The Learning & Development podcast is hosted by our Chief Learning Officer David James. Featuring L&D leaders from across the globe, each conversation focuses on hot topics in the profession. This transcript is from the conversation between David and Mike Collins on automating L&D.
David James: Welcome to the Learning & Development Podcast. I’m David James from Looop and each episode I chat with guests about what lights them up in the world of people development. This week, I’m speaking with Mike Collins, who’s an experienced and influential voice in L&D, as well as being a previous guest on this podcast too. This time, we’re talking about how and why L&D need to expect a great deal more from learning tech, not just to provide content, but to eliminate administration and automate support for employees. Now, let’s get into it. Mike, welcome back to the Learning & Development Podcast.
Mike Collins: David, great to be here. Thank you. How are you?
David: I’m very good. I’m very good. Thank you very much. Now, having recently left River Island, you’ve been tempted back to the vendor side to help with learning tech implementations. What persuaded you to make this move now?
Mike: That’s a very good question. I’m like the L&D boomerang. I flip between in-house roles and the supplier side. I think one of the draws of that for me is that it’s great working on the supplier side. I really enjoy the variety and working with different organisations who all face what they think are different challenges, but more in all are quite similar challenges. At the same point in time, when you work in-house and you are in that level of detail, you get involved in so many different aspects of the organisation.
If we take the last role I had at River Island, the role wasn’t just an L&D role, it was more around people experience, which took in everything from onboarding through to attraction, through to induction, through to development programmes, the whole technology ecosystem. For me, from a personal development perspective, David, as well, it helps keep me on my toes and ultimately helps me stay focused and really close to the customer.
There’s nothing more rewarding and satisfying than helping an organisation go from A to B, where B is in a better place where there is improved performance, better culture, better communication. Let’s face it, the technology space at the moment is probably the most exciting that it’s been in Learning & Development and set with the backdrop of COVID, where organisations are being forced to change their business models, the way in which they interact with each other, they work, they collaborate, how they interact with customers. I think when I was looking at what came next for me in terms of career, the conversations I had with you guys at Looop, and obviously, we’ve known each other for a while, it’s so different in the marketplace and having been so close to a fast-moving goods business and understanding the problems, every conversation that I had with Looop and you guys was different to other technology providers.
I think in this podcast, we’ll probably unpack some of that and what it actually means and why, but for me, it’s such an exciting opportunity to help implement tech that makes a difference and actually delivers on what we’ve been saying in L&D for quite a while. There you go, the boomerang is back on the vendor side and absolutely ready for all the challenges that come with it because there’s so many opportunities and I can’t wait to work with all the Looop customers.
David: Wonderful. I just want to caveat, say to the listener, this isn’t a Looop advert. We’ve invited Mike back in, you’re a couple of days into the new role, but having transitioned from in-house at River Island, this was a massive opportunity to explore both the expectations from L&D on learning tech and what we all need to do to expand our expectations. Because as you’ve just said there, Mike, tech I think has advanced more in the last five years in Learning & Development than it potentially has over the previous 25.
I’d like to explore that now because the advancements, you could say almost up to this point in learning tech, seems to have been more around new and novel forms of delivery rather than anything smarter than that. Why do you think this is, and what are we missing if we only consider the delivery of content or mainly consider the delivery of content?
Mike: Listen, you’re absolutely right. For those of us who’ve been in Learning & Development for such a long time, delivery of content was primarily done in a classroom environment for so long and you remember your OHPs, your PowerPoint presentations, stand and deliver, which then moved to other forms of smart boards, e-learning, virtual classrooms, social technology. We’ve been on a steep learning curve, not only with the tech, but also with the mindset, the behaviours, the principles, the methodologies that all sit behind it.
As a profession we are evolving and developing so quickly, however, the focus on content delivery for me has been one of visibility. It’s easy to see when content is being delivered. It’s easy to create and establish a content library. It’s easy to measure things like how long people have been somewhere, or what content and resources they are accessing at a time that’s usually locked away in a traditional corporate LMS. The term that I’ve become accustomed to learning more about, customer experience is around beauty analytics, which you can measure at surface level, but actually, what does that tell you?
I think the opportunities that we’re potentially missing at the moment is this explicit link between content and resources and actually business performance and the metrics that sit around that. I think there’s a massive disconnect that there was in previous roles, the conversations were starting, but the disconnect was between what the technology out there was actually offering and could deliver versus the easy, low-hanging fruit of actually just getting content up.
I think a content library should not be central to your Learning & Development strategy. It’s a part of it, of course, but I think because it’s been easier to focus on and it’s visible and it’s easy to show, I think the main focus for a lot of teams and organisations have been invested in delivery of content in various different guises and channels. I think now the more developed and more evolved conversations are making that link now between well, so what? We’ve got the content, we’ve got the resources, how’re we delivering that to people in their place of work, using the channels that they use on a regular basis?
That’s the challenge because that’s a different conversation to, hey, we’ve got an LMS, come and check out the content, come and search for what you need. Or you’ve had a learning need identified, let’s push it to the LMS, where the onus is on the learner, the work colleague to actually then go and find that content consume it but then, so what? I think these are the interesting conversations, certainly interesting conversations that I’ve been in over the last 18 months, two years, to turning it from a content library to one of performance support in that moment of need and taking the onus away from the learner to be able to have to find stuff and waste time on it.
I know we’re up against the likes of Google as the greatest performance support tool that ever was, but we don’t have Google in our organisation. What we need to do is work towards those contextual content depositories, and resources that help people find content really easily, distribute it, use it, and then tie it back to some performance outcome. Now that technology is catching up with that, it’s a really interesting space.
David: Yes, I agree. It is a very interesting space, but to look back, continue to look back just for one more moment, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that L&D has had a checkered past with learning tech. You’ve just described it there, whether it be clunky LMS systems filled with generic e-learning. Now, I’m not sure a lot of people in L&D are ready to admit how much we’ve got wrong before. Where do you think we, as a profession, have got technology wrong?
Mike: I will hold my hands up on the L&D podcast and say, “My name is Michael Collins, and as an L&D professional, I have got learning technology wrong in the past.”
David: If we’re at therapy, Mike, I’ve got my hands up as well.
Mike: Listen, let’s be honest. I don’t think there is anybody in our profession who hasn’t used technology in a way that perhaps wasn’t as thought through as hindsight tells us it should have been. There’s a number of factors for that, whether it’s, I’m guilty of this as well and I think a lot of people are, which is the shiny new toy syndrome, L&D being associated with magpies.
Then when you build in that mentality of, if you build it, they will come, there’s a real disconnect between people who aren’t interested in the shiny new LMS. They’re not interested in what features it’s got. They’re not interested in whether it does X or whether it does Y. What they’re interested in is, does it help me do my job better? I think again because the focus has been on the tech, we’ve almost forgotten about the user experience, the customer experience, and the performance focus of actually what the tech is there to do as an enabler.
I think it’s easy to just deliver technology for technology’s sake. It presents projects, programmes, it’s all wrapped up in digital transformation programmes. We’ve got to have cloud-based systems that you can access on mobile as well as desktop and tablet and everything in between, but couple that with, unfortunately, content that’s perhaps been designed in a way, I think we’ve all heard of click next e-learning. We again bury that in those systems and that technology, the focus isn’t on the user, the focus is on the tech.
I think for me, that’s the crucial area that we’ve got wrong in the past is that we focus too much on tech, too much on the assets, and creating these beautiful looking PowerPoint presentations that have some level of interactivity. We jump from one to the other really quickly without really truly understanding how that technology supports, impacts and helps the end-user.
Yes, I think we’re learning all the time. Nobody gets this right perfectly. For me, one of the greatest things that we can do is we can run experiments, we can develop minimal viable products. We can get closer to our customers now. I think a lot of technology now is enabling that to happen, which is bridging that gap.
Then lastly, I think we’ve got to talk about data. I’m a self-confessed geek with pom poms, and this is something that I keep coming back to time and time again. I’ve cut my teeth on Google Analytics, from a marketing perspective in particular, how digital marketers use analytics and campaigns. Primarily you’ve got to understand what the data’s telling you, what insights you can get to tell that story and help develop that narrative so that when you’re in business conversations, you’re not talking about L&D measures.
Let’s face it, those aren’t what people are interested in. It is performance outcomes, it’s business metrics and tying what you’re doing as a function in partnership with everybody else, and what is the data telling us? What are we doing successfully? Where are the gaps? Where are the priorities? And then focusing our resources really carefully on things that are making a difference, because if we can’t tell that story and tie it back then we’re again in those so what conversations.
With resources now being pushed on the backdrop of COVID and organisations being under such pressure, L&D has got a fantastic opportunity here to partner strongly with the business to develop really strong programmes, really strong resources and help focus on keeping people doing their job and doing their job well and getting better at it.
Technology is just purely the enabler, but we’re getting better at understanding how the technology adds value. For me, again, this is why it’s such an exciting space in the learning tech market because there’s some tech that’s doing this really well, but then taking it to the next step further and making it even easier for learning & development teams to get access to that data in a meaningful way.
Listen to episode 52 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
David: I think what you’re describing there with when stakeholders expect– and L&D provide, the learning metrics of bums on seats, hours and days spent training, hits on the LMS, satisfaction, and all of that stuff, that tells me that there is a low expectation of what Learning & Development actually offer. If it is just attendance, completion, and satisfaction and stuff around those. Even if you’ve just– if you throw in compliance there as well, I think that is speaking to a baseline expectation of Learning & Development that is not one where the engagement with Learning & Development’s offering actually makes a tangible difference.
Because I think this is where learning & development gets drawn into being more of a benefit than it is what we all see as the potential here. When we say, as part of the employee value proposition that on average, we provide people with a thousand pounds per person, per year for training, the average person attends so on. It’s seen as a perk.
Don’t get me wrong, it looks pretty attractive on that level, but I think that it contributes to the dumbing down of our profession and that of order takers that all we need to do, and this is where sometimes the language of Learning & Development really grates with me, when we have an offering or a provision, it’s just stuff available rather than there be– we provide solutions that are going to, and it’s as you mentioned there, make a significant impact on whether an organisation survives or thrives in what are now some of the toughest situations that many people will find themselves in.
Which leads me nicely on to the next question, because I think that part of the L&D condition as it were, is that we love to solutionear, but I hear a lot from L&D professionals that there are so many solutions out there that they don’t know where to start, and often, they feel they’ll never get to grips with what’s emerging.
Now what’s wrong with this approach is it puts the cart before the horse and implies that L&D need to know all the solutions, just in case a problem surfaces that needs said solution, or there is a silver bullet solution. That one platform can solve all the problems, which doesn’t exist. Are there more productive ways of understanding problems and then addressing them without going too quickly to a tech solution?
Mike: I think people listening to this podcast will probably appreciate and understand themselves that the tech market, learning tech specifically, is a bit of a minefield. There is so much choice, and we are bamboozled by, again, the terminology and language that we use within learning as well. Whether it’s artificial intelligence, whether it’s gamification, whether it’s microlearning or whatever it is, rebadged as the next, I mean, 10 years ago, when I was getting my head around what social learning was and collaborative learning, community as a practice, these were all new and exciting.
Again, it is linked back to that the magpie syndrome, where we hear a fad or a buzzword and we go off in that direction without truly understanding it, which then leads us to solutioneering because we’re put in the– we walk around with a hammer and nail, that’s all we’re going to be able to do. Whereas the toolkit for L&D needs to be so much wider.
I think one of the skill sets that we are seeing, and this is nothing new, but I think it’s been talked about for a long time, but actually, we’re having to do this, which is more around performance consulting, which is really immersing yourself within the business to understand where these points of friction are, where the points of pain are, why are people not being able to do their job?
It doesn’t necessarily need them a course, it doesn’t need to take people away from the workflow. What it needs is an understanding of is it a process? Is it a behavioural issue? Is it a skill? What options do we have to meet that gap? I think if we always look, put the horse before the cart, then we’re always going to be delivering similar solutions, but then when you’ve got the backdrop of all these learning technology providers, different feature sets, and different buzzwords, it is really difficult to cut through that noise and actually work with tools that, like you say, isn’t the big tool that does everything, because that doesn’t exist.
Because of APIs, the ability now to look at your estates, I’m going to use the term ecosystem, because I think that’s the easiest one to describe whether you like it or loathe it, for this, I think it works. As organisations are now looking, and putting the way in which their people are working into these buckets, whether it’s communication, employee experience, collaboration, whether that’s their email, Teams, Slack, or whatever tools, where their social elements are coming from. Rather than getting people to jump from one to the other, from one to the other, from one to the other in a really cumbersome and clumsy way, through APIs, you’re now able to link these systems together to be able to create a really cohesive experience for colleagues.
Now, what that means is that rather than having to choose one technology provider, you’re able to truly understand what’s happening in the business, where those pain points are, and how do you fix it with a number of solutions that are then linked through an API with single sign-on. That means that ultimately, from a colleague perspective, they are in your organisation’s domain, and they can move freely through that.
What that then means is that you can start to push and pull accordingly. It’s not just a destination or a journey that people need to go to. You can intelligently and thoroughly engage people in different channels, making sure that they’re getting what they need at that time, rather than having to break it and come out of the workflow.
Now, this is not happening. This does not happen easily, because it’s about a cultural change as well, and I know this is a deeper conversation than just about technology and what the marketplace is doing, but some of the conversations that I’ve been involved in just this week, really shows again, the desire for people to create really compelling work experiences, and there’s so many different facets and complications to that. This is where L&D really do come into their fore, because they can see the organisation at a different level and perspective to many of the people that are either facing the business or part of the people team or HR team.
We’re in a really unique position now to understand how workplaces are shifting and evolving and working and where does Learning & Development sit? Where does performance sit? Where does communication sit? Where does collaboration sit? What does social sit and how do you map out these touchpoints? So what actually when somebody needs something or there is a need, you’re already talking with the business to understand where that need is. Then rather than just jumping with one solution, you can take a step back and go, “Right, what actually is this? How do we distribute it? How do we create a campaign around it? How do we create some compelling assets? How do we make sure that we get it to people in time? Then what’s the data telling us?”
Primarily as well, you consult the data first. What data do we have? I know this is a bit long-winded, but I’m on it now. What data do you have in your organisation? Go and talk to your data analysis team. Go and talk to your sales team, your customer service team. Go and talk to your people team around what data is available, because one of the biggest challenges for organisations is data. Everyone will talk about data, but when you look at what data you’ve actually got, it’s sometimes really difficult because you’ve got lots of it, it’s really difficult to filter, to make any sort of meaningful data, so L&D can’t do this on its own.
We’ve got to make sure that we’re working with different areas of the business to understand what data we have, what’s telling us what, and then that enables us to start working out, what initiatives? What campaigns? What change programmes can start to impact those metrics? It’s been talked about for such a long time, and some organisations have done it quite well. Some have struggled and some have failed completely, but I think we’re all getting into those conversations now where, what’s the data telling us? What insights have we got? What story do we need to tell? What do we need to measure in terms of change and impact?
David: What I’m hearing there, Mike, as a thread through all of this and linking it back to the question is, spend less time trying to understand what solutions there are out there and more time understanding the performance problems in your organisation. Because the more specific you can get in terms of a real critical point of failure with real people in your organisation, and understand what the performance expectations are, then the solutions become apparent. It’s not that you need to assess the market and then have up your sleeve 600, 800, 1,000 LMSs or suites of generic content, however, they may present their content. It’s about fully understanding what it is that people are trying to do.
One of the real threads that comes through of doing this podcast now for, oh, dear, it must be coming up to a year and a half, is that people are saying the biggest shift Learning & Development need to make is from a learning mindset to a performance mindset. Because if you have a learning mindset, it doesn’t really matter what LMS or content you bring in, it doesn’t matter. Because if your goal is to provide “learning”, it’s easy. It’s really easy. You can get loads of credit for it by branding this platform, filling it full of content, and then trying to drive traffic towards it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, driving traffic towards a clunky platform with generic content is one of the hardest things you can do in Learning & Development. It can be a massive distraction from some of the stuff that can really add value, but having a performance mindset and seeking to understand what the biggest blockers are, to not just performance but results, and then sourcing the solutions that make a demonstrable difference in those areas, that’s harder. First of all, the conversations are harder, but the investment is easier. You know what the problems are.
Listen to episode 52 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
Mike: The payoff is there. I think one of the things that is really frustrating for Learning & Development, and I’ve been there myself, I’ve administered learning management systems, I’ve been coordinating, I’ve been administrating, depending on the technology, a lot of time is spent having to administer and manage learning management systems. Again, that’s just crazy. Why would we use systems where all our time and effort is actually being used to manage the system as opposed to supporting our end-user to help do their job better, quicker, faster?
I know those roles are different, but again, we are in a time where I think Learning & Development that I joined 15 years ago, is so much different to the Learning & Development that I’m in now, and love seeing, and love developing, and how it’s evolved. Whether it’s workplace architects, performance consultants, videographers, there’s a range, warmth, and depth of roles that Learning & Development can offer, but again, we always run the risk of being separate to the business.
Again, this is not a new conversation, but I think it’s one that we keep needing to have because it’s encouraging everyone within your Learning & Development teams. You may be part of HR teams or an operational team, to understand where your place is in the business and how close you are to the customer, because if you’re still not close to the customer post-COVID, then there’s a real danger that that team will be obsolete, it will be no longer adding value to the business in the way that it needs to, so, therefore, it will either be absorbed or it will be discontinued.
know people listening to this may have gone through that experience. I’ve gone through that experience myself, it’s a really challenging time, so rather than stick with what we’ve always done, we need to take on these new approaches. We need to be brave. We need to experiment. We need to do different things, and with that, we need tech that does support and enables that.
David: You’ve touched on a couple of things there, Mike. Number one, that job losses in Learning & Development, as well as many other fields are reaching a critical point. These are tough times for everybody, and on top of that, if you’ve got a Learning & Development team and there are people within it who are working for the technology, I think that’s pretty dystopian. Whether those are LMS administrators, whether those are people who train employees on how to use the tech, that’s a dystopian view. That smacks of bad tech design or just old tech.
Where we stand today, automation has the opportunity within Learning & Development to pick up a lot of the slack, to do a lot of the hard work, but with automation, very quickly, people might be thinking that the robots are coming after their jobs. It’s not what that means in Learning & Development now, is it? I think that there is a lot of positive that can be taken from automation in L&D that could free us up. Do you not think?
Mike: Absolutely. I’m smiling internally as well because when you said the robots are coming, I remember doing an Ignite talk at CIPD North a couple of years ago, and I showed a slide of three robots powered by AI actually dancing with obviously human traits. I got 300 HR professionals to all stand-up and dance like robots, which was hilarious. The point that I was making is that automation in people terms, in L&D terms, does not mean that the Terminator’s coming, that Skynet’s going to be bursting through our walls.
Fundamentally, yes, there are changes in a lot of industries. If you think about the way that distribution centers have changed, thinking what the Amazon logistics center looks like with all the bots that move. Think about how self-driving cars and automation there is going to revolutionise the taxi industry. Of course, there are these big macro changes that things like artificial intelligence and automation is going to change, but when we distill it down from an L&D perspective, let’s look at what our colleagues in marketing have been doing since the dawn of marketing, which is using technology to be able to create channels of communication, and then reinforce that with automation, whether that’s through email, whether it’s through text message, whether it’s through mobile apps now.
Again, what they do very successfully is they go where the customer is. You don’t ask the customer to come out of what they’re doing and come over there, because the bottom line is, they’re trying to sell products. Again, marketing is about solving problems that people have with a product or service that they have and the cost of what people are willing to pay for that service to solve their problems. It’s exactly the same principle for Learning & Development. For me, automation and learning means taking away a lot of the baggage, a lot of the administrative functions and thinking carefully about how we push out content, resources, performance support tools, to the channel where our people are.
I think this is where it’s really exciting when you start overlaying Learning & Development with a marketing mindset, and developing the competence and the skill sets associated with digital marketeering, which is around, how do you construct a subject line? How do you ensure that your call to actions are really strong? How do you measure where people are interacting with your content? Then as a result of that, change what you’re doing, because you get better success rates with one approach than another approach.
Then how are you identifying where your customers are at a given moment in time and most receptive? Then you’re programming and automating your content to go out at that time. Now, this is really new. This is not something I think that is widespread. This is the bit that excites me as a learning professional that’s been lucky enough to be involved in marketing teams and working in terms of digital marketing. Because I think the aspects that they’re using there absolutely support Learning & Development.
Automation, for me, is a real positive thing in Learning & Development because it allows us to programmatically help people get access to things that they need, when they need it. The positive side of that is, it’s free and actually having to do those things beforehand and probably unsuccessfully, it’s so heartbreaking for all that work for so little response. Then, when you add the dashboard at the end of it, that tells you all the great stuff that your campaign and the information that you’re pushing out and the impact that it’s having, you’ve got a really nice loop, which there is no pun intended there whatsoever, but I guess there is.
David: To make this come to life, if we take a look at compliance, for example, automation in compliance can look very much like a marketing campaign through HubSpot. Now, whether Learning & Development know about HubSpot or not, it’s about automating large parts of taking people through a predefined funnel, which is somebody within your target market, taking them through or guiding them through a funnel which provides them with valuable insights, know-how, and with a view to helping them to do what they’re trying to do, but guiding them to buy the product at the end. I mean, that’s the marketing element.
For compliance, this is about pre-defining a route that you want people to take. Dropping them into a compliance campaign with the communication, “You need to do your compliance by X,” in the tools they use for work. The messaging allows you, whereas email perhaps didn’t, to constantly prompt people to do the thing you want them to do. You set your parameters in terms of your timing, and then you can fully automate your communication. You can fully automate the distribution of the learning content. You can fully automate the consequences of not completing it.
Escalating it to the line manager based on when the compliance training is then completed. You can auto-renew, as well. As soon as somebody changes roles within the organisation, and then more regulation comes into play, they can automatically be dropped into a new campaign. Legitimately, you can start a campaign that’s linked to your HR system so it recognises both joiners and people who change roles. As long as the content doesn’t change, you can go on holiday for the rest of the year. It takes over every single element based on what you set those parameters to be. How much would that revolutionise your role at River Island?
Mike: Listen, what we’re essentially talking about there are personas. Again, a marketing trait is being able to understand your customer base, understand their needs based on location, job role, likes, dislikes. The amount of stuff that Google, Facebook, all the social behemoth giants have on us through what we like in the system and how we interact with the system is absolutely huge. We would be naive to think that every single browsing experience that we have, and every tool that we use, and every advert that we see has not been programmed to have some level of automation assigned to it based on our personas.
It’s the same, and this is where it gets really exciting and I get geeked out, because when we start looking through the marketing lens within an organisation, we’ve already got predefined personas, whether that is length of time in the business, job role, seniority, what the hierarchy is. Then obviously, what you’ve been talking about there is pre-programming automation to help steps and people access things in a structured way. Where it gets really exciting as well, is where you can– Did you ever use the app, If This Then That?
David: No, I didn’t know of that.
Listen to episode 52 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
Mike: Essentially, it was– I mean, it’s still there. Through APIs, you could essentially say, “If I do something in this app, then it’s going to add it to another app.” You could have various different recipes, they used to call it and I loved it. I loved the approach because you could say, “Right, well, if I’m going to watch something in Slack, then I want it to populate my–” There was an aggregating tool that I used to use as well. I dropped content in one place, and it will be distributed in two or three places, or I’d add a to-do note in another place, and it would populate an app on my phone.
It was these recipes that you could put in place. If you did one thing, it would trigger another. Again, these triggers in marketing are really, really important because what we can start to say is, right, well, if a new starter has gone through a constructed and programmed approach or campaign as it were, where people will get access to information depending on when they interact with something, what you can do is say, well, if they then branch off from that and access another resource or another area, and they show an interest in something else, that can then trigger another campaign that will then allow them to access and go through another path.
Straight away you’re intelligently interacting with people and getting them access to things that they are interested in, and perhaps need without lifting a finger. These are all pre-programmed, these are all things you can set the recipe and the triggers to be able to support your people in an invisible way. Then, we’re into the realms of invisible LMS, deep linking, being able to create an experience where people are accessing what they need, without having to be bothered about, “Oh, well, what system am I in? What platform am I on? Do I need to log in? Do I need to do this?”
Then, being able to distribute that through a channel like Teams, like Slack, through email, SMS, through the open APIs. This is where technology’s getting really smart, because again, you’re going where the customer is, you’re not asking them to come out of the workflow to be able to interact and consume, and change what they’re doing.
There’s so many exciting things that we can talk about in this field, but I think it’s about understanding it. That’s the key thing. I’m lucky enough that I’ve had certain levels of exposure to this, but in the early days, I was like a rabbit in headlights. I really was, because it’s so different to what we are taught and how we are perhaps told to think in Learning & Development.
As I say, there are so many talented practitioners now out there that have to change what they’re doing, and are looking at these as opportunities, rather than, “Oh, no automation. It’s the end of L&D as we know it.” Yes, absolutely, it’s going to end some processes and it’s going to end some types of roles potentially, but what’s to say those roles can’t evolve, adapt and develop and flex to actually meet the needs of the business as opposed to the needs of the system?
David: I think that, first of all, I completely agree with you, we do need to overcome this fear because I think if we are automating the administration of say, compliance, then we free ourselves up to do more high-value stuff. I believe that if we then free ourselves up to have performance consulting conversations, we elevate the status of Learning & Development. At the moment, we are limited because, especially during these times, I think the more Learning & Development functions are going to find resources harder to come by. They’re going to be shrinking teams and perhaps shrinking budgets. Being able to automate some of this is going to help.
We’re not talking just about automating say two-dimensional elements of Learning & Development like compliance processes. There is the greater opportunity, isn’t there, for skill-building, for transitions. For example, new starters a lot of the time, after an immersive or consistent experience for the first two and a half hours, or half-day or day of joining the organisation, they’re largely left alone to fumble along, solving the same problems that have been solved thousands of times within their organisation. We have new managers who are neglected for a great deal of time to try to fumble along again and solve the same problems that have been solved.
I know that that there is this expectation that line managers will be taking on this role of coach and mentor and buddy and all of this, but in the harsh realities and in a harsh business environment as we have today, everybody’s bandwidth is shrinking. Learning & Development do have an opportunity here to create, as what you talked about before, to enhance the work experience, not create a parallel learning experience, but to focus on what it is that people are trying to do.
You must now see the opportunity to help during these transitions and as people face unfamiliar situations and challenges, perhaps for the very first time, not in a learning way, but in a guiding and supporting performance way. Am I right?
Mike: Definitely. If we go back to the first question, which is about moving from in house to vendor, I think the underpinning, one of the real underpinning reasons for that is because personally, what I enjoy, and what I get the most satisfaction from is having those conversations. I think it’s moving that dial from old school thinking to not just a new way of thinking, but a complete openness to challenging everything that has gone on before and being open and honest enough to say what we’re doing now isn’t quite working and it might not be broken, but we know that we can refine it.
Those conversations, for me, are what get me out of bed in the morning, I really enjoy having them. They are difficult to have. The journey that we’re talking about here, just like we’ve been talking about for the last 15 years, it’s incremental change. The way that I liken it is almost like L&D are working in agile sprints where we’ve got these backlogs that we’ve been talking about for ages, but are we ready as a profession to move on? We know it’s there, and then all of a sudden you get this really fast development of tech, tech, tech, look at all these features, look at all these functions, and the business is still catching up in these cycles.
The methodology of agile thinking in terms of developing quickly, MVP, minimal viable product, get it out to your customers, test, get feedback, look at the user insights, and then iteratively design. The same principle is for learning development teams, for our roles, for the structure of the teams, where we sit within an organisation, for me, all that is up for debate. I think once you start unpicking the problem, what’s the issue that we’re trying to fix here, straightaway, that takes you down channels that you wouldn’t have understood.
Now, that technology is enabling all these things to link together. We’re in completely new ground, David. I think this is the exciting bit for L&D because if there’s any team in an organisation that can A, grasp that, understand it, distill it, and actually interpret and be able to play it back to people that are working in business, frontline, who are time-sensitive and perhaps don’t understand all the jargon and the technology, that’s the opportunity for us. That’s where I’m seeing at the moment, learning & development, making the biggest difference in organisations, where the goalposts have been moved to disruption, as a word.
We talked about it for ages, good God. The biggest disruption that any organisation has had in the 21st century has been COVID that has challenged absolutely everything that we’ve known that has gone before, none more so than in Learning & Development. It’s an exciting time, scary time, time to be brave, but I think fundamentally, there is a massive shift happening within organisations, and Learning & Development have got a great opportunity to stand up and make a true difference.
David: I’ve heard in the conversations with guests since COVID that they’ve had to pivot quickly to a more agile approach and not necessarily agile with a capital a, but one where they need to listen to their end-user to move quickly to develop minimum valuable products, to iterate in order to hit the mark. Then they’ve been expected to make a real difference, which is more of an agile approach.
You mentioned there about user insights. One of the great thrusts forward that I think that this situation provides as well as smart technology is building user insights into any campaign so that we move away from a content play or a distribution of content play to a dialogue, which is, “You told us you needed this. Here’s some useful stuff. Has that helped you then to do what you’re trying to do? Or what help do you need?”
What I hear from learning professionals is that it’s really difficult to get meaningful dialogue around learning solutions, but from my experience, it’s really easy to get dialogue from performance and results conversations where you build user insights into the very fabric of your solutions that are underpinning now performance and results. Again, is this something that resonates with you?
Mike: Yes, definitely. I think it gets muddled a little bit as well with user ratings, reviews, recommendation engines, whatever technology supports that. Fundamentally, what we’re talking about here is getting close enough to our customer and making it really easy for the customer to provide direct feedback on the things that they are going through and using. Do they like it? Is it useful? Is it helping them or is it not?
If you start doing that to the majority of things that you are doing, very quickly, you will understand what’s working well and what’s not working well. Where have we got our finger on the pulse and where have we not? Where do we need to direct resources? Where do we need to prioritise? Where are the gaps?
One of the greatest opening conversations that you can have with people is, “Right. Okay. We’ve got your learning management system, it’s full of content. It’s got, I bet, user-generated content, stuff that you’ve designed. You’ve got your content library plugged in. What are people searching for? How would we find that information?” Well, surely your LMS has a search function. Surely you can get the data of keywords or tags that people are searching for. A lot of organisations will struggle, and L&D teams will struggle to understand what people are searching for,
That fundamentally is something that opens up, where do we need to focus? Where are our priorities? Not necessarily “I think there’s a business need in influencing skills because two people in my team haven’t been closing deals particularly well.” It’s understanding where your users are going, what they’re looking for, what they’re consuming, and then how are they feeding back on that? It’s been historically difficult to get that close, but I think with things like poll surveys, user insight tools that can give you real-time data and feed those into dashboards, whether that’s through analytics or on native analytic tools and systems, you’re starting to create these really easy to understand data points that, as you say, give you user insights that you can then take definitive action from.
What I love about that is it means that L&D teams are not focusing on things that don’t matter, that they think they’re important to us, but actually to the end-user, they’re not. It’s a bit of a shift from L&D-centric to user-centric to making sure that where you’re focusing on is the priorities, and right now, everyone needs to be doing that because that’s what matters and that’s what’s going to keep us all in business.
David: I couldn’t agree more there, Mike. As we look to wrap up this conversation, I think we’ll all agree that smart technology can help L&D so much more than many in the profession realise, and that’s what we’ve been talking about today. If you were to distill it down in terms of what L&D should expect from their tech and then what they should do, where would you start?
Mike: Again, really, really good question. We’ve got to get tech working for us, not vice versa. If we are a slave to our tech, then we’re doing it wrong. I think fundamentally, technology is almost something that shouldn’t be seen. If you are at the moment, focusing on pushing people to a set destination or pushing people out of where they are currently to come into a destination or place to learn and consume content, I’d really think carefully about what the experience is for your learners and your work colleagues. Think about that workplace experience.
Think about the ecosystem that people come into, from their first point in an organisation, how are they welcomed? What are their interactions? This is where I think customer experience really opens the floor for Learning & Development teams. Map out your customer journey. Where are the touchpoints? Where does that involve people? Where does it involve tech? Where does it involve processes? Because if you can get that seamless, if you can get that as friction-free as possible, then that allows you to really focus on what matters most, which is not ensuring that your technology is always working and always there, but it’s about getting closer to your users.
By working closer with your customers, co-creating, continually improving iterative design in terms of what you’re doing and where your focus is, and then getting the data. Make data a stalwart of your weekly conversations, your monthly conversations, create those stories, those dashboards, or that narrative that allows your business stakeholders and the people that you’re working closely with to really understand the activity that’s happening and the impact that the push-pull of what’s actually happening and what you’re doing.
Because I think that the opportunities are there. I think we’ve just got to be brave. We’ve got to continually push boundaries and challenge the status quo of what’s come before in terms of tech. It’s really interesting seeing the RFPs and seeing what organisations– I’m going to be quite, not challenging, but I’m going to be quite controversial, is that if you are talking about gamification and if you’re talking about artificial intelligence and if you’re talking these things and you’re putting them as a must-haves, why? You need to be able to articulate why?
What difference is that going to make to your learning experience, but fundamentally to performance, because these are interesting things, but are they what matters most? I would encourage everyone to look at your technology and to say, “Is that technology going to help us do things smarter, quicker, faster, with less resources and really meet the need of our learner, which is fundamentally helping them do their job quicker, faster, smarter?”
I think that’s the conundrum that we’re in at the moment. The smart teams are thinking like that, other teams are getting into that space, but we’ve still got a lot of people that are still focusing on, “Let’s get the technology, let’s get the features,” and not thinking about it from a performance support perspective and what people actually need versus what we think is right, and what we potentially think we want.
David: Part of that hard work that we want the tech to do, it’s got to include automation, automate, and elevate the status of your L&D with the free time that you gain from getting off the hamster wheel of recurring tasks and administration.
Mike: Absolutely.
David: Mike, thank you very much. It’s been a very insightful conversation. If the listener wants to follow your work or connect on social, how can they do so?
Mike: Yes, absolutely. I’m on LinkedIn as Mike Collins. I’m also on Twitter as @Community_Mike. One of the aspects actually, David, we’ve not touched upon this, but I know in the first podcast that I came on we talked about communities of practice. One of the most exciting things about the role at Looop now is I’m going to be working with a really forward-thinking and talented bunch of L&D practitioners in a community, so Community Mike and the geek with pom poms is back in a big way and I can’t wait to get started.
David: Wonderful. May this kickstart that all off. Mike, thank you very much for being a guest again on the Learning & Development podcast.
Mike: My pleasure, David. Thank you.
David: I’m hoping that this episode has had you reflect on your own expectations of learning tech and to realise you could be achieving a great deal more than you are with the right approach and, of course, the right software. If you’d like to get in touch with me, perhaps to suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, you can tweet me at @DavidInLearning, or connect on LinkedIn or Facebook, for which you’ll find the links in the show notes. Goodbye for now.
Mike Collins is a pioneering and influential voice in L&D, having been Senior People Experience Specialist at River Island and in the Learning Transformation team at Direct Line.
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