Precision begets precision...Sloppiness begets.....

You probably guessed that last word...

Let’s start with this premise and see how you like it - no one, and I mean no one, has ever produced, sold, or managed learning. You can produce content. You can build that content into a coherent curriculum. You can train people. OK…let’s try the other way…have you ever been in a class or a lecture or a workshop or a conference session and walked out having learned nothing? Wait. How did that happen? The point is, we as a #learninganddevelopment and/or #training industry are awfully imprecise in our language.

Why is language important? Imprecise language has created problems like spawning an entire industry selling something called a “learning management system.” They’re really content management systems or completion tracking systems - the only learning management systems are firmly lodged between our ears. It would be a reasonable question though, once you’ve spent all that money on an LMS to be shown how it manages learning wouldn’t it? It doesn’t though. “e-Learning” is another kettle of fish but I’m almost OK with it because it denotes a medium or a channel. So now we’ve created a product family that can’t show what’s in its name.

This imprecise language has also fooled us into thinking that “learning” is what we give to people. This leads to some people thinking that orgs need us because without us, how could they be learning? People learn every day in a multitude of ways that do not include the work you or I do. People would go on learning, would figure things out on their own if entire departments disappeared. It would be different sure but it (learning) would go on. So now we have products that don’t do what their name implies and we have whole orgs that are in the same boat. Instructional Design is actually a much more accurate name. But if we used that name, then we couldn’t have LMSs, or micro-learning or nano-learning, which are literally just descriptions of sizes of content. I almost forgot we couldn’t be selling game-based learning since that really just described a delivery mechanism for content that may or may not be built with training or instructional design in mind. I know I’m not changing a vocabulary overnight but before I hop off my soapbox…one more thought.

We, the Imperial We to include Training and L&D orgs etc, wonder why we can’t get a seat at the table. One reason is that until we change 800 year old double entry bookkeeping, the only way we can account for employees on a balance sheet is as liabilities or costs and you don’t invest in costs, you reduce them (that’s why if any company ever says ‘people are our biggest asset’ - run - they’re lying by definition). The other reason is that if I ask 10 different “learning” teams how they justify their costs, I’ll get 12 answers. If I ask Sales - I get one answer. Marketing can quantify their value. Even innovation teams can count number of ideas generated and number of ideas moved into production. What does the “learning” team peg their value on? Performance? Retention? Even customer training/education teams can quantify their value in terms of contact hours or downstream impact from clients that have used their content. And yet we wonder why we can’t get the respect we think we deserve from senior leadership (and to be clear, I think we deserve it too).

I’m sorry if you’ve read this far thinking there’s a big answer that I have, I apologize - I don’t have the big answer. I will continue to argue that WE (the Imperial again) can provide a service that can be a critical competitive differentiator for our companies. We won’t start making real headway as an industry (I’m in no way discounting the heroic efforts of individuals who have made progress in their orgs) until we get some consensus on something as basic as language to describe our products or the value we deliver (oh and change that accounting system too). Thanks for coming to my rant - I’ll see myself out.