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 Brian Murphy on performance-focused, data-led and campaign-driven L&D.
David James: Welcome to the Learning & Development Podcast. I’m David James from Looop. Each week, I chat with guests about what lights them up in the world of people development. This week, I’m speaking with Brian Murphy, who is Global Head of Learning Transformation at AstraZeneca and an award-winning L&D leader for his work at Citi. Before we get started, if you’re enjoying this podcast, please do give us a rating on your podcast app of choice so that others can find us. Thank you. Now let’s get into it. Brian, welcome to the Learning & Development Podcast.
Brian Murphy: Hi, David. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
David: Brian, you’re recognised as an industry-leading and award-winning L&D leader. This is the first time we’ve spoken, but I’ve been aware of your reputation and achievements for some years. Now, without wanting to make you feel uncomfortable so early on in the podcast, but whilst asking you to blow your own trumpet, what do you think differentiates you and your work?
Brian: You have made me a little bit uncomfortable by giving me that introduction, I’m flattered. I’ve been thinking about this actually recently because I’ve recently made a change in my career, and I think it’s a mixture of timing and luck. What I mean by that is the work that myself and the teams that I’ve led in the learning space have been doing, really, I think are seeking the opportunities to deliver on where L&D should always have been.
I’m sure we’ll get into that later in the conversation and what I mean by that, but I think there’s never been a better time to be in L&D, and I think we’re just reaping the rewards or the type of work that L&D really should always have been doing. The business environment means that really, it’s a fantastic time to reposition learning in the business context. I probably wouldn’t overstate it, I would say that it’s timing and luck. Maybe we’ll get into a little bit around that in the course of this conversation.
David: Yes, we certainly will, Brian. As you’ve alluded to there, you’re Global Head of L&D at AstraZeneca now, we will come to that part, but I think certainly for me, it was your work at Citi that brought you to the attention of myself and, I’m sure, of many. Can you describe what you achieved there?
Brian: Sure. Over the space of five years, I led Learning and Leadership Development for Citi across the EMEA region, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, as well as leading the workplace learning strategy globally. As I said at the beginning around timing, everything aligned well for me at Citi during that time. We had a regional CEO, who was really ambitious about the learning culture that he wanted to help create.
I suppose the learning team I inherited that was really, really hungry for change as well, there were some great folks but really positioned as a training utility within the organisation. We went through a number of years where we reinvented ourselves, basically, making that shift to a team more of performance consultants, marketeers, behavioural change consultants rather than training managers.
Looking back, it was great. We ended up being successful in stimulating a real pull in the organisation for learning, developing a greater learning maturity, and learning culture. We were able to track that as we went along as well. Certainly, we ended up winning some awards and doing some good work, but it was very much a journey, by design, particularly in terms of first starting with ourselves and changing our own mindset and capability, before then working with HR and the business around modern workplace learning and how that should work across the organisation.
We ended up reducing our spend in learning actually by 25% but over the same period, increasing our learning engagement by 30% and really being able to deliver a much more compelling value proposition for the bank. It was a great journey, and I was very lucky to have some really smart people working for me.
David: You mentioned there and you’ve described a lot of the changes that really are at the front-of-mind of Learning & Development professionals, that performance consulting around adding elements of marketing in there, being accountable for business results. Where did that come from in you, seeing as this is a place that as an industry, we are wrestling with now and clearly, this is something that you’ve been at the forefront of for a few years now?
Brian: I think as a profession, definitely as you said, it’s been moving in that direction. I guess there’s a couple of things, one, I come from a business background. I’m used to sitting around leadership tables, really not talking necessarily about HR topics but around business topics, of which the people agenda is a big part.
When I came into the learning profession about six years ago, I met a profession, not just at Citi but more broadly I would argue, going through a bit of an identity crisis and really looking to understand its new role. For me, thinking about it through the lens of the business, through a performance lens, and bringing an orientation around marketing, and these elements became natural.
I also became interested in following experts in the learning field, who were probably a bit more aggressive, and they themselves were also looking at these areas. In true social learning style, I had the opportunity, I guess, to form an opinion by talking to other folks. I think marketing is an interesting area, marketing 20 years ago was probably where learning is now.
A lot of activity, a lot of money was being spent but not a huge amount of analysis on measurement or business impact, whereas if you go in and talk to marketeers now, they’re incredibly sophisticated in what they do and how they work back from business impact, I think there’s lots of lessons to be learned for us in our work.
David: So much of that resonates with my experience, Brian. When I was Director of Learning & Talent at Disney, I was exposed to conversations there that I really wasn’t expecting. What I mean by that is that when you’ve served the Learning & Development apprenticeship in the classroom, you really aren’t exposed, and then also if I add in there, that then you’re involved in a training needs analysis or learning needs analysis, which really is a prioritising and resource allocation exercise, rather than a real performance enabler.
Doing that for 10 years and then being exposed, at senior level, to “Yes, we now need to prepare an entire country to perform completely different roles having zero churn and your team will help us,” or “We are looking to integrate several different functions across the business and having a more collaborative sales function,” which meant that rather than splitting this by division and having an expert, you will have generalists, but they need to be aware of a whole portfolio of different products and services.
“Therefore, David, we’d like your team to help with that.” You step back and you think, “Man, you can’t do this in a training course. There isn’t e-learning to do this. This is something far more structural.” There’s a cultural element there as well because the people who sold games and DVDs were very different to the people who then sold consumer products.
It’s a very, very different type of conversation, and what it comes down to, you talk about the measures there, no one was saying to me, “Just get everybody through it.” They were saying to me, “We want people to actually be ready. What is it that you can do to help us to make sure that they are ready and they’re hitting numbers really quickly?” It’s a very different type of conversation. I don’t know if that resonates with you.
Brian: It absolutely resonates with me, David. What you’re saying there reminds me of that struggle that we had at Citi where we had to nearly unlearn, especially our frontline learning colleagues, had to really unlearn what they knew and to be agnostic of solutions. They had to be relentless when focusing on what the performance gap was and really understanding the root cause analysis.
That was it, that needed to be their work upfront, because if you have a natural orientation too, and many learning people are incredibly creative and really smart, but we can gravitate to what we know. I guess with the team that I had, some of them really enjoyed instructional design, they were very good at it and liked that a lot, but we had to reorg and change our work around and be very much led by the business needs and the business performance gap. Then we would solution-architect accordingly, not the other way around. There’s a real difference between that– and it’s not easy to do because sometimes the business also doesn’t help themselves because they’ll come and say, “Listen, we need training and ABC.” The real skill is to use that consulting skill to be able to sit down and go, “Great, let’s work through this together and really understand what we’re solving for,” and having the confidence to push back and really look for that conversation.
Listen to episode 53 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
It’s quite a change. We went through a bit of a journey at Citi to really understand, making sure we didn’t fall into those traps of going to a solution too quickly and a traditional solution at that. We had quite a bit of upskilling around that. Some of the things we did, just to go further on that, was we supported our learning advisors and performance consultants with a methodology and an approach that they could use as a bit of a crutch to a process that they could follow, a consulting process they could follow.
There’s many out there, so it’s not necessarily which one, but to have something to follow, which provides a structure to be agnostic around what the solution should be, but it meant that we had to unpick our whole operating model and rebuild the learning organisation because we used to have a lot of generalists. Then we decided, “Let’s break down the process of how learning gets identified, or the needs and the solutions, and then deployment of that.”
It’s not for everybody but most people actually enjoyed that. It brought a certain level of professionalism to what we did, but it’s a piece of change work really in effect, but I think the outcome you get will be higher-quality learning outcomes, greater business impact, because you’re solving for business gaps, performance gaps, rather than delivering training solutions because that’s what the business necessarily asked for.
David: What you’re describing there is, from my experience and from the people that I’m speaking with on the podcast who have made that transition is that– The first conversation or that conversation exploring what the actual need is, is perhaps the most critical element because, in my opinion, in the past, when we have separated or we’ve been advised of a performance need, and we can apply performance just to really drag this down into layman’s terms, this is people doing the work or trying to do the work and trying to get results.
It’s grounded in what people are in organisations to try to do. Sometimes, the old way would have been to translate those performance needs into learning needs and then, from that learning need, aggregate common needs and then develop standardised solutions so that by the time that they come back down to the people who need them, they’re largely unrecognisable from the actual need.
If I understand correctly, Brian, you’re talking about a performance conversation around what is actually going on to understand what it is in the context in which people are performing and then suspending any judgment about what that solution might look like because we are ingrained a lot of the time.
As I mentioned earlier, the L&D, the typical Learning & Development or training and development apprenticeship from days of yore would have been in the classroom.
A lot of the time, it’s about delivering programmes, content, or courses. From what I understand, if I’m right there, you’re suspending that solutioneering until you fully understand what’s actually going on and what needs intervention, is that right?
Brian: That’s exactly it. It’s not easy to do because– Actually, in fact, at AstraZeneca, we’re probably in an even better position because our frontline learning, well we don’t have frontline learning people in my team, we actually rely on talent and learning folks who are even broader than just learning. What those allow is just to understand, “What is the performance gap and what’s causing the issue? Therefore, what’s the solution on the back of that?”
Very often it’s not a learning solution, certainly not a traditional learning solution. It might be clarity, or, usually, it’s just clarity on roles or responsibilities, or there might be some issues around rewards, maybe a culture issue, manager capability. There’s a bunch of different things, and these things are complex, and nothing is in isolation, it’s always a part of a system.
There will be discrete elements that come out of that, which fall into the learning space, for sure, and then we can look at that, but also the other thing is, a lot of times, it’s just performance support that’s needed. People just need better job aids to be able to do a good job. Recently, I was asked to sign off on some training for managers, for when somebody exits the organisation.
I don’t have a big team here at the moment. Therefore, I might have somebody leaving my organisation once a year, if that. Going on a training course to understand what I need to do every time somebody leaves isn’t really helpful. What would be much more helpful is an automated process or performance support, where I can get informed as a manager “If somebody is leaving, this is what I need to do, here’s a checklist.”
The default option is often to think of a training course solution. We’re all aware of that. We know that we should be smarter around how we diagnose, but actually, my lesson that I learned at Citi was that the people that it’s hardest to change their mindset around this area are ourselves and learning professionals. I think the business gets it really quickly because they don’t have time to waste, but we’re so very good and used to doing certain things. The hard work is actually with ourselves. That’s where we spent a lot of time at Citi, actually.
David: I agree. I’ve recognised those words very well. I was talking to somebody last week about exactly the same thing that it’s us. They asked me, “How do you sell this approach to the business?” I was thinking “Your business is the least of your worries”. When you’re selling them, well, first of all, when you’re having the real conversation about what’s really going on, providing them the comfort that they are really being listened to, and what you’re talking about will actually be addressed, they’re with you.
It is the Learning & Development folks who believe that learning looks a certain way. Then there are certain misnomers that create almost a mythology around Learning & Development such as there are deep skills or deep learning that can only be developed in the classroom. Most of the people I’ve worked with have never been on the classes that we are now mythologising about. They’ve sorted this out for themselves.
Now, of course, with somebody’s own endeavor to develop themselves, it’s not all about them doing this in isolation, they have also made the connections and been role-modeling behaviour that they’ve seen work. They’ve not been doing this in isolation, they’ve just often been doing it without us.
Sometimes we mythologise our own abilities and products to such an extent that we devalue what you’re describing there as performance support, which is as I say, it’s useful stuff at the time. It’s actually required, not immersive experiences at a time that could be provided when it is convenient to Learning & Development and the individual that just so happens to be weeks, months, or years further down the line when the need has actually passed.
Brian: Yes, I agree. The right answer is the right answer. Maybe I have a little bit of an advantage in that I don’t have a 20-year learning career. To your point, if the solution is a very sophisticated, immersive learning experience, then great. We’ve got to spend money on that and the investment, as long as it’s the right solution for that.
Likewise, if it’s a really quick win over here and if it’s performance support or actually it’s not a learning issue at all and it’s something for my colleagues in another part of the organisation, we should just do that and move on because if we keep– It’s basically design thinking around keeping focused on what’s important for the end-user and what’s going to help them with their problem.
Our orientation on what our work should be should be about that. This is where it’s quite, I suppose, a commercial orientation around where this– It’s not to belittle or suggest that we don’t continue to need really strong structured learning and formulary. We absolutely do, but there’s a pallet of solutions and I really don’t care which one we use as long as it’s the right one solving the right problem.
David: Well, let’s talk about what this looks and feels like to the people that you’re seeking to influence, whether we call them employees, end-users. You talked about shifting from courses to campaigns, and I pulled a quote from your LinkedIn, “Putting social learning at the center of your work.” Could you describe to us what you mean by this and how it was experienced by employees?
Brian: Sure. I guess when I took on the job at Citi, I got curious about– Maybe I should start again and be a bit more honest, I really didn’t want to be the head of learning for Citi, and I really had my arm twisted, and when I started the role, I reflected on, why was it that I wasn’t excited at the beginning of that going into the role? It was because the stuff that the learning team was doing really wasn’t relevant to the business.
I got really curious about what would be relevant and started to follow certain individuals who were really talking about learning in a different way. I got very friendly with Charles Jennings and other folks like him, and Charles is a great friend and colleague to this day, and really around how learning happens and the fact that informal learning is a huge part of how we learn and how we develop.
We put some structure around that using the three E’s, which is nothing new about the three E’s version of 2010, but I prefer it because it doesn’t talk numbers. Really, the fundamentals is that it gives a framework and an orientation around learning through experiences, learning through exposure to others, and learning through formal education. Not particularly sophisticated, but actually a pretty robust model to help orientate people around how learning happens.
In fact, we have great learning opportunities in the flow of work every day, especially when we work with colleagues and managers who also understand that. We took a campaign approach really around creating room and opportunity in the organisation to have a conversation about learning, not the what of learning because the what is still important, but it’s becoming arguably less important than the how of learning.
If we can bring learning agility to the organisation, and at AstraZeneca, I’m proud to say we have a CEO who has put learning agility as one of his four enterprise capabilities to develop our business strategy. If we can really support learning agility and help the organisation at an individual and collective level, to learn every day and get really good at learning to learn, then I think we just had to take a campaign approach to that at Citi, which was really just to help people understand these concepts and then apply them themselves.
Then you’re really getting into an interesting space around learning culture and empowering the organisation to learn at the speed of performance and to really, truly let go. We talked earlier in this conversation about the role of L&D. If you operate in the space that I’ve just been suggesting, it does require a complete 180 turnaround around how you think of your work within L&D because you’re moving away then from primarily developing training and managing training into a space where you still do some of that, but you’re also scaffolding learning opportunities and experiences, building learning agility and capability within the organisation.
Listen to episode 53 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
It’s not just at your door, and it means you have to get out of the way often. You have to bring new skill sets to the core, like building communities of practice, community management, supporting behaviour change, and these types of outcomes. It is a choice ultimately around where you want to spend your time. We just made a choice.
We’re continuing to do that here at AstraZeneca, which is, we’re going to absolutely support formal learning, but we’re not going to put all of our efforts into that. We also want to support informal learning and learning the flow because if we don’t do that, we don’t extend it past the classroom, we’re not doing our job, and we’re not supporting real learning as it happens.
A lot of this is happening already in the organisation. It’s just not really classified as such, and it’s certainly not supported in the right way or acknowledged, or best practice isn’t spoken about enough. What we’re going to be doing here at AZ, we’ve started to identify informal learning and best practice in the organisation and then seeing how we can help Business Team A transfer and shift and share that great learning and formal learning practice to Business Team B.
I have moved around there a fair bit in answering that question, but I feel strongly that we’ve got to continue to be broad in terms of how we think about formal and informal, but that does require a different skill set and mindset in the L&D function.
David: I’d like to just zero in on that a little bit because you talked earlier about you and your team having better performance consulting conversations, which requires a bit of a pivot as much as a skillset to pivot from learning focus to performance focus. What other development did you and have you brought your teams on to get to prepare them, again, from those who may have had the traditional L&D apprenticeship to one that is focused on performance, addressing learning in the flow of work, and a more marketing campaigns approach? What kind of development and areas have you worked on?
Brian: This is going to sound really basic, but the first thing we did was to become great social learners and informal learners and continuous learners ourselves as individuals. You can’t teach something and you can’t advocate for something unless you have experienced it, hopefully, yourself. That’s my belief. One of the things we did at Citi was we worked with Jane Hart, who I’m sure many listeners will know, is a social learning expert.
I met Jane recently in Germany, and we reminisced about her starting us on our journey at Citi. We went through a series of workshops with her around just getting curious about building your own professional learning network using social networks around being really intentional about creating that network, working out loud, all of these concepts, which we’re now familiar with, but back six, seven years ago, we weren’t, but it allowed us to understand the power and the impact of this as individuals.
Then, as we started, professionally, to look to seek to be connectors in the organisation because that’s what I believe learning professionals, ultimately, that’s our job is to be connectors, then we could really advocate for that and support that at scale across the organisation because we had been beneficiaries of that ourselves. That’s just one example of that.
The other thing we did was I hired a marketeer, somebody who didn’t come from a learning background but came from– actually had worked in talent acquisition and in other areas where marketing orientation was needed. She came in and joined our team and brought a whole new skill set and mindset around how we go to market and how we engage with people and revolutionised how we did our work and also was a fantastic bridge to internal communications and our internal design studio and all of these fantastic colleagues inside the bank who we didn’t really have a natural affinity or connection with.
She was able to bridge into those worlds as well. I think it’s a mixture between upskilling yourself but also forming coalitions and connections with experts across the organisation, who frankly, are better at some of the stuff than we traditionally are. If you work in those two elements together, then you can probably accelerate your change. That’s going to sound really corny now, it’s like being the change you want to be. You’ve got to show up first and do that. Then it’s so much easier to build a business with you if you’re able to demonstrate and show what it feels and looks like yourself.
David: It just makes it feel and seem much more robust as well, Brian, when you describe it like that, that you have to do this yourself to show that it’s not just the delivery or the provision of another fad. So much of Learning & Development is challenged that the next shiny thing is the thing that people jump on. I think that if this is something that you know has worked for the people in your team, then you can become advocates of it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations with L&D people who have named a new or novel thing and said, “Hey do you do this? What do you think of that?” I ask, “Is that what you use? Is that what you’ve done?” Sometimes I get the crass response. I have, no word of a lie, from a L&D professional, heard, “No, that’s not my learning style” and you think, “No, you’re avoiding this. You’re providing medicine for your people that you don’t take yourself.”
I think that that’s got us into a terrible hole as far as e-learning’s concerned. There are other things, as well, that we’ve added on and bolted on that we don’t actually go to ourselves when we’re looking to either plug a performance gap or help ourselves progress.
Brian: I think there’s absolutely that point around our own personal experience. I think you need to experience it to understand it as well, to really understand it, and then when you really understand it, then you can be best placed to deploy that in the right way with the people. The other thing, though, that we’re doing probably more of at AstraZeneca and my new team, is data gathering around understanding what the user is looking for, what the organisation needs are, and taking extra time.
It’s very easy to fast-forward and say, “We know best, or maybe the CEO knows best, or the folks who are asking for a meeting know best.” There’s a great culture here, whereby even if that comes down from on top, we have the ability and the right to go and seek out and gather data around what the reality is on the ground.
It takes a little bit longer, but we get the right outcome and then we play that back to our senior leaders here, which is the reality that we’re going to solve for. Sometimes that looks very different to the perceived reality, and that applies to solutions as well. We’re creating an agile approach in the company at AstraZeneca around a listening strategy that continues to evolve as we work to build our enterprise capability.
To your point, it’s absolutely understanding these concepts, and drinking our own champagne is a phrase we like to use, but also, it’s about just spending time talking to colleagues about what’s going on for them. We are now starting to institutionalise that. We’re running Raise the Bar sessions where we have users and colleagues who give us real-time feedback on a range of topics.
We cycle through those every few months, and it gives us a very rich dataset that we can continue to evolve the offering. It goes down very well with our business leaders, who really respect the fact that we’re able to put datasets together that are really strong indicators of the current state as well as where we want to go, because the other thing is, being honest about where our starting point is I think is important as well, lots to reflect on in terms of being humble and not thinking we don’t necessarily have the answer as we begin.
David: Great. Brian, talking of reflecting, I’d like to ask you a question about your own journey. You’ve recently moved, as you said, from Citi, where you were established and successful, to AstraZeneca. I have a question that I hope will shed an insight into what it means at a senior Learning & Development level. I mentioned earlier and I’ve mentioned on several podcasts that reaching senior positions, the role fundamentally changed for me, the conversations, the solutions, the relationships, and everything. I wonder, what’s been the challenge and the stretch for you in your new role?
Brian: It is a very different environment here than at Citi, two great companies but very different. Citi was relatively centralised. Both companies are incredibly diverse and international, but AstraZeneca is quite decentralised. It’s very fast-paced, very innovative, and it’s set up intentionally to be decentralised.
A lot of our business units, whether that be our research and development units or our production units or our commercial units, have a lot of autonomy to make their own decision, and that’s just to ensure that we can develop the best medicines for our patients as quickly and as successfully as possible. There’s a real discovery, innovative culture, and that’s wonderful.
It’s certainly wonderful for somebody like me who’s trying to support a learning culture because it’s in the DNA of the place. Where it becomes a challenge is when you do an enterprise role across all of these different areas, federated areas. It can be a bit of a challenge because you’re cutting across many businesses that are quite independent. That’s very different.
Listen to episode 53 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse. I think it’s just different, so how you lead in that environment, that needs to evolve. What I would say though is, there’s pockets of really great, best practice, so our job isn’t just to stop things happening and say, “Listen, this is what you should be doing, and we’re going to do that from the center.”
It’s very much a partnership approach whereby we are bringing in a federated learning model. We haven’t had a centralised learning team before, so we’re picking our way through that. Back to my theme of being a connector, we’re also able to identify some really great practices in certain areas where it makes sense for those baseline capabilities agnostic of the business line that we own.
We’re able to say, “Actually, we’re going to reinvent the wheel. We’re going to take this from over here, and we’re going to bring this and scale and maybe change the mode of it a little bit but fundamentally leverage the experts that we already have in the company.” I think that’s a change from where we were at Citi, again, not worse or better, just different.
I think the natural DNA of this place, though, is to have a discovery focus. Again, it’s how you tap into that, how you always use the language of the organisation and the business, not learning the language. I’m sure that’s a pain that comes through often in this podcast. The other change, to finish this answer off, is that there are four very different personas.
What I mean by that is, in the bank, you’re dealing with professional and knowledge-based workers who, give or take, are fundamentally in a similar profile of individuals, whereas here we have scientists who are incredible people, incredible subject matter experts but in a laboratory environment. We have operations people who are manufacturing the drugs and packaging them in the warehouse, quality, etc.
We have commercial folks, who are sales guys, usually on the road, working remotely. We have enabling functions, HR, IT, and so on, that’s four very different personas. As I’m thinking about our learning strategy, which is really for everybody, it needs to touch everybody in this organisation and truly to marketise the ability to learn every day, we have to keep in mind all of those.
There’s a lot more than four actually, but these are the four simple personas, and that’s quite a change as well. Really enjoying this new opportunity, this organisation is incredibly ambitious about learning. It’s in the DNA and investment and there’s a real push on a culture of lifelong learning here. It comes from the CEO. It’s on his scorecard as well.
I’m really lucky to be in this environment, not without its challenges, but again, it’s a great learning opportunity for me to develop and execute a learning strategy that’s going to be fit for purpose in a very different environment. Some of the things continue to pull through. Informal and formal learning, campaign approach, some of these elements we’re continuing to do here, we’re going to do them differently.
We have to land things in a different way because this is a different type of organisation. Some things are the same, and other things are very different in terms of environment, but this data gathering and understanding what’s going on under the hood of the organisation, I believe, is going to become the secret to our success. Continuing to be led by what the data is telling us is something that we’re going to build a team around.
David: I can’t let that one slide without probing a little bit further, Brian, because it is such a hot topic in Learning & Development and something that I’ve talked a great length across many podcasts about. You’re right, and I think that the data element is perfectly aligned to what you were describing before about speaking and understanding the language of the people that you’re trying to support and what they are trying to do across those four very distinct areas.
Starting from a place of data, which I’ve talked to so many people about, helps you to understand, what is a critical point of failure? I’d say failure because that’s often when we get involved. Failure, of course, is relative, but when there is a critical element to get involved in. I know that Tracey at Sky, when she talked on the podcast, said she always starts from a place of data.
Now, the data reason, then the map, on which you say, “Right, I can see clearly what’s required,” as Laura Overton then says, “It’s there for interpretation for which evidence-based practice is essential in understanding what people are experiencing in relation to that data.” What do you mean then by data? What is it that you’re doing to understand what’s going on in your business with data?
Brian: I suppose there’s three things, if I can remember the three, the first is looking at it from an analytics perspective. I’m very lucky that one of my peers within the talent center of excellence here is the head of workforce analytics. My boss, who’s the head of talent, has brought talent and learning and workforce analytics together under the one stable.
We have the ability to work with my colleagues in the workforce analytics group to really understand what are the data sources we can access and the business data sources as well, not just learning. We want to really shift the focus. That’s the first thing in terms of creating those different data points and those system data points across multiple platforms. That’s the first one.
The second one is a lot less sophisticated, which is just going and talking to people and creating data from conversations. There’s great technology now where you can crowdsource, and you can get fantastic input from folks. We’ve been doing that, the benefit of doing it that way and adding that into your system data is that you’re creating engagement and a culture of change agents by reaching out and doing that as well. That’s the second point, and I knew I was going to forget the third point.
It’ll come back to me, I’m sure, in a second, but I suppose it is around thinking about how you can start building pictures around it. Oh, yes, I know what the third was, if I waffle on for long enough. The third one then is around that it’s just an ongoing continuous process. For me, these are these continuous loops whereby as we’re working, we’ve gathered our data, we’ve formed an opinion. To Laura’s point, I drop my cap to Laura on this topic any day, but I like the point that she’s making around how it’s being applied, and then you’re gathering that feedback from your users and then looping that back again.
I think it’s just a continuous process, but the key I think will be, going forward, these learning professionals who are able to access rich datasets but then are able to also create their own listing strategies within that, within the piece of work that they’re working on. Then it’s up to people like me who look at it more in a macro perspective and they’re thinking, “What are the two-year cycles that we’re going to look at from an enterprise capability perspective that our strategic workforce plans and other datasets are coming in and supporting?” I think we’re not there yet. What we’re trying to build is an agile approach where we’re using data from different sets at the micro and macro level to keep forming pictures and informing our work. I’m sure it sounds like Sky and certainly, Laura is great on this. I must go back to your back catalogue and listen to some of the podcasts and probably learn a few things from them.
That’s the emerging picture on data because sometimes when I hear data, it’s like, this is a black box of ones and zeros. I think it’s about information and knowledge, and that comes from multiple sources, so accessing and interpreting that is going to be a key skill, going forward. I would include basically talking to people and gathering input because the benefit of doing that is you get engagement on the back-end, which you can then leverage when you get to the launch phase and you’re seeking change in the business.
David: The black box that you just described there, I think it’s a common way of perceiving data. The way I like to describe it is, it’s just about validating or challenging assumptions in our context. So many assumptions are thrown at us and we make those. It’s about just pausing for thought and instead of taking the order or jumping, it’s about understanding or seeking the data to either validate or challenge those assumptions.
Now, I’ve realised we’re coming to the end of the podcast. Brian, I’ve got a couple of questions. The first one, I would love to know, especially because of what you’ve said so far, that you weren’t sure about coming into the profession, that you are refocusing your team from the traditional focus of learning to performance and you brought in a marketeer. That all added up, what’s the state of L&D, in your opinion?
Brian: You’re ending with a big question, aren’t you? I was at the Learning Awards the other night. I go to it most years, and like you and your listeners, I go to many conferences and so on. I came away feeling really positive, and it wasn’t just because I’d had a few drinks, a few glasses of white wine. I think that I was really impressed with not just the quality of the winners and the nominees but also the categories of awards.
LPI, they have done a great job. But I think as a reflection of the profession, there was an award for business impact. There were many things you and I have just spoken about, actually. It seems that we’re making a lot of progress. I think the profession is going from strength to strength, but I don’t think we’re out of the woods.
I think because all of our human nature is to attach learning or associate learning with schooling and education, I think that we always just have to continue to evolve and to continue to help colleagues learn, get more curious around how learning happens and how that applies, whether if you’re working in a corporate sector, how that lands and thinking about the end-user and thinking about the impact that you’re trying to achieve.
I think we’re moving in the right direction. I still think we’ve got a ways to go, but I think the last few years have seen a real shift. I think the learning technology space is fascinating. I still think most of the providers aren’t where we need them to be, but I think they’re moving at a pace. I think in the next few years, it’s going to be really interesting to see who are the winners or losers there and who can really shift and meet the need. It’s a very exciting time. I’m sure, as evidenced by the discussions that are happening in this podcast, it’s an exciting time to be part of the L&D profession.
David: I agree. Brian, I don’t think there’s been a better time to join and be part of it. Finally, Brian, I know that you are on social media, sometimes I see you speaking at events and being published, but if people want to follow you on social media, how can they do so?
Brian: Yes, if you want to get in touch, I am on Twitter @bnmurphy14, pretty creative right? And I’m on LinkedIn. Yes, delighted for people who want to get in touch to have a conversation. I do join people to my professional learning networks. Jane Hart should be very proud of me, so I’m doing that, being a social learner.
David: Wonderful. We’ll put the links in the show notes. Brian, thank you very much for being a guest on the Learning & Development Podcast.
Brian: David, My pleasure. Thank you.
David: Examples of progressive L&D practice, which are performance-focused, data-driven, and campaign-led should be amplified in order to raise the profession. I think this conversation with Brian will help to do this. I’m sure his example will help anybody who is interested in knowing where to focus their development and their practice. If you’d like to get in touch with me, perhaps to suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, you can tweet me @davidinlearning, or connect on LinkedIn or Facebook, for which you’ll find the links in the show notes. Goodbye for now.
Brian is an experienced and award-winning L&D leader with a reputation for innovation and achieving results. As Head of Learning & Leadership at Citi, Brian achieved the Gold Award for Innovation In Learning from the LPI (2017) and the same standard for Best Use of Social & Collaborative Learning Technologies from Learning Technologies (2016). Now at AstraZeneca, Brian is Head of Learning Transformation.
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