hotel oeb case ba outstanding leaders

Joint ELIG Pearson Online Educa Berlin Learnshop

How to Guide Innovation in a Changing Education Ecosystem Friday 6th December 2013 -‐ 11:45 -‐ 13:30

Case Study Template & Background Information

This interactive Learnshop aims critically to reflect how to innovate in a profoundly changing education ecosystem. What are the opportunities for innovation within emerging lifelong and life-‐wide multi-‐stakeholder and multi-‐sided ecosystems?

The subsequent case information will form the base within the Learnshop to examine the case through the lens of a rigorous and structured framework, the Pearson Efficacy Framework, as a tool to engender learning-‐focused behaviours when assessing and evaluating prospective innovations. Facilitators

Contacts: Kelwyn Looi Andreas Meiszner ([email protected]) ([email protected])

Andreas Meiszner European Learning Industry Group (ELIG), The Netherlands

Elmar Husmann European Learning Industry Group (ELIG), Germany

Kelwyn Looi Analyst, Office of the Chief Education Advisor, Pearson, UK

Vaithegi Vasanthakumar Associate, Office of the Chief Education Advisor, Pearson, UK

Fadi Khalek VP-‐Higher Ed & Voc Learning Solutions, Pearson Education EMA

Adam Black Chief Learning Technologies Office, Pearson ELT; SVP Efficacy and Global Scale of English Products, Pearson English, UK

HoTEL OEB Case Study Template

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Case Study Template General Information

Name of Case : British Airways, Outstanding Leaders blended leadership programme Case Website: Contact information Name & Surname: Patrick Thomas Institution or Company: LINE Communications Email: [email protected] Stage of Development: Commercialised

Case Information 1. Background & introduction Briefly describe the nature of the case It is important to set the context in which this frontline leadership programme was launched. It was very different to any landscape that this kind of leadership programme would ever be launched in. The backdrop was one with enormous business issues, high public risk and British Airways’s reputation at stake. Historically leadership development in BA had only ever been isolated at the very top of the airline. Following September 11th 2001, all development that wasn’t legally mandatory was stopped. The airline was on the edge of bankruptcy and with only weeks of cash reserves left in the bank. All leadership development throughout the organisation had completely ceased until recently when the portfolio that Outstanding Leaders is part of was launched. During these 10 years, leaders were pushed to their very limits especially at the ‘frontline’ interface with our customers – but with no leadership development to pull from. They were thrown into:

• The chaos of the opening of Terminal 5; • Volcanic ash, snow and so on terminating operations; • Militant and disengaged employees (AND their mangers). These people had been on strike or

threatened strike from 2003 to 2011 in all frontline areas – ie the terminals, catering and most drastically the flight crew and then cabin crew. The last cabin crew strike lasted 22 days and cost BA over £150m.

BA’s reputation in 2011 was simply appalling and BA’s leaders were at breaking point. Outstanding Leaders was part of a comprehensive and integrated leadership development portfolio The airline started with the top 1,000 leaders, developing the leadership behaviours, skills and knowledge needed to recover and succeed the tumult of the past decade. Outstanding Leaders was introduced just as the ‘no strike’ ballot was received. The aim was to rebuild and re-‐engage frontline leaders with the understanding that the programme was critical to the airline’s success BA knew it needed: Speed – this was a small window of opportunity to start to get as many people through the programme as possible; Cost effective–the frontline audience is over 4,750 and the airline needed them to be out of the operation for as short a time as possible;

Evaluation Questionnaire HoTEL events

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Scalable – the airline needed it to be able to be rolled out quickly, globally, with common tools & language; Flexible -‐ it had to be able to be part of a programme BUT with elements that could ‘stand alone’; Engaging -‐ as well as transforming their perception of BA (and therefore the airline’s customers) BA also needed to transform people’s perception of online learning. The perception to date was that online learning was dreadful multiple choice, inanimate, boring health & safety. They wanted to prove that it was something that employees would engage with, use and reuse! 2. Conception and progress to date How did the case come about, what progress has it made to date, and what are plans for the future? The airline had been working already with ORConsulting and LINE Communications. They brought together the complimentary strengths of the 3 companies to create this ground breaking programme:

ORConsulting brought the leadership development expertise LINE Communications the online and blended expertise BA understood the culture, unique challenges, opportunities and HUGE PR risk (almost everything they did at that time was picked up by the press)

Outstanding Leaders couldn’t be a training event but needed to be a long-‐term blended learning solution. It needed to equip managers with the skills, knowledge, reference points and confidence to enable them to support and develop their teams. Their teams would be going through a development programme too. Outstanding Leaders needed to be designed in a way that it could adapt to whatever new challenges they airline was sure to face. The programme was designed with seven key phases to be accessed via the British Airways moodle LMS:

1. Introductory email to all invited leaders 2. Online 360 review completed by all invitees 3. Online learning:

a. Programme overview b. 4 short knowledge modules on leadership methodology, behaviours and terminology; c. Fictional scenario of an automotive manufacturer undergoing significant change to a

recent take-‐over for a foreign company; d. Challenge modules to engage learners with both the leadership methodology and what

is being expressed in the fictional automotive company. 4. 2 day workshop 5. Post-‐workshop online learning

a. Scenario challenge – culmination of scenario plot b. 4 updated knowledge modules reflecting new knowledge from workshop c. 2 new knowledge modules

6. Leadership accreditation enrolment and exam prep 7. Online reference materials

Eight months after the successful rollout of the LMS version of the blended programme, BA purchased iPads for all cabin crew and flight ops personnel. BA then commissioned LINE to develop an iPad compatible version for cabin crew who tend to access their development training whilst in the airport before flights.


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3. Outcomes & value proposition What are the intended outcomes & value proposition of the case with regards to enhancing learning and education? Outcome BA introduced a challenging customer proposition for their colleagues to deliver. The programme was designed to support colleagues and their teams in delivering excellent customer service by equipping them with the necessary tools. The design of the blended learning programme had to meet the following criteria:

1. As a behavioural capability development, in the workshop OR Consulting used an experiential facilitative approach to enable the participants to reflect upon their own attitudes and behaviours as leaders. This aspect is highly personal and self-‐reflective – it is also the element most participants rate the highest from the existing 3-‐day workshop. A design of the programme would look to extend the experiential journey of the workshops.

2. It would also look to prolong the impact of the learning experience so that participants have time to use the models and tools, meet and collaborate with one another and have an online resource which people can go back to over time.

The design split out the core skills, tools and behavioural models into pre-‐workshop learning, application of those skills during the workshop and reflection and collaboration as post-‐workshop activities. Aims The pre-‐workshop learning:

• Ensures that participants know why they are participating and what is expected of them • Provides an understanding of both the Leadership Capabilities that Managers of FLLs are

expected to enact and the behavioural expectation for their Front Line Leader colleagues • Provides a basic understanding of the key models to be used in the workshop

The aims of the workshop are to:

• Transition Managers of FLLs from being supervisors to being leaders • Support participants to enact the required behaviours in order to lead their complex teams more

effectively • Develop leadership, coaching and team effectiveness skills • Create a supportive peer-‐coaching network in which to facilitate and enquire about new skills and

enhance their sense of belonging to the BA leadership community The aims of the post-‐workshop learning are to:

• Provide reflective exercises and challenges that integrate the tools and behavioural models from the pre-‐learning with the workshop experience

• Create a space for participants to collaborate online • Allow the BA Leadership team to update each other with relevant news and events • Provide a dedicated resource for colleagues to refresh their learning prior to sitting a test to gain

certification (Outstanding Leaders is accredited by the UK Office of Qualifications and Examinations. Participants will have the opportunity to achieve either a Level 3 award in Leadership Excellence or a Level 3 award in Customer Centred Leadership).


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4. Measures of achievements and success What are the intended (or already implemented) measures of achievements and success through the case life cycle? This could include the data that you will collect, examples of research activity etc. British Airways conducted a 6-‐month review of efficacy and impact of the programme. Below is a summary of results:

• That 73% of observers asked about the progress of their colleagues 6 months after line managers indicated that they had seen positive change and transfer of learning into the workplace. Particular improvements observed were improved relationships, increased confidence, an improved attitude and tolerance to others, more proactive leadership and better team working

• That the average impact of the learning for 100 ‘graduates’ of Outstanding Leaders was assessed as 2.37/ 5 where 5 is no impact and 1 is excellent impact. This score indicates a high level of the transfer and impact of the learning

Beyond the measures of effectiveness of the programme, BA also noted changes across the global organisation as well as changes to the culture of the organisation. These include:

• Cultural shift started, especially amongst cabin crew who were now feeling better engaged by the organisation and a part of the future success of the airline;

• The programme has enabled our leaders to re-‐engage with this critical group of frontline leaders who were neglected for over ten years;

• The programme design had a clear cost benefit which reduced the running of workshops from 3 days to 2 days – saving one day

o Saving delivery costs of £1.6mil o Offline roster of cabin crew reduced – this is a significant cost to the business o Programme design and build cost £150,000 for the online offering

• Reuse and extension -‐ programme participants are re-‐using online resources. The resources are now being extended to a wider audience through the onboarding programme

• In terms of the impact to global operation of the airline, from 2001 to 2011 the airline has had six strikes, threatened strikes or walkouts. Since delivery of this programme, the organisation has not experienced any industrial relations issues. In fact, the business perceives this leadership development programme to be instrumental in changing the culture of the organisation.

The programme won the Brandon Hall Silver award for ‘Best Use of Blended Learning’ and was shortlisted for e-‐Learning Age Awards ‘Excellence in the Production of Learning Content’ 5. Impact What is the envisioned impact of the case, in particular on the wider education community and the changing education ecosystem? Outstanding Leaders has greatly influenced learning innovation throughout the organisation. From technical point of view, British Airways produced the programme on a moodle test server which sat outside of the organisation’s firewall. This was done because BA’s LMS was too restrictive with the file sizes it would permit. LINE conducted a series of technical tests to measure the optimal video compression rate across BA’s global stations. With the feedback on the technical test, BA could prove that video would be accessible even it its most remote stations. The BA Learning Innovations team then had a case to show that an investment in a new learning


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management platform would greatly enhance the delivery of development programmes across the business. The Learning Innovations team succeeded in influencing the Board to invest in the new technical platform and they will roll out the new system to the global teams at the beginning of 2014. Outstanding Leaders was the first fully blended learning programme delivered by British Airways. It has set the benchmark for the blended design of future programmes. With the rollout of the new learning management platform, the Learning Innovations team is optimising its entire face-‐to-‐face portfolio and engaging its development partners re-‐design the majority of those programmes as blended learning engagements which leverage social learning, video story-‐telling, online modularised learning resources/nuggets and rich scenarios. Cabin crew’s appetite for learning on their iPads has also informed how suppliers will be developing content for the new learning platform. All new content will be built using HTML frameworks and no Flash assets.


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Background Information Context

The HOTEL (Holistic Approach to Technology Enhanced Learning) project originates from the observation that most of the TEL research so far has concentrated mainly on the development of ad hoc technologies for learning, failing to capture both the potential adoption of emerging technologies not originally designed for learning in education and training environments and the innovative use that is made of technologies in non-‐formal and informal ways of learning and the extent to which this could be transferred / adapted to formal learning environments. This is believed by the Consortium to provide a misleading and fragmented picture of the extent to which new forms of using technologies (already mainstreamed and/or successfully piloted and/or emerging) support learning. Innovative practices in the use of technologies for learning (especially in non-‐formal and informal learning environments) are often not sufficiently considered by research whereas bottom-‐up innovation is playing an increasingly important role in the field of TEL, which might lead to new theories for learning. On the other hand, there is a need to verify the impact of existing learning theories on TEL practices to determine whether this has led / is leading to innovation. Furthermore, the lack of a holistic approach in TEL as described above puts at risk the effectiveness and mainstreaming of new ways of using ICT for learning purposes: too often the timespan between the identification of technologies that have a potential for learning, the theoretical analysis of pedagogical implications, the piloting of such technologies and their adoption (first at small scale and then mainstreamed) is so long that the technology itself becomes out-‐dated compared to the changing environment and learning needs. Pearson’s Efficacy Framework would be tested as a [e.g. stand-‐alone] means to support the different stakeholders to innovate in TEL / education. ELIG and Pearson have been working together to design a learnshop that would foster the hands-‐on experience of using the efficacy framework with test cases of technological innovations in order to examine:

i. Whether new innovations necessarily support learning enhancement

ii. The impact of existing learning theories on TEL practices to determine whether this has led / is leading to innovation

Objectives of the Learnshop

1. For attendees the learnshop would provide the opportunity:

a. To acquaint themselves with the efficacy framework as a tool to engender learning-‐focused behaviours when assessing and evaluating prospective innovations

b. To be involved at the input phase of the project, allowing for feedback provided on evaluating the efficacy framework as a support model to be incorporated into future iterative decisions of the holistic model

c. To examine their own ‘case’ (or a sample case) through the lens of a rigorous and structured framework, providing the participant key takeaways at both the transversal and individual case level