A member of a Learning & Development team in a large consultancy was planning to “enhance the usage of their e-learning portal and bring in more awareness about this mode of learning”. He was looking for “material on enhancing an online training mode, and any mailer/ initiative that could help make this a success”.

I found myself feeling moved to offer up some thoughts. Here’s what I said;

Your query / request is easier to answer if you can clarify what “enhancing the usage” means within the context of your current organisation’s project. There are at least four dimensions for enhancing usage - each of which can be addressed uniquely. The dimensions are; quality, frequency, breadth and depth. While these dimensions are of course inter-related, each dimension requires your direct focus if you are going to establish the success metrics by which you can measure your project’s progress and ultimate achievements (and value).

I will hazard a guess and respond to an assumption that by “more awareness about this mode of learning” you are responding to someone’s request to increase the breadth of the “usage” community. So in this response, I’ll speak briefly to expanding usage breadth.

First of all, let me say that I speak from an experience of attracting circa 30,000 users to our digital learning medium out of a target group of circa 50,000 people. While the need for our learning-related work was initially recognised and requested by the Chief Executive, it was entirely up to our own efforts to make a go of it. We had to look to our own devices to attract and then satisfy people interested in learning what our team had expertise in. We soon realised that we could not personally, directly reach out and teach each one of the 50,000 people in our “target zone”. So we began exploring ways to become available via digital media.

Having your eLearning modules available is one thing. Making them attractive to those who come to have a look at them and hopefully use and learn from them is another.

But invoking enough curiosity in them in the first place, so that people decide to come to have a look at them is yet again another challenge - and a primary one. Without enough initial curiosity across your target group, you’ll find yourself recalling the old question, “If a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to witness it, did it make any sound?” In the words of my most recent client, “we need to get loud”.

So you need to ask your self variations of the following question, “What is my target group currently listening out for? What will sound like music to their ears? What will draw them out of the crowd and into my auditorium” Then learn to play that tune, to sing that song, to direct that chorus.  You need to become something like the siren call that causes them to look outside the blinkered pathways they are daily trotting along on. What will cause them to turn their head and look at you and your eLearning portal?

After a number of trials and tribulations, we discovered that for us, the simple answer to those questions was to make sure that the sincere inspiration that our subject matter experts felt about their subjects was conveyed within the modules themselves. Then we did the same within the communications about those modules being available.

And the very best way to capture that inspiration was using video. So our eLearning modules became video-centric and our communications and interactions about the modules being available utilised extracts from the video footage. We provided 45 second teasers of what the experience of each subject matter expert would be like. Over the next few years, 30,000 people came into our port as a result.

I am generally so busy (working hard) running my three micro-organisations that I don’t give myself much space to enjoy the food, music and cultural developments of my own family’s background (let alone others’ backgrounds)

So I have generally been intellectually bemused (at best) by the notion that ‘celebrations’ of cultural heritage / difference would or could make much difference to ‘doing business’. This in its own right has been a cultural (cultivated) bias of my own of course.

The few forays I have had (by invitation) into this type of celebration highlight to me a general one-way mentality - one of “tell me not what a  local culture’s influence on our ‘doing business’ has been, but do tell me how ‘doing business’ has influenced the cultures in the locations where we ‘do business’.

To the degree that leadership is about “energising people”, then to be sustainable in this dimension of leadership is really about helping people locate, access, release, enjoy and benefit from their own sustainable ‘energy source’.

Reflecting further, the human reality (or mine, at least) is that the energy of pleasure (almost regardless of source) improves both personal and collective productivity and thereby group performance capacity as a consequence.

The causative relationship is not logical - it’s physio-logical - and is essentially therefore unstoppable. You only need to consider how your personal life impacts your own work, to see where I am going with this.

You’ve got to explore the subsurface of a person, of a culture if you want to tap into the energy source(s) waiting - and wanting - to be released.

Then you have something to distil, refine and effectively convert into business benefits, to speak in a more financial / shareholder focused language.

Corporate Carnival events go some way towards opening this exploratory and expressive territory for its participants.

Tapping the energy flowing out of these events is an interest to me - especially in relation to amassing a collection of new stories from diverse backgrounds that awaken capacity and promote capability to improve performance in sustainable ways.

I’ve hesitated with blogging as it seemed like it would feel like a burden to have to keep writing. My writing only comes in spurts.

But then, talking with my daughter, I realised that if I didn’t have at least one sharable insight each week, I was in trouble!

My working ethos has been to “fumble forward fast”. And here I was resisting what I just knew would be a fumble first type experience…

So the inner red flags went up and I accepted the plausibility that it was time give myself permission to step into this share-by-typing mode at least once per week.

So I am.