#20 🎮💡💎 Podcast notes: Simple explanations of how value is created and exchanged (11/14)
Recently, I've had a nice conversation with Liz Ștefan, the host of the L&D Spotlight podcast. Here's the part where we discussed about simple explanations of how value is created and exchanged (min. 42:11 in the podcast episode).
Liz: It almost sounds like there's an implicit expectation from the L&D professional to be this superhuman who understands all these contexts and is able to get that insightful that they are able to suggest ideas or offer advice or contribute.
And I'm thinking here that probably most L&D professionals can't realistically understand everything in all those worlds that you're talking about. The tech world, the procurement world, the sales world and whatnot.
And I'm thinking that it might seem daunting because to me it would. If I were in a position to understand, just the task of understanding itself, of each of these tiny little worlds, to me it would be a bit scary, honestly, and probably it's time intensive and intellectually quite demanding.
But you can always take it step by step, checking for understanding. "Did I get this right?"
You go back to your L&D bubble and you think an idea based on what you think you understand. Then you go to the world of sales and you ask them: Look, is this something that you feel would add value?
Because it feels like a lot on the shoulders of L&D professionals and this sort of consultancy role, consultancy approach can become very complex very quickly, to the point where so much information could even pollute your ability, as an L&D professional, to bring value.
Bülent: Yeah, so the challenge here is to find what works for you, your L&D team, in your specific context and to find this informational balance, I might say. And an inspiring format for me, related to this. There are some Wired videos on Youtube, where professionals from various areas explain the same thing at various levels.
So they explain it to a small kid, they explain it to a high schooler, to a student, to a PhD, so what I came to realize is that you don't need to understand at a PhD level. You don't need to understand at a level that a Senior Sales, a Senior Developer, or even a mid-level one. So you need to have some working understanding of how that part of the organization creates value.
Ok? So let's take sales for example. In a nutshell, sales understands the market, the needs in the market of the various customer segments and then connects these needs with the offerings of the business. Once they identify various needs at the customer, they are able to decide if the offering, whether it's a product or service, of the business will or will not address those needs in those specific parameters.
This is the core thing. In order to do this, there are enablement activities to create this type of value, such as: relationship development, keeping up-to-date with the products, services to be able to update their understanding.
So this type of very simple explanations of what those people do is many times enough to be able to think: Ok, I'm an L&D and our colleagues in Sales need to have a constant up-to-date understanding of our products and services, that we're developing and offering as the business.
So how could we use learning methods, various types of learning interventions, experiences and all that to be able to help our colleagues in sales do this core thing they need to do, in order to create value by matchmaking with the customers, easier, faster, with less hassle.
So it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. And I can go and explain all the functions that I interacted with, in a business, in a few phrases. But these phrases are the essence of that function, because they are connected to the value. Why does that function exist?
Usually the existential questions are around value. Because if they wouldn't provide value, so that the whole business functions better, or the various parts of the business function better, or the customer get more value, that function wouldn't exist. So you can get to the essence of specific parts of the organization by asking this value question.
Bülent Duagi is a Sr. Strategic adviser for Tech companies and a lifelong learner. He works at the intersection of Strategy, Foresight, Leadership, Org Design, Product and Capability Development. Connect on LinkedIn and learn more by exploring his professional one pager.