Hello, welcome everyone to this session this afternoon. We're going to be recording a live episode of The iDeas Podcast which is hosted stand alone but also as part of the Instructional Design Tips YouTube channel. If you haven't subscribed, shame on you and subscribe now please. I will check before you leave, phones out.
Initially I've got some questions that I want to make sure we cover but then I'll be turning to you to do my job for me in true director fashion. So please have your questions ready for Helen, not for me, I will not be answering any questions. Nice ones. We'll go with that one. As I said at the start of the day, which you weren't here for, actually you missed that little clip. If we can completely change the nature of the questions that would be fantastic.
Because nothing better than watching people squirm on camera, is there? You're welcome. Thanks, Tom. Awesome. So, throughout, please feel free to cheer, clap, otherwise I just had candle after afterwards anyway in pretend you all found everything funny. But other than that, just like any other session. So on that note, this is The iDeas Podcast, the show where instructional designers, nLND professionals of all types
discussed their big ideas in the world of LND. And this episode's a little bit different because there are other people in the room and it's really uncomfortable. There they are, see. All in our tiny little office. No, we're live at Connect 2023 and we're with Helen Marshall, C.L.O. of Thrive, who we've tried to book on the show before. Yes. But this is quite a nice moment, I think, because we first met Connect. We did, yeah. What, 2019? Something like that, yeah.
I think it was the first conference I had been to outside of Learning Tech. So it was, yeah, a bit of a new experience for me thinking about what am I going to do, who am I going to meet, what kind of ideas are going to be discussed. And yeah, we apparently met in a networking session, which I remember fondly, everyone clearly. But it was, it was a great conference and it's a really nice kind of full circle moment to be back here. And it be back live in person in general anyway.
But then also obviously to be sitting on stage this time. I will endeavor not to take that personally. I am quite forgettable, I suppose. But just let's draw a bit of a comparison then. 2019, that event, what were you doing? Where were you in the world of Elendee? So I was working as a senior instructional designer for a company called Brightwave, who if people haven't heard of, were specialised in bespoke e-learning development for companies all over the world,
and they also had a platform element of the business as well. Just as I had started working there, they'd been acquired by Capita. So although the Brightwave brand was still very much a thing, and we had our own identity as a business, we were run ultimately by Capita. And eventually they were fully absorbed and now Brightwave unfortunately do not exist in the way they did when I work there.
Very much in their learning design space, thinking about how to challenge customers and their ways of thinking about learning and what that looked like for their business. And I think one of the things for me at that point was when I knew that I needed to go somewhere else and do something a little bit different, was the idea that if you started to challenge customers too much,
it started to become a commercial issue for the business. So sales suddenly started going, why are you asking so many questions? You can ask a few, but don't really dig into what they want and what the problems are they're trying to solve. And that's really when I thought, no, it's not, I need to pivot and do something a little bit different.
Awesome, so point of comparison, that's 2019, where are we in 2023? So I am now a chief learning officer for a company called Thrive where we're learning an all in one LMS solution and content provider. So in a very different space to where I was in 2019 and now in the fortunate position to be challenging people and to saying not just within our business itself, but outside of that in the wider industry.
In the right rooms, talking to the right people, asking difficult questions that people might not want me to ask or opening up the avenue of conversation for people as well. I often feel very fortunate to be in this role because it's not one that you often see in an event of space. The idea of my role is that I communicate with the wide industry about our product and what we're doing internally and what we're thinking and where we want to push the industry forward.
And the other side of that is being involved in events like this and being in other industry events or again in the right rooms with the right people, communicating all those amazing ideas back into our business to say, look, these things are really important to the people at events I go to. So let's talk about them internally and let's see what we can do. I've just been, I've just been in Joe and Neil's session in the big debate around sustainability.
And he got my mind ticking and I immediately text our co-founder and said, you know, we need to be thinking about our CO2 and like, how do we communicate that? What does sustainability look like for us as a business, which we'll watch and see what happens with the responses to that question. But it's exactly that, you know, how do we respond and communicate those things to people when they're not necessarily things that people, especially vendors and suppliers speak about that often?
Awesome. So what you're saying is attended LN Connect, senior instructional designer to CLO, clearly a strong connection there. That's a great attending future events. Good, good. It's not sales pitch, it's not. But on the note of today and the event as a whole, our focus really is on what does the future of LND look like?
You know, we like to focus on the little topics at the learning network. So in your mind today, let's forget about the next six months, the next year, let's forget about the next two years. Let's look further down the line. What are you thinking about? What do you think we should be thinking about that maybe we're not?
Well, actually, I think we are already thinking about the right things in my opinion. I think in five years time, we're going to be experiencing something that is learning in a much more personalized way. And we're already thinking about what that looks like and how we get there. But I think within maybe even less than five years, we're going to be at that point.
But there's a huge mindset, if needed, to get everyone else on board and aligned with us as well. So I think over the next few years is going to be a huge alignment piece. But really, we are going to be pushing for more personalized experiences that match the expectations of the people coming into our businesses. I think it's about 2025. So within that time frame, 33% of the workforce are going to be made up of Gen Z, who have a very different approach to work.
So it's how we accommodate that and create new experiences that match those expectations. So I think things like how we establish human connection and how we continue to do that over the next period of time with the influx of new technologies. And I'm going to try and not mention AI too much, Michael. How we do that will create an opportunity for us to think about that piece around bringing people together and bringing people along on the journey.
So I feel like we're already talking about the right themes. And I'm very hopeful that within five years, technology will have accelerated very quickly to get us to that point. However, I really do genuinely realize that that is my consistent optimism that is that play there. And for anyone that's been in the industry for any length of time, shifting the way that we do things, the way that we operate, the way that we fundamentally think is very difficult.
So I'm hopelessly optimistic that that is where we will be. But there's also an element of realism in that. Is it just a utopia that I'm dreaming of? Will we all be on that journey together? And I think we will. And we'll certainly be creating that more personalized experience at the end of the day. Again, to come back to that expectation point of view, adapting to the way people expect to operate within an organization, it's not just a learning problem.
It's a whole employee experience cycle problem. And I think this is where the future of L&D is also headed for me in the more holistic approach to employee experience or development across a business. And that means that L&D might be more dispersed than it is now. What does that look like for the future of L&D? Again, is that something that's realistic to even achieve? There are pros and cons to having L&D teams that are interspersed within an organization instead of having an individual team.
But that's something that could happen as well in my mind, L&D sitting within multiple different functions within a business. But yeah, maybe a lot to unpack. No, that's the point though, isn't it? It's a lot to unpack and that usually steers our view away from it because it's complicated and we don't know a lot of unknowns. We're working with assumptions. And so it's much easier to go, well tomorrow, I'm going to do that, that, that, that.
So it's really important, I think, to kind of zoom out and take that view sometimes and have a think about, are we moving towards that or are we just treading water? Yeah, and the, this CIPD workplace report that they released earlier in the year spoke about how time and engagement were two of the biggest, biggest barriers for L&D teams within, within L&D at the moment.
And my first opinion was like, that's always going to be the case, like that's just ignore the fact that there are even issues because they're always going to be issues. But actually, how can technologies that are coming into play help with that? How do we free up people's time more by utilizing technology or other methods? And how do we kind of spur on engagement from that perspective?
So although, although they are barriers and they're going to be persistent barriers for anyone, how do we start thinking about what, you know, how we might approach that? I don't necessarily have an answer for that, but I think it's really interesting to think that if they're the biggest barriers for people at the moment, how can we be leveraging technology to free up more time or increase engagement?
I guess engagement is a little bit of a dirty word as well because people are like, well, you know, just because people are engaged doesn't mean they're learning and that's so true. But it is the first, for me, it's always the first point of call is if people are engaged, they are going to be more invested, they're going to be more bought into what you're doing and how you deliver it.
And then they're going to be actively participating in whatever it is that you do and believing more in what you do. So yes, engagement statistics might be vanity metrics for people at the end of the day, but it's still really important, I think, to start there and then think about where you're headed as well. I sense you predicted my follow-up question there. The minute you said the word engagement, I was like, right.
I'm going to get in there first. That's the challenge for anyone that comes on the show at the moment they use the e-word. It's define that and talk to me about what you mean. So no, that's one of the better definitions we've had. Usually it's views.
But I do think, as vanity metric as they are, it's still useful to think. So we work with customers all over the world. We have a learning platform that people have implemented and utilised in the first point of call is getting people on the platform, getting them engaged. And thinking about, are they looking at the right stuff and what is their journey telling us and how can we create journeys that take people into the right places or surface the right things at the right time.
And whilst content views don't mean anything other than someone has viewed your content, it's telling you a little bit about the user behaviour. It's not telling you how much they've learnt, but it's telling you that they were there and they were looking and maybe how long they were looking at it and maybe where they went on to click next and, obviously, who got the right tools to do that.
So again, it's that kind of process of what's next and how, what do we do after that and now we know what people are looking at and what things are surfacing for them, what other experiences can we create. So it's that first point. So I think it's a valid definition by some people. It's just that extending it to actually this is what we do next.
I think because it falls into that bracket of vanity metrics, which I think has become pretty roundly used these days, we tend to assume what's a vanity metric, therefore it's a bad metric. It's a metric we shouldn't care about. And that was never really the idea behind vanity metrics. It's, they have a value, it's just important to know what it is and that it's not learning related.
So no, I think I think I'd probably agree. I just always wary of the word engagement. So I'd really like to open it up, largely because I have no idea what the time is because the ambition of me being able to see what that clock says from this distance. No, it wasn't going to happen. So does anyone have any questions for Helen? And Tom. Excellent. This has gone phenomenally well. It's been from the BBC. Look at that. I shall run a mic over to you, Ben from the BBC.
Well, I'm glad I'm not going to look back down to some current podcasts. Great. So I was just going to follow up on the metrics because actually we do use the engagement thing quite a lot because even that has been quite hard pace to even get some of those. So I was just wondering about what do you measure beyond that? Like I know what we should do, but what kind of practical things are you doing?
Yeah, it's a really good question because I think like, let you say that the engagement as the first point of call, even getting to that point is really difficult. And it's a behavior shift in people. So I guess it's going to be terrible answer. It depends on what your problem is. So I think like taking a step back on that question, it's, you know, what are you trying to change or what are you trying to shift in whatever it is that you're doing?
And what data do you already have available to you across the business? And that's going to be held by multiple people within your business. A lot of the time it's not even necessarily going to be held by an LND team. So getting your hands on that and thinking, actually, that's how I can benchmark where I am right now. A really easy example for us at Thrive is product sales. So a lot of our retail customers wants to increase product sales as anyone that selling a product does.
And they have kind of benchmark data for how, how, which regional teams are selling which kind of products and how often. And then being able to work it from there, saying, well, if we release this learning experience to you, is it going to ultimately impact product sales at the end of the day? The problem could be we're not seeing enough sales or people aren't giving customers the right type of information to create a sale in the first place.
And this is what the data is telling us and this is where we want to get to. So I think yeah, identifying the problem in the first place that you want to get to is where I would start with that. Awesome. Anyone else? Come on, be brave. Oh, look at that. Is it going to be about AI? Hi, everyone. Long time listener. First time caller. I did actually want to ask a question about AI. This morning we all heard that bad things are going to happen.
In your opinion, what is the worst thing AI is going to do for other people? What's the best thing as well? Oh, nice question. I unfortunately wasn't here for the keynote, but I have heard that it was quite scary and doom and gloom. And I've used the term cautiously optimistic about AI quite a few times now that it has the potential to have really positive impact on a lot of different areas of our lives, not just our work.
But my element of caution comes from the ethics of AI and not as not fully grasping what the implications are for, I don't know, even chat gpt's use across an organization, for example. I think that's one of the worst things that could happen is a chat gpt gets hold of so much personal data or confidential information and there's a huge kind of data breach somewhere. I think that's a huge risk. One we need to be conscious of and aware of.
But the greatest thing that's going to impact Ellen D, I think, is making, I feel like making learning experiences more equitable for people and surfacing the right information at the right time and the right way, depending on who you are and what your role is within the business. So maybe that's an employee that benefits the employee. Ultimately, that's going to help Ellen D teams to create better experiences for people. Lovely stuff, we've got an AI question, look at that.
From the person who said he didn't want to talk about AI anymore. Well, you can never trust he's Ellen D, people have flipped flop constantly, one thing, some other direction. Anyone else for audience questions, you might never get this chance again. I need to stop going back to my seat, this is a really stupid decision. Right, we are good sir. Thank you so much. Hello. Russell. How's it going? Good, how are you? Yeah. Should I stop a chat?
My question was around human connection, which you obviously mentioned at the beginning. I think obviously today, I feel on, feels the same that today's brings us that opportunity. So I've meet new people connect. But my question to you is around in an organisation, we know that social learning happens, which must be. What can we put in place to schedule in, is going to help support that?
It's interesting you use the word automatically there, because I'm not 100% sure that it always happens automatically. And you need, often, it does from like, you're connecting with someone you're learning from, you're having a conversation. But actually if there's something specific that you're wanting to do and you're wanting to facilitate the space for something to happen,
then you need to be facilitating that space in some way. So I think it's creating the right environments again to come back to the point I made earlier. And setting the expectations for people and what it is that you're trying to achieve through social learning. Social learning is a huge thing for us at Thrive and fostering that in a digital way as well as in person way.
That often extends into the organisations that we're working with. So how do we bridge that gap for people and create more blended solutions ultimately at the end of the day. But I think it's making people aware of what learning is and how people learn and what you're actually doing when you're having a conversation with someone. And that comes back to the principles of how you learn on a daily basis or within your own lives or even at a biological level.
And that's something that I think potentially we need to be doing more of and talking about more and even ourselves learning about more as LND teams. Because it's not something for a, I guess, even new generations come into the workforce. It's not something that is commonplace to talk about how you actually learn and how you do that. It's very different to what is fostered within an educational system within the UK at least.
So I think maybe we have a responsibility as LND teams to share that with the wider business to create those moments for social learning to happen knowing that that is how people sometimes learn effectively. Thank you. Lovely stuff. So we are coming towards the end of our time. That's gone quick. It has, isn't it? That's rather terrifying. But I said at the start of this episode that this podcast is all about people sharing their big ideas for LND.
Because we've all got one, whether we've shared it out loud or not. We've got that thing that we're passionate about, that we think that we need to pay more attention to, that we think would make all the difference. Helen, what's your big idea for LND? See, up until this moment, this was the first episode in a long time. I wouldn't have to do any editing. I could have just taken the SD card out, uploaded it. Sorry, though. No. I ruined it. Yeah.
I'm not going to do that. That's going to be there in the recording. Just to set everyone's expectation there. It's not going to happen. You've now got to change the toggle on YouTube from my parental advisory now, too. Okay, I might be... Yeah, that's stupid. Yeah. Big idea. For those who don't know, I run a community called Women In, which is a WhatsApp community, outside of the work that I do at Thrive.
Based on the fact that I'd identified a problem that was particularly facing women, returning to work after periods of leave, or just in general being part of smaller, or even large-scale LND teams, not feeling connected to the wider industry and wanting to create a space where they could share openly, gain information about best practice, challenge ideas, or even just talk about problems or things that have been going on within their daily lives.
I created this community on WhatsApp to create that safe space for people to share and be part of. It's been phenomenal. The reception has so far been phenomenal, and it's been a little bit of magic. People coming there and sharing really openly and freely with other people.
Whilst I've done that, the other side of it is LND in general, and I'm going to be talking more about community and maybe how they foster communities within that organization, which is a very different thing to doing it externally. But I think there is something in there around how do we do that within our own organizations. So I think we're going to see a bigger push internally within businesses to create opportunities for conversations to happen and action to be taken.
Practically how you do that is another thing. I'm actually going to set up an event in February that's bringing lots of different community creators outside of teams together from LND Shakers and Offbeat and people like that too, and women in HR, so doing HR element as well, to talk about how you would think about fostering community within an internal team. Because, again, like I said, it's not that straightforward that you can't just pick it up and shift it.
There are different parameters and different expectations. But my advice at the right at the beginning would be, as long as you're identifying an opportunity or a problem that already exists within your organization, if you want to create a community around a shared problem, that's going to stand you in good stead.
Because if you're just creating a community for a sake of creating a community, it's probably going to have a really high engagement to start with, and then dip and fall, because the problem really isn't there in the first place and people will not necessarily need that engagement. So something around community to sum up.
That's, I think, what a great day to finish up talking about community on, because I think it's fair to say that if anything stands out from today, given that you'll have listened to nothing anyone's actually said, is the community that's come together today at this event, which has been phenomenal to see, and something that I think a lot of us have really missed in the last couple of years. So Helen, thank you for finally appearing on the ideas podcast.
It only took arranging an entire conference and inviting you to it to get this episode recorded, but I appreciate it. It was worth every minute. And thank you to our wonderful studio audience who have remained quiet, laughed at the right moment, and of course we'll clap loudly in just a few moments. Thank you studio audience. Thank you.