Building The Foundations - From four people and a blank page to a Global Learning Organization - Part 1

Building something from scratch sounds exciting when you look back at it.

What you don't always see are the countless decisions, processes, conversations and sometimes rather unglamorous pieces of work that sit underneath the finished product.

When three colleagues and I joined the founding team of what would eventually become a global learning organization within a multinational Group, we had no idea that a seemingly simple exercise in documenting our processes would grow into 13 chapters covering almost every aspect of the business.

What started with a question of “Do we really need this?” eventually became an operating framework, a quality system, an audit trail and an important part of the organization's credibility.

I've decided to tell this story in three parts.

Not simply because there is a lot to tell, but because the journey itself happened in stages. First came the building. Then came the discipline of creating a quality framework around what we had built. And finally came the realization of what those foundations had given the organization.

Breaking it into three parts also makes it easier to explore each stage properly, without turning one story into an overwhelming read.

So, over the next few weeks, I'll share the journey from a blank page to a quality standard, and ultimately to the realization that some of the work we initially questioned became some of the work we were most grateful to have done.

Part 1 – Starting With Nothing - Four people, a blank page and no playbook.

When you are part of building something from scratch, there is a certain energy that comes with it. Everything feels new, everything feels urgent, and there is always another thing that needs to be done. That was exactly where we were when three colleagues and I became part of the founding team that would go on to build a global training organization within a multinational Group.

We were creating the business as we went. We had programmes to design, stakeholders to engage with, systems to establish, learners to support and an operating model to figure out. At that stage, we were a small team, and much of what we did was based on our own knowledge, experience and conversations.

It was in the middle of all of this that we began talking about Standard Operating Procedures, or what people love throwing around so often as SOPs.

At first, I remember wondering whether it was really necessary to spend so much time documenting what we were already doing. We knew the processes. There were only four of us. We could speak to one another, solve problems as they came up and get on with building the business. It was easy to see documentation as an administrative exercise that could wait until we were bigger.

But we decided to start anyway and that decision turned out to be one of the most valuable decisions we made.

Starting with a blank page

There was no existing playbook for us to simply adopt. We had to create the way the organization would operate. The four of us began documenting everything we were doing and, more importantly, thinking through everything we would need to do as the business grew.

We looked at operations, learning delivery, administration, IT, HR, Finance, governance, quality and the many activities that sat between these functions. We mapped processes, clarified responsibilities and began creating a common understanding of how the business should work.

The writing itself required far more discipline than I had initially appreciated.

An SOP is not simply a description of what happens. To write one properly, you have to examine the process closely enough to understand every stage of it. Or, as my GM at the time would often remind me, “Sherol, you need to eat, sleep and breathe this business.” Those words stayed with me. He taught me to look beyond the task in front of me and truly understand the business, its people, its processes and what made it work. I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor!

Back to SOP writing… you have to challenge assumptions, identify dependencies, clarify ownership and make decisions about what good practice actually looks like.

As we documented the work, we also discovered things about ourselves. There were processes that existed only because someone had always done them that way. There were steps that could be removed. There were gaps that became obvious only when we tried to put the process into words. At times, two people were approaching the same activity differently without realizing it.

The act of documenting the business was therefore also an exercise in designing the business.

Over time, what started as a collection of procedures grew into 13 chapters covering virtually every aspect of the business. These were not just learning procedures. They covered the wider operating environment, including operations, IT, HR, Finance, administration, governance and quality.

Those 13 chapters became a kind of operating blueprint for our division.

Looking back, I think that was when my perspective began to change. I stopped seeing the SOPs as documents we needed to create and started seeing them as part of the infrastructure we were building. What I didn't realize then was that those 13 chapters were quietly preparing us for something much bigger...