But why a honeycomb?

It’s not because we are obsessed with bees. (We are, a bit, but that came after.)

It all started when we were rethinking the notion of a “course”.

Our challenge was to organise a collection of interrelated topics and behaviours in a way that made sense to people but was not restrictive - we needed to show logical scaffolding of concepts and their relationships to each other but allow people to jump into whatever concept they needed most.

We needed to show people what they had done and where they needed to go - a bit like a map.

Then we wanted to roll it all up so that there was an organisational view that gave actionable intelligence to HR, L&D, and business people.

It was a lot of information to pack into something we wanted to engage people.

So we started drawing and The Honeycomb proved to be our perfect visual framework.

Honeycombs in nature use the least amount of resources to hold their contents with the greatest possible structural stability. They also allow bees to work on cells simultaneously rather than linearly.

With it we can present a lot of information in the most economical and coherent way, allowing many people within an organisation to learn simultaneously without forcing a prescriptive path for any individual learner.

When we show it to people, something clicks. L&D leaders can spot what they are missing in terms of coverage, people can see something they are interested in and, when we start filling it in with data, you have a tool with which you can build a strategy. Whether that’s your own personal development plan or a plan for how you are going to move a massive organisation.