 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are joining us from, thank you for joining me on this Career3.org podcast. My name is Abhijit Bhadri. I work as a talent and branding evangelist. I work with organizations on helping them craft their talent strategy and I work with individuals as they go through career transitions and ideas and help them discover the next big step that they are going to take. This particular podcast is all about fascinating career parts of people and also learning from something that they bring their expertise to. When I think about my guest on today's podcast, I want to say that this person is a keen cyclist. He's cycled about 500 kilometers in Sri Lanka and then he's also cycled for about 1,250 kilometers. That's one hell of a distance because it's from Barcelona to Barcelona, done that enjoys cooking, skiing but the most fascinating part that I found about him is that he actually has a service dog. He made the service dog learn enough stuff to get employed. Now very obviously that means this person has something to do with learning and development and you're right because this person also has a day job being the chief learning officer for Ernst & Young, EY. Take a guess who this could be. Simon, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here. Thanks everybody. It's great to be here and honest to join you. Your new role as the global learning and development leader for EY, your prior role was the chief learning officer for Novartis. This is a new role for many organizations to really put this focus on and my question for you would be that if you were to really start thinking about writing the job description for a chief learning officer when you started doing it for the first time and if you are doing it today, what is the difference? What will get added? What will stay constant? How would you frame it? Yeah so I think to answer that I'll probably look at what's changed over the last five or six years in general and also you know what have I learned over the last five or six years that I didn't know before and I think there's probably two or three things that really jump out so one would be my appreciation of culture I think which I don't think I would have built in enough maybe five or six years ago that culture can be a fantastic force to supercharge if you like everything that we're doing in the learning world and I was really fortunate at Novartis that we had a strong culture of inspired curious and I'm Boston that curiosity piece really powered up a lot of the work that we were doing in learning but without that cultural force then it's like you're sort of swimming upstream you've got makes everything harder so I think that appreciation of culture is definitely something I've learned and that would be different probably in how I'd written things five or six years ago and how I would write them again now I think skills and the importance of sort of tying things to a common skills framework and then going beyond learning into other HR and talent processes so that people are hired based on skills that people have developed based on skills that people can see career opportunities based on skills there's a common framework around all of that I think those ideas were sort of emerging five or six years ago but I think it's gone way way further in that time and would be now a prominent part and then generative AI wasn't even on the radar five or six years ago AI would have been just one of the skills in probably the IT function maybe into some of the wider digital function but wasn't something that was really being heavily used within the learning team and wasn't something that was one of the absolute top business priorities whereas you know today I think it has to be a key part of the role of any learning leader to be understanding how can AI play a role within the learning function whether that's in content creation on content tagging in AI coaching or whatever that may be but also how can then the learning function support business in building and understanding so building skills around generative AI and understanding how it plays a part in the strategy so I think that's pretty three big parts that would have not really been there to the same extent five or six years ago and now I think is a big part of where any learning leader needs to be focusing their efforts so you talked about three things one you said that the importance of culture if you really have to make the organization continue to learn fast culture becomes very important the second thing that I heard you say was that you know the focus on the skills economy you know and part of that how do you keep that going and the third is also really you know how gen AI is really changing the learning function itself and how we learn inside organizations these are the three big shifts and that's really very well structured I would say when you look at someone who's getting started in the early days of their career they have a lot of questions about if I want to become the chief learning officer for an organization what is the best part to take it's an interesting one because my path is probably not the path that most other people would have taken to come into a chief learning officer role I started life as an auditor I did that for a while I got involved in then doing some technology-based training things around software revenue recognition and it's like all this training side of things of using technology is really interesting and I sort of pivoted my career and then did some consulting around learning and training for a while then moved it then to sort of opportunity to actually go outside and set up my own business with a colleague there and we built an e-learning company together then moved into consulting it's seven years of consulting around learning then went in-house and sort of led to learning transformation then the last 10 years changed country and a range of different learning roles culminating in chief learning officer roles so quite a varied career I guess apart from the audit piece at the start learning has been a consistent path through I guess I've seen a number of different elements of in-house suppliers I saw a small supplier side large consultant side and and seeing inside lots of organizations so for me I guess that's helped in seeing all those different angles and seeing it across a number of organizations and I hope that's given me sort of some skills and knowledge to be effective in the role now and that is one path there would be I would say if you're staying within the learning world then you'd need to sort of see many different aspects of learning but I would encourage people I guess to be dipping in and out as well of learning that I think the value of running one's own business is then the importance of financials and cash flow and all of these pieces really hits home otherwise you can't pay people's salaries and all that comes with that and sometimes that's a little bit lost in a large organization as to some of the sort of financial basics I think being on the consulting side and actually you know seeing different organizations and you know what works and what doesn't work and some of their challenges I found that hugely valuable so for leading a learning organization I found it very valuable to have those different perspectives I guess a little bit on the consulting side maybe is a valuable addition I think sort of seeing a few different organizations maybe some different industries is valuable but reflecting I mean even that time in audit has been very valuable through my career in different ways and coming into this role now is actually hugely valuable and at the time when I was switching out I probably looked very differently on it but that I was you know leaving mid my exams hadn't stayed on to finish my exams which would take another 18 months and I was like oh maybe I wasted that time but actually looking back over my career it's been hugely valuable at many points and I don't think I'll be in the role I am now I've probably hadn't had some of that foundation in audits as well you know you use it on my wasted my time I'm just curious in anyone's career journey what would count as a waste of time so interesting as I reflected on that recently and I think there's probably even at the time when well when I felt that I've wasted my time actually with hindsight I've realized that it wasn't wasted so that audit period felt like it was wasted but it gave me financial basics it gave me an understanding of how accountancy works it gave me insight into different companies and you know how they they pair their accounts so all of that actually proved valuable throughout my career I studied German at school at college and two years at university and then spent 15 years not speaking German and had reflected you know that's that was a waste of time learning all of that not not getting to it and then suddenly I get a role in Switzerland whereas German speaking and suddenly that background in in having German suddenly comes back and while I've forgotten a lot of it it gave me that grounding to be useful so I think sometimes even when we think we've wasted time on something it's strange how life twists and turns actually shows that can be useful in in some way I'll completely agree with that I studied I have a degree in law and I never practiced it because you know at that point of time I thought it's not something that I could potentially do well I sort of dropped that and for a long time at the back of my mind I thought that degree in law is a waste of time I really didn't quite use it but when I started doing my own consulting work you know I ran my own little firm that was probably one of the most important things I did as I was signing contracts and I you know was writing up contracts with other providers etc that was hugely hugely useful and so I just think that in many of the things that we don't see an immediate use you know it still goes into your entire sort of framework your worldview it shapes your worldview and then you'll find the place where you can use it you are able to use that one other lens and I think is how I sort of look at that you know you wrote a book with a couple of other co-authors you know so I really enjoyed reading your book just wanted to know what is it that made you choose two other co-authors and what was that like the process of writing I really really reading your book and I thought it was fantastic so yeah yes yeah it was prompted by a couple of people spontaneously so they're saying I should write a book about what we were doing at Novartis and I'd never thought about writing a book I didn't have aspirations to be an author but it's like well if two people completely unprovoked it have mentioned this maybe maybe I should think about it and then that was having dinner with Paul and Garrick who had worked with for a while and they'd written a book before and so I was picking their brains and these couple of people had said this to me actually what's involved and how did they find it when they wrote their book well actually they'd been on the Novartis journey they were involved at the beginning helping to shape a workshop to come up with our strategy they worked at various points over the years with us they had cited the story they were interesting curiosity both knew a lot about learning the learning world and so yeah we decided we'd embark on the journey together write it together and I'm very glad we did because I mean give it just been me I don't think I would have ended up finishing it sort of had great intents to start that yeah probably wouldn't have followed it through but actually the three of us together we were able to sort of motivate each other there was the social contract that we'd say we'd do something by a certain point we'd need to fulfill that and we spent about a year working together getting that written yeah launched it in 2020 and yeah ever since then it's been great to be on the journey of having the book and then the associated podcast and learning a lot more through that around curiosity and meeting some some really interesting people along the way you also have a podcast called the curious advantage I really enjoyed listening to that and that's one of my certainly it's among my top favorite ones I was listening to a couple of them in the recent past the one with Rita McGrath a particularly good one where she talks about how do you look around the edges which to me was the essence of curiosity how do you look beyond what is obvious and what is seeing how do you go beyond that that's the curiosity factor I think the link that I formed with my head was when you are pursuing something without actually an immediate application that is curiosity in your case the fact that you spend time as an auditor and understood some of the functions of the organization in depth there was no use for it at that point of time but it was your worldview in the same way when I did a degree in law I had no immediate usage I wasn't practicing it law but then it sort of really changed my worldview and what I was using it many years later in a different time and shape I think that's the value of curiosity you are able to connect the dots at a later point of time definitely and it's often that sort of being curious about things that are maybe tangential or maybe sometimes don't even seem directly associated to the core job or the core role often it's in those moments of curiosity where actually things make sense and can bring it back together on the podcast we had Fassin Arasim and the CEO at Novartis and he talked about how some of his breakthroughs had been in something completely unconnected in the arts or culture of the way actually suddenly something makes sense and he was able to solve something back in the here and now for a work related so I think that's the power of curiosity is suddenly clicked together from abstract principles or so forth that we can bring back and solve problems in the here and now in an organizational context and especially today public listed organizations are really focused on showing their shift on a quarterly basis you know so everybody is very focused on they forget the long term yes everyone talks about it but they are focused on the short term and say what's it going to do for me today do you think that's conducive to or does it change the way that we can leverage learning so I think we're all driven by the immediate benefits of something but I think many of the things that we learn may will pay out and I mean there's examples we talked about they've paid out way in the future I mean my German was 15 years in the future and at the time it really didn't seem like it and I think there are things like that where if we can learn it enough and retain the information I guess that's the challenge with our forgetting curve and we do lose track of things along the way but sometimes that broader grounding will come back and prove beneficial in the future in different ways like you also studied law I actually did evening classes at when I was at college and made a big mistake of getting the exam dates muddled up because it was evening classes rather than my day college and I missed one of the exams and ended up getting a really bad mark because 50% of my my marks are immediately gone same thing though that law knowledge which at the time seemed like it was going to not be valuable over the years in business contract reviews all of these things actually enough of that knowledge retained that it becomes useful so yeah I think it's sometimes it's hard to predict which things will actually benefit us and maybe some of it is also through through those skills that we build we actually shape the paths that we that we do that may maybe certain some of that knowledge it actually helps and get a certain steps along the way because it is they're locked away somewhere the book that you've written about the curious advantage I was particularly fascinated by you talked about 12 things that these are you and your colleagues described this as the 12 curious ideas one of which for example was really around that curiosity is the key to thriving in the new digital reality yeah and since you've written the book one of the biggest things that has changed is you know generative AI so therefore that in itself proves the first part but when you wrote that what did you have in mind you know when you said that staying curious is the key to thriving well I think that there's a lot of evidence that shows sort of the world is is speeding up and if we just look back over the last five years we've seen unprecedented events with the pandemic with the latest advances in gen AI and there isn't a playbook that we can refer to that says when gen AI hits this is what you do you know step one step two step three and you know 50 companies have done this before and this is the answer we're faced with uncharted territory and how do we navigate through that how do we thrive in that environment if I expect that I know the answer to it I'm going to fail because there is no clear answer and with the pandemic there wasn't a this is the way forward with gen AI there isn't a do step one do step two because that's always been done the way we approach it we need to experiment we need to learn from each other we need to figure out what works along the way we need to try things and be comfortable when those things don't work and they fail and we then learn from that and we pivot and we adapt and through doing that through creating an environment where people can ask questions and and can be curious you know that's how we we navigate through I guess as we were writing it we didn't realize that it would become so relevant in such a short time we sort of accelerated the writing because the pandemic was sort of coming in around us so we've actually this this is a great way for people to help navigate through that but I think it's even more relevant now with gen AI and we wrote it in the context of some of the digital things that were happening we talked about it as the greatest advantage in digital times that that's become even more prevalent I think with with gen AI that yeah the way to navigate through it is is to create curiosity in the organization and to experiment and to ask questions and to be comfortable in sharing what works and what doesn't this whole process of writing a book today I find that has become infinitely more challenging because you know especially when you're writing about something which has even a remote link to technology and today is hard to think of a business book which has no reference to technology even the earlier days to be this clear division that this is more of the people side the human side and this is the technology side today even that is overlapping so when you look at that it's so hard to write because what you write today before you finished your first draft and you've read and sort of you're looking at it something else changes so I kind of struggled with that when I was writing career 3.0 it's constantly changing you know so the example that you get today you would really wish from the point of view of publication the world would pause for a little bit so that you know you can get the book out in finish was that how you looked at it because you also wrote a book during the pandemic which was completely different time of our lives and the whole world in some sense was going through a digital transformation yeah well I'm experiencing it now so together with Paul and Garak and also someone else Julie installed we're actually writing the next book if you like which is curious about generative AI so it's taking the framework that we have in the curious advantage and applying it into the topic of the moment of how can one be be curious about generative AI how do you navigate through it and so yeah we're facing that as we're writing it that moving so fast every day every week there's new elements but interestingly I guess the way we're writing it is less about the this is the technology today it's more the how do I navigate through it so what are the questions that we need to ask what are the the things that need to be in place to be able to understand it and to have teams and organizations that can embrace and adopt it and and those seem to be sort of staying somewhat constant through albeit the examples as you say is the moment one publishes it the examples will be out of date because yeah it is moving so quick too you also tied curiosity to learning and you said that how we learn and apply the ideas and the future of learning it's really all driven by curiosity I couldn't agree more with it what do you think people who are not in the learning function you know who are not formally pursuing lnds that day-to-day work what should they take from this statement I think a recognition that things are maybe not as we always see them that if we if we hold too firmly on to what we know what has got us to where we are then actually that may not not help us in the future so an appetite to be constantly learning constantly curious constantly questioning I think is is super helpful in whatever role anyone is is in particularly as people go through into sort of leadership roles because often the things that have made us successful and got us to where we are the things that are going to make us successful in the future and there are many areas I think where yeah what we've done over the last five years if we take that as the recipe for success is not going to be the recipe for success for the next five years because we're going into a very different world so that ability to constantly question to constantly learn to not be too confident that what we think is right is necessarily right and to therefore learn from others and create the environment where where people can share their ideas can can ask those questions and can figure it out together what the best way forward is whatever you personally you used to believe it to be true and that it's no longer true you know give me an example of that yeah well I guess you know how I look within learning you know how do we create learning how long does it take for us to create learning what does good learning look like what's cost effective for different solutions a year ago even you know the way we would have created things it might take three months to create a program it would be created in certain format or whatever actually now the initial high-level design and objectives maybe can be created in chat gpt and hours can be then validated far quicker all of the artwork and imagery potentially can now be created using a mid-journey or dali or whatever it may be and instead of spending hours falling for the right image or having someone design it and just create exactly what we need straight away that some of the things that would have been very expensive or sophisticated in terms of simulations or some of the adaptive learning and other pieces that may be more limited to you know nor niche use cases maybe these are now becoming more accessible so how I would have approached a particular solution two years ago as to how long things would take how much things would cost what's the best solution I think all of that needs to be questioned in the light of new tools new approaches and also just the speed of change because actually if it takes me a year to create a piece of content now actually the world may may not be at the same in a year's time ready for it enough has been written about how people learn how do they unlearn I haven't read enough about unlearning I'm just always intrigued yeah I think it was um Brian Murphy from Microsoft in fact um who talked about holding lightly on to what we believe to be true I think that's a really nice way of looking at it of uh yeah that we shouldn't be too fixed in anything that we believe is true because actually there's a good chance that there's an alternative view or actually that it's changed I think a recognition that what we learn may be somewhat temporary maybe a recognition there's a difference in skills as well so if we learn some of our soft skills of communication stakeholder management these things actually those will probably be quite enduring and hold true for a long time some of our more technical skills prompt engineering some of the some of the using tools etc yeah they may be great for a year or two years but I suspect many of these are going to be changing here far faster so uh yeah I guess a mindset of yes I'm learning this but I may need to unlearn or forget or challenge this very very quickly um depending on what it what it actually is and I also think that you know being able to sort of segregate that and then I'd like your definition of what are like typically called soft skills I like to use the word people's skills because skills yes yeah our skill sort of gives it actually a misleading level much longer to build but they are far more durable a lot of things around change those are things that sustain but on the other hand things which you can learn pretty quickly not to say that they don't need effort which can learn quickly whether there's you know all the content and domain and the laws of physics and coding and everything but it also changes equally fast you know so you're the half-life of a skill in those areas is well yes sir is failure a trigger for unlearning or failure failure and you kind of construct your own reality over time which way so I think it can be a problem I guess it depends what we mean by failure as well so it had Amy Ebenson on the podcast recently talking about her new but right kind of wrong actually saying there's different types of failure there's there's failure where I'm pushing new boundaries and no one knows the answer and that that's not really failure that's just taking a risk trying something we learn something we move on so in that situation I'm not sure it's even unlearning I think it's actually there it's it's helpful to learn from that failure from that thing that didn't work because we then try something else we build on that we question what what exactly went wrong versus a failure where actually there is a right way to do it and it's everyone so where there's a right way and I decided to deviate from that and everything went horribly wrong I think that sort of failure we should also learn from but ideally we learn before that failure of recognizing there there is a right way so from reflecting on that it would be probably most failure even all failure we can learn from some of them maybe we need to learn a different way but yeah there's probably something to learn from all all things that don't work what does harder learn from success or failure so I think failure is much more powerful as a learning driver would be my take that if things work well maybe we don't reflect back on what we did but when things go horribly wrong then we reflect far more and it's going to give us a much deeper yeah a deeper experience that we can learn from would you agree well I don't know I always think that when things go right we ascribe it to ourselves that are immense talent and we say went right because I'm so good but when things go wrong we always say oh you know because that person wasn't doing this and this was so the probability of learning from success is I think equally hard which is why sometimes it's very hard for people to replicate their success because they kind of ascribe all of it to themselves and you know you play a miniscule role even in your own success and I just that's a very sobering thought that you know you aren't that responsible for your success so you started by saying when you would write the role of the chief learning officer today you would put a lot more into building a culture of learning and that is really sometimes a missing element that you put in you know a program the program view of learning and then that leads to its own set of challenges yeah we built that culture of learning because workness culture you know learning is always something that you again as I said you blame others you say that department didn't do this or the customer that wasn't ready or the price was not right but have you built a culture of learning and learning from failure and success I mean and culture change is very hard so there's no there's no silver bullet to um to be able to change a culture I think there's many many factors and there are there are many that will be able to talk far better than I on on it but I guess from the things that I've seen that have had an impact I guess a mixture of being a very clear leadership messaging around what is acceptable and what isn't acceptable clear symbols of the culture of and there is a change and this is what the new or the evolved culture would look like tying that in through things like reward and recognition mechanisms so I guess recognizing that a culture is a result of you know what we do here and what we do here is driven by the systems and the processes that exist in the organization and and how the leaders show up and what they accept and don't accept mixture of communication mixture of making sure there is the understanding and the skills and all of those elements in there as well and specifically on a learning culture then are people committing time to learn are people recognizing what learning is I don't just mean formal learning and all of those things we talked about of experimentation and being able to learn through the work that we do and placing enough importance on that do I feel guilty if I'm spending time learning am I penalized if I spend time learning is there a value placed on having the most up-to-date skills and building those internally or is it that always will look outside the organization to get the latest skills and never look to build those from people within those are all factors I guess that create this learning culture and ultimately also an element around the resources that are allocated to make those things happen as well but while the learning organization plays a part in that it can't be driven solely from the learning organization either it needs to be an organization's leadership that places the value around it that's an interesting way to frame it because you could argue that when the shelf life of a skill drops as it has today now the IBM research talks about the shelf life of any skill that you have is less than three years so we should look at that in which case does that mean that the owners on keeping themselves skill is more of the individual than on the organization because the organization well yes they will create the conditions and they would support the individual but predominantly the individual who has to swim harder to be able to build that skill in real time is that where the world is going to be I would see it as a mix so the it can't be all on the organization and it can't be all on the individual that the organization plays a role in making sure the opportunities are there in order to build the skills whether that's through the learning resources whether that's through experiences and opportunities and projects and role development and all of these pieces that the organization needs to have the mechanism and the resources there but there's also an onus then on the individual to take advantage of those resources and to put in the commitment and the motivation and to see the value from it and it can't be all on the individual because then they wouldn't have access to the resources and it can't be all on the company because you can't make someone do something that they don't want to do so I would see there's a mixture therefore of the system and the the resources available and then you know the individual to take advantage of those and to see the benefit in in building those skills and I think that it eventually it will boil down to the degree of curiosity of the individual to say that here's what I want to learn and you know again when you're looking at the future we are all able to see what is in the immediate next step but very often we don't look far enough as you know your example of learning German something that happened and it was a rich dividend that paid back when you started working in a country which was German speaking but it was a foreign language when you started to learn it what is foreign then becomes native at some stage in a connectable world you know a lot of time and energy is spent by organizations and individuals in providing inputs so you learn about different pieces and we are at that golden age you read a bunch of things you read this report you hear a podcast you watch this on youtube you do this how does one connect the dots how do you find connections what is your process of doing so through my net wide I guess I'm in the hope that it sort of finds the things that are most valuable so whether that's through I find linked in a very good source for sort of latest information so by following a lot of interesting people on there that's a very good source of sort of new information articles research etc through listening to podcasts so and try to keep up particularly with the the generative AI piece so that's moving so fast that I'm listening to sort of short almost daily updates on what's happening there but then also going into so deep learning around topics that I know very little about follow the let's freedom podcast which I find massively interesting where you go three or four hours into a subject often on areas that I wouldn't have necessarily chosen to go into but actually when you hear about it then it sparks ideas and connections maybe that aren't there I think learning from others is really powerful so there's various forums and groups that I belong to where I can meet with other learning leaders to be able to learn you know what they're doing how where they found solutions that I haven't that I can learn from them and and can sort of share some of the things that we're doing as well so between reading listening connecting to others hopefully through all of those there's then little sparks at times of things that are okay that's that's something I need to remember and store away for where it may be maybe helpful and something that can reuse I always think that in a time-stopped world that we live in you generate a lot of inputs but you don't have enough time to connect the dots and I think that is probably the real casualty of learning that you you know a bunch of different things but you don't piece it together to make sense so that's the I think the tragedy of today what is better to learn bite-sized content or long form you mentioned next week when some of these are you know they're three four-hour podcasts and then there are these learn leadership in 30 seconds kind of things which of these do you think really should people be looking at in order to build skills specifically to build skills I think it's it's more the longer form applied elements but to build knowledge and understanding then maybe the shorter form pieces and I think that's where I think maybe as an industry we can often generalize about learning as a single need rather than actually separating out there are times where we need deep learning to apply ourselves over a long period of time and coming into EY now something like learning to be an accountant there is a lot of knowledge there's some complex elements there need to be applying that and learning that over time and it's hard work and you know it's building out a deep skill and that's not gonna come from a five-minute podcast and they're reading two articles it needs that deep application of thought and learning in order to be able to build out those skills so that would be I guess an example where it needs to be long form if you like and really sort of applied learning but then many other things we can learn through listening through reading get through getting in bite size chunks and we can pick it up over time and we can piece those bits together and it gives us that knowledge and maybe some of that knowledge over time becomes a little bit more towards a skill as well but so I think it's it's back to the age old near right solution for the right job and there's a place for all of these things and it just depends what we're trying to achieve from it personally I find it very useful to hear a podcast which is one person very doing a deep dive and the logo form podcasts are particularly useful I like that but I find that when I listen to in a conference you know at some of the firm conferences when I kind of find that they have people on the stage three or four people discussing something which I already know a little bit about when you share them bring their different ideas and one person represents one company on a sector or you know different levels of experience when they talk about it that is when a lot of things come together so hearing a panel discussion is for me very enlightening especially if it is done well it can really piece together some of the ideas in my head what's your writing routine like how often do you write how do you structure it tell me all about it yeah so currently I would say distracted because of throwing myself into into a new role so prior to the starting this it would have been blocking chunks of time to think about a particular area often driven by a particular piece of research or whatever as well so actually tying that back into those sort of bite-sized learning pieces often as I'm looking at LinkedIn or reading articles or whatever I'll be tagging things of this is a useful piece that it's a useful data point or a useful principle or whatever that I can stick that in as something to then think about in my writing in order to be able to reflect upon and see if there's a place there but it's typically done in in this room here I shot the door and give myself a couple of hours and try and contribute to but my writing's all been done as well in a collaborative way and so therefore with regular check-in points with Paul Garrick and Julian now with the new book that said to just check you know how are we progressing and how do we want to break things up between us and now what do we want to do how does it work do you take three different chapters of a book and you distribute it amongst three people or are all of you writing the same chapter and then you piece together which of those who is so we're following a similar model to the way we did with the first book which is sort of very high level or sort of chapter headings as a starter and then this one is is helped by we have our seven C's model that is providing the sort of core of it so we apply the seven C's in so essentially a sort of set of introduction content then we apply the seven C's model and then some takeaways and things from it and then within each of those chapters we start with a sort of okay what are we going to cover sentence or two sentence or two becomes paragraph or two drop in sort of case studies and data points and things and then we work through and we each go in and do elements that we we find relevant to us which will then give us something that probably doesn't flow and then we'll need to do a cleanup at the end where we go through and so okay now from all of these individual pieces let's make that flow into into something that works end to end and with this one it's going to be also a lot more resources and things in there so checklists or new guides to things to think about or whatever so we'll try and make this much more practical of how one can work through within one's team or individually about being curious you know when you see the future of the learning profession the learning and development team when you look at that you know how do you view this changing because today the opportunity to learn from anyone and everywhere it's just democratized that you can just go to youtube and hear the best of picas you can read the most books they are available today it's just download away kind of thing in a world of abundant resources does the corporate learning and development team still have a role so what is that yeah so i think that there definitely will be a role i think it's going to be an intriguing exercise to sort of envision what does learning look like in three to five years time i think there's still going to be a place where you have things created in house on how the organization does things so while yes there's great content out there on the internet there's also a lot around but this is how we do it these are out this is our processes this is our principles this is what differentiates us and therefore we need our own in-house learning as well but i think when you explore sort of where ai is going and on not just how we create learning in terms of sort of how we do what we do today better using ai but more than when we think well what can ai actually do to transform what learning looks like and also then what does learning look like in a world where we're all using ai if i'm spending my days in co-pilot or maybe co-pilot 3.0 in the future where i'm actually just talking to my assistant co-pilot and it's doing my work for me and we're having sort of discussions around how to do things and it's creating presentations and it's writing code and it's doing all of these pieces here how do i learn in that that's a fascinating question and you know what what does then a learning organization look like there i think there will still be a place for structured learning back to what we were just saying there's certain things where you need that structured learning approach because it's complete but there will also be a lot of just-in-time things maybe where ai is either doing things for us or is actually coaching us and guiding us as we go and we had sal karm on the curious advantage podcast recently and he was talking about karm ego which is the ai assistant that they built into the karn academy and that was fascinating i think it was now probably a year ago was using chat gpt4 that they built that and it guides students through the content it doesn't give them the answers but it plays the role of a teacher and it gets to know what they like and it presents things they like football it will talk about it and another allergy of football so they can understand it and things and it really helps them learn and that should be applied into a corporate environment so actually we have our ai assistant coaching us and helping us so as we go maybe it's the learning team's role to help teach the ai in order to be able to then you know provide what's needed i don't know i think it's a fascinating question i think to start to explore you know what does it mean in a world abundant with with ai we are coming up towards the end of our conversation i want to sort of have your views on the process of onboarding which i also think is deeply linked to learning so in this case the individual gets a chance to learn about the organization which he or she is entering into my view of onboarding is that it's always extremely one sided in the sense that there's a certain amount of knowledge that the person needs to pick up it's sort of really from the organization to the individual and that can be done in different ways you know through meeting people presentations conversations all of that i think the big missing piece of design in my mind is that organizations do not make peace for that individual to come in and sort of really say that this is what's already going on you need to figure out which piece of the puzzle you are going to be and just do that but the person himself doesn't change to allow for that individual to come in and you know bring the learning of this person so there's a lot of time wasted in organizations onboarding this person to learn this new language so to say but not leverage enough of what language this person already speaks how do you define it and you know what is the role of onboarding yeah so i guess i'm living it at the moment so as we record this saying is day 20 or something in my new role so i guess my lived experience for the last 20 days of it is actually a very positive one of a real willingness to want to hear the observations of someone coming in from outside and those ideas but i think that's quite unusual from what i hear from many organizations that actually at least the sort of stereotypical view being that you come into the organization and this is how it's done around here you learn the way that it's done and you know no one wants to hear the new ideas and i think it was google i think that was held up as a role model there around actually in the first 60 days trying to extract as much information as possible from the new person because after 60 days you go native but actually in that first time that's when there's that why are we doing it like that or that seems a very strange way to do it did you know there's a different way so i think in looking at onboarding i think that two-way element is way more powerful than just to learn about the company forget everything you knew before or don't create the opportunities to see that fresh pair of eyes looking at things and being able to see maybe opportunities where things could be done differently in the traditional learning model it's the siege on stage versus a two-way kind of a learning process which learning today is all about and i think that's the shift that most organizations would do well to recast their onboarding instead of make it not sure is the wisdom you need to fit into but so really try to see then what is it that you observe what do you bring in to leverage that to make the fastest amount of changes to use that as an opportunity for the organization to also grow or at least be prepared to make those shifts so i think that's wonderful we are really at the end then i just wanted to ask you for your favorite model that inspires you to learn what would that be i've always go back to where one of my um my favorite films of um uh growing up at the dead poet society and the the calf adium of seize the moment that's uh i think yeah there's always opportunities for us to be learning but yeah do we grab them do we uh embrace them more uh to be looked the other way so yeah let's go with go with seize the moment thank you thank you so much uh cyber it was lovely talking to you and uh look forward to continuing our conversation thank you thank you for having me it's been a great conversation thanks i've