LH126 Polynesian Navigators with Laura Overton and Michelle Ockers

over the 20 years or the 15 years of doing the benchmark, all those new technologies came in, you know, the smartphone arrived, we had mobile learning, we had microlearning, we had social learning, we had, yeah, as new, every range of technology came in, we had a new model of learning applied. And it was really damaging our ability to actually drive value back into the business because you go, okay, as long as we do a micro thing, an e-thing, a mobile thing, a gamey thing, then that's going to be the latest thing, and everyone's asking for it, and I'll deliver it. But when we lose the heart of why, why we're doing what we're doing and how to apply what's necessary in our organization in order to achieve that business goal, that destination, we're just applying the technology without, as you say, being really specific to what are we trying to do and how we're trying to do it.

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In the 1770s, Captain Cook sailed into the Hawaiian Islands with the finest navigational instruments at that time available to humanity. And what did he find there? Indigenous people who had been crossing 2,500 miles of open ocean in double-hulled canoes for centuries, with no compass, no clock, no maps. How did they do it? The answer to that question is part of the inspiration behind a new book on L&D leadership, which is the subject of this episode. L&D today is not short of instruments. Models, frameworks, platforms, methodologies. There's never been more to reach for. And yet the research keeps saying the same thing. Most L&D functions are still struggling to show they're actually going anywhere.

I'm not seeing a lot of change. That's what it was like 20 years ago when I first started doing this research, and it's what it's still like now.

What if tools aren't the answer? What if the thing that's missing is something harder to teach and train? That's something I asked the co-authors of this new book. So who are they, Marianna?

Laura Overton is an award-winning learning strategist with over 35 years' experience in L&D. She is the founder of Towards Maturity, the research programme that benchmarked high-performing learning organisations over two decades, gathering insight from more than 10,000 L&D professionals worldwide. An academic fellow of the CIPD and the Royal Society of Arts, she is one of the most consistently cited global influencers in workplace learning. And it should be said, a good friend of the podcast. Michelle Ockers is the founder and director of Learning Uncut, working with organizations on high-impact L&D strategy. She is the host of the Learning Uncut podcast, now in its 7th year, and has built an extensive catalog of real-world case studies from L&D teams across Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. A popular keynote speaker, she is based in New South Wales, Australia. Together, Laura and Michelle are the co-authors of The L&D Leader, published by Kogan Page in October 2025.

In this conversation, Laura and Michelle take the Polynesian navigation idea somewhere quite demanding, because navigating, it turns out, first requires you to be honest about where you are. And Laura's assessment of where most of the L&D profession currently stands, is not entirely comfortable listening. We also get into the question that sits underneath all the talk of business value we hear a lot of nowadays, and I push on it fairly directly. When Alan Dee talks about driving value for the business, who exactly is that value for? For the learners, or for the shareholders and stakeholders of the organisations they work in? So where do the learners come in? Laura and Michelle had a very practical answer and it's one I think is worth hearing.

Laura and Michelle, it's great to have you on the podcast. Welcome to The Learning Hack.

Thank you. It's great to be here talking to you, John. Nice to meet you.

And always brilliant to be back, John. I'm really looking forward to this.

Good. I wanna talk mostly about the book you published in October 2025, The L&D Leader. Can you each describe the genesis of the book from your individual perspectives? And I gather, Laura, it's 6 years in the making for you, so maybe you should go first and then Michelle.

Yeah, I'm clearly a very slow writer. No, seriously. It was really, you know, most people know me from my research work with Towards Maturity, looking at high-performing teams. When I stopped doing that, I really wanted to say, okay, well, what's next? And everyone was saying, well, you must write a book. And I was asked by the publisher to write this book, L&D Leadership. But John, it didn't seem right at the time. It was 2019, and I just stopped the research. So, I thought everything that I was gonna be writing was looking back on the past, rather than really thinking about the future. And for me, the whole concept of Towards Maturity as an organization that I'd founded for that 15 years was all about how do we move into the future? How do we get ready for the future? So this book was about how do we kind of leverage the past in order to understand how we can navigate a future that is new and uncertain. And I needed those 5 years in between. I needed the pandemic. I needed the personal uncertainty of, you know, how do we define our own leadership in our field and as our own identity as well. So, for me, the book became less about how do you lead an L&D team into business success and more about how do we as learning professionals lead ourselves into a future where we can contribute value to others. And I think probably that experience of those 5 years for me was a really important part about setting the book, that and finding somebody amazing like Michelle who can make sure I can put pen to paper and keep my feet grounded. So, so all of those factors coming together, um, um, kind of contributed to the fact that why the book came out in, uh, '25 rather than 2019.

Neat handover there. So Michelle, what's your perspective?

Laura's given me some really nice hooks there. You know, John, Laura's not a slow writer. She's a researcher. She's a divergent thinker. And there were moments when I thought the book just was not going to be written when— after we'd started, even because of the level of, you know, divergent thinking, the researching, the interviewing, the shaping and reshaping. Laura is never comfortable to rest on the laurels of past thinking. She's always looking for how can we frame this differently? What does this really mean for the future? How can we use this? How can we shape it? She's actually a pretty quick writer because there were some chapters that got written very quickly, very close to the deadline, which was nerve-wracking, but we got there, right? So that's part of the beauty of working with Laura, is this researching and the way she's continually searching, looking, leaning into things. And I'm really glad you waited 5 years, Laura, because that 5 years gave me an extra 5 years to be recording podcasts, stories, conversations, case studies, real-world examples with L&D people from around the world, a lot from Australia and New Zealand, but many other locations. So for me, it it was a chance to really use the case study base that I'd built up to look at, well, how do some of the patterns and the insight Laura's seeing and these principles, which I know we're going to talk about, John, how do I see that being expressed in the real work of L&D professionals? So that for me was the opportunity to work with Laura.

Okay, so it'd be good to know how the collaboration has shaped up before we get into the details of the book. Could we clarify your collaboration a bit? Because I've kind of hazily Be Aware of Emerging Stronger, everything around the pandemic, so it's like hazy memories for various reasons. Can you tell us how the collaboration began and the various things you've been involved in?

Yeah, John, we came across each other in 2014 on the platform formerly known as Twitter and dearly loved by those of us forming our personal learning networks at the time in learning and development. And I joined a Twitter chat which was about benchmarking where Laura was the featured guest. And I was working as an L&D leader in a role at Coca-Cola Amatil at the time. I was attracted to what she had to share. I reached out, started using the benchmarking, and we just struck up this continuous conversation around the value of the benchmark and how I was using it in practice. Then when I started working with clients through my own business, I continued to use the benchmark. So a lot of the early collaboration was around the benchmark itself, and the two of us actually working together with some of my clients here in Australia. And that shifted, of course, when we had the chance during the pandemic to work on a project we called Emerging Stronger. And maybe you can pick that side of the collaboration up, Laura.

Yeah, it's— it was really funny, John, because Michelle's got this great podcast, but— and what she wanted to do was to do, you know, just explore what was happening as it was happening. So there was no sense of, you know, sort of like, we have a plan, we have a plan to help people get through this, but just a chance. She opened her platform so generously to just explore with others how people were surviving through 2020. And Shannon Tipton, I think, was the first person you invited to come and co-host with you the podcast, and then you asked me. So we had that. Global perspective of the stories that we were capturing. And for me, as Michelle says, as a researcher, those stories were absolutely fascinating 'cause I was constantly plotting the patterns that I was seeing in the stories that people were telling us about how they were surviving, what they were doing, how they were shifting into the data of the past as well. And so, Emerging Stronger became not just a, a way of notarizing what was happening in 2020, but also exploring how people were emerging stronger. And we ended up doing a series of masterclasses, we called it, which is so ironic. It had to become a masterclass in emerging stronger through a pandemic when no one's ever done that before. So we were all learning together and we had these amazing global cohorts that were kind of connecting and engaging through with us. And that was a 2-year project where Shannon and Michelle and I collaborated and connected and worked work together to say, okay, well, how do we need to be different as a result of going through that pandemic? And I think that really kind of helped us work out, or certainly helped me clarify what was needed in the L&D Leader book as well. It's like, okay, it started to position us for the future.

So, on the subject of Emerging Stronger and the pandemic, what can you say about the legacy of the pandemic now looking back on that experience? Okay, so it gave us working from home and a mental health crisis, but what lasting effects has it had with regards to learning and L&D, would you say?

For me, I thought it was very interesting because I'd felt as though it was an environment that we had been through before. You know, having done the research for the last literally 20 years now, there are quite a few emergencies that the world has had to cope with: the recession, 9/11, which completely shook the foundations of the way people were doing business and therefore how learning and development would adapt. So in one sense, the pandemic did show me that, yep, we were about to react in exactly the same way as we've reacted to many other changes in the past, which was, oh my goodness, we've got to change, let's dive into technology. And I was sitting there thinking, please learn, please learn from the past, please learn, don't just think that the technology is suddenly going to help you doing what what you did in the past with just with the technology means that you'll fall flat on your face. And that's what happened for many, many organizations. They were running through with their technologies and were just, just like 9/11, were relieved when people could get back face to face and almost like, whew, I told you so. But there were some organizations who had, in the same way as they have over the last 20 years, used disruption to their advantage to shape and reshape how they were doing things. And I think for me, that was the most exciting thing about the pandemic was yet again, the high-performing teams were those who were able to experiment, explore, learn, and adapt as a result of that disruption. They weren't just resilient, they weren't just there at the end of the pandemic, but they had changed positively as a result of that. They were antifragile, you know, and I think that's the really exciting thing about those high-performing teams is the way that they can flex and use disruption as a way to redefine who they are and how they drive value. So, I think there's I think there's been two implications for the pandemic. There's this sigh of relief when people have said, "Oh, we told you technology wouldn't work," a sigh that has been echoed throughout the whole of the last 20 years, but also a sense of, "Okay, I'm ready for the next thing." And of course, the next thing was AI.

Anything to add to that, Michelle?

Yeah, I think it showed us our potential, and we went through this, this little golden period almost, which I know is an awful thing to say given, you know, how terrible that the pandemic was and the impact it had on people's lives. But it did build our credibility. It showed us what we could do at a pinch if we needed to move quickly and work more closely with people from across the business. And you might recall the LinkedIn Workplace Learning reports for a couple of years after the pandemic— so, well, when did the pandemic finish? But, you know, round about 2021, 2022, even into 2023, it showed that there was a sense of greater closeness to the business, a sense of greater credibility, a sense that we were given the opportunity to add business value. So I think it made us more aware of our potential, as well as, to Laura's point, more aware of continuous changing and the need to be adapting and leaning into learning agility. Now we've backslid to some degree, but I think there are still traces of that and a longer tail of interest in business value and an awareness of our potential.

I think, Michelle, also what happened during the pandemic for those who were lucky enough still in the learning development profession to be in work, it was part— we were rolling our sleeves up. Everyone was working to the same goal. Which is that kind of concept of co-creating value is something that was in the research over the last 20 years and is at the heart of the L&D Leader book. You know, how can we get to a point where we could work with the business on their goals rather than getting the business to work on our goals? And I think the pandemic showed us what it felt like to genuinely be on the same team and be working towards the same goals of business survival during those years.

Yeah, and I think you said in your CIPD report, Laura, that, and you mentioned it in the book, I think, that it enabled L&D to become a bit more strategic. From my background in mostly in technology, it did kind of drive people to online learning in droves, of course, because it was the only game in town and sort of completed that transition that had been been a bit slow. And there were corners that didn't seem to be touched by it, where there's still a lot of classroom training as normal. In tech, weirdly enough, I think this was a really surprising story to me about the rise of Teachable. They'd had massive success in the tech sector because their platform was well equipped for what that sector had to do in getting a lot of classroom training online. And it sort of completed the job that perhaps wouldn't have been done otherwise. I think it's interesting that, this is reflection rather than a question, I'm afraid. It's interesting that maybe AI is now doing a similar thing with personalization that we've all been banging on about for ages, personalization of learning. And suddenly that's coming about through AI. There can be a desire to do things for a long year, a long time, and you perhaps need a crisis or a disruptive change to actually make it happen. But coming back to the L&D leader, what are you trying to tell people with the book? I read that you haven't based it around any particular model so much as about principles and mindset. There's kind of a model in there with the TRI thing, but I might quibble. Is that a fair summary, and is there a danger perhaps that makes it a bit abstract?

I think it's a really good observation there. And I think for me, I had been working with L&D models for the whole of my research career, deconstructing them, exploring them, taking a model like, or a framework like 70-20-10 and saying, okay, well, what do the behaviors look like? Taking Kirkpatrick, what do the behaviors look like? Taking performance consulting, what do the behaviors look like? And so, I'd been deconstructing models for a while and noticing that there are there are many good attributes of models across the board. But then when Michelle and I were starting to write, I said, oh, let's do a little bit of research, funnily enough, on how many models are out there that L&D professionals can access. And it soon got way out of hand. When we got to 200, and we felt that we couldn't really, as researchers, say there are 200 models, because there were so many more, you know, the issue became, okay, there is an overwhelm. We talk about content overwhelm for learners right now, but there is an overwhelm for learning and development professionals. And a model, what I've found in my own career, is it can also be alienating. There are those that follow 5DI, those that follow 70-20-10, those that say 70-20-10 doesn't work, you know, those that love ADDIE, those that don't, you know, and all the acronyms, all the models, new people coming into the industry. It's almost like it's an overwhelm. And then you layer on the overwhelm of the new technologies that are coming through and the overwhelm of the tech, of learning science and the things, all the things that we're supposed to do as a professional. It was almost cramping our style. And I'd seen that for a while. I've been commenting on for a while, you know, our preoccupation with ROI models is almost like a, kind of like a chain around our legs holding us back with fear of doing the wrong thing. So we wanna say, okay, well, what are the first principles? Let's go back to first principles. You know, whether you love him or hate him, you know, people like Elon Musk have been successful because they haven't gone with the current model or developed a new model, but they've gone back to the first principles to solve a problem. And we saw, we've got so much data, Michelle has got so many amazing stories, you know, that maybe we can distill those first principles principles, and that's where TRI has come from. And it was, that was the toughest thing, John, you know, I've known the TOOLS maturity work for so long. I mean, so many data points to end up with TRI, which was the principles of let's, how do we, how are we continually tuning into what's going on into the business? How are we responding professionally in such a way that it will support the business? How are we continually improving those, that TRI, those TRI principles are almost so basic that anyone can use them. And we can start to get that into our vocabulary, we can get that into our thinking. So when we're looking for models, we can choose the right models that are going to work for us in our situation. And that's why we wanted to go back to first principles, is we wanted to say to each learning leader, and that includes those who are brand new in industry who want to make a difference and those that are leading teams, you know, how can you make sense of your organization? How can you choose the right modules that will work with your organization and allow you to continue to learn and adapt as an organization, as a learning and development team? So, yep, there's principles there which we wanted to bring out for people so that it was more accessible for all of us to be high performing, not just those who were lucky enough. But we want, you know, we didn't want it to be abstract. And that is why, oh, thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Michelle. Because that was the last thing we wanted to do. We wanted to look at examples. We wanted to look at ideas of being able to apply them so that people could take the book and say, actually, I can see how I can do that for myself, how I can adapt that for myself, how I can evaluate that model for myself. But Michelle, I mean, you helped ground it, didn't you really? So practicality. Was critical for us.

Yeah, can you take us into that process of, um, Michelle, of, of working with this fast but divergent writer? Uh, and yes, yes, be kind.

I had the advantage that I was already familiar with the benchmark, right, because I'd been using it for so many years. So I had a feel for it. I was a little surprised that there was still so much work to be done on moving from the benchmark into what are the underpinning principles. But as they evolved, I looking for. I went back through my catalog of podcast stories, thought about work I'd done with different organizations. Laura also has worked with many organizations. We both have big networks. You know, what, what are examples of high-impact work, work that has made a difference to difference in businesses and to the people in those organizations that we can take a look at and overlay using use the principles as they were emerging as a lens to say, does this help to understand the practices that led to the success of these initiatives? And can we pull out concrete examples to share with the reader? So the book, John, whilst it is principal space, it is chock-a-block with examples. And even if I just think about, you know, under each of those big principles— tuning in, responding, improving, there's a set of sub-principles. So there's 9 in total. If I pick one of those from the responding area, one of the principles is engaging influencers. How do you engage influencers in the environment that a learner, and I use that word learner with caution, but someone who's been through a learning experience or engaging in a learning experience, someone we're supporting to improve their performance, how do we engage those around them to influence them to help embed new behaviors, to make shifts, to apply knowledge and skills. So there's such a range of examples from Sydney Trains, who ran a frontline customer service program and gave everybody a lanyard pin, which their staff used to really value putting pins on their, their lanyard with their name tags on it. And they had branded pins which signaled to managers that these people had undertaken the program, and they were able to— then the managers were able to ask ask questions and reinforce the learning and ask them how they're applying it. Through to McKinsey, who ran a feedback skills surge, but all of the communications and the encouragement to participate in the opt-in program came through respected local leaders. All of the invitations, distribution of material and so on went through local leaders who had greater influence. Through to an example that Laura pulled out from something Charles Jennings had done many years ago at Reuters, equipping line managers to run something called a monthly power hour with their teams around learning topics and around continuous learning. And like, there's just 3 very quick examples, right? But the book is just packed with really short examples and 7 longer-form real-world examples that we use the principles as a lens to dissect. So if people are looking for prescriptive step 1, step 2, step 3, you're not going to find that in this book. What you are going to find is a set of principles that you can apply in your own context, drawing on a whole suite of examples of what it's looked like, how it's been expressed in a range of different real-world contexts to navigate your own way through your environment to impact and value.

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For me, that's a strength of the book, the fact that it is based on this wealth of attention on benchmarking excellence, on seeing what people are doing and drawing from that principles rather than giving a kind of crusty and model on. I do take that thing that, you know, you could— the books that take a formal kind of step 1 and then step 2 and step 3, I mean, it's very easy to come to that. You're in an organization in a sector like kind of shipping or defense, which is a bit away from the norm. You think, well, that's just not going to fly. You know, it's too kind of prescriptive. Whereas looking at what has worked for other people over the years and what kind of continues to stick as a principle, just seems to be a really good approach. So I think that's really summed up well what it is that's unique about this book. Another aspect of it though is it opens with the story about Polynesian boat navigation. I've come across this story before in other contexts. I can't remember where. It's sort of half listening to something on Radio 4, I think. I thought, oh, that's interesting. But for those of our listeners that haven't heard of this, can you tell us what it's about? And how it relates to L&D leadership.

It's such a big and rich story spanning over 50 years, but I'm going to, I'm going to sketch enough of it that I think Laura can then talk about how it's relevant to L&D leadership and why we chose to use this particular story. And so in the 1770s, Captain Cook sailed into Hawaii, into the Hawaiian Islands, with what were then very modern navigation instruments. And he, he marveled at how the ancient Polynesian navigators had managed to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti, 2,500 miles of like endless ocean without any instruments. How did they do that? And he had incredible respect for the navigation skills of the Polynesian navigators. But, you know, over the centuries, by the 1970s, that traditional navigation heritage had largely been lost. And there were many Western academics who were really dismissing it and saying, well, maybe they just drifted and really underplaying the skills of the ancient Polynesian navigators. It was also an era in the 1970s where there were a lot of cultural challenges for Hawaiian people, a lot of negative stereotypes. So there was this kind of, you know, sense of cultural demise that was assailing a lot of the Hawaiian people. And in the 1970s, there were 3 visionaries who founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society: Ben Finney, Herb Kane, and Tommy Holmes. And their goal was to rediscover, to figure out how it was that the ancient Polynesian navigators had managed to find their way from Hawaii to Tahiti, not just once, but many times over and over. So they built a traditional double-hulled canoe canoe called the Hokulea, the Star of Gladness. The canoe was one part of the picture. They had to figure out who knew, who had this knowledge, how did they rediscover this knowledge. So they searched around and they found a person who was living on one of the outlying islands, Malpalaug, who actually still knew the traditional navigation approaches. And he agreed to help them and to start teaching some of their younger people. Particularly, there was one character, Nanua Thompson, who 50 years later leads the Polynesian Navigation— Polynesian Voyaging Society. But he was really eager to learn. So Mau joined the crew, they trained, they figured out with Mau's help how to actually make this journey. And in 1976, they sailed into Tahiti thinking this was about a journey and a rediscovery of navigation techniques. They were greeted by 20,000 Tahitians on the shore. When they landed. And what they suddenly realized was this wasn't just about proving a point. It was actually about connecting a people to their heritage.

Hmm.

So it's a very tricky story to tell because we need to— and that's the short version of the heritage. That is the short version. For those who are interested, of course, it's the introduction to the book and then we weave it through the book. But it's also a sample chapter that you can download for free from the Kogan Page website. If people are interested in exploring exploring that story more fully. There's so many more nuances, but Laura, hopefully I've laid enough of a foundation there for you to talk about the relevance to L&D leadership.

Yeah, I mean, John, for me, I came across that story because I was on AI trying to work out about how a compass works. And in the book, we've got— we've talked about the TRIBE principles, but we also talk about the BOLD principles, the mental compass inside of our heads that help us orientate as learning professionals, being business first, being open-minded, leading learning, you know, being deliberate, being intentional, and those principles that we need to carry in our heads. And I came across this story when I was investigating the idea of an internal compass, because that's what these navigators had. But as I dug into this, and I've got something like, I think, 35 different resources, books, podcasts around this story, I realized that actually it resonated so much with what we need as learning leaders. Not only their ability to navigate an uncertain, you know, the ocean has no paths, it has no GPS, it has no models to get us from A to B. But one of the things that they said to help them navigate was, can you see Tahiti in your head? You know, can, are you visioning and can you vision where it is that you're heading? And that sense of having that goal of business value was so important for us. Our ability to understand and read the environment, to respond daily, to be able to check in on a daily basis, to change course, that's what the TRI principles were about. But I think as we dug into the story, that L&D leadership was also about us regaining our confidence as a learning profession. I felt as though we'd been on the shore for too long, in the safe shallow waters. And for us to really drive value in the continually changing world of work, we needed to be able to navigate our own paths in that work. And so for me, the story, there was so many angles in the story that helped us understand who we could be, who we are, regardless of the tools and the technologies that are coming in. We don't have to be reliant on that. We can be a profession that can drive business value by working in different ways in that ocean. And you heard it on Radio 4 somewhere. It was only after I'd done all of this research and shared it with Michelle that I realized, someone said to me, "Oh, that's the story of the Disney film Moana." And I'm like, "Oh, is it?" I promise you, I didn't get it from Moana. I was listening to Naoma and listening to Mal Thompson and all of the different, Mal Plow, all of those different people telling their story. But it resonated with us believing in ourselves as a profession and being able to navigate our way to driving real value in a completely continually changing world of work that meant that we had to take quite a bit of negotiating with our publishers to say, we want this in here. It's different. Different, but we don't care. It's important to us. Yeah.

And see the movie if not. I must admit, I must confess, I came to this story with a little bit of suspicion because I thought there's a bit of woo here and it was all woo. But then hearing more about it and reading more about it, it's very interesting that the techniques that people used to use to navigate in the years before longitude and compasses and all the rest of it was so much to do with local knowledge, which is kind of like muscle memory knowledge about winds, tides, just the quality of the ocean that you're on, and that incredible specificity of your local knowledge that enables people to kind of build that up. And somehow to pass it on through a kind of, you'd imagine, a kind of experiential things where the young people would come on the boat and watch the old navigator sniffing the winds. And, you know, I'm getting quite romantic and we're here in any way. Is there a kind of another facet to this that As technological revolutions happen, people lose the sense of old crafts and techniques. I mean, people no longer know how to weave and so on. In actual fact, they do survive. You have these places like the Wildland and Down Museum in Sussex where the repair shop is filmed, where they kind of keep a lot of those old agrarian crafts alive. But as technology moves more and more into learning and into L&D, is there a kind of bit of skill fade there that we need to keep alive?

And that was exactly it, John. You know, over the 20 years or the 15 years of doing the benchmark, all those new technologies came in. You know, the smartphone arrived, we had mobile learning, we had microlearning, we had social learning. We had, yeah, as new every range of technology came in, we had a new model of learning applied. And it was really damaging. Our ability to actually drive value back into the business because you go, okay, as long as we do a micro thing, an e-thing, a mobile thing, a gamey thing, then that's gonna be the latest thing and everyone's asking for it and I'll deliver it. But when we lose the heart of why we're doing what we're doing and how to apply what's necessary in our organization in order to achieve that business goal, that destination, to raise up that island, of business value, then, you know, we're just applying the technology without, as you say, being really specific to what are we trying to do and how are we trying to do it. And that's at the heart of who we are as learning professionals. You know, we're there to change behavior. We talk about our role being helping others to be equipped and ready. So, we need to be able to do that in a way that builds that muscle memory and allows us to adapt. I mean, it's AI today, it'll be quantum tomorrow. It will be, you know, there's gonna be something new that comes along every time which releases new potential in us. But unless we actually really understand how to navigate and why we're doing that, we're not gonna be able to release the new potential of the tools and the technologies and the shifting world of work around us. And I think that for me is the important thing about revisiting that core muscle memory about who we are. And although the TRIBE principles, try and be bold, it seems so much like common sense, you know, it works in other sectors, you know, agile development, you know, all of that kind of thing uses these principles, but they come from us. They come from our data. They come from our stories. You know, they work for us as a learning profession.

So speaking more generally, pulling back a bit in focus maybe, how's the L&D community changed and evolved in the years you've both been monitoring it? And Laurie, you can speak to that with an eye to data, of course, with the, you know, the tools maturity benchmarking thing that goes back for years. And, you know, I remember listening to all those reports and going to your events through the years, so you've got a wealth of detail about how L&D has changed. And then Michelle, after that, I'm very keen to hear about your podcasting experience. But Laura, do you want to kick off?

Yeah, I think sadly the data, and it's not just the Tourism Tourism, as you say, I've been working with the CIPD on their Learning at Work study, has been showing us that that as learning professionals, we're still very, very focused on what we produce for people rather than the value we create with people. Back in 2019, when we talked about the transformation curve, we talked about producers versus enablers, and those with an enabling mindset as learning professionals were less about how can I produce more content, less content, different content, more online content, less online 'fine content,' but more about how do we enable individuals in the organization. So, I'll be thinking much broader about the whole learning process of an individual in the context of work. And I don't see that much change today. Those that are pushing into that enabling are continuing to experiment, continuing to explore, continue to think about things differently. But I think it's really only 10-20% of L&D professionals who are working working in that space. The rest are still grappling with this producer mindset. How do I produce more for less? How do I produce more engagement? How do I produce more, you know, what can I make for people? And that I think is— so I'm not seeing a lot of change. That's what it was like 20 years ago when I first started doing this research and it's what it's still like now. But I think the big shift and when Donald Taylor last year said, "I'm seeing a little bit of change in the global sentiment survey." I immediately wrote back and said, "Please tell me it's that people want to drive more value. They are suddenly understanding that it's the outputs rather than the inputs that are important." And he never replied. But in his next report, he was saying value is back. That excites me. It breaks my heart. It's because a lot of people are facing are facing uncertainty themselves and how can they generate that opportunity for learning and development to show that we deserve not a seat at the table, to be in the organisation. But that kind of pressure that there are on learning and development professionals right now say, okay, are you useful in the context of everything else that's going on? Do you actually provide value and use back into our organisation? I think that is driving an interesting value and that I'm seeing increase. And it was really exciting to see that in Donald's work. But Michelle, I think you've— you're talking to people like John, both of you are talking to people all the time. I mean, does that resonate with you?

Yeah, it's interesting your observation there about the Global Sentiment Survey that Don Taylor runs, because one of the things that's interesting about that over the 14 years that survey has been running, that sentiment survey, is that many things come and go. Many things, you know, there's an interest, it rises up, through the ranks of what people say is hot in L&D, and then it kind of fades away over time as it either drops from interest or becomes established as mainstream. But creating value and consulting more deeply with the business have endured, so it shows that there's a continued interest in it. But maybe we, we kind of haven't reached a point as a profession where it's mainstream enough that we don't think it's hot, if that makes sense, that we're still trying to lean into it as something that we need to be paying more attention to. So that's an interesting way of looking at it. I think I have a really skewed view through my podcast and the work I do in learning strategy. I think I'm talking to the 20% that Laura referred to, you know, because the people who are coming onto the podcast are able to talk about high-impact work and are doing effective, effective things. And if I just think about the 7 years of the podcast and some of the things that maybe were a little more novel 7 years ago that I think are more mainstream now. Human-centered design springs immediately to mind, and that idea of tuning in to the people in our organization and creating with others is something that is expressed in the principles, in the TRIBE principles. But, you know, 2018, I had a couple of episodes that really leaned into human-centered design, and they had such strong listenership. And now it's It's kind of, I don't do stories specifically about it because it's so mainstream in the people I'm talking to as guests about around an approach. I'm also seeing on the podcast conversations more approaches other than just chucking courses and content at people, which of course is where some are still stuck. But campaign approaches and more use of behavioral science to embed change is something I'm seeing showing up a lot more in the podcast conversations. Conversations. Time to learn has, over that 7 years, it's always one of the key barriers. It has been for years in the benchmark, right, Laura? One of the big inhibitors is people don't have time to learn. I think the pressure on that has dialed up significantly over the last 7 years, which is why we're getting interest on an ongoing basis in, you know, microlearning and learning in the flow of of work, however misunderstood and misused those labels might be, but finding ways to encourage people to learn without having to step away from work for as long is certainly a big shift I see showing up. And, you know, more learner-centered experiences. I was on a it was actually a webinar I hosted, co-hosted last week, and one of the things we were talking about was learner learning experience design. And someone, I'll give a shout out to Ryan Tracy, who's well known in the Australian L&D community, said, I don't use the term learning experience design anymore, I use learner experience design. And I thought that in itself is an interesting shift, right? Because it makes it even more centered on the learner. You know, what's their experience rather than the experience of learning. So yeah, I think more human-centered design, more approaches other than just courses and content becoming more mainstream, particularly a campaign and behavioral change approach, this enduring interest in business value, and, you know, trying to find ways to respond to the increasing pressure of time to learn, to create more continuous learning environments are some of the key shifts I see to turning up.

That's an interesting contrast there with Laura talking about the lack of change apart from in the top 20%. And from your point of view, Michelle, the top 20% are exactly the people you want to focus on because they've got something new to say. You must have the similar problem to me that I could fill the podcast day in, day out, year in, year out with people who say very similar things about, you know, we want a place at the top table, We have to drive more value to the business and you can't have a program where everybody says the same thing every year. So you're looking for the outliers, the people who've done something really kind of interesting and innovative and adventurous, I think. Yeah. And you've been doing it longer than me. I actually, you know, I started 2019, you were already there and doing it. So respect.

Not much longer, John. 2018. I did it because I was traveling that year and I wanted to find a way to stay connected to the local, the Australian learning and development community. So the podcast was a way of, as I was traveling, to be able to have ongoing conversations. And you probably experienced this yourself, John. It's such a great way to be able to reach out to people in the industry and say, let's have a conversation. It's an amazing vehicle. Vehicle for that. Yeah.

And in terms of following your interest and your own personal learning, it's a wonderful thing. There's a lot of talk in the book about the business value of learning. And we've heard a lot in recent years about how L&D must demonstrate its value to the business. But I wonder if there's a bit of tension here. Because everybody says this now, but I have this niggling thing here, and I'm sorry if this is just kind of a pet peeve, really. I wonder if there's a bit of tension here about the question, who is learning for? The current call for it to be harnessed to business objectives, for L&D to be laser-focused on the needs of the business. Doesn't that ultimately mean that learning, when you ask the question, who is learning for? It's for the shareholders. It's for the benefit of the shareholders. Shareholders, everything else in business is supposed to be, or the taxpayer if you're a public sector organization. But what happened to the old idea of developing people? And there's also a question of motivation, I think. I mean, maybe about 10 years ago, there was research coming out showing how much of a motivator for staff choosing an organization it was that they would get decent training. And this certainly is with the old dynamic of why people went into the BBC, to earn less or into a publisher to earn less and yet to get really good training and come out and get a better paid job somewhere else. How do you motivate people if that's not part of the equation where ultimately it's, you know, we are just going to develop people whose skills in this particular area are going to be revenue generating in the next few years. Am I just making this up? Am I a dangerous communist or is there an inherent kind of challenge there to the basic contract between employer and employee.

I think it's such a beautifully framed challenge there because you're right, when people say, let's drive the business value, you know, what's important for me to get more budget into my training organization? And I've got to show that I can, to the finance director, that I can add something back to the business. But I think with the research that I've done personally, even the very first report linking learning to business, I think it was, it was back in 2004. And there I was asking the learning professionals in that study, you know, what are you doing? And they were linking to business goals, but I also went out to individuals in those organizations. There were about 16 organizations, 2,000 individuals, I think it's one of the first pieces of learner Kommers research, you know, about why do you do what you do? And for me, that was so powerful because it showed me how they link together. So that's really been at the heart of my research all the way through, is that balance between individual and business goals. You know, is it supporting— you know, before skills, we were finding, you know, the skills kind of words that are coming out at the moment and the rhetoric around skills, we were finding that those individuals, organisations that support career goals and business goals tended to be more of the high-performing organisations. It's always that balance. So for us, we talk about the role of learning and development, as I mentioned before, about being equipped and ready, but that's individuals, that's teams and organisations. And I think that that's the important balance here is how do we help all of those come together? Because we can't deny that learning and development. When we are at work, we are supporting the individual at work. And that research you saw 10 years ago is replicated now, John, isn't it? It's, you know, people want to go where they can be developed. And, you know, there's a lot of the stuff that's coming out of, you know, things like the World Economic Forum and everything about, you know, a career trajectory may be different now. You know, we may go sideways, we may go into different disciplines in order to move forward. And I think that's always been at part of the high-performing teams. They always recognize that balance between the two. And that's for us, it's why the tuning in principle isn't just about tuning into what's needed by the business, but tuning into what's needed from individuals as well and how you then create that balance. And our role in bringing that together within the context of the organization is absolutely vital. So, I think it's for us, and when we wrote this from the evidence that we've got, it's always about the balance of the two rather than business value means it's not just value to the finance director or the sales director, but it's the way that the whole ecosystem and infrastructure works together to bring benefits, individuals, teams, and organization.

Okay, so it's— getting that balance right is part of being a high-performing team. Yeah.

And always has been. And always has been. That's the interesting thing.

If I can just add one point to that, it's definitely both and. But one of the ways that this is being accomplished in an era of continuous changing, and, you know, this idea when we lay the foundations for what's the world of work like now in the book, in the opening section of the book, you know, this idea that we're in an environment of continuous changing. Yeah, it was the pandemic at one point. Now it's AI. There's, you know, other forces of change around us. And we have a chapter called Over the Horizon, which is On the surface of it, it's about skills, but it's really about the fact that we have less and less time to support the people in our workforce and our organizations to respond to change. So how do we do that? And one of the common characteristics in the real-world examples that we give is around transparency with people in the organization, making sure they understand what skills the organization needs and that the ways and opportunities to build those skills are visible and transparent. Parents so people can choose to engage with them. Talent marketplaces are one great example of how making opportunities visible for mentoring, for secondments, for projects, for roles, having that available and visible to people makes a huge difference. And the other way is just opening up programs and pathways. We've got a great case study from AstraZeneca where they basically went, You know what? It doesn't matter what business unit you're in. Here's access to all of the programs and pathways and development opportunities in the business that anyone can choose to engage with. So I think that transparency and visibility is one of the ways you can help to connect individuals to meaningful learning opportunities that are going to help create business value. So it's both/and.

Lastly, the usual question: who should we be listening to now on L&D leadership, what are your current sources of information and inspiration? And maybe rather than the usual suspects, who is kind of coming into view that you hadn't necessarily kind of followed before and is now proving to be a kind of beacon?

This is interesting. So if we're not going with the usual suspects, because I had usual suspects in my mind, you know, people who combine evidence with practical experience, who kind of are honest about constraints, trade-offs, implementation. But of if we want some, like, who's capturing the attention, who are maybe fresh voices, fresh thinking, someone we spoke to in a previous podcast interview, Laura, Harold Oberer, is doing some very interesting thinking and community building, and I think is well worth listening to. The L&D Movers and Shakers is a community that is young and fresh and vibrant, um, as well, and offbeat. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Down here in Australia, there's a community which is hosted through LinkedIn called Kraken L&D Down Under, which is an awesome name for a community, right? Um, which, uh, is, is really vibrant and connecting people, uh, to explore their work together. So communities that connect people, people who are challenging thinking, I guess. And there's a lot of younger people coming into the profession with fresh eyes and fresh energy who are shaking things up a bit. And I think some of those communities are really attracting a lot, a lot younger people as well. Laura, what's your— do you have a build on that or a different take?

Well, I was thinking about leadership, L&D leadership, and I was thinking about where do I go? And I go to research and business leadership. And so I think what's been new for me in the last year is how I've been using NotebookLM to, to be able to listen to what's important to business leaders. You know, for example, the 29th PwC CEO study has just recently come out. You know, what's, what's business leaders worried about, concerned about? And so I found that NotebookLM is really helping me to kind of think about the research in a different and fresh way. 'cause, you know, we need to be able to connect with leaders. And so people like McKinsey and PwC, people are doing things with CEOs and business leaders all the time. That's so much information we've got access to. And yet with a tool like NotebookLM, we can kind of say, well, what does that mean to me? What does that mean in my world? What can I learn? What does it mean about my leadership? And also how does it help me relate better to the leaders potentially around me? So I don't know whether that's too out there, from in terms of what I'm listening to, but I just thought I'd lay it out there for you.

Well, I think it's a massive sign of hypocrisy because I didn't read your book using Notebook LLM because I was specifically told not to put it into an LLM.

Yeah, books are different from publicly available research.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's very good advice, I think. And also that thing of having a kind of more general take than just narrowly listening to people within our sector. I think That's really important. We try to reflect that in the way we do the podcast. So wrapping up, thank you very much, both of you, for that. I thought it was a really interesting and valuable look through not only the book, but both your collaboration and your experience in your different fields. Great to have a podcaster on the podcast. And very good luck with all the rest of it. I hope the book does really well. Thank you very much for taking the time today. Thanks, John.

Thank you.

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