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 Nigel Paine on developing a learning culture & organisation.
David: Welcome to the Learning and Development podcast. I’m David James and each week I’m going to chat with guests about what lights them up in the world of people development. This week I’m delighted to welcome Nigel Paine where you’ll get to know a whole lot more over the course of this great conversation.
Nigel, welcome to the Learning and Development podcast.
Nigel: Thank you so much David, it’s great to be here.
David: You’re a hard man to pin down to a brief role description Nigel. Your LinkedIn profile has you down as Learning Now TV presenter, as a podcast host… But you do quite a bit more than that. How would you describe yourself?
Nigel: I do a lot more than that. It’s very hard to pin down and I kind of pick the things that interest me in a particular month and I’ll change it the next month, but I actually teach. I teach on a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia and I work for the University of Chicago, Chicago Booth business school at the London campus.
I write books and I’m going to talk about my latest book, but I’ve written most of my life and I’m intensely writing now, so I write a good thousand few thousand words most weeks now about the world as I see it, about things people asked me to write about and about things that get me enraged or even interest me, but I also work with companies.
I’ve just come out of a huge project working with the FMD on Innovation and leadership development, working with 12 large companies right across Europe. Unfortunately, none in the UK. Learning about how they’re dealing with the challenges and leadership development at the moment and the report is now out in draft thank goodness.
Eventually it will be published and there’s a magazine journal feature coming out with it from FMD. So that kind of stuff, I work with individual companies as well. And I do work with executive teams. I do coaching, particularly increasingly for younger people coming through the industry or coming through an industry, even young entrepreneurs trying to help them guide themselves and work out what they need to do to flourish in this kind of crazy environment we live in. I do a lot of stuff, it’s true, which is really a strength or maybe a huge weakness, I’m not sure!
David: I’ve known you Nigel from your work at Learning Now TV and we’ve known each other for a few years, but before we knew each other, when I was at Disney you were at the BBC.
Nigel: I was indeed. Yes, I was 5 years at the BBC running their Learning and Development operation. And that was me being a big slug of corporate. I really learned a lot when I was in the BBC, but we also did a lot. I remember when I joined, one of my senior staff Gareth Jones said to me Nigel, you’ve got a very big train set to play with and he was right.
So we did some ambitious things that I couldn’t really have done anywhere else where everything else was all kind of struggling to pull bits and pieces together. In the BBC we could think big because they were big challenges from big things we had to do and I completely transformed the learning operation in the BBC and I think I did some good work, but I had some great people actually doing the work. I was just remotely connected while people work very hard, but we had a good sense of vision and direction at a time when the organisation was changing dramatically.
So it taught me a lot about managing change and engaging people through change, all that kind of stuff.
David: I think we could have a conversation in itself about how we could use the adventures of leading learning and development functions in large complex organisations.
Nigel: It’s fascinating because I’ve worked with Disney as well. Not in the UK, but I’ve worked with the Disney learning team in the US. What an excellent organisation, they know what they’re doing. Really professional and very very nice people. So I know the kind of world that you were working in and it’s exciting but it’s very challenging. Disney is very very demanding of everybody who works for the organisation, as you will know.
David: Yeah, it’s exciting and challenging in the same regard. But Nigel, I’d love to talk with you about your book. First of all, congratulations on your book, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read. The book is about workplace learning, how to build a culture of continuous employee development, it’s a fascinating read bringing to life a lot of prior thinking with authors from across different decades.
I’m not too ashamed to say that a lot of those authors and references you mentioned I’d never heard of. Back in the day when I was earning my stripes and learning about Learning and Development or training and development, books were limited in that I could see to assessing, designing, delivering training programs.
You mentioned you’ve written plenty of books, Nigel. With this one, what were you hoping to achieve?
Nigel: I always write my books in a rage. And the rage behind this book was that the term learning culture has been bandied around by people who, modestly I say this, but who did not know what they were talking about. And had no sense of that history where it all came from, from the 80s. And there was some very good work done in the 80s, but it didn’t really lead to anything. So I thought it was really about time that someone went back to the ages, tracked the journey, looked at what was happening today and tried to help other organisations and other individuals get their head around the idea of a learning culture and thereby having better tools and better ideas of how they might build one in their own organisation.
So that was the logic behind it. And I did it when learning culture was kind of modest. It’s now everywhere. Today this morning, I read a post by Nick Shackleton-Jones where he’s teaching other companies how you build a learning culture. I didn’t even know Nick was teaching people how to build a learning culture!
So it is everywhere but I want it to be the right kind of understanding of a learning culture so people do a good job. They don’t do a kind of rubbish job, and we end up back where we were in the 80s where it all dies a death in three or four years time. So the book has got a mission behind it.
David: In the introduction, you describe how many of the ideas in the book will seem beyond the hopes of L&D professionals in organisations where the environment and culture are not conducive to a learning culture. I see this and hear this all the time. So what can we do about this if we see if this is our context that we don’t have an environment or stakeholders who are ready to engage in this conversation?
Nigel: It’s true, if you’re in transactional L&D, if you’re an order taker then to have the aspiration of ‘we’re going to build a learning culture this year’, no, you won’t, you just won’t do it. It’s more complex than that. But the key thing for me is at the starting point is you’ve got to know yourself and know your organisation. So you’ve got to look at the blockages and what I’m trying to say in the book is if you just focus narrowly on learning and it’s all about learning learning learning, you missed the whole point. It’s about culture with a big C as it is about learning culture. Therefore you have to understand the nature of the culture and you have to understand the blockages which stop you moving forward and I’ve outlined some of the absolutely fundamental ones like trust.
If you are operating in a very low trust organisation no one respects you, no one trusts you, no one trusts each other then you’ve got to fix that, or at least go some way to fixing that before you can begin to get at the kind of essence of a learning culture which for me is not about individuals learning. That’s okay and that’s obviously important, but it’s about sharing. A learning culture is where people take information from outside and from inside, share it really quickly and turn it into action. Action is my closing, if you don’t take action, you haven’t got a learning culture. You’ve just got a nice load of things going on which may feel warm and fuzzy. I’m about action and so many people who talk about learning culture forget that little bit. ‘Yes action, oh sometime down the track’. No, it should be at the beginning of your debate and your discussion and your priority really. Better action.
David: So, Nigel, who then decides that they want to embark on this journey of becoming a learning organisation? I mean, I think it’s a cop out a lot of the time to say ‘well it’s got to start from the very top, it’s got to be the CEO or the MD’ but a lot of the time a company culture is the embodiment of a strong character which may be the figurehead there. So, where do you stand on this point and is not having the ultimate buy-in by the MD or the CEO an absolute killer here?
Nigel: Eventually it will be, but not to begin with, you know, the idea that the CEO is all seeing all, doing all, knowing, and that you wait for the word to come from on high before you can take action is crazy.
I think that you can start to build the conditions, you can start to share the evidence and you can convince people through the organisation and it may be a long time before it actually percolates upwards [if you can percolate upwards] till it gets to that top bit. That doesn’t stop you doing stuff and the key to me is not to say isn’t it wonderful to have everyone learning? Who cares? No one cares. What you have got to say is wouldn’t it be better if we could take better decisions, move faster, have more ideas, be more Innovative, have people cooperating and working together? Very few managers unless they’re kind of psycho would say why would we want that?
Yes, they want you, but they don’t understand the dream if you like is clear, but how you get to the dream is not clear. That’s where the role of L&D, the ability to frame it, and to offer solutions and processes, is absolutely critical. That’s what you have got to do. So, just because you’ve got someone who is indifferent. I think if you’ve got someone who is deliberately hostile and wants to you know, screw everyone the entire time, probably find another organisation, but you’ve just got someone’s got lots of other issues and lots of other problems, you can make the case and you can build a very strong case, and if you couldn’t you shouldn’t be doing it.
If you can’t see the business benefits for the organisation then you shouldn’t be doing it. It’s not about nice learning. It’s about hard-edged business benefits.
David: And going back to what you said before it’s about action. It’s about doing enough of the right stuff. And then for me it’s about focusing and having conversations on outcomes, not the activities. Too much of the time we’re talking about programs and content and when we’re talking about programs and content and we don’t have engagement then I’ve heard excuses such as ‘well, our people don’t like to learn’, ‘our people don’t have time to learn’, and then you’ve got all of the caveats and the ways out of a learning solution.
The reasons why learning solutions fails such as ‘well, the manager didn’t didn’t support the learning’, ‘the learning wasn’t taken back to the workplace’ and all of that stuff makes me think well how fragile are your ‘solutions’? If they fail at the first hurdle, when I hear talking about action, and then you’re talking about hard-edged, we’re talking about supporting people with the reasons they’re at work and the reasons they want to be better and not just about the engagement in the Learning and Development offering.
Nigel: Absolutely. Yes of course, and in some ways that comes second. When you see the benefits, the business benefits, you go backwards and say oh right, it’s worth engaging these people, but up until that point, it’s all about focusing on the change you need to see in the organisation. ‘We made this mistake’, ‘this didn’t go well’, ‘we lost this customer base’, ‘we didn’t understand this issue’, ‘we didn’t understand why this product was failing’. Right, okay, if we understood these things better and we took faster action, would that be a business benefit to this organisation?. Yes, it would. All right. I can help you with that process of solving those problems, not ‘I can generate loads of learning in the organisation’ because fundamentally no one cares.
David: Well you’re talking about solving business problems rather than justifying the investment in learning content and programs which are two very different things. And of course, we see the posts everyday on LinkedIn and on Twitter where you say ‘well the prerequisite to having a successful learning a development function’, ‘or a learning organisation’ is senior level buy-in and I think that’s what we’re discussing here is that’s not going to be just magic to you. You’re not going to be provided with the currency or the credibility to just be told ‘right, you Nigel have got my backing from day one. Let’s let’s invest more in your programmes’. It’s about speaking the language of the business, doing something that actually matters and then taking data and your metrics that matter to the business to say, ‘hey, look I’ve been doing this over here and we seem to be benefiting as an organisation.I think that we could do more of this if we can have a conversation about what this would mean’.
Now I’m not using learning jargon here. I’m not trying to convince the CEO that we need to invest in or build a learning culture or learning organisation. Speaking their language in order to inch towards what we’re talking about as in a learning culture.
Listen to episode 5 of the Learning & Development podcast here.
Nigel: Yep. What you want is a CEO or an executive to go ‘we like what’s happening in this organisation. How on Earth did this come about and why did we do that so much better? Tell me more.’ So it comes from them because they want to understand the process. And you say ‘well we can do more of this.’ You’ve got their interest and engagement but you’ve got that through results, not through theoretical models.
You can pick up a model of learning culture and say ‘look at this, isn’t this what we want?’ Yes, it may be that model is very useful to an L&D team, but you know, I would keep it quiet, I would focus on some real issues in the organisation, like bad behavior, lack of transmission of ideas, people hiding blame or blaming other people, hiding mistakes, lack of communication across departments, all the things that hamper organisations, that’s the area to focus on. Everyone is willing to talk about those things. Don’t just talk about learning culture models.
David: So let’s let’s take a step back then because what we are talking about are the conversations that we might be having and of course, you know, you and I have sat in very senior roles in Learning and Development, and I’ve argued for a long time that when you’re exposed to board-level conversations you change the way you think about Learning and Development. It’s much less about delivery and much more about outcomes, but I don’t see a lot of L&D Department’s with the remit, the currency, or the skills to change the learning culture and yet so many say that they need to.
How do we get past this initial hurdle?
Nigel: That’s a very good question. And I guess there are three or four ways. The first one is you’ve got to understand the nature of the organisation. So you have got to get out there and talk to people, you’ve got to understand the blockages, you’ve got to understand the frustrations of those people’s lives. What drives them crazy? What makes them leave? What deeply inhibits their ability to do their best? And when you’ve got that, you’ve got a kind of blueprint emerging so that you can see what you need to fix. You can see if it’s bullying or it’s poor middle management, you know what you’ve got to fix and then you start to fix it, and you can do some of that with learning, some of it can be done by just talking to the organisation and setting standards and maybe developing values that are appropriate or mostly enforcing values that already exist and which are ignored.
So you start on that process of organisational development through people. And eventually what pops out of the other end if you keep going along that path, what pops out is more of a learning culture.
David: Nigel I need to address the elephant in the room. You mentioned in the book that a course mentality works against the learning culture. Considering that courses are often the Bedrock of L&D, what’s the shift you’re suggesting?
Nigel: The shift is… I’m not saying let’s dump courses, but I think they’re useful. The problem is when that is all you think you’re doing. Even worse, if you’re just running a catalog of courses, which you present to an amazed and unsuspecting world and they go ‘Wow! What a fantastic catalog. I think I’ll pick that one or I’ll pick that one.’ You’ve got to get out of that mentality and you’ve got to start saying we will scrap everything we do. We’ll start from zero and we’ll build back depending on need. What are the most acute needs in the organisation? And that can be very challenging because people have delivered courses that they personally have a stake in, that they’ve done for years, and to say to them we’re not going to do that because it’s not key, it’s good and it’s interesting and people like it, but that’s not why we’re doing it.
So you’ve got to take everyone with you and say right let’s work our way backwards. Starting with what is the most acute need in the organisation? Sometimes you can’t get out of it, you can’t stop doing compliance, but you may want to do it in a different way.
So courses are just a part of what you do, that creates space to do other things, have encounters, experiences, to have journeys, to give people information, to let them kind of develop their own courses. We live in a world surrounded by YouTube and TED talks and goodness knows what… I can’t believe it’s beyond the wit of any human being in a workplace to not build their own course around their own needs.
And the truth is that L&D maybe find it slightly unpalatable. But the vast majority of learning is solved by individuals or teams without any reference to L&D. They just get on and do it. And the BBC was full of incredibly talented people who got on and did it and we had very little intervention, even though when I joined the BBC I had 525 staff. I had a huge amount of staff, but we were hardly touching the surface in some areas and yet you begin to think that you are indispensable and that is a terrible thing to think.
You are not indispensable, so get out from behind the courses barricade and work out what are the key needs and how you solve those needs. And you know, the programme I have been working with in Europe with some big companies, big companies are dropping all of their leadership development because it’s just not fit for purpose. That is very hard for the whole team that have been together for years, often, the organisations that they’ve worked with for years, and say we’re going to rethink this. And one organisation has just replaced courses with experiences. Just exposing people to a different world, taking them out of the corporate head office and seeing what’s going on on the street. Seeing what startups are doing. Think about new markets, think about the ways they work, and then pull that back into the organisation. What did you learn? How do we spread that around? That’s not a course and at all. And eventually that might compliment courses, but if you don’t lose that mentality that everything has to be a course, you can’t change and move forward.
You know, I ran a residential Center in the vale of Evesham and everybody thought that’s two days and one night. Why? Because they had to fill up beds. Everything you went to, it was two days and one night and they put a really good programme together for two days and one night because we needed to know how many bed nights. So that wasn’t about learning it was about bed nights. So you’ve got to try and get out of that if you possibly can.
David: Yeah there’s so much about duration and there’s another topic right there, but what you’re describing is something incredibly bold. There is an admission from Learning and Development who stock-in-trade, whose apprenticeship is conducted in the classroom a lot of the time. We pride ourselves on being deliverers of learning [used to be training] and now we deliver the internal process of learning. And what you’re saying there is that this stock in trade, this skill that we’ve home dived all these years and what we’ve trained our stakeholders, not just as individuals, but as a profession, to take as our offering is to be sidelined a little yeah, it’s as you say, I mean, I’m careful with my languages as well because it’s not about putting the course to bed, but it is about recognising that if we know what people really do need help with in our organisations, whether they’re crying for help or not, then we can guide and support them as and when they require, which can help them with their performance and results and the organisation with its capability, but I don’t think we really believe that we’ve ever been doing that with courses.
I don’t think that as a profession we’re as mature now, there are some strong voices that we read and people that we know who have been calling this out for a long time. But as a profession, are we ready and are we aware that our stock in trade the course and/or e-learning when we’re blending isn’t really doing the job that we are in organisations to do?
Nigel: Yep. I think that’s right. There’s a much bigger job and it’s a recognition as well that people learn in all sorts of different ways and that sometimes with performance support, what people want is a checklist or an answer, they don’t want a course. And it’s also to recognise that huge amounts of learning takes place by just being in an organisation and talking to someone and saying ‘Hey David, you know, I can’t do that. What did you do last week?’
If you can facilitate that and open up some of the blockages and there are in many organisations, don’t talk to him, get on and do your job. If you can just open that up, create the free flow of knowledge and support, you are doing a huge amount to create better learning and more comprehensive learning. After all, even if you have a plethora of courses in the biggest catalog in the world, you’re only giving people relatively few hours in their working year. And what we’re talking about is a few hours in their working day.
It’s moving learning and work not only a bit closer, but so that it’s almost indissoluble, so that learning is work and work is learning. That is the future, because we need to learn so much more and we need to believe in ourselves as learners and that one aspect of a learning culture.Those organisations that have succeeded every single person in that organisation is not afraid. They know they can learn and relearn and one of the problems with resistance to change is fear. I know I can do this but I don’t know whether I can do anything new.
If you’re in a learning culture, you have no problems with that at all, because you’re used to taking on new challenges. You’re used to working with young David over there for half a day to get myself to a different skill base or to help me on a different pathway. That’s just second nature to you. That’s when I think learning becomes really exciting and integrated and ingrained in business and not something separate. It’s got to be integrated, that’s the key.
David: Now, there is the risk of sounding like we’re so far detached from the realities of people in Learning and Development and maybe we’re a little bit bonkers, but I think it’s really important to recognise that you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Start again, tell your stakeholders that there’s no more training from now on and that we’re going to do things a different way, but bear with us because we’ve got nothing at the moment, we’ll build it around you. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing that traditional is dead and digital is taking over and all of that stuff, it can be iterative. It should be iterative. It should be based on what works rather than necessarily what can be done.
Nigel: What you want is your dream of what you want to achieve, you’ve got to have that vision… You’ve got to have that idea in your head about the kind of organisation you’re trying to build. And then you work out what are the first things you can do while leaving most of everything else in place and then the second things, and then the third things. And how do you judge what’s most important? The things that will make the biggest difference with the least effort on your part. And just keeping your staff with you, because the last thing you want to do is be the head of Learning and Development where everybody hates you in Learning and Development.
The rest of the organisation might think you’re alright, but your own team disown you because they think you’re trying to take away their jobs. So it’s step by step I think. And just like in a learning culture, take people out, take them out of their little bubble in L&D and see what’s going on in the organisation. Take them out of the organisation and see what other organisations are doing at the same time. Give them a sense of optimism and a belief that things can change, because part of the problem is people believe there’s no other way of doing it. And if we did do it, it’d be too hard and we’d might make a mess of it and we all get fired. That’s not true. But you need to know what you’re doing.
David: Well, the good thing about your book is the richness of the case studies and there’s one in particular with Naomi Lockwood, which really brought this to life for me. She talks about partnering with employees to help them achieve what they’re there to do, ultimately affecting performance and outcomes. Now this is a far cry from traditional models of creating learning facilities, whether it be programs and systems that seem to run parallel to the business, is this right?
Nigel: Yes. Naomi is a classic example of an L&D leader who came in and saw everything that she didn’t want to happen in the learning operation, with very strong course focus and catalog focus. And the first thing she did was talk to staff and find out what they really wanted and what needs they had that weren’t being met and then she worked back from there and tried to take her team with her. So she did everything that I think everyone else should do. So if you read Naomi’s case study, it can be done and she’s in a very traditional, very straight-laced organisation. It wasn’t a kind of wacky, you know, a startup or anything like that. It was you know, Cambridge education. They’ve been around hundreds of years and are not renowned for going around doing crazy things. They’re very solid, they need to do things in a very systematic way, but she managed to convince the entire operation that they had to shift and she did a remarkable job in the time that she was there.
David: You mentioned there that she bought her team with her. I have a lot of conversations with Learning and Development leaders, I have conversations with HR directors who say that they are looking to recruit Learning and Development people, but they don’t seem to have the skills required today. The towards maturity Benchmark reports back this up.
There’s a spidergram in the reports, there have been for the last five to six years that I’ve seen, and what they generally say is Learning and Development are strong in the traditional areas of training delivery, of teaching and assessment, of learning administration and then on coaching and project management and pretty much weak in every other area. Now the weakest areas in this year’s Benchmark report seemed to be data analytics, supporting performance and digital content development. That sounds like there is quite a big gap between what the profession needs right now and what’s being recruited and the traditional skills that are relied upon.
Now that says to me that that’s a gap that needs to be bridged. In your opinion how do we go about doing that?
Nigel: All right. Well, I think first of all that the idea that you have to do things to people, or they have to wait until someone does something to them has got to be blown apart. That every single person in L&D’s responsibility is to stay in touch with what’s going on, and everyone has got access to the tools that will help them move forward in all of those areas you’ve mentioned, so I don’t want any of the kind of ‘oh, it’s not fair’ that you have a role in building yourself and not being the the Cobblers child.
You start your own learning journey, you talk to people who are in those areas and things like digital content development, sometimes what you need to do is have the right skills to be able to buy into someone else’s digital content skills and not think that everybody has to be able to do everything.
You know, there’s plenty of small players out there. Lots of gig workers, people who will come in and work with you on a project and do stuff for you and then go away again, and they’re very happy doing that and they can be incredibly useful. You don’t have to buy in a huge great expensive digital content factory in order to be able to deliver successful digital content. You’ve got to think about what you need and build it slowly. It’s like you need a learning ecosystem, not an LMS, for example, if an LMS costs a fortune just get that ecosystem right and then work out how you pull in existing digital content. For example, there’s a massive amount of Open Source material out there just go to iTunes University and see what there is. Pull in your TED talks and other available resources and curate them, don’t create them, and recognise that for many people they’d rather have something that’s slightly rough around the edges and available today than a perfectly crafted piece of digital content in six months time, because it’s needed today. And I think we’re moving away now.
There are some things where you do need that high touch and high craft, but we’re moving away from that to a world where read that, think about that, write that, get in touch with those people sit around a table and work it out yourselves. There’s a lot of learning that can take place that doesn’t require big budgets and high skills, but you’ve got to know how to do that too, and you can find out. So I think every learning professional should be on their own learning journey at the moment to see where it’s moving and to make sure they don’t get left behind and that’s very very important.
David: I think one of the things building on what you’ve mentioned there is that there are no silver bullets now in Learning and Development and I think that that’s a misconception as well.
Nigel: It’s really not a kind of quick fix. It’s a work in progress that pops out in the end.
David: Nigel, you’ve struck me as someone who is always challenging yourself. You’re active on social media. You run your podcast, you’re the presenter on Learning Now TV, as well as what other people will recognise as a day job, if you had I mean, it’s not and I’m recognising that as as a way of in Learning and Development by just trying stuff we broaden our skills by not perhaps seeing ourselves or pigeonholing ourselves in a traditional sense, was that a conscious effort for you? And what’s that delivered for you?
Nigel: I think I’m insatiably curious and I recognise now that I was as a child and I used to quite literally get beaten by my father because I’d take things apart. He would go absolutely crazy, he never said, ‘oh how lovely that you’re investigating this machine’. It was always ‘you’ve broken it!’ And I did have a habit of taking things apart and getting them back together again apart from this one little bit which I just couldn’t work out where it went.
But that’s kind of what I’m doing now. Even now I take things apart. I love taking organisations apart, taking technology apart and understanding how it can be reassembled. What has it done for me? I think primarily it keeps me interested. I never get bored and I don’t like doing the same kind of stuff. I’m not very good at sit you down and do that again and again and again and if someone wants me to do that, I’m not the right person. But I am the person who can share ideas, bring in ideas, bring in new innovation from somewhere else and try to share it across the organisation or with the people that I’m working with.
So I think it makes me maybe shallow, but it makes me interesting and I don’t know whether those two things are good or bad. Maybe I should have specialised in my life and become a world expert in one thing. But I do know a lot about a lot of things and I do feel that I’ve got my finger on the pulse of what’s going on in L&D and if I didn’t I probably would leave because if I haven’t then I would find it very difficult to work with anyone not knowing what on earth is going on or where it’s all going. So there’s that advantage. I do think what’s going on now is so interesting. I think there’s a real chance to make learning the heart of modern organisations because they can’t survive without upping the velocity and the means, the way of learning.
To me that’s very exciting, like my whole life I’ve waited to be someone to say, you know, you were right 30 years ago. And being ignored, abused, pushed to one side, suddenly we’re right in the heart of it. And this is a unique opportunity and if we blow that I think that’s crazy to do that. So this is a great time. I don’t want to stop working. I want to see this thing moving forward because it is like a juggernaut on the move now and that’s very very exciting.
David: I feel that too. I do feel as if Learning and Development is at a tipping point. One in which we will truly have technology support us and do some of the heavy lifting for us, but there’s the other side of that when I read people like Guy Wallace on LinkedIn who talks about how he’s been doing this stuff since the late 1970s and early 1980s.
So that’s when I kind of think are we too ingrained to make the change? But then I also look and think well we won’t hold onto data forever inside Learning and Development. Our business leaders are going to take a keen interest on how people are employed in order to affect business goals.
So I’m kind of tempering my optimism whilst also recognising that this might actually be taken out of our hands. Now, to lead that into a question, in your book you mentioned that technology is an essential component of a learning culture. You’ve already touched on this a little bit by saying that one single technology system such as the LMS perhaps isn’t going to be fit for purpose, we might need to look at the ecosystem. In what other ways do you see technology being used differently from the traditional approach of perhaps an LMS filled with e-learning?
Nigel: The way that I think technology is important is it does a number of things brilliantly. One is it brings people together, so that it is a way of having very useful synchronous and asynchronous discussions and some of those things in real time and problem-solving in real time and you’ve got to make use of that communication set up.
The second thing is that if you are sharing, you need to store something. You need to have a place to store, a place where people can go to and look in the drawer, look in the cupboard and not have to reinvent the wheel constantly and the best way to do that is with technology and thirdly it allows you to move much faster. So it allows you to build stuff, distribute it and get things moving in an organisation, regardless of where they happen to be.
And I don’t even think that this is inapplicable in an organisation where everyone is in the same building. I still think that you have to have a really rich technology environment so that when you’re ready, when you need it, it’s all there for you and not say you’ve got to be here at twelve o’clock so you’ve missed your chance and all of that stuff. Just to understand the way technology is changing the world. You know, it’s beyond my comprehension that organisations watch everyone walking down the street with a mobile phone, sitting on the tube with mobile phones and they come into the organisation and are told to put them away and you can’t have Facebook, use your company phone that’s crippled and you can’t go on the internet and they think that’s a good idea, you know. Basically we’ve got to catch up with the way people experience the world outside the organisation here and bring it in, and learning is a good way of doing that because people are sharing and learning and doing all sorts of things online which they weren’t able to do essentially before they had smartphones. 2007 was the iPhone. It’s not long ago really, you know, I remember it, you remember it. And it’s going to go much much further. So in some ways we’re aligning the outside with the inside and then going back outside and seeing how that influences things.
David: I completely agree with you and to build on that with regards to Learning and Development, what I see as one of the biggest blockers for us as a profession is that we don’t think big enough as far as technology is concerned. We look at the systems and content that we have in-house and we think of ways that we might package that up or get that out to people, rather than thinking about the ideal situation that we would create for people experiencing friction, challenges and unfamiliar situations in the organisation that aren’t able to perform and deliver the required results that they are trying to gain, and then think how best can we support them? How best can we make sure that our intervention works?
And how do we scale that for the benefit of everybody else? I think that we limit ourselves with what we have rather than just thinking ‘what do our people really need in the service of what they’re here to do?’
Nigel: Yep, and what are people doing that we could learn from and amplify around the whole organisation. What little group over there are doing brilliant stuff? All we need to do is amplify that, and we’ve got an amazing result. Yes, cry, a bit of humility, a bit more listening, a bit of understanding the way people solve problems, because we are problem solving beasts and work is one long problem-solving activity? How do I do that? How do I get around this? How do I get that person to agree? Some of those insights are rich and could be pushed across the organisation and some of them aren’t but you have got to focus on the ones that work.
David: Yes, Nigel I think problem-solving beasts might be a great title for this podcast but I think it is a very good time to wrap that up. Thank you very much for your time. If people want to find you it seems as if you’re in many places, how best should people reach out or find what you’re involved in?
Nigel: Luckily enough I’ve spent my life hating my name because it was so slightly unusual and I wanted to be Peter Smith and not stand out, but actually my name stands out so just Google Nigel Paine, nigelpaine.com, you can get everything there. The book is available from Kogan Page if you’re interested, it’s called Workplace Learning: How To Build A Culture Of Continuous Employee Development, and I’d love you to get a discount on the book. If you put in the code friendsofnigel, you get a discount and free postage and packaging, if you’re interested in the book. So please get in touch. I’m very easy to find and very happy to talk to you.
David: Thanks, Nigel. I would wholeheartedly recommend the book. It’s written by somebody who knows how Learning and Development works in organisations, the complexities. It’s not an oversimplification. There are no silver bullets. You feel the bumps in the road in the case studies so all I can say today is to do yourself a favor and invest. But all that’s left for me to say is Nigel, we thank you very much for coming on the podcast. We look forward to speaking with you again soon.
Nigel: It’s a huge pleasure, David, thank you very much.
David: I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Selfishly, I know I did. If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can tweet me at Davidinlearning, or connect with me on LinkedIn or Facebook, you’ll find the links in the show notes. Goodbye for now.
Nigel is a prominent figure in the global L&D community and has been involved in corporate learning for over twenty years, including time leading the BBC’s Learning and Development operation.
He left the BBC in September 2006 to start his own company that is focused on building great workplaces by promoting creativity, innovation, values based-leadership and learning and the link between them.
He speaks regularly at conferences around the world and teaches on a doctoral programme at the University of Pennsylvania and for Chicago Booth Business School.
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