In the 1975 blockbuster movie Jaws, when the actor Roy Scheider sees the sheer size of the shark they have gone to hunt, he mutters, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat.’ These days the phrase is used when a situation seems insurmountable. I don’t know what the chief learning officer mentioned in Chapter 1 said to herself when she first saw the spaghetti ball diagram of the learning structure she had inherited, but in my imagined reconstruction it was Scheider’s line. Or at least, it should have been.

Not all spaghetti balls are as large or as complex, of course, but most corporate learning functions will have their version of one: their own structural, political and financial entanglements that they need to unwind. This chapter is about how to do that unwinding, and about how to create clarity and simplicity no matter how complex the environment. It is about how to develop a tool capable of cutting through such complexity. It is about how to build a bigger boat.

The basic tool you, as a learning professional, require is a strategic plan. Whether you are building, rebuilding or simply extending a learning function, you are going to need a strategy, and a good one at that. When asked, as I sometimes am, what makes for a good learning strategy, I tend to reply, ‘alignment, alignment, alignment’. The first thing that springs to mind for most people when they hear this is the importance of aligning learning strategy with organisational strategy. That is hardly surprising, if you consider the volume of academic papers, magazine articles and blogs all articulating this core theme: that if learning is to be relevant for businesses, if it is to be perceived as valuable, then it has to be aligned to their objectives.