 The environment around us is changing at an increasing pace and we need to adapt all the time, which means that learning has become a key component for personal and organizational growth. We learn all the time, but most of it is done unconsciously and often in very ineffective manners. And that's where learning design comes in. And you're going to hear all about it in this episode. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hey, I'm Andre. This is the service design show and it's episode 126. Hey, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about discovering what's beneath the surface of service design. What are the hidden things that make a huge difference between success and failure, all to help you design services that make a positive impact on people and business? The guest in this episode is Andre Plout. Andre is the founder of a human machine, which is a learning design studio based in New York City. The reason I'm excited to have Andre on the show is because I think service design is all about change. I've even said that change is the ultimate deliverable of service design and change is driven by people, which means a lot of learning is going on within service design. But I think we don't spend enough time designing the learning experience. As you'll discover in this episode, learning is much more than following a training or a course. We have to take a much more holistic perspective on what learning is. But maybe the most interesting part of this conversation with Andre for me was the focus on learning as a strategic business tool for growth and how learning can enable individuals, teams and organizations to get the best out of themselves. I'm really excited about the potential of learning design and I hope that at the end of this episode, you'll be as well. If you enjoy conversations that help you to grow as a service design professional, make sure to click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when new conversations like this come out. We've been doing this for the last five years, so be prepared for the next five years. Now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Andre Plout. Welcome to the show, Andre. Hey, thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me. All the way from New York City. The connection between Amsterdam and New York is pretty good. Yeah, well established. Well established. But I'm pretty close to Amsterdam, not in Amsterdam in Utrecht, but I think it's what most people would call it the Amsterdam measurable area unless except the people who live in Utrecht. Andre, we're going to talk about a super cool topic, a topic that you're super passionate about and a topic that I sort of that it surprised me in a few ways based on what I've seen from you in previous videos and in preparation notes. But before we get into that, could you give a little intro to who you are and how you got excited about the topic we're going to discuss today? Yeah, I'd love to. So my name is Andre Plout. I'm the founder of Human Machine, which is a learning design studio. And basically I'm a learning designer. I've been doing learning design for the better part of a decade in all sorts of different environments from really big companies like Apple to startups like General Assembly to digital agencies like huge based here in Brooklyn where I am. And now working with all sorts of clients to really rethink the way that people learn, the way that we build learning products and experiences and to really sort of try to elevate this idea of learning design to sort of sit alongside these other great design disciplines like service design and user experience design and system design and also just elevate it beyond this point of just design and into strategy and helping organizations rethink the way that we work, the way that we collaborate and the way that we learn. There's a lot to unpack on there and those are some hefty ambitions. Before we dive into that, I'm going to do a 60 second rapid fire question round with you. Go on. Five questions, answer them as quickly as possible. Are you ready? Okay, ready. Ready. What's always in your fridge? Oat milk. Oat milk. Right. Yes. Big on the oat milk. Multiple guests have been so far. Anyway, question number two is which book are you reading at this moment, if any? Yeah, I'm reading a book about John Marshall. So one of the first Supreme Court judges in the US. I pretty much only read nonfiction. It's like the only thing I can get into and particularly history books. So that's what I'm reading right now. We'll add a link in the show notes. Next question is about Superpower. Which superpower would you like to have? Teleportation, I think, just being able to be in whatever place I would like to be in that moment. I am not a big flyer. I don't love flying, but I have to do it all the time, obviously before this year. And so being able to skip all of the travel stuff and just show up wherever I want to be, to show up would be really nice. Maybe video chats. Yeah, that's the closest I've come. Yeah. Next question is, what did you want to become when you were a kid? A lot of different things, but the one thing for the longest time was a filmmaker. So a director, I always made little home movies with my family and my friends. And that carried me even into college when I studied film. So being a director and being a filmmaker was always what I wanted to be. Interesting career plot then at some point. Final question is, when did you learn about service design? When were you first introduced to the term? Yeah, I think I was first introduced to service design back in 2012, maybe, when I was working at General Assembly and we were building the user experience design course. And I was working with some incredibly talented user experience designers on the curriculum and the idea of service design came up. And I was so blown away by it because I realized that was what I had been doing for a long time. When I was at Apple doing training, I was working with the retail stores and the retail employees. And so much of that is service and teaching people how to deliver great service. And when I first learned about service design, everything just clicked. So that was when I first learned about it. Hmm. Awesome. Andre, learning design. That's the thing you're passionate about. And that's the central theme of our topic. Now, when I heard the term learning design, I had a different expectation, I think. So when I heard learning design, I was thinking about it's the discipline, the design discipline of designing training materials, courses. And I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's going more into instructional design kind of thing. And you have a different perspective or a broader perspective on learning design, right? So how would you define learning design? Yeah, so you're actually exactly right that the things that you described, which is designing instructional materials and curriculum, that is absolutely part of learning design. But it's just a part in the same way that you would think of content strategy and, you know, UX writing and copywriting, those are still part of design and user experience design, but they're not the only parts. So thinking about the curriculum, thinking about materials, instructional materials, that's sort of how people have thought about this field for many, many decades. And that's where it's been called sort of instructional design. The way that I've been trying to think about it for a number of years and the way that I try to talk to people about it as is a much broader concept. And it's one that involves really looking at the entire learning experience for the participants going through it and realizing that they're not just interacting with a slide deck, they're not just interacting with a curriculum, they're going to be interacting with one another, they're going to be interacting with the instructors or the media that is available to them, they're going to be interacting with the outside world that is outside of that learning experience as they try to implement new skills and new knowledge. And so when you broaden it out like that, you begin to realize that there is a sort of interactive aspect to it, there's a community aspect to it, there's a lot of emotional aspects to it, you know, how do we convince people to learn? How do we convince people to change? There are some really profound design challenges when building a learning experience. And to just look at it as content, I think misses the sort of diversity and complexity of what is really a very cool thing that you're putting somebody through, which is a change process basically. That's it, it's about change, right? And that's what you're designing for and looking beyond maybe a single medium or limit that set of media like articles, slides, video presentations, right? You're also looking at the relationships between people. I'm curious. So learning design, what is, which challenge does it address? Like, what is the problem at its core that it's trying to solve? Yeah, how would you describe that? I think this is what I think is interesting about learning design and why I believe it fits in the same category as things like user experience design and service design is that at the end of the day, learning design, the problem it's trying to solve is getting either an individual, a group of individuals, or even a whole large organization to go from point A to point B. It's trying to help them do something that they previously couldn't have done before. And I think that's pretty much the goal of any design discipline. It's to essentially create an experience that enables people to do something that previously might have not been possible. The thing that makes learning design unique is that that gap that it's trying to close that getting from point A to point B has to come down to it's a gap in knowledge or skill or experience. And so if the reason somebody can't do something is because they haven't heard about it, they don't have the vocabulary to discuss it, they haven't had the opportunities to practice something, learning design is there to solve that problem. And that could be true for if you want to learn how to code and you can't do that right now, that obviously can be something you can learn through a learning experience. But it can also have to do with teams getting together and collaborating. How do you get a group of people to work really well together? That's a point A to point B problem that learning design can also play a role in. You can help people learn more about each other, make decisions together and create an environment where things like feedback and conflict and collaboration works really well. And that's also a problem that learning design can solve. For me, at least, I have to expand my horizon and perspective on what or maybe how learning works. My perspective on learning is very instructional based, but I think based on what you already mentioned, there are many different ways we can actually learn. Is that something, is that a misconception that you've heard more often? Yeah, I think so. I think we've all been trained to think of learning as a very either kind of not very interactive thing or a very sort of linear thing where we're sitting in classrooms, we're reading textbooks, or even the relationship with learning where we might have somebody like a teacher who we expect knows more than we do and they're there to sort of deliver learning to us. I do think it's important to shift that a little bit and to almost break learning down into a more basic concept. So it's actually, sometimes it may sound more complicated. I actually think it's about simplifying the idea of learning down to its basic form, which in my opinion is it's how people take in and process information and then how they take that information and translate it back out into a behavior that has an impact. And so when you break it down to that really fundamental definition, what you start to realize is we're learning constantly. You don't have to be in a classroom or on an online class to learn. We're constantly taking in information and processing it and allowing it to change the way that we act. And so I think that definition gives it so much more freedom to not only have it be and look and feel however you want it to feel, but you also begin to realize that most of our day is spent learning. Whenever we interact with somebody else, we're learning. Whenever we start a new project, we're learning. And so it creates a lot more opportunities to design those learning experiences that aren't just like a traditional classroom environment where it's a you're giving me information and I'm giving it back to you. So if we're all constantly learning, and I think it's absolutely true, what is the added value of doing it consciously through learning design? If it's happening already, what challenge do you see that isn't being addressed right now? Which problem is there that learning design has the opportunity to help us with? Yeah. That's a great question. Again, I think of it as a design discipline in the way that everything is designed. Anything that exists is designed by some process, but it's either going to be designed through a thoughtful, carefully methodical process of designing something and taking into consideration the user's needs and the context of what it's being designed for. Or it's going to be designed, as I call it, by default, where a lot of thoughtful decisions aren't made. Things are sort of the way that they are because they are that way. And I think we've all experienced, whether it's products or services, that are designed by default that a lot of thought wasn't put into it. And you end up experiencing pain points and inconsistencies and frictions that are frustrating. And I think it's the same for learning design. I think we are learning all the time. But if you've ever experienced a learning experience that was not thoughtfully designed, or if you've ever been frustrated when you tried to learn something, it might be as simple as trying to make a recipe from a cookbook that you found confusing or the instructions were complicated. It might be any time you've used a public service like the subway or if you've gone to an airport and you haven't been able to navigate it or you couldn't figure out how to use the ticket machines. This is where learning design and service design really overlap. It's part service design, but also how do you learn to use a new piece of equipment? That's learning design too. And so you're learning all the time. Anytime that you feel frustration over not being able to do the right thing, that's where learning design can play a role and make that a much more seamless process. I talk about this all the time that learning design isn't there to make learning easy. Learning should be hard. If you're learning something significant, it's kind of like exercise. It's not always going to be easy. You're going to have hard runs, you're going to have hard workouts, you're going to struggle. That means that you're doing it right, that you're building up skills and strength. But what learning design should do is make things simple. We should remove any barrier in place that is keeping you from learning that skill. And if you're doing it right, learners will still struggle to get the skill, but they won't struggle with the experience. And so I think that's the difference is we're still learning all the time, but I think a lot of it is frustrating and confusing. And there's a lot of roadblocks staying in our way. And learning design is really meant to take all of that away. Makes sense. Learning shouldn't be should be hard, but it shouldn't be confusing, right? Or painful or frustrating or things like that. You mentioned something about elevating it to the level of the other design disciplines and taking it into, I don't know if you use the word boardroom, but moving it up to higher levels within the organization. Why do you feel that's important? And maybe also the question, why now? Yeah, yeah. So I think it's important because we're sort of constantly reinventing. I think people talk about the future of work a lot and what that's going to look like. And we've had the last year that has almost kind of thrown a wrench into it, put a pause on a lot of those things. And we're getting a chance to kind of restart some of that thinking now. And it's going to look very different than what we thought it was going to look like a year and a half ago. We have people going back into the office, we have people staying home. It's sort of both a challenge and an opportunity to totally rethink the way that we work. And to your point about kind of elevating learning design, I think what I realized over the past five or so years is that learning design isn't just a design discipline, but it's also a strategic business discipline. Going back to that kind of basic definition of learning, which is taking in information, processing it, and then translating it into behavior, that's what work is. We're constantly taking in information and then changing our behavior based on that. That's what most of us are doing when we are working. And learning design, I think, can play a role in helping executives and business leaders and operations folks really think from a really thoughtful, methodical design way of how are we helping our employees do that? How are we onboarding them, whether they're brand new to the company or we're sort of onboarding them back to work from the last year and a half? How are we organizing our teams and setting up those team members really well to collaborate, to communicate, to give each other feedback? How are we retaining knowledge? I think this is such a big thing where I've seen in a lot of different organizations that the same mistakes are constantly being made because as an organization, we're not really consuming all of the information that's coming in. We're not translating it into institutional knowledge. It usually sort of stays in little pockets within our employees or within teams that end up going away or people leave companies. And so I think there's all of these opportunities to use learning design to rethink the way that we're working. And I think right now is the perfect time to start asking these questions because I think we're starting over a little bit when it comes to work. So it's a great opportunity to be thinking about this. Yeah, and it's not just an opportunity, it's probably a necessity for a lot of cases. And while we were explaining this, the word growth came to my mind, like every organization wants to grow in a certain way, in a certain direction, and you do that through learning, by learning from each other, by becoming better at what you do. And from that perspective, I guess it makes total sense that it is a strategic business tool, as you mentioned. I would be curious if you have an example of how, what does learning design look in practice? Because we've touched maybe the conceptual, strategic part, but you've been doing this for 10 years. What is it that you actually do? Do you have a story on an example? Yeah, I do. There's a couple that I can share. I'll give you one that goes back to this idea of helping organizations kind of work better together and really using learning design as a little bit more of a strategic discipline. So one of my clients was really struggling with the management sort of culture within the organization, but what they perceived, what they saw was that people were not happy with their managers, and that they wanted to improve the management quality across the organization. And so what we originally started to talk about was training, which I think is sort of the first place people go to in their minds when they have a problem like this, is we need to train people to be better managers. And so we spent a long time coming up with all sorts of new training experiences and materials and workshops and classes. I spent the better part of two years traveling the globe, going all around hosting these training sessions for managers. And what I figured out through that process in speaking with a lot of the managers in this organization was that the problem wasn't a skills problem. These folks, for the most part, knew how to be really great managers. They had the skills to be able to do it. What I found was that they didn't have the time and the culture in the organization wasn't set up to encourage them to manage. There was the sense that management was kind of the lowest priority amongst everything else that was happening in the organization. And so that was a really eye-opening experience for me because what I realized is this part of learning design, which is curriculum development, learning experience, can solve a lot of problems. But it can really solve them if they're sort of a knowledge or skills-based problem. It's not a great solution when you are dealing with procedural problems or cultural problems. But learning design can still help diagnose those things. A big part of being a learning designer is being able to identify gaps. So in the same way that as a service designer or a UX designer, what you're doing is identifying user needs and doing a lot of research, learning design has that too. Where we need to figure out what is the thing that's keeping our learner from being able to do the thing that we want them to do? What's that gap between point A and point B? And what I realized is that as a learning designer, I had the skills to figure out and find non-learning design problems. I was able to find cultural problems and structural and operational problems that learning experiences weren't a great solution for, but I could still help define the right solutions by identifying the right problems. And so that was a really important sort of turning point for me where I realized maybe what I'm doing isn't part of the solution, but learning design can still play a really important role in finding the right problems and then helping to find the right solutions. So in your story, what would have been the challenge if it was learning design challenge? So in this case, it was culture or maybe processes. You mentioned skill, behavior, knowledge. Would it boil down to that? If they wouldn't know what the threats of an effective manager are, would that be then a typical learning design challenge? Yeah, exactly. And we certainly saw some of that. So that's not to say that learning design was completely the wrong solution. It was definitely a good solution to a very specific problem. And the problem that learning design is very well suited to solve is anything that has to do with knowledge, skills, or experience. And so if I don't know what makes up great management skills, if I don't know what a manager expects it to do, learning design can help solve that. If I've never gotten a chance to practice, for example, giving feedback or I've never gotten a chance to practice delivering a performance conversation to an employee, learning design is perfect for that. We can create a safe environment to help people practice those skills. And that comes down to experience as well. Maybe I know how to do it, but I need more feedback. I need a coach or a mentor to help me build up that skill. Learning design is perfect for that as well. So those are the types of problems that if you find them, if it's anything having to do with, do they have the right information? Have they gotten a chance to practice it to develop a skill? And do they have an outlet to continue practicing it, getting more experience and getting coaching and feedback? Those three things are perfect sort of problem areas for learning design to come in and solve. Now, you mentioned that the initial thought was, we need to train these people to do their work better. And you figured out the problem was somewhere else, like in a lot of design environments and projects happen. I'm curious if it also happens the other way around. So maybe my question boils down to, when do you come into the scene, when do you come into the scene, into the scene as a learning designer? I can imagine when somebody thinks they need a training, like that's a really easy signal to call a learning designer. But Arthur, have you been in situations where the challenge wasn't learning? Maybe it was organizational design or I don't know. And then they figured out, hey, maybe we need to do something with learning design here. Yeah, so that's a great question. And I think what I'm about to say probably is going to resonate with most designers, because I think this has been the case for most of the folks that I've spoken to outside of learning design, but in UX, visual design, service design, which is I think learning design should be brought in earlier than it typically is brought in because it can play a really important role in the strategy. So you're absolutely right that most people think of learning design when they've come up with a solution already, when it's, they think we need to just build a training for this. And I think this happens again with any design discipline, right, is we have already come up with a product idea. We've already, we know we need a website, so let's just bring the designer in. But then when the designers brought in, there's all of these questions around, well, how did we decide that this is what we needed? And, you know, let's, let's rethink the actual sort of user needs that we might have here. And so it's exactly the same thing for learning design. Oftentimes, a training or workshop is not the right solution. And the earlier you can bring a learning designer in to actually try to sort of do a needs analysis, evaluate what are the gaps that exist here. And usually it's not as simple as just one problem, right? Usually there's a number of different gaps that are contributing to a problem. And learning designers are really good at separating those problems out and saying, cool, we have a skills problem. I'm going to work to tackle that through a workshop, through training, through materials. But it looks like in order for that to be effective, we've got these other issues too that we need to work through. And I can play a strategic role in that. But we should also bring other folks in who can help, again, whether it's not having the right tools or not having the right processes in place. All of those things a learning designer can help with. But a learning experience is not usually the specific solution to those problems. Got it. I'm trying to translate it to my own world. So for instance, it would be great to bring you on board the moment I'm starting to formulate my yearly goals for, I don't know, reaching a broader service design community with the show or having more impact with the service design show on a global scale next year. And you would be sitting next to me at the conference table. And we would think like, what is the thing that I maybe personally or as a team have to, in which areas do I need to grow as individual or as a team to actually be able to achieve that goal? And that would be something where somebody like you would be able to give direction, right? Exactly. And I think at the moment you suspect that there is a need or a problem that will have to involve some sort of behavioral change to solve. That's I think a good place to bring in a learning designer. And again, management is a very classic example of this. When you realize, you know, I don't think that our current managers are at the level that they need to be at. Instead of sort of jumping to that conclusion of we need to train them, bringing in a learning designer at that point and saying, we have this problem here, let's look into it. Let's figure out what it would take to truly resolve it. That's a perfect place to bring somebody in. And maybe even before the problem. So we have a goal. We have a goal of becoming a more effective team, right? Exactly. And growing in certain areas, learning how to do stuff might be one of the challenges we face. Yeah, exactly. How do you do that? How do you get in before the problem is defined? Yeah. So this is actually I had a conversation with the CEO of an agency at the very beginning of last year. So this is just before the pandemic started. And he was actually just starting to have these thoughts. And it was a super cool conversation where we talked about like his organization was running well, people are happy. There were no real problems that he was trying to solve. But his thinking was very much aligned with the way that I've been thinking about this for a long time, which is, how do we fundamentally rethink the way that teams work? How do we fundamentally rethink the way that people collaborate? One thing that I've been thinking about a lot for the last few years is sort of analogies to sports. And how when you think of how team sports work, it's so much about not just the one individual who's just incredibly strong, but it's how the team functions. And it's about building up such a strong team cohesion that players know exactly what the other players doing, what they're thinking, they can anticipate moves. And that just comes from a really strong team culture. And what's funny to me is that we don't do a lot to try to replicate that in the business world. We sort of put people in functional teams, but we don't think so much about what cross functional teams look like. We don't think a lot about how do we train those teams? How do we set them up to succeed? How do we continuously improve them? We don't think a lot about things like onboarding. We don't think a lot about keeping a team together so that they could really know each other as opposed to sort of constantly breaking people apart and changing teams on sort of a quarterly basis. So those are the things that I've been thinking about this CEO of this agency was also thinking about similar ideas. And I think that's how you get ahead of it is looking outside for inspiration, looking at a team that may be functioning well and saying, what can we do differently? How can we get even more out of this? And how can we improve the experience for those people? So I think those questions will help us come up with solutions before any problems kind of come up. So why aren't organizations thinking about this? And if you've seen examples of organizations who do consider having effective teams and effective individuals, like what are their the characteristics of those kind of organizations? Yeah, that's a great question. I think the reason we don't think about it is there's that sort of famous cartoon of like the two sort of cave people like trying to push square rocks up a mountain. And then there's the one person kind of chopping away at their rock to make it a wheel. And the folks pushing up the square rocks are saying, we're too busy to stop and do that. We need to keep pushing this up, right? So we don't we don't take the time and pause to evaluate the way we're working because there's so much work to be done. We think it's just better to like forge ahead. And so I think it's seen as a luxury, it's seen as sort of slowing things down, it's kind of seen as unnecessary. And I think because of that organizations kind of prefer to just keep doing what they're doing and try to squeeze as much out of that as possible. And I think that's coming at the expense of our mental health, I think that's coming at the expense of the work itself, and of the people doing the work, which is really unfortunate. So I think it's in every organization's best interest to take these moments to dedicate a few key people to really think about how do we work, how do we function as an organization. So I think that's why they don't do it. In terms of the characteristics of organizations that do this well, I think it's really interesting, like let's use Spotify as an example. Whether or not they do this well, I don't work with them, I'm not inside Spotify, so it's hard to say. But they are pretty known for some of the team models that they've published. They've thought about this differently, they've put some ideas out into the world. I talked to many clients who reference the Spotify sort of organizational model as something that they aspire to. So I think whether or not that's working or whether or not they're a model example, it at least shows that they've put some real thought into doing things differently, and they're getting recognized for it. And so that's something that I would look at as an example. Any organization that is really outward about how they work and doing it differently is one that's interesting to sort of look for inspiration. I'm curious if also one of the characteristics could be the fact that maybe Spotify is starting out a team-centric or team-led or rather than process-led or output-driven. And I can imagine that a lot of existing companies will have a heritage and have a structure in place. Those structures have been put in place where processes were dominant and it was about predictability. Right now a different model, which is maybe more of an agile team model where you need to be able to quickly adapt, requires you to put other things in place as in teams and think about the team experience and how you can let a team perform rather than how you can let a process perform. I don't know. Does that make any sense? It totally makes sense. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that's not to say that things like productivity are not important, but I also think that the type of work that we're doing now, and I say we, I'm talking probably most of the audience listening to this and a lot of the folks in the sort of design tech sort of knowledge industry, I think that's mostly what I'm talking about. Productivity looks just very different. It's hard to measure just hard output from the work that that sort of group of folks is doing. There's a lot of creativity involved, there's a lot of critical thinking and solving really difficult problems, and that kind of work isn't linear. It's not like you spend X amount of hours and you reliably get X results that come out of it. And so we can't really bring that kind of factory mindset into this type of work. It just doesn't really correlate. It's not the same. Yeah, and that's sort of the argument why learning and learning design has become or will become more prevalent because we need to adapt more and more. We need to change more and more more than 10 years ago, more than 20 years ago. We have to keep growing. We have to keep evolving at an increasing rate. Exactly. And I think that the same evolution that learning design can play a role in work is the evolution that I believe learning design has itself experienced where we've gone from a real focus on content and this idea that learning is only happening when you're consuming information or when you're taking tests and we're really trying to change that mindset to say learning is happening when you're connecting with your fellow students or colleagues. Learning is happening when you're watching a documentary that really inspires you to go further in this field. That's all part of learning too. It's a lot less linear than I think we think of it as it's a much more creative, immersive, emotional process. Yeah, it's emergent and it's harder to measure. You have to look at the entire system which makes it super complicated. You need people who trust this. What do you feel we as a design, service design community have to learn ourselves to actually get this adopted quicker? Yeah, I think it's a combination of things. One is thinking bigger of our own disciplines. It's about realizing that the role we can play in organizations and businesses strategically is really, really valuable. I think thinking bigger thinking of our disciplines as really a strategic discipline is helpful and then learning as much as possible about what resonates with the folks who need convincing. That was something that I felt like I really had to learn over the last three or four years is when I walk into a CEO's office and I'm talking about rethinking the way we work and rethinking the way that teams function and adding in onboarding experiences and reboarding experiences, a lot of times it can just sound like let's slow things down and let's spend a lot more money. I had to figure out how do I talk about this in a way that resonates with that audience and make them realize that this is about creating a better work environment. This is about getting better work because the people who are doing that work feel rejuvenated. They feel more engaged with it. They work better together and they're not getting burnt out. It's really about fine-tuning what we do and presenting it in a way to those stakeholders in a way that resonates with them, but never losing sight of the fact that what we're doing is really valuable and it's not just applicable to products. It's not just applicable to commercial practices. It's really applicable to anything that human beings are interacting with or involved with that involves behavior and change. What you mentioned about understanding the needs of your client and the people who will be paying for that, that's huge. That's super important. That's an undervalued skill within a lot of design disciplines. I'm curious, you mentioned in the last three or four years, you focused more on that. What has given you the biggest insights around this? Because I think even if you're a service designer, getting this right can have huge impact. Yeah. I think one big insight for me was, and this is just working with different CEOs and senior executives and things like that, is sometimes the thing that those folks are not very good at themselves ends up being a little bit of a blind spot. They might feel like, well, we don't really need any of this because they might not really understand it as well or they might have just not thought about it in that way ever. I think it's about, again, sort of fine-tuning that messaging and realizing that the initial reaction might be, you know what? I don't see the value in it. That doesn't necessarily mean that they actually don't. That just might mean that they've never really thought about it that way. One, I think is don't give up. Two, it's almost try to apply the same skills and tools that we use when we design to that communications challenge. Here is this executive in front of me and they're at point A and I need to bring them to point B. I do this work all the time for learners. Just look at those folks as users, as learners, and how do you sort of close that gap? What is the knowledge? What is the skills? What is the sort of service experience? What are the touch points that that individual might need to sort of achieve the thing that we would hope for them to achieve? At the end, you still might not succeed, but giving it a try and believing in that process, I think, is the best way to go. Amen. I totally agree 100% and treating the sales of this as a journey rather than a single interaction, that's the key. And designing that journey is the thing that we're already good at. We just have to do it consciously, but treating it as a journey, as a learning experience. We have to educate, we have to teach, and the moment we sort of realize that that's the challenge that's in front of us, it actually becomes a lot of fun and it becomes much less scary. How would you describe the evolution of learning design in the last five years and where do you hope it will be in the next five years? What is the forward momentum? Yeah, I think the evolution really has, over the last five years, been from that content-focused instructional design to experienced focus learning design. When we sort of had that realization when I was back at General Assembly and we started to completely rethink the way we built programs, completely rethink the way that we marketed them and scaled them, it unlocked all of these possibilities and we started to talk about it more publicly and we created titles like education product managers. We tried to sort of mirror a lot of the team structures and titles that came from digital product teams. So we had education product managers, we had learning designers, we had learning architects who are sort of your real sort of developers and it's been so cool to actually see that language out in the world now. I feel like I see education product manager as a role in other organizations. I've had conversations with universities and advised them on building learning design curriculum. So this is starting to become a real discipline that is separated from instructional design, which again, I see instructional design as a skill set within learning design. So it's certainly not irrelevant, but I think it's a smaller subsection of a bigger thing. So I feel like that's where we've come, where we're now having schools building curriculum around this and companies really taking this a lot more seriously and talking about it in this way. I think where I would like to see it in five years is to see basically this role change institutionally. And what I mean by that is folks that are in learning and development inside companies. So that's what I did in my previous role was the head of learning and development at an agency. And so those folks are usually pretty focused on things like compliance training or just like employee engagement, which are important things. But I'd love to see that role evolve. And for the person who's doing learning and development to actually look more like a strategic learning designer, a chief learning officer, where things like compliance training and engagement are a part of that role. But much bigger are things like onboarding, team collaboration, management and communication and strategic sort of organizational sort of design and processes. So just a much bigger strategic definition of the way that we think about learning and development at companies. Let's hope so. And I hope this episode contributes to that. If people are excited and want to learn more, what are some good resources to start reading more about learning design, watching videos, reading books? What would be the first few that you'd recommend? Yeah, totally. So I'll throw a couple of them out there. So I always get the title of this book wrong. And I don't know why. But if you search for it on like Amazon or something, it will come up. And I believe the name of the book is Design for How People Learn. It's a yellow book, right? Yes, there's like a sort of human head shape on the cover of it. It's a great book. I think it's one of the first books that I've seen that really starts to think about learning design in these terms, which I really like. Another book that just recently came out that actually is sort of not at all about learning design. But as I read it, I was like, wow, this is actually exactly about learning design. It's a book by Fred Dust from IDEO called Making Conversation. And it's fantastic. It's a great book. And it's honestly like if somebody were interested in getting into learning design or becoming something like a facilitator, that's a book that I would highly recommend. Because I think at the end of the day, learning can sometimes really feel just like a conversation. And that's what this book is all about. Okay. I'll add the links to the books down below in the show notes. And how would you summarize our chat in the last 15 minutes? If people remember one thing, what should it be? Yeah, that learning design is just another design discipline that can be a part of your toolkit as a designer and that it can really fundamentally change the way that we think about how we work as individuals, as teams and as organizations. I think that's really my key message. What potential do you see for learning design? Leave a comment down below and let us know. And as you've made it all the way here, I'm guessing that you enjoy conversations like this. So if you haven't done so already, click that subscribe button to get notified when new episodes come out. Thanks a lot for watching and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next video.