Sometimes you need to take risks to avoid risk

Last week I chaired the Charity Learning Consortium‘s conference in London. There were some excellent sessions from Sudhir Giri of Google, Iain Napier of British Telecom, Nigel Paine, and Simon Mercer and Kate Graham from Redtray. Each one of the speakers challenged the audience of L&D staff from leading UK-based charities to think differently about the way they manage learning and development in their workplaces, in particular to better harness the potential of social learning and to reduce the dependence on meeting face-to-face.
There’s no doubt that the majority of the audience was convinced of the arguments, but it was also evident from the questions and the outputs from the activities that they were far from convinced that they’d be able to make much impression with putting these ideas into practice. One response came back time and time again to the question ‘what’s stopping you from putting what you’ve learned into practice?’ and that was ‘our organisation is too risk adverse’. Whether this risk aversion is in fact from L&D rather than the wider organisation is debatable but what is not is that the fear of change is a very real barrier.
In normal times we could probably live with the fact that we – or the organisations in which we work – are intrinsically risk averse. We may wish we were a little braver, but at least we weren’t going to fall flat on our faces. The big dipper might look exciting, but for now the roundabout is suiting us just fine. And at a time when resources are being severely constrained and headcount is dropping, it might seem even more appropriate to keep your head down and hope that the problem will pass. But inaction could be your biggest mistake, for a number of reasons:
  • The problem is not going to pass in a hurry. Some forecasters now expect ten years of economic doom and gloom.
  • L&D has to be proactive in dealing with the crisis. If they are not, senior managers will make decisions on our behalf and we won’t like them one bit. You can’t complain if irrational policy decisions are made (such as ‘no face-to-face under any circumstances’ or ‘everything must be self-study’) if you haven’t got in first with a more rational strategy that would have saved a similar sum of money and preserved quality.
  • If the worst comes to the worst and headcount is chopped then those that showed the greatest appetite for change will be the last to go and the first to be re-hired.
The reality is that we have to take risks in promoting new ways of learning, in order to avoid the much greater risk of oblivion and unemployment. I know which I’d rather go for.

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