e-Learning
Your Best Change Agent

e-Learning is a potent Change Agent:

The strategy for e-learning should first and foremost be a strategy for effecting change in the three primary areas of government, health and educational, rather than simply a education and training tool, which of course it is. e-Learning is certainly the most powerful tools in the armory of change.

Change requires a sequential approach

As a change agent yourself - your recommended approach to change management should be sequential. The approach consists of establishing Awareness, developing a Desire for change, providing the Knowledge relevant to that change followed by the training needed to provide the necessary Ability at a point that intercepts (Intercept Strategy) the implementation of change and finally a continuous Reinforcement of the positive messages associated with the change. The so called ADKAR model proposed in various forms by Prosci et al.

Importantly, e-learning can facilitate every stage of the process of change and is thus your most potent change agent - providing the means to effect Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Re-enforcement of the Message.

However, as a change agent you need to be aware that to effect positive change one must first consider the process of change and the relationship between the changer (A) and the ‘changee’ (B):

Push-Pull Strategy:

It is highly unlikely that simply ‘pushing’ your ‘product, concept, idea, or service’ across the chasm to the changee will result in any long term acceptance of your product. To be effective, there needs to be a desire on the part of the change, the change must be motivated to accept and fully utilize the product – this can only be achieved through a ‘pull’ strategy.

Change can often be assisted by embodying the message of change in the medium itself, i.e. the object (in this case e-learning) used to deliver the message of change – in other words the oft quoted ‘message is in the medium’.

For example, a typical push strategy of central government might be based on their mandate, the provision of interoperable service buses, or the need for agencies to work together to provide seamless services that are more ‘customer centric’. Despite the laudable intentions, this could elicit highly resistive responses from managers and staff at the agency.

The Negative Manager’s Response to Developing seamless services with those of another agency could lead to:

The Negative Employee’s Response to Combining our services with those of another agency could lead to:

By contrast the addition of a pull strategy for agencies would create a ‘value proposition’ for the agency’s managers and staff and a pull strategy for citizens and business would do likewise. Instead of attempting to sell the end benefits of seamless government to a manager or employee one attempts to find ‘value’ to the manager or employee.

For example, increased professional status, greater job satisfaction, reward and recognition, etc. Changing the response accordingly:

The Positive Manager’s Response: Combining our services with those of another agency could lead to:

Clearly, this requires commensurate programs to change pay scales, grading, set-up internships, secondments, new professional development paths, etc.

Having created potentially valued and desirable change opportunities for the changee, we need to promote through conventional techniques – office memos, newsletter, TV and radio, etc.. to achieve a basic awareness of what is being offered.

Using the philosophy of ‘the message is in the medium’ we can use the medium of government e-services and e-learning as change agents themselves exclusively to deliver both the detail and content associated with these desirable opportunities.

Subtly linking ‘real value’ for the individual, citizen, employee, manager or business executive to these mediums – e-services, and e-learning and in so doing reinforcing the message that these tools have practical and personal benefits to the individual when adopted.

The proposed e-commerce for everyone (see e-commerce section), is a typical example where this approach would be employed again acting as a powerful e-service based incentive for enhanced adoption rates and change.

In this particular example – we can work back up the line from socio-economic benefits such as mass contribution to the GDP of the KSA, creating financial and social independence for the aged (50+), retired, disabled, work at home mums, small shopkeeper, etc…to providing more focus to agency services, e.g. business setup, entrepreneurship, common service and contact centers, etc. as well as achieving the adoption rates required nationally by central government facilitators that will achieve the level of savings and socio-economic objectives that they are targeting.

The same change agent approach can be deployed in health to induce healthcare practitioners to develop their skills and to become more effective particularly in remote situations, where e-learning and participatory Web 2.0 tools could be used in combination to introduce rapid change:

Applied to Education, the approach could be used to raise the professional skills of teachers, reward them for developing learning resources, introduce new professional opportunities, as well as enhance student and parent engagement.

The key to change and the use of convergent tools like e-learning alongside other e-services as effective change agents is not to become too focused on their more obvious applications, e.g. e-learning and education, but to see them for what they really are – as instruments of change or change agents and influential in their own right, i.e. deploying them in new synergistic and exciting combinations, making their use an integral part of obtaining meaningful value for the change.

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