Leaders never stop learning

We all learn – day in, day out. Sometimes we choose to – new recipes, different hobbies, foreign languages. Other times, situations encourage us to grow as a person. Or even as a company.

Telenor is a leading telecommunications company across the Nordics and Asia with more than 186 million customers. With the industry changing at fast pace, a cross-border Deloitte team has been helping their leadership team become more agile to take the company into the future.

A changing landscape

The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and of course 5G – digital transformations continue to challenge telecommunications companies and leaders. Telenor is no different.

They realised they needed to transform as a company and create a shift in their culture to continue to be successful in the long term. But where do you start when you have 2,000 leaders spread across multiple countries, who look after 20,000 employees worldwide?

We’ve worked with Telenor to create an online learning solution focused on supporting leadership to enable agility across the company. It had to be a space where leaders could learn from each other, feel safe to experiment and seek guidance in making decisions that would help move Telenor forward. It’s safe to say we learnt a lot along the way too.

Working across borders

Our Norwegian colleagues have been working with Telenor for years. But to bring the best of our firm to Telenor for this project, we gathered an international team across different functions.

Our Human Capital experts in Oslo focused on researching agile transformation and developing content. Then there were the technology experts specialising in learning solutions from Belgium, who built a custom system from scratch through an open platform.

We also worked with colleagues from the UK and Denmark specialising in agile training. And of course we relied on Telenor’s own Learning & Development experts too, who were key in making sure the learning content was 100% relevant for their leaders.

We worked closely with Telenor to deliver the project through short sprints, releasing an early version of the landing page with teaser content. This allowed us to collect feedback along the way and adapt as required by our users.

A shiny solution

In less than three months, we built a digital learning platform with a variety of content – including perspectives from Telenor’s own experts, thought leaders from Deloitte, and top business schools and academia. We also combined the digital elements with in-person sessions, such as classroom training, workshops, labs and safe-to-fail experiments.

The fun part? The platform is based on scientific research into how the brain likes to learn, empowering learners to select what most appeals to them depending on their specific challenges. And gamification made their experience more fun – through a travel theme, the leaders complete ‘expeditions’ with different activities outlined on a map.

We rolled out the platform to 573 leaders at first. During the outbreak of COVID-19, we quickly added new content to support leaders in the new challenges they were facing. As shared by CEO Sigve Brekke in an interview with the World Economic Forum, it’s been an opportunity to address the future of work head on.

We’re now working on scaling the programme to accommodate thousands of leaders across the organisation. Future, here we come!