Building a learning strategy: Investigate

Remi comes back from her walk with a specific intention. She is going to figure out what this program is actually supposed to do.

She pulls up the organization's website, finds the strategic plan, and opens it. She has seen this document before but never read it with her program in mind. She reads it now.

It is clear. It is well-written. There is a real sense of direction in it. Remi feels a small swell of pride. She works here. This is good work.

Then, she starts investigating. She pulls up the program's resources one by one and lays them alongside the strategic plan. Some of it lines up. The financial literacy workshops? She can draw a thread. A couple of the toolkits connect too, in a way that feels intentional. Someone, at some point, was thinking about this.

But some of it? She cannot find the thread at all. A few resources exist because someone built them, not because anyone sat down and decided they should exist. Even the ones that do connect, nobody ever wrote that down. The logic lives in someone's head. Probably a someone who no longer works here. One departure away from gone.

Then Remi asks herself a tougher question. How do we know any of this learning content is actually working?

She goes looking for evaluation indicators and feedback loops. Any sign that someone tracked whether these learning resources changed anything for the people they were built to serve. There is nothing. No data. No way to make the case, to a funder or a director or anyone, that this program's learning resources are worth what they cost. This is the gap. Not chaos. A gap.

Remi opens a blank document. She is not writing a strategy. She is nowhere near ready for that. She is starting an investigation file. She copies in the mission statement. She writes down what she understands the program's goals to be. She sketches a rough map: connected, not connected, unclear. Then she writes a question at the bottom of the page. Who exactly are we trying to reach, and what do we need them to be able to do differently?

She does not have the answers, yet. But she has written it down for the first time.

The document is thin. A few sentences, a few thoughts and questions, and a a lot of white space. That is fine. Nobody has done this before. She just became the first person to start.

Have you ever opened your organization's strategic plan and tried to draw a line from it to your learning resources? What did you find?