Listen to our exclusive interview with Laura Overton, about her move to Tulser and how L&D is a driver for business value.
Listen to our exclusive interview with Laura Overton, about her move to Tulser and how L&D is a driver for business value.
Welcome to the stellar labs podcast, future learning today at Stellar labs, our mission is to bust the technology skills crunch with effective, measurable, engaging training. We consult on design and deliver the technical and people skills and competencies you need in business. In these podcasts, you'll hear from industry experts and practitioners from the worlds of technology and training. They'll share their experience, insights and inspiration and their visions for the future. With you. Keep listening to start your future learning here today.
Stella:Hello and welcome back to the Stellar labs podcast. I'm delighted to be talking to Laura Overton well known for being founder of towards maturity, but Laura has a new and exciting world opening up to her. She's teaming up with Charles Jennings and his team at the 70 2010 Institute. And they're creating an entirely new organization called Tulsa, which I know is an acronym for results. So Laura, welcome to the stellar labs podcast. And tell me a bit about Tulsa.
Laura:Oh, Stella. Thank you so much genuinely for inviting me. It's been a really interesting six months as we've been really thinking about since I left towards maturity and I love the research that we did. It was my driving passion. But I realized actually my passion is about changing the industry and I'd certainly seen patterns in the data about the real potential that learning and development have for impacting business value. And, you know, I've worked with, XXX and Vivian Hein and, and Charles from the 70, 2010 Institute on and off over the years. And I know that they share that passion. So we started to talk about what new things we need to be doing to really support the industry and as a result of that, Tulsa was born.
Stella:So it's really exciting and I'm presuming that comes out of some frustrations perhaps you've had in the past, or maybe even now?
Laura:Anyone who's working in the world of work can be frustrated. You know, those of us who have a vision, you know, getting our visions, heard, getting our visions understood, is one thing, but you know, the world of work is incredibly complicated and we know that it's gotten more complicated in 2020. So yes, there are frustrations, but I believe that the industry, the learning and development industry potentially is poised to really become of age and realize its potential. Because there's so many opportunities that are around us and I think what's frustrated me in the past is that we love to talk about new things, but we like to do familiar things or at least try and squeeze the familiar things that we do into new packages and new ideas. And I think we're very curious and an innovative group of people, but most learning and development professionals feel frustrated by that and organization as well. So their dreams and their visions are, they're struggling to actually see some of the true potential of learning, taking place in their organization. So my frustration is probably an industry frustration and I believe that there is time now to maybe break through some of that and to harness the opportunities that we need and to harness the experience and the evidence that we've built in our industry and in the world of business to say,"okay, is there a fresh way and a fresh thinking" and behind the scenes my colleagues have been doing some incredible stuff, really looking at how individuals, teams, organizations are starting to learn and get some practical ideas together, which really resonated with what I was finding in the research as well. So yes, frustrated but excited.
Stella:I can hear your excitement and you know, I have myself benefited so much from the research you've done. So, that was how I came across you. And I'm fascinated by what you've done. I'm really interested to hear you talking about that you w ere sort of perhaps poised o n in a new area. And I think, you know, 2020 has changed a lot of things for a lot of us. I was having a really interesting conversation with my colleague, my CEO, Raf Seymus the other day. He comes from the world of tech and he was saying, you know, 15 years ago or so, the IT department was seen as a cost center, it was just a big drag on resources but now it's a fundamental part of industry and a part of business and we're kind of interested as to whether you see that as perhaps that we can take L&D from being traditionally a cost center. You know, it's the first thing that gets cut when there's a crisis of any sort. I t doesn't seem to be happening right now. So I'm really interested as to how that might play out in the next few years.
Laura:Yeah. Well, I think it's quite interesting having been in the industry for a few decades now. I've lived through a number of crises. My specialty has always been in from the mid eighties, the application of technology to learning. And when there were recessions, when there was 9/11, when there was the.com crisis, whether it's 2008, everyone was saying, Oh my goodness, you know, how do we get efficiencies in? How do we, you know, sort of start to deliver more for less. I have learned to hate the phrase more for less, because often it just meant how do we put more people through more content for less money.
Stella:And less application and performance?
Laura:Not even less application or performance, that doesn't even come into the equation, Stella. I haven't even been thinking about that. Historically when we've been looking at this kind of more for less concept. And I think this h as really fueled the view of business for learning and development as being a cost center, where they look at your catalogs, look at our portfolios, look at our learning management systems and s ee lots and lots of beautifully created and curated content, big c ontents, more content, micro content, and e- content. A nd there's a"so what" factor in all of that. What i s that actually doing for us as a business? And yet at the same time, the same business leaders are coming to us as learning and development and saying,"give me a call, give me a micro c ontent, give me,..." you know. So, I think it was David Wilson from p assway and Charles Jennings. They sort of like 10 years ago, w e're talking very actively about the conspiracy of convenience. You know, m anager's a lso learning professionals to deliver learning programs, initiatives, a nd courses, and learning professionals s ay, Oh, thank goodness I'm wanted. And then h e d elivered them to the best of our ability. And it's a loop which keeps us as being seen as an order taker. It's not just that we are order takers, but the business wants us to take their order and it's very dangerous for us in these very turbulent times. because then y ou t hink, well, actually, maybe I don't need to order that, y ou k now, like I don't need one of those and I think there's a real danger there that we've always been seen by the business as that. And yet the potential certainly through the work that I l ed when I led that 15 year program of longitudinal research about what delivers i n business impact, u m, the potential for l earning a nd development to really contribute business value rather than just take away business cost is phenomenal, but very few of us actually a chieve that. So, and I think possibly now is the time for us to step up into that.
:That's really actually music to my ears and really interesting because this week we actually put in a proposal, somebody said, can you do X for us? And we thought, yeah, we're not actually very excited by X because it's pretty old standard. You know, we know exactly where X is going to go. So we've gone back in and said, we can't give you X because you've had X and X didn't work. So actually we're going to give you Y and Z and maybe even A, B and C as well. We're giving you some that you haven't asked for, but we're giving you what we actually think you really need. And we put it together in terms of the added value they will get from it. And we'll wait to see the results. But I think this is exactly what we need to do. We need to start saying that we can say, we can help you find something better than what you currently think you can do,
Laura:But Stella, that takes confidence. Doesn't it?
Stella:It took a lot of bravery.
Laura:It takes a lot of courage to say, I know you want that, but I believe that you need this. And that's where I found over the last 15 years and probably the first 15 years of my career as well, having some really strong evidence behind you to be able to bring that challenge, because we don't want to upset our customers. We don't want to say that your baby is ugly. When you have to do something that is a little bit more creative. And I used to find, certainly with a towards maturity evidence, which is now being taken forward through Emerald works is that independent focus on: this is what the evidence is saying. That actually leads to better results, is it worth us taking a risk. I know I'm challenging you, but it's not just my opinion. It's not just because I've got a product to sell it's because actually the evidence is stacking up and all your work in kind of brain-friendly learning all that evidence is stacking up the scientific and the insight evidence from the marketplace. Um, and I'm hoping that we will get smarter in using that to bring those challenges, to give us a little bit of that, literally that Dutch coverage, to be able to say, you don't want that, but you need this.
Stella:And I think it's really interesting, Laura, you've sort of talked about, you know, the evidence coming in from sort of the business side. That's the whole learning analytic side coming in. This is what we're learning from neuroscience and kind of evidence based learning, you know, all these things are perhaps coming together now, whereas perhaps in the past, we didn't have this facility to some of the data was there, but we didn't have the mass of it, and it is really helping us, I think, be more credible.
Laura:And it's not just having one source of data. I think one of the things is triangulating. And that's a danger from us. I've seen that and I've seen it in myself. you know, when you stop and after I had some good reflection time last year, and when I decided it was time for me personally, to step away from that bulk of data, because it allowed me to stop and reflect and I didn't want to become blinkered. I didn't want to have just one view on the world because that's really dangerous for us because we start to then believe our own press without questioning, without reflecting, without thinking. But I also have to admit that's a very vulnerable situation to be in. And, you know, it was a great deal of vulnerability involved with kind of stepping away. But then you can suddenly say, actually look, all of these other independent views and ideas and concepts and stories that are above and hang up. And it gives you that courage to say change is needed for us to become, instead of taking those orders to really genuinely becoming that profession that contributes back value to an organization business value.
Stella:And I think it is about becoming professional. I think, you know, a lot of people and me included ended up sort of falling into training. We weren't led there because we woke up as youngsters and said, Oh, I really want to become a professional trainer. Most of us fell into it. And I think it is about making us into a profession that we can be proud of. And that uses the tools that other professions use.
Laura:Yeah. I think what's interesting though, is that I did want to become a professor and I did a psychology and mathematics degree. And the only thing I wanted to do when I came out was to join a training department, but of course I had no experience. So I couldn't be the Sage on the stage, which was expected in the e nd. I had to start from the ground up in a training department. And that's when I got hooked on the technology side of things, because they had an interactive video in t he cupboard under the stairs. And as a psychology graduate, looking at adult learning, I'm thinking this piece of kit seems to be ticking many more of the boxes t hen the programs that were going on in t he organization at the time in terms of the way adults learn. And so I, I got sidetracked immediately, right at the beginning of my career into an area which most learning professionals hated, absolutely hated let alone wanting to professionalize. So sometimes we have to create our own tracks through that. But have that heart o f wanting to be a professional yeah. Wanting to create professional, you know, wanting to be considered, wanting to have the evidence behind us. And I think sometimes when it's not available to us, it's up to us to create that professionality. And t hat, t o me, that was always about going back to business. What did the business want? And is there anything that I was doing that could help the business? And then that actually helped, you know, the very new space t hat I was moving into to become much more acknowledged because I spoke the language of business, I think.
Stella:I didn't know that history about you. So I'm really, really delighted to have that little piece of history there. That's great. Now, one of the other things I know we've talked about Laura before and I think we both have a passion for is, it's not just about, you know, training up the L&D team to be more professional and to be better. But it's actually about supporting the people who are doing the learning, the people who are doing their jobs and actually helping to support them in making their own experience of learning a richer, possibly easier experience. Even if they're presented with something that is not an ideal learning situation, how they can actually take experiences, content, whatever it might be, and actually turn that into some real learning that then becomes, you know, new skills, new habits, new ways of working. What's your thinking around that at the moment?
Laura:Well, I always used to find it very amusing. When in the towards maturity studies, many learning professionals would say, you know, I've got this big vision about what I want learning to be. I want it to be pull, not push and self-directed and user generated. And then I would also then say, well, the reason I'm not achieving my vision is because, and it was always like almost two thirds year after year of learning professionals said,"my staff, my workers, learners, did not want to do this type of learning. And they wanted to be in the classroom". I'm like, this is something wrong here. There's something wrong. And seven years ago, we started a program, which we used to call the learning landscape, which was okay, let's be brave. Now let's just go out and find out how people learn, how they think they learn. Now there's a lot of debate. As soon as you use the word learning, you and I know that the whole of the learning profession wants to spend at least 10 days debating what is learning. And you know, most people don't do learning but I'm thinking what in natural language, if I ask my father, how did you learn how to p rint that Rose? I didn't say, how did you.... I can't even think of another word for what l earn, y ou k now, it's a natural word when we use it in a natural context. So that's how we did. We w ent out over a period of probably about six or seven years, went out to 50, it might even be 60,000 individuals knew all kinds of jobs. The only thing is that job wasn't called a l earner. So they w ere in the world of work. How do you learn what you need to do your job? Where do you go? Who do you talk to? We didn't ask them about what do you prefer? Because as soon as somebody says, well, how would you prefer to learn? H e'd s ay, well, I don't want to, it's u nder m e turkeys voting for Christmas. You know, I quite like going out to nice events, et cetera, et cetera. So they would always prefer a classroom. But let me just say, what's useful for you. How do you just go about this? And then i t's surface, you know, it's our communities, it's our managers, it's our buddies, It's our mentors. It's our Google searches. It is our formal learning programs, it is our e-learning programs when they get that right. And they go out and they're willing and they're motivated to p otentially use technology. And this was before all of our current situation to be able to connect in and engage. And then that really surfaced to me, the real importance of teamwork in learning and the absolute centrality of making our work useful and relevant to the situation and individuals in at the moment, the critical role of the l ine manager, and also, the hidden staff that we c ould perhaps help do what they're already doing, but smarter t hat they probably had a certain level of unconscious competence when they're doing this. But how do you raise that to you know, being conscious? And it's the data pointed us to say, actually, the high-performing learning organizations, high-performing learning cultures, they were proactively supporting that mental process. And you know, I personally think that this is something that we need to do a s learning professionals. We need to support the leaders. We need to support the leaders to help their teams learn, not to become learning managers, but to help them reflect and apply and consider what went wrong in that mistake, you know, create that, but also to support the leaders themselves in learning to learn themselves.
Stella:Yeah, absolutely. Right.
Laura:They're under a lot of pressure right now. Yeah. So it's a different type of role but I think it's massively powerful and really needed and a job. I don't think many learning professionals take on board as being their thing.
Stella:And I think for me, it's very much around the fact that we talked about the unconscious competence we have of learning. Of course, we've learned for our entire lives. That's how we've got to where we are. But for me, I think there's something about unpacking that well, to take the unconscious competence, make it conscious again, so that you can build on it by then adding in, you know, whether it's new techniques, new tips, new tricks, you know, or even sometimes just going back to what you already knew before, but you've perhaps got out of the habit of, or whatever it might be, but actually supporting individuals themselves and in finding their own way through their learning journey, their learning pathway. So that they're more skilled. So if you can spend millions, as we know on an LMS and fantastic systems, but if we're not empowering the learners themselves were actually wasting a lot of that money because you're losing a lot of the potential that could be there just with some probably not enormous amounts of tweaks, just in helping them get that learning agility really it's like going to the gym. You can be, sorry, I am a very incompetent runner, but I only need to go to the gym or to get a trainer for, you know, short time and suddenly that scale can be so much better. Yeah.
Laura:And I think what's really interesting about our role as learning and development professionals is the fact that we can help people build scale and competence in a particular role. But the critical thing for us is to help them to be able to apply their knowledge into new situations and that is, is central right now. I'm finding, you know, I'm of an age where a lot of my niece nephew got children, they're all coming now into the workplace. They're all leaving school, leaving university, and I'm spending so much time working with them on just having chats about how, you know, don't fix yourself on a career because you might have to zigzag around it. My God daughter for example, wants to do, I want you to go into event management and hospitality. You're just about to leave school of apprenticeships. And suddenly she's saying, Whoa, okay, this is exactly the best job for me right now. But then we start to say, okay, well, what are the types of skills that you can build that would allow you to go back into that at a later stage and that mental agility of being able to apply one set of skills to another challenge as it comes through, I think is a really critical aspect of the work that we can do with individuals in the workplace of all ages. and I think that's a thing. And I hope we will step up to the challenge.
Stella:I hope so too, Laura. So we're kind of coming short on our time. Loving the conversation. We talked a bit about the future of learning in terms of learning being more professional. What else do you see in the future?
Laura:What I saw in the research program that I did over 15 years was the potential for learning and development to move. In the report called the transformation curve, which was the last series that I did with towards maturity. We talked at those being to the left of the curve of those of learning producers, you know, producing content courses, experiences, you know, in order to meet the needs of organizations, but to the right of the curve. When the business value that was reported significantly increased. The reports back on, you know, learning is improving agility. Learning is improving innovation. Learning is improving skill, learning is improving the stuff that CEOs are asking for at the moment. That is a shift from the left to the right, from becoming producers through, to learning enablers. That's where you're starting to play a role within business. Because that learning has to be facilitated. That change has to be facilitated within the context of business. It means you're in partnership with line managers, with team managers, you're in partnership with business leaders and they are in partnership and understand the role that they have to play in order to create an environment that allows the whole potential of that organization to come forward so that I can see a pathway to the future, our data and map that pathway can also see people being very stuck potentially to the left of the curve, because there are things that you need to let go of.
Stella:Asking for courses?
Laura:Yes, asking for courses, saying yes to courses, but also as successes of the past that you, we need to let go of some of those successes, we need to let go of some of our faillures, you know, we've tried that in the past and it didn't work well, maybe the timing was wrong.
Stella:Well, I think Corona has shown that for precisely, hasn't it? And so due to the technology, having progressed too, of course.
Laura:The technology is much more accessible. We're having to do it. We're finding that our human connection right now is being enabled by technology. It's not being cut off by technology. It's one of the few things. So it's allowing us to see the potential of technology. Whereas historically, potentially you might have said, we could only have a level of connection on a human level where the classroom or via face-to-face interventions. And now we know there is a different type of human correction that is possible, and that opens our minds up to say, well, maybe I can try new things. So I think the future is potentially very strong. We've got the environment, we've got the CEO's through PWC over the last two years. CEO's are saying, I need new skill in my organization to bring agility, to bring innovation and to bring growth into the organization. So it will be down to us to say, okay, how do we respond to that? Do we want to just take the order for more skills or more programs and more curricular, or do we want to say, okay, how do we enable our organization to continue to rescale, to continue to upskill? And that is a job of all of us, and that's where I see the potential. And that's why I wanted to team up with the other guys at Tulsa, because we want to support the community in doing that. You know, we've got a vision, we've got data and we're continually researching, not just in our field, but in the field of business as well to say, okay, well, what is it that we need to do differently? and to join in with people like yourself a nd learning practitioners and suppliers and consultants t hat share that vision, t hat's amplify that voice i t's f ind pathways through to the future together because it's not going to be one organization or one product that does it. It's going to be our collective wisdom that drives us into the future. And we want to be part of that.
Stella:And what do you think for people who want to be part, what do you think is a good starting point?
Laura:Team up with people who get us. I'm not saying team up with myself or Stella or Tulsa or Stellar Labs. Look for people who are talking about this, look for people who are open to sharing their experiences, assess all of those individual data points or those individual stories, um, you know, get out there, ask questions and experiment. Because you have so many of the community behind you, but also look for systems, processes, because it's not all just about creativity.
Stella:Absolutely. I totally totally agree. Love creativity as I do.
:Yeah. It's really important because what happens with just thinking, I'm just going to try this means that we trip over the same mistakes that have been applied to it again and again, and again, that's something, the vision that I share with the guys at Tulsa is that there needs to be a little bit of method in our madness in order to achieve the vision and the potential of our industry. And how do you do that without stifling creativity? How do you bring method to experimentation? How do you bring structure and acceleration to progress? And that's essential for us. I think as an industry.
Stella:I think not to go off on two hours on creativity, cause I'm sure we could, but I think actually that process and structure can actually help us be more creative. And it also enables us to build, because if you get the process right, you can, you can adapt, you can tweak, you can experiment so much more easily because you've got the basic structure, right? And then you can be creative from there. So for me, that's music to my ears again.
Laura:Well, I love this world, learning and development is, is just the most exciting place to be right now. And it's great to be able to work in that field and to bring those ideas and to bring experience and data and evidence. The fact that we can make a difference. We can be value creators, not just order takers. And that's so essential for our thinking moving forward.
Stella:Thank you, Laura. It's been a delight talking to you and I look forward to having another conversation again with you very soon.
Laura:It's been brilliant. Thank you.
Stella:Thank you Laura. It was fantastic.
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