Ep. 10 HOW CAN WE SLEEP IF L&D IS BURNING

Greg Arthur (00:02.497)

Okay, hi everyone. We are with Nick Petch for the product design for learning podcast this week. And Nick is someone I met about, I'm going to say a month ago on a Slack channel. And then we only properly spoke a couple of weeks ago. But I'm already fascinated and very excited for where this conversation is going to go from our first chat. Nick is going to be, so we're doing it under the,

Nick Petch (00:16.073)

there.

Greg Arthur (00:32.044)

the umbrella of innovation and I will give Nick no more introduction than that and maybe let Nick introduce yourself.

Nick Petch (00:40.777)

Yeah, thanks Greg, absolute pleasure to be here, mate. And yeah, I enjoyed bumping into you and some of the threads we're pulling and having a bit of a chat. I guess, quick bit of background on me to just give you a general shape. When my mom asked me what I do, I sort of tell her I'm a design-based researcher.

working across different intersections as is the nature of design. So sort of work across learning, design, strategy, and sort of the systems territory as well. Been in design about 20 years and kind of, you know, worked in many of the different avenues of it from, you know, everything from actually doing design through to more strategising and, you know, more in the research front as well.

I've always kind of had an affinity with learning and been sort of at that cold face of learning. And yeah, I think it's a very exciting time to be an outlier in and around the learning industry, which I think is a bit of a theme that we'll probably jam on today. But yeah, I think times are changing rapidly. And yeah, very happy to be here with you chatting about it.

Greg Arthur (01:43.245)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:55.896)

Cool. Thank you again, Nick. And so when we first spoke and I was talking to you about my process and how we run over two circles, how we run the product design for learning process. And we kind of run this kind of custom or homemade version of product design. We got really into how you focused on innovation. You talked about research as well just then. So how would you summarize

the innovation side of like a, I was gonna say like a generic learning process, but just learning in general. If you just focus on the innovation side of what you talk about, could you give us a more information on what that means for you?

Nick Petch (02:38.057)

Yeah, it's a really big domain, I reckon. But I think ultimately innovation is whatever the context is willing to afford. And I'll sort of break that down a little bit, right? I think the word innovation is kind of, it's hollow unless you put a context in it. I think that's kind of key. And so I think like, like what I really like about research is

Greg Arthur (02:49.453)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (02:57.453)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (03:05.287)

We know learning happens in context. And that's really where learning and impact and innovation can actually really occur. so one of the things I like about research is it's really the way in which you can get into relation.

with that context. Maybe it's an ecology, maybe it's a system, maybe it's an organization, depending on whatever you want to view it as. But without research, you can't get into a relation with that context and that system. And without doing that, I don't think it's possible to innovate. So for me, innovation, yeah, sorry. I was gonna say.

Greg Arthur (03:41.687)

So I saw... sorry. Sorry, after you. After you. Carry on. Carry on.

Nick Petch (03:46.137)

I was going to say, look, for me, innovation is that piece around getting in relation to the context in which you're working with and to find, ultimately, I feel, the small, fast-moving, probable experiments. There's a couple of reasons, I reckon, why that's important. I don't think organisations...

communities, cultures and so on, can actually handle that much innovation. It actually needs to sort of naturalise as you sort of implement it right, because otherwise it becomes relatively unsustainable or people miss it all together or you try and do too much at once. And so I really feel like making...

you know, a campaign of small incremental innovations and movements and shifts, know, small edits and big ripples. I'll give you a couple of examples of where I think innovation is at the moment in learning. It's definitely not at the graphic level.

Greg Arthur (04:39.798)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (04:53.818)

of an experience. I think that was 90s basically. I think, is it at a product level? No, I don't think so. Is it in a, not wide scale, not wide scale. There is some very cool stuff happening, but I don't think it's clear yet. And that's more in the generative AI front, and I think that's maybe emergence back there.

Greg Arthur (05:06.081)

Not wide scale anyway, I don't think.

Nick Petch (05:20.329)

Is it on a service level? I think so. I think innovation, of 2024, the place in which innovation occurs is actually on the service and the experience level. So what that means, I feel, is very much like not just looking at the product, but at the full ecosystem in which the product sits and where it belongs.

think we were nerding out on this Donald Shun quote when we connected, which is like, yeah, it's not what road to build, it's where to place the road. Because I think one of the things about innovation is it sort of actually occurs where there is no qualification. So the idea being,

It's not what bit of road to build because that's a graphic problem. We solved that decades ago. We could build any type of road, underwater roads, overwater roads. All that stuff isn't the problem space. The problem space is where do we put the road? Does it go underwater? Does it go through a community? Does it go through a school? Does it separate and divide a neighbourhood? This is the problem space that is multifaceted and there is

Greg Arthur (06:26.987)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (06:37.243)

there's no real qualification for it. And a fun fact I actually looked up, which I think also explains a lack of innovation in learning, is what they used to do to figure out where to put freeways and highways back in the day, is they used to get the map out.

Greg Arthur (06:38.986)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (06:56.079)

And they used to find the average distance from the state line and bang, that's where the road would go. It would go directly into the average of the spacing between the state lines. And that's how they solved that problem.

Greg Arthur (07:12.287)

I mean, I mean, the, the, the crikey and just to clarify, I'm usually standing up for these, but I figured for our one, I'm to sit down because we're going to get real into it. So I might jiggle around in my seat a bit. I, I like the fact that there is some sort of mathematical scientific base level, but like something where they gone, this is an average. We'll just bang it here. And at least everything's uniform. But my issue with that, my issue with how

Nick Petch (07:17.511)

Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Nick Petch (07:37.575)

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (07:42.377)

when you're talking about innovation and all the other things that you were talking about around just saying like, it separate a neighbourhood? Or does it go through a school, through a road? If you bring that into a learning context right now, the A to B of does it get us from here to here seems to be what I see a lot of people focusing on. As in we have a, I always keep saying leadership is a thing, maybe not leadership, we just have a skill problem to go. So we have a skill problem, we'd like not to have a skill problem, fine.

Nick Petch (08:01.842)

yeah.

Nick Petch (08:06.473)

you

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (08:11.723)

I get that makes perfect sense. Companies do this all the time. But then when you start to think about getting from A to B, there is like, if you broke down into A1, A2, A3, there could be three points, could be 300 points in between, but nobody seems to really focus on more than just we got to get from here to here. So let's make a thing. So when you talked about service design, I think it's definitely,

It's definitely something that is being appreciated more, but I don't feel like we're bringing in true service designers. We're bringing in learning people and expecting them to do service design. And I don't feel like we're offering anyone anything tangible around experience design, which would then affect service design or product design. We're just saying to them, this is a phrase that we're all saying a lot at the moment. So let's do that for a bit. And

Nick Petch (08:43.038)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (08:49.641)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (09:08.083)

It's a great experiment. If someone somewhere is going, this is going really well. Well done because we've got so many people trying so many different things, but I'm interested.

Nick Petch (09:13.533)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. And the way they're dividing the average is we've got a skills problem quick, generate 30,000 skills, just get a computer to just now basically aggregate a content ecosystem and job done. And it's just like, nope. And I think...

Greg Arthur (09:30.719)

Ahem.

Greg Arthur (09:35.883)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (09:42.449)

Yeah, the practice dissonance in L &D is huge. It's so big that I don't think we can see it anymore. Because of holes back here, you know, like, I think the skill shortage in L &D for progressing L &D aren't skills of L &D, really, quite simply. I think we're just trying to apply it to learning or to a context. don't...

Greg Arthur (10:05.771)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (10:08.105)

I don't necessarily think that's the right approach. I find it quite interesting, particularly when people say, I've been working in complex systems and helping organizations do X, Y, and Z for ages, but I'm not a learning expert. It's like, I think you might be, actually. I do sense, like, yeah,

Greg Arthur (10:23.113)

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (10:28.373)

Just to cut you off there quickly Nick, how would you define a learning expert right now?

Nick Petch (10:37.007)

L and D or learning? I need to separate the two. because, here's the thing, when you're dealing with the education system, one of the inevitable things you will end up bumping into as a teacher is the business and the policy end of education. And oftentimes, it can really outweigh,

you know, the volume of learning that's occurring. In fact, a lot of what's being designed and done is more to do with policy and with the business end of it. And hey, fair enough, it's a pretty tough gig running education, whether it's university, you know, schools and so on so on. I believe L &D kind of has the same problem a bit, right? And really, they're often looking at the wrong things. They seem to have a bit of a

complex with being seen, feel like it's L and D is about the volume of things for them, right? And I don't think volume is actually the right metric or aspiration because more volume does not equal, you know, what's on the other side of often what we're trying to look for, right?

Greg Arthur (11:48.299)

Mm.

Greg Arthur (11:55.563)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (11:58.033)

So I'd say the difference between L &D and learning is L &D is highly institutionalised and therefore has really, I feel, a lot of the anchors and lot of the challenges that come with being institutionalised. The same problems and challenges the tax department has, the government has, right? They tend to develop these Stelic types of anchors like...

Greg Arthur (12:18.165)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (12:22.109)

you know, same thinking and bias and these types of things. Whereas I think learning experts come in all shapes and forms. know, learning is probably, our greatest human phenomena. It's been around for a little over four million years, perhaps, since fundamentally we'd started.

Greg Arthur (12:29.255)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (12:46.169)

using tools and creating tools. So you can probably go back to the stick and the rope, right? The stick was used to push danger away, the rope was used to pull things, positive things, you know, towards us, right? Food, friends in flight, I guess. I didn't live back then, but you gotta use your imagination. But really, like, you know, that's how far back learning kind of goes. And we've been through, obviously, industrialization. That had a...

Greg Arthur (12:47.944)

Mm.

Yeah.

Nick Petch (13:13.725)

massive impact on learning. That started with the whole kind conveyor belt kind of approach to learning, I really feel. There's a lot of work in the 80s to try to disrupt a lot of the thinking around learning, like the performatists, right? They're sort of more performance consulting type folks, often training's the last intervention.

Greg Arthur (13:27.368)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (13:33.415)

where I feel like today, unfortunately, training's always a first intervention. And that sort of shows you, I think, that cycle. I feel like the only people doing complex work that don't understand gamification, as an example, is L &D. Because they haven't read much of the literature outside of, I think, few of the pamphlets that have been passed around. They tend to feel gamification is about.

Greg Arthur (13:43.112)

Mmm.

Greg Arthur (13:53.67)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (14:02.237)

badges.

Greg Arthur (14:03.676)

Yeah, and points and this is the thing, there is somebody, I won't mention their name, they might not be comfortable with it, but there is someone I used to work with that is super into games. And when we first started talking about games outside of work, aren't we nerd out about, I really like a horror game, like a Dead Space or Resident Evil, those kind of things. Love them, could play them all day. Then we started to make games at work.

and I immediately kind of was like, this is rubbish. They're all rubbish. I've never played a work-based game and gone, I can feel a change in myself or someone has noticed something in me. All I've done is gone, I got some badges that are meaningless and some points that I don't really care about. And I just stopped doing my emails for 20 minutes, but I could have done that by just going for a walk. Like this doesn't really feel, and they had a very, very different opinion.

Nick Petch (14:52.457)

Totally.

Nick Petch (14:56.424)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (15:01.651)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (15:02.45)

But I asked them and I challenged them to tell me, find me a game that is work based that actually does anything. Yeah.

Nick Petch (15:12.125)

Yeah, yeah. I feel, yeah, it's a false economy of motivation. I feel like I might have taken this down a rabbit hole with that, because you asked me a simple question. What is the difference between L &D and learning? I feel like that is sort of just one of those signals that kind of tells me something institutionalized, you know.

Greg Arthur (15:17.031)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (15:33.779)

Whereas I feel like out there in the learning landscape, I mean, you can go across so many intersections from knowledge management, which Elodie has no idea about, let's be honest, through to complexity in systems work, through to social impact work, through to, I mean, arguably learning is the main function of all design.

Greg Arthur (15:56.358)

Hmm. Yeah.

Nick Petch (15:57.381)

So think about anyone who's designed a bridge or a road or a new policy structure for getting better service to marginalised people. There is a lot of learning. And I think this is where maybe part of my influence is the research I've kind of been doing is really looking at what I'm terming the fourth field of learning, which is

Greg Arthur (16:04.9)

it

Greg Arthur (16:18.672)

Mm.

Nick Petch (16:23.881)

a learning, a field of learning beyond the first three fields of education, training and development. It's really taking a view that education, training and development are quite simply constructs for learning, right? Industrialized constructs. And I feel that 90 % of the literature is where 10 % of learning is really happening.

Greg Arthur (16:29.594)

Mm-hmm.

Greg Arthur (16:47.771)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (16:48.217)

and that there's this vast unexplored domain where we have very little to no knowledge of the learning of living systems. And so I've sort been looking at this kind of space that is non-linear, it's non-authoritative, so there's definitely an absence of authoritative knowledge and practice, which is what makes it accessible. You know, it's definitely...

Greg Arthur (17:09.315)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (17:17.363)

got a strong dialogical presencing, means that, again, there's that absence, but it means that, like, there is a lot of dialogue occurring, that it's artifact rich, so things are being made quite rapidly, quite scrappily.

Greg Arthur (17:26.467)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (17:32.792)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (17:35.047)

And I think also, you know, in this particular space, numbers don't mean a hell of a lot, or binary data doesn't mean a hell of a lot, rather, we need to sort of look at and turn to, and I'll link this back to the innovation question we were talking about, like I think the furthest forefront for learning and innovation is very much in the data space that we, you know, are looking at, and I don't think...

Greg Arthur (17:58.414)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (18:02.513)

numbers or know, cold extractions of facts are kind of really what we need to be doing. And the work I've been looking at is narrative enhanced practices. So that's really considering.

distributed research approach where we collect masses of stories and narrative from people about a particular context that we're researching. The stories we tell ourselves and ultimately the stories we're telling each other about a particular thing. And then using...

Greg Arthur (18:24.453)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (18:33.953)

Are you talking about like true experience design then, but through very much a product design process. So like if someone's making a, looking for something to show you, just something like a thing, like a real product, this microphone for example, they probably didn't, the guys at Rode probably didn't just go, we've done it now. Attempt one, aren't we great? Let's go and sell it straight away.

Nick Petch (18:41.146)

yeah.

Yeah.

Nick Petch (18:48.477)

Yeah, I feel ya. Yeah.

Nick Petch (18:56.775)

Nah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (19:01.903)

They probably went through a lot of different things that got them there, a lot of talking. And I feel like for learning, is a real genuine interest in everything you've just said. And I think there are, I'm going to be very generic and slip them into two camps. I feel like there is one camp people that can do it and are really trying their best to do it.

they have some level of limited success because obviously they're in a corporation or they are paid by a corporate entity so there are rules and things they have to follow and games they have to play and then there are other people that just talk about it and just say the words and don't and don't really understand the words and I feel for them because there is nowhere to go apart from I would argue

Nick Petch (19:44.552)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (19:56.101)

this podcast or any other podcast you've been on all finding you physically and asking you to talk to them about it because I don't think people are talking about this. I don't think people are explaining it in this way. Yeah.

Nick Petch (20:04.353)

yeah, it's, yeah, yeah, yeah, don't like you read, you I think you hit something really, really important. I would call it emergent practice. And all fields of practice, I feel have

emergent practices stemming out of them. Just so happens, you know, design has a sort of a specialization in creating emergent practices, because it's sort of what design has become. It's not about material standards anymore. It's about what are the most like...

aggressive techniques, approaches, mindsets, experiments, practice architectures we can use to explore how we might create health products that create a greater sense of personal authenticity, right? Or whatever the context is. And I feel like this space becomes highly...

Greg Arthur (21:03.747)

Mm.

Nick Petch (21:11.261)

Like one of the things I think designers can do very, very well that is unique is they can balance multiple truths. It's like contradictory to the scientific world. It's like something absolutely can have multiple truths to it. You the use of this Shure microphone.

Greg Arthur (21:27.234)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (21:30.823)

you know, isn't just for podcasters, right? It's got multiple kind of scenarios and truths and things like that to it. And I think like just having that, like what I would call being ecologically minded, that is you're not so like attached to facts, you're more sort of going out into the ecology, you understand facts are just an abstraction. It's like one truth.

Nick Petch (21:59.273)

And so, it's interesting then, it's like, this is a complicated system.

Greg Arthur (22:22.371)

Mm.

Greg Arthur (22:44.643)

Mm.

Nick Petch (22:45.389)

So you start to realize, I feel anyway, that you can't really fix a system. You can't impose a fix on a system. You can really only undertake initiatives really in an attempt to amplify and dampen signals in a system and try to influence it to interact differently with itself. And I sort of bring this up because I feel like we've spoken about like where's innovation? We've spoken about

Greg Arthur (23:11.296)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (23:15.401)

I feel like some of that emergent practice and what's out there and I feel like the narrative enhanced approach towards dealing with this type of stuff is really the only way to first make a system actually visible. I'll give you like a performance context just to ground this stuff because people are probably listening going, what is this?

Greg Arthur (23:32.811)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (23:40.041)

Well, it's happening in Australia. But I think like, so let's just take something everyone knows. Diversity and inclusion. Cool. So often what happens with diversity and inclusion is they go, hey, does anyone know a trainer or some good training that was done on diversity and inclusion or some cut, paste, job done, see you later. No change. And it's happening at mass. Essentially, a lot of important things.

Greg Arthur (24:02.261)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (24:05.949)

However, we sort of like, okay, instead of that approach, which I just call the non-design approach, it's absolute non-design, instead of that, what we might do is we might go and capture the stories of 500 people in a big organisation, or we might ask them some interesting questions like,

Tell me about a time when you experienced diversity and inclusion here. how often do you feel like this culture has been made for you and who you are? Or asking some of these deeper types of questions and gathering these stories that people are telling themselves and then determining the stories people are telling each other. And what will come out of that is ideally stories we, as an organisation, want to hear more of and stories we want to hear less of.

Greg Arthur (24:35.147)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (24:52.553)

rather than trying to fix the whole thing, which you can't do, mind you, and which training will never do. We cluster these stories into what we think are the most important, like what's the next right thing to do? It's like, that cluster of stories over there. We wanna hear less of that, we wanna hear more of this. It's like, okay, cool. What is the smallest, cheapest, fastest moving experiment or probe that we can run to try to shift those stories?

Greg Arthur (25:06.038)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (25:19.137)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (25:20.489)

And that's literally what we're doing. Sometimes it is a two page PDF. Sometimes it is a message from the CEO. Sometimes it is, you know, just these small incremental shifts, right? But you try and get like a whole bunch of them going at once. This is how you actually start to change a system.

It's not the three year transformation with the linear plan. Never works, never has worked. I feel it's like this other type of approach where you're creating multiple stimulations and simulations in a system to start interacting differently with itself. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (25:52.096)

Hmm.

There's a, I don't know how much you're into cycling. There is a, they're now called in the Oscar-winning deals, used to be Team Sky. It was the Chris Froome, Bradley Wiggins kind of heyday. And they just won everything. Like they could just turn up and be like, gosh, I just woke up this morning. You are sorry?

Nick Petch (26:10.953)

Okay. They were the Stephen Kings of cycling. That's it. They're like the Stephen Kings of cycling as in they're just like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (26:19.167)

Yes. They could just turn up and be like, I slept terribly last night guys. look, I've just won. Like they were great. They were really, really great. And they had a very specific moment in time, quite a number of years where they were untouchable. The guy that was the team principal was a guy called Dave Brailsford. And he's gone off and started doing some other things now. And incidentally, they're not doing as well. Whilst he was there,

Nick Petch (26:28.859)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (26:48.241)

was a phrase I kept hearing over and over again which I never really looked into until much later on we talked about marginal gains so he was basically talking about things like so it's probably when I started to kind of very slowly look into like bike mechanics like how can I fix stuff myself on my seat or how can I set my bike up to be right for my body and my riding style and blah blah blah so he was talking about certain things like on the time trial bike

you're in a very, like your back is like this, your head's down here, like you're not in a regular racing position. It's all very aerodynamic and all the rest of it. But you're saying obviously where your seat is, because of your body position, be, even if it's like two millimeters back this way, that can make such a difference to how your legs power through and how flat you can make your back and where your head is and all the other bits and pieces. I'm not trying to win any time trials, I'm, that's not me.

Nick Petch (27:44.265)

You

Greg Arthur (27:45.311)

But little things like that where I was thinking, surely two millimetres means nothing. Like two millimetres is like what this? Maybe less, it's tiny, it's nothing. And then he was talking about watching a race where one of his guys was doing it and they're just shifting their bum back a little bit on the seat. And he's going, we had some issues in training, we had some issues with the mechanics and the rider and they weren't getting on and blah, blah, And the guy lost about six seconds on his time trial.

Nick Petch (28:12.489)

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (28:13.673)

and instantly came second rather than first where he should have come. And then the next time they doing it, the guy didn't move apart from his legs and he absolutely floored everybody. And they were like, we got it right this time. And that was the only thing they changed. Well, the only thing he said they changed. But this notion of, like you saying, it's not a linear three year journey of we're not doing so great now, but in three years we're going to, you know, we'll get these young riders, we'll train them up and blah, blah. Because I know we've got some really great people right now.

Nick Petch (28:25.843)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (28:29.821)

Yep. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (28:43.381)

We need to do something right now because not only we're getting paid by the sponsors, we've got a team to pay for, we've got staff to pay for, we've got fans to entertain and we've got races to win. So, and this will happen every year for the next three years, unless we start doing something about it right now. But yeah, it's mad to think that this happens in probably lots of other sports or industries, but learning just kind of, just kicks the same can down the road.

Nick Petch (28:55.913)

Yep. Yep.

Nick Petch (29:00.905)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (29:05.513)

This is what.

Nick Petch (29:11.446)

Yeah. Yeah, and so let's talk about performance problems. Performance problems need to be addressed right now. Not next quarter. Not in eight weeks after we've storyboarded. Right now with the market. Right, that is.

Greg Arthur (29:17.429)

Mm-hmm.

Greg Arthur (29:21.237)

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (29:28.522)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (29:34.749)

That is the holy grail. And it's almost like, it's funny, the way LND thinks about learning at times, it's like, okay, well if we just have all the content there, when the performance problem, which no one's identified, occurs, people will just magically go to the LMS, which is where learning goes to die, let's be honest, and they will pluck out a 15 minute module and...

Nick Petch (30:06.041)

It's kind of nonsense, I guess, but I actually kind of want to go back to the moving on the seat piece and stuff, because I can sort of maybe draw this link. I'll attempt to. A little bit earlier, I was talking about what's great about research in that it enables you to get into relation with and communication with that ecology, that system you're in.

Greg Arthur (30:13.696)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (30:33.171)

And these athletes, what makes them great and doing those micro massive impacts is that they are so deeply in relation with that system they're in, is they're performing and cycling and so on and so on. And so that's what I feel like there's totally a link in that analogy there about making those micro increments by being in relation to and in communication with that sort of system.

that you're working in. And I feel like that's kind of the key is sort of starting to change the mindset about how we approach design and change and this type of work because the other kind of piece that's there I think if you move beyond training and education, I started to realize anyway that

you know training by the time it's implemented ends up being an authoritative knowledge and practice written by someone else yesterday. in that case, it's real purpose is to sort of establish and maintain the rules and routines within a context in which it's got some boundaries like an organisation or some job families and that type of thing.

Greg Arthur (31:39.114)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (32:00.519)

Whereas I feel like what we're actually needing to do is in a safe and responsible way is actually to break rules and routines. Because that is kind of what innovation is. know, and this is where the whole like, so what you're saying, you should climb ladders dangerously and the whole compliance thing pops up, right? I don't really think compliance is...

necessarily learning often, it's more policy and that's where that business end I was sort of about, that could stay in education, that's fine, go back over and stay in training, no dramas, we're talking about learning here, it's a far broader spectrum. And there is some incredible learning to be happening in...

Greg Arthur (32:40.04)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (32:46.247)

not just the cognitive domain, but these other domains that I feel are more to do with safety, like the affective and the psychomotor domains of learning, which is not just what's going on here, but what's happening emotionally and physically, right? I learnt recently, I've taken up DIYing, bands and tiny homes and things of that nature.

Greg Arthur (33:02.941)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (33:13.585)

I can't cut straight to save my life. Doesn't stop me chopping through the side of my van, know, like, just like cutting a hole out and just kind of going, it's too big. Right? Right? So this is my psychomotor kind of cognitive dissonance that's going on with something I'm completely unskilled at, but it's totally overconfident about it. So definitely some, you know, cognitive dissonance happening there. But.

Greg Arthur (33:25.725)

Hahaha

Greg Arthur (33:32.157)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (33:41.683)

But the of the point I'm sort of trying to make is like, you know, I feel like learning is so much more holistic in that sense. And there's no possible way that we can really design for practicing across multiple contexts in a training context or in a training simulation.

Nick Petch (34:04.169)

I'll sort of bring into maybe some product and some data space because talking about data and the narrative stuff's awesome. People are probably like, what are you talking about still? But trust me, it's out there. You can go, you can have a look at what's out there. But one of the key...

shifts that I think we need to do to innovate is step away from respective analysis, which is we currently do in education, where we put people through training or educational curriculum. We test them, see how they went, and then afterwards we send them an engagement survey and say out of one to five.

Greg Arthur (34:28.03)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (34:42.579)

How awesome was it? And what can we do to make it better? And by that point, it's too late. It's done. I call it autopsy data. It's like the data of dead people, right? It's like, what did people do? Did they complete it or incomplete it? I can't think of anything more useless outside of a compliance context for an organization.

Greg Arthur (34:44.242)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (34:49.086)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (35:03.378)

I mean, is that also not a million miles off what kind of college and university is though? You kind of spend quite a number of years and in some cases a huge amount of money and then you come out at the end with a bit of paper and you say, I turned up enough to get this. I mean, apart from, and I'm gonna, again, I'm sure there are more than this.

Nick Petch (35:13.438)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (35:25.139)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (35:28.573)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (35:33.544)

But apart from doctors and vets, I can't think of anyone that comes out with anything hugely practical where it's maybe a little bit more day one. You can actually do something on day one in a real life context.

Nick Petch (35:48.957)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel yeah. And you know what's even funnier in the medical space is CPD, which I'll get into at a later point, but that's your monthly mandatory three hours of learning. And it's like, why three hours? It's gonna be three hours of content. It's like, well, why three? Like, you know, like who came up with the number three? you know, it's very interesting. But, yeah.

Greg Arthur (36:04.296)

mad.

Greg Arthur (36:13.512)

Someone who's worried about lawsuits somewhere said, three.

Nick Petch (36:17.031)

I think so, I think so. So that's one side of the coin. That's status quo, that's where we are. That's how I feel the vast majority of all educational technology, systems, philosophies, whole kit and convertible has been designed. The shift where we're gonna go is not respective analysis but monitoring as evaluation. That is where measurements never really done. So.

Greg Arthur (36:37.693)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (36:44.251)

So some of the work that I was sort of doing was looking at job task-based learning practice architectures. So essentially taking a skill, defining the skill by identifying the 16 to 30 job tasks that correlate to that skill. If done well, then would represent the different levels of proficiency of having that skill in the organisational context. Then...

Greg Arthur (37:07.836)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (37:12.189)

taking adults out of their homes at night and putting them into sprints, right? And essentially the sprint architecture design is, you your job as a learner is fundamentally to do two to three job tasks a week.

Greg Arthur (37:26.088)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (37:27.283)

job of the leaders and the managers who are also on sprints but more so coaching and leadership is to create the opportunities for you to practice those job tasks. So if your job task is understand the customer and your level one proficiency on a skill, your leader's job is to create opportunities for you that week to be able to listen to the customer.

Greg Arthur (37:37.192)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (37:50.057)

And so all of a sudden we have this sort of, this actual system that's starting to influence itself differently, job task by job task. And this is why it's very interesting job task, because job tasks, we can monitor the completion of job tasks in near real time in relation to a skill.

And when this starts to get really interesting is like, if we figured out that, I don't know, if we don't learn underwater basket weaving in six months time, we're out of the market. We will not compete in the market. Everyone's talking about underwater basket weaving and how important it is. So okay, so we built her course. It's full of content stuff and whatever. And we enrolled, you know.

2,000 of our frontline sales force in it, because they're the key. And it's been going for six months, and there's 23 tasks in it, and there's been less than 5 % adoption or completion of those tasks. That is probably the surest measure as an organisation as to whether or not we actually pertain a skill, whether or not we actually have a skill, and therefore whether or not an ROI is even

Greg Arthur (38:47.193)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (38:56.195)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (39:03.907)

are feasible or true or whether or not we are on point for our strategy. And what's even better about that approach I feel is for the, from what I've seen for the first time in LND or learning, we can actually intervene.

and actually iterate. So if we do have something that's deployed and we can see the job tasks aren't being adopted, we have a multitude of small probable options available to us. Okay, so let's maybe go rapidly review those job tasks to make sure they actually correlate correctly or let's communicate and start to get the line managers to drive this stuff for some motivation or some cultural shift, right? Or some expectation shift or let's maybe, you know, start to pull some focus

scripts from that. So rather than building 12 month long training programs and doing all of this type of stuff where content's not so much a premium anymore, and that breaks my heart, because I started with books and made my way through digital until I knew I love content, right? I like really high quality content. But I feel like just working on iterating those job tasks and getting it right, and getting the people right, and getting the culture right, and getting the climate right.

Greg Arthur (40:04.175)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (40:17.678)

Mm.

Nick Petch (40:19.741)

And that is, I feel like, where the future of it's all going and where technology obviously needs to go.

Greg Arthur (40:25.848)

Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. think that's all that's all it's very logical, which makes it feel like it should be part of a product process because that is largely based on logic. It feels like there is still somehow an appetite for these long form extravagant let's fly people around the world courses. But to your point about

Nick Petch (40:51.901)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (40:53.998)

giving people opportunity for the tasks. There's also, the only bit I would add to that is it's also for people to be continuously monitored and course corrected. That marginal gains again around, yes you did the task, but doing the task, don't know, 50 times doesn't mean you're any good at it. If someone hasn't gone, you've been doing it wrong since the third time and you've assumed that that's the right way. just, it's like me fixing my bike.

Nick Petch (41:15.421)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (41:23.096)

is very off the moment so it's Tuesday now, Saturday just gone, I took my bike in for a service and I put it back together and there was one bit that wouldn't go back together so I assumed this bit must be broken, one of the bearings is not doing what it should be doing so I showed the the much clever mechanic man and said I've done all this, here's the bits I've done

this bit, I'm holding it over here and my bike's over here and he was like, you've just put it on the wrong way around, that's why it's not, I was like, it is broken but because you've been doing it there, was like cool thank you very much, could you please replace that, thank you. But I did ask him, was like can you show me how to do it because if I take it apart again because I'm traveling or something, I need to know because I can't keep ringing you up and go, alright Steve, how do I do this?

Nick Petch (41:49.865)

You

Nick Petch (41:53.385)

Good.

Nick Petch (41:57.563)

Yeah!

Nick Petch (42:05.397)

I love this so much. This is great.

Greg Arthur (42:17.626)

So there needs to be that kind of, that incremental, whether it's something really hard and fast, like just show me once and I'll get it, or if it's something like a behaviour, you're gonna get it wrong sometimes because there's gonna be about a thousand outside factors that come at you. So it's knowing how to either spot that or be self-aware or something to just follow the path you're to be following.

Nick Petch (42:17.715)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (42:28.275)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (42:39.517)

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, yeah. And I love this so much and I was laughing, I was doing a whole bunch of Ikea. I spent two days battling Ikea on the weekend. put it together and I looked down and there's like a spare nut on the ground. I'm like.

Greg Arthur (42:57.018)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (43:00.925)

Yeah, so probably in there somewhere. Like it's meant to be in one of those little now unreachable corners, I, you know, that happens I think often. Couple of things here. So I reckon, so one of the things we learned with that job tasking stuff is it takes the average employee two to three attempts to kind of start getting those job tasks. Think about like,

responding to client understanding in the sales space. So you listen to the client or you read the brief and now you need to write a 1A4 page that demonstrates you understand what on earth they're talking about and that you've got some value to offer. You're not gonna get that first try. Sorry. Yeah, okay. So repetition across context.

Greg Arthur (43:29.486)

Mm-hmm.

Greg Arthur (43:41.881)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (43:48.495)

Awesome, probably the best thing for learning. But I actually found some other things that were really, really interesting, I thought. And it does link to the behavior piece, which I want to touch on, because I feel like behavior is incredibly difficult to get to. Like so hard, actually, you know, because it actually has more to do not with the learning component, but the environmental component.

Greg Arthur (44:05.818)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (44:13.939)

So with these kind of like learning stuff and what needs to be present, what signals need to be strong and amplified in a system in order to sort of have a capacity for learning at scale is really like permission, opportunity, motivation. And when I say those three words, I mean them not just.

Greg Arthur (44:38.582)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (44:43.815)

you know, intrinsically like or like not just internal to to to that individual. mean, collectively, as as as a workforce, but also collectively as a workplace, maybe even collectively as a sector, like or as a you know, like

Greg Arthur (44:49.28)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (45:05.161)

I don't know if anyone's done the research on this, but I'm willing to bet that some sectors learn more than others because it's a necessity. Like, I don't know, maybe space travel. Maybe they learn more often than say, I don't know, healthcare, right? Why? It's interesting thing to look at. But one of the things that I think we actually need to be looking at isn't on...

Greg Arthur (45:13.002)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (45:31.389)

graphic or the product level like we were talking about before. I think the innovation is in how do we create environments where there is permission, opportunity and motivation because I feel like if the environment, the key actors and the key scenes provide permission to learn and engage in different ways by providing opportunities then the human motivation actually follows. I think right now

Greg Arthur (45:33.015)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (45:41.546)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (45:57.643)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (46:01.545)

60 % of the workforce doesn't wanna learn. It's like, just this global workforce apathy that's going on. It's the whole quite quitting thing. It's all of this stuff that's happening. And it's partly to do with, it's not L &D's fault for sure. There's so much going on I feel, but we need to become, I think, environmental.

Greg Arthur (46:08.055)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (46:26.045)

I don't want to the term engineer because I think you can really engineer. It's an easy way to explain it, but it's a bit different in practice, but really environmental engineers where we're starting to engineer the environment to allow and provide permission of learning. And what that actually looks like in reality is like...

Greg Arthur (46:33.718)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (46:46.843)

I've never worked in sales before, but I'm keen to start learning. So you know what? My manager's gonna give me a low risk opportunity here to actually go and have a go. And they're gonna give me just enough performance support, thanks to Nick's.

Greg Arthur (46:58.581)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (47:04.617)

Agile Sprinty system I'm forced to do now. There's a PDF there with five things to do and that's what I'm gonna do. And it's like, didn't do very well on that. But then my manager's being instructed to sit down and let's do some reflection. What worked, what didn't work. It's just that creating that cohesion of an environment that's got the right kind of permissions and behaviours because

Greg Arthur (47:09.857)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (47:24.213)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (47:34.075)

One of the other thing, and I think Dave Snowden says this so well actually, if I can not butcher the quote, you can convince someone of anything in a workshop. I could convince them that this idea is amazing, that this value is really important. If I can lock them down and explain it to them, they will agree with me. I can convince them to agree with anything in a workshop.

Greg Arthur (47:55.028)

Mm.

Nick Petch (47:57.353)

As soon as you send them out and back into the real world, if that environment isn't congruent with that, see you later. That whole training was a waste of time and money, you know?

Greg Arthur (48:05.589)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (48:09.403)

Yeah and I think that last few points especially about the workshop and about the low risk sales opportunity, all of that for me ties back to service design, product design as in you could have, if you take product design first, you could have a great product. If nobody needs it, if nobody really knows they need it or even knows about it, which largely is a marketing thing,

Nick Petch (48:37.107)

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (48:39.05)

then it could be a great product that fails because it doesn't get used. If you have a great service offering, and again, if people don't need it, don't know they need it, that kind of thing, it will still fail. But it's also down to a point of if you don't enjoy it, like there is a level of enjoyment, and enjoyment could be in multiple different things, but like it could be that you are good at it. You could have been great at this fictitious sales opportunity. But if you didn't enjoy doing that,

Nick Petch (49:00.925)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (49:09.183)

they're not going to get the best out of you long term. They're going to be dragging you, kicking and screaming. If they go Nick, you were really good. You're like, yeah, I was really good, but I can hate it. So like, don't make me go back there. there needs to be, there needs to be the kind of marriage of both to be able to say, these things have to have to be, which I think the right word, not true. Cause that feels a bit hokey, but like,

Nick Petch (49:12.585)

That's right.

Nick Petch (49:19.037)

Yeah. Yeah. It's like public speaking or something. Yeah. It's like...

Nick Petch (49:29.95)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (49:38.191)

or an authentic practice, right? Like the way...

Greg Arthur (49:40.581)

Yeah, yeah. But like I said about the person leaving the workshop, how many workshops do people leave? Onboarding is the main one. Where they leave and onboarding for a company and go, everything's great, you're gonna have the best career in your whole life. And then you leave and go, yeah, like.

Nick Petch (49:46.941)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (49:55.175)

Yeah. Yeah, the broken promise of like, yeah, yeah. And you know, it's fascinating about, I love new starters, like in their psychology that's going on there. It's an identity crisis at scale going on for new starters. And the thing they really care about is, is, my boss like me? Or does my boss like me? Do I like my boss? And did I actually make a good decision?

Greg Arthur (50:02.005)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (50:12.853)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (50:25.577)

But it's like by the time you're our age, you know, it's not about the values, it's not about, you know, these tropes, right? It's about, so like the way we used to design values, I feel like when you're really limited, because I think some, we're talking like no constraints, but let's put some constraints in place. 20-minute module. How do you go about doing organizational values? 99 % of the time what happens is they go, here's our values, click on them, and there's,

some words and it's Nikon, maybe there's a video from the CEO, of course there's a video from the CEO. know, stories and stuff, and that's cool, that's cool, right? That's better than nothing. I think the way to do values is you go, what are you interested in? Where are your strengths, where your weaknesses? Get them to do sort of a reverse type of behavioural kind of questionnaire. Then illuminate which values most correlate with what they've provided in terms of where their key interests are.

Greg Arthur (50:58.9)

Hmm

Greg Arthur (51:07.732)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (51:23.943)

That is, I feel like, how you actually reverse this whole thing to lead people towards finding their own authentic practice. It's the meaning making that kind of happens in this space. getting back to what training is, which is the way I frame it, it's practically the Death Star, right? Authoritative knowledge and practice written by others yesterday to establish and maintain rules and routines. That's its function at an organizational.

Greg Arthur (51:43.892)

Mm.

Nick Petch (51:53.289)

It's not authentic practice. And what's really interesting about this stuff is best practice, codified practice, really only works in a very ordered type of system where things are pretty chill, pretty calm waters. And start to like, wind starts to blow, throw a couple of variables in, that all goes out the window. All goes out the window and we step into these other spaces.

Greg Arthur (52:06.164)

Mm.

Nick Petch (52:20.645)

of like novel and like emergent practices where really the skill is actually more of a seek, sense and respond. Or sense, you know, analyze, categorize. Like, you know, and start to break problems down and figure it out that way. And I feel that type of environment is one that actually is not applying training or learning stimulus that comes from L &D, but rather what I call real world

Greg Arthur (52:27.262)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (52:50.067)

training, sorry, real world learning stimulus, which is highly unpleasant and tends to occur when something is unreadable, unfindable, unfixable, undiscussable, un... unthinkable, a lot of these uns, which are very unpleasant type of territory. But really that's where learning happens. It's when you're hit with this sort of left field...

Greg Arthur (52:52.689)

Mm-hmm.

Greg Arthur (53:10.259)

Mm.

Nick Petch (53:19.803)

spontaneous context and you need to kind of adapt into that, right? You didn't see it coming this time. It's got your...

Greg Arthur (53:21.34)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (53:26.035)

So, yes to all of those. I wanna go back to a point you made a minute ago, but just on this one. If you take the average, actually no, not the average, let's take all of them. Let's take everyone that works in L &D right now. You've just said that last statement about everything's unthinkable, unimaginable, this is where they're, and again, I do fully buy into that.

Nick Petch (53:33.715)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (53:45.534)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (53:56.275)

How do they attack that? In a corporate setting.

Nick Petch (54:00.221)

Yeah, yeah, probably move beyond training and focus on creating more environments that can sustain a culture that has really a presence of learning. A presence of learning like so okay, well, what does that look like? It's like, well, okay.

Greg Arthur (54:15.068)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (54:23.721)

Probably the most entry level thing I can think of is a hackathon. Problem with hackathons though, it's got the same disease as training has with regards to learning, which is that it happens on a Thursday between the hours of 2.30 and 2.33 and it's got a preset agenda and this and that this and that. Yeah, and so what we kind of want to be doing is...

best simulation for work is work. Like work is learning and learning is work. It's that simple. And there is absolutely time, place, and intervention for training. Absolutely, it's got a function for sure, right? But I think a lot less than we sort of think about. So probably where I would sort of start really thinking about approaching it about what organizations can do is I'll go back to the narrative thing. I would actually start collecting at scale

Greg Arthur (54:54.929)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (55:20.347)

stories about real learning, right? Tell me about a time when you did learning that had nothing to do with content or training.

Greg Arthur (55:22.642)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (55:28.905)

and start to gather those stories and start to go, hmm, this is getting interesting, there's like 10 different cluster themes going on out of those cluster themes. Which of these stories do we want to hear more of or less of? This stuff's all about collaborating with complete strangers to fix a problem that we know is of high value to the customer and to our bottom line. Awesome, more of that, more of that. What's this one? This one is about getting a LinkedIn learning.

Greg Arthur (55:40.38)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (55:57.001)

license and looking at something and then that's it. like, okay, lesser that, right? And then so then what we do is in the environment, starting to work with that ecology of those people and saying, okay, look, we've heard you, this is where learning is really happening and where it really matters. So these are the initiatives we're doing, right? We're gonna create a problem factory.

bring problems, it's gonna be cohort-based learning projects, you've got a point two FTE permission to go and work on these projects, right, that you're passionate about, you know? So actually tackling learning from a policy level, right, which is a smart business decision, because policies, organisational policies about LNT budgets and...

Greg Arthur (56:43.068)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (56:51.337)

You know, if you can write a good enough letter, we'll give you $1,000 and you can go and do a course. We won't ask you if you ever used it or not. As long as you say it's for your job, it's, you know. So I would throw that out and I would basically go, right, everyone's got a .2, right, out of their, you know, 1.0 functional week time. This is for full time people. And I would support that. And then you've to get your leadership aligned to that. The biggest marker.

Greg Arthur (57:00.401)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (57:17.809)

I think for the adoption of learning is the attitude in which your manager shows up with. So if they are your closest point of authority, assuming you take managers seriously, right? If they show up with an entrepreneurial attitude towards learning.

Greg Arthur (57:22.578)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (57:36.925)

What's the highly likely behavioral outcome or correlation with that? It's going to be learning type behaviors, right? Entrepreneurial learning type behaviors. If their attitude is like, yeah, go and investigate. Here, take half a day, go look at it. Or, hey, if you check this out, you should go and spend some time with that person, Entrepreneurial, right? Versus non-entrepreneurial. Have you done your compliance training? Good, because they keep chasing me about it. Or learnings for after hours.

Greg Arthur (57:44.129)

Mm. Mm.

Greg Arthur (57:55.149)

Mmm. Yeah.

Nick Petch (58:06.813)

That's that's one I hear pretty often too, right? It's this time is a real myth, I reckon. Sorry.

Greg Arthur (58:08.9)

Yes, yeah, I mean, I mean, we, we've, we have both been, I currently am small business owners. so I guess that entrepreneurial attitude is something that resonates with me where you don't, you don't have a guidebook. There's no safety net and there's curriculum to get on board with. You're just there to go. I've got to, you know, my, my end state is

do some great work, get paid, pay my bills, still carry on doing great work. They kind of feed each other. But then underneath that is this subset of activities, these work tasks, which are accounting and sales and God knows what else. And then also really silly things that you go, I never had to deal with this before. I didn't know I had to deal with this before, but now I don't have very long to not only deal with it, but deal with it correctly and properly and it will happen.

Nick Petch (58:45.693)

Yeah, it's a dream.

Nick Petch (58:52.521)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (59:09.008)

however often any time it's going to happen. And you, and you just get on with it. Like in the last, so this has been what now? 16 months I've been doing this. I'm going to sit and make a list after this of all the things that I've done that I didn't think I would need to be doing. Because it is a long list. Interestingly, company values,

Nick Petch (59:11.259)

It's pretty real, doesn't it?

Nick Petch (59:29.789)

Yeah, yeah. I love that. yeah, yeah, yeah.

Greg Arthur (59:38.02)

has not been on that list.

Nick Petch (59:41.129)

Don't need them, don't need them because, like the idea with values I feel, ultimately they're a behavior. Organizational values are what to do in the absence of knowing what to do. I feel like that's the fundamental function. I think they're often used kind of incorrectly, you know? I've always liked the idea of like,

Greg Arthur (59:50.714)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (01:00:09.44)

I guess almost like

archetypes. This is something I haven't seen done but it's like okay well what are the archetypes you allow here? It's like right well you can be an innovator and that's what it looks like you know or you can be the connector or you know you can be so they're giving me these these sort of multi-dimensional authenticity to to to or permission to to be

Greg Arthur (01:00:20.675)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:00:41.939)

to take on some authenticity about how I shape myself and how I sort of, you know, frame my mind around my role and how I'm allowed to sort of act and behave in my role. And I think like that kind of archetypal or sort of like more like showing, you know, giving people some type of modeling for sure, because I think that's helpful. Otherwise they just revert to a standard script. Yeah, I think there's more.

Greg Arthur (01:01:06.872)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:01:11.731)

better than values, but also pretty progressive, right? But some really progressive organizations do do this. They have these sort of like hero personas. They've got like, know, sales, research, R &D, you know, and they tend to take on these personas about what they stand for. And I think that's kind of really worth its weight because it's almost like you've got communities in...

Greg Arthur (01:01:22.105)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:01:29.295)

Mm.

Nick Petch (01:01:39.879)

like all these sort of factions in an organisation. And I'm actually doing some research on factions at the moment in organisations. There's some very interesting stuff. I was reading Chris Argyle's Organisational Defence Patterns.

blow my mind, right? Yeah, it's real heavy. But there's like factions in organizations, right? You've got your sort of your status quo folks, you've got your innovators, you've got your firefighters, you've got your, you know, these different archetypal sort of factions that tend to emerge. And you hear about them and see them in different cultural aspects and things like that. But I do feel like we could actually probably create spaces for those.

Greg Arthur (01:01:57.999)

That's heavy.

Greg Arthur (01:02:07.843)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:02:26.884)

Mm-mm.

Nick Petch (01:02:28.329)

you know, and everyone's of value. The horrible labeling of the status quoers, for example, I bet if you actually took the time to sit down and listen to them, what they're actually saying is actually really important. It's like, we've all been here 35 years, we've seen all these attempts of other stuff and all it's done is X, Y, and Z, right? It's actually, none of it's worked. We still think the customer, and understand the customer, is the most important thing.

Greg Arthur (01:02:41.945)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:02:57.821)

That's the list, yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:02:59.124)

And I think that they say it's quote people, I've been in a couple of organizations where there's been those 15 to 20 year beyond kind of groups of people. there are, and again, I'm going to generalize, it feels like there are two camps again of these where there are some that do reflect on everything that has happened over time. And they can say,

Nick Petch (01:03:10.131)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:03:25.24)

the thing that this company used to stand for or the thing that this company used to talk a bit more about, that's the thing we're missing sight of that. If we can get back to that with a modern context, it won't happen overnight, but we'll get there and we'll be great. There's that. Then there are those that, that just kind of just shut off to everything and say, well, when I joined, it was great. And then someone came along with some idea on an iPad and

Nick Petch (01:03:41.437)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:03:48.839)

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:03:54.988)

I'm not into that. And they just completely reject everything. So I think there is a bit like any healthy society, you've got to have conflict, you've got to have difference of opinion, you've got to have people that want to keep their protected beliefs and their theories about why it should be that way. And you've got to also have people that completely challenge that and say, things have moved on. And you've got to just chuck them all in a room.

Nick Petch (01:04:05.821)

Yep. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:04:24.822)

And as long as they can come to some sort of agreement or some sort of, not even in a room, but some sort of conversation, long as they can have some sort of agreement around a common goal is this. And that's what we need to achieve. You don't need them at that point to figure out how they're going to get there. They just need to agree on the common goal and what success looks like.

Nick Petch (01:04:44.297)

And this is where I, yeah, yeah, and this is I think what you call like a.

like a power zone for systems work. So, okay, so you've got all these, let's call them tribes. These different tribes, they've all got a different narrative. Somehow, magically, you get them to all agree, like, yes, we need water, right? Yeah, we're gonna die if we don't have water. So, okay, cool, cool. Now, unless you're concerned about...

Greg Arthur (01:04:58.318)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:05:16.261)

How we go and do that, right? Rather than that, you kind of empower them all to run off and go and do it. And this is what great organizations do. What great organizations do and great, I think, leaders of design or leaders of organizations is they deploy multiple experiments looking at the same goal at the same time. Because likely only one of them is going to be successful out of seven.

Greg Arthur (01:05:37.656)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (01:05:42.761)

And so you give them all $50,000 at start. So go on, cool, go on figure it out. Here's 50K each, right? That's an investment of, let's say 500K, whereas if you put it all in one pot and one pie and spend 600K on something that didn't work, right? This is where the logic of the, what are we calling it? The two millimeter seat shift is really starting to occur.

Greg Arthur (01:06:06.851)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:06:10.119)

And what can happen, I think that's really cool for proper, legitimate, organisational learning, is that each of these projects can start learning off each other.

Maybe they join forces. Maybe they split out into tiny little multiples, right? Who knows? But the idea, again, I think is the idea of creating stimulus in the organization for change around a particular shared value or agreement. And not putting any caps on that. In a sense, it's a hackathon at scale.

Greg Arthur (01:06:39.854)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:06:46.712)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (01:06:47.827)

But it's not that like what I was talking about before, it doesn't have to happen between the hours of X, Y and Z. And you can work on these two things. It's like permission, opportunity, motivation. know, like if you think the future of this washing machine company is in solar powered wind sales, go and show me how. Like that's what great leaders do, you know?

Greg Arthur (01:07:12.204)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:07:14.537)

That's what Steve's kind of, I wouldn't say Steve Jobs necessarily, but I think like up in that territory of like, Google Cardboard, I think was like a brilliant innovation. And that was done, you know, with pizza box at lunchtime. Right?

Greg Arthur (01:07:26.52)

Mm-hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:07:34.927)

That was also like post glass though right? Which

Nick Petch (01:07:38.601)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they had Google Glass. But the problem with Google Glass was like it's inaccessible. So VR is a commercial flop. Don't get me wrong, it's incredible technology, amazing brands and people and stuff, but it's a commercial flop. It is not accessible. Or it's not adopted in terms of a product.

Greg Arthur (01:07:55.694)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:08:02.693)

Apple will get it right, I know, because they've been watching for years. But even their recent stuff, I think, was just a probe to price out of the market. I don't know. We'll see. Product conspiracy. That's for another product. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:08:06.254)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:08:15.662)

I mean, I'm intrigued by it. And if we're talking about innovation, I'm really intrigued by this nature of we're all gonna have these even, know, big gigantic headsets or these tiny little glasses that don't really look like anything, or maybe even we'll go back to Google Glass and it literally just has a tiny little bit of plastic. I mean, who knows? Or glass, whatever it's gonna be, maybe. But at no point have I done

I'm going to say 90 % of what, maybe 95 % of the actions I do in my life over the course of a year and gone, do know what? If I had this great big thing, stick out, strap to my face, this would be so much better. Like I'm more than happy just going, I can just get on with this. But then I can see somebody use, Microsoft has some really good use cases. But then the Vision Pro, was it two grand? Upwards of two grand?

Nick Petch (01:08:57.811)

Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:09:08.477)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:09:12.561)

Yeah, yeah, sup.

Greg Arthur (01:09:13.418)

One of the key videos I saw of it was someone going, you can play a vacuuming game. I'm like, or I could just get an actual vacuum out and clean my real floor rather than going, I've fictitiously cleaned up this floor that doesn't exist. Like that's bonkers.

Nick Petch (01:09:18.302)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:09:24.268)

Yeah, well, that's perfect analogy. It's perfect analogy for workplace learning as well. we like, like if work, if the performance.

imperative at work was vacuuming and vacuuming well. We could A, build a training simulation with all the scenarios of vacuuming like, my God, there's a cat. my God, there's a wrinkle in the rug. Like, you know, there's maybe a glass of water sitting there. Do you A, go around, you know, you could do that. Or you could use work, you know, and, and I think

Yeah, for me, it's a bit of a no-brainer, I feel. The other thing, though, I think that it's kinda starting to get, for me, I thought this was very interesting. And this was a flop, absolute flop. Yeah, but it's got tiny little 360 camera, simple walkie-talkie voice-activated GPT. And this is kinda like a cognitive apprenticeship thing.

Greg Arthur (01:10:10.117)

I've seen these.

Greg Arthur (01:10:31.316)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:10:32.73)

I think learning will move towards a small Tamagotchi like, well.

You know, all these, right? But I think there's something about having an isolated, dedicated, full-function product, like this is for learning, this does these five things. Doesn't have the whole ecosystem that everything a phone can do, gets a bit much. But I'm very interested in watching this space, and this thing's not great. It doesn't recognise the difference between a piece of coral and a rabbit's paw, to be honest. I've been doing a whole bunch of experiments with it.

Greg Arthur (01:10:54.122)

Mm.

Nick Petch (01:11:11.403)

It'll get better though. that kind of, hmm, cognitive apprentice or Merlin type of hardware piece I think is very, very interesting because for me, the big thematic that's going on in 200 years of design as to where we are today is deinterfacing or deinterfication.

Greg Arthur (01:11:12.5)

Mm.

Greg Arthur (01:11:31.818)

Mm.

Nick Petch (01:11:39.195)

So that it's the idea that the fact that I can now access the world's information through my own language with ChatGPT, it's huge. It's massive. And yeah, yeah, yeah. I think...

Greg Arthur (01:11:51.54)

Mm-hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:11:56.082)

and your iPhone.

Nick Petch (01:12:04.027)

Language is such a big deal like such a big deal half the barriers learning and stuff like that is

getting a language download first so you can understand what the heck they're talking about. In fact, you can't even find the right course until you understand what marketing analytics means. You know, like it's kind of a bit of, but if you sort of just use your own language and think, said, what is it that marketing people do to get more customers and make things more effective and da, da, da, da, da? You some knowledge back. wow, there's the discipline and the field of marketing analytics and this is kind of what it's about and da, da, So you're discovering.

Greg Arthur (01:12:16.202)

Mm.

Greg Arthur (01:12:33.128)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:12:42.735)

knowledge, which isn't necessarily learning at this point, but you're discovering knowledge through your own kind of language and your own world view, which at times could also be a bad thing, because we might be closed and whatever. But I just think this is really, really big deal. And I don't think it's so much about content. And I also don't think it's so much about...

Greg Arthur (01:12:56.692)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:13:09.925)

information that's meant to be remembered. Because I think this is also a big chunk that's missing from the whole learning equation. Everything is designed as if it needs to be memorised. It doesn't.

Greg Arthur (01:13:14.388)

Yes.

Greg Arthur (01:13:19.933)

think there's a difference between memory and if everyone took that on face value and didn't remember anything I would wake up like where am I like every like do you what mean it'd very very bizarre but then like there are certain things that then through repetition you kind of muscle memory or you kind of intuitively start to make decisions so if you're

Nick Petch (01:13:27.228)

I

I think we're already there though, to be honest.

Nick Petch (01:13:46.739)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:13:49.512)

So I'm doing some work with a company that does trading for their clients at the moment. And I asked them some really basic questions, I'm very risk averse, so all of this would be a no for me. Like unless I can give you 10 pounds and you tell me it's gonna make me 20 pounds, I'm not giving you any more than 10 pounds. Like I need to know exactly what's happening with this. They're like, we've got some people that put in big sums of money, they're very...

Nick Petch (01:13:49.704)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:13:53.619)

Yep. Yep.

Nick Petch (01:14:07.496)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:14:12.979)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:14:16.626)

happy with risk and this is how they, you know, but it's not for everyone. And they were talking to me about how they make decisions on how to overcome when something hasn't gone the way everyone involved in that transaction had planned. Whether it's tiny, big, whatever it's going to be. And there isn't, whilst there is a system that is tracking it to tell them this has gone above what people have been said they're comfortable with. There is still a human element.

Nick Petch (01:14:34.536)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:14:45.828)

on both sides to kind of say this is what's happened it's all we suggest but it's ultimately up to you. Do you want to do something about this or not and there might be two or three ways to deal with it. So there isn't necessarily a memory approach of you've been through the content you know exactly what to do you're kind of just intuitively and through experience going I'm going to give you some advice ultimately I could be wrong. But then going back to your your little device

Nick Petch (01:14:50.793)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:15:10.663)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:15:14.729)

Mm-hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:15:15.443)

There's a Black Mirror episode from a couple of years ago and I worry that the trend of Black Mirror episodes coming true is just going to be a thing now. But there was one about social media. So it followed the life of, can't really, it was the first one where they had like a really recognisable actor.

Nick Petch (01:15:18.951)

Yeah, I like the one.

Nick Petch (01:15:25.219)

Eh... 100 %

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:15:35.401)

I think it's season one. It was either season one or two. Yeah, yeah, I remember the one. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:15:39.248)

I it's two and she's living this kind of picture perfect life and then through a series of events has a real downfall and every interaction is scored each other so you and I would score each other off this and say I had a great conversation Nick five stars you might go he said a couple of things that wound me up two stars. I wonder if learning will just become like that where people don't have

Nick Petch (01:15:48.723)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:15:54.142)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:16:06.056)

Content they just have some sort of device where they just say I've done a thing I'm now a two out of five, but only need to be a two out of five for this job because my five out of five task I need to be a five out of five or Something really bad is going to happen. So that's I'm spending my time and I can justify it rather than people just Writing CVs and LinkedIn posts and God knows what else they do going. I'm just I'm just really good

Nick Petch (01:16:16.701)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:16:25.095)

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:16:34.888)

and and I had all this budget and had this great big job title I'm the best okay okay cool

Nick Petch (01:16:41.523)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, know, all design has deep within a high potential for unintended consequences. mean, look at dynamite.

Greg Arthur (01:16:50.664)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:16:54.376)

developed to help people, used to rob trains. Where do want to start? Look at social media. Designed to connect people, ends up dividing entire countries. There's all of these unintended consequences out there for sure, and that is part of being in the great human experiment. There is no life without consequence. But I do feel...

Greg Arthur (01:17:03.513)

man.

Nick Petch (01:17:24.093)

I do feel like there's a couple of interesting things in all of that that are some of the frontier, I think, for I think the spaces to be played. Because you can play in other spaces that I don't think are gonna go anywhere, like creating the ultimate LXP or...

you know, these things that are already dwarfed by where things are really headed, which is, I think, de-interfaced post-structural world, right, of this stuff, and that is, yes, in technology, but it's also the way knowledge is gonna work and professions are gonna work, and you can see all of the markers and things, but I do feel like...

Greg Arthur (01:17:51.759)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:18:11.097)

It's up to each individual, ultimately. Learning is one of these very interesting things. I'll see if I can just kind of land this, I'm conscious of time as well. I did a pretty deep study surveying and interviewing a good many people on what learning is.

Greg Arthur (01:18:30.437)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:18:33.199)

And I was looking at it through a couple of different lenses, like the epistemological view about, you know, knowledge and knowing, knowingness, and then the ontological point of view about really just like being, you know.

Nick Petch (01:18:50.026)

So one of the key questions I was asking was like, what does learning mean to you and how does it change your view of the world?

Greg Arthur (01:18:58.598)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:19:00.681)

And then, know, the sentiment I got back from a good number of people ultimately was that learning is the immaterial self. So, you know, as we sort of voyage through our professional and personal lives, and often a lot of this gets put into like a lifelong learning category, right?

Greg Arthur (01:19:21.733)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:19:27.433)

But I think there might be more importance to lifelong learning than we give merit to, both in our professional and personal lives. And I think it's about time that we started to advocate for organisational justice in terms of lifelong learning and the human outcomes that actually surround that and creating better outcomes. Because I think learning is that important.

Greg Arthur (01:19:36.166)

Mm.

Greg Arthur (01:19:51.238)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:19:57.15)

if not one of the more important things for organisations and for us as a species, that it's worth actually advocating and going for the human outcome element. I mean there is no stronger socio-economical indicator than education.

Greg Arthur (01:20:21.592)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:20:22.121)

you know, globally speaking, and I need, okay, that was 2017 studies, I need to go and check if the world hasn't changed. But whether or not you've been educated is that strongest global indicator as to where you're gonna be on socioeconomic ladder. More stronger than many things like what country you're in or, know, so.

I really feel like that's how I sort of feel about learning as a function and I don't think there's enough people taking care of it. That it needs a whole bunch of more people to really be looking not in the L &D thing, but in the kind of the learning kind of thing. And I don't think you're gonna find them in L &D much longer. I think they're gonna more go out towards...

Greg Arthur (01:20:53.22)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:21:06.223)

social impact, complexity, service, interaction, right? These are people who see learning, but they recognise it sort of runs through many, many facets, yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:21:12.046)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:21:18.242)

Yes, yeah, I agree. think there's definitely something about...

I think we touched on it right at the very top of this. I think it's definitely something more around service design than anything else, as in, this might even be a symptom of a post-COVID world that now that we are allowed back out, and it sounds mental to even say that we weren't allowed out as an entire population, but we're allowed back out, we're allowed to do things again. Service takes on a whole new meaning, as in,

Nick Petch (01:21:44.776)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:21:52.197)

pre, during and post and how we adapted to that. I haven't done any research on this so I'm not gonna pertain to know the ins outs of it but...

Nick Petch (01:21:54.345)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:21:59.869)

Well, I have actually written a rather lengthy essay on this particular thing. I'll try and summarize it briefly if I'm able to. It has a lot to do with design, but long story short, before the Great War,

Greg Arthur (01:22:18.052)

Please.

Nick Petch (01:22:25.169)

We were really obsessed with material standards. It wasn't just what car to build, but building the very best car, materialistically. And then kind of like the Great War happened, and the world got to see what happens when that gets industrialized through warfare.

the scale and the terror of Hitler's war machines and all of this stuff had a massive effect on the world and kind of scared us a bit senseless. And following on from that, we started to realize that the very thing we're obsessed with, material standards, is the very thing that's gonna kill us. We're actually gonna choke to death on floppy disks if we keep making them.

And so that's sort of like that general sort of thing. So what's actually happened is a transition out of that and it sort of started to bubble up with network thinking which came with probably like my generation like 1985, maybe a little bit earlier with the internet and HTL or hyperlinking. It actually changed the way we think in networks. This started to sort of shift and what became apparent is it's not about material standards anymore.

It's about quality of life outcomes. And when you're talking about quality of life outcomes, all of a sudden, the work is all really invisible. It's all submerged. It's not the material standard that's on the...

surface anymore, it's the healthcare system, how it works invisibly and why those service structures and where all those placements of those roads, not the type of road, is operating, how it's operating. And that, coming back to experience design and stuff as well, that's where the experience economy has kind of come from.

Greg Arthur (01:24:12.429)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (01:24:22.919)

birthed from fundamentally it's why we now measure culture with ANPSs. It's why we now are more customer obsessed or patient obsessed not product or you know we could be making widgets.

Greg Arthur (01:24:35.683)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:24:41.947)

or coffee mugs, but we're customer obsessed. We don't care about, we're not obsessed about like is it ceramic, is it like this, is it that, it's like what do customers want? That's the quality of life outcome, we're all in. So in a nutshell, and if anyone argues and says we're not in a, if anyone argues and says there's pure product organisations, not in a service context, well, you know.

Look at Tesla. Everyone thought it was like they bought a car, not a service, until they bought the car and realized there's no service. And then they realized the product is defunct. Or when the Tesla servers go down and you can't even unlock your own car, let alone start it.

Greg Arthur (01:25:14.389)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:25:34.048)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:25:36.925)

That's where we're at. And I think there's some fascinating history about the, it's like a 200 year stretch, give or take of that transition. And to maybe put a pin in it, because I talk too much, don't I? But where we're at now.

Greg Arthur (01:25:45.664)

Mm.

Greg Arthur (01:25:52.066)

I don't know, always been, it's genuinely been fascinating.

Nick Petch (01:25:55.273)

I reckon some of the most interesting thinker I think that we've got that we're lucky to have that who's decided that okay I'll hang out in the learning space. It was actually over in your part of the world, Julian Stodd and he's got some fantastic fascinating you know

Greg Arthur (01:26:10.572)

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Nick Petch (01:26:17.565)

works out loud as a researcher. Very, very good stuff. But one of the pieces that he's really got me thinking about is this social age, which is really a time to recognise and balance our prior economic achievements. This kind of newfound sense of social responsibility. And you can see that in everything. In every little micro increment.

Greg Arthur (01:26:33.687)

Mm.

Nick Petch (01:26:47.311)

It's like, you you can't even buy toilet paper anymore without planting a tree somewhere. know, like it's just, it's everywhere now. And it's actually becoming some type of, I think you're right. I think it is gonna be that black mirror thing. Cause there is like a social currency kind of thing.

Greg Arthur (01:27:05.597)

yeah yeah yeah yeah and i guess i guess the the learning version of social currency is linkedin at the moment it's linkedin or it's slack channels or it's

Nick Petch (01:27:14.281)

yeah. Be seen. Be seen as a, as as a learn. Yeah. Like, like I, I, I do spot that a bit. Yeah. I'm like.

Greg Arthur (01:27:21.673)

It's... It's that kind of,

Nick Petch (01:27:27.165)

much knowledge I collected you know or something.

Greg Arthur (01:27:29.157)

yeah it's how much I've gotten how much I'm willing to impart but then and again there is nothing wrong with that as a transaction but it's what am I trying to say it's more are you self-perpetuating your own brand or self-motivate or self-promoting your own brand for doing that or are you even if you're doing it for money because that's just having a job or running a business are you doing that to create things that are

using all of that knowledge that you're telling everyone you have to actually do something useful, meaningful and thing that's going to last? Or are you creating Tidal when Spotify and Apple Music already exist and it's just something that nobody cares? Like what's the point? Like what's what's what's happening?

Nick Petch (01:28:17.705)

Yeah, and you know what I think is the clear differentiator, and we should probably stop after this so we don't get too dark on the web, but people who make their own ideas versus people who are essentially building their brand based on just curating and sharing other people's ideas.

Greg Arthur (01:28:33.313)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (01:28:44.801)

Like for me, this is the big thing and and and it's like, you know people will take someone else's work and sort of like Try to like become the host of it and sort of then use that as their platform They were absolutely no original thinking they they don't have a practice. All they really have is a platform A media platform, you know, no different to a Fox News versus somewhere that actually does journalism

Greg Arthur (01:29:12.203)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:29:12.913)

I guess so so for me that is Wow, that's a personal preference happening there, but I think there's there's a there's an integrity thing there right it has this person actually done the year of Painful anguish to actually come up with this concept that you know could be right could be wrong, but they've still created it themselves Genuinely, you know to try and get at a particular issue or whatever it might be they're doing

Greg Arthur (01:29:34.187)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:29:42.109)

Yeah, versus like, here's a top 30 resources from the top 30 LinkedIn voices of this week. It's like, you know, but that's me. I'm a bit stuck.

Greg Arthur (01:29:48.341)

Hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:29:51.669)

I I mean, there's nothing wrong with signposting people and there's nothing wrong with using your platform for good. I would still wonder what are the foundations of that platform though? Like, why are you, why are you the best to be able to tell us this and what are you basing that on? Or is it just, these guys have good numbers. So kudos for good numbers.

Nick Petch (01:29:56.99)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:30:05.789)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:30:15.737)

I think people make it up. Yeah, I think people just see it and model it. It's kind of how behaviour works. You could almost argue, if the research is telling us, if some of the social research is telling us that emojis are now equivalent to body language in terms of expression, which they kind of are, then I think...

Greg Arthur (01:30:42.167)

I I've never done this one though like that one like where you go that's really good like

Nick Petch (01:30:45.321)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you might offend someone. it's got a weighting toward a body language, you know what I mean? But it sort of then also maybe presumes that LinkedIn is a social environment. It's a social network. so,

Greg Arthur (01:31:04.041)

Mmm, yeah.

Nick Petch (01:31:07.943)

you know i just think that these aspects to to being in that environment where people's behaviors are really influence so one of the things i've been experimenting with is actually changing the way my phone functions so without getting into too much detail on an iphone you can actually set the different focus modes

Greg Arthur (01:31:30.141)

work focus on my phone right now. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:31:31.623)

Yep. Yep. Yep. So I'm sort of trying to go now a little bit deeper and go, OK, this is my thinking focus. This is like my learning stuff. This is like my silence type thing. Really trying to remove all of the dark patterns that have been designed into the tech and everything around me to try to shift some behaviors. I'm finding my tensions being pulled in too many directions.

Greg Arthur (01:31:57.085)

Mm-hmm.

Greg Arthur (01:32:01.279)

Mm-hmm.

Nick Petch (01:32:01.799)

with tech and yeah it's about rewiring that you know and it's even like this is a silly one i do but after work when we finish and after work each day i put a rock on top of my laptop

It's closed lid and I just go, I put a rock on top of it. I don't know why it works, but it just helps me to completely physically, mentally, emotionally disconnect from whatever was happening over there in work for the day and just kind of now actually return home, especially working remotely from home a lot.

Greg Arthur (01:32:40.691)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:32:44.077)

It's yeah, some of these smaller experiments about like some of these things Really are the things that actually affect behavior. It's these like small kind of You know, it's not nudge theory per se but it are it is these little nudges like I Think there was one incident or sorry instance where they wanted to reduce sawmill accidents

Greg Arthur (01:32:51.241)

Hmm. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:33:07.565)

And behavior is totally irrational, it's never logical, right? And so what they figured out is by just getting people to put a glove on one hand, it reduced sawmill accidents significantly. Because it just created awareness about the body and the boundaries of the body. It gets a little weird, but I think there's a whole space in there that is totally illogical to what we think about behavior and behavior change and...

Greg Arthur (01:33:23.551)

you

Nick Petch (01:33:34.097)

working in that domain and really the only way to do it is I think

Nick Petch (01:33:40.349)

do it yourself and and they're coming yeah just trying to tie a loop back to the LinkedIn thing.

Greg Arthur (01:33:46.266)

Yes, I mean the only thing I would add to that and I'll close on this on your sawmill axe with a glove is when we spend time with learning teams or I'm sure you've had the same when people talk about learning they talk about what the learners are going to feel and what they're going to do and half the time this is minimum

Nick Petch (01:33:50.161)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:33:53.545)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:34:12.67)

50 to 100 people in these groups they're talking about could even be thousands and then you kind of have to be the guy where you go well I'm more kind than you they're in like 30 different countries they're doing over a hundred different roles between all these people and they're a way varying degrees of age group and all the rest of it and you're telling me that all of them are gonna think and feel the same things because you've done a thing like probably probably not

Nick Petch (01:34:31.827)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:34:36.858)

It's insanity what that is.

Greg Arthur (01:34:41.342)

And if they are, tell me what it is because I would love to know if you're correct or not. Pretty sure you're not. But then when people start doing something, and I will take leadership as a role here, and I'm not bagging on it at all. If you're just in a role as a leader, you're in a monologue is not whatever happened on this leadership course or your ideal leadership role model or the company values or you're just going about your day.

Nick Petch (01:34:47.027)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:34:52.393)

Mm.

Nick Petch (01:35:11.411)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:35:11.568)

So if there is something to the sawmill thing where you have that glove on to go, remember guys, you've got a hand and it is no match for all of this machinery. Like you will never ever win this fight. And there's your other hand pushing the stop button really quickly. Like just having something that is just a little reminder, a little marker that just kind of says, just remember what your purpose is or what your goal is.

Nick Petch (01:35:22.153)

for the soul.

Nick Petch (01:35:29.256)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:35:34.141)

Yeah, the signal.

Greg Arthur (01:35:38.587)

right now or what your reason for existing or your reason for doing this action is and if you can't have that find something else that does the same thing it's in something that brings you back to where you are so like you said focus made on your phone i've started using it only in the last couple of weeks incredible keeping my door shut when i'm working at home purely to be able to say this room is where i work the rest of the house is my house immediate separation

Nick Petch (01:35:55.677)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:36:07.635)

Yep. I think learning and stuff has more to do with relationships than content. And relationships have more to do with the environment than I think individual behaviour.

Nick Petch (01:36:47.241)

How do these signals that we can put out there actually start to break some of the scripts that make us complacent about things we probably shouldn't be complacent about?

Greg Arthur (01:37:29.052)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:37:30.313)

So think climate change is probably a pretty interesting one that there's a lot of attempts going on and I think it is important. As soon as you say I'm going to take your leather handbag away or I'm going to do something that's going to affect you, people start to realise it's real. Rather than this big kind of it'll never happen to me mentality.

Greg Arthur (01:37:53.166)

Hmm, or it will never happen in my lifetime. That's what I'm hearing at the moment. So So we have in UK we have ULES and I can't exactly remember what the acronym is, but it's basically It's a low emission ultra low emissions zone. So basically unless you've got a newer hybrid or Or even an electric vehicle you get charged for driving in built-up areas or certain areas and they're expanding ULES zone out of London So it's coming out to nearer the home counties where I am

Nick Petch (01:37:56.913)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:38:12.487)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:38:23.555)

My mum was affected by it so she's kind of retirement age, she's in her 70s, is not a fan of this at all because she had to change her car and I explained to her it's a climate change thing and blah blah and you know all she's going to be paying I think is 15 pounds a day just to drive your car as soon as you hit the road that's 15 pounds. was like that's going to add up really really quickly. But obviously for her

Nick Petch (01:38:45.129)

Yeah. Yeah, it's insane. It's 30 bucks over here, Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:38:51.398)

But for her it's like, well, this isn't going to affect me and it probably won't really affect you in your lifetime. So why am I being affected right now? And it's like trying to explain, like to be fair, she's being logical. I don't agree with it, but she is being logical. But then it's a case of if you bring this back to a learning context, something you do might not have an effect there and then. But if you're trying to innovate,

Nick Petch (01:39:01.427)

Bye.

Nick Petch (01:39:07.731)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:39:13.993)

Yeah.

Greg Arthur (01:39:20.07)

you're looking for those little increments, some are bigger than others, where you will eventually start to affect something much, much bigger. And if you can affect something much, much bigger, so again, if we took your approach of research-based rather than just going out and straight out designing things, it won't happen overnight. It will be much, much smaller pockets in big organizations. But if you start to build that as a culture, you're changing that whole business.

Nick Petch (01:39:22.813)

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:39:28.583)

Yeah.

Nick Petch (01:39:45.769)

Yeah, 100%, 12 to 14 % more revenue. Like organizations who choose to upskill over rehire, which I think is a great metaphor for doing things right, in a sense, retain an average of 12 to 14 % more revenue. On average, that is, that's an average.

Greg Arthur (01:39:59.27)

Hmm.

Nick Petch (01:40:13.737)

For organizations that care about money, ta-da. For organizations that don't care about money or something more than money, even better, right? It's a no-brainer all around, but the question is, yeah, can we get there with the current generations and kind of where we're at? We're in an interesting place, but may not love this talk. It's been fascinating.

Greg Arthur (01:40:39.332)

It's been pretty real.

Nick Petch (01:40:41.479)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, why not? Yeah, me too, mate. I look maybe we'll do it again sometime.

Greg Arthur (01:40:43.961)

I've really enjoyed it.

Greg Arthur (01:40:49.082)

100%, 100%. I would love to have you back on and just in case anyone is still listening, hopefully you are. I have been my notes off over an hour ago. This has just been a really fun conversation. It's hugely interesting, Nick. Let's definitely do it again. And thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it's probably quite late for you now. So I'm gonna let you roll, but thank you again, sir. Really appreciate it.

Nick Petch (01:40:57.769)

you

Nick Petch (01:41:15.354)

Yeah, happy days, alright? Bye.

Greg Arthur (01:41:17.058)

Mega. Thank you.