L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - The State of L&D: Navigating Novel Technology on a Learning Budget

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

What will be hot in L&D in 2023? What challenges will learning leaders face this year? If you’re an L&D pro, you may have answered a survey asking these questions at some point in the last 10 years. They come from Donald Taylor’s indispensable L&D Global Sentiment Survey. This week, we discuss with Don his findings from 4,000 respondents, covering the challenge of tightened budgets, the adoption of burgeoning tech, demonstrating a learning ROI and much more.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, 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. Today we speak with Donald Taylor. Don is a keynote speaker and consultant, widely recognized as a top thought leader in the world of learning and development. Since the year 2000, he has chaired the Learning Technologies Conference, the world's leading annual conference dedicated to tech-supported learning in the workplace.

In 2017, Don wrote the book Learning Technologies in the Workplace, published by Kogan Page. He is perhaps most known for his annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey, which just reached its 10th year. The survey asks thousands of learning professionals across the globe a simple question, what will be hot in workplace L&D this year? He also asks about the challenges learning leaders face, the answers to which play a major part in our conversation today. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay. And today I'm speaking with Donald Taylor. Don, thank you so much for joining me today. It's wonderful to have you on the show. Great to be here. I want to start off by looking at your global sentiment survey, pretty easy place to start for us. We'll get into some of the specifics of what was hot and what was not. But I would like to start with the open ended part of the survey. You said in the first release

that you're going to do a blog post follow up eventually once you've read through all of the answers to that question. But you've received, I believe you said more words than the little prince has words in that book. So have you had a chance to read through it all? Anything that you can update us on from that right now? I have read through them all. There's no dramatic changes. What is interesting, though, is that the response to the survey was great. We had 4,000 people from 100 countries. And we have this obligatory question, what do you think is hot? Okay, now that varies. The responses to what's going to be hot next year varies a lot across countries. But the challenges answers don't vary. Not a great deal, not nearly as much as what's going to be hot. It seems that everybody pretty much universally

has the same challenges. I think that's a really interesting take that whatever we might be excited by actually in the day-to-day job, we're all up against the same issues. So what are those issues ultimately? Are we looking at budget problems, those sorts of challenges, or is it more about how we actually get people to learn and be engaged? I would love to say it was something about the theory and methodology of learning, but you're right, it's budgets. If you look at the count of the words used in the 2023 survey versus 2022, the number of times, the words that came up most often in this year versus the previous year was budget, value, and impact. Those words were used far more often this year than the previous year, more than twice as much in the case of budget. So people are very concerned about budgets,

or they were in December 2022 and January 2023 when the survey ran. And that's kind of been borne out this year. We've seen budget cuts. I've been talking to a lot of people who are saying that departments have suffered really tightening of what they've got. A lot of people being laid off. That's what I'm hearing anyway. I haven't got any numbers for it, but I think it reflects the reality of where people are. Budgets are tight and therefore people want to be able to show the value and the impact of what they're doing. Of course. So those are the big challenges for this year.

What about the fact that we're dealing with so much brand new technology and really complicated technology these days? So we have AR and VR, we have AI, we have immersive stuff. This is expensive stuff ultimately. And I would assume that a lot of leadership is looking to consider adopting this just because of how effective it has the potential to be. But I would assume that's going to constrain budgets even further and make the pitches for implementing those into L&D a little bit more challenging as well. Yeah, when budgets are tight, it's certainly going to be difficult to make the case for spending

money on new tech. But I don't think that's the main blocker. I think the main blocker is simply that L&D is typically scrambling to do what it's always done. So it's flat out doing the day job, which is typically running compliance courses and creating materials. There's a lot of justification in saying we shouldn't be doing all of that stuff. But nonetheless, that's what L&D is asked to do. So until it can push back and say, we're not doing that, that day job is keeping L&D

fully busy. It's not ready to adopt new technologies. Now, here's something really a bit odd about how the voting went around AI during the course of the survey. So the survey takes place over roughly two months. First month, we do social media. Second month, we do email. Social media people are far more typically early adopters. They're excited by things. So ChatGPT comes out on the 30th of November. Survey starts a week later. In the first days, the thing shoots up for education. If I look at the different workplaces, if I look at education,

they are totally behind it. Jumps up to number one on the list and it stays number one for education throughout the course of the survey. For freelancers and for vendors, it starts off middling and it goes up to number two and it stays there for the whole of the survey. But for workplace learning and development, it starts off sort of nowhere, goes up to number six and then actually comes down to number eight. Bear in mind how enthusiastic everybody else is about that, how enthusiastic the rest of the world is about AI, what's going on in January that people are actually voting less for that than for other things like collaborative learning, personalization, and skills, and so on?

What's happening is that the first group of people who respond, the social media people, are the people who are into the latest thing. But the email lands on the desks of people who've, they have had a chance to see that social media stuff and they haven't responded. They are caught up in their job. They're trying to get the day job done. And they see this thing. For them, AI isn't as important.

And that's why it gets marked down. So what we're seeing with the workplace learning and development cohort, and this is about 1400 people internationally. So it's a big chunk of people. Those people are not as taken with AI cohort, and this is about 1400 people internationally. So it's a big chunk of people. Those people are not as taken with AI as other people are. And I think for good reason, because they've got enough on their plates already, and they see it as being probably a bit too much. Now, that was January. It's not January now. Okay, so things have moved on.

If we ran the survey now, I suspect the results would be different. But it's still the case that I'm sensing still a lot of wait and see in the L&D space versus elsewhere. People are still waiting to have people show them the money. How does it actually work? They want to know, they want to get something that puts AI to work for them, rather than the whizzy, extraordinary things it can do, they want to see it put to use in something that's practically of value to them. Yeah, of course. I'm not surprised that you describe it this way. AI has been inundating social media since December, basically, especially, I mean, LinkedIn, just dozens of posts on AI a day on my own feed and to this day still. So that

pattern makes sense to me. But I also think that the job of those who are deeply in learning development, L&D pros, and those folks, it's more complicated. And it's I would assume that a lot of people who see things on social media about AI, you know, it's the exciting stuff. Sometimes it's the AI art and then generative content. And then it's the how can it make my life easier. But when that comes to what an L&D pro has to do, it's a you know, you're working with a large cohort of people, you're working with a large cohort of people, you're working with the brain and learning. So the implementation of any technology seems to be more complicated to me. I just think it's not as simple. And it's especially complicated

where you've got this really powerful tool that clearly can do a lot, but doesn't have one particular application. Contrast that with mobile delivery. Okay, so mobile delivery, it's very clear. It's a substitution. Oh, you could deliver this way, but look, there's this new thing. Mobile delivery, it's the same as the other one, but different. You deliver to people's mobile devices. Brilliant. So it's a straightforward substitution. AI isn't like that. It's, here's the special source, which can change everything you do in some way you just got to figure out how i have heard organizations doing a really good job where individuals are experimenting in teams actually chat gpt or indeed gpt4 can be focused on particular tasks that they do

and they share this information across the team the team as a whole then gets more effective what it's doing and increases its productivity. It's almost like right now, people have to be doing that experimentation and they have to have the time to do the experimentation in order to reap the rewards. One of the conversations that I've had most commonly about AI within L&D and within HR and recruitment more broadly is workforce intelligence

and how we now have pretty strong tools that allow us to measure what makes for good work within the organization, sort of a very deeply analytical way, and what like career pathing and that sort of thing. So identifying skills and identifying habits, and then helping people maybe, you know, choose, then where to go or what to do to really optimize their day to day. And it does sound like there are some tools that are coming out that will apply that to learning in some ways that sort of like adaptive learning those sorts of opportunities. Are we making that progress? Are you seeing out there that technology is sort of making that progress with workforce intelligence and actually

implementing learning within organizations? Absolutely. And the organizations that are doing this best are not the ones that started on the 30th of november 2022 when they started playing with chat gpt now the organizations have been doing it in advance and those organizations are already doing great stuff with absolutely adaptive learning personalization and also skills-based talent management where you look at what's going on in your organization you get get a view of skills, you try to match people's existing skills to vacancies, and you have a better internal talent marketplace, can skill people up in order to get to new positions now, and of course, build for the future. None of that actually is new. And we've had that's been going on for a

long time. It's just been augmented. And the interest in it has been supercharged by what's been going with AI, it's undoubtedly the case that a combination of processing power, effectively free data transfer over the web, and the ability using AI to identify people's skills, I'll come back to that, and also to match people to content and also to roles much faster, that has supercharged what's going on, no question about it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm wary of claims that we can tell what people's skills are by looking at their online activity.

I think there's two problems with that. First, it's difficult to define what the skills are, because if you're using technology to define skills, you are almost certainly missing out on some things. There definitely needs to be speak human interface there. All the best systems I've seen are using humans plus AI to create their taxonomies. If we restrict ourselves to what is possible to glean about somebody via their online activity, we miss out on a whole bunch of stuff that we wouldn't know otherwise. You wouldn't know from my daily online activity that I'm pretty good at speaking Turkish. That might be useful to an organization. You wouldn't know about it. You'd have to put it into the system and a whole bunch

of other things as well. So I think it's pretty dangerous to be seduced by this idea that because we can use these tools, which are so powerful, that's everything. It's not there is more than online presence to us as people. You're not the first person to say that on the show, actually, Christopher Lind month ago or so, very similar thing, you know, why are we saying, hey, computers, figure out the skills that my team is good at when, theoretically, leadership should be deep enough. you know what your people are doing that you kind of understand their skill set better than hopefully any computer could i think is the hope and i've got a lot of time for his approach to things and i would say that always

these tools should be the starting point and the background to a conversation because ultimately it's the conversation between people where the real value is so what about proper learning analytics then learning analytics then? Learning analytics and consulting more deeply with the business saw small but noticeable bumps in the survey results that you had. And VRT, which is a European, I think, VR provider, did a survey as well earlier this year, about 150 L&D pros is their market. And they said only 9% of those folks are actually trying to measure a direct ROI of learning. So, you know, less than one out of 10 are actually looking at ROI. And to nobody's surprise, most analytics, most data that's collected is still just sort

of like satisfaction surveys, whether it's from the actual learners or the leaders who are kind of overseeing the learning. So based on your survey results and everything, do you think that we need to work harder at establishing how to find an effective ROI with learning? Yeah, we absolutely do. And it isn't difficult and it is very difficult. So, and I'll come back to the survey in a minute because there's an interesting series of data points

around this from the survey for the past 10 years. But it's not difficult because all you've got to do is do what the business needs. And that's why it's difficult because you have to find out what the business needs, not what the business says it wants. Very often the business says, oh, I need new time management course for my people. Actually, no, what you need is better management from the person who thinks they have people need the course. Going and having the conversations with the business that establish the exact need is an area where L&D is undoubtedly lacking, which is why consulting more deeply with the business is one of the options on the survey, because that's actually what is crucial. You've got to consult

with the business and then you've got to come back and show value. Oh, you've got this issue, but when it did something and look, we managed to produce a result. That is where L&D needs to start with everything. And it doesn't, it's still learning development sees its role as being largely the creation and dissemination of content. Coming back to the survey, if you look back to 2016, the survey results for both showing value and consulting more deeply with the business have pretty much been a flat line for the past five years. And the numbers are important because for the past five years, each year, we've had more people joining the survey. For the past five years, the numbers have increased for those very slightly. It wouldn't matter that if it was only a very slight increase, normally you might say, well, that's just statistical variation. It wouldn't matter if it was only a very slight increase. Normally, you might

say, well, that's just statistical variation. It's just your sampling. But the thing is that over time, every other option on this survey has descended in value. It's just what happens. People get excited about something, and then the excitement dies away. But not with these two. With these two, they have failed to die away. Now, that gives me hope, Tyler, for the future. It makes me think that there is a group of people out there. And it's typically around 6.5% of the people vote for these things. And the top value is roughly 12% on the survey. So there is a core of people who each year are backing this and are saying it's important to them.

And it's slightly increasing each year. So that makes me feel that there is hope for the future. But we might take a long time getting to the point where it's absolutely normal to start with consulting with the business. So when it comes to really establishing a clear ROI, though, are you seeing any systems that are doing this really effectively? I mean, it just seems like a challenge. And I haven't really discovered any tools or resources or teams that really just know how to nail the ROI of their learning consistently. And especially if you're dealing with situations where you have to kind of read between the lines and assess, hey, maybe that leader who thinks they need better time management

actually needs to be a better leader, especially if you're going in that direction. There's a little bit of conflict there. So it becomes even harder to really demonstrate what it is, the value that you're giving. So are you seeing any teams that are just that have really strong data? Maybe there's an AI tool that can do this sort of thing, but they always just have a strong ROI table and they're showing and they're demonstrating to leadership, here's what value we actually brought. Very often organizations that claim to be or vendors that claim to be offering ROI are in fact offering cost reduction. Now that's not necessarily a problem, but it's not ROI. ROI means you put money to something, you get more money out of it, not you spent less money doing something. No, I don't see any platform able to do it. And I'd be amazed

if it could, because the platform would have to do an awful lot of complicated things that you simply can't do without understanding the context of a business. But yes, there are people doing great stuff out there. So Guy Wilmshurst-Smith, who runs, his official title is Head of Training for Network Rail. Now, Network Rail looks after the railroad track in the UK. That's several tens of thousands of miles of railroad. And it sounds like a pretty minor job, Head of Training. Head of Training here means you've got, in his case, 500 people underneath him. It's a pretty big team.

Plus, it's got another 100 people in the IT department whose only job is to look at data. The great thing about Network Rail is they have got oceans of data because they track everything. And he's able to go to his customers who are the railway companies that use the railway system and say to them, I can reduce your delay minutes on this particular track, on this particular set of points, if we train these people to this level over this period of time, within this period, for this period, we are with a very high degree of certainty likely to reduce delay minutes by whatever. He's using their data, he's using the conversational, the metrics that they use, delay minutes and other things, to express why training is important.

And it's a no-brainer. Yeah, okay, well, if you're going to meet my needs, I pay this much, of course, I'm going to do it. He's going well beyond that. That's a very simplified example of it. So where data already exists, and I've seen similar things with Vodafone in the UK and elsewhere, where organizations have lots of data already. That's one way in which it is possible to show ROI if you take the time and you've got the people to do it. He employs people whose job it is to look at data. But at the same time, you don't have to take that numbers-driven approach.

If you use, for example, the Brinkehoff method of success case study and look at what is it that's working and explore how that works, relate that to business metrics, you are going to end up with something that shows that you've got an ROI. But it all takes work. And it takes work that is beyond the daily production of content, which L&D is obsessed by. And you have to get to the point where you carve out the time in your day

to make that work possible. And that requires something very important, which L&D people aren't very good at, which is saying no. We have to say, no, I'm not going to spend time producing that course. No, I'm not going to do this content because there's something strategic I'm working on. That's a bit of a challenge. Most people in our field don't do that very well. Sounds like the New York subway system could learn a lot from Network Rail over there. In the same survey that I mentioned before, Vierte, only 15% of these learning and development pros said that attracting and retaining talent is a top three reason for the content that they create and the

job that they ultimately do. And this could be some sort of a sample error, the market that they're looking at could be a very unique one. But ultimately, that seems like a small number to me. Training and compliance, those sorts of things were about 30 to 40% up there and sort of like hard skill training, but engagement and retention just didn't seem to matter very much to this group. Also, this is based out of the UK. I'd like for you to just give your ideas on this, but do you think that this might be perhaps due to the fact that budgets are constrained, and folks are really forced to focus on the things that matter most, which is the compliance and things that you just simply can't miss? Or what do you think about that number? Two things. I think you're right, people are focused on the stuff that they are measured

on. So yeah, I'm very much on compliance. That's totally what I'm gonna jump on and say is my job. But there's something else here as well, which is sadly that too many people in L&D, they don't see the wider picture outside their organization. They don't see the wider picture inside their organization of what else is going on. And absolutely, retention, keeping people in role is a huge value of L&D, not in its own right. So that's not why we do it, but it absolutely should be an add-on benefit. And by the way, if you're looking for ROI, one of the easiest ways to get ROI is to say, hey, our churn of staff used to be X, it's now Y, and that's lower than X. If we do some sums, we can quickly work out that we've saved the company this much per

year. Now, of course, then you have to say, we think only so much percent of that is down to L&D. But even so, it's a simple calculation to make. And it's a calculation that everyone in the business is going to understand. I think the problem, Tyler, is not the people aren't having an effect on it. The problem is that they don't see that as part of their remit. And that's because they don't see the bigger picture of the business. And that's sad. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. I mean, if you're implementing some sort of a distinct learning program that is meant to be entertaining in some way, or just an exciting informal type option, you can pretty clearly draw a line between retention and that if it's timed out, and you have an actual timeframe, I think that should be a good

way of demonstrating an ROI. So I do like that. I want to look at your book very briefly on learning technology. You tell the story of Bolton and Watt back in the 1800s, steam engines. So I love this story. I'm going to dare to make a admittedly a stretch comparison here. But when steam came out, it was a brand new technology. It changed the way the world worked in many ways. And Bolton and Watt, what they did was they took artisans and they trained them very deeply on the skill of creating steam engines, and they did really well because of it. I'm going to make the leap to AI and say this is a whole new class of a tool that frankly changes how the world is going to work technologically. And my question to you is, are there companies that are going to deeply invest in their people understanding how to augment their work with AI and how AI is going to change the world. Those who just invest directly in using these tools that are sort of burgeoning now, but will eventually come out sort of getting in early in the education. Are those companies just going to win out? I love that comparison. And I think it's spot on.

They had real problems, Bolton and Watt. They had problems finding people who were suitable. They had problems. You skilled people up and guess what? They left and they went elsewhere to competitors. But they couldn't run their business, which was at the leading edge of the industrial revolution, without having these people. They also had problems with people being drunk in charge of steam engines, which strikes

me as being a really dangerous thing. It doesn't have... Well, I don't know, actually, being drunk in charge of AI could be pretty serious too. I agree. I think there are going to be organizations which are going to invest in not superficial, but quite deep understanding of AI. And those organizations will win out because they will have the knowledge base that's required to keep getting value out of something which we are only at the beginning of. Tyler, I've been on stage running conferences, having people do keynotes where every year somebody's waving their arms around saying, this is the latest, greatest thing. I don't do that. I tend to be quite reserved about things. I am quite clear, having been working in

this field since the early 1980s, before the World Wide Web, I'm quite clear that AI is transformational. And we are only at the beginning of it. And it's part of a set of other things that render it more powerful, like processing power, like the World Wide Web and the internet. So all of these things together transform how we're going to work. This is going to carry on for decades. The organizations which put the investment in right now and build the skills and knowledge and retain people and look after them so they want to stay with the organization are absolutely going to win out.

And I think the analogy with Bolt and Watt is pretty spot on because that's where they were. And you think about Steam, it took decades for that to really have its full impact. Same is going to be true with AI, even though at the beginning, you see all these fantastic things which are changing, the deeper impact won't be seen for a long time. My issue with this theory, though, is that obviously the companies who have the most resources and those who are already technologically adept, especially when it comes to things like programming and coding and just, you know, understanding how computers work, those companies just have are leaps and bounds ahead of everybody

else. And I just think of how much bigger big tech might become in the near future. But are there ways that smaller companies, but you know, still companies that have a robust L&D system, can implement sort of a universal AI education, even for those who don't have the technological know-how to jump in and understand what's going on. Because theoretically, it will be able to impact all of our lives in some way and the jobs that we do, hopefully facilitating the things that we do. So how can learning leaders help those who just have no technological savvy

kind of understand where this is going so that they aren't completely left in the dust? Any advice for that? It is a fabulous question. And I would say, if you're a learning leader out there, you're in a really good position to help your organization do well. And it does not depend on getting people

who can program or code. I was at an event last week in London, get-together in London of AI people, just getting together for a couple of hours, having a chat, discussion, pizza, and a few presentations. There was one man who runs a 40-person company who was getting all of his people to experiment with AI. He said that, to his great surprise surprise that the people who were the programmers and who were dealing all the time with code and systems were some of the worst people at getting the best out of generative AI. The better people were the people who, typical liberal arts graduates, and the difference between them was that the liberal arts graduates were treating AI as if

it was a colleague and were asking it questions, having a conversation with it. Whereas the coders were imagining that it was a machine, which probably is how I'd produce it. They were approaching it like it was a machine where if you'd put in input A, you'd always got output B, which is not always the case. And I would say that we are very quickly getting to the stage where AI, to shift forward a couple of centuries, AI is more now like the introduction of electric power taking over from steam power. So the introduction of electric power famously, when electric generators or electric motors were first put into factories, they replaced steam engines. And the steam engine in a factory, you'd have one single huge steam engine, which then ran belts and ran a whole haul of machines off it. And initially, electric engines were like that. You had one big electric engine replace the steam engine. which then ran belts and ran a whole haul of machines off it. And initially,

electric engines were like that. You had one big electric engine replace the steam engine. And then people worked out, actually, these electric engines can be quite small. And we can have lots of different electric engines around the place doing lots of different things optimized for things they do. AI is like electric engines. They are like a lot of small things that can do really powerful things in different places. And you don't have to understand how the engine works. What you have to do is understand what it can do. That's quite different. So you don't have to be able to program it. You have to be able to understand the principles on which it operates, and therefore what you might get out of it. So for L&D leaders, I'd say, if we're looking at

getting the best out of AI for our organizations, we need to be getting people and experimenting with AI in such a way that we ask it to do things and we see what can it do. You could start very simply with GPT and asking it to do certain tasks and see if it could become more and more expert at carrying out certain tasks for you. This has happened. People have done this and they found it to be very useful. You do not have to be a great coder to make that happen. In fact, it's probably better if you're not. And I think I'm looking to Simon Brown at Novartis, who does a great job experimenting with AI. His advice is just get in there, try it and get everybody to try it and compare notes. And that's probably the way to adopt AI effectively fastest is just to

let a thousand flowers bloom and see which ones grow the best, because you probably can't predict it. You'll have somebody in your organization who's going to be really good at trying out this stuff and you just won't know it's them until they give it a go. But the power that it potentially could have, do you think that warrants that pretty much every organization dedicates deliberate time to at least testing these things out and letting those flowers bloom? Yes, absolutely. I think organizations have to make the sacrifice of time to see that there is, to find out where this could work. I don't think it's possible to centrally dictate it, although you may have a couple of functions which you know it's going to work. But otherwise, I just say, go out,

give people an hour a week, two hours a week, whatever. Some people get really obsessed and they'll do it in their free time. Great. Okay, let them bring back what they've got and who knows what you'll discover. Returning to the book again really quickly, the 70-20-10 rule, I want to ask about that really quickly. So that's about experience, learning from others, and sort of deliberate imposed learning, 70% experience, 20% learning from others, 10 imposed learning. I want to ask if this is, if it still applies right now, if anything has changed post-pandemic, because things have changed. Experience isn't quite what it was because folks aren't out in the field in as many positions. I've talked to so many salespeople, for instance, and actually I used to work in sales. I used to go out into the field

and knock on doors five times a week. And I'm pretty sure the people who do my job that I used to have are knocking on doors way, way less, if at all these days. And I've been told that people just don't want to meet in person, especially for sales opportunities anymore. So that's one example, but experience seems to be different, as does learning from others, because so many people are working from home, the way that we interact with others is just different now. And there are less opportunities for casual interactions by the water cooler or whatever. And I just think that learning is different. So does 70-20-10 still ultimately apply? Do we need to sort of maybe slightly move those numbers? What do you think

about that? Firstly, the numbers are a framework. And I think Charles Jennings, who's the big proponent of 70-20-10, would never claim that it's there exact. But, and that being said, actually, I don't think there needs to change. I think that still we learn largely from experience and by reflecting on experience, questioning and trying to improve it. The nature of the experience is different, for sure. It doesn't mean that we're not experiencing things. So if you're selling online rather than selling face-to-face, it is still an experience. In terms of the 20, I think you raise a really good point. Okay, we're not in the office. We're not seeing people so much. That doesn't mean it's less important. I think we

instinctively learn by watching and following and asking people questions. And I think that means that we should be making more deliberate space for that to happen in organizations, not saying, oh, we can do less of it. I think rather we need to make the space for it. That to me sounds like maybe the 10% needs to go up a little bit. If we're deliberately increasing the space that we have for learning and that sort of thing, I feel like my ultimate question here is, does that 10% of sort of deliberate, dedicated learning, does that need to increase perhaps? I mean, do you think that because of... I'm not sure. I think it does need to increase for some people. So I think for new joiners, it has been very difficult during the pandemic because they would have relied on the 10 and the 20 to get them up to speed. And they come into organizations now,

they're not getting, if they're working from home or they're coming to the office one day a week, they're not getting the amount of social interaction they used to get. And I think organizations need to be explicit about providing that, both the explicit instruction and the social effectively providing coaching or mentoring to help people explicitly get over that. Some organizations are doing that. In fact, the organizations that don't, they're going to suffer churn from new joiners because the social bonds that are made and the excitement of learning something new isn't there. And people will then drift off to another job that might offer it. Sure. Another survey I want to talk about, Corporate Learning Networks,

I think it's the State of Talent Survey, a market study. I think they had around 1,400, 1,500 people interviewed also in the L&D world. And about half of those folks said that they do have fears that learning content doesn't prepare businesses for disruption. And I'm not sure you can really prepare for disruption. I would venture to say that taxi companies and hotels and all those big styles of company, the industries that were disrupted by Uber and all those big styles of company, the industries that were disrupted by Uber and the big disruptors, you know, Airbnb, what not many years ago, I'm sure that they had relatively robust learning departments in place and that they felt like they were probably prepared for the worst of things. And ultimately, I don't really know how deeply those industries were impacted, but

they seem to be doing okay now. And to me, the question of disruption is more of one of like the highest up leadership. How do we make our organizations diverse enough in terms of product and offer and service that one big change isn't going to completely bring us down? Or just, you know, how do we be innovative enough? And of course, that does come down to innovation among all your people. But can we really, really prepare for disruption? Or is that kind of the point of the term disruption, that it's just not something that you see coming? Yeah, if it's something you prepare for, it's not very disruptive,

is it? So I think you're right. I would say the biggest way to guard against disruption is that business about diversity. I think you need diversity of product and offering, but also diversity of people so that you've got more than one way of looking at the world. And I've seen organizations which have been super effective going in one direction, but then something changed and they couldn't shift and they went bust within a couple of years. So I would absolutely say that making sure you've got the right people is probably more important for disruption than trying to give people a course. I see. Yeah. The same survey respondents also said that current tech solutions have very limited collaboration ability. There's two of them. It was not very strong integration opportunities between technology and then limited collaboration ability in many of the technological tools that are sort of popular and in play today. You know,

it kind of feels like at least the experiences that I've had that breakout rooms are still kind of like the way that we learn collaboratively, just, you know, simple sort of classroom style virtually. And then you just go into breakout rooms and then you review and you reflect. It all still seems pretty simple, which I don't think is a bad thing. But I do have bigger hopes for how we collaborate virtually and technologically. And it kind of sounds like everybody else does too. Like there's just some really highly creative way to get us working together and building out scenarios. I spoke with Karl Kopp just a couple of days ago, actually, who does gamification.

And we talked about, you know, getting a dungeon master from Dungeons & Dragons to come in and kind of implement these, you know, storylines to really teach people effectively and just make things more exciting. And that's kind of a vision that I see that's totally possible for learning technology, but it just doesn't really seem that maybe it's been too widely adopted. So are you seeing anything like that that's happening right now with really strong collaboration

opportunities, either already active or coming in the near future with technology? I mean, it's already happening, of course, in organizations. People are collaborating really strongly over Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook groups, and so on. I was going to say the drive, I'm not sure if it's a drive, but perhaps just the natural desire of people to collaborate and chat with each other can't be repressed. So if they're not getting together face-to-face, they're going to do it online and they're already doing it. And are they learning from it? Yes, they are. And that's one of the reasons they do it. And they're doing other stuff as well. So in amongst the holiday pictures and the picture of your cat, you've got great collaboration taking

place where you're learning something useful. It's a mistake to try to impose something from the outside that says, all right, now we're all going to come and it's that awful scout mastery tone of voice. So come along here, we're all going to have jolly good fun here. Well, actually, we're having fine fun over here. Thank you very much. So I think trying to impose it is wrong. However, L&D has a great role to play in terms of two things. Firstly, better facilitation. And it might be the Dungeon Master's the right way to do it. In another way, it might be that, well, we're going to run a 30-minute session, we're going to get people together, and we're going to explicitly focus on dealing with challenges where we're going to surface the tacit knowledge within this group and solve a problem.

And that's social learning. People aren't providing L&D department doesn't provide content, it provides the opportunity to learn. But the other thing L&D can do as well as the facilitation to get people together and learn well, and that could be synchronous or asynchronous, is to somehow capture and distribute the implicit knowledge, the tacit knowledge that's part of that. And I think this is one of the great new frontiers for L&D, is trying to capture what's inside people's heads, get it out there so that more people can benefit from it. If we can do that, we are getting to the secret source that makes organizations successful. If we don't do it, then it's going to happen anyway, but in a fractured and non-scalable way. If we can help people, if we can help get the best out of our individuals and share that information,

that becomes super useful for the organization. But ultimately, are you saying that however people naturally collaborate, especially almost in their free time when it comes to learning and just working together, are you saying that that can be and might be the most effective way for us to learn collaboratively? I think if people are already doing it, then they are already undoubtedly learning in that process, whatever it is they're doing. Is it the best way of doing it? Probably is, but we can augment it. It's the best way it is at the moment. We can augment it by providing better facilitation, by capturing and scaling some of the results of what we find, facilitation by capturing and scaling some of the results of what we find and by providing more opportunities for it so that everyone can get involved. So the guy on security might have

something really useful to add, but he can't contribute because obviously on his job, his job is not to be on his phone, but to looking around, making sure things are all right. So there's lots of ways in which L&D can play a role in getting more people involved to do a better job and then making sure more people know about it. Yeah, that's fascinating. There was this one time when me and my best friend went really deep into a wormhole on a blog that belonged to a mathematician. I believe it was Terence Tao, and I think he's actually based out of the UK, but he has a blog. It might have been somebody else, but I'm pretty sure it's Terry Tao. He and hundreds of other world-class mathematicians are trying to solve these quote-unquote unsolvable math problems together. And what they did is a random blog post about that, you know, one of those problems.

There are just literally thousands of comments on this blog talking to each other all day long with like long proofs written out, like paragraph page long proofs and just these crazy mathematic discussions that I don't understand that really only these guys can understand. But this was just sort of naturally born. I think it was like back in 2008, 2009 of a WordPress blog. And these guys like really made some progress, some like high level philosophical, theoretical, mathematical progress. And me and my friend who are looking at at this we're just so fascinated by how such a simple tool that is simply not built for this kind of work became the tool that did that work ultimately like you'd think that in-person collaboration might be a great way to do this but you can't always be together just doing this and it became like this wild

asynchronous way of actually making like this kind of global progress from this tool that was not designated for that. And that to me kind of says that ultimately it's the motivation that brings these things out. It really doesn't matter the tool or the format at the end of the day, if you can motivate your people. And I do think that L&D pros and learning leaders can probably utilize technology to bring out that motivation and their ways of incentivizing that. Of course, world-class mathematicians, that's most of what they think about. So their motivation is just natural because their passion is so high. But when you're talking about folks like security or people who maybe just simply don't have the time or the access, you know, sort of enabling and motivating people to actually contribute in these formats, I think might be more important than

the newfangled technological resource that's actually making the collaboration happen. I totally buy that. And this is where it's the innate human drive to share and to learn from each other is more important than whatever tool you're using. And I wouldn't underestimate how motivated some people are for their job. I was watching on Instagram a stand-up comedian the other day asking big audience in the UK, right? Okay. Who's got the coolest job here? Woman's hands shoots in the air. I've got the coolest. Okay. What's your job? What's your job? Do you know Tesco's? Tesco's right? Big store.

Yeah. Yeah. I know Tesco's big store, right? You know, those yellow half price stamps. Yeah. Yeah. I know them. That's my job. I put the yellow stickers on things saying it's half price. She's passionate about her job. And the crowd loves it. They love how passionate she is. The crowd loves it. And she's totally into it. And probably she's got some technique and way of working that if everybody knew about

it would make that process much better. Let's give those people the opportunity to share when they can. And it's a process of small increments. It doesn't have to be world-beating. Everyone sharing the little tips they've got could make every organization better. Yeah, that's a fascinating story. I've seen that video too. It's very, very funny. She takes over the show from the comedian for about two minutes. She's so keen, it's brilliant. McKinsey now, another survey, survey number six here. McKinsey recently released a report,

I think it was actually just a couple of weeks ago, but they said that the most successful employees are up to 800% more productive than their colleagues in the same roles. I mean, that's a huge number. And I frankly, they couldn't find exactly how they came to that number. But I'm inclined to believe it just because I've seen, you know, sales differences and people, especially in those sorts of roles, I believe it's probably more abstract to really identify how much more productive, you know, one programmer is than another, but there are probably ways. But to me, it speaks to the need for mentorship and coaching and just collaboration among maybe newer and more experienced people and that sort of thing. So I want to talk about that very briefly. So what are some really interesting maybe coaching interventions or mentorship

interventions that you've seen? And how do you think we should be going about that sort of in this new century of hybrid or decentralized work? I can quite believe the statistic. And I've seen it with programmers. I've seen programmers be literally 20 times more productive than other programmers. And it won't happen with everything. You can't be 20 times more productive at emptying a trash can than somebody else. But you can with some things.

Sales is one. Program programming is another for sure. So with those, I think there is always a question of natural aptitude. So some people are just going to do it better. And some people do it even better if they get more coaching. So you've got to recruit right. And the coaching mentoring is absolutely part of it. It doesn't mean necessarily telling people how to do the job. In fact, probably usually it doesn't. There was this famous story Colin Powell told. I heard him speak about this. He went into Reagan in the White House and he said, oh, Mr. President, it's in the Oval

Office. I've got a serious problem. I need blah, blah. And he explains the problem. And Reagan is just sitting there looking out the window and said, well, I was expecting him to come up with an answer. And Reagan says, I won't do the Reagan voice. He says, I'm just watching the squirrel out there on the rows. And he describes what the squirrel's been doing and how the squirrel had solved the problem. And Colin Powell nods and he goes out. And what Reagan had told him was, without using the words,

my job is to make the difficult decisions. And I think it's Eisenhower who said, the difficult decisions I make are the 51-49 decisions. That's my call. The other stuff you've got to look after. That's your job. I can't answer it for you. Just go and do your job. Your job is decision-making. So that was probably quite a powerful example of coaching at quite a high level, helping somebody who's a pretty serious general understand what his job was. There are lots of examples of people providing coaching for people and mentoring and even praise and support in such a way that helps them understand by internalizing it and making the leap of understanding themselves, which is so much

stronger, how they can do their job better. And you're absolutely right. In a world where we are decentralized, where people aren't sitting down face-to-face and what have you, those things don't happen. You don't walk into the lift. You don't walk into the Oval Office. You've got to make the time to get together and have it and still have the conversation in hopefully what's a reasonably relaxed, social, but an open manner, hopefully what's a reasonably relaxed, social, but an open manner, because that situation, people are more open to receiving input. That's a real trick. It's something most managers probably aren't very good at, because most managers get promoted because they are good at doing their job, not because they're good at managing or coaching. L&D has a huge role to play here

in helping managers be better coaches and mentors, face-to-face and virtually. Definitely a huge role to play here in helping managers be better coaches and mentors face to face and virtually definitely a huge role for us for the future what about this git lab and a handful of other mostly sort of like digital product companies i think a few sas companies do this as well are not only entirely remote and in some cases have been since before the pandemic but are also entirely asynchronous of course you can't be 1000% truly 100% asynchronous, but they describe themselves as wholly asynchronous, which I think just kind of means that you don't have to clock in and clock out and there's no nine to five. But GitLab is one that I think was actually interviewed by McKinsey for this purpose. And the CEO, I think was in the survey that I just mentioned. And this just

doesn't seem like a very conducive environment to learning to me, like based on what you just said, and based on, you know, what we know about learning, it seems like that just wouldn't be as easy. I'm sure they have a pretty strong system for it considering their success. But what I do know is that specifically GitLab has a massive sort of documentation system. They probably have pretty strong systems for things. And maybe the people that they hire, you know, the way that they recruit and they hire is just very specific to that sort of cultural fit. So do you think that this is maybe just an anomaly because of the sort of industry that they're in and what they do? Or can we learn from this style of work? Both. I don't think every organization can adopt it. If you look at

Automatic that owns WordPress, and famously, that is completely asynchronous, and they're all over the world, and they've got really smart people doing stuff. Nobody has joined that company as a fresh out of college, right? So you're joining them as somebody who already knows your work. That's crucial, right? So no government is going to take over the training of people to get them from zero to being an ace coder, it just doesn't happen. Somebody has to take people in from college and it has to be used for them in being junior coders. So it's not going to work for everybody. Still, we can learn from them in the sense that if nothing else, it's possible. It's possible to have these process of work where you can be entirely asynchronous, the process of work where people are sharing very freely, and the culture is such that you can share freely, but it doesn't mean all ideas are good, and there's an open and frank discussion about the ideas that are good and aren't, and nobody, you have enough psychological safety for that discussion is not negative and affects people, so they don't want to contribute more in the future so that actually

strange enough the psychological safety part of it for me is a big takeaway from being able to work asynchronously the other part of it is of course that these organizations are all very specialized and most organizations aren't if you're in retail you have to recruit an awful lot of people in different roles in order to just get the money into the bank account to pay everybody the end of the month it's a process and you couldn't that always synchronously, but parts of it you can do. And I think increasingly, we're going towards a future whereby we've got organizations which aren't the walled cities of the past, either in or out, but there's a varying degree of employment with organizations. And some of it may be that you are not working for the

organization physically, you're not on the payroll, but you could be based in a completely different country and still contributing. There's lots of examples of that, but I won't go into them now. It's lots of examples where people are distributing stuff and being very successful about it. So we're up against time now, but I do want to ask you one more question, kind of roll it back up to the top. In many ways, you've already addressed this, but how to work with the budget, how to not only work with the budget that L&D pros are given, but how to convince leadership that they need to invest in learning and development. So we've talked about showing value and just the question of adopting really high level new technology, the complicated stuff that costs more, that is

newfangled and requires maybe more time to adopt properly and more research to really assess if it's something that's good. But how do we formulate our arguments? How do we make an impassioned plea for, you know, money to do what we need to do and to also go deeper than just the simple compliance stuff and actually identify that, hey, this is important for retention and for engagement. And people enjoy this. The conference board, one of their surveys from last year, like well more than half, a majority of individual contributor respondents said that a very important part of the company that they work at is the resources that they have for self-development. So we know that people want this sort of thing. So how can we turn this into a really effective argument to leadership to say,

hey, we need the money. What we do makes a lot of sense. And this is important going forward. If people aren't already coming to you in an L&D role and saying they want your help to solve problems, then you have an issue because it means you're not seen as being a problem solver, but rather as being a function rather like facilities management. Nothing wrong with facilities management, but L&D, I think, is investing in the core resource of the organization, the people. How do you get those people? I think there's an awful lot of stuff you could do around this, but there's one core thing that anybody could do,

which is to go out and achieve some small wins. Just go and help one part of the organization do its job better. What happens there is that you've shown your value to one person in the organization, you keep doing it. Now, how do you find that person? I don't know, but it will depend on the organization. Build your network so you can find out where the problems are, where you can solve something reasonably quickly. The point about that is it's not just that you've shown that you can solve a problem, but you've developed an ally. Whoever runs that department, whoever you've helped out, you've helped them do their job better. That person then becomes an advocate and they are going to listen. Other managers will listen far

more to that person than to you. Everybody in every organization is asking for money all the time. It's just how organization works and there is never enough. So if you've got somebody else saying, hey, I use this and it really helped for me, then you've got something. So start by building allies by doing the day job really well. It doesn't require fancy technology, but it does require to go out and talk to people about what's needed for them to solve their problems. Great, I love that.

Before I let you go, Don, would you just mind telling our audience where they can learn more about you and your work? Yeah, I'd like a sort of sexy, deep bass voiceover for this, but I'll just give you the URL, donaldhtaylor.co.uk. There we go. Perfect. Thank you so much for joining me today, Don.

And for everybody at home, thanks for listening. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. 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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