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Learning Is The New Working — Technology
Learning Is The New Working

‘Learning Is the New Working’ is a new podcast from Chris Pirie, ex-Microsoft Chief Learning Officer and now independent investigator of The Future of Workplace Learning. A set of stimulating conversations with some of the leading thinkers and edge practitioners in the modern Workplace Learning space, from Chief Learning Officers  to Learning Experience Designers, from Neuroscientists  to Technologists, vendors of Learning Tech, and the HR leaders charged with developing human capital potential.  Our topics are everything from the American skills crisis to our scary, but fascinating, century: how the rise of the robots, AI, employment and demographic change are re-shaping all our lives – in work and out of it. We will also explore how the process of Learning is itself changing with current and emerging technology, share war stories about which new ways of delivering Learning work, what Sales Enablement is versus what it could be, what a ‘Learning Science’ might offer… all with the ultimate aim of empowering the CLO.

Copyright: © Copyright The Learning Futures Group

Latest Episodes:

Robert Poynton On How To Create, And Hold, A "Space To Learn" May 20, 2020

Show notes

With a third of humanity still in various forms of Lockdown, the worlds of Work and Learning hare changing radically, indeed will arguably never be the same again. As Learning Leaders we can be forgiven for asking ‘What Now?’ In our new COVID-19 mini-Season at ‘Learning Is The New Working,’ we’re reaching out to some smart folks who might give us some useful food for thought here, and you can’t get better than this week’s guest, Oxford University in the UK’s Robert Poynton. Poynton, an Associate Fellow at the University’s Saïd Business School, first came to my personal attention when, just out of Microsoft, I read his fascinating 2018 book Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life). The basic idea couldn’t be more timely; access improv skills that an actor might use on stage to the everyday business of work and life as a way to embrace change as a natural process, putting creativity and innovation at the heart of all you do. I love this, and it definitely inspired me to try new things, so I decided to reach out to Robert in his home office to capture some of his reflections on our current global situation. We find out about his personal intellectual journey studying Psychology and Philosophy at the same institution he still works in then a move into Advertising for a few years, then: how he works in both Oxford, but also “off grid” in rural Spain; the range of brands, including Nike, and leaders he works on in both his Executive Education and Improv work; the ‘Do’ series of books and its guiding ideas; why improvised theatre fascinates him so much - and why it should you, too; how it turns out improvisation is actually based on a set of practices that can be studied and learnt and help us deal with Change; why we end up spending too much time in our own heads and that noticing your environment can really help; how to map his ideas onto being a better Learner; his reflections on the clues the response to COVID-19 is giving us; and much more.

Turning Disaster Into Purpose: Cornerstone's Tina Bolding May 13, 2020

Show notes

In our on-going Learning 4 Good season, we’re working to find out what corporate L&D can learn from the innovative Non-Governmental Organizations, Private Social Enterprises, and Community Organizations using Learning and ed tech to build trust and capacity for social good. This week, dial in for our 50 minutes of great interaction with an online learning platform that partners with NGOs, leading agencies, and experts in humanitarian aid and development to make the best online learning available to anywhere, anytime, for free (and which is supported by the Cornerstone OnDemand Foundation). That is, of course, DisasterReady.org, and we were so happy to get the chance to talk to its Director, Tina Bolding, former Accenture partner-cum-humanitarian sector and Tulsa, OH leader. In our conversation, we ask about her connections with the Mid-West, as well as: a snapshot of the 160,000 humanitarian sector Learners who access her organization’s material round the world, as well as how it connects with the wider Cornerstone OnDemand mission and the distinctive services it offers; its roots in the Pakistan 2010 Flood crisis and how quickly a new learning portal was spun up to help Save The Children; its commitment to multilingualism and how that affects its content creation strategies (hint: collaboration!); the most popular topics sought on the platform; the complexities of serving a complex humanitarian ‘market’ - which also hasn’t quit caught up with online learning, in many ways; next up on the agenda: boosting accessibility for users with poor Internet access; her views on how to make Partnerships really work; and much more.

In The Age Of Google And Netflix... Why Is It Still So Difficult To Learn? Enter the Knowledge Cloud May 06, 2020

Show notes

In this latest episode of our ‘Learning Leaders’/Season 5 stream of the podcast, I have the privilege of sharing one of the most stimulating conversations I’ve had since starting ‘Learning Is The New Working.’ It’s with a true Workplace Learning giant - global Influencer, serial entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist engineer, former Obama Digital Fellow and one-time public servant Karl Mehta. Gain the benefit of our near-hour of conversation and insights the CEO (or as he jokes, ‘Chief Plumber and Problem Unblocker’!) we uncover with the Founder of what he calls the ‘AI-powered Knowledge Cloud’ that’s EdCast. Karl gives us an overview of a very busy life running not just that company but a bunch of great non-profits like Code for India, as well as: a life journey from growing up in India and adopting an engineering but also an entrepreneurial mindset from very early on; the personal reasons behind his comparatively recent move into the $7bn edtech market; his conviction that Learning and Working can and should be the same thing; a deep dive into the EdCast product story - and why 250,000 Indian IT experts are already on-board with it; the story of his time in the White House; why, and soon, the L&D department will have to get involved in the learning and training of robot talent; why edtech procurement can get so (needlessly) complicated; why there can be no digital transformation without workforce transformation; if there's a specific Indian approach to education, and is it one America wants or not; and much more.

Digital Humanitarianism Is Our Best Hope For The Future Now Apr 29, 2020

Show notes

On last week’s ‘Learning 4 Good' episode, we broadcast a late 2019 interview we’d conducted with one of the Directors of the Humanitarian Leadership Academy (HLA), Nicolas Kroeger. If you haven’t had a chance to listen quite yet, the HLA is an exemplar, really, of many of the things we set up the Season to explore: to find out what corporate L&D can learn from the way NGOs, private social enterprises, and community organizations are using Learning/ed tech to build trust and capacity. The mission of teams like HLA - now becoming part of global charity Save the Children - is, of course, becoming even more important, but also challenged, by the on-going Global Lockdown, or ‘The Big Reset’ in Josh Bersin’s useful summation. So, in a rapid follow-up, we jumped on a late Friday afternoon with Nicolas to get an update on all that, which includes the astonishing fact that its global Learner intake has increased by 20,000 since the Lockdown started, as well as the fascinating fact that HLA’s talking to the UK Government about helping train up the 750,000 regular citizens who’ve signed up to help the country’s NHS fight Covid-19. But we were also lucky enough to get his colleague Atish Gonsalves, the body’s Global Innovation Director, on the call, too - enabling us to understand his approach as a non-profit CLO and create of Innovation opportunities around global Learning. So, tune in to hear more on: just how do you help locales with already weak health systems deal with a novel virus; HLA’s concerns (but also preparations) for helping countries that may face not just Covid, but a natural disaster (which haven’t stopped); the kinds of training people are looking for, which range from technical but also Project Management and even help to bolster their personal resilience; how both Kroeger and Gonsalves are concerned that online training gets properly supported by the human element, and that we need to quickly evolve something between self-guided learning and what we get as people from a face-to-face mentoring session; how the truth of the statement, ‘People we serve know what they need’ is even truer than ever now; Atish’s personal career journey/what being a Chief Innovation Officer means at a global NGO, and a hint of the next stage in his growth - him setting up a mixed reality gaming system company, Gamoteca; and much more.

We’re All Human. But Are We All Actually Humanitarians? HLA Director Nicolas Kroeger Apr 22, 2020

Show notes

In our on-going Learning 4 Good stream on the podcast we are trying to find out what corporate L&D can learn from the way NGOs, private social enterprises, and community organizations are using Learning/ed tech to build trust and capacity. In this, our eighth such encounter, we’re hearing from someone right on the nexus of where international development meets humanitarian aid and so perfectly placed to enlighten us about all of these major issues. That’s the Director of The Humanitarian Leadership Academy, which was set up to empower local responses to crises - Nicolas Kroeger. A French-German national who’s raising a family in London after many years of field assignments in places such as Zimbabwe, Tajikistan, Sudan and Timor-Leste, in our near-hour of conversation Nicolas outlines the HLA mission and its specific relationship with Save The Children, then helps us better understand: the Academy’s main offerings - Kaya, a digital learning platform accessed by over 115,000 Learners in 190 countries, and HPass, its standards and certification offering for aid professionals and practitioners, as well as a fast-growing consultancy practice; how development and aid are starting to interact in really interesting and new ways; its key resources, including its thought-provoking ‘You Cannot Argue With A Flood’ immersive 360-degree educational movie (which we highly recommend you check out); its work with Paolo Alto’s Institute for the Future on trying to spot the patterns in global affairs it needs to be on top of; the importance of data and learning from its wealth of experience to do just that; and much more.

"Your Brand's Going To Be Defined For A Long Time By What You Do Now:" Kevin Oakes, i4cp Apr 15, 2020

Show notes

In our first episode since COVID-19’s grim debut and the lockdown of three billion of us worldwide, we offer some thoughts on ‘What-If’ to ‘What Now?’ - an attempt to curate timely, useful conversations to surface best practice, build community, and share what we in the Workplace Learning community are doing to best cope with what Josh Bersin’s calling ‘The Great Reset.’ We’re kicking off this new conversation stream pretty strong, with a very thought-provoking meeting we had online with highly-respected Learning tech veteran Kevin Oakes. Kevin is, of course, CEO and Co-Founder of HR think tank i4cp (the Institute for Corporate Productivity), a leading research firm all about discovering what makes the successful people practices of high-performance organizations so effective, and which claims to produce more human capital research than any other firm on the Planet. In the course of a focused 38 minutes of dialog we review the mission of i4cp, then dive into: why he lives in Seattle - a city he moved to from Boston to start work with MSFT founder Paul Allen on what was originally Asymetrix then became a small company you may have heard of, Click2learn; the rest of Kevin’s unique resume, which includes entrepreneurship and leadership at major detect brands such as SumTotal Systems; the concept of the ‘next practice’ and how that can help the CHRO; how, if the CFO was the hero that emerged in the 9/11 crisis, it may be that the HR and CLO is the figure brands are coming to in this one; how new work practices like employee swaps and new (overdue!) attitudes to gig workers are being rapidly brought together because of Coronavirus; how the long-term effects of remote working and learning will change our world for ever; and much more.

How CAEL’s Working To Develop A Sustainable Talent Pipeline Apr 08, 2020

Show notes

This week we go back to that mysterious, pre-Pandemic world where we all went outside and met other humans! Remember them days? Sigh. In this case, it’s one of the excellent Workplace Learning humans I had the deep pleasure to meet at last September’s ‘Learning Leaders’ conference in Washington, DC (and after which we’ve named this Season 5 stream of the podcast). That’s Marie A. Cini, Ph.D., who’s the President of Strada Education Network affiliate CAEL (the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning). In our half hour together in that warm, balmy Washington afternoon, Marie was kind enough to explain to me the CAEL history and what’s changing with it now, as well as: her organization’s new focus on the whole post-secondary education universe, as well as employers and even regional development policymaking teams; how places like Pittsburgh and Houston know there aren’t that many steel mills or oil derricks any more for locals, and so are working with her team to not just spot the next careers for residents, but help seed them; how CAEL helped McDonald’s develop an app to inform team members of what they could do next if they wanted to, either inside or outside the Golden Arches; her call for dialog with CLOs like you to better inform her and her colleagues about the adult learner challenges and opportunities in your industry that she needs to know about - so go to the CAEL conference in November! And much more.

“Fresh Insights Into Development Effectiveness:” The World Bank's Sheila Jagannathan Mar 25, 2020

Show notes

In our latest episode in our on-going 'Learning 4 Good' season, where we are finding our what corporate L&D can learn from how Non-Governmental Organizations, Private Social Enterprises, and Community Organizations, who are all using Learning and ed tech to build trust and capacity for social good. We’re hearing from the people on the ground who are experimenting to help build skills and capacity in under-served populations and using learning technology and design to build relevant skills for social enterprise and humanitarian leadership, and we’ve got a perfect guest to help us do just that this week: Sheila Jagannathan, Lead Learning Specialist over at The World Bank over at Washington, DC (not an NGO, of course, but still part of the infrastructure fighting global poverty through capacity development, not building, as we’ll soon see). Sheila is also Program Manager of the Bank’s Open Learning Campus, which is part of its Development Economics Knowledge Management practice, which we hear all about in our near-hour together, as well as: her personal journey, which saw her being explored to the ideas of AI pioneer Seymour Pappert back at MIT in the early 1980s which led to her transferring her interests into ed tech and the forerunner of adaptive learning - Intelligent Tutoring; the wide span of her current responsibilities, from monitoring skills development to preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution; how her portfolio fits into the overall mission of the Bank, and the extensive profile of the people she needs to help; why she prefers capacity development to capacity ‘building’ - and why she thinks the latter is no longer a useful concept; why Learning also involves UnLearning, letting go of no longer useful ‘knowledge;' her conviction that investing in early childhood education could be critical for our common future; the importance of Learning Analytics to what The Bank's trying to do; and much more.

Be Safe, Everybody: A Special Message To Our Listeners Mar 19, 2020

Show notes

In the light of our current extraordinary circumstances, our host Chris Pirie takes stock of where we are, what we need to focus on, and what we need to all do together to get through safe. As we will.

Dealing With A Time Of Declining Skill 'Half-Lives': Change In The Higher Education Sector, With Northeastern’s Dr Sean Gallagher Mar 11, 2020

Show notes

What has the impact of digital been on the Higher Education sector? Is it almost kind of easier to get ‘into’ Harvard or MIT at postgraduate level now instead of for your Bachelor’s - and does that really matter? How is the sector coping with the challenge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and how is it faring in terms of partnering with the world of work to help us all cope? How do we square the alleged decline of value in a first degree with the fact that the majority of US job openings ask for a BA? There’s probably no sector in the economy as important to the future of Workplace Learning than the world of the modern University, but we need to know what are the major trends emerging that can help us plan ahead. This week we talk to someone in the catbird seat in terms of helping us understand; Dr Sean Gallagher, Founder and Executive Director of Northeastern University's Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy, and who also works at the college as Executive Professor of Educational Policy. With an impressive mix of tech, business and educational research forming his own career choices, Sean’s full-time focus now is on getting the answers to all the questions we posed, plus ones you and I haven’t even thought about yet - making him the ideal guest for our next episode in our ‘The Learning Leaders’ mini-series. In nearly an hour of great conversation we hear about his own journey, then dive into the context, a buoyant - maybe surprisingly buoyant? - $650bn HE market; is re-training actually a Corporate Social Responsibility action? The emergence of the ‘middle’ skill level; the changing demographic of US education versus other geographies; online degrees - the first 20 years; what ‘sustaining’ disruption may look like; why the MBA is the lab for Learning change; where we are with Credentialing (and likely go next) and Experiential Learning; and much more.

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