Adaptive Learning – Mind Mapping

Aoife Farrelly

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Background

My role is developing & delivering Sales learning within the Americas and I’m part of the global sales  learning team.  In 2016 we launched our new global foundational sales program in 7 languages which  was designed with 15 stakeholders and 24 Subject Matter Experts to ensure that any salesperson with  less than 2 years sales experience would take part within the 8 week program that allowed team  members to benchmark themselves, learn the skill, apply within the business before coming back to  learn the next skill.  After launch there was a change by the business that impacted the intended  audience meaning that we had significantly more team members that needed to complete the program  with much more experience and as such the consequence have been: unsustainable volume of delivery,  poor satisfaction results of the learning as 62% are not the intended audience and add to that we have  pushed our LMS to point where we have numerous “Band-Aids” to make it all work.

Challenge (Problem)

Now we are working on designing & developing our next level of learning (intermediate) for a global  audience.  It is essential to understand the personas of the different roles/experiences that the teams  face so we can look at curating, developing and delivering a blended experiential learning environment  that adapts to the individual learner based on their experiences & knowledge.  Before Covid-19 we had  planned a mixture of virtual and in-person experiences and believe that for the next 18 months this will  predominantly virtual but this is still to be decided when we know what wows & works.

Selection & Application

Working with our vendor partner we had a kick off meeting (brainstorming) to understand what we  were looking for.  We used two mind mapping tools (Performance Canvas & an Empathy Map).  For the  Mapping of Empathy we split our activities into the main two categories of team members (on property  & above property)

Adaptive Learning – Mind Mapping

Aoife Farrelly

Page 2 of 2

Insight

The performance canvas was an excellent tool that enable us to have a frank and honest conversation  about what we (stakeholders & learning) were looking for.  There was conscious bias to what we know  and done in the past and our partners challenged our thoughts with what is & what if questions.

The Empathy Map really made us delve deeper from a team member’s perspective although I still  believe we have a long way to go as there was only one person who knew the roles & situations well  enough to provide clarity and insights.

Before moving forward we will need to: Increase sample size for the Empathy Map to ensure we have  captured all the thoughts and refresh both tools with the impact of Covid-19 which may have influenced  some of the priority topics.

Approach

Throughout the program I really liked what is, what if, what wows and what works approach as I believe  our team tends to work more like George and to make the impact that our business and us want we  need to try different thing.  I’m still thinking of the impact of Learning Launch vs. pilot and wondering  how we could use in the future.

