L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Reframing L&D: The Need For Learning Practitioners In An Evolving World

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

In this episode of L&D in Action, we’re joined by Dr. Nigel Paine, speaker, consultant, author, and Presenter of Learning Now TV. Nigel has had an illustrious career in learning and development, including a stint at the BBC leading the digital transformation as Head of People Development. Nigel believes that L&D professionals stand at a pivotal cultural moment that demands a new focus on mobilizing the entire organization to address problems collaboratively as teams, employees and individuals with unique skills.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by GetAbstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential and building a culture of learning in your organization. With an eye on the future and a preference for the practical, we address the most important developments in edtech, leadership strategy, and workflow learning. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Nigel Payne. Nigel is a speaker, consultant, researcher, and author. He is the founder of

the consultancy NigelPayne.com. Nigel, thank you so much for joining me today. Such a huge pleasure, Tyler. Good to talk to you. Absolutely. I always start off just asking my guest really quickly, can you describe your background, all the great things that you've done, and what you're up to now? I've been around quite a long time. So I started my life working with adults. So I actually started almost where I ended up. Very start, I used to work in extramural tuition at a university. So I was working with adults that the university brought in and shared their expertise. But that didn't

last very long. You know, I ended up running a software company that was focused on educational technology. And we have the honour of being, or the status of being, the very first software company outside the US that Apple bundled. So they bundled one of our pieces of software, which was an incredibly exciting moment. We didn't make a huge amount of money out of it, but they sold 27,000 copies of the software for us, which was wonderful. I spent a large part of my formative life working on learning and development within corporates, big and small. And I still do that. It's still a passionate love of mine to make learning in organisations way better than it is. And it should still be dramatically improved and around that you know I present a tv program once a month for one hour and I do a weekly short podcast not as sophisticated

as yours Tyler but an eight minute podcast really just reflecting on what strikes me about the world it's called from scratch and I write you, you know, I'm currently half to three quarters of the way through my fourth book, which I want to finish by the end of the summer, September odd. And I continue to write. I write lots. I write articles. I write blog posts. I write reviews and I write books. And I also do research. You know, all my books are research-based. And I continue to read scholarly articles and try to get an evidence for everything that I think and say. So I'm what I would call an evidence-based practitioner. I feel like you're burying the lead a little bit, if you will. You also spent almost, or more than, two decades, I think, at the BBC. Is that right, as head of learning? I did. I spent a number of years. It wasn't that long, but I spent a number of years running

the learning operation for the BBC, which I call myself the CLO of the BBC. And that covered everything. So everything from leadership to induction through to in front of camera and all the engineering and technical stuff that goes into being the world's largest broadcasting organization as it was at the time I was there. Well, I guess that you had a stint in ed tech. That's really fascinating. And you have had basically every angle on learning and development on education, it seems, you know, ed tech, working at the BBC now, you know, operating a consultancy and

sort of being a learning influencer in that sense. And right now, what I've seen from you and your recent writings and in an upcoming talk that you're going to be giving is you are addressing how we need to reframe L&D. And I would love for you to just quickly give an overview as to what you mean by that and which direction you think we should go in learning and development. I don't think we need to reframe L&D because I think it's a good idea. I think we need to reframe L&D because organizations need to adjust to what I consider to be almost a different age, an age of insecurity, insubstantiality, massive change, and forces unknown operating in our world with a breath of air, things fundamentally change change and the idea that L&D in the face of all of that of all these huge organizational needs sits back and offers a

program of courses managed on an L&S counted by statistics and that is their job seems to me to be increasingly wildly inappropriate. So I think there's a divergence at the moment and I want to get back to convergence. A divergence between what organisations really need in terms of learning and understanding and what a lot of conventional L&D offers. I think things need to be aligned. Because I have naive and big thoughts and one of them is that this is the century of people organizations will improve not through buying more technology that's just there you know that underpins everything we do but by getting more out of people and to get more

out of people it's not just about their competence their skills It's about their comfort, their belief, their engagement, their motivation. And all of those things are at the heart of what I think a contemporary L&D operation should be involved in. And many are not. That's my mission. It's comforting to hear you say that you believe this is the age of people as we sort of sit under the ominous shadow of chat GPT and AI. I don't want to dive into that quite yet, but I'm sure we will get there at some point. We should go there. I think it's fascinating. I heard you and Martin discuss it on From Scratch as well. And it's an important conversation, of course. But I do want to talk about the fact that you're reframing,

at least what I've read about it, you give various areas of new focus. It actually sort of, it's similar to Dave Ulrich's reframing of HR as toward human capability is kind of what he says. There's various areas of focus. But as you also say about L&D, ultimately, it's about bringing things more holistically to look at the nature of the organization. And to me, this is like, yes, of course, this is what we should be doing. So what happened, Nigel? What happened that we're just not there, that this isn't how learning and development thinks, that we're not focused on the right thing? Who's to blame or what is to blame, can you say?

The world is to blame, ultimately, that things have changed so rapidly that it's hard to catch up conceptually. But what is to blame is that in some ways, a lot of L&D leaders outsource their brains to the big suppliers. They say, if you get in with Cornerstone or any of the other big guys, they will look after you. know they will have the solutions and I think these are amazing tools tools that we never had 20 years ago but on the other hand the responsibility for defining strategy rests entirely with the people inside the organization so that they can make it fit for purpose it isn't something that you rely on someone else to tell you what to do so i think there needs to be what i say is a re-engagement with practice you know that if you're a physiotherapist and

someone came to you and said a physical therapist in the us if someone came to you and said i've got i've got a problem with my hip you wouldn't say oh right okay so i'll fix your hip they'd say now where is the pain now what about your knee what about your hip. They'd say, now, where is the pain? Now, what about your knee? What about your ankle? And they would say, actually, the problem at your hip has got nothing to do with your hip. It's all to do with the way you walk or whatever, whatever it might be. So the physical therapist is using her professional expertise to make a judgment. And as a practitioner, she gets better at being a practitioner. She attends seminars, she reads papers, she tries to understand the latest techniques, latest devices. So she is an evolving, continuously developing practitioner who is responsible for her world. She doesn't

bring in a piece of kit and say, oh, tell me, what do I do with this? And what does that do? Okay, I'll let the kit tell me what to do. But I think in L&D, that concept of practitioner has been lost. And I think that's wrong. I really do think that you have to be a practitioner, and you focus on your practice, and you get better at your practice, and you keep abreast of new developments in your area. You work with other practitioners to get better. And you essentially do your fieldwork. Every single day is an opportunity for fieldwork so that you viscerally understand what's going on in the organisation. You don't believe what other people tell you.

You don't take orders from other people. And you certainly don't look outside the organization for entire solutions. Maybe tools that will help you, but not for solutions. Your job is to come up with new solutions. So I would like to kind of re-engage L&D with their core, their core beliefs, their core attitudes, and their practice, essentially. It's interesting the history that has developed around work and work optimization. You are one of the few researchers and authors

that I've seen who really takes a deep look at history when discussing learning and development and its function. Referring back to Taylorist behaviorism, we've come a long way from more or less viewing humans as cogs in a machine to ultra-optimize efficiency in an organization or in their company. We've come a long way from just having people, the motion and time that they spend doing things be super mega ultra hyper-optimized

for the purpose of making as much money as possible. In some cases, that probably still exists out there. But you say that organizations are more organic than they are mechanical. And I'd love for you to, first of all, just elaborate on that and explain more what you mean by that. You say this in your book. In a Taylorist or Taylor believed that the big problem with workers was that they had brains. And Henry Ford once said, when I hire people, the tragedy is they bring their brains with them. In other words, Taylor believed that the manager told the worker what to do, and the problems were when the worker went and did things on their own,

or they thought about stuff. Now, you'd say, wow, that's the most unbelievably crude and primitive thing to think, and what a crazy way to treat human beings. I think if you talked to 100 people in the workforce, 20 or 30 of them would say, that's exactly how I'm treated. I'm told not to think, I'm told not to have ideas, I'm told just to get on and do my stuff. Even at quite a high level, it's not just on a factory production line. And the revolution in work has been to say, going right back to Edwards Deming and the revolution in work has been to say going right back to Edwards Deming and the

revolution in Japanese industry after the second world war every single person at work needs their brain their commitment their engagement and their ability to work together on solving local problems now Deming continuous improvement was not about big managers coming and saying, oh, do that differently. Tyler, don't do it like that. Do it like this. It was Tyler and colleagues sitting down and working out how to do it better themselves and just getting on and doing it. Continuous improvement. Also, just the idea that if you've got big problems in the workforce, the solution is usually lies within the workforce. It doesn't come from outside.

The solution usually lies within the workforce. It doesn't come from outside. And that is another problem, that idea that we don't trust our workforce to understand what's going wrong and how to put it right. And I think all of that adds up to an incredibly poor work experience. And when people have poor work experiences, guess what, they're not motivated. Guess what, they don't put themselves out for the organisation.

Guess what, they don't lift a finger of their discretionary effort because discretionary effort is the effort that people can put in and to me the difference between two organizations one powering along and the other stumbling is nothing to do with they've got more technology or they've got smarter people or they only recruit Harvard graduates or stuff like that. The difference is one group are willing to give their discretionary effort and the other group aren't. I think it boils down to that. When you have engaged individuals, the energy that they create solves any problem and keeps the organization moving fast where you just say tell me what do i do i don't know it's not my job nothing to do with me or even worse when you

get organizations where people hide their lack of knowledge they cover up when they make mistakes and they never ask for help asking for help is like suicide why would i ask for help admit that i don't know i'll be fired the next day and when you have a whole organization with people masking pretending they're more competent than they are covering up on their mistakes making sure everyone gets the blame apart from me i think your organization's in its death throes maybe not immediately but eventually in its death throes. Maybe not immediately, but eventually in its death throes. Because that is just grinding down to nothing. Eventually the organization gets caught out.

The mistakes can't be covered up any longer. Or little mistakes add up to one big, huge, catastrophic error. And there's so many times when you see organizations stumble. There are people saying, I could see that happening five years before. Oh, I didn't want to say anything. It wasn't my place to say. Oh, I wasn't allowed to express my views. You see that the heart of it is about people. And that's why I believe that this is the century of people. People will fix problems. People will maintain productivity. People will keep organizations afloat. We can't rely on geniuses at the top or machines at the bottom to do it, even chat GPT, which

is going to be a thread running through this conversation. Naturally. Is it one of the biggest rubs in developing learning programs within organizations that people don't like to admit that they're wrong? We were talking earlier about your experience at the BBC and how some of the greatest learning moments were when people were doing something wrong or where they hadn't yet been educated on how to do something. In fact, you were sort of bringing in the digital era, the online era to the BBC. So virtually everything that you're doing was cutting edge and new. But in many cases, you were teaching people

how not to do something one way and how to do it better. Is this one of the toughest things about developing a learning program that people don't want to admit that they're wrong or that they don't want to have to improve themselves in the way that they're not good? Yeah, it's absolutely true. And it's one of the reasons why so much learning fails, fails to change behavior. And particularly leadership. I wrote a whole book about why leadership programmes fail. And one of the key reasons is that if you've been operating as a leader for five years, and someone takes you out of your work and puts you in a programme for three days, and says, now go and do everything that you did for five years, completely differently, because I've told you to do it. Guess what? Nothing changes.

They go back into the workplace and go, yeah, yeah, there was all that stuff, but this stuff worked. The way I do it works. Or someone says, why are you doing that differently? Do it the way you used to do it. So most leadership programs that don't focus on behavior change are just interesting experiences, but they have no lasting impact. And I think when you are trying to change people's behaviour, you're getting at the heart of who they are as human beings. And A, you've got to create a safe space so someone can admit, wow, I could have been doing that better for the last 10 years. And that's a big admit for anybody.

You've got to admit it and you've got to work out what you need to do differently. And then you need to start doing things differently. of all forcing it until it becomes automatic and at the point where it becomes automatic your behavior is fundamentally changed and it's no good just changing for one day it's changing forever and to me i would evaluate a leadership program not by asking the individuals if they had a good time for three days. Of course I had a good time. You took me to a major hotel. You know, there was spa facilities. I got to go to wonderful restaurants. Of course I had a great time.

The only way you can judge a leadership program is by asking not the leaders, but the people they lead. And say, have you noticed any difference? And if they say, no. He was away for a few days. Now he's back. That's a failure. It's when when they go funny you should say that yes she's behaving very she's asking this and we we did this that we've never done before and we are we all felt this is something something weird's going on here this is very different then you start to say ah there's some hope here things

that things are shifting but if you don't notice any change, what is the point? Answer the question. There is no point, in my view. You wasted your money. In the vein of leadership, you also, you write about how it's important to have advocates or sort of champions

of continuous learning in an organization. Those who are advocating actively for developing a learning culture. And you mentioned how this is really critical among leaders to have that sort of mindset. actively for developing a learning culture. And you mentioned how this is really critical among leaders to have that sort of mindset. To me, this is sort of a two sided question. It's how do you convince the individual contributors, all of them that it's worth doing this? I mean, most, you know, I would argue that most people agree that having resources and access to this sort of

thing is good. And that continuous development is sort of a net good, a net positive, but how do you convince them that they need to take the time, and they need to think about it critically, and they need to participate in this? And also, how do you convince the leaders that are up at the very top that there needs to be time for this, that they need to not just have, you know, access to learning tools and some sort of a platform, but it needs to be sort of a deliberate investment that may even take out regular time from one's week or month or even day in some cases. So how do you convince everybody at an organization through those champions or those advocates? Yeah, it's a really good question. And the answer is by what the impact of that is.

So where there is that resistance, what I urge people to do is find the small pockets of change, find the individuals and teams that are doing things differently, and try and quantify the impact of that and then share that with the top leadership. And they go, wow, we need more of that. You've got your modus vivendi, you can move forward. If you do all of that and the top leadership say, we don't care, find another job, because they're never going to get it. So it's about proof of concept. The second thing I tell organisations is that you've got

to make learning work and work learning. It's not I work and then I learn. Oh, I haven't got time for learning. I work, I work, I work. You have to say, show that where learning emerges from work and goes back into work, efficiencies accrue, benefits accrue immediately. And you want people to realize that every minute they spend improving their work is a benefit to them and the organization. Because things that took two hours take two minutes. Things that used to take five people an hour, take two people 30 minutes or 20 minutes. So you see these benefits from working smarter and being conscious learners about how work works and learning to improve the work process and deal with the challenges in the work process. Small micro challenges and big macro challenges. And if you start to get people

to focus on that i always ask the question how can we make your life better at work what could we do that would make you smile and feel that you've got something really much better out of work would make your life easier i've never met anybody who says oh my work life is perfect there's nothing you could do to help me. It's the exact opposite. It's where do I start and where do I stop? Because there's so much, so much that people feel frustrated by. And some of the things that I suggest is that if you give people permission to admit what they don't know to be open about mistakes they've made and you give people permission to help each other you start to shift towards that learning culture

focused on work because when you say i don't know and someone helps you you've learned something if you don't know and you cover up you haven't learned anything apart from you've learned how to cover up and blame other people there's so much blame goes on in organizations it's never my fault it's always someone else's fault and you meet people who are geniuses at never taking the blame and we call them teflon sams you know teflon they everything slips off them beautifully they never nothing ever sticks and those people are very dangerous people in an organization because they're toxic and their impact is toxic most usually one of the biggest questions that we're addressing these days is how to make workflow learning happen how to have effective

learning in the flow of the work that we're doing and i think that yes is effectively what you're saying make learning work and work learning i think that everything that we do should include some sort of evaluation process to it, if that were possible. You know, there's some level of how much, you know, micromanaging and micro-optimization are we doing there. But at the end of the day, I think it's safe to say that the most effective retention and learning comes from when you're doing something in the moment or shortly after you've, you know, when you're learning shortly after the moment that you've achieved something or

attempted something or just done something. And this, I think this is being self-conscious. Yes. It's being self-conscious at work. Exactly. So that you're aware of what you've done that is good, that you should build on and what you've done that is not good and that you should build on, and what you've done that is not good and that you should improve upon. And these are very, very important. So instead of just doing work and just not even thinking about it, you do work consciously. You're a conscious worker. And at that point, you begin to see all the things that are wrong and all the things that could be done better, or all the things that are right that should be shared. Of course. And most people have got tricks, tips, and shortcuts that they use to survive, and they never share them with anybody.

And my belief is that if all of those were openly shared, everyone would benefit. The organization would rise and rise and rise. Because people solve problems all the time. They don't even realize that. Of course. And they solve problems all the time, but they never share it.

They never see it as a solved problem. They never see it as something improving the workflow. They just see it as, that got me out of jail. Yeah. It's a tragedy in a way. So what you've got in many organizations is the same problem being solved on a daily basis by thousands of people when one solution would solve it and we

could all move on. But we don't do that because we don't share. So how do we systematize that? How does the organization or the company take hold of those things and also, you know, come up with their own solutions and best practices? Because in many cases, the organization and the leadership has better access to potential solutions and skill sets and knowledge. So how do we systematize these things? Right now, there are plenty of tools and services and leadership strategies for teaching people sort of on the job and as they're working. You know, that's really being addressed. I'm a big believer that maybe this is a place where AI actually can do some really good

here by getting more deeply involved in the day-to-day tasks that someone is doing, especially on their machines and on their devices. We already have software that allows you to track what somebody does on their device. There are plenty of types of industries that unfortunately have sort of this big brother type monitoring of their employees, and they quite literally track what they're doing on their screens to the second, sometimes, you know, less frequently than that. But my point is that there is technology to know what people are doing moment to moment, minute to minute. And with maybe the combination of AI's ability to assess what's going on, and you know, the success rate of certain tasks and assignments,

maybe there's a way that some sort of casual AI intervention moment to moment in the flow of work can actually be a really strong solution for this type of learning. Would you maybe agree with that? I would. No, I would go even stronger. I think it's a certainty that this is going to happen. What no one has talked about, and it's very interesting that no one's talked about it,

is the idea of having the AI focus on the internal networks and the internal learning in an organization so you you get an expert companion if you like sitting at your side who understands the way the organization works so if you say you know how do I do this it draws on the expertise and insights of the whole organization and I think if you could do that and because it's learning all the time then it whole organization. And I think if you could do that, and because it's learning all the time, then it gets better and better. I think you'd see huge efficiency gains. So there's AI that is out there crawling around the world, but no one has talked about AI sitting inside and crawling around the organization and learning about the organization

and how it does things. But I think you're right. You know, I see, you know, AI as a valuable assistant. It's not going to take my job. You know, a machine that can't even tell you one word after another. It's just kind of guessing based on patterns and paradigms that it's got from somewhere else. The idea that's going to replace me is total nonsense. But as a companion, it could could be brilliant it's like my laptop you know what would my life be without my laptop i often think about that actually you took my laptop away i would be like a hopeless child helpless child you know my laptop is my life it's my brain it's my external brain yeah it's on on my laptop and all the connections that my laptop makes. It is an integral and really important part of my life. You know, I love my laptop.

I talk to it. I thank it every day for just being there and surviving and doing stuff for me. But it isn't me. It doesn't replace me. And I see AI as like a whole different synthetic kind of companion that sits with me. And I think that would be really interesting. It would be like my chief of staff. You know, if we could all have a chief of staff,

I would love to have a chief of staff who worked out what I needed to do, went ahead and got it, went and got intelligence, did some research for me, made me much more efficient and effective. And those people, it comes from the military, you know, it was for very senior military. the chief of staff ran the show and i'd be happily seed an awful lot of the boring stuff that i do to to an ai companion without any problems whatsoever but i would see it would it would make me better make me more efficient and it would would mean i didn't go scrabbling around trying to remember

this and find that and whatever all the problems that we have with day-to-day work that is compounded you know that organizations find that people waste thousands of hours a year on looking for stuff that they knew is there somewhere they can't find of trying to cover up for mistakes because they don't want to admit they don't know. All of that, if you took all of that out of the equation, you free up massive amounts of time for productivity. That's why I go back to the CEOs who say, oh, we haven't got time for that.

Oh, they've got to get on with the business. And say, sometimes you've just got to stop the machine and reflect. And reflection is incredibly important. Let people reflect, let them work out what they can do better and more effectively. And then you actually get back the time you've just spent tenfold, maybe even 15 fold. So we waste vast amounts of time being busy. And whenever people say I'm too busy to do this, I always challenge them. I don't believe that at

all. When people say, when I say you should be reading books and they say i haven't got time to read books i don't that's rubbish it just they choose not to and they choose to fill their days with stuff that is less important than reading a book so i'm saying just free up half an hour you can do that anyone can free up half an hour a day i don't believe there is anyone who can't free up half an hour a day i don't believe there is anyone who can't throw up over there unless they're working in a call center and they've got you know x thousand calls to make and even then i think that a call center that created space for people to work together on common problems solve some of the challenges that you have to deal with again

and again and again and if you had time at the end of every day to reflect on what you could have done better, where the real problems are and that you can share those with colleagues, you'd actually get far more efficient call centres than thrashing people, flogging them to death, getting through as many calls as they possibly can and allocating one minute 28 seconds a call regardless of the complexity of the call. So I just think every piece of work can be made better by some reflection and by some focus on improvement.

Simple as that. In enlisting AI and technology to help us out in this way by, you know, freeing up time through being a chief of staff, that sort of thing. I mean, to be an effective chief of staff, you have to have a deep understanding of the systems and things that are in place for that specific role. And AI clearly has the capability to do that sort of staff, you have to have a deep understanding of the systems and things that are in place for that specific role. And AI clearly has the capability to do that sort of thing.

But that means that the modeling that takes place must be effective. So, for instance, you know, OpenAI is using just, you know, language modeling from tens of millions of articles and things on the Internet. But if you were to create, let's say, you know, like a chief of staff for a specific organization, there's a responsibility of the people in that organization to do what you said, which is reveal the solutions that they're coming up with so that a machine has the ability to, you know, learn from those things. And I want to go back to my prior question about sort of systematization of this and what organizations can do to offer solutions categorically from internally, from

their own knowledge and what they've learned in best practices and any other research that they've done. So do you think that this is an obligation of an organization? And do you even have any good examples or case studies of organizations that have done this sort of thing of cataloging knowledge internally and making that available as a learning resource? Yes, I have. logging knowledge internally and making that available as a learning resource yes i have but one of the things i think that the big mistake that um km knowledge management made was to assume that you have to create documents you know that yeah tyler you've done that now put it on the

system and you have to find uh fill in a form keywords particular formats you know make sure it's tagged in the right way and you go i've lost the will to live no i'm not even halfway through so i i don't think it's it's it's that kind of formal i think it's more informal there is formal stuff but for example if you give people permission to sit as a group a small group and work on problems they will they will come up with brilliant solutions because they're all involved and they're all they're all suffering so if it's giving people space and time not documentation and if you do that and then someone says look I just jot down the best practice so someone willingly does that so you don't you don't try and categorize it in a similar way just jot down the best practice that is the bit that gets picked up and and

dock and stored and and and replaced by something better as time goes on. So it has to be a kind of human-centered process, not a machine-centered process. Now, as soon as you ask most human beings to fill in folders and files and tags and all that stuff, they don't do it. They can't be bothered. And it's boring. When you get people to engage with each other, that is always interesting.

And it always comes up with novel solutions. Now that five people who sit together and share a common problem will come up with one best solution that could be improved upon the week after and the week after that. Five individuals trying to work it out themselves are just deeply frustrated and unhappy and they don't come up with anything useful or one person does

and no one else even realizes. You've got to open up the world you know that it's about focusing on solving problems that's the key. I once heard Etienne Wenger the guy who invented communities of practice. Etienne saying when did anyone say that communities of practice were about sharing knowledge? He said, I can't imagine anything more ridiculous than putting 45 people in a room and saying, share your knowledge. But he said, some organizations have interpreted communities. He said, communities of practice are problem-solving environments,

and out of that, as a byproduct, becomes knowledge sharing. But you don't start off by saying, right, share your knowledge. If you said to me, share your knowledge on this, I would never clue what you're talking about. If you say to me, there seems to be a problem here, I can begin to participate. So it's giving people permission to talk, help, solve problems together, and walk away from individual desks, you know, without having to ask permission. This is the problem. We're so, so focused on individual productivity, individual desktop, individual screen, that we've forgotten that most good ideas aren't individuals, it's groups coming together. And we've lost that.

This is especially critical when it comes to really intelligent people having doctors and high level researchers and successful people continuing to learn at their organizations. I've had this conversation with a few folks now. And based on your writing, I think you'd agree that, you know, when you're working with maybe high level scientists and high level journalists and that sort of thing, those those people are less likely to want to change what they do or admit what they do is wrong or maybe learn something new, especially when it relates directly to how they do their day to day job. And you actually refer to an interview that you did with Bill Gates, I believe, where he said that. And then it was Microsoft's goal to make it so that when you bring three really intelligent people together, the sum of what they create, the impact is greater than sort of three individuals. And I think that's effectively what you've been saying here.

And I want to, you know, let's solve this problem. So how do we have really intelligent people, really high level individual contributors? First of all, how do we convince them to learn and how do we give them the most impactful learning programs? What is actually going to teach them and have them improve? Yeah, I think, first of all, there's something called humility. And humility is admitting what you don't know. And many organizations are full of people who are not humble. You know, in fact, they've been taught over the years, that humility is a career limiting, you know, arrogance is career making. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that you've got to stimulate people's curiosity. Someone like

Einstein was intensely curious and he loved meeting people and talking with people who were clearly not as smart as he was because he was incredibly bright. But he would sit and listen to people and listen to their questions, and that would help him formulate something new. So I think, you know, if Einstein can be curious, all of us should be more curious. So, you know, I'm fascinated by the world, and I really enjoy listening to what people's perceptions of that world are

and perceptions of their job. And you can help people be more curious by one of the things I do is help people frame questions one of the great ways of learning from people is to ask the right questions open questions not questions that intended to show how smart you are or questions that don't really need an answer because the answer is in the question but open questions where the answer really matters and if you can get everyone in an organization more resilient and more willing to admit what they don't know and ask questions to try and fill the knowledge gaps with their colleagues with their customers with their suppliers and with the world you begin that process of opening up the organization to becoming more

intent on building better knowledge and increasing knowledge and understanding the difference between knowledge and information and i was listening to a program on chat gpt and saying that chat gpt has no knowledge it just has information which it pretends is knowledge and when it doesn't know it makes things up and this is one of its problems someone said it's like playing two truths and a lie which actually bt the problem is you don't know what which one is the lie it never tells you what the lie is it makes stuff up so if you can create an environment where there is a thirst for knowledge for getting better at learning what that what on earth is going on and doing things better as a result of that. You begin to create that kind of open organisation.

And the progress is incredibly powerful. If you take an organisation like WD-40 Company, when Gary Ridge came in as the CEO, it had a market cap of $200 million. He left as CEO last year, market cap $1.6 billion. And he did it through knowledge, through let's work on what we know and what we don't know. Never, ever fail to admit you made a mistake and let's learn from your mistakes. Let's celebrate mistakes because that's how we learn. And let's pull what we know. So if we know something special in Brazil, let's share that in North America or in other countries around the world.

So the company grew slowly, steadily and strongly on the back of knowledge and shared knowledge. And what they make is, you know, stuff in a can. You know, we've all got one in our garage and it's great stuff. But no one would have believed when Gary took over the company that he could completely transform its prospects and turn it into this gargantuan operation and he did it through knowledge sharing and openness and putting people together

and trying to defeat some of these barriers that people put around themselves to stop you actually admitting what they don't know and or being arrogant about what they do know and demanding me me me gary's gary's managers in wd-40 are bonused on how well their team performs not on how well they're because their job is to make the team perform that is their job live the values embody the behaviors and perform as a team so So he tries to take out the me, me, me, and I don't care about anyone else, just me. And if you cascade that

down through the organization, you end up with a very interesting culture. And that's what he built, a very, very interesting culture, different culture. I think one of the challenges with fostering curiosity and openness, as you're saying here, is that it's hard to measure these things. You know, I mean, these are abstract, and they're sort of emotional. But also, L&D has this issue. You've spoken this with Martin Cousins on from scratch, actually, when we're measuring the effectiveness of learning programs, the data just isn't very good. You know, the metrics that we're looking at are vanity metrics, we're talking about, you know, how many lessons were completed? Did you enjoy the lesson? It's it's just very simple, sort of qualitative. And in a lot of cases, I suspect that that stuff is biased, just because people are more likely to say that

they enjoyed something, because they don't want to upset somebody, especially at their work, they don't want to upset a colleague or leadership or something like that. So to me, I just haven't really heard of any really effective data gathering experiences when it comes to learning and development. And that's just because I guess it's hard. But you say that it's really important to look at the learning outcome and assess it in that sense. And I still think that's a big challenge. You know, when we're in the formal education system, what we're looking at is the outcome is then we go into the workforce. So what percentage of people that were in this major now have jobs or something along those lines. So it's just, it's a challenge. Have you seen any really

strong examples of this or anything that you can cite specifically? The first thing is you've got to get rid of all that nonsense. Okay. Did you learn your program? Yeah. Just get rid of it and focus on measuring impact. You know you know brinkhoff has got the success case method he developed a whole methodology for measuring impact which involves in his view interviewing the most successful and least successful participants and looking at the because what he found was that sometimes what holds back an impact from a learning program is nothing to do with the program or the learning or the participant. It's to do with the environment and the culture in the place where it's supposed to be imposed or where the improvements are supposed to take place. So if you fix the culture, suddenly

the learning takes off. So it's all about impact. And it's all about being honest about what has occurred. You've invested this number of dollars. What has occurred as a result? And documenting that. And as I said, asking people, maybe not the individuals who are responsible for the inside the program, but those that they influence outside. Have you noticed anything? What's going on better here? And just having some pretty blunt statistics. Are we improving productivity? Did this happen?

And if it did, be honest about the percentage that you can attach to the learning yeah because often if things are going well in an organization you anything looks as success if things are going badly anything looks a failure so you've got to be a bit more honest about saying oh we're 100 improvement in sales all due to that sales training program that i developed it's rubbish you know it won't be true because you've got good products to sell. But you may have made a 20 or 30 percent impact, 30 percent difference. I would accept that. I would go with that.

I would bank that because I think that's pretty impressive because so many make no difference whatsoever. And if you're not making any difference, why are you doing it? It's a vanity project, otherwise. Of course. That's what worries me. I think that's a very important observation, Nigel, I do. And thank you so much.

Before I let you go, can you just let our listeners at home know where they can learn more about you? www.nigelpain.com is quite a good place. You can track me on LinkedIn. I'll happily follow you or join up with you, connect with you on LinkedIn. Absolutely no problem. And I like dialogue. If anything I've said challenges you or you want to debate more, I'm easy to find. I'm easy to get in touch with. And I'll happily keep the conversation going for as long as it's relevant.

And when is the new book due? The new book is, it will be finished this year. So it will come out, I think, early 24. It's going to be about organizational learning. I've got about 17 different titles. The eventual title, I'm not of, but it will be about the power and importance of organizational learning. Great. Well, we'll certainly keep tabs on that. Again, thank you so much for everybody at home. Thank you. Thanks for joining us and we'll catch you on the next episode. Cheers. Huge pleasure. Thank you very much, Tyler. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating,

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