Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of the L &D Books, one of the Women Talking About Learning podcast. I'm Andrew Jacobs. Originally, this was going to be one episode, but as our guests had so much they wanted to share with us, we decided to make it a two -parter. In this part, our guests discuss their own books and we'll hear more about writing in general in part
two. To help us get a greater understanding of what it's like to write a book we have four awesome guests who have all written different books for L &D. Two are from Canada and two from the UK. Our first guest is Hannah Brown. With 25 years in learning development, Hannah bridges the gap between formal training and learning embedded
in Teams. Her latest book, Into the Hands of Leaders, Employee Growth Through Learning, reflects the need for organisations to move training out of the classroom and into the hands of leaders, where they build cultures of learning. Our second
guest is Beth Kugler -Blom. Beth is a facilitator and learning designer who creates impactful meetings and learning experiences for clients through her company, BCB Learning Inc. Beth is the author of Design to Engage, How to Create and Facilitate a Great Learning Experience for Any Group, and is the host of the Facilitating on Purpose podcast.
Our next guest is Pam Hamilton. Pam is a collective intelligence expert and author of the workshop book, How to Design and Lead Successful Workshops and Supercharged Teams, 30 Tools of Great Teamwork. She is the founder of Queen's Award -winning innovation and capability agency, Parafin. Our final guest is Emily Gardner. Emily is a trainer, facilitator and author of The Path of the Guide, a framework for effective corporate facilitation.
She specialises in facilitation and innovation skills for corporates and also has a coaching practice supporting facilitators to scale their impact. Recorded in July 2025, this is such an engaging conversation. This is women talking about learning. This is Hannah, Pam, Beth and Emily talking about L &D books. Hi, Beth. It's great to see you again. I know that you're in BC. How's it going over there? What are you up
to these days? I'm visiting a friend, so I'm not even in my regular office, but I'm really happy to be with you, Hannah. Nice to see you again and also with Pam and Emily. So I'll say hi to Pam. Pam, how are you doing today? Good thanks, Beth. Nice to meet you as well, Hannah, and great to meet you, Emily. So we've got two people in Canada, two people in the UK. How about you, Emily? How are you today? Yeah, I'm good,
thank you. I mean, good to meet all of you, since I didn't know anybody before I joined today's call. I guess it's just so interesting to hear about why everybody's here. So I don't know. I mean, Hannah, you kicked us off. So I don't know if you want to share a little bit about why While you're here on this episode, what is it about L &D books that you really wanted to talk about? Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Emily. So I wrote my book. It's actually my second book.
It's called Into the Hands of Leaders, Employee Growth Through Learning. And I've been working in learning and development for probably 25 years, which makes me feel really old, but that's the
truth of it. And I guess over that time, I've realized that Yes, and most of that time has been working in kind of designing formal training programs, working with learning and development departments, things like that, trainers, facilitators, and that there's an important role for formal training, but also realizing that there's so much learning that happens on the job and in
formal learning. And so the book is really about... how can we take some of that learning and put it into the hands of leaders and help leaders create a culture of learning so that we can reinforce the learning that's already happening and promote it a little bit more. So that's my book and I'm clearly passionate about it and I know, Pam, that you got all of our books and you were saying earlier that there's so much alignment between
what we're all saying in our books. So I'm excited to hear a little bit more about everybody else's and where all the synergies and overlaps are. Yeah, it's a good point. So Hannah, I did buy all of our books before this recording and I've had a quick look through and it's just amazing. We come from completely different backgrounds and places, but we've got so many things in common about what we're saying. You know, we're saying things like, Today's working world is so pressured,
so difficult. There's so much change fatigue. People have no attention spans. And yet learning is so important. I mean, we know for a fact that there are huge skills gaps in businesses. People are trying to create new business models to deal with new marketplaces out there. We know that employees themselves or anyone in any organization, even if it's a charity that you're volunteering in, we need to learn, we need to grow our capabilities. And there's a lot of challenges for, I think,
people's time and attention. And I think you pointed it out in your book, Hannah. In fact, a couple of you did. You know, you can't just provide the resources. I always say to my clients, if you build it, they will not necessarily come at all. So, you know, doesn't matter if you've created the most beautiful playbook in the whole world, literally, maybe no one will read it. And so it's a real challenge for our you know, professionals like us. How about you, Emily?
I like that point. Yeah. What I was going to say, Pam, is that I feel like for me, when I wrote my book about facilitation skills, which I know is something that we all touch on in our books in some way, it's not just about giving people those skills. It's also almost creating that demand because you were talking about the world of work and how the workplace is changing. I've done a lot of work with companies over the
years. My background is in innovation. So companies more and more readily will bring people in to train and run workshops in the innovation space. In the facilitation space, I still feel like that's really nascent. And one thing that we're all trying to do is let people know through our books and sort of cultivate the demand for that skill and show how important it is to democratize
skills across the organization. And like you were saying, Hannah, give people the power to take those skills into their own hands and use that to create this culture of learning which spreads everywhere in a very natural way and isn't just dependent on external facilitators, trainers, coaches, even though there is a place for those sorts of things, but really democratizing those skills and putting them into the hands
of people I think is so important. Yeah, I was thinking about that too, in terms of when people start to want to learn facilitation skills. So my first book is about designing and facilitating learning, but I'm actually writing a second one right now, which is going to be called Everyday
Acts of Facilitation. And so I'm thinking about, and I'm trying to write it for that time when people, maybe they've just been asked to... you know, teach something or train in some way in their organizations, and they've kind of fall. We all fell into the role, I think, of being a facilitator. I don't know who grew up wanting to be a facilitator. It's so rare. I never heard of it. But, you know, how can we get people at the moment where they go, I think this is sort
of a thing that I can learn more about. And how do I do that? And where do I go? And books are one way, right? I'm also trying to say we can look around us at the world around us, all the conversations we have every day and learn facilitation skills or what not to do sometimes as well from what's happening in our daily lives. So, you know, if we can get them to know that it's a field, it's a thing, then our books are there for them, aren't they? What do you think, Hannah?
Oh, sorry, Emily. Go ahead, Emily, and then I'll chime in. All I was going to say is I think you've hit on a really good point, Beth, which is about this word facilitator and the word facilitation. And actually with the sort of sphere that we're all operating in, you need to talk to people who perhaps are facilitating but don't know that's what they're doing. And that comes with its own
challenges of generating that awareness. I think you've all done really well at picking book titles, because I personally really struggled with that, trying to find something that communicated what these skill sets do without calling them out explicitly in a way that would make people feel like that's not for me. But sorry, Hannah, I interrupted you. You're going to start speaking. Yeah, no, no, no, it's OK. Beth, I know your first book and I'm excited to hear that you're
writing your second one. And your first book was, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I read it a little while ago, but it was facilitation skills more for facilitators, so people who are are in the learning and development space or
the training space or the learning space. And what I think from your next book is it I think is everyday acts of facilitation and so it feels to me like it's stretching into and anybody can be a facilitator and if I think about the messages in my book it's leader, what's leaders role in, in encouraging their teams to learn a kind of on the job. And a big part of that is for them to be facilitators. How can they facilitate learning? How can they facilitate discussion and dialogue?
And so yeah, lots of Pam, I know you said at the beginning, lots of overlap between our books, but I'm seeing a really clear one, clear one right there. I agree with you. And I completely agree. I mean, my, as you know, my book's called the workshop book. So, you know, kind of the
most plain name for it. And in fact, that's how I got into learning and development was actually by running innovation workshops like you, Emily, but then bringing all of that skill about, you know, inspiring people, making them curious, making them have some sort of attention, bringing that into learning. But I feel like you're right, you know, facilitating or leading any kind of learning is a universal skill. because of the times that we live in right now, because we lack,
I think, a little bit of formal structure. And I definitely don't want to go back two centuries to where every meeting had a chairman, but somebody who has an agenda for the meeting makes sure that lots of different people get to talk rather than just one person. A lot of the work that I do is using the principles of collective intelligence, which is a science which measures how groups of people are more intelligent as a group than
the most intelligent person in the group. if they behave well, and there are three things that make them do that. One thing is turn taking. So conversational turn taking where everyone lets everybody speak because you then get that diversity of opinion. Second one is building on ideas, not just waiting for your idea and then saying it out loud. And the third one is more women in the group because women tend to be naturally more empathetic and aware of and
not, you know, that's a stereotype as well. But the science proves that more women in the group are, you know, are able to get greater collective intelligence. I feel like women do naturally facilitate in whatever sphere of life we're in, we're always thinking about what does everybody in the room need, which is why I think we bring this kind of skill to learning. I'm super excited about your book, Beth, about everyday active facilitation, because it just feels quite true.
That is what we're doing all the time. Even if it's tiny, it doesn't have to be a massive week long thing. Yeah, that's right. And I think Hannah was alluding to it too with leaders because we want people to know that facilitation skills are they can be used one -on -one, don't we? And not just with groups. We're using them all the time. And actually, I think they can make us better people, you know, for like facilitators
can change the world. Yay, you know, I'm so pro get on my soapbox about what skills we bring to the world. But let's talk a little bit more about our books because I think it's so exciting for me to actually talk about the book because it does feel like something that's off the side of my desk in a way. I mean, I'm a learning designer, I'm a facilitator, but then like the rest of you, we wrote a book and not everybody does that. But maybe I can ask Emily first, why did you
decide that you would write a book? You know, what brought you to this point? Yeah, I always had to hesitate to admit this, but I actually started writing the book completely by accident. So I am a writer, like always have been. I have a literature degree, so I learned to write very long essays about things that other people had written down. And when I first joined the world of work, as I mentioned, my background's in innovation.
So I was working for a financial services organization, wound up in their innovation team, which was just me and one other person not knowing what we were doing. And we started with books, you know, we read sprints by Jake Knapp and we were like, yes, we can take this, we can introduce this. And we just started doing things, you know, trial and error. And then From there, I moved into innovation consultancy. So working with loads of different organizations, workshops every
day, all of that sort of stuff. And I just started a Word document one day and started writing for myself, you know, what went well, what didn't go so well, what I could do differently. And one day I opened this Word document and I was like, wow, this is really long. This could be a book. So I took a week off and I sat down and started jumbling all the parts around until I was like... Okay, this is a framework. I think
I'm starting to take this seriously. So from beginning to end, it took over three years to bring the book to where it is now, where people can actually hold it and buy it. And I still find it almost laughable when I see people holding a copy. I'm like, did I do that? Is that that
word document? Is this that thing now? But looking back, I'm going to retrospectively add a reason that I wrote the book, which is, I guess, it was a sort of love letter to myself in that first original role, I guess, because I feel like I really wanted those skills to be able to facilitate well within a corporate context, except I didn't know what facilitation was, and I wasn't sure that's what I was doing. So let's say that I wrote the book to my past self. I feel like it's
the same for me, Emily. I started writing the original workshop book because this new one is 10 years later. It's the updated version and it's like 80 % new. even though it has the same foundations. But yeah, you know, writing down what really worked, what didn't work. And I'm, as I said, at the beginning of the conversation, while we were just warming up, I said my, you don't really read my book, it's more of a manual. It's like, have it ready for when you need to
do a specific objective. So that's what I really love the kind of gamifying of different objectives into different structures. And so do you need to create new names? Or do you need to align a group of difficult stakeholders or, you know, do you need to create something that's an idea that works really, really well, but improve it.
So I've kind of done it through the lens of all of the different challenges that I've done in my, you know, 25 years of workshops, working on things from diamonds to toilet paper and everything in between, probably similar to you, Emily. How about you, Hannah? Yeah. Well, a first quick thought. I don't remember when this was. I'm going to guess COVID is a bit of a mind vacuum. So I want to say it was five years, but if I add COVID, it was probably more like 10 years.
So let's say it was 10 years ago. I can remember literally coming out of my mouth, I could never write a book. I don't even know what I would say. And so it's really interesting to be on the other side of that. So if you're listening and you're wondering, can I write a book? I would say, absolutely, you can. And so why did I write my book? So as I said earlier, I've been working in learning and development for a long time. And most of that time has been as a consultant
designing custom programs for clients. And I had lunch with a client probably two or three
summers ago at this point. And she was telling me about a program, she's the manager of a learning department, a program that they created with a lot of... a lot of detail and and like really good design that went into it like they did a needs assessment and it was for leaders in their organization on change managing change and the leaders all came which was great and they asked them you know what do you need to be able to implement these concepts in your organization
to be able to actually apply what you've learned and so they got this feedback and then they turned around and they've created a follow -up program on resiliency specifically and when they invited those leaders back to the resiliency program of the hundred or so leaders only six people signed up and When my client told me this my heart just sank And it was so familiar to me.
So yes Yes, well, that's the thing and that's how I felt when she was telling me because I thought in my time consulting I feel like I've heard this over and over again and I I started thinking there's a there has to be a better way or a different way that we help people change their behavior or improve their performance or learn essentially, be more innovative, Emily, because I see innovation and learning go hand
in hand, right? And so I really started questioning my own profession about all this formal training and realized that we can't just have formal training, that we need to look at that culture where we're learning and working and growing. And so it was that lunch that was really pivotal and the seed that was planted about how might this look different
for it to be more effective. Can you imagine that in this time starved, high pressured, low attention span world where there's so much change, so much learning that we need and so much demand for learning that we still have people, all of us, who feel like we don't have time to learn what's being given to us and the resources that we're privileged enough to have. It seems like such a shame. I totally agree. I think it changes maybe how we write books, because we don't want
to stop writing books, do we? And there's multiple ways to read books. We're all reading more audio books, aren't we? Just to try to fit it in, but I don't know. We can't stop doing this, but maybe we write them in such a way that it's easier to read. I know when I wrote Design to Engage, I said right in the beginning, you don't have to read this from cover to cover. You can just go to the chapter that is relevant to what you're
doing right now and get that piece. And we know that's good learning anyway when it's immediately relevant for the... for the people. So did you think about how you wrote your book, any of you, and make different decisions based on kind of that busy world we're all living in right now? Yeah, I was going to talk about my own process, but also link back to something that Pam had said, which was, you know, my book's more of
a manual. And it connected with me when you started talking Hannah and saying, If you don't think you can write a book, you absolutely can. I was having this conversation with another facilitator recently where she said, oh, I really liked your book, Emily, but I can never write something like that. You know, my mind doesn't work in that way. My mind works in a much more visual mapping way. And I was saying, that's OK. You can write a book which is just facilitation maps.
You know, I think we all do have a book in us. And as you rightly mentioned, Beth, people have different preferences for how they take things in and learn. And that's fantastic. It just means that there's more need for diversity out there. So in a way, it lowers those barriers to thinking I can't write a book because I can't write in this particular style. You know, that's absolutely fine. People take things in in different ways. And people make choices now about what they consume
based on how they can consume it. I think that's one of the joys of There's not many great things to say about Amazon, but that's one of the great things to say about Amazon is you can look and you can definitely find something that suits you and your style. Yeah, definitely. But keen to hear from the rest of you on the format of your book and how you picked it. I know you said, Beth, it's dive in and out. Was that a similar approach for you, Hannah, or did you have something
slightly different? Yeah, well... I was thinking I was going to talk about just my latest book, but I'd like to kind of contrast both of my books. So my first book was very much kind of what was in me and what could easily, and I'm using air quotes because it's never easy to write a book, but what was easy to write based on my consulting career. And it was very much for learning and development professionals, how to design really
impactful virtual training. And I was very conscious of making it very user -friendly and digestible or accessible. I have a great graphic designer that I work with and there's lots of images and illustrations and models and pictures, for lack of a better word, to make it really easy. I didn't want it to be like this dense textbook, kind of Pam, like yours, like reference, like go in when you need it, right? I wanted it to be really accessible. And my second book is really different.
So it's written for leaders, still without learning emphasis, but written for leaders instead of L &D professionals. And my approach with that one was, well, first of all, I had this lunch with this client and I'm like, well, is this a thing? I think it is. But I wanted to validate that. So I ended up taking probably a good six months interviewing lots of different leaders and getting their perspective, which was really helpful in shaping kind of what I ultimately
wrote. And many of them agreed to have their stories in my book. So there's still some models and not nearly as many illustrations, maybe one or two, but there's leaders' stories throughout. And so I was conscious of not having the book be just my voice, but to pull in other voices and perspectives to, again, make it a little
bit more interesting. So it's a really different read than my first book, but I hope it says, I don't know, I have to ask, I suppose, if it's, yeah, that having the stories in there makes it a little bit more engaging. Hannah, I want you to tell everyone what you did about the podcast series for your second book, because I haven't read, I'm going to full disclosure, I read your first book, but I haven't read your second book, but I have listened to the short podcast series
that you did, which is brilliant. And I think people should know that you did that. Yeah, thanks, Beth. So a colleague of mine when I was talking about researching and doing these interviews just kind of said off the cuff, he's like, why don't you record them and turn them into a podcast? And like I said, 10 years ago, I could never write a book. I was like, I would never do a podcast. But he planted that seed and that's
what I ended up doing. So about half of them, sorry, not half, half a dozen of them agreed to use that recording in a podcast. So I worked with a great producer who took those. So it's not like this style where it's a topic and it's different people talking. It follows the story arc of my book and it's me with Emily and then me with Beth and then hearing a little bit from Pam kind of all around a theme. And it's not a forever podcast because I feel like that would
be just far too much. to tackle, but it's six episodes kind of that I launched leading up to the book. So it was a nice way of providing a different format for people to hear or read what I had to say. And again, not just hearing it from me, they're hearing it from other people's experiences. Because stories bring all the interest,
don't they? I mean, whether or not you can say who the case study is or not, it doesn't matter because so long as you can, you know, put their name as confidential, you can tell a story that's maybe a total failure. Yes. People love, love, love, love listening to those or learning from those and then, you know, and then some successes. So it was, it's the thing that I've learned the most about writing my books is put in lots of stories, you know, the more traumatic, the better.
And then it's like learning, isn't it? People then learn because they get a spike of emotion and it's memorable. And so they take that story with them. Yeah. When I got my first book edited, the editor said, I love your stories and please do more. So I went and wrote a bunch more and tried to integrate them in. And now when I'm writing this one, it is all story based. But my challenge is, I mean, Emily, you mentioned diversity before. I'm thinking so much more now.
I mean, it's not like I wasn't thinking about diversity and inclusion five years ago, but now it's just even so much more a part of my reality and my recognition as a white middle -aged woman. I only have my own experience and I just try to learn about other people's experiences. And so part of me is saying right now, well, I can only talk about my everyday, you know, everyday acts of facilitation. I don't know what everyone
else's everyday looks like. So it's a challenge to kind of boil it down to just the mindsets and the skills and the whatever. And hopefully that resonates with people around the world because we're so much more our global audience for each other. Now, we weird people who read, you know, write and read books in training and development and learning, learning and facilitation, all the words, right, that we use in our field. And
so are you going to do that, Beth? Are you going to ask for different people's perspectives on everyday facilitation? You're going to do it from your perspective. But yeah, it's kind of a challenge, isn't it? Because I interviewed 30 people when I wrote my first book and that was really useful. And I think maybe I needed that in terms of like a validation or something at the time to say, well, I don't know, do I know what I'm talking about? Well, 30 other people
were kind of in line, right? And it felt good to do that and to put their quotes in the book. But in this one, it almost is a little bit more memoir and looking back at my whole life and go, well, how did I become a facilitator? and a learning designer, you know, yes, I took formal courses, but actually all those micro moments across my whole life, you know, and I'm, I'm 51, like I've had a big life so far. And how did, you know, how did we all learn the things
that we learned? It was tiny stuff along the way, right? So it's, it's got a bit of a memoir quality to it. So it'll be a different type of book. Yeah. But what about you, Pam, because you've written two or three books, I think, and are they different from each other in certain ways? Yes. So the first book was the workshop book, which was definitely about what I'd learned and the different techniques related to corporate
facilitation, usually around innovation. And then I went into trying to do a much more clever book, which I'm really very proud of it. It's called Supercharged Teams, and it's got a lot more research behind it. And it's all around collective intelligence. So instead of just how to bring people together in one meeting, you know, or one workshop, it's about how to build a really strong team. It's again a toolkit. It's 30 tools of great teamwork. And I really enjoyed
writing it. I wrote it during the pandemic or at least just before the pandemic. And I was talking about remote working at the time and virtual workshops and everything. And then it sort of landed. The thing is it landed in the pandemics. So I'm super proud of it. And I still refer, you know, I still refer to it all the time, especially because so many people, so many experts gave me amazing research and incredible
interviews. So I really reached out in that one, whereas the first one was just me saying what I'd learned. And then I did the update of the workshop book, which was fascinating because I've done a kind of a combination of the two books now because I have the old workshop book, then I had to update it. And the publisher said, you know, please make sure that it's at least
10 % new. And it was like 80 % new, but just because of how much has changed in 10 years, but then I went out and interviewed lots of different people. So hopefully brought more case studies to it, even though it's still a manual. So yeah, it's been a wonderful journey. You know, one of the best things about writing these books, apart from the fact that writing is quite hard and you've got to do it in addition to all of your day job, is the people that you speak to,
isn't it? People like yourselves you meet or the people that you're interviewing. And that's such inspiration for anybody. And that's so enriching, don't you find? Is that what you found, Emily? Yeah, definitely. Meeting new people was a big part of the book writing process for me, not just for the side of getting people's insights to put into the book, but also from the side of What does it mean to write a book and to be
successful in that space? You know, I reached out to a bunch of L &D authors, not any of you three, so it's okay, I didn't get ghosted by anyone in this school, but I reached out to a bunch of other L &D authors and spoke to some about, you know, what makes a book successful, all of those types of things, and really tried to do my research into that as well. And that was such a fruitful process to... learn about
those sorts of things. I think one other key thing that I learned from writing the book was how to work in public. So the year before I published, I was thinking, how am I going to get to the point where this is finished? And accountability is a massive thing for me. So I was thinking about how can I create accountability? And I set myself the goal, like every week this year, I'm going to put a video on LinkedIn of me talking
about something in the book. I'm going to do it every week for the entire year and just hopefully it will help me to get over the line. But it did way more of that than that as well because it introduced me to new people. It helped me to develop and refine my content because they
had to talk about it. Then I developed and refined it further because people gave me feedback and it got me more comfortable as well with appearing on camera and building a sort of momentum behind the book so that when it came out it wasn't just launched into a vacuum, there were already people there who were interested to read it because
of this content. So I think there's so much to be said for the process in pushing you out of your comfort zone in so many different ways that you don't necessarily even anticipate when you start going through that process. I mean I see you all nodding so I know you've probably got one or two stories along these lines as well. We're going to take a pause here, stay tuned for the second part which will be out in a day
or so. A huge thank you to our awesome guests Hannah, Pam, Beth and Emily and you'll find all their details along with links to the subjects they spoke about in the show notes.