Enabling Learning in the Flow of Work
Our client saw learning in the flow of work as a critical unmet need for busy leaders, and their next product opportunity. But before we could start consumer research, we needed define the value this product would add through the lens of a unified brand purpose.
In 14 weeks, we facilitated Purpose workshops, conducted multi-market research and delivered a framework of the learning journey to better understand needs and ideate around value propositions.
New Product Development / Consumer Research / Corporate Learning
creating brand purpose workshop
synthesizing takeaways
leading purpose statement reviews
facilitating interviews
ideating card sort concepts
synthesizing findings & framework
leading experience principles
creating behavioral profiles
defining 9 opportunity areas
I was responsible for...
The Ask
Phase I: Facilitate internal alignment on brand purpose and start to imagine how the business units relate to one another.
Phase II: Use customer research to identify value propositions for corporate learning products that target the needs of the modern and aspiring leader.
Approach
2 purpose workshops
Phase I : Brand Purpose Alignment
Our client wanted to create a new product, but didn’t want to be spread thin between too many ideas. To align all 3 business units and invest in one big idea, they needed to first find common ground in their brand positioning.
To unite our stakeholder groups around a common goal, we started our workshops by asking them to explore a collage of opinions and react to what they saw. Using real quotes from stakeholder interviews, this visual quickly highlighted agreement and disagreement in order to focus the remaining discussion.
Bringing the best ideas to people, throughout their journeys, to unlock the leader within them
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- purpose worksheet response
While each business unit had their own audience and delivery method, our stakeholder groups agreed that their content positioned leaders to do good in the world. However there was a lot of disagreement as to how this might manifest because they were biased towards their own portion of the business.
Phase II : Global Customer Research
Our challenge then became, framing consumer insights in a way that opened the doors to collaboration between the business units, and leveraging the overlapping value of their content.
What are the learning needs of leaders, when do they seek out learning in the workplace and how?
Recruitment (n=28)
Leaders Profiles
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Developing Leader
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Established Leaders
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Expert Leaders
Primary Markets
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United States
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United Arab Emerites
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United Kingdom
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India
Other Considerations
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Industry Diversity
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Gender Diversity
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Racial Diversity
Our clients' internal leadership framework used career stages to understand typical learning needs and how they evolve over time. By leveraging the Developing, Established and Expert profiles in recruitment we ensured a shared understanding of who exactly we hoped to target with this new product.
Generative Research Card Sort
Using hypotheses from our client's in-house research team, we ideated around new ways to deliver learning.
Each concept card tested ideas of immediacy, credibility, reminders and long term goals. The concepts gave us an early understanding of the value and desirability of certain features.
![[INT]HBPfsd_SynthesisBoard - US Concepts](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/bb3c60_e50d192d2a5744a394ed435340090ef5~mv2.jpg/v1/crop/x_0,y_9,w_2619,h_1349/fill/w_396,h_204,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/%5BINT%5DHBPfsd_SynthesisBoard%20-%20US%20Concepts.jpg)
Framing Learning Opportunities and Insights as a Learning Journey
We found "learning in the flow of work" as the action of learning to meet urgent needs when you don't have the answers, knowledge, skills or confidence; we wanted to describe the motivations and behaviors throughout the learning process.
From the moment you need to learn something, how you go about learning it and how you evaluate if the learning need has been met.
Acknowledge the learning need, and weigh it's necessity
Choose to prioritize the learning need
Pursue resources, validate their potential value and immerse deeper into promising sources
Assess if content has met the learning need
Apply learning to the need advance learning through further inquiry
This framework helped us break down and share the learning behaviors and needs of each profile, as well as the highs and lows of their unique emotional journeys.
Evaluating on the Fit and Feasibility of Value Propositions
We crafted a 3 step workshop to first engage with our research findings, then ideate off opportunities in small groups, and finally write promising ideas as value propositions.
By including stakeholders from all business units, we were able to break down the siloes in thinking. Instead collaborative ideation brought the best of each group, as they worked with a shared sense of purpose.
Guided by stakeholders and anchored in the experiences of the customer... our team delivered 2 value propositions, recommended features for success and opportunities for impact
So what?
Our client's in-house research team was stuck in categorizing learning as either acute or aspirational. Learning in the flow of work seemed more acute and they struggled to imagine how their existing content could fill that need. By framing learning as a need for validation, our new definition broke them out of familiar arguments to move forward together.
What an impressive array of work you've delivered for us. We're feeling really good about where we've landed coming out of this engagement.
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- Executive VP
