#16 🎮💡💎 Podcast notes: Unlocking strategic thinking (7/14)
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 unlocking strategic thinking (min. 26:39 in the podcast episode).
Liz: Yeah, I realize now from your example that even aligning on the understanding of certain words can play a major role in a company working more smoothly or progressing faster. Just our of sheer misunderstandings about words, you could create a lot of problems.
So I can understand the power and the impact. Ok, very cool.
I want to quickly go back to a thing which I think would be key for L&D becoming strategic to the organization. So when we say that an L&D professional or an L&D function looks at and understands the value and the behaviors of the organization, that is where L&D can actually impact things like productivity, accuracy of work, maybe even satisfaction with the jobs done and so on. Obviously, growth, development, learning.
And I believe that understanding these things, value and behavior, and enabling progress in these two specific areas is what can make the L&D function be strategic. Is that correct?
Bülent: Yes, in the sense that these two, the value and the behaviors, are good starting points.
At the same time, in order to unlock strategic thinking in L&D, what I found in my experience is that the best starting point for being able to think strategically is to able to zoom in, zoom out.
So, to be able to go from the macro level to the micro level.
Let's say micro level is behavior. People doing things (doing is the "behavior" part) in their work life, day by day, week by week, collectively as an organization, they are creating and will create value to the customers, to each other and so on.
Behavior is at this micro level. At the same time, it might be useful to go at the other "zoom out" level, macro level of "Do I understand what our business is doing?". "Do we understand, as the L&D team, what is happening in the markets that our business is serving?" So this ecosystem level view.
Because if you're able to switch from very specific, very micro level understanding and interventions and enablement to this macro, very high level and profound understanding and influencing and enablement.
So, for example, let's say at the macro level, I'm giving this example of data science.
Lots of talk about "data", another overused word. What if we, as the L&D team, discover ways in which our organization can effectively develop its data science capability. So to be able, at the organizational level, to use data science in order to make better business decisions, to anticipate stuff, trends, patterns and everything. This might actually unlock some very strategic things at the macro level.
For example, let's say you are an e-commerce business, operating in a specific geography, but without having this data science capability in your organization. From time to time, you go to various experts, various consultancies to help you with synthesizing, processing and having the dashboards and all that.
What if the L&D team, understanding the macro level, so this ecosystem, markets, collection of markets in which the business operates, is able to figure out that data science would be a very important and strategic capability that would unlock new options for the business and proactively come and influence, lobby, make the case for developing the data science capability in-house.
So, you see, it's useful for thinking strategically to be able to make this jump, usually very fast, from the most macro level to the most micro level. Because strategy as a way forward connects the macro with the micro level. It connects the internal with the external. It connects the present with the future. It's at this intersection or in-between macro-micro, inside-outside.
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.