Of you. Thank you. So the the approach to thinking about strategic business partnering is because we fundamentally get it wrong in terms of what we're trying to do. We try and talk strategically, but actually we don't what we should be doing is thinking strategically but acting tactically. Okay, so let me draw we're going to draw a triangle. So you draw a triangle, pretty much an equilateral triangle, pointing upwards, like so, halfway across. Draw a line and then complete that as a second triangle. So effectively, it's a triangle inside the triangle. And what you have is four triangles. We go to the very top one. This is strategy. And strategy goes at the top simply because we seem to assume that that's where it should be. It sits at the top of the organization. Now what is interesting is different functions will have different strategies, but there will be a business strategy within the organization, central box, or the central triangle, sorry, is tactical and strategic. If you imagine if you were to put your hands under your nose and look around, that's strategic. See, don't worry about what's happening down here. You're looking ahead around and about tactical is like wearing blinkers. You put them up. And so I'm going, I'm focusing on this, but all the way through, so I have an understanding of what's happening here. And that's the tactical approach. Bottom left hand, box is ops. Triangle. I keep saying box the bottom left hand, triangle is operational. And that is the imagine the hands have gone from being blinkers to being now in front of your face. So they are now. This is the operational activity that has to happen, and the focus is short term on the things that we need to do. And lastly, bottom right hand triangle is transactional, and that's where you've got the hands in front of your face, and you're counting. How many fingers are there? What we do in lnd, and this is the conspiracy of convenience, as identified by Charles Jennings, is there is strategic intent in the organization. There's something has to happen. We want to improve in performance. And so in terms of strategy, they go to you as a learning function, and say, fix this problem. And what we do is we create an operational activity, a training course, an E Learning Module, work guide that we expect people to complete in order that we will then see the performance improvement to validate what we do. We then roll this thing out, drive people towards it and say, go and do the thing. We did the thing you wanted, the thing to improve stuff. Here's the thing. Go and do this thing. Go on this course. Complete this healing with your laughing. Shannon, I know because you get this do the thing, complete the thing. Let's get the data confirming the thing. And then what we do is we feed that data back up into the strategic space. So the senior managers come to us and go, we wanted you to improve management. And we went, look at the brilliant courses we did. Look at these classes, look at these workshops, look at the ratings we got. They're amazing, but fundamentally, nothing has changed because it wasn't a course that was needed in the first place. What we should be doing is working inside this triangle. So assume, from strategy we're working inside the triangle. There's going to be a line that runs inside from strategy to tactics. So when someone comes to you effective strategic learning partner and business partner will sit there and go, What is your problem? Help me understand what your problem is. Help me understand from a business performance perspective, how much of it is, is capacity, how much is ability? That's where capability comes from, capacity and ability. So what's the capacity issues? And some of those capacity issues won't be learning and skills related. And the role of the learning function is, then, if we draw a line between tactical and operational is to broker what the appropriate support and solution needs to be. So we end up having conversations and brokering with subject matter experts what is really needed to demonstrate this performance, and we consider it, and we go back to strategic intent and say, Is this what you wanted? And they come back and go, yeah, absolutely, make that thing happen. And then what we do is, then we do our delivery, and delivery is on the line that intersects tactical and transactional. Now we make sure that delivery happens, but our transactional data that we. Get back is within context of other things that are happening within the organization, and then we're feeding back performance related activity to a baseline which has been agreed in advance from a strategic business imperative in the first instance. Does that make sense?
Completely, completely. And I love this drawing, because really what you're saying here is, you know, with the red arrows, that's us working almost outside, right? So that's working outside of the business, versus with the green arrows. Now we're being partners, and we're working within it, yeah,
and this is something we do in Andy all the time. I had a real, really good argument with somebody about this, because I think we talk about aligning with the business strategy. We should never align with the business strategy. We should integrate with the business strategy. Oh,
there's an important designation, isn't it, because
if you're aligned, you are not part of,
Oh, damn Andrew,
don't you love these little words I dropped, don't you love I
do. Oh, that
that's okay, and that's where strategic partnering comes in. You are not aligned with the business. You are integrated with the business, and your conversation is then about the performance of the business, not performance of the learning function.
Wow,
that's the difference. The green arrows are integrated. The Red OS red arrows are aligned.
That's you just blew my mind with that one. You did. You just, you did. Just when I think I've got it nailed, and you come along and make me realize that I'm a neophyte, it's that is just, that's a mind blowing way of looking at it. It really is, and really it's an important that's an important difference. It's small, but really important. It's
is that difference between, are you a separate function, or are you a function that works within the organization? And this is the the ongoing thing everyone talks about, are we getting value from our learning function? Well, value is perceived benefit divided by cost. Now, perceived benefit that you produce is learning data, then your value is learning related. If the perceived benefit is business data divided by cost. Now, all of a sudden, you're producing business value, and that's the shift. If you're aligning, you're only going to work on learning data. If you're integrated, you're working on business data.
That is so true that, you know, and that just shifted. It just shifted the way that I'm thinking and talking. I like to think that I'm doing the things that you're describing, but I need to go back and take some mental inventory, right, and, and I think, Am I really doing those things? I believe I am. But now I really want to be conscious about how I'm thinking about it, you know, am I what am I producing? Am I really driving that integration that I'm hoping to drive, you know? And from a client perspective, it's, yeah, do I want to be, you know, involved, but what happens when I leave? Am I setting the stage up for somebody else to be equally involved in what is happening, right? So, so setting that organization up for success becomes really important. And I love the way that you preface that, because now I'm going to take a different approach to making sure that the organization is indeed set up for success when you know when I leave it,
and that this is where the building capacity part is really important. So again, we do this all the time. We run learning programs for leaders, for example, what do we do to build space for those leaders and those managers to then develop into their role? We don't. We assume that we inject them with an mobility pill, you know, we give them a big bottom of content and assume they can then go and do the job. The whole element is we have to build the capacity, right? So I talk about, there's five elements we have to work on. Okay? So four elements relate to capacity, and one relates to to ability. So the the first element we need to do is our is our strategy, aims and objectives. And are they aligned? Are they clear, concise and absolute clarity that anybody can understand? And that's the first one. Second one is, are our structures and relationships in place in order to make this work? Structures and relationships are different. A structure relates to the roles, relationships relate to people. So do we have the roles in place? And then do we have the people in place? Thirdly, we're still not as skills. We're not talking about skills yet, but thirdly, we're talking about systems and processes and ways of working. What processes and technologies are in work to enable these things to happen? Then. Let's talk about skills. Now we talk about skills, behaviors and attitudes, because then they are a result of and a support to the things that have come before them. The limiting factor, the one round that prevents this stuff happening, is the culture, right? So absolutely, got strategy, structure, system, skills and culture. You can't just work on skills on their own, because you won't shift the culture or the systems might not support it, and people find reasons not to do it. So the skills get wasted. So we pump all the time and energy into the skills when all the other stuff is the the aligned. No, that's alignment, integrated. Looking at brokerage, that's where the brokerage piece comes in. One of the things we did, we were talking about, we were asked by managers to improve sickness absence. Okay, so get the sickness absence down. It's a UK thing. It's not so, yeah, you get it in us, but it's more UK thing. And so what we did is we found out the problem was, is managers weren't logging sickness on the system because they didn't know where to find all the stuff. So we didn't run any courses because they'd already been trained. They've been trained three different ways, you know, find a way to train them, and we'd done it online and face to face and all sorts of things, and it hadn't made a difference. What we did is we made a GIF, a GIF of six images, which we annotated with the login here, click here, click here, boom, boom, boom, and there. Off it went. What happened? The gift got shared everywhere, and everybody then started recording sickness with sickness reporting went up, right? Oh, my God, this is terrible. No, it's not, no. Now you're getting an accurate right happening within the organization, and in terms of informing the culture, massive win for the organization.
I love it. It's then you that's that's just a great example of sometimes we overthink this whole process, you know, and we think about driving, you know, stakeholder value. We talk about performance impact, but sometimes we just talk about it in such high altitude ways, we forget to see that it's little things that we can do that creates that benefit and creates that credibility and trust and relationship that really does underpin what we can do to help make an impact.
I mentioned it in the chat. We worry about busyness with a Y, not business with an i, that's right, and that's the problem. We do loads of stuff really well, but it has zero effect on the organization, because it's the wrong thing to be doing. And it's good stuff in itself, right? Yeah, in absolute terms, it's good. In relative terms, it's meaningless, right, right? And that's the because it's,
yeah, it's sitting, sitting. So when you think about your triangle, it's sitting way out there, like it's the moon,
exactly. Learning, theater.
Learning theater, exactly. I've heard you use that term before, yep. Everybody
can go to it, everybody can look at it, everybody can understand what it is, but it makes not a single difference the organization learning
theater, I love that. It does help. And thank you for spending these extra moments and recording, helping me to record this. Let me stop this now, but I do appreciate it. So for people watching and listening, where can they find you? They'll
find me on LinkedIn. Is probably the easiest place. Andrew Jacobs, L and D are all one word. You can find me on LinkedIn. I post every day. Get about half million views a year on the stuff that I post on LinkedIn. So join in the fun in the conversations on there. Alternatively, you find me@lan.com W, L, A R n.com.
