L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - The 5% Solution: Prioritizing Learning and Development in a Busy World

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

In this episode of L&D in Action, we’re joined by Simon Brown, Chief Learning Officer at Novartis, to discuss how he and his L&D team have cultivated a thriving learning culture for an organization of 105,000 global employees.

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 Simon Brown. Simon is the Chief Learning Officer of Novartis, as well as the co-author of The Curious Advantage. Simon, thank you so much for joining me today. A pleasure to be here. Thanks, Tyler.

I'd love for you to start off just by explaining a little bit about your own career, how you've come to where you are as the CLO at Novartis. Absolutely. So studied management, went into accounting, actually as an auditor. Fairly quickly realized that that wasn't the long-term path that I wanted to take. Got involved in using technology for learning, doing interactive PowerPoint on CD ROMs and realized that there was lots of opportunity of how this technology could be used. And that took me into then consulting around how technology could be used for learning. That then led me to actually set up or co-found a company called Brightwave in the UK. It's an e-learning development company, which did that for several years and grew the company. Then went to join

Accenture and spent seven years as a consultant working with a whole range of large global companies around their learning strategy and looking at how they structure their learning teams. From there, I went to join a major bank and then three years there on a learning transformation program, looking at how they do learning and the operating model and systems and academies and so forth. And finally came to Switzerland about 10 years ago now to join Novartis. Been a range of learning roles within Novartis, first in sales and marketing, then in our drug development area. And then the last four years or so now, I've been chief learning officer responsible for all of our learning across 105,000 associates around the world. So you've been through a couple of different industries, several different positions as well.

And 105,000, as you said, that's massive. Novartis is a fortune, what, 50 company, fortune 100, somewhere pretty high up there, I believe. I'm sure you're familiar with the 10,000 hour concept. Malcolm Gladwell is a big advocate of this. I think he wrote an entire book on it, but it's pretty popular these days. If you spend 10,000 hours on something, that's how you can expect practicing it deliberately. That's how you can expect to become a true expert at it. And one of my favorite things about Novartis is that you have some sort of a quota, would you call it a quota, where you expect all of your employees to spend about 5% of their time or about 100 hours of learning every single year?

Is that right? Is it fair to call it a quota? Not so much a quota. So we refer to it as an aspiration. And so it's really encouraging people to commit time to their own development and to be building the skills that they need to be successful. About three or four years ago, we were looking at what some of the barriers were to people actually building their skills and undertaking learning. And what we heard was that I don't have time to learn and my manager doesn't support me in my learning. I don't have time to learn and we're all busy, but ultimately some of that comes down to prioritization. How much do we prioritize our own development? How much do we prioritize learning new skills? And actually, do we prioritize our own development? How much do we prioritize

learning new skills? And actually, if we prioritize everything else above that, that may be fine on any given day. But when that goes weeks and months and maybe years before actually investing in our own skills, then that starts to become a problem. So we wanted to send a clear symbol, essentially, that we want people to be spending time on building their skills and making sure they have the most up-to-date knowledge and therefore we arrive a number of 100 hours there's nothing scientific about that it's more symbolic it's about five percent of people's time and we took the view that we can give people access to great learning opportunities

great learning resources and encourage people to be committing time to be able to take advantage of those it takes away that at least helps with that challenge of prioritizing time. The other piece was around my manager doesn't support me. And if we give a clear symbol from the company that actually we do want managers to support people in their development, because having the latest skills, having the latest knowledge is critical to our success. So it's very much an aspiration rather than anything else. 100,000 people though, that's like I was saying, 10,000 hours across 100 hours across 100,000 people is 10 million hours.

And that's a big number. I can only imagine there are some serious conversations with stakeholders and leaders at Novartis and ultimately trying to convince everybody that that was a valid pursuit. I'd love to hear about sort of what was the path to? You know, how it is convincing everybody to actually put in those 100 hours. But, you know, primarily, how did you convince people that that was a worthy pursuit? And so if we go back to 2019, it was a conversation with our exec committee to make the case to go big on learning. In 2018, we'd done 22 hours on average of learning across the company, and we'd seen it declining for the last three years. In that situation, with skills expiring

faster than ever before, with new-to-world skills coming, we know that learning is one of the top reasons that people join organizations, and we know that if people aren't learning and developing, it's one of the top reasons that people leave organizations. So we made the case to say, well, actually, if we want to attract and retain the best talent, we need to have great learning opportunities. And to deliver on our business strategy, actually, that requires us to have the latest skills, whether that's around operational excellence, whether that's around scientific innovation, whether that's around data and digital, skills are going faster and faster and faster, and we need to be investing the time to do it so we made the case for going big on learning the aspiration of five percent of time we're still some way away from that meeting that aspiration we may never meet it and that's okay it's more

symbolic around actually we want people to commit time and we've seen progress though if i looked in 2021 we'd more than doubled the amount of time that we were doing in 2018. Last year, we had a lot of change going on within the company. We were still about 90% higher than we were in 2018. So it's a major increase in the commitment that people are making to developing themselves and to building those skills and knowledge. You clearly have pretty good data set up around this and you're tracking things pretty well. Are you able to explain or describe how much of this learning is autonomous versus maybe like, you know, compliance related or group managerial

related mentorship? Do you have data on those sorts of numbers? Yeah, so we look at what's assigned learning or mandatory learning, and we look at voluntary learning, as we call it. And what we've seen is a gradual increasing in the amount of voluntary learning which is great because that means that's people committing out of their own free will if you like to be developing themselves and so it's that voluntary learning that we really want to be encouraging more and more ironically and a bit paradoxically to setting an aspiration for people spending more time learning we're also working really hard to reduce down the amount of learning that we're doing from a mandatory perspective. And so we work hard on actually certain things, how do we make sure that they're done really efficiently, and that we can get the

message over in the least amount of time, while at the same time, encouraging people to also be spending time to develop their skills. So in a way, we're sort of working against ourselves. But that's right, we should be efficient to make sure time spent learning is time well spent and is done in the most efficient way. And therefore, the time spent actually actually get the greatest return on it by building those skills. I'm sure a lot of that comes down to the technology that you use as well, you know, instructional design, but also probably a good amount of technology and distribution and all that. I'd love to hear what is the architecture or the ecosystem of learning technology that is used at Novartis? Yeah, so the last few years, we've been looking at our ecosystem through a skills lens and sort

of re-architecting things with skills at the heart of it. So we have our learning management system that is sort of underpinning everything and particularly for things like assignments of learning and scheduling of learning, that's a key tool. But then in front of that, we have the learning experience platform. And next to that, we have a talent marketplace and we have all of that integrated and all of that then using common skills. So that way, people can enter into those systems what skills they have or what skills that they want. And then it will either recommend learning paths through the learning experience platform. We use Edcast as our learning experience platform, or it can recommend platform. We use Edcast as our learning experience platform, or it can recommend projects or roles through the talent marketplace. And we use Gloat as our talent marketplace.

Yeah. Don Taylor, who I'm sure you know, he actually released his global L&D sentiment survey recently, the results from that survey. And skills-based management, I think, jumped up like three spots on the what's hot question, the one question that he asked. I think it went from number six to number three with like almost a 10% jump or something along those lines. And I think you use this term in there, a marketplace of skills. This is something that I'm seeing more and more. I've spoken with Robin J. Suthasen recently, who's the author of Work Without Jobs and other books as well. He discusses, you know, marketplaces as really becoming ultra critical to, you know, all of industry, of industry, focusing less on the jobs that people hold and the skills that they have to accomplish things.

I find that growing more and more. Do you see that becoming even more present at Novartis? Do you see a decreasing focus on actual jobs and potentially a change in that direction away from jobs and more toward skills? Certainly see an increase in the use of skills as a language and as a currency. Not yet seeing, I guess, a move away from jobs, but we're investing to make sure that we understand how jobs link to skills, how people link to skills, and also how our learning content and learning opportunities link through to skills. So they become the heart then of how these things all fit together.

So that means as an individual, I have a better understanding of the skills that I have. It means I can better articulate the learning that I need through saying, okay, I want this role and I know the skills that that role has, or there's particular skills that I feel I need. And then through having that across the systems, I can then either see in the learning experience platform, okay, here's a learning journey that may be made up of a mixture of internal, external content, et cetera, that can guide me towards building that skill. Also, within that skill, what level do I need that skill? Is it a fundamental level or is it actually

through into an advanced level? And then from a role perspective within the talent marketplace, maybe there's projects that we have that would be super helpful for building out those skills. And then people are able to commit to projects in there or find projects in there that can help them say, maybe I want to develop my project management skills. Maybe someone needs a 20% project manager and I can work on that alongside some of my responsibilities in order to build out that skill and open up other opportunities for me. So by having that ecosystem that's integrated across the talent marketplace and the learning experience platform with skills at the heart of it, it joins all of these things together and creates a lot more transparency for people of opportunities, of what sits behind roles,

and also of the other ways that those skills can be developed. I read that Novartis has a system of, for it to categorize its capabilities, that you use something like 15 core competencies and hundreds of more like functional skills. Is that a system that you use? Is that accurate? So historically, that's, yeah.

So we spent time coming up with a core set of competencies that we used across many of our roles. And we came up with an internal framework of competencies that we used across many of our roles. And we came up with an internal framework of about 600 functional skills. That's probably going back eight, nine years ago. That was the work that we did. And that was sort of the approach at that time. Fast forward to today, and predominantly with AI and the way the technology has advanced, we're now able to use a sort of recognized skills framework. We use the, what's the MC burning glass framework. And the latest I heard was

there's 50,000, something like that skills within there. So the joy of technology and AI, huge amount in there, obviously, and vast majority of those won't be relevant to every organization, but it means that there's a level of granularity in there. And through technology, through actually using AI to automatically be able to tag learning content to those skills, automatically add job roles to those skills, and also to be able to then infer skills for people, it allows working with a much more granular level of skills than would otherwise be the case. working with a much more granular level of skills than would otherwise be the case. And talking to other organizations, that allows a much better opportunity for reskilling as well, where people can build up a more detailed profile of the skills that someone has, which means then when you're looking at what other opportunities could use some of their skill sets, actually, if you've got more granularity there, it means it opens up

more opportunities for reskilling as well, which is an exciting opportunity. When I hear all this, it sounds to me like there's going to be some serious challenges to leadership, especially when you're thinking about marketplace, using the marketplace and, you know, distributing work differently. You mentioned somebody acting as a 20% project manager. I can only imagine that, you know, leadership and management becomes, you know, a little bit more difficult, making sure that the folks that you're responsible for are dedicated to the projects that you give them and distributing their time exactly as needed among, you know, the autonomous, the freedom of access they're given to other projects and also their, you know, core skill set activities that need to accomplish. Do you have guidelines for the system?

Do you have guidelines for this system of leadership at all? So there's certainly some principles that underpin it for how our management leaders would support people to be able to take advantage of opportunities. But I guess there are always challenges within leadership and we try and make certain things simpler. So from one hand, having something like a talent marketplace is great from a manager's perspective because actually it may give me access to people that I wouldn't otherwise be able to discover, maybe to extra resource because people are interested in the projects that I'm putting on and are able to commit some time to it. So there's a lot of benefits, I think, as well. As well as for one's team, it's great to be able to see the opportunities that are out there and it's motivating to know know, you know, what opportunities are there, what roles might be relevant, and you know, what great development is out there, as well as helping people to build the skills they need to

actually perform better as well within that team. So there's new things for, I guess, managers to get their heads around. But there's also a lot of benefits, a lot of transparency that it provides, and yeah, a lot of access to learning and development opportunities that will help within the team as well. What about leadership large companies tend to have systems for either you know mentorship systems or some sort of peer-to-peer person-to-person type system for helping new leadership you know adjust to their positions does nevadas have anything along those lines yeah so we have different solutions for different levels of leadership and management. So first line manager level, we have a program called M1, a nine month journey that builds out

core management and sort of early leadership skills that people need. And then a big focus over the last few years has been around unbossed leadership. We have a program called YouGrow that helps leaders to become better leaders to become more self-aware you know work out some of the things that hold people back some of the things to overcome to be able to focus on becoming a better leader and that's been a big focus for the last few years to really help our leaders to become stronger unbossed leaders in pursuit of our culture and our cultures around being inspired curious and unbossed so in pursuit of our culture and our cultures around being inspired, curious and unbossed. So a big part of that is that the role modeling skills that our leaders

have. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, unbossed is pretty directly implies autonomous, you know, free to do things as you would like. My biggest question there is how do leaders make sure that learning is taking place in the moments when it's needed most? And that could be in moments of mistakes where some sort of improvement needs to be made or just in the critical moment where something can most effectively be recognized as key information and learn. How do you make sure that there's good oversight from leadership? So to clarify, unbossed is not just everyone can do whatever they want. So it's around an empowerment that the people have,

but there's still the strategy, the direction is set by the leader. The leader is still very much accountable for making sure the team is focusing on the right things, but people are empowered within that and given the psychological safety to be able to speak up to challenge, et cetera. And the leader is still very much there

to guide, to lead, to make the key decisions, but to create the and that the leader is still very much there to guide to lead to make the key decisions but to create the environment within the team where people can share their ideas can experiment etc as well and within that to encourage also then the curiosity of the team and that involves learning and encouraging people to develop the skills that they need to be able to execute within that but also to be curious in other ways to be able to undertake the skills that they need to be able to execute within that, but also to be curious in other ways, to be able to undertake experiments, to ask great questions. And if we look at how do we innovate, how do we move forward ultimately, and how do we discover new medicines? It's through doing things differently, it's through discovering new things, it's through experimentation and trying. Many of those experiments may not work, but if we're learning from each other,

if we're curious, asking the right questions, that's how we discover new ground. Yeah, I think in the book, it's mentioned that it's important to reward people for curiosity regardless of failure or success. That's intriguing to me. How do you manage that? Yeah, so it's an important one because research within Novartis shows that the manager of a team can make or break the curiosity of that team. So we had data around the difference between a manager that was ranked as favorable and a manager that was ranked as unfavorable. And there was 18 point difference in the engagement of the team based upon whether the team ranked the manager as favorable or unfavorable. So huge difference. based upon whether the team ranked the manager as favorable or unfavorable.

So huge difference. But when we looked at the different dimensions there, it was actually in curiosity that there was the greatest difference. And there was a 22-point difference between favorable and unfavorable manager in how the team sort of ranked on curiosity. And therefore, the manager can either create a safe place for the team to be curious, where people can ask questions, people can try things out. It doesn't matter whether those things work or not. If don't work we share what didn't work we try a different way and eventually we find the right way of doing it but actually if the manager if someone asked me a question and i shut them down i mean that's a stupid question if i offer

up offer up a thought and you know that's crazy no don't suggest that but if i try something out and it doesn't work and my manager gives me a hard time for it, next time I'm going to play it safe. I'm not going to try and stretch the boundaries, try new things. I'm going to do what I know is works, what I know is safe. And if we want innovation, if we want to find new ways to discover medicine, we need to be asking bold questions. We need to be able to experiment and try things, and we need the safety to do that. And a lot of that comes down to the manager to create that space, encourage that curiosity and support people in asking questions, in trying new things, in exploring things,

doing that in smart ways. So if you fail because you didn't follow something that should be done, that's not something that should be rewarded. But if I follow the right process and I ask a new question, I try something and it doesn't work and I share what didn't work so others can learn from it, then that should be something that we're encouraging. This is sort of the ultimate question. How do you manage closely and effectively without micromanaging? How do you encourage curiosity and innovation without kind of going off the rails and doing things that are clearly not going to work out and also without, you know, kind of going off the rails and doing things that, you know, are clearly not going to work out. And also without wasting time focusing on the tasks that you have at hand to, you know, accomplish your most important goal.

It sounds like you have a way to measure curiosity. You know, you mentioned there percentages related to how you actually measure how much a team is curious. Can you describe how you measure curiosity? Yeah. So historically there have been a number of measures that we've used as a proxy for curiosity, if you like. So we have quarterly pulse surveys, and in there are questions that relate to opportunities to learn and develop. And we have things around the amount of time that people are spending learning and developing. We have things around where people rate managers in what we call our team perspectives. So there's various different sort of questions and dimensions from which we can get an idea around the curiosity within the team. And from that, we're able to sort of make

certain assumptions. Interestingly, with my co-authors, we've been working on a curiosity diagnostic with Ashridge Holt Business School, which will actually give a much clearer view around how do you measure curiosity within large organizations. So that's something that we'll be launching soon, which will go much more accurately to be able to then define what is the measure of curiosity within an organization or across teams against the dimensions that we talk about in the book, our seven C's model. And that way you can see how as an organization you compare with a benchmark and then what can be done to actually encourage more curiosity with an organization. I think it's also important to recognize that innovation is part and parcel of what Novartis does. As a developer in the medical world,

you always have to be innovating and discovering new things. So I'd love to hear about any internal systems that you have to make sure that you're always pushing the envelope and, you know, looking for the next great thing among your sort of research and development. Yeah, I mean, there will be various systems for different use cases across various points in the sort of research and development cycle. But ultimately, going beyond systems, beyond processes, it's more around having incredibly talented people who have the right culture around them in order to be able to share their ideas, innovate and collaborate around making those new discoveries. So systems is a part, processes a part, but great people with the right culture is ultimately the most powerful in all of that. is ultimately the most powerful in all of that. Speaking of those people,

a lot of them are, you know, genius level individuals. You have doctors and you have incredibly high level researchers and academics. How do you get those people to be convinced that learning is as critical as it is? Obviously what they're doing every day

when they're discovering and they're innovating, they're learning for themselves, but they're also kind of learning for the world. Again, they're pushing that envelope. But how do you convince them that, or how do you teach them? How do you best engage them in a learning program from a corporate level? I think it's

fair to recognize that there are many people who teaching is not going to be the answer. And if I'm a scientist who has been doing this all my life, and I'm a world expert in whatever, then trying to teach that person something is not going to be the answer, at least not within the subject area that they are deep experts. It may be that actually, you know, there are learning solutions that will be valuable for them in completely different areas. But often as people getting more and more expert, they may not need reskilling like other people will need reskilling, of course, that sort of thing. Yeah. Or at least, you know, there may be a new tool to use, there may be a new approach or whatever but

it's yeah it's unlikely to be teaching them around the area of their expertise i think that there it's more how do we connect then the right people make them create the right communities create the right sharing opportunities so people can learn from each other so when we talk about learning it doesn't have to be a course it doesn't have to be a piece of e-learning. Actually, a lot of our learning is done through talking with each other, either internally within an organization or with networks that we may have outside of the organization as well. So it's creating that environment where we can learn through all manner of different media, different formats and podcasts like this and ways of sharing information that

will work based upon what it is that the person needs to know but then from a learning professional perspective it's how do we make sure that stuff is easy to surface so how do we make sure that those communities happen how do we make sure that three people across different parts of the world who have a common interest actually discover each other and can connect and learn from each other how do we have surface those opportunities create those communities and more and more i think that's the job of learning organizations is you know a part of that is having the right content but also a part of that is how do we share knowledge how do we create the culture so people can be learning from each other learning

through as we talked earlier sort of developmental opportunities through projects these pieces as well looking at that much more holistically rather than the answer is I have to go and teach someone something. Are you doing any of that though? Are you having that sort of collaboration where, you know, you're sharing skill sets by deliberate teaching? That is actually a pretty common method that I've seen. And actually banks seem to do this a lot, larger banks where they have almost like, you know, school is in session and they allow anybody to teach what their expertise is to just about anybody else who would like to learn from them. They have almost like a marketplace of education where you can just sign up to give a session and then whoever wants to join can join.

Anything like that at Novartis? Yeah, we have. So we've had in the past things like our Curiosity Month where we've surfaced experts or influencers from across the company and created a platform for them people to be able to share whatever it is that they are expert in so that others can learn from that. We've created communities. So we have recently created a knowledge management community, which is focused on helping to build the community that will then help others to share that knowledge across the organization. to share that knowledge across the organization. And we've got four or 500 people as part of that knowledge management community, learning the skills of knowledge management to help them share that elsewhere.

We have facilitators on many of our internal programs are taken from the business or from they're not professional learning people. They will actually be people who come from their managers or they're people from within the business and they will be the facilitators on the programs that we run. So yeah, a real range across the organization, different ways, different models, and also through technology providing platforms where people can share their own content

as well. So for user generated content that that can be posted into the learning experience platform and we can learn from each other wherever we are in the organization. This is really complicated. You have several layers of education going on here. I want to return to that question of the digital architecture for learning that you have, because it sounds like you have, you know, a pretty good background in ed tech from years ago, sort of when you started out. How many iterations have you gone through to get to where you are right now? And is that sort of a persistent part of this process of learning is always making sure that digitally, especially in, I mean, already Novartis is an incredibly diverse workplace with employees all over the globe. But now that we are post-pandemic and probably even more decentralized than before, how much is

iteration of technology playing a part in optimizing your learning? Yeah, you're absolutely right. When you're talking about learning for a large global organization, it becomes very complicated. And simplistically, it's like, hey, just deliver some training courses to people and be done with it. But you're talking about a hugely diverse audience. in our manufacturing areas through to IT or procurement or other areas of expertise through to clinical trials and the deep expertise that's needed there. Salesforce and our medics out in the field, very, very different roles, very different skills and knowledge that are required, very different mechanisms for how you would access

learning, whether you're in a manufacturing site or you're in your car on an iPad in a car park or in a hospital room, through to office-based, et cetera, or in a lab, and all of these are very, very different. So creating the technology architecture that manages across that does become very complicated. It's taken us many years to get to the iteration where we are now. About nine, 10 years ago, we had a big program to consolidate 14 different learning management systems down into one core learning system. We had seven different talent systems that we consolidated down as well. It probably took about five years for that program. A huge wealth of courses that were in there that needed to be cleaned up, a huge amount of data in there that needed to be cleaned up. So that got it down to sort of a single learning management system. Then with the advances

with the learning experience, we then brought in last year, a learning experience platform that sits in front of that. And with the advances in skills and the project work, et cetera, we brought in the talent marketplace. So now we have really the front face of that is a learning experience platform and a talent marketplace integrated. And more more it's getting everything into their common data behind it and courses tagged and things ai to help surface it and all of that should mean it's simpler for people to find the learning that they need because the ai understands what people find valuable and can surface the right things at the right time and point them towards project roles and other future job roles and so forth. But getting all of that to work together

and yeah, there's quite a lot of effort involved in there. Fortunately, there's a fantastic team that we have within Novartis who have the expertise to be able to do that and think through many of these challenges and help to solve it and help to make it as user-friendly as possible at the front end of that.

So a lot of that complexity is hidden and you just get stuff that hopefully feels intuitive and valuable when you come into it. I want to talk about that AI a little bit more. I mean, that sounds like you guys are definitely ahead of the curve when it comes to helping your employees learn using automation. What is the ultimate goal of that? Is it to help in career growth? Is it to help in learning as a source of engagement and productivity? Is it more just to help in career growth? Is it to help in learning as a source of engagement and productivity? Is it more just to help people discover what they might like from your learning system and more or less how to use it more simply? Because it sounds very complicated.

What would you say is the ultimate goal of utilizing this AI? Yeah, I think making it really simple and straightforward to find what you need when you need it. So because of the breadth that we have across the company, we have a large range of different learning programs, different ways that people can learn from sort of small nuggets of learning through to sort of 30, 40, 50 hour programs that build out deep skills. So navigating through all of that, if it was a catalog would be very, very difficult. So there's a role there for AI to play to say, okay, I understand Tyler.

I understand the role that he's doing. I understand the skills that he needs. And actually today, I think based on what he's learned in the past, I think these three things, this article, this podcast, maybe this longer-term deep skills-building program are the things that would be super helpful for you today. And then depending on whether you use those whether you find those valuable yeah it gets clever and cleverer around what you're finding valuable weaving into that you know over time also and

maybe you need to connect to this person over there because they similar interests and you probably can collaborate on things and that's then bringing some of the wider knowledge into there as well but i think AI can make it much simpler to find what we need when we need it and help us then to build the skills that will allow us to be more successful at what we do. It actually also connects you to other people. So as at today, not directly, but over time, that would be where we'd see something go that, you know, here's the expert in whatever it is that you're interested in. If you're not connected with this person, then link up.

And we have ways to connect through Yammer and through other knowledge platforms, et cetera, today. But more and more, the way we can make this easier for our end users, the way we can join all of these things up, the more powerful it becomes. Yeah, I mean, 100,000 people is 10 of my hometown, and I only knew, you know, 5% of my hometown. So I can imagine having an AI resource that could say, hey, you know, you have these interests. I mean, at the end of the day, that became Facebook, you know, 10 and 15 years ago,

but even still having a resource based on the actions that you take and what you excel at and what you could use help with, you know, recommending people, I think that would be a very cool addition. I want to zoom out with AI actually, and use it as sort of an example. So in the curious advantage, there's the seven C's of curiosity. And number one is actually context. This is an important topic to me because when it comes to learning a hundred, five thousand, you have every manner of worker, you have frontline workers, you have scientists and researchers, you have leaders and you have, you have everything there. Let me put it this way. Do you agree that it is an organization's responsibility to give every individual the context that they need to

appropriately understand in their learning a difficult topic? For example, AI. People have different familiarity with technology. If somebody is a coder or a programmer, they probably have significantly more familiarity with how AI and how these new technologies and Web 3.0 work than somebody who just doesn't have that sort of knowledge base. So how does Novartis provide context to help sort of level the playing field when it comes to learning really challenging new things? Yeah, so I think answering from a learning perspective, I think it's a mixture between providing a broad set of resources that people can take in any context, and then for specific targeted skills and needs, it may be far more important to provide that detailed context.

So as an example would be having access to project management learning within the learning system. So if I want to improve my project management, I can go in and I can choose what aspect around project management it is. And I can then go through a generic program that allows me to do that. That may be helpful for some people. There may be though particular roles or particular teams where actually we want to get far more detailed into project management around a particular piece. And there, maybe we use some of that generic content, but maybe we need to then provide a much deeper context of, we're not talking generic project management now, we're actually talking

about project management in the context of managing a clinical trial, and it will be using these systems. And therefore, we need to provide far more context around that to be able to go into in the context of managing a clinical trial and it will be using these systems and therefore we need to provide far more context around that to be able to go into much more detail and build out those skills and be able to apply that using the examples so i think the answer is sort of it depends sometimes it's great to have that generic piece and available to everyone and people can go in and dip in and get what they need but But sometimes if there's a deeper skills need, then we need to build something that is far more specific. And something like project management is a good example

because project management can have a huge range of what we mean by that. If we look across industries, I might be a project manager of building an aircraft, and it's a sort of multi-year, $100 million project. At the other end i may have a project management of how to design a garden and do whatever oh i may have something that's it project management that's hugely complex in one way or there's such a variety of those that without the context actually i may be learning something that's not so helpful so a mixture of

you know understanding the context and understanding what may need it. And sometimes generic solutions are fine. Sometimes we need to have a really specific solution that has a lot more context wrapped into it. You know, a big challenge, you know, it sounds like one of the big challenges that you're facing here. But at the end of the day, this is a very robust learning culture. How do you emphasize and encourage learning in the flow of work? Yeah, so a mixture between, I guess, tools, solutions to be able to do that. How can we make sure that learning is embedded where people need it? So where we do have tools and things, for certain instances, we've embedded learning and support into those tools within our learning system, in fact, and where we do our objectives and things like that.

There's an embedded performance tool that allows then I can get help at any point that I need as I'm going through that. And it gives me then context sensitive help to support what it is that I need. So the more we can put learning in when we need it, the better. The more we can actually learn through projects, the better. So learning is not detached and outside of work. Actually, we're learning through doing. Yeah, the learning process is actually doing the work itself rather than on a case study or whatever. Yeah, I can imagine the marketplace contributes pretty directly to this and, you know, dedicating your time to those new

projects. Exactly. I'm building my skills through a project that directly to this and, you know, dedicating your time to those new projects. Exactly. I'm building my skills through a project that I'm doing. And it's actually, it is, the learning is the work and it's very much in the flow of work. So the more we can do that, and we can't do that in every case, but looking at where we can do that, where it's most valuable is absolutely the way forward. the way forward. What about re-skilling that when you're talking about really having somebody switch from effectively one career or one hard skill set to another hard skill set? It sounds like you have an infrastructure that could really encourage this. If somebody doesn't feel thrilled with what they're doing or really wants to try something new, it sounds like they could pretty easily discover that not only through the marketplace, but just through the system of

competencies and 50,000 infinite functional skill sets that you have, you know, this almost feels like a university system to me. It almost feels like it's got your sort of like diversity of degrees and pathways and projects to actually pursue those things. I mean, do you agree? Does it feel and is it modeled after a university system in some ways? It's not modeled after a university, but we have links to university programs. So through our partnership with Coursera, we provide access to learning content from hundreds of leading universities around the world that people can go in and get certifications from those universities. And that's one of the pieces from sort of the reskilling element is making those really quite in-depth learning journeys available to people so that they can go in and work through a 30-hour learning program, sometimes even more than that, and end up with a university certificate at the end of that, which then has currency for being able to change across roles and things as well. And it's both valid inside the organization, but also recognized outside the organization as well.

And we have a virtual career center at the moment, which identifies where we're going through a period of change where people can build out some of those certifications and valuable skills that could be relevant externally as well. Yeah, so when you're talking about hard reskilling, what are the systems behind that?

Because like I said, it sounds like you're really almost encouraging one's ability to modify their career pretty aggressively if they wanted to. But of course, you have to keep people on track. I mean, not everybody wants to just up and change what they're doing entirely. But I would argue that a company like Novartis probably has a higher percentage of people that are maybe looking to switch into something new and are just very much capable of that. Would you agree? Yeah. So it's where do you draw the line between what we call upskilling and reskilling? And ideally, it's sort of people are constantly learning, constantly building skills.

And actually, you're directing that wherever your interests lie. You don't need to ever fully reskill because you've evolved your skills, you're learning all the time, and you head in the direction that you want. There will be times though, as you say, where then actually it's more of a reskilling where, okay, actually the path that I'm on, there's not immediate opportunities there, but actually 60, 70% of my skillset is valuable for this other role over there. And therefore, I want to build out the remaining 30, 40% that I can do. We haven't done so much of that yet, but that's absolutely where in the do we haven't done so much of that yet but that's absolutely where in the future we want to be doing more of that and that way you're able to provide

people with more opportunities because yeah there's other roles that even though i don't have a strong match for that actually we've got the learning journeys available to build out and provide those skills so that's absolutely the direction we want to be going in one of the other c's i mentioned earlier that there are seven C's of curiosity, you know, from the book. Another one is confident. I want to talk about how you, I mean, I think this also goes back to the inspired, curious, unbossed. When it comes to curiosity, when it comes to innovation and discovering new things, you obviously have to have a lot of confidence there. How are you instilling confidence in learners? i guess it's through providing great access to learning opportunities

providing then opportunities to apply some of that those skills in as safe an environment as we're able to generate and through supportive management that helps people on their development path but also provides people with feedback and we're all learning where we all get things wrong as we are trying to apply new skills then to provide the feedback and the coaching and the guidance to be able to build that confidence and to be able to apply them ongoing so learning often is actually a hard painful process because we're not good at something and we're trying to learn it and we may be clumsy in how we apply that first of all. So if we can provide a safe environment that people can be learning those skills, testing out those new skills and providing

the coaching and the guidance when we get it wrong, then that goes on to build that confidence over time. So you told me earlier that you have instituted sort of an augmented reality or a virtual reality system for your manufacturing. This, first of all, sounds really cool and I would love to experience it myself. But more importantly,

I think adopting these sorts of resources into education, you know, like I was saying earlier, anything from AI are already, you know, doing very well with it sounds, but also Web 3.0, the metaverse, VR and AR,

all of those things. They're really complicated. They're not cheap and it takes time to properly test them. So first of all, I'd like to hear about the system that you have for manufacturing. But second of all, what is the overarching thinking behind how do we test these things? How do we make sure that we're making the best decisions for cost effectiveness and ROI and then the implementation of these new tools and resources. Yeah. So there's several different use cases that we've had within our manufacturing area. One in particular talk about was around manufacturing line clearance. So if you imagine a manufacturing line and you have various products on the line, and at some point you may

need to change those and you need to make sure the line is properly cleared down, that there's nothing trapped or left on there or whatever, before you then start with a new product. And in order to train that, historically, we would have shut down that line and then we would have gone through and trained on the actual material. But if you can do that in VR, then you don't need to be shutting down the line. So we recreated the manufacturing line within virtual reality. People then were able to don the headset and actually go through and practice the line clearance without actually shutting down the manufacturing line in order to be able to do it. And that was so realistic. We even have people where part of it, you go down on the floor to sort of check underneath it and people are trying to pull themselves up on the machine. But of course, it's a virtual machine, but it's realistic enough when you're in there that you sort of feel that it's actually there. So that one was a very

effective piece of training and it had a super impactful return on investment as well. So it was about five weeks return on investment to pay for the production of that because the cost of shutting down a manufacturing line is very high. So finding the right use cases is hard, but when you find them like that, it can be really powerful. But you could have created a similar piece of virtual reality training for another line that wasn't in use all the time. And actually, then it would have zero ROI because actually you can practice on that one without shutting it down. So choosing the right use cases, the right ones that drive the value is really important in that yeah so how do you go about that is there a system of exploring and looking up new options and you know

seeking new technology and small pilots and testing and all that how does novartis do it yeah i mean elements of always keeping an eye to you know what is new and we need to be thinking about but with any of these it's around here what's the right solution for the situation so weighing up you know is this something that can be super simple and it will still get the get the right outcome or is this something where we need to invest in some specialist technology tools platforms in order to be able to do it really understanding the need understanding the skill we need to develop the knowledge we need to develop how that will get applied is if a small audience large audience single language, many languages, one-off or

ongoing static content or something that's going to be constantly updating? All of those questions would lead to potentially different solutions in terms of how we would address the learning need. And we need to be able to weigh up all of those when we're thinking of a solution. And I guess my last question is, do you encourage these solutions to come from anywhere? Because I would argue that anybody at an organization at any level can have really good ideas for systematically improving things like productivity. If you're familiar enough with the technology, I would argue that a part of being unbossed, you know, having that sort of autonomy is that you get to offer those

suggestions. Maybe it's not something that's directly related to your own career path and your own skill set. But if you're familiar with something like AR and VR, you know, I'm a gamer. I've used this stuff a lot in my life. I wouldn't say that I could come to Novartis and say, hey, guys, I want to be your VR consultant. But I'm sure you have folks internally that are really, really smart with this stuff and that can come up with these sorts of ideas. So did you encourage these sorts of innovations, these ideas to come from really anywhere in the organization? So yes, to come from anywhere, but then making sure that we're linking up the right people with the right teams in order to be able to support those. So we don't want lots of duplication, lots of things where actually we're building something that already exists over there or

isn't going to be compatible or is going to introduce risk on certain areas. So that we have great learning teams around the world and different parts of the business and where those ideas crop up, then they can work with those learning teams. If needed, we connect them with the right experts in technology or in learning design or in data and analytics that can then work with them in order to build out those ideas where appropriate. Or maybe we actually have something that already exists and a great idea, but we've already solved it over there. So let's just reuse the one that's over there. So that's where the learning teams around the world can help to sort of navigate through that and figure out what's already there and what we then take forward. The depth of collaboration and community that you describe is really fascinating. It's really

exciting to hear about. And I like that a lot. Well, Simon, I think we can wrap up there. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been great talking to you. Thanks, Tyler. Very much enjoyed. So great to talk to you. And everybody else listening at home. Thanks so much for joining. See you on the next episode. 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, leave a comment, and share the episodes you love. Help us keep delivering the conversations that turn learning into action.