I find great joy in serving clients who are sincerely committed to developing their people. This joy springs forth when you see their people overcoming challenges, developing new mindsets and skills, and contributing to bettering their organization, personal lives, and often even on the wider societal level.
This makes it all the more painful when I continue to hear of how organizations often continue to face recurring issues in developing their people. Despite their best efforts to invest in various team-building workshops and training programs, these organizations were struggling to see any lasting impact. Their team would return from learning and development workshops or sessions seemingly motivated and re-energised, yet within weeks, the same challenges—poor communication, lack of collaboration, and declining morale—would resurface. The experience of the people – whether the staff themselves or their managers – is often FRUSTRATION (and rightfully so!). They had tried everything from offsite retreats to intensive training sessions, but nothing seemed to stick.
In reviewing their challenges, the problem wasn’t a lack of effort or resources; it was that the solutions they were using didn’t address the root causes of their issues. They needed something more transformative, yet relevant, to facilitate lasting change within their team.
Unfortunately, such frustrations and inaccurate solutions are commonplace. Organizations around the world invest millions of dollars into training their people, only to encounter ambiguity and disappointment in their returns. The solution is not to abandon learning and development—continuous learning is essential for any organization’s success. Rather, it’s about identifying the types of learning and development that foster deep, sustained growth that benefits both the learners and the organization.
Reflecting on my experience in servicing clients in the people development arena, it became clear that the traditional methods they had been using were too surface-level, too theoretical, and too general. They provided temporary boosts in morale and some conceptual learning but failed to facilitate the united, sustained learning and behavioural shifts that led to real improvement. What the team needed wasn’t just another workshop; they needed an approach that would engage them on a deeper level and encourage continuous growth and development.
Achieving this was no easy feat. With some trial and error, here’s what we discovered were the essential elements in maximizing learning and development efforts in the workplace.
1. Creating Shared Experiences
One experience that I often hear from clients is how their people return from training experiences feeling very much energized, but then their excitement quickly fades because the learning from the training did not translate into their daily work. To make learning stick and propagate in the workplace, it must be integrated into everyday tasks and team dynamics. How does one achieve that kind of integration between new skills and mindsets, and old or existing processes?
One important vehicle to facilitate this integration is shared experiences, where team members learn together through practical activities where all participants must play their part. By having shared experiences, entire teams can be aligned in their understanding and application of new concepts. This makes it easier to carry the learning back into the workplace. The collective approach embeds new skills and mindsets across teams and organizations, rather than leaving them behind in the classroom or sitting solely upon one individual.
This shared experience element is non-negotiable for any practitioners serious about equipping and propagating their learners’ newfound skills and mindsets. Notably, this is seen in the increasing number of training courses which strongly recommend or even strictly require organizations to send small groups or teams of learners rather than individuals.
2. Provide Immediate, Actionable Feedback
Another source of frustration that many clients have shared was the lack of visible change or impact after training. Traditional learning methods often have delays in the application and feedback process. Between returning from the training course, catching up on the backlog, and finding a suitable scenario to apply the learning, this approach makes it difficult to apply and refine new skills promptly.
To drive meaningful change, it’s crucial to incorporate immediate, actionable feedback into the learning process. One model of learning and development which facilitates such immediate feedback and improvement is a game-based learning approach. This approach allows for simulating real-world scenarios where participants can test their decisions, receive instant feedback, and adjust their strategies on the spot.
This accelerates the learning process and ensures that new skills are immediately applicable to real work challenges, bridging the gap between theory and practice. Now, learners can flex their critical thinking, creativity, and other crucial skills to test their grasp on newfound skills and mindsets. Some organizations may be concerned that moving with such a pace may be disruptive to the processes that they have established, which allow the company to operate without disruption. Importantly, game-based learning simulates real-world and real work scenarios. Thus learners and organizations can experiment and learn at pace, without worry of any missteps affecting their real work scenarios. This need for effective learning to have real-life relevance merits its elaboration.
3. Ensuring Real World Relevance
Another common struggle clients share is the inability to connect the theoretical knowledge from workshops to their specific work challenges. They recognize and yearn for learning to be truly effective and directly relevant to the day-to-day realities of the workplace.
This is where designing learning experiences that reflect the actual situations and problems employees face is key. By facilitating such experiences, we allow our people to practice and refine their skills in a relevant context. Game-based learning is a powerful platform to enable this. By replicating real work scenarios in a game or play environment, the problem-solving can be contextually relevant, yet safe for experimentation and innovation. This makes the learning more impactful by empowering employees to experiment with solutions beforehand. Thus, upon returning to the workplace or relating back to their work tasks, there is already a greater confidence in applying any new learnings.
Practitioners of learning and development would be familiar with the need to apply learning and development in the “T” model – ensuring that one’s learning has both depth but also breadth. That is to say, besides individual or singular aspect expertise, one must be able to execute lateral learning and application. One of the risks that must be managed as this lateral learning is executed is how it intersects with many other aspects, stakeholders, business processes, etc. of the organization, which are themselves deeply invested in their own vertical and lateral learning.
In other words, high-performing organizations are often exactly that because of the stability and consistency they have developed over time. Disruption is kept minimal or even eliminated. How then can the necessary elements of creativity and experimentation be properly executed to further an organization’s learning and development? If learning is done in a too metaphorically remote or far-removed manner, it is obsolete. If done in a too close-to-home manner, it is intrusive at best and destructive at worst.
The solution presents itself through workplace learning solutions which simulate the real world and real working scenarios that the organization encounters or even wishes to experiment with. By having learning solutions which are gamified or game-based, learners are presented with real problems and decisions that need to be made. At the same time, they are given the psychological safety to know that what they learn and experiment with in their decisions is allowed to have the full creative range – since there is no more fear of affecting their real-world operations. This unlocks powerful possibilities for both the learners individually, and also for the entirety of the organization as the power of play is leveraged to discover new possibilities.
Final Words
Learning and development are critical for ongoing growth and success, but traditional methods often fail to create lasting impact. By focusing on shared experiences, providing immediate feedback, and ensuring real-world relevance, organizations can facilitate transformative learning efforts, moving from surface-level engagement to deep, sustained change. Game-based learning is a powerful tool that addresses these needs, offering a practical, engaging, and effective approach to development. If you’re looking to maximize the impact of your learning and development initiatives, consider how game-based learning can help you achieve lasting results.
Explore StrengthsAsia’s game-based learning solutions for team development with Team Forging today.
Mark Lee
Having experience in business consultancy across a range of sectors such as entertainment, social service, healthcare, oil and gas, transport, intellectual property, and the public sector, Mark’s joy is being able to keep the people as the core focus amidst the busyness of business.
