How to Build a Good Enterprise Learning Strategy

The purpose of building a learning organization is to unlock the full potential of the business.


Learning at the organizational level is strategic because it impacts the firm’s long term surviving and thriving. Thus, learning strategy should become an integral part of the business strategy which enables top management to identify crucial learning related issues, set guidelines, prioritize, and take actions to solve well-defined problems and improve the overall organizational maturity.

Diagnose learning related issues: Digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment, ride learning curves to get into actions in creative, positive, and productive ways that educate, support, and celebrate every critical step of the business transformation journey. To develop a good enterprise learning strategy, it’s crucial to diagnose learning related issues such as learning inertia, learning curve awareness, or learning disability, etc, and further dig into the root causes such as close mindset, static and stale culture, or bureaucratic management style, etc.

It is also important to identify the gap between knowledge and insight, help digital leaders and professionals not become overwhelmed by the exponential growth of information and abundant knowledge, apply learning, act, observe the consequences of their actions, and make continuous improvement.

Digital gaps may be defined as the difference between “the way things are” and “the way they should be.” The easiest gaps to identify are those relating to learning and knowledge. The business becomes more successful when the corresponding learning curve has reduced uncertainty to the point where both the strategic synergy and organizational interdependence can be structured and learning gaps can be closed seamlessly to improve the organizational learning intelligence.

Set guidelines: Digital encourages learning, autonomy, and innovation. That means the guiding principles, in fact, become more crucial to be defined as core criteria and behavior guidelines to encourage learning and practice a multifaceted digital management discipline. It could also mean less restrictive rules or bureaucracy, break down silo thinking and keep information and knowledge flow seamlessly and inspire learning and growing continually.

In fact, setting guiding principles for organizational learning is not to manipulate “how,” but to clarify “why” first. Create a shared framework which will lead to shared learning and meaning. Some general enterprise knowledge management and learning principles include:

-Learning needs to become the digital mantra; and knowledge needs to be managed more systematically.

-Learning is a human problem and not a technological problem.

-Digital learning should become more informal, interactive, and adaptive.

-You can't resolve 21st century learning and Knowledge Management problems with the mindsets shaped half a century ago

-Continue to learn so you can keep improving.

Manifest the competitive learning “logic” of the business: Collective learning is the secret source to foster a culture of innovation and drive a company’s long-term success. A learning strategy is the organization's competitive learning "logic" manifested through organizational cultures and actions. It’s critical to build a culture to encourage learning, creativity, and align the employees' professional goals with the strategic business goals of the organization.

It is imperative to improve the knowledge management which involves the use of technologies and processes with the aim of optimizing the value that is generated, and with the goal to explore the breadth and depth of knowledge, its prospects and practices and improve organization’s collective learning capabilities and ultimate business competency,

Develop the creative learning formulas: Technology is a cornerstone of digital businesses of any size nowadays. Thus, creative learning can enforce trust relationships within the organization. People want to grow, develop and learn, The digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations. 

Try to create a subsystem (team) that leverages experiences, understandings and meaning and develop the creative learning formulas.You need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, more importantly, you have to create new knowledge, more frequently replace the out of date knowledge in order to do things in a better way for solving either existing or emergent problems creatively. Some interesting learning formulas include:

(Topics + RightwaytoInform*HelptoLook Intelligent)=C-Level Success

Topics = (Buzz Topics = Systems Scalable + Data Mining + Reliable + secure)

HelptoLook Intelligent = Right Topics + Buzz phrases + examples

The purpose of building a learning organization is to unlock the full potential of the business. A good learning strategy can help the business diagnose the common learning disability issues, make an objective assessment of learning curves, set guidelines for collective learning, fine tune the learning organizational structures and processes and improve the overall learning maturity of the organization.

Posted in: Learning,Strategy