Despite best intentions, many L&D teams find themselves brought into learning needs conversations too late to provide value. They become "order takers", building learning solutions that were already scoped for them by other stakeholders. This is bad for business: Training is developed without the benefit of understanding the learners' needs or environment, and without the clear line of sight needed to align with organizational goals. The end result is a lot of L&D resources devoted to creating a product that fails to resonate with learners or help the organization meet KPIs. In the meantime, instructional designers get burned out creating programs and products that they know aren't going to make a difference. They lose their motivation, and some might start looking for other opportunities.

In this session, you'll learn how becoming the valuable performance enablement component your team was created to be starts with establishing your identity as a learning experience design (LXD) team that is focused on your learners, not your learning product. We'll explore how you can use tools like learning personas, learning journey maps, and empathy maps to help you realize this mindset by giving you a deeper understanding of your learners. This way, you can meet their needs in ways that are natural to them. We'll demonstrate collaborative mission and vision crafting exercises you can use to build consensus within your team about who you want to be and what influence you will have on your business partners and the rest of the organization, while truly showing love to your learners by leading with empathy. Next, we'll discuss who to enlist from your organization to help communicate and evangelize your identity as a stakeholder in performance improvement and reaching organizational goals and KPIs. We'll discuss how to respond to pushback you might receive from those who might be reluctant to the shift to LXD. Finally, we'll give you some ideas for how to advocate for your team by showing how your early involvement in gap analysis and scoping discussions will benefit your learners, your stakeholder partners, and the organization as a whole to all achieve their goals.

In this session, you will learn:

• The difference between a traditional product-first L&D mindset and a learner-first LXD mindset
• How crafting a mission statement and team goals helps your team to define an LXD mindset
• How incorporating learning personas, learning journey maps, and empathy maps can help realize the change to an LXD mindset
• How to identify key organizational allies for evangelizing your team as stakeholders
• How to communicate that by becoming an early stakeholder, the LXD team helps partners in performance enablement meet their goals

Technology discussed in this session:

Mural/Miro/other whiteboarding applications