Learning Objectives, Performance Objectives and Business Needs

This month's Big Question - Scope of Learning Responsibility? (see my posts: Learning Responsibility, Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis and Long Tail Learning - Size and Shape) has raised some interesting questions in my mind. It also just triggered something for me around Learning Objectives vs. Performance Objectives vs. Business Needs.

Mick Leyden - Professional Responsibility??? tells us:

The learning professional is responsible for ensuring learning objectives are achieved regardless of the delivery mode.

This sounds quite reasonable at the surface. However, it dawned on me that if you define the scope of responsibility based on learning objectives you end up limiting yourself to focus only on content, immediate knowledge transfer, the fat end of the Long Tail Learning.

Is this possibly the crux of the issue? The disconnect I talked about in my previous post?

I would claim that willingness to accept definition of your scope in terms of learning objectives puts you in the box. To get outside the box, you need to have business needs and performance objectives.