Throughout my book The New Learning Architect I take time out to look at real-life examples of great learning architects in action. Next up is Charles Jennings, who believes firmly in the power of social and experiential learning at work, and has successfully applied these beliefs within the complex and fast-moving environment of an international news agency.

Charles Jennings originally went in to Reuters (now Thomson Reuters), the world’s largest international multimedia news agency, in 2001 as a consultant, tasked with drawing up a new learning and development strategy. His client liked the approach and, as in what Charles describes as “every consultant’s nightmare”, he was asked to come aboard and implement what he had recommended.

Assessing the situation
Charles joined an organisation with a unique profile, employing more than 18,000 people, including 2,500 editorial staff, journalists, photographers and camera operators, and offices in 200 cities in 94 countries. Reuters is the largest provider of content to the internet and supplies data on almost one million shares, bonds and other financial instruments. It updates its financial data at 8,000 times a second (23,000 at peak) and publishes approximately 30,000 headlines and over eight million words every day.

He set about finding out what was currently being spent on l&d. He discovered that when all the hidden costs were taken into account, actual costs were much higher than was previously thought. Charles describes how the regional training operations were run as “fiefdoms, all in competition with each other. There were no standards and massive duplication of effort. Little was shared.”

Charles identified six issues which needed attention:

1. The lack of a coherent global learning strategy.
2. A lack of accountability – the supply and demand of learning services were separated organisationally and in budget terms.
3. No ability to gather global management information, including costs.
4. A lack of consistent standards – many different approaches to analysis and design of learning solutions.
5. A drive for volume rather than value – essentially they were running a training fulfilment service. Charles describes this as a ‘conspiracy of convenience’: performance analysis is not done or done poorly; business managers want ‘training’; training managers deliver it; no-one measures it.
6. The lack of a global vendor management strategy, leading to inefficiencies in procurement and inconsistencies in learning outputs.

Charles set up a global learning function, with the aim of developing a common infrastructure – in terms of both structure and systems – and common standards for stakeholder engagement, learning and technology. To steer this new global initiative, Charles took the important step of establishing a company learning governance structure, as embodied by a Learning Advisory Board.

Charles knew that this body needed to be populated primarily by key stakeholders in l&d, not by HR and training people. In spite of its name, this group was not just advisory; it was responsible for decision making. As an example, Charles presented compelling evidence to suggest that moving some aspects of l&d online would not impact on effectiveness. As a result, the group made a clear decision: if the requirement was concerned with knowledge acquisition, then they wouldn’t try and meet it in a classroom. As Charles emphasises, “It is better that decisions like these come from stakeholders, not from l&d.”

The group set out four key challenges:

1. To build a world-class l&d service more closely aligned with business strategy and priorities.
2. To embed best practice processes in all l&d activities across the company.
3. To provide fast, effective deployment of mission-critical skills and knowledge.
4. To support the business in managing budgets and vendor relationships more efficiently.

One of the first priorities was to push accountability back to the line with functional rather than regional heads and a small central co-ordinating unit. The change in culture was emphasised by changing all job titles from ‘training’ to ‘learning’, emphasising the new role as enablers rather than providers.

Learning is a process, not an event
Charles made extensive use of the 70:20:10 model (sometimes referred to as the Princeton University Learning Process) to shape Reuter’s learning architecture. This maintains that 70% of learning at work takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, 20% through interacting with and observing others and receiving feedback, and 10% from formal training. In other words, a large proportion of learning is experiential in nature, as we are defining it in this book.

Charles acknowledges that these proportions cannot be applied rigidly and that different balances might be needed at different stages in a person’s career. He also foresees a shift to something like 45:45:10 if greater use is made of social media within organisations: “Learning is always social. This was at the heart of our approaches at Reuters and our use of learning technologies. Where there is maximum collaboration among learners and where employees can easily capture and publish best practices, then the community as a whole can re-use and leverage its intellectual capital.”

The learner is at the heart of this approach, able to access libraries and knowledge bases, communities of practice, experts and coaches, collaborative learning environments, mobile performance support tools and classroom training.

As Charles explains, “We learn through experience, through conversations, through practice and through reflection. These are the criteria by which to assess any design for any learning solution.”

Charles Jennings is the Managing Director of Duntroon Associates, a leading learning and performance consultancy company, focused on helping organisations build their ability to deliver maximum business benefit from their workforce. Charles is also a member of The internet Time Alliance, a think-tank of leading practitioners helping organisations ‘work smarter’ through informal and social learning.
From 2002 until the end of 2008 he was the Chief Learning Officer for Reuters and Thomson Reuters where he had responsibility for developing learning and performance strategy and leading the learning organisation for the firm’s 55,000 workforce. He is a leading thinker and practitioner in learning and development, change management, and performance improvement.