EA Voices

According to a recent survey by McKinsey,  “the great majority of our respondents expect corporate learning to change significantly within the next three years”.

It seems that whatever the topic of the survey, middle managers and management consultants always expect significant change within the next three years, because this is what justifies their existence.

In this case, the topic is corporate learning, which McKinsey recommends should be done “at the speed of business”, whatever that means. (I am not a fan of the “at the speed of” cliche.)

But what kind of change is McKinsey talking about here? The article concentrates on digital delivery of learning material – disseminating existing “best practice” knowledge to a broader base. It doesn’t really say anything about organizational learning, let alone a more radical transformation of the nature of learning in organizations. I have long argued that the real disruption is not in replacing classrooms with cheaper and faster equivalents, useful though that might be, but in digital organizational intelligence — using increasing quantities of data to develop and test new hypotheses about customer behaviour, market opportunities, environmental constraints, and so on — developing not “best practice” but “next practice”.