

The result of this attention to stakeholder involvement was a smooth deployment of the program, its learning, and tools. In fact, the actual execution of the entire program was almost anti-climactic. Stakeholders were prepared to use the new tools, and prepared to support them.

Conclusion

You've probably noticed that analyzing resistance to blended learning opens up larger issues. It's understandable that project teams under pressure to create new programs on aggressive schedules might be reluctant to entertain the broader cultural and organizational implications of their work.

Yet each company cited in this article discovered that, properly handled, addressing these issues made learning and OD stronger players on their corporate teams. Properly deployed, blended learning initiatives can increase the visibility of OD, erase the view of OD as separate from the 'real' work of the organization, and affect real, visible, profitable transformations in customers, partners, vendors, and employees.

This article was published in Link&Learn newsletter, published by  Linkage, Inc.

Ceil Tilney is the Regional Vice-President for the Western Region at Linkage, Inc., an OD company specializing in Leadership Development. Ceil specializes in performance management and technology, building learning strategies, and stakeholder management.

References
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Dilworth, Robert (1995) "The DNA of the Learning Organization," in Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow's Workplace Portland, OR: Productivity Press.
Forum Group (2002), "e-Learning: Adoption Rates and Barriers," The Forum Report .
Forum Group (2002), "e-Learning: Approaches to Implementation," The Forum Report.
McLagan, Patricia A. (2002) "The Change Capable Organization," T&D.
Schank, Roger (1998) Virtual Learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.