Cense

Innovation to Impact

Do You Need a Chief Learning Officer?

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Innovation is learning transformed into value, by design.

– Cameron Norman, Cense Ltd.

Organizations develop c-suite level roles because of a recognized need for focused strategic action and attention toward a particular aspect of their operations. Finance, Operations, Technology are just some of the areas that have developed into C-level roles and offices in many businesses and non-profits.

What about learning? As with many c-suite portfolios, learning touches everyone in an organization and serves as the fundamental mechanism for resilience, flexibility, and innovation. It’s curious that this role doesn’t exist, which is why we developed it ourselves.

A Chief Learning Officer is someone who is responsible for advancing your organization’s understanding of itself, its innovation activities related to its strategy, and its impact.

Why a CLO?

If your organization is substantially affected by changing markets, social and cultural changes, environmental and health threats, or shifts in human or technological resources, you need a CLO.

Learning is about ensuring you’ve got the sensory capacity to take in what is going on around you to monitor activities inside and outside your organization and within the market. It blends together monitoring and evaluation (M & E) with strategic foresight so you can see what you’ve done, where you are, and where things are going.

A CLO is responsible for not only ensuring you have M & E and trend data but that you use it. The CLO ensures that evidence is brought to the table to guide strategy and support innovation — which is learning transformed into value, by design.

Combined with foresight data, this also means ensuring that your organization calibrates its strategy to suit its needs, changing conditions, and ensures its operations and direction is aimed at the future, not the past. As ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once said about why he was so great at his game: he skated where the puck is going, not where it’s been.

The CLO role focuses the organization on these insights.

Building on Strengths

Lastly — and just as importantly — the CLO is responsible for fostering a culture of learning within the organization. This involves ensuring that the talents and skills within the organization are recognized, that staff are provided with the opportunity to share what they know to increase the capacity of the organization as a whole, and that new knowledge, skills, and insights are brought in from the outside.

This job is about knowledge and skills integration. It’s about getting the return on the investments made on people, processes, and innovation as a whole. It’s getting the very best from your best.

Best of all, any organization can do this and create this role for themselves and place learning on the same level as other c-suite priorities as we enter an age of transformation and change. Be ready.

If you want to establish a CLO office in your organization or want a fractional CLO to serve in this role, contact us. Our CLO service is designed for this and is aimed at supporting organizations in becoming their best through learning.

Three Questions for Evaluative Thinking

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Evaluative thinking is at the heart of evaluation, yet it’s remarkably challenging to do in practice. To help strengthen those evaluative neural pathways, we offer some questions to aid you in developing your evaluative thinking skills.

To begin, let’s first look at this odd concept of ‘evaluative thinking’.

Tom Grayson’s recent post on the AEA 365 Blog looked at this topic more closely and provided a useful summary of some of the definitions of the term commonly in use. In its simplest term: evaluative thinking is what we do when we think about things from an evaluation perspective, which is to say, a point of view that considers the merit, worth, and significance of something.

Like many simple things, there is much complexity on the other side of this topic. While we have many methods and tools that can aid us in the process of doing an evaluation, engaging in the evaluative thinking supporting it is actually far more challenging. To help foster evaluative thinking we suggest asking three simple questions:

What is going on?

This question is about paying attention and doing so with an understanding of perspective. Asking this question gets you to focus on the many things that might be happening within a program and the context around it. It gets you to pay attention to the activities, actors, and relationships that exist between them by simple observation and listening. By asking this question you also can start to empathize with those engaged in the program.

Ask: 

What is going on for [ ] person?

What is going on in [ ] situation?

What is going on when I step back and look at it all together? 

Inquiring about what is going on enlists one of the evaluator’s most powerful assets: curiosity.

By starting to pay attention and question what is going on around you in the smallest and most mundane activities through to those common threads across a program, you will start to see things you never noticed before and took for granted. This opens up possibilities to see connections, relationships, and potential opportunities that were previously hidden.

What’s new?

Asking about what is new is a way to build on the answers from the first question. By looking at what is new, we start to see what might be elements of movement and change. It allows us to identify where things are shifting and where the ‘action’ might be within a program. Most of what we seek in social programs is change — improvements in something, reductions in something else — and sometimes these changes aren’t obvious. Sometimes they are so small that we can’t perceive them unless we pause and look and listen.

There are many evaluation methods that can detect change, however, asking the question about what’s new can help you to direct an evaluation toward the methods that are best suited to capturing this change clearly. Asking this question also amplifies your attentive capacity, which is enormously important for evaluation in detecting large and small changes (because often small changes can have big effects in complex systems like those in human services).

What does it mean?

This last question is about sensemaking. It’s about understanding the bigger significance of something in relation to your enterprise. There can be a lot happening and a lot changing within a program, but it might not mean a whole lot to the overall enterprise. Conversely, there can be little to nothing happening, which can be enormously important for an organization by demonstrating poor effects of an intervention or program or, in the case of prevention-based programs, show success.

This question also returns us to empathy and encourages some perspective-taking by getting us to consider what something means for a particular person or audience.  A system (like an organization or program) looks different from where you sit in relation to it. Managers will have a different perspective than that of front-line staff, which is different for clients and customers, and different yet from funders or investors. The concept of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ is judged from the perspective of the viewer and a program may be wildly successful from one perspective (e.g., easy to administer for a manager) and a failure from another (e.g., relatively low return on investment from a funder’s point of view).

This question also affords an opportunity to get a little philosophical about the ‘big picture’. It allows program stakeholders to inquire about what the bigger ‘point’ of a program or service is. Many programs, once useful and effective, can lose their relevance over time due to new entrants to a market or environment, shifting conditions, or changes in the needs of the population served. By not asking this question, there is a risk that a program won’t realize it needs to adapt until it is too late.

 

By asking these three simple questions you can kick-start your evaluation and innovation work and better strengthen your capacity to think evaluatively.

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash