Greg Arthur (00:00.192)
into it. Cool. Welcome to the Product Design for Learning podcast. We have Charlie Kneen with us from Solvd Together. Charlie, welcome. Lovely to have you. And our topic today, we might call it something different by the time this goes out, but the current title is Human Centered Design for a Skills-First Transformation, which just rolls off the tongue. It's nice and catchy.
Charlie (00:11.747)
Thank you very much.
Charlie (00:26.467)
Haha
Greg Arthur (00:28.142)
You see it on a t-shirt. So before we get into everything that we're gonna get into today, we usually start with our guests giving us their context or their perception of the topic within 60 seconds. So, or as close to 60 seconds as you can. in 60 seconds, can you give us your view on human-centered design in the context of a skills-first transformation?
Charlie (00:55.063)
with pleasure. Where do I start? So I think that HR is very good at rebranding itself or rebranding aspects of what it does. And I think the latest rebrand is skills. So I think people are talking about skills. I've seen lots of posts on LinkedIn about it. But my perception is that actually a lot of people are just sort of updating their competency framework and regurgitating what they've always done.
I think there's a lot of people making a lot of money out of skills, new skills platforms and whatnot, but I think ultimately, unless you fundamentally rethink how you're organising people and delivering the strategy as an L &D function, then I don't really think you're going to ever get to a skills-based organisation. So that's what I'm really, that's where human-centred design comes in.
Greg Arthur (01:44.321)
Yeah. And when you talk about skills and capabilities, and also just tasks, I guess, that people have to do in any job, how do you, how do you separate those three things? And is there more than three things to separate? Cause I've seen people talk about, we're going to a skills-based organization. Okay, great. They go, here's all the roles we've got. Here's all the skills they need. And they either forget the tasks they have to do or
competencies or behaviors or the culture that they're operating in and they're only again from what I've seen they're only focusing what's happening right now they're not actually thinking about anything wider than that and also not just gaining a skill but levels of skill and then how you hone that and how you nurture and how you maybe share with other people like it just seems to be a case of it feels very transactional is what I'm trying to say and it doesn't feel right so how do you how do you separate those guys around
Charlie (02:25.571)
Hmm.
Charlie (02:38.445)
Hmm.
Yes, I think it's the same as people starting with content as a method to deliver learning. I think it's the same mentality and mindset that underpins the skills approach that most people are taking. So I think the first place to start is not your roles that you currently have. That's number one thing. The first place to start is the business strategy. So what you're actually trying to achieve.
and then working backwards from the outcome that you want, which is outcome driven design, which is, I suppose it's akin to human-centered design, but it's sort of thinking backwards from the end result rather than doing the research and then designing the thing. And I think both of those two approaches are core to how we think about business problems. So starting with the strategy and working backwards is number thing. The second part of it is what actually is a skill. And I think that's where people...
sort of look around for their competencies and things like this. And I think what competency frameworks are is essentially compound skills. So if you take something like communication, you can break that down into multiple different contexts where communication is valid. And the reason that's a problem is because if you ask somebody in an interview, tell me about a time you communicated effectively, they'll choose the context that suits their, you know, the answer to their question. Similarly, if you're taking a...
Greg Arthur (03:55.595)
Hmm.
Charlie (04:06.073)
competency-based approach and you have a manager having a conversation with a team member and you say I really think you need to improve your communication skills because that's what we got in the competency framework. The person will be able to pick times where they are good at communication and times where they're not. It doesn't really give you a complete data set let's say to have a good conversation about and to my earlier point about outcome driven design. When we're talking about skills most of the time what we're talking about is
Greg Arthur (04:22.124)
Mm-mm.
Greg Arthur (04:27.083)
Hmm.
Charlie (04:35.509)
a leader having a good conversation with a team member. Like that's the pointy end of a skills-based organisation. And so if you work backwards from that and you design a product, to your point about product design, you design a product and a service that suits that particular context, then you're in a much better, you're from a much better starting point than you are if you go, well, what do we already have? We've spent a million pounds on, for this consultancy, developed this really complex competency framework, no one's used it.
Greg Arthur (04:38.592)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Arthur (04:42.325)
Mm-mm.
Greg Arthur (04:55.008)
Mm.
Charlie (05:04.099)
we must throw more money at it to get people to use it and we must procure this expensive tech. Yeah, exactly. Then... Yeah.
Greg Arthur (05:06.858)
Yeah, we'll just put a really fun brand around it. Exactly. It's tech and it's brand and it's just, it feels a lot like a lot of noise when there's already a lot of noise. It's just people shouting at each other. Sometimes just on an email.
Charlie (05:22.009)
Yeah, I think it's bullshit basically. I think a lot of what people are doing is bullshit. And that's no disrespect to anyone because I just think it's a mindset shift that needs to happen and I think it's all underpinned by, you describe it as transactional, a computational model of humanity and how we work together in an organization. So if you think about people as essentially zeros and ones in a...
Greg Arthur (05:25.162)
Yeah?
Charlie (05:50.113)
in an organization and you think about cause and effect as being quite linear, then I think you want a skills-based organization, buy this piece of tech, build this competency framework, communicate it, magic happens and the business becomes skills-based. Similarly, if you're designing a learning program, build the content, launch the content, magic happens, people change behavior. So I think it's the same mindset and I think that's ultimately what needs to shift.
with a skills approach as well.
Greg Arthur (06:20.203)
Yeah, 100%, 100%. And then something to generalize a little bit here with two camps, but there seems to be two camps in learning at the moment, largely from when I'm looking on LinkedIn or going to conferences and chatting to people where there's the one camp that says things like, L &D's dead, we're all finished, the industry's dying out, you know, this is the end. And then there's the other camp that going, everything's great, we're trailblazing, we're having a good crack at it.
but both of them seem to talk about skills-based organisations or human-centred design or 5DI or something along those lines. They both seem to have it in there somewhere, usually in a positive context. But how do you approach a skills-first organisation or a skills-first transformation with those two kind of groups of people that are, I guess they're conflicting and there is often a middle ground, but how do you kind of rationalise that when you're trying to get your message across?
Charlie (07:00.909)
Hmm.
Charlie (07:21.569)
So yeah, I did actually listen back to the Learning is Dead podcast that you recorded with Toby. I don't think learning was ever really alive. think that's kind of my position on it. I think it's just, it's called learning, but it's actually something else. You know, it's actually education. So I don't think it's ever really been alive. I think that what we'll need to see in the near term, and I think we'll probably will see in the future is.
more of a pivot towards performance as a foundation for what we in people development do, which will be facilitated through data and it's something that respects AI and stuff like this. The people that are, kind of, never, I never want to be a grumpy old man about this kind of stuff. Like I think you can get really, really frustrated with.
Greg Arthur (07:52.884)
Mm-mm.
Greg Arthur (08:04.394)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (08:14.216)
Right.
Charlie (08:20.249)
the people saying the same stuff just regurgitated on LinkedIn, the same thought leaders saying the same stuff. But ultimately, I think people are trying to do the right thing. I think it just comes down to, I think it comes down to the system. And I think it comes down to corporate business. And I think it comes down to hierarchy. Because I think a lot of our clients talking about career pathways.
A lot of our clients see the skills thing as an opportunity to essentially resource and give people career opportunities internally and create more of a fluid experience. But ultimately these are businesses in a capitalist system with a structure and that structure is generally hierarchy. So while it seems like a really good idea to have a skills-based organisation where everyone can kind of move around.
Greg Arthur (08:56.457)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (09:03.466)
Mm.
Charlie (09:10.999)
be resourced on projects. I've worked in that environment. It's called consulting. The way it works is you have a resource manager and you have all the people's profiles and skills and they have skills aligned to them. And the resource manager goes, we've got this interesting project over here with this client. We could develop this person and he's got related skills. And let's move on to this project. Career development, learning, great success. What actually happens is resource manager gets bypassed. Person that lead X goes to.
their mates and says, we've got this project coming up, who have you worked with that's done this? I recommend this person. But that's how it works in practice. So it's not skills-based, it's social. So I think the skills-based organisation piece is ultimately another attempt to...
Greg Arthur (09:47.303)
Yeah. Yeah.
Charlie (10:00.995)
tag people and profiles with a way of organising them in a kind of formulaic way, but that's not how people are. So I think you're better off looking at the system, looking at the strategy, giving people like you would with any team development or team performance, to say this is the strategy, this is the purpose, this is the stuff we care about, and this is how we're going to measure it. Get out of their way and let them find their own way and...
that can be facilitated partly through R &D, but it's also gonna be partly facilitated through removing barriers to them going where they wanna go and stuff like that. that's kind of, I mean, that's long answer to question, but that's the positive end, I think, of the learning is dead conversation.
Greg Arthur (10:36.402)
Yeah.
Greg Arthur (10:39.848)
Very nice case.
Greg Arthur (10:44.777)
No, no, and I was a little told he said that kind of made me think, you know, maybe he's right. Maybe we've all been getting it wrong. I like his future vision was was very interesting. And I would actually quite like to see a version of that. But I think your answer there, especially when you mentioned about social. So we were talking earlier and you said you've got a three year old. So no one and I don't have any kids at the moment. So like maybe I shouldn't speak about this. But as far as I'm aware, nobody that
becomes a parent for the first time can 100 % say, I'm 3000 % prepared. Like I know exactly what's going to happen. I know how to deal with every situation. I've done this call. So I've been through this experience and I know exactly what to do because it just happens. And it's probably quite overwhelming from what other people have said. So if you take that as like obviously a massive life event,
you boil it down to people being at work just trying to do something different that they maybe haven't done before, but they've done something similar, then that's where I can see that the logic of a skills based organisation being these things aren't rocket science, but they are kind of similar ish. So there is a kind of that expectation of, yeah, you can kind of dip around and kind of be not an expert in everything, but you can be good enough to get by. But then
can see the flip side of that around, like you said, the whole consulting approach of how people then start to use that type of resource. And also people that are maybe just getting by in way too many skills and not functioning in a handful of things that they are specifically trained for. As in, I wouldn't call a generic handyman to do some very complex electrical work in my house. I'd be really worried about, I don't know enough about it.
At what point am I going to get alleged queued from just turning the lights on? Like, yeah, I don't know how you, how do you approach that with clients when they kind of feel really jazzed up about skills-based organizations and they kind of come to you with this approach or that's what they're asking you to do? How do you kind of either pick apart what they're actually asking for or try and win them around to something that's more in your line of thinking?
Charlie (13:08.185)
Well, usually we would, well, we tend to work with clients that already believe what we say, which is helpful. You know, they are already thinking strategically and outcome-based rather than tech-based. And usually if we brought in early enough, that's the conversation we have. There's a diagram we've made, which is kind of like, rather than starting with tech, start with outcomes.
Greg Arthur (13:15.344)
Right.
Greg Arthur (13:36.485)
Hmm.
Charlie (13:36.621)
work backwards from there, take as an enabler to facilitate a experience for the leader and also the team member, but also for the business in terms of being able to, you workforce plan and all that good stuff. So I think that's, that's the first thing. I mean, frankly, if an organization comes to us and says, we've got a competency framework and we want you to turn it into a, you know, we to turn this into a skills-based organization.
Greg Arthur (13:42.919)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (13:49.339)
Mm.
Charlie (14:05.369)
We're not above saying we're not the people you should be working with. I think that's a better and a fairer way of approaching those kinds of conversations really, because you don't want waste people's time. And actually a lot of clients don't want to hear that they're doing it wrong, especially if they've invested the cash already. yeah, I'd say that's the approach. But I just wanted to come back to your point about having a child and...
Greg Arthur (14:14.245)
Mm.
Greg Arthur (14:23.462)
Mm-hmm.
Charlie (14:34.359)
So I'm using that as some context for a skills-based organisation. I mean, we did NCT. We were fortunate enough to be able to do NCT. It's not something everybody gets to do because it's a bit of extra money on top of what you'd usually get through the NHS or whatnot. And when you're about something like changing a nappy, are, you know, ultimately that's a measurable and achievable, measurable and evidenceable.
Greg Arthur (14:56.23)
Mm.
Greg Arthur (15:03.633)
Yeah. Yeah.
Charlie (15:03.731)
And I think that's what skill is, right? And I think that's where we get a little bit confused with competencies as well. Again, come back to my communication example. If your communication is the skill, then how are you going to measure the communication level? You've got to have multiple contexts for it really in order to do it properly. Whereas when you get to a skill level, it's, it measurable? Is it evidenceable? So that if I'm a leader, I can have a conversation with a team member to say, show me that you can do.
this, change a nappy. What are the KPIs for changing a nappy? No shit on your leg. A relatively happy child that doesn't scream, doesn't roll off the bench, hurt itself, clean clothes, et cetera, et cetera. Those are ways of measuring the effectiveness of my skill at changing a nappy. And I can do it on a doll multiple times, but nothing prepares you for the leg or the occasional.
Greg Arthur (15:33.862)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (15:43.568)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Charlie (16:03.181)
water that might spray at your face or whatnot. I think there's the L &D analogy in there is changing a nappy on a doll is your experience design, isn't it? But nothing is going to pay you the way for doing it in the real life. this is where you can use tech like VR and stuff to recreate the experience as close as dammit to what the reality is, which is really what we do at Solved.
Greg Arthur (16:13.924)
Yes.
Greg Arthur (16:18.712)
Exactly. Yeah.
Greg Arthur (16:28.357)
Hmm.
Charlie (16:32.339)
not complicated again, just like what do want people to do? We want them to fly this airplane. Okay well why don't you build an airplane simulator and make them fly it until they crash a million times and learn how to fly. That's just experience design in my view.
Greg Arthur (16:47.493)
Absolutely, absolutely and that's the kind of thing that I that I fully buy into is in if you want somebody to do something this is where it comes in with product design as well if somebody's buying a product or a service or whether it's a learning thing or an external thing they already know why they're going to engage with that product and service it's going to do something for them and it's and it's very very clear there might be some extra hidden benefits later on once they've adapted it to how they want it to
integrate with their life and that kind of things but that's kind of later down the line but then when it comes to learning and you're talking about experience design it should be pretty much like can you replicate the real experience but in a safe environment and can you find out all the different ways that you can, can't, should, shouldn't do it and things that you're good and not good at so you know maybe it's you can fly the plane really well it's just landing maybe it doesn't get that well that time but as long you're in a simulator that's fine like
No one died, it's fine. But then, yeah, I do wonder how people miss the mark with human-centered design and experience design, and if they, what kind of challenges you see with people that kind of, again, like throw the word experience design or the phrase experience design around, but maybe miss the mark when it comes to like proper human-centered design. What kind of things are you seeing that people, not in a, not because they're.
bad or they're silly, just that they aren't aware enough about it or haven't done enough research into it to fully understand it. What kind of things are you seeing that people miss the mark on?
Charlie (18:24.535)
Yeah, and it's the content focus and it's the knowledge focus and it's a computational view of how the brain works. know, Nick Shafferton-Johan talks about it as effective context. It's kind of the same thing. So rather than looking at, you know, rather than looking at the content of the knowledge you want to impart, you look at the way I think about it is what would need to happen to me?
Greg Arthur (18:29.038)
Mm-mm.
Charlie (18:53.977)
for me to behave in this way. Again, it's outcome driven design. So let's say I'm a baggage handler at Heathrow, as an example, and let's say the issue is safety. And let's say the issue is, I don't know, moving trolleys around. I actually don't know if they do that job, but let's say that they do. How do you get them to, what would need to happen to me to...
Greg Arthur (18:56.397)
Mm-mm.
Charlie (19:21.879)
to be doing that particular task in an unsafe way and then decide that I need to do it in a safe way. I would probably need to have some kind of experience which caused me or maybe people I care about or potentially caused me, caused some passengers some kind of risk, know, near miss that kind of thing. So, because that's a...
Greg Arthur (19:25.816)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Arthur (19:41.239)
Mm.
Charlie (19:47.193)
That's an emotional experience that I would have that would make me think twice about running with my trolleys or whatever it might be. So how do you simulate that experience or that emotional connection with that kind of situation in a safe way? So I think that's what experience design is. It's not thinking about, well, what they need to know is that this is unsafe.
Greg Arthur (19:50.755)
Mm.
Charlie (20:09.069)
What they need to instead is what would you need to experience to know that it's unsafe? I think that's the crucial difference. So a lot of what we design really in any context is as close to the emotional experience of the thing as we can. A great example of that is in and out groups as an example. We designed some stuff for a D &I project which is around, how do you simulate the emotion of being an out group?
Greg Arthur (20:14.103)
Yes. Yeah.
Greg Arthur (20:25.859)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Arthur (20:39.075)
Hmm.
Charlie (20:39.383)
And it's quite a simple design. was, you have an in group and you have an out group. You basically separate a big group into two and then you brief one group and you say, right, you're the in group. Well, you don't call them the in group, but you're one group. You're gonna work on a problem together. Just exclude the other group as best you can.
So just don't engage with them or don't listen to any of their ideas or whatnot. And then you get the other group to work on the same problem and then come back in later and say, well, we've got all these ideas we want to share with you. And the in-group basically just doesn't let them into the circle or doesn't listen to them or talks over them and stuff like that. And people were getting so upset from that experience that some person walked out.
Greg Arthur (21:19.895)
Mm-mm.
Charlie (21:21.815)
And it's a really simple design, but it simulates the experience of being a minority in an organization in whatever context and what that feels like. And then the debrief is where you get people to reflect and go, you so how did that feel? Shit, right? That's how a lot of people feel. it's these, know, the, the reason for that is A, B and C. So another cool part of it, I would say is experience first, knowledge after.
Greg Arthur (21:28.449)
Hmm. Yeah.
Greg Arthur (21:35.373)
Yeah.
Greg Arthur (21:48.002)
Mm-hmm.
Charlie (21:48.729)
because the knowledge is the sense making or the meaning making of the experience and that is a crucial second half of experience design too. So I'd say those two things are probably the kind of key aspects I think people tend to miss because it's driven by what content the stakeholders want to put into the people's brains which is the, you know, it's not how the human brain works basically.
Greg Arthur (22:10.957)
No, not at all, not at all. a similar example I'd worked on kind of leads onto the next question, it's very around kind of culture change when it's more than just either a singular person or like a very targeted team. When you're looking at maybe like organizations as a whole or massive groups of people, we were doing a change program, like to cover something ridiculous, like 60,000 people. So there was never gonna be a one size fits all.
So we asked them to do certain tasks and fit them into their daily work life and also to how they engage with their team. So similar to you, it was things like, we were talking about not just conflict as in if you disagree with someone or if you need to manage someone that's having a bad time, but also how you have all the ins and outs of conflict. So whether you are struggling and lash out.
or whether it's someone near you and you need to help them or whether you just start struggling and need someone to help you. So we were asking people to kind of almost like play loads of different roles, but just kind of like decide on any given day within a particular period, you're going to play this role this day, this role that day and that. And just see what people did with it partly because we hadn't really tried it before. So kind of wanted to see what people did with it. And it was quite interesting to some people saying, this is my best friend at work, but on this day,
absolute dickhead like couldn't even look him in the eye and then other people were just like I didn't even realize until they'd said I'm really struggling with this because they're just so good at having a poker face and just being like the go-to or you know the rock in the team wherever it's gonna be so in kind of condensed teams it kind of works nicely to be able to say so how did you feel about that what would you do differently or would it have been much easier if you just gone guys I've been trying this for five minutes can't do it
could somebody just help me because you do it all the time or I realize I'm being a massive pain in the ass right now or you've told me I am I will recognize that for next time or whatever it needs to be but when it comes to like whole companies or whole departments even about tens or thousands of people how does human centered design from the from work you do in the and the thinking you've got how do you even begin to try and shift a culture when it is way more than just
Greg Arthur (24:32.609)
As in you can't give everyone the same emotional experience. So how do you begin to kind of plug in human centered design, especially when you're talking to people that are maybe saying, I'm more interested in, are you going to come in budget? We need it in six months. And the age old thing that I'm sure you hear and we love to hear as well. This is how we've always done it. It's like, well, that's why you called us. So how do you approach those kinds of things?
Charlie (25:00.537)
So you're talking about, I think you're talking about budget and scale.
Greg Arthur (25:04.607)
Yeah, scale mainly. Budget, I guess, is one of the kind of the drivers of some people's agenda.
Charlie (25:07.47)
Yeah.
Charlie (25:12.323)
Yeah, so I would say that if you do human-centered design properly, and one of the, I suppose, the beefs I have with people talking about is people do human-centered design and then e-learning is the answer. It's like, it's never the answer unless the problem is regulatory compliance, which is totally legitimate reason to use e-learning, but you might as well just make it a one page with a checkbox at the end, which says I've read it. So I'd separate compliance and learning anyway. yeah, to answer your question, I think...
Greg Arthur (25:33.6)
Yeah. Yeah.
Charlie (25:43.577)
What you find when you do research is that the problem is never, there's never a silver bullet to solve a problem. It's never an experience, frankly. It's never one experience. It's never one resource. It's always those things in the context of a system. And that system will probably include a number of or levers. It'll be probably leadership. So what behaviors are being role modeled at that level?
Greg Arthur (25:53.396)
Mm-hmm.
Charlie (26:12.589)
There'll be things like values, like what are people aware that the organization cares about? There's things like performance management, which is kind of a representation of what the organization cares about in kind of data. There's technology and systems. There's literal physical environments. So how is the office set up, et cetera, et cetera. So when you do any kind of research, that's what you find. And the challenge that I suppose we would have in aligning ourselves as an L &D consultancy.
is that you don't have a remit necessarily to look at all of those things and say these things need to change. And that's why Solve, we're moving into a more strategic transformation type place because what I care about is having impact and making businesses successful and making people effective in their jobs. And you can't do that just in L &D because they don't have the clout and they're too far downstream with the decisions being made. So ultimately, you've got to elevate the decision to a stakeholder.
Greg Arthur (27:00.032)
Hmm.
Charlie (27:11.863)
level which is probably a CPO in our world, know, Chief People Officer. And then you've got to basically prioritise the challenges and the levers that will achieve the thing that you want. And again, working about roots from the outcome, if the culture you want to get to is X, what would need to happen to people to deliver that culture and what would be the environment that you would need to facilitate them to behave in the way that you want to enable the culture. So again, it's a combination of
Greg Arthur (27:24.168)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (27:32.766)
Mm.
Charlie (27:42.669)
doing the research and looking forward and also working backwards. That delivers the change and then from a scalability perspective, not everybody has to have the same experience to move in the direction you want them to move in. Top-down in hierarchical organizations works fine depending on what you want people to do, but they're similarly bottom-up.
Greg Arthur (27:45.652)
Yeah.
Greg Arthur (27:58.814)
Yeah.
Charlie (28:10.585)
by which I mean starting with the employees and their challenges and concerns and things like that also is required. So I would say it's a combination of those things but it's not a one size fits all by any stretch.
Greg Arthur (28:12.905)
Absolutely.
Greg Arthur (28:21.023)
No, no, absolutely not. I think the way we kind of talk about it is what vehicles we're talking about. So you can still get a gazillion people to the same location or the same destination, but they could all take a variety of different vehicles or different routes to get there and how you want to stretch that analogy further. like, it doesn't need to be, I don't, I feel like maybe the way society has moved on in, I don't
10, 15 years, maybe 20 years since the 2000s started. Things are so much different to how they used to be when we were maybe at school. As in you had a very structured routine, things outside of school probably weren't that different to everyone else. Whereas now it's, there are so many things that you could take two identical people with the same social constructs but have two incredibly different lifestyles and two incredibly different.
thought processes and belief systems and all rest of around how they engage with the wider world. And then if you chuck all of those people once they become adults into a workplace and then expect them to go, yes, but you all, all your badges say the same company. It's like, right, they didn't all walk here. They didn't all get the train here. They didn't all come from the same town. Doesn't work like that anymore. And I think that's where I'm seeing L &D being kind of
shooting itself in the foot with this whole, we're doing this blanket approach of, know, here's a really great program or here's a really great way that we've always done it. And not really thinking about, as you were just saying, like a kind of more bottom up approach of, let's go and engage with people first, because they're the people we're trying to affect. So we need to understand who they are and what's up with them, rather than just, they're all just number one. Like, it doesn't work like that.
Charlie (30:14.969)
Yeah, well, another example from we did one of our clients on a leadership program. similar challenges, about two and a half thousand mid managers. And we needed to put them all through the same experience to kind of reset their expectations in a consistent way that led, you know, deliver the business strategy. And at the same time,
We wanted to give people a personalized experience so that they felt it was relevant and meaningful for them. But the challenge was in that population, you had people that had been in for 30 years and people who had been in role for six months. People that were from a, let's say, a white British heritage and people that were, you know, not. And so the challenge was how do you create, you know, both relevance and meaning on one side and also business.
business impact on the other. And so the way we did that was doing that research as you talked about, but then understanding again, what's the pointy end? So what are the challenges, what are the conversations that leaders are having? Because ultimately does come in organisations that are social. So what are the conversations that they find difficult? And then how can we simulate those conversations as closely as possible? And because we spoke to a broad range of people, we also understood that in some contexts, some conversations were more...
challenging than others. So let's say, in some security context, it's how to deal with a challenging passenger and in other contexts it might be how to have an effective performance conversation. And so we did a sort of choose your own adventure where they had a period of time in the experience we designed where they could essentially choose what they wanted to engage with and then we simulated those conversations so they could practice and get immediate feedback on them.
Greg Arthur (32:02.46)
Hmm.
Charlie (32:06.903)
while also doing the stuff that was the sense making and consistency. As a business owner, I get both sides now. probably was all about the people at the beginning when I started my career in Andy. I was always about the people. Whereas when you become a business owner and you start managing a team and you're looking at finances and commercial models and stuff like that, you do have to remember that ultimately you're running a business and to protect the majority, you have to make...
Greg Arthur (32:11.355)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (32:33.981)
You
Charlie (32:37.061)
difficult decisions and those aren't decisions that everyone's going to like all the time. So the same is true of leading in any one of those businesses and delivering programmes in any those businesses. It's got to be worthwhile for the business ultimately. It's got to make them more money. And this is why again we start from the question we always ask is what problem are you trying to solve? So it's like what are the key metrics?
Greg Arthur (32:38.468)
Mm.
Greg Arthur (32:48.7)
Yeah.
Greg Arthur (32:56.413)
Mm-hmm.
Charlie (33:05.729)
In HR, or my experience, it always comes down to engagement, retention, attrition, inclusion. Sometimes you get lucky and you work on sales programmes and sales academies and stuff and then it's like, money, like how much money are you making? That's easy to measure. But from a people development side, it's generally those sort of things. And that's why in our approach, we always start at the end and work backwards.
Greg Arthur (33:21.948)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Greg Arthur (33:34.651)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think there's definitely, there's definitely a need for people, especially when you talk about leadership programs. Actually, I would say even like any program, if someone is engaging an outside vendor to do something, that's one side. But if you're asking someone in a business to stop what they're being paid to do and to go and focus on some sort of learning or performance program.
If I was asked to go and do something other than what I was focused on, first of why do want me to do it? What's the point? What am going to get out of it? Or is it something you're going to get out of it? If it's two things that I need to know. And I do find, I'm seeing a lot of people struggling to justify it beyond, this is a really good skill to have, or this will look great on your CV. But if a company can explain, like, we have this agreement that you turn up and do some work and we pay you.
and this is great and then this will keep the, you know, this will keep the ball rolling. But then every now and then we're going to drop some things in for you to get better at that and to maybe move on and for the company to move on. It's pretty simple, like, but I don't see that happening enough. And again, it kind of feels like it's, if you ball human sense to the side down to the most basic premise, that should be the, that should be almost like the structure of how they explain every single intervention. Say this is why we're doing it.
Charlie (34:44.6)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (35:00.464)
This is the benefit of it. And if you can't, if you can't articulate that chance, you probably shouldn't be making that thing in my mind, but we'll see.
Charlie (35:01.293)
Hmm.
Charlie (35:12.537)
Yeah. Well, what's interesting about L &D in general is that I don't see very many L &D professionals spending a lot of time doing internal training. And I'm someone who delivers and designs and whatnot these big programs for these companies.
Greg Arthur (35:25.914)
No, no, very little actually.
Charlie (35:36.313)
for these companies. And it's a good test. The litmus test for me is my wife because her reaction to any kind of L and D in where she works is, ugh, really, what a waste of my time. So if that's my persona for what I'm designing, I'm gonna make damn sure that it's useful. And I think that's the nub of it. But you know what, experiences and events and fun.
Greg Arthur (35:57.818)
Yes.
Charlie (36:05.957)
are useful to people and they're useful for businesses. We wrap them up, know, historically we've been wrapping classroom training up as kind of training, but ultimately it's like, do people have a nice time? Do they network? Do they get some nice food? Do they stay in a nice hotel? Like it's an experience, a shit one, but it's an experience. So there's kind of, there's two poles really. It's, you know, useful stuff, useful experiences, or actually just...
Greg Arthur (36:07.546)
Yes.
Greg Arthur (36:19.867)
Mm.
Greg Arthur (36:32.155)
Yeah.
Charlie (36:35.383)
fun, event-based, call them iconic, know, activities and adventures that you might go on. We have that in our development here itself, the idea of adventures, going on adventures, because you have a bit of, you have your opportunity to go and explore stuff without any kind of really strong...
Greg Arthur (36:41.583)
Mm. Yeah.
Charlie (37:01.399)
let's say learning objectives out the back of it because you never really know where those things are going to go but you just kind of expose yourself to new and exciting ideas and new exciting adventures and you bring stuff back and it will enrich your enrich your development it will enrich you as a person and it would probably also enrich the business again if you're happy and you feel like you're having a great time going on adventures then it's a much you know it's a much happier place to be as well so
Greg Arthur (37:03.855)
Mm.
Greg Arthur (37:10.683)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (37:15.791)
Mm.
Greg Arthur (37:20.004)
Mm-mm.
Charlie (37:28.945)
I think we overcomplicate it with trying to, and this comes back to the skills conversation, trying to structure everything so that somebody in HR can organise a spreadsheet. It's not really a fair representation of what a business is, which as I said is a social construct.
Greg Arthur (37:40.175)
Yeah.
Greg Arthur (37:49.275)
Absolutely. And I think, and I think if you look at social platforms where people congregate, the obvious, you know, Twitter, Instagram or X, sorry, TikTok, all the rest of it, they are pulling so much data from every kind of thing people do, even down to like, you know, how you thumb stoppers and how long they're scrolling for and how much time they're spending on certain things. So they can be continuously at the top of their game.
to say you're gonna come back because we're gonna keep making this more addictive and keep serving you up the things that you're not just thinking you want, but the things that we know you want because that's where you're spending your time. Whether you would openly admit to the things they're looking at on there. I don't know, we'll find out one day, maybe. But then someone said to me recently about you've got all these like kind of heritage L and D teams in like, know, bigger, much bigger companies where they've got maybe come two, 300 people in some kind of learning or.
development function or capability function and they're saying that their view is that they're wondering or they're kind of partly worried about in 10 years will that even be sustainable? Do you need 200, 300 people in a development team or could you get away with having 10? I kind of sat and thought about it for a while. I think you could probably get away with a much smaller group but if you have that bulk of people, we were talking about resource earlier,
and you're talking about social constructs, at the moment I see L and D as a function talking about data a lot, but not really getting into the weeds of it and not continuously measuring. They just kind of measure things as and when they need to, they kind of dip in and out. So when we're talking about things like classroom, I actually don't mind a classroom as long as it's done properly. If it is just turn up, listen to someone at the front of the stage, get a nice lunch, go home, I'd rather just sit and...
do something, literally do anything else for the day.
Charlie (39:46.231)
I don't think really, I mean, I say, don't really think anyone's doing that stuff anymore to some, I mean, even the most, the biggest bubble that people sit in, I'm sure they've heard of things like interaction. The only time that doesn't happen is when you get like, apologies to all the IT colleagues out there, but like, generally speaking, like new tech.
Greg Arthur (39:50.542)
I hope not.
Greg Arthur (40:03.961)
god.
Charlie (40:15.619)
comes in and someone in IT goes, right, we need to people in this new tech. I have sat fairly recently in, you know, IT training, is this, when you want to do this, click on this button. When you want to do this, click on this button. It's like, you could have just recorded a video. But anyway, sorry, I interrupted. But yeah, I'm just sticking up for the classroom as well, I suppose.
Greg Arthur (40:16.281)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (40:28.865)
Mm. Yeah.
Greg Arthur (40:34.765)
That's it. I'm with-
Greg Arthur (40:39.833)
I'll come back to that point in a second, but what I was thinking was if you have all this abundance of people, just shift their focus onto what in theory, in my mind they should be doing a bit more of now or a lot more of now is rather than having a pulse survey start, middle and end of the year, just have it all the time. Just be continuously measuring what is happening, why is it happening? And you find out about problems as they're happening. You might find out a by-product of a problem.
rather than trying to design a solution when you kind of only really understand it to 10 % of its gravity. Then you kind of waste all your time and resource doing something to go, doesn't this look great? And you go, it looks great. It's not going to solve anything because you don't know enough about it. So this whole kind of social organism of a company is run on people's, partly on, you know, they're there because of a skill or a reason to exist in that particular part of the company.
Charlie (41:07.843)
me.
Charlie (41:21.177)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (41:35.746)
But they're also there because they're a person and they have engagements and interactions with other people that they're working with. know, nobody works in a silo for too long. So it kind of feels a bit like if we don't understand the people we're trying to help, then it's fine to understand the business, but you need to understand, you have to understand both basically. If you have one or the other, then you're fucked. Simply.
Charlie (41:46.755)
Hmm.
Charlie (41:57.785)
Hmm.
I suppose, yeah, I suppose I'm tired of the argument, I suppose, because...
It feels like probably at least for the last 10 years we've had quote unquote thought leaders saying, let's beat the target audience. And it's like, no shit. Like, we need to move on from that. I think the biggest challenge, mean, so yeah, so I completely agree with you on the data front. I think the pushback we always get is survey fatigue and stuff like this.
Greg Arthur (42:40.344)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Charlie (42:43.165)
There's a few kind of misnomers I would say in corporate business. One of them is the survey fatigue thing, which is, yeah, if you send a 30 page questionnaire every two months, people are gonna be tired of it, right?
But people aren't tired of speaking to you about their experience of working at a company if you make it useful. Like, if you show them and talk about how you're using the data to improve what you're doing, no one's gonna mind that. You know, and... That's all right.
Greg Arthur (43:12.501)
Yeah and also like and I'm sorry to go about the amount of times when people have said about survey fatigue and I've said for every single prototype I've ever made and probably will ever make as soon as you say to someone what do think it doesn't matter if they have the most placid opinion they will give you both barrels and some of it's really positive and most of it's kind of wow what I think is it and it's like that's great I need to get all of this out of you as quickly as possible
Charlie (43:35.447)
Yeah.
Greg Arthur (43:42.423)
If you just send them, like I say, a 30 page survey and don't do anything with it, you only have to do that once. And everyone's already made their mind up and gone, well, this is just a waste of my time. No one is, again, I only have X as a social platform now. I'm probably gonna leave because of news, because of the, yeah, all the horrible, horrible people that congregate on there.
Charlie (43:52.247)
Mmm. Yeah.
Charlie (44:02.329)
Because of the racists.
Charlie (44:06.751)
You're just horrible people.
Greg Arthur (44:09.281)
but there's some great cycling accounts that I need to keep following. But until then, you can literally put up the most bland story. You could just say, I had a lovely Monday. I would give it an hour and you're going to get 400 people's opinion on why Monday's this, that and the other, why you're this, that and the other, and then why they then start attacking each other. So if you have a genuinely interesting statement to say to people in your organization.
Charlie (44:20.729)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (44:39.063)
They're not exactly the same people that are on X, they are still people with opinions. What you've got to do is engage them in the right way and they will tell you. I just feel like that's something that we're collectively missing a trick on as an industry.
Charlie (44:52.577)
Yeah, I think, well, my only point about X is they talk about freedom of speech, but it's not accountable, freedom of speech, because it's anonymized, so it's not the same thing. So that's where Elon Musk is talking shit and is a real problem for the world. But, yeah.
Greg Arthur (45:00.246)
God no. Yeah.
Greg Arthur (45:08.746)
I went near the voter payment thing, so yeah.
Charlie (45:12.289)
Well, yeah, we could go down a rabbit hole. That's not. So, yeah, I'd say the fatigue piece is bullshit just because it's not done purposefully. Because you have Silas in the business, you have multiple people all doing that kind of research or what not should be.
So you just need to centralise it and just make it more consistent and make sure people are getting, know, teams enabling functions essentially getting what they need from the business to understand what their challenges are and to, you know, to put the right structures and processes in place so that people can reuse data that they capture. I'm going say that even in a company of our size, which is a small business, we struggle to share consistent insight across our team from one research project to another.
because there's no one holding that accountability. So I think that's an easy, relatively easy win and sort of mitigates that kind of survey fatigue piece. The other thing is this kind of obsession with one platform to rule them all. And I know it's kind of Microsoft, but Microsoft is pants in many ways. The user experience is bad. we use, like in our personal lives, I'll use...
maybe 20 apps a day without even blinking about it. That app does the thing I want to do at the time I want to do it, whereas these kind of, my colleague Redmond calls it feature bloating, which is when you get a platform that's built to deliver a certain thing or deliver a certain purpose, and then you get clients that, because the software is a service, that ask for this thing, this thing, and this thing, and this thing, and they just build up and up and up to the point that it's...
Greg Arthur (46:49.718)
Mm.
Charlie (46:54.905)
unusable because there's so much stuff that it does. So that's the other kind of aspect of I suppose employee experience as well, just accepting that it doesn't have to be a one tool thing. Actually multiple tools have multiple benefits. As long as they're more or less linked within the tech stack you've got, then it's fine. Stop obsessing over it.
Greg Arthur (47:11.103)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Arthur (47:17.526)
Yeah, absolutely. it's, yeah, it's feature requests seem to be the thing that people kind of, they come to us with, I really like this, I really like this. Wouldn't it be great if we put them all in one? Kind of get, well, you've just listed like say four or five apps, maybe more. Why don't you think there's still four or five apps and very successful? There's a reason for that. You don't need them all at once. If you try to do five things at once,
you're going to do five things very badly and maybe not even do two of those things at all. I'm very aware of time, but I have two very quick questions. So we'll do them quickly. So if we, I'm going to say 2030, it feels like maybe that's a bit too close. Say 2035. So you've got time to change your mind before then. What are the emerging trends in human centered design now that you think will become the norm by 2035?
Charlie (47:53.425)
yeah
Mm.
Charlie (48:18.777)
If I'm honest, I L &D will still be doing the same thing as they've always done in 35 as they are in 24. Because actually, I'd separate L &D really from what will become.
performance, development, whatever it might be. I think a lot of people in L &D will be doing human-sensitive design. I think they'll be doing research and stuff, at least on the face of it. So I think that will be a thing. But yeah, the L &D industry doesn't move fast at all. So I don't have a huge amount of hope.
Greg Arthur (48:40.586)
Mm-mm.
Charlie (49:01.047)
that it's going to change overnight and actually it benefits us that it doesn't because that's what we sell. it's fine. Our proposition will still be legitimate in 10 years I would say.
Greg Arthur (49:15.477)
I wrote this question the other day and I was thinking I don't know if I have an answer myself. So I actually kind of keen to see if you had one but yeah I think there's a lot of nodding from my side around. Yeah I don't disagree I think you'll be right. The last one is more what advice would you give to any individuals or companies that may be struggling to get started with human-centered design whether it's
understand the concept or just very practical first steps. If they feel like they're stuck in it right, might get into it.
Charlie (49:52.857)
Very interesting question. And something else, having a conversation with a client about this week. So we've helped a few clients attempt to do this. And I say attempt because they've not been particularly successful. Brilliant, the viral line's going off. Can you hear it? Yeah, okay, well let's just wait until it stops.
Greg Arthur (50:10.034)
I could, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Charlie (50:15.865)
Okay, so, just do it now.
Charlie (50:22.745)
Blue bike.
Going for another hour probably.
Charlie (50:39.319)
So the question was, how do you get people's organizations started on human-centered design? Yeah, so yeah, so like I was just saying, we've had a few organizations attempt to do this, and I say attempt because they haven't been particularly successful, and it comes back to what we talk about with outcome-driven design. In order to do human-centered design effectively in a corporate business,
Greg Arthur (50:44.552)
Yeah, what advice?
Charlie (51:06.647)
you need to change fundamentally how you perceive what you're doing and what you're doing. And that starts with you as a leader of that function, but also your team also. the first step, one of the first steps that I would probably look at is redefining what L &D is there to do. It's not there to take orders from the business or it's not, you know, it's essentially a course shop.
is there to deliver the strategic value to the business and your first step is to understand the strategic value of the business and to have conversations with the business about what the strategy is and then figure out how you can best enable that through skills development and things like that. The other thing I would say that is a real crucial factor, yes there's the kind of process of human-centered design, you can look at IDEO as an example of that, but it's...
I would say tracking and measuring your time as a resource is one of the fundamental things that people can do to move in that direction because ultimately it comes to how much time and energy are you putting into something.
Greg Arthur (52:09.747)
Hmm.
Charlie (52:23.577)
without really understanding, well, time, energy, and money, which you'll be able to track if you start tracking your time, because you'll be able to get an average, let's say, of your team's salary. So you'll know that, let's say, on average it's 500 pounds a day to employ your team per person. And what does that mean per day your time spent is, I don't know, 20 grand. When you start looking at it like that, you start to be much more purposeful in...
Greg Arthur (52:27.08)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Arthur (52:43.059)
Mm.
Charlie (52:53.657)
how you're prioritizing what your team is working on. And if your time isn't prioritized to focus on strategic business imperatives, you're not doing it right, basically. So I would say a practical approach would be one.
Greg Arthur (53:07.504)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Charlie (53:13.431)
think about what you're actually trying to achieve and understand the strategy and deliver the strategy and to start tracking and resourcing your time on projects for the business as if you're an internal consultancy.
Greg Arthur (53:21.298)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (53:26.246)
That is excellent advice. Cool. And finally, is there anything you want to plug before you go? Maybe you hadn't written a book, but planning to write a book?
Charlie (53:36.695)
No, I haven't written a book yet. I feel like I have to, otherwise no one listens to you. there's plenty of shit books out there. Well, yeah, exactly. I'll probably just get AI to write me one and then I can say I've written one. Plugs. We do these things called learning labs, which are every quarter, but I might increase the frequency of them. And I just get somebody interesting in to talk to us. And when I say us, I mean...
Greg Arthur (53:40.082)
Ahem.
Greg Arthur (53:44.018)
No one's listening to this right now because I haven't written a book, so...
Charlie (54:04.887)
me and also anyone else that comes along. It's really a form, we'll get to network, ask some questions. I post those out through Solve Together quite regularly. signing up to those, signing up to the Solve Together newsletter as well, you'll get those kind of notifications. And next year in February, we're gonna run an in-person, we're calling it Solve Together mixer. So it's an in-person event which we'll bring together. Well, part of the stimulation was,
the conversations we had actually Greg at the learning network which is it would be really great to get together with innovators in the industry and to talk about and to see some new and exciting ideas in practice. So that's what that's going to be about. So that's coming up in February so again if you sign up to the newsletter at Solved or the learning lab you'll get a notification of when that is.
Greg Arthur (54:36.434)
Hmm.
Greg Arthur (54:48.101)
Yes. Yeah.
Charlie (55:01.273)
opportunity to register. So yeah, those probably the two main plugs that are going to add value. Otherwise, give us a call. Let us know if we can help you.
Greg Arthur (55:10.681)
Nice one, nice one, cool. Well thank you so much for your time. yeah, we'll think of a catchier title when this goes out, but otherwise, good stuff. Thank you, sir. Cheers. You too. Bye.
Charlie (55:21.593)
Thanks Greg, good to chat to you. Cheers. Bye mate.