The Big Challenge: helping organisations adapt to a new (virtual) world

The Big Challenge

We’ve never known more challenging times for organisations and their people, pushing human potential to the limits with the immediate need for more effective organisational learning and remote working ability than ever before. It’s a rallying call for greater personal and organisational adaptability, in order to meet the growing and shifting challenges the world faces today. Organisations and their individuals, teams and leaders need to be agile. Learning & Development (L&D) interventions hold the key – but will face their own transformation too.

 

Despite this, budget is now tighter than ever before. With that reality come the skeptics’ calls for organisational budget to be more cautiously spent on than ever before too. It’s a real paradox – to improve organisational strength, and yet (most often) having less ability to invest in people to do so. We hear you. It’s time for L&D to adapt even further than in recent decades. The world needs superhero individuals, teams and leaders. It’s time to step up and unleash these superheroes with more impactful and better value L&D solutions than ever before.

 

Our own research shows personality accounts for up to 19% of job performance. With this, we know personality is a serious predictor of workplace performance, and understanding it is key for successful personal and organisational solutions. Then you throw the current global situation into the mix and suddenly the need for a deepened understanding of people and how they behave is more important than ever for building adaptable and agile organisations capable of thriving during the toughest of times. There have been huge changes to the world of work, whether it be remote working, shifts on organisational strategy or changing job demands, from the most junior roles up to C-suite.

 

 

 

 

The challenge is set, and it’s a battle Learning & Development specialists are destined to help solve. With an expert understanding of human capital and the ability to unlock human potential, L&D teams are primed to create huge impact right now. But one of the biggest global challenges facing L&D teams, and their organisations, is one that existed even before the catalyst of these uncertain times; how do we unlock the potential of people through interventions? How do we maximise the value of investment of L&D interventions, beyond doubt, and make them a cornerstone of organisational growth? These crucial questions can be broken down into three challenges:

 

• How do we deliver learning that lasts a lifetime? To make learning sustainable beyond the initial intervention with better participant engagement than ever before? Achieving learning that becomes part of organisational culture, evolving to meet new emerging challenges, without a longitudinal reduction in impact?

 

• How do we ensure Learning & Development investments are scalable? Are they able to be rolled out across the whole organisation without having to sacrifice quality of learning as the solution grows in size? Or without demanding ever increasing human capital and budget to ensure quality is maintained?

 

• And now more than ever before, is learning remotely accessible? Whether at home, in the workplace virtually, or from a remote working location? How easily accessible are the tools for participants to experience?

 

Let’s break down these three challenges down so we can see what is needed to make Learning & Development solutions the better-than-ever superpower that will help organisations successfully grow and adapt.

 

Sustainability

• Long-term impact is dictated by whether the solution ‘sticks’ within an organisation
• Sometimes learning is forgotten or not updated, or never embedded at all
• Over-reliance on face-to-face workshops, coaching sessions and paper-reports with little focus on Participants owning, interacting with or continuing their development beyond the coach’s active help

 

Scalability 

• L&D solutions require expertise to be rolled out effectively
• The larger the organisation, the more human capital is required
• This is further worsened by a lack of technology which makes the need for human capital and cost even greater
• Spark Coach allows a single Practitioner to run large scale projects, and gives them the technology to do so effectively.

 

Remote Accessibility 

• L&D solutions are practically limited by time and location constraints of getting everyone in the same room
• Even when done virtually, there’s no specifically designed platform to run such virtual offerings. Well, not until now anyway.

 

 

 

 

The Big Solution 

It’s time to reinvent learning and transform L&D as we know it – to create learning without limits. L&D across the world must overcome the traditional limitations in learning and interventions. Gone must be the days of drops in engagement of staff between sessions. No more paper reports gathering dust in desks, often from learning fatigue during large one-off sessions, but maybe sometimes from never being successfully engaged with in the first place. Nor the missed learning opportunities from those crucial development moments when the coach isn’t around to help. Organisations need personal development remotely accessible at the push of a button with self-driven, deeper learning that lasts a lifetime. Coaches need to be able to run more continuous interventions, and likewise more interventions at once than ever before. They need to be able to develop people anytime, anywhere, across any size project.

 

We’ve made the biggest addition to our personality tool, Lumina Spark, since its creation – so you can deliver more sustainable, scalable and remotely accessible solutions than ever before.

 

We spent our first ten years transforming how personality is understood. Now we are transforming how personality is delivered. Spark Coach means you can truly celebrate your people and build better organisations by putting learning into the hands of those you share it with, empowering their individuality and exciting the continuous curiosity to learn and adapt, so you can achieve better organisational outcomes than ever before. Spark Coach allows you to create learning without limits.

 

 

Spark Coach is on a mission 

Give your Participants tools they can take away to self-develop in the workplace and from home – so learning doesn’t have to stop at the end of the workshop. Spark Coach supercharges your L&D by giving your superhero individuals, teams and leaders the remotely accessible and self-driven tools to truly own their learning, empowering their individuality by interactively exploring their personalities with a conversation that never stops. You’ll excite the continuous curiosity for learners to discover themselves, adapting their strengths, evolving their areas of development and ultimately boosting their performance to help solve your organisational challenges. You can support them through every step of the process, or step back and let them take the reigns. It’s all down to you. Whether face-to-face, working remotely or a blend of both, Spark Coach is here to make L&D bigger, better and more effective than ever before.

 

Keep reading to understand how Spark Coach will evolve L&D – forever.

 

 

Three Key Features

 

Patterns of Personality

The Patterns of Personality feature allows you and your Participants to interactively play with their personality, exploring their unique Quality Patterns across the Three Personas. These include their amplifications, hidden treasures, paradoxes and more – all automatically adjusted to reflect their most significant Patterns and create continuous curiosity for self-development. The Quality Patterns reflect strengths as well as possible areas for development using smart data and simple language. This helps guide the Participant’s development journey with easy-to-understand, relatable and precise meaning.

 

Participants can adjust their Quality Patterns to visualise their future potential development. This interactive animation and visualisation of their personality creates the continuous curiosity for personal and organisational change that is both inspiring and practically displayed. Information on the 24 Qualities is provided through in-depth video explainers by Dr Stewart Desson, creator of Lumina Spark.

 

The result is highly deepened engagement with learning creating the continuous curiosity for Participants to learn and means engagement that will make interventions sustainable and scalable across entire organisations whether face-to-face or used remotely.

 

 

Discovery Coaching Questions

Asking questions is fundamental to learning and exploring personality. Participants can choose their most important development areas and answer personalised coaching questions, ensuring they can focus on what really matters – taking genuine ownership of their development.

 

Putting learning into the hands of learners empowers their individuality and shows them as they truly are. And why shouldn’t it? It’s time to celebrate your people.

 

Discovery Coaching Questions are supported by the articulation and achievement of key goals using the GROWS framework. With learning focused on what really matters to each individual, and adaptable to their emerging needs, solutions can stay current and even evolve to new challenges. Learning is continuous, creates the curiosity for more, and is evolvable so sustainability is not only achieved, but grown beyond its initial need.

 

 

Personalised Coaching Guide

Practitioners can view Participants’ coaching answers and goals and generate a dynamically created and Digital Coaching Guide, meaning they can provide direction and support whenever it’s needed. Print it out before your workshop or feedback session to gain a powerful tool that allows you to focus in on the important questions.

 

With this in mind, L&D teams, coaches and Practitioners have the opportunity to transform their role through using the Digital Coaching Guide. You can stay organised in the virtual world and run more customised interventions than ever before whether fully virtual or blended with face-to-face. Anytime, anywhere, any size project.

 

 

Four Powerful Steps for Participants

 

Spark Coach takes Participants through their patterns of personality, discovery coaching questions and a personalised coaching guide. You can guide Participants across these features with four powerful steps to their development journey; identifying key areas of focus, exploring their Qualities , reviewing their coaching questions and helping them set personal goals. Each of the four steps are designed to maximise the quality of development you give your Participants throughout their journey from start to finish. Get as involved in their development as you desire, or simply step back and give Participants total influence over their development. The choice is yours.

 

Maybe you want to introduce performance management to your team. You can use Spark Coach for continuous development, periodically answering coaching questions and GROWS, using them as a basis for all of your performance conversations. The conversation never stops.

 

Or perhaps you simply want to add a new layer of depth to your 1-to-1 coaching. Spark Coach gives you and your coachee their Spark Quality Patterns, dynamic questions and personalised tips, allowing you to skip straight to the questions that really matter.

 

 

 

 

The Journey – 1. 2. 3. 4. 

 

Step 1 – Identify key areas of focus

Participants first identify their key areas of focus based upon their Lumina Spark Portrait provided by their Practitioner. This can come from a range of workplace and job role reflections looking at what the Participant wants to achieve to support them in their role, whether it be continuing a growing strength or identifying an area for development that hasn’t been addressed so much previously.

 

 

Step 2 – Explore Qualities

On the one hand, you have the powerful quantitative trait-based data points linked between the Participant’s Lumina Spark and Spark Coach that will interactively display within Spark Coach enabling the Participant to play with their personality and show them as they truly are.

 

 

On the other hand, the Participant will gain deep qualitative guidance from their Practitioner, who will have helped guide them through their Lumina Spark Portrait, empowering their individuality initially prior to receiving Spark Coach.

 

 

Exploring Qualities is exciting and Spark Coach is designed to make learning self-driven and interactive, meaning you can create the continuous curiosity for learning that ensures impacts have their intended sustainable impact, create deeper engagement to not only solve but evolve to new organisational challenges.

 

 

Step 3 – Review development list

Coaches and Participants can review the developments that emerge from interactive play and exploration during their journey, rounding up and optimising their knowledge that was stimulated from the interactive play and exploration during step 2 where they looked at their Qualities.

 

 

Step 4 – Set personal goals

Knowledge is power. Yes, self-awareness is necessary, but it is not sufficient to create lasting change. Acting on knowledge is where change is really created and recreated so that learning doesn’t stop at the end of the workshop. Participants, supported by their coach, set personal goals to keep their learning accountable and empowering of their individuality. This ensures that the intended outcomes of interventions can be truly achieved.

 

 

 

The future is now

L&D has never been so exciting. Now coaches have the tools to transform people with effectiveness never seen before, addressing the traditional limitations in learning with deeper, interactive and remotely accessible learning. Furthermore, in these times of remote working, coaches will make learning more human than ever, and crucially so. Helping organisations adapt to the current global situation is more achievable than ever before through L&D. It might just be the missing piece of the jigsaw that so many organisations are struggling to solve right now. It’s time for learning without limits.

 

Spark Coach empowers the individuality of those you share it with by putting personal development into their own hands. Now you truly celebrate your people and those you choose to share Spark Coach with, giving them an interactive and impactful experience that excites the continuous curiosity to play with personality, embedding and growing their learning long after an intervention or workshop. Transform your organisation, one human at a time with sustainable, scalable and remotely accessible learning. Discover learning without limits. It’s effortlessly virtual. Interested? Head over to our launch page where you can check out the Q&A on everything Spark Coach.

 

 

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See all our Spark Coach support articles on Knowledge Base to help get you started here.

 

Already a Lumina Learning Practitioner? Premium Subscribers get Spark Coach for free with every Lumina Spark Portrait purchased.