Use learning journeys to develop complex and interrelated skills, invest in personal and professional development, build trust and comfort with experimentation within and across teams, create openness to new mindsets and ways of working, and prepare individuals to support organizational transformation.

Seven Steps to Design a Learning Journey in Your Organization:

1.     Understand organizational goals. A unique benefit of offering a learning journey inside of an organization is that it can be customized and designed for the organization and the results you want to achieve.

2.    Research, design, and empower organizations to understand what their stakeholders and customers care about in order to create meaningful content for a learning journey.

3.    Design a pilot and invite high-performing teams that are already inclined to new ways of working to be the first cohort.

4.    Recruit support from managers and leaders. Involving managers and leaders creates more people who are invested in the success of the learning journey.

5.    Get feedback from learners and their managers both during and after the pilot. 

6.    Iterate on the design of the learning journey by incorporating feedback along the way.

7.    Continue to look for ways to improve the learning journey after each delivery to ensure it is meeting the needs of participants and the organization.

Reach out to us to talk about designing organizational transformation with learning journeys.

Credits and Sources

Contributing authors: Sylvia Raskin, Lauren Broomall

Editor: Peter Moon

Originally written in February 2019

Revised in July 2020

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[2] Pink, D. H. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

[3] Gallup Inc., 2013. State of the American Workplace, Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders Report.

[4] Schrader, M. B., Kotter, J. P., & Buckingham, M. (2016, September 09). Why Leadership Training Fails-and What to Do About It. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-leadership-training-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it

[5] Beer, R. E. (2015, July 13). Why Change Programs Don't Produce Change. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/1990/11/why-change-programs-dont-produce-change

[6] Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

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