Creating and scaling a digital learning ecosystem

Creating and scaling a digital learning ecosystem with Julie Dervin from Cargill

Learning for a remote workforce in the age of coronavirus

I know you are dealing with some unprecedented challenges out there, especially in the corporate world, where people are working remotely that maybe weren't working remotely before. If you're in the learning development space, you already had the challenge of getting people's attention, designing and delivering effective learning and development programs, which is something I'm passionate about doing. I love helping all of you and giving you information that you need. You've got the new challenge that it needs to be delivered virtually. People are not allowed to get together in person. I have been thinking about this and looking for guests that could provide some value to you in this time and wanting to pivot quickly. I know I haven't put out a lot of content on this yet.

I'm looking for more. I got this one done with Julie Dervin, who is the Head of Global Learning & Development at Cargill, which has 140,000 employees. They have responded well to this crisis. In fact, they’re preparing for almost years. Julie in this interview shares her story of how they built a digital learning ecosystem. There are some great lessons that all of you can learn and take from this. Without further ado, I welcome back Julie Dervin to the podcast. She was on in February of 2019 talking about the digital transformation they were going through. She's back to talk about digital learning. Here's my interview with Julie Dervin.

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I'm excited that you're joining me for an interview with Julie Dervin. Julie is the Head of Global Learning & Development at Cargill, a major global food and agricultural company with over 100,000 employees. I'm particularly excited to invite Julie back on the podcast as she was featured on Episode 69 back on February 19th, 2019. That time we talked about managing a global digital transformation and connecting learning strategy, which was a great interview about all the things that Cargill was doing at the time. Julie and her team have been investing a lot in digitizing the learning there at Cargill. It happened to be extremely relevant for the times we're in under Coronavirus and COVID. Julie, welcome back to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be back.

Thanks for coming back on. We booked this under a rather short notice with all the things going on in the world. We are right in the middle of the Coronavirus crisis, whatever you may call it, where most of the global workforce is working remotely. We’re living in unprecedented times. How has Cargill responded to this so far? How has it been going with everybody or as many employees as possible going from an office to remote?

We have approximately 50,000 to 60,000 of our employees that are office workers. Another 100,000 that work in our plants and in operations. It's mainly been our employees that work in the office that have transitioned to a full-time work-from-home situation. The good news is that Cargill in many areas has honored and practiced a flexible work arrangement. Many of our team members or employees are used to working remotely. The challenge has been that it's flexible. You could choose whether or not you needed to be in the office or you could work remotely based on what the day held for you or the type of work that you were doing.

In this situation, the choice is taken away. Our only option is to work from home or work remotely. We've had some of the challenges like many organizations, how do we ensure that our network or bandwidth, all of that can handle the breadth of traffic that this is creating for our networks? There's also the personal side of things. Many of our employees have children who are engaging in distance learning and no longer are going to school or small children, who no longer can be a childcare. That juggle is more of, “How do I manage my day when I have to be both a parent, stay-at-home school teacher and work, sometimes all at the same time?” That's the challenge that many of our employees are working through.

At Cargill, we have a very strong culture of safety, that has kicked in during this time. The message loud and clear of practicing what we all know around safety and making the right decisions, keeping our employees healthy, so that they can continue to do the work that they do, that is so important to enable our global food supply chain. Those are some of the things that we have been navigating and working through. There are many more things, but those are some of the obvious things.

Reframe how you look at failure and think about it as learning and creating the conditions for that learning to happen. Click To Tweet

No doubt. Those challenges are common to many. Cargill already had a huge culture of safety, so I'm sure there was no question about doing the right thing to keep employees safe. Everybody's in the same situation where they're all working from home. I'm glad you mentioned employees juggling these dual roles of worker, parent, teacher. I'm dealing with the same challenges. I can relate. I've got two small children at home. My wife is doing more of the schooling during the day while I work and conduct some of these interviews. It's still a very unprecedented challenging time. For me, it's up to me to figure it out, running my own business. I know we didn't talk about this beforehand, but is there guidance that the company gives to help employees manage their time and keep things flexible so they can get all of these things done?

One of the ways that we have been trying to help our employees is my team has been involved in that and very quickly pulling together a set of topics that are relevant to helping people adjust to remote working. Helping them adjust to sometimes the stress and the anxiety that the situation is bringing upon us, helping them to get trained up on some of the productivity tools and collaborative tools that they have to now use. Our learning and development team was able to quickly mobilize to organize these resources and make them available. That's due to the work that we've done with our digital learning strategy for the past couple of years that has put us in that position in order to provide our employees resources that would be helpful as they make this adjustment.

The other part of it is we have continuous messages coming from the crisis management teams that have been organized in each region, putting guidance in place, resources in place and FAQs in place. Making sure that employees have somewhere to call if they have questions to get those answered. There have been a lot of resources. The one that I'm extremely impressed with is how quick the L&D team was able to mobilize to curate these curriculums and be able to provide them to our broader HR job and family as well as integrate these tools into the crisis management messages that are being sent out to employees. Pointing to these resources to help them with a myriad of things that they may need help with.

You were ready to respond and get resources out to employees to avoid some of that confusion. Often, there's that period of time in between where everybody's trying to figure out, “What the heck are we doing?” It sounds like Cargill's L&D team was ready to respond. I'll use that as a good transition into the L&D journey and what you've been doing with establishing the digital learning environment. Maybe you can take us back when we had our last conversation. It was all about the digital transformation that Cargill's going through and how you're starting to set up this digital learning environment. I know you've done a lot of work to essentially be ready for something that you probably had no idea was coming. None of us did. It seems like you're in a good place for it compared to a lot of companies. Take me back to that. What was the impetus on the strategy and how have you set up this new digital learning environment?

Several years ago, Cargill was starting to feel the impact of a lot of disruption and uncertainty in a very tangible way. It continued to amplify. Our CEO and our executive team shaped a strategy that basically called for us to transform, begin transforming, building new capabilities and investing in those capabilities that we had never built before. There are external pressures coming in such as aggressive competition, nontraditional competition in areas that we had never seen before. It’s disrupted supply chains, environmental concerns and everything in between. On top of that, we had the transformation going on inside Cargill and all of those pressures. In those early days of the learning and development transformation, I was asked to shape a new vision, reimagine learning at Cargill.

Everyone knew that we needed a different strategy. There wasn't clarity on what it needed to be. One of the things I talked about in our previous podcast was around aligning learning to business strategy. Simply stated that's exactly what we did here is we listened to the signals of the organization. We listened to what our business leaders were asking for, the pressures that they were feeling. We knew we needed to develop a strategy that addressed things like speed to learning, increased accessibility and access to learning resources, the ability to scale much broader than we had been able to scale learning before and doing that in a very efficient manner as well. We can't forget the effectiveness of the actual learning experiences and ensuring that the learning that we were designing was meeting the business needs.

Digital Learning Ecosystem: Ensure that the learning you’re designing is aligned to the business strategy and meeting the business needs.

Taking a look at what was going on in the learning and development industry too, which was being disrupted by many new learning technologies, that we never had access to before, that were coming on the market and enabling us to do things in learning and design learning experiences that we would have never been able to design before. That's what started this whole journey and shaping a new vision, translating that into a strategy, focused around these key measures that I mentioned, and being able to start by experimenting and developing the proof of concepts. We didn't go big. We didn't try to win over all of HR and leadership. We started very focused and partnered with an area of Cargill that was ready to partner with us and experiment and try some new things out.

That experiment, that proof of concept enabled us to get some quick learnings. We looked at and said, “If we were able to scale this type of outcome and impact more broadly across Cargill, what would that mean to Cargill?” We took that business case to a few senior executives and got the endorsement and got the investment to start going down this road. We've been at this for about a few years now. Given this situation, this environment, we feel very fortunate that we had gotten started back then because it was a very easy transition and little to no disruption, being able to continue to support Cargill’s needs.

I feel fortunate that you're here on the podcast to share some of that journey. This is something you've been working on for a long time. I want to talk a little about the scale of the technology. You also mentioned something in there about going to the business, essentially getting the approval, getting the funding and sponsorship for this. That's something a lot of L&D people struggle with. The last time, we talked to you about the importance of aligning, learning with strategy. I know that's something you've always been big on and already speaking the business language. Can you take me back to that and any insights or tips as far as selling this to the business, getting that funding, getting that approval? I'm sure this was a massive investment to make.

Yes, definitely. We're a bit opportunistic. What I call the drum beat at the top was we need to transform. We need new innovative ideas. We want our leaders to be bold and take bold actions. Refining our edges and solving the same old problems the same way is not going to get us where we need to be. Those were the messages we were hearing. From an opportunistic standpoint, we said, “If this is what we're hearing from the organization, this is what we're seeing going on in the learning industry and some of these new technologies coming available. How do we get started?” Get started in a small way because we don't know what we don't know.

I remember sitting at my desk a few years ago and thinking about the strategy and what I was about to propose and throw my hat in the ring for not knowing how we were going to execute it and fully if it was the right thing. We started small. We did a proof of concept. It didn't take a lot of money. It didn't take a lot of resource at all. We kept it very scope. We were very strategic at who we partnered with in the business to make sure that the area of the business we partnered with, that they were ready to work in a very agile experimenting way knowing that certain things may not work well. There was going to have to be a lot of learning.

How to create a digital learning ecosystem: 1. Start small

Making sure that if we did this right and got the impact that we thought we could get. It was a high enough profile area of the organization that people would pay attention to the results and be interested. That's how we got started. We got started small and very focused with a part of the organization that was ready to partner with us that was high profile enough to where others would pay attention and give merit to the results. We took those results and we took that outcome. We did some modeling with some of our other learning programs and said, “If we transform these other learning programs into this type of a design, what value would that create for Cargill? How if we scaled this right? What did that look like in terms of dollars?

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What did that look like in terms of savings, cost avoidance? What did it look like in terms of how fast we could respond to the business need? How big if we could scale learning?” All those types of measures. We modeled that out in a few of our areas like frontline manager development, sales skills development. That's what we took to our CFO, our CIO and our CHRO, the three chiefs. We needed investment. We needed support from IT. We needed our CHRO to champion this. That's how we got started.

That's something that is replicable that a lot of people can learn from. Maybe don't come in and say, “We want millions of dollars for this huge program for 100,000 people.” Start small with a pilot, prove the concept with a group that is influential and start to scale out from there. Cargill being such a huge organization, you do have massive scale to deal with. What are the challenges there? Were there trade-offs between quantity versus quality? A very high-quality program may not scale as well as something that's simple and scaled but may not be as effective. Did you have to deal with some of those trade-offs? How did you make those to make it effective and timely for people out in the workforce?

With Cargill having as many employees as we have, the number of geographies, all the diversity and complexity that we have, we needed to be able to scale. As a large organization, that is always on our mind, how are we going to scale this? We don't have an open checkbook to spend as much money as we want to. We have to always have that ability to scale and to do it in a way that's efficient. The other part of that equation though is the effectiveness. Many people think that when you scale something, when you do it efficiently and you use technology to do so, you're losing quality. It's a trade-off. What we've found is that's not the case.

We always had in our principles that we needed to be able to scale. We needed to be accessible. We needed to be able to respond quickly. We had to do it efficiently within a budget. It needed to be effective. We needed to achieve the business objectives that we set out to achieve. The other part of that is the learner engagement. It has to be engaging for the learners. A lot of people think that there are trade-offs when you go digital to that engagement and effective piece. I would argue that has not been the case here. When you open your mind and you ask yourself the question of, “How might we do this?” We don't put barriers in front of our creative thinking and our ability to think out of the box and problem solve. It's pretty amazing what our teams can come up with. With all the technologies we have access to now that we didn't have access to a few years ago, there are many creative ways that we can design highly-engaging, highly-impactful digital learning experiences.

I know a lot of people would probably think, “If we do this, there are a lot of trade-offs.” It won't be as effective as classroom, in-person, experiential learning. If you're willing to take some of the barriers off, get creative, you can come up with ways and have great resources. You can come up with ways to make it engaging and as effective.

Prior to this whole COVID-19 situation, organizations had choice to decide how they were going to design their learning experiences. If the learning and development group was coming to the table saying, “We should try this digitally,” they were getting pushback from stakeholders saying, “No, we need to do it in person. That's how we do things. That's how we do our learning,” and not being able to sell this transition to digital. We're in a situation where we don't have a choice. I'm interested to see what comes out of this situation by way of innovation, by way of creativity. We're in a situation where nobody has a choice. Either you figure out how to continue your organizational learning in a digital way or you're not able to support the learning. In a time where we don't have choice and it has to be digital, we need to remove the barriers of categorizing what type of learning can be digital, what type of learning can't be digital and start asking ourselves at every turn and every step, “How might we do this?” It's amazing how much that opens up the thinking.

Digital Learning Ecosystem: The industry is very dynamic right now. New things are continuously coming on the market.

That's so important. Thinking about things differently and how you're going to make it work. Now knowing that we have to make it work, this is the environment that we're in. It's easier than ever to make things work because of all the technology that's available. Do you want to talk about any of the technology or partners that you used to help make this reality?

We've been working very closely with partners such as Degreed, Intrepid and SuccessFactors. We have a learning content management system, uPerform. Our approach to technology is more of a learning technology ecosystem. When we started down this path and we shaped the strategy, we translated that strategy into seven critical digital learning capabilities that we needed to build. By having clarity around this digital learning capabilities that we needed to build, we could partner with our IT organization to engage them in the strategy and engage them in the thinking around, “What are the technologies and what does the architecture of this technology environment needs to look like to support these capabilities?”

How to create a digital learning ecosystem: 2. Be flexible

What we came up with was moving away from the monolithic, one-size-fits-all, everything is done in the learning management system to, “Let's choose the best applications for the various capabilities.” With the API capability and being able to integrate the systems a little bit easier than we have been able to in the past. We're able to have multiple technologies that we have been able to integrate to create a very seamless experience for our employees. Those are some of the technologies. That's how we've thought about our technology environment. We wanted to keep it very flexible because the industry is very dynamic right now. New things are continuously coming on the market. We want to be able to flex. If one technology has served us well for a certain period of time and now, we have something new that we want to move to, we can easily unplug it and be able to move new technologies in. That's been our approach there.

I like how you worked with so many different partners. I'm sure there were challenges and great things that worked out with a lot of them. Getting to that, one of the things we wanted to talk about that would be helpful for others to hear is what are 1 or 2 things that your team did that worked well? You think like, “We're proud of this. That worked out well.” What are a couple of things that did not work out very well that you learned from?

Let's start with the things that did not work very well. We have created a different culture around things that we say didn't work very well or let's call them a failure. One of my team members who we brought over from the innovation part of our IT organization, she introduced us to an acronym. It's FAIL. It stands for First Attempt In Learning. If you also followed Carol Dweck’s work around growth mindset, one of the simple things that she says in order to develop a growth mindset is replace the word failure with the word learning. We've tried to cultivate that type of culture within learning and development. We do a lot of experimenting. I'll use our frontline manager development program as an example. We have a completely digital design, many different design elements and engaging elements that go into it. One of the things they wanted to experiment with was this idea of using a chatbot technology as a coaching technology for the participants going through this digital experience.

We hitched it on to the delivery of the digital experience. We told the participants, “This is an experiment. We don't know how this is going to work. Would you be willing to participate in it?” It was whoever volunteered to be part of the experiment. They gave us feedback. We learned things like it could be better used as more of a learning adviser of how to keep people engaged in the learning and reminding them of additional tasks or tactics or things that they needed to keep the learning going rather than a true coach. That was a learning that came out of it. One of the other things was we serve employees that are all around the world. The time zones are extreme. We had a person from Australia who said, “This is interesting. I'm glad to be part of this, but it's a little bit annoying when I get the text from the chatbot going off in the middle of the night reminding me of some learning activity that I need to do.” The chatbots we were using didn't pay attention to time zones. That was an issue.

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That's one example that it didn't work for the business case that we were trying it out for. However, we had learnings from that which we can apply it because I'm sure we will try to use chatbots again in other areas. We have that learning that we wouldn't have otherwise had. It didn't cost any extra. Nobody got in trouble for it not working well. It was a fun experiment for the team members to be able to do. The other area that I would say that we learned a lot was the age-old conversation around buy or build and technology. We were looking at pulling in various applications into our ecosystem to serve different needs for us. We always held the vision of once we get the applications and building the capabilities that we needed them to support, we need to integrate these applications. We want to give our employees what we call a single front door. One place that our employees come to access all the different types of things they need to do for learning and with learning. Initially, we thought, “There isn't anything out in the market that can play the role of that single front door helping to bring all these technologies together. Let's build it in-house.”

How to create a digital learning ecosystem: 3. Learn and adjust

We've got about three months into it and realized that we probably needed to pivot. Go in a different direction and use one of the applications that was already in our ecosystem as that single front door instead of building it ourselves. We didn't want to get in a situation where we were constantly now software owners and always having to keep things updated. That wasn't the business that we wanted to be in. We had significant learnings that came from that experience that we wouldn't have had otherwise. We didn't know at the onset what the right decision was to go with an application that we purchased already or to build it ourselves. We could go either way, but we had to choose one and we needed to get some learnings. That's what came out of it was we took a step forward. We made a decision. We approached it in a way that is, “We're going to learn as we go. Here's the amount of money we're willing to spend to learn from this. Here's our scope. We're going to get to this point. When we get to this point, we're going to pick up and we're going to debrief. Should we keep going down this path or has this given us information to make what is the right decision at this point in time?” I would say those were two failed attempts in learning.

I'm a big fan and believer of that. The book, Mindset, by Dr. Carol Dweck had a big impact on my life as a business person and even a parent. I've used a mantra I learned from someone else years ago that there is no failing only learning and growth. Every “failure” is an opportunity to learn. All failure is something that didn't go as planned. You hope the chatbot would be a great tool and it didn't quite work out as you planned. It's an opportunity to learn and adjust.

Small steps, if we could reframe how we look at failure and think about it always as learning and as leaders, we can create the conditions for that learning to happen. Think of how creative and innovative our teams would be.

One success that you're proud of from this journey?

Our focus of putting the learner at the center of everything we do, that is our North Star. Everything we do, every decision we make, is a learner-centric decision, which is very different than traditionally how the learning and development profession would approach their designs from a very educated functional view with our models of how we do design, how we understand adult learning. Very little about understanding our populations, how they prefer to learn, what are the rhythms of their workdays, what frustrates them about the current learning, what types of technologies do they use on a regular basis? We completely flipped that paradigm.

Digital Learning Ecosystem: The two key ingredients in the success is bringing people in early and helping them shape your new strategy.

Our strategy is 100% learner-centric. Borrowing practices from the marketing industry around developing personas that were representative of our learner populations. Developing learning experience map that corresponded to those personas and using that data and that information to make decisions around how we design learning, what types of technologies we use in the design of the learning depending on what persona we were designing the learning for. That has been a huge success that has carried us through this journey. The other positive impact that I get asked a lot, “What was the change management strategy like when you started a digital first learning strategy?” Frankly, the learner-centric approach was our change strategy. When you understand what your learners or the populations you're serving with learning, how they want to consume and engage with the learning. In turn, you design the learning with that in mind, there isn't a change strategy. You're giving them exactly what they've told you that they wanted. I would say that's probably one of the big successes that has been a thread all the way through this journey.

Even the “failures” were such great learning points and things that you can build on. You've had some great successes as well. I have a couple of more questions for you. One is on the partnership with IT because in a traditional business view, you would think of IT and HR or IT and L&D as being two very separate units that maybe don't talk to each other that much. It sounds like you've had to work very closely and form a great partnership with IT to make all of this work. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like and how you've made that successful?

We've had to work very closely with our IT partners. The success came early on when we engaged our IT partners very early in the vision shaping and strategy shaping process. We brought them in very early. We knew that we needed them to not only cognitively understand where we were headed, but we needed to engage them in this journey, engage them in a way that they saw an opportunity to learn new things as well, and to do different types of projects that would have significant impact to the organization.

Engaging them early, not being afraid to include them in the strategy shaping process. The other piece that has been very important has been with our learning and development talent. We built our new learning and development team, to enable this new strategy, make sure that we have the right talent. It was a requirement that technical aptitude was a core requirement for every learning professional across the board in this new team and new model. Historically, we would have one area in learning and development that was responsible for the authorizing tools, the LMS. They would interface with IT.

In this new model, the requirement was everyone across the board needed to have digital literacy, technical aptitude, comfortable working with technology, building their data and analytics skills. It didn't matter what role you play within our team. You have to have that as a core skill. We've been working hard at building those skills and that enables us to partner then very closely with IT when we understand the technologies, the features and functionality. I would say that's probably been the two key ingredients in the success is bring them in early, bring them in, help them shape your new strategy. You may be surprised they may bring some ideas that you didn't know that they had. Looking at the talent and skills that you have within your learning, development function and making digital literacy and technical aptitude a requirement across the board for every role.

It’s an integral and important partnership. It sounds like you've made it work well. Last question, Julie, for our audience in learning and organizational development that maybe they're a little bit behind at this point, but as you said, “We're all in the same situation now. We have to create learning that works for people working remotely and we've got to make this work.” What's one more piece of advice you would give that maybe we didn't cover so far?

It goes back to that mindset. We're always starting from a place of asking the question, “How might we?” versus, “Why we can't?” To leave behind us this thinking of, we've got to categorize what type of learning lends itself to in-person but doesn't lend itself to digital. What type of learning only lends itself to digital? We have to stop that categorization and leave those mental models behind. We now need to enter in to these situations where we are understanding the organization's learning needs. Regardless of what they are, how might we respond and solve those learning needs using all the tools, processes and creativity in order to design a digital learning experience.

Taking those old filters and removing those barriers where your thinking is very compartmentalized of what works well in digital and what doesn't is very important. I would say lastly from a learning and development professional standpoint is if you haven't reflected on this yet, I would encourage everyone to start reflecting on this. This is about how you are thinking about reinventing yourself as a learning professional within your organization. This journey that we've been on in Cargill has required every single learning professional on the team to be willing and vulnerable to reinvent themselves as a learning professional, including myself. Being able to say, “I don't know how to use these different tools. We've never done this before. I've never used this technology before.” It's a bit of humility and vulnerability, but realizing that our profession is going through a big transformation in and of itself. If you haven't started that thinking around how you’re going to reinvent yourself as an L&D professional, now is a good time to get started.

Disrupt yourself, reinvent yourself, we've got to be thinking about that, whether it's learning and development or any professional as we're moving into the “future of work.” Things are changing all the time. If you're going to be stuck in your ways and thinking it's always going to be the same, you're probably going to get disrupted. If you're willing to open your mind, get creative, learn, adapt, be vulnerable and say, “I don't know how to do this. Let's figure it out together,” you're more likely to be a useful and valuable in the future.

That is all we have for now. Julie, I appreciate you taking the time to come back, share some of the journey you've been on and what you've been doing there at Cargill. It's relevant to the times we're in now under Coronavirus or COVID-19, and what many organizations are dealing with having all of their employees working remotely and trying to figure out how do we continue to give them the development opportunities and programs that they need. Thanks again for coming on.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Andy.

• Julie Dervin on LinkedIn
• Cargill
• Episode 69 – previous episode
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck