Guest: Laura Overton, International speaker, Author, Founder of Learning Changemakers
Published: February 5th, 2025
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Episode summary

A powerful framework for finding direction when the solid ground of the workplace has shifted beneath our feet.

Laura Overton is a true pioneer in the industry. For 15 years, she led "Towards Maturity"—a longitudinal study program that gathered data from thousands of L&D leaders globally to uncover what actually drives business success. She describes herself not just as an analyst, but as a "re-searcher"—someone insatiably curious about how we become our best.

In this high-energy conversation, Laura blends hard data with human intuition. You’ll learn why modern leaders need to look to ancient Polynesian wayfinding techniques to navigate the "ocean of uncertainty," why we need to move from rigid models to flexible principles, and how to adopt a "Smart Bold" mindset that values business intent over being the loudest person in the room.

Key topics

• 🌊 The Ocean of Uncertainty: Why L&D feels like it has lost sight of land, and why traditional "shore-based" maps no longer work.
• 🛶 Wayfinding Principles: How the Polynesian Voyaging Society's practice of "Tuning In, Responding, and Improving" offers a blueprint for modern agility.
• 🦁 Smart Bold vs. Brassy Bold: Why you don't need to be an extrovert to be bold—you just need agency, evidence, and business intent.
• 🤝 The Truth About Collective Wisdom: Why gathering people together is just "noise" unless it is unified by a shared purpose.
• 🔎 The "Re-searcher" Mindset: How to maintain professional relevance by staying insatiably curious and looking for patterns.

Top quotes

“We are in the middle of the ocean... all we see around us is horizon and all we feel underneath us is constant moving... how do we navigate through that?”

“Smart bold means that you can be an introvert... Smart bold means that you are business first. You understand why you are here. You're not here to get learning credits. We're here to drive business value.”

“They are constantly tuning into the environment... and then they're working out how they're responding... and at the end of the day say, 'Where are we now?' That is improving.”

“I describe myself as a 're-searcher'... constantly revisiting that question about how can learning and development deliver better business impact?”

“That purpose allowed us to bring our collective wisdom together... it's not just a free for all and a bonfire... but actually, we all care about this.”

Resources

• Whitepaper: Beyond the trade-off: Group learning for a world in transformation
• Book a Platform Demo

Full episode

Laura Overton: What they did was they said we have to revisit these old techniques, because they’re being lost and we are being lost as a people. And that really resonates with me because at the moment learning and development professionals I think are feeling lost. They're being seen as cost centers, they want to be able to deliver more, and our identity, we’re kind of losing... yeah, and I see a sadness setting in and I see tough times for our industry.

And when he said that, something clicked for me in the data. And it was like, actually, high-performing learning teams, what they are doing is they are constantly tuning in. They're constantly tuning in to their work environment, business goals, what's important to their learners, and then they are working out how they are responding.

Mike Courian: Laura, welcome to the podcast.

Laura Overton: Thank you, Mike, I cannot wait for this conversation, really looking forward.

Mike Courian: Yeah, it's great to be with you. Now the way I like to start each conversation is I like to ask, who is Laura? If there were three words that you think would be keys that would unlock us understanding you a bit better, what might they be?

Laura Overton: Hopefully, I am curious. I think that is the number one word that I would use to describe myself. But I'm specifically curious about how learning and development can become the very best that it can become and you know, really contribute back to business. And that's not just because I happen to be doing an L&D role now, I've been doing this for years and years, decades and decades. I was passionate about coming into this field and I've stayed in it for the whole of my career.

And so I think the second word would be passionate. So I’m curious, I’m constantly wanting to learn, but other people say, "oh you’re very passionate about this" and I’m like, "yes I am, I've been doing this for 30 years and I'm passionate about the potential of people and the potential of people who bring out the potential of people."

Laura Overton: And another word that I’m embracing more now is that I’m a re-searcher. I was having a conversation with my professor on the program that I’m on at the moment, and I said, “Well, I’m not an academic researcher.” And she said, “Yes, but Laura, you are a genuine researcher. You are constantly revisiting that question about how can Learning and Development deliver better business impact? And you look at it from every angle, every single angle. And the fact that, you know, you are genuinely a researcher.” And I thought, “I like that.” So they would be my, they would be my three words. I would be curious, empathetic, and a re-searcher.

Mike Courian: You’ve given me a lot to grab hold of, so that’s awesome. You’re also not just passionate about what you do, I can tell you naturally exude a lot of energy in this wonderful way. You have a passionate presence, and I’m sure that serves you quite well because sometimes I feel like it takes that to get the research out of someone else, especially if a lot of your information has to come from other people. You know, you’re not studying rocks. You’re studying cultures and companies.

Laura Overton: Exactly.

Mike Courian: And so, do you find, now that I’ve called that out, do you find, if you look back in recent years, that that’s actually supported that research, having that passionate personality?

Laura Overton: Yeah, I spent 15 years gathering data and I was known during that period for the data I gathered around the industry, around the globe. But when I wanted to look at the challenge from a different lens and walk away from my data, what I found was that, oh, who am I without my data?

And that’s when I realized that as a person, I can draw out things that maybe others can’t because of curiosity. I’m not just doing this for a job. I really want to know.

Laura Overton: So, I want to know why things work and why they don't. I love to observe what's going on, I love the context in which I'm observing those situations.

So, in every aspect of the work that I do—and you know, I will facilitate, I will host, I will do a lot of talks, a lot of webinars, workshops—but for me, it's always the connection with the people who are in the room, it's always the connection with the audience or with the other presenters in a conference workshop that are the really interesting things for me. And that, I think my personality allows me to work with organizers, work with other presenters, work with an audience because I'm genuinely interested in what they have to say and how what I might say complements it or how I can learn from them as a result.

Mike Courian: And I find it makes navigating most things so much easier being curious. Now I don't know what it would be like to not be curious, but it means that it's very easy for me to get invested in most things. And so I can totally see it helping in a similar way.

I imagine if I was a part of a panel or speaking, actually the most fun would be engaging with both the audience and the others you're with. I think some people do enjoy the moment to share the things that they've worked hard to accumulate, but that's probably not the bit I would enjoy nearly as much as the interaction.

Laura Overton: Exactly. You know, and curiosity as well, it allows you to kind of tune in to what's going on around you, so you can be more responsive to it. But the other thing it allows me to do is to not be offended as well.

Because if somebody disagrees with you or somebody feels that that is wrong, then the majority of the time I can say, "Well, I wonder why. I wonder why—how they are looking at what I've just said, how they're perceiving me, what's going on in their world?" So it also—it just—it just takes the tension out a little bit.

Mike Courian: Yeah, and the thing I always ask myself, "I wonder what they heard?" Because sometimes when there's a disagreement, I'm like, they might not have heard at all what I was trying to say. And so I often ask myself that, because often they've heard something entirely different.

Mike Courian: entirely different and that's fascinating. When you were saying a researcher, you called out not really a traditional academic or or something along those lines. Can you parse out the difference for me? What's the difference in your mind between those two positions and why do you feel like you don't fit in the one box?

Laura Overton: Well, it was just really interesting. The first 15 years of my career, I was spent at the leading edge of educational technology at a time where the internet was born, at the time I actually worked for the organization that invented the word e-learning. And trust me, it did not mean what it means now. It was like a new vision of how we can connect, how we can learn with each other, from each other, how we can learn real-time, how we can have personalized paths.

Mike Courian: I'm going to have to interrupt you. I love that you just said that you worked for the company that invented e-learning and it's so fascinating to me, and I think this will come back to this, but I'm just going to put a little post-it up for us, is it's so interesting that the goal was for it to be collaborative, for it to be imbued with all the things that make learning human and make learning effective. And it's so interesting how over the years it drifted so far into such a different individualized place and really maximizing on efficiency but possibly missing out on some of the effectiveness. So anyways, I just wanted to call that out because I thought that was fascinating. Now you carry on, you are heading somewhere.

Laura Overton: Yeah, I was very passionate about this field of work. But as a woman in my career, well, obviously, but the point I was trying to make is that the world I was working in was a very male-oriented world of work. And so I found that I leaned very heavily into looking at research, looking at things like Gartner and IDC and you know, now it would be the World Economic Forum, you know, what people are saying when they're talking to business leaders.

Laura Overton: ...about the world of work, what’s going on, so that actually I was able to lean into that research with authority and allowed me to be incredibly successful within my career.

But what I found was that there was no research about the things that actually matter to me, which was about how I work with an organization who is doing something new with learning, who wants to achieve different types of results and move away from the norm. Research that looks at how I deliver better business value.

You know, I worked at a great company where there were fantastic technical people. I wasn’t the technical girl. I was the person who wanted to actually find out how technology can connect with the people and how the people can connect with their work. But there was nothing around that. So I took voluntary redundancy when my organization was bought out. I think it was ahead of its time and it had to go backwards because the industry wasn’t ready for it and I didn’t want to go backwards so I decided to leave and work out what my next path would be. No idea what that was.

But I was curious and passionate about my work and I contacted a magazine and I said I’d really like to just try and find out more and I did the first piece of research. I studied 16 organizations, didn’t trust what the L&D people said because they’re of course going to be really proud of their work. I said, “Can we go out to your learners?” and we got 2,000 learners from those organizations involved.

And really exploring what made them want to learn, how they learn, how they learn differently. And these organizations, 16 had been recommended to me independently as being those who’ve actually got their head around what technology had the potential to do. So it wasn’t that I’d gone out to look but they were they’d won awards, different people had said, “Look, these guys know what they’re doing.” More to the point, their learners really back that up and I think that’s where—

Laura Overton: It was one of the first studies that brought the learner voice into it. It was back in 2004. So when I say I got into research in that way, that was the journey. I did this story, and a government department heard about this study and called me in. And they said, "Laura, we want to understand how employers are using technology to drive better business results." And I said, "You know what? You should buy my report."

And then they carried on talking a little bit more, and at the end I said, "You know what? That's all in my report. You should buy it." I was very posh. And at the end, they just had to throw their pens down: "Laura, we're interviewing you for a job." And I said, "Are you?"

Mike Courian: That's so funny. I was so deep in your side of the story, I was like, oh, the last thing I'm thinking about is a job.

Laura Overton: Exactly. So you know, you relate to where I was coming from. But they—they wanted to invest to understand how the world of employers were thinking about learning innovation. I took on a three-day-a-week role because I said to them, "I can help you research, but if I become a government person, I will lose my connection with the world of work."

Where I need to stay in the world of work. And—and the study that I started was continued initially with government funding. And then as with normal government projects, they always get bored. And so I then set up a not-for-profit organization that continued this community-driven study of work. And it was—basically was funded from across the industry and was offered free of charge to anyone who wanted to benchmark the maturity of their learning strategy.

And I did that for 15 years. And technologies came and went, and came and went, and—but there were some common things all the way through that. But there wasn't progress, then I thought, this study is great, but it's not helping me understand how we can make progress. So I walked away from it about four or five years ago, and again, not sure where I was moving into, but I wanted to keep on exploring and finding out what it is that can help us as learning professionals.

Laura Overton: ...better business impact. So there wasn't a piece of academia in there. In fact, the only piece of academia was when I spoke to my institute, the CIPD, saying 'I want to be involved with you, but I can't become a member because I'm not an official practitioner, and yet you've used my research in your work for the last five years.' And they asked me to become an academic fellow, and I had to go through a process of proving my academic worth to academics from having no academic background at all, apart from the research, which was very thorough. But it was only then that I got my academic fellowship and they said 'You should write a book, Laura, about how academics should do research.' And I'm like 'Okay'. I didn't write that book, by the way. It wasn't quite in my field of passion.

That's a little bit more about, you know, how I am passionate. You know, I live in curiosity. I lead this story of how to find out more, and I try to do it in a way that is as independent as possible, hence setting up a not-for-profit, hence not having one sponsor but 30. You know, to really bring that independent thinking that people could trust and make evidence-based decisions.

Mike Courian: And what I think is so interesting is you're well ahead of your time, because I feel like you were aggregating something of real value that then all of a sudden perpetuated your opportunities. You're getting job offers. It's funny, you were just a textbook case in just good business as well, if I break down all the components of the story. So it's no wonder you are where you are. I'm curious, if you weren't doing this, if all of a sudden you're like 'Nope, nothing to do with learning anymore,' is there like an alter ego career that you imagine you would do?

Laura Overton: No. If I, I mean, there are probably fields where my experience and my...

Laura Overton: ...could benefit from, but would I be able to bring my genuine interest into that? Now, is it L&D as such? Well, yes at the moment, but is it how people learn, how organizations learn, how we learn together? Are there other roles that would actually allow that to happen? Because, for instance, I've never been a trainer and I don't think I would like to be a trainer at all in that space. But I love to be with people, I love to facilitate, I love to understand how interesting things can come about. So doing that type of role that is always going to be around how others learn.

If I could retire, I think I'd still be curious about this. I think I'd still be going, "Oh, I spot a pattern of what's going on in terms of what I'm observing right now, and I want to get involved with the conversation, or I want to ask a question." Because this is my fit. And actually every other area that I'm interested in—I mean, I love to cook and, you know, I love to dabble in the garden—but what I often enjoy about them is the metaphors that they create for me that allow me to make more sense of what's going on in my field of passion.

Mike Courian: Yes, I think it's—I think it's awesome. I've also been noticing Cal Newport, I think was who I was listening to. He may not be the leading expert on this, but he was just talking about the dynamic of needing to be away from this sort of primary mode that we work in. And that when given space, our brains will replay the prior thing we were thinking about—and I know nothing about this neuroscience so I'm just, forgive me listeners if I have some of this wrong—but apparently, it will replay at a subconscious level the thing we were just thinking about, like rapidly at like a much faster speed. So you're not conscious that any of this reprocessing is happening, but it is. And he was saying that's why you need to have spacing between learning, and that's why you need to have breaks.

Mike Courian: There are lots of different mechanisms. The brain's so complicated. But that idea has just really pinged me that going for the walk, the 10 minutes, I might be not thinking about anything. My instinct is I don't know how that was of any value, or I might be in the garden, or I might be cooking.

And I love that you said the metaphors come out of that space because it's so true. You see the connections. They're abstracted from the language that you might normally use, but then it's so much more clear and beautiful when you see it in that other space.

And the other thing that I was thinking about is just how this phenomenon of sometimes you come back to it after you've gone away, whatever it is. And that was the phenomenon that Cal was calling out is going, yeah, because your brain's literally worked it out at a subconscious level. Because I've had that a few times lately when I read it the first time, I have no idea what that was trying to say. And I come back and I'm like, oh, that's weird. I don't know why I had so much trouble the last time. And so I've been really just captivated by these habits that we allow ourselves to enjoy, and they're actually far more important than I think...

Laura Overton: Definitely. And the work done on neuroscience, I'm not a specialist, but I'm lucky enough to know a lot of people who are really strong in this field. Yeah, Amy Brann, Stella Collins, Lauren Waldman, you know, people who are really studying it actively.

And it makes so much sense. And when I kind of layer on what's surfacing now about how we learn, and I layer it into the high-performing strategies of high-performing learning teams, they may not have been using that language, but they were creating those spaces, they were doing those things, they were involved with repeating. And so for me, really getting to grips as a learning professional with the way our brains work is a fundamental professional strength that to me has got to be essential moving forward.

Laura Overton: Once it allows us to do fun things as well like being in the garden, being with our kids or cooking a meal and say hey it's okay I'm learning.

Mike Courian: I know. It's funny how you sometimes have to have an excuse but it's been my favorite excuse lately of going Mike, it doesn't feel like it but this is really important and it's kind of learning to trust it even though it might not feel a certain way.

I'd love to ask you in our correspondence before this call you brought up this interesting line of how to navigate an unknown future. I want to know what are organizations feeling most unknown about at the moment or maybe we can narrow it to what are learning professionals feeling most unknown feeling most uncertain about?

Laura Overton: I think what's happening in the workplace right now, it's been building up. If I look at the I don't know 50 odd benchmark reports that I wrote over my period of running the benchmark study, every single one from 2004 even ones I've written since then as well up to 2023, that's 20 years, everyone started with we are faced with an era of unprecedented change that's driven by technology, that's driven by global pressures, that was driven by recessions, that was driven by you know geopolitics, that was driven by so many different factors.

At a macro level and then on a kind of a micro level driven by shifts in the marketplace, shifts in competitors for organizations and then going down even further as learning and development professionals, you know, is technology going to take my job? Is the virtual classroom not the same as being in the classroom? You know, sort of, is there a rapid application development tool like Articulate going to take my job?

Mike Courian: Exactly. I'm going to take away my instructional design.

Laura Overton: Yeah, I'm going back decades here in this conversation. But now it's all coming together. Your social media was a really interesting one. You can't trust it. You can't get people together in communities. You can't do those things, you know, because we're not telling them what the truth is. We're allowing them to work things out for themselves. And how will you know that it's right? And all these fears and uncertainties.

And yet, I've got to a point in my study where I got so fed up looking at learning and development professionals saying, "my learners won't really understand how to learn in this new world of technology." And I said, "this is ridiculous." So I restarted my learner study and I got 50,000 different individuals from directors through to apprentices, saying, "how do you learn what you need to do at your job?"

They were all over it. And it's not just YouTube, you know. The classroom was still valuable, the formal process of being together scaffolded, absolutely still valuable at all levels. But there's this sense of that... that is uncertain.

So if you look at a traditional learning and development person's role of creating programs and content and doing your training needs analysis and creating that catalog, if it's not that catalog then they've shifted to their calendar. It's like you're on the shore and you can see what's what and you're confident and it's solid ground underfoot. Whereas now, the metaphor used speaks so strongly to me and I was very lucky that it resonated well with Michelle Ockers as well when we were writing together.

It's much more as we are on an ocean, but we are only surrounded by the horizon. We are in the middle of the ocean. We have lost sight of land. Everything that anchored us is shifting. Where we work, who we work with, how we work, how we respond in our workplaces, what our work is, um, who our customers are. It's all shifting. The solid ground of that... of the land that was...

Laura Overton: It resonates with me in the middle. We know we've got to get to a point of driving better business impact in order to be relevant. But where is that land? All we see around us is the horizon. All we feel underneath us is constantly moving. And all we see above us are the clouds shooting around or the storms rolling in or the doldrums with no wind, nothing happening. And we're just sitting there. And how do we navigate through that unsettling change when we don't actually know what our future is? And that's the picture that really resonated with me about where we are right now.

And I'm excited as well because there are things that we've learned in the past and things that other people have learned in the past that can help us move through that process.

Mike Courian: So if we draw from some of those metaphors that you and Michelle use throughout your book, what are some of the ways that we can tackle or point the boat in the right direction when all we see is the horizon? What are some of the foundational things you point leaders towards?

Laura Overton: Well, looking in the data, we always have patterns in the data. So even when all of this change was happening over the 15 years that I was gathering data, there were still core patterns that really seemed to work consistently that set the high performers apart from the others.

And that was the kind of concept for the book. I said to Michelle, "I've got this idea. I want us to go back to core principles, really get this down to core principles rather than another model." Because models are amazing for scaffolding great new behaviors, but when things change, perhaps the environment in which that model was set up has shifted now. So how do we learn from our models but go to principles so that we can make our own way through? And it basically came down to three principles. And I think what really helped to consolidate...

Mike Courian: In my head, we had the data, we had—and Michelle has done hundreds of incredible interviews with practitioners. I had tens of thousands of learning and development professionals and millions and millions of data points, but what are the principles? And it was really the story of the Polynesian navigators, particularly the incredible story of the Polynesian Voyaging Society 50 years ago, where they said, a navigator could find themselves in the middle of the ocean.

So the tip of—you know, you’re based in New Zealand, you’re at the tip of the Polynesian triangle, which is one of the largest space spaces, you know? People have been living in that environment, it's all water. And when you step out for a trip, I used to think going to visit Michelle was a long old drive, you know, from Melbourne to Sydney, you know? But these guys are 2,000 miles without all of the modern James Cook 17th-century navigation techniques, with intent set out and they brought families and lives to new islands and they moved culture around. So they had worked out how to do this. And when the Polynesian Voyaging Society, what they did was they said, we have to revisit these old techniques because they're being lost and we are being lost as a people. And that to me resonated because at the moment, learning and development professionals, I think, are feeling lost.

Laura Overton: They're being seen as cost centers, they want to be able to deliver more, and the pure identity that we talked about at the beginning of this conversation, we've kind of lost that. And I see a sadness setting in and I see a tough time for our industry. And that's what was happening 50 years ago, some amazing people in Hawaii worked out they want to work out how to learn to do this again. And the story is full of the highs and the lows and terrible tragedy, but also incredible triumph.

Mike Courian: ...incredible Renaissance of culture.

Laura Overton: And uh, Nainoa Thompson is indeed a navigator, now he's the chair of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, celebrating 50 years this year. And he had, in this marvelous video, I'll send you a link for your show notes if you would like, he said the way to be a navigator, he said every day we tune in to 5,000 different things. The swell of the sea, the land, the weather, where people are, the stars, at least 5,000 observations are made every day in order to make 500 different adjustments. And at the end of the day, they say, "Where are we now?" And they look at the horizon and the stars and work out where we are now?

And when he said that, something clicked for me in the data. And it was like, actually high-performing learning teams, what they are doing is they are constantly tuning in. They're constantly tuning in to the environment, their work environment, business goals, what's important to their learners, and then they are working out how they are responding from the strength of the canoe. The canoe for me is one of the hulls, we've already talked about it. It is the science of how humans learn, human brains learn, and the other is a hull of digital capability. And the hull of the whole canoe, the boat that the Polynesian Voyaging Society did on this epic journey, that's adaptable for them to be able to take not only themselves but their community across the ocean.

So the way that we are responding, and then how we are engaging with people, that responding is not taking prebuilt courses, but it's about a professional response to the environment. I, for me, oh, it's that triumvirate tuning in, responding, improving. And like Nainoa at the end of every day would say, "Where are we now? Do we need to shift?" So it's not about "Let's evaluate at the end..."

Laura Overton: In a different brand that we're constantly improving. Suddenly, when we layered this onto the data, it made sense of our learning and development data. Today, everyone we've been borrowing from, design philosophy and, you know, systems thinking and all of these things, but this was surfacing from our learning and development data gathered over 20 years. And it was that metaphor of the art of navigating that ocean, going back to ancient techniques. Now of course we've got all of these proven technologies, but if we really bring these ancient techniques of tuning and responding, improving to our profession, it allows us to use these proven technologies and allows us to be able to navigate that world of work.

Mike Courian: Can you tangibly paint a picture for me of a way that you've seen an organization tuning in well and responding well? Because I'm just imagining there's so much happening. How do you filter through, like you said, the 5,000 things so that it can become the tangible amount of decisions that can be made? I'm even wondering if the leader's role is to be the aggregator or have the wisdom to see the trends. Is that part of it?

Laura Overton: It is part of it, and we deliberately talked when we were writing about a broader definition of leadership, a broader definition of an individual who can lead others to be able to learn more, be more, become more effective. This definition of leadership that we've we've got from an ancient president, John Quincy Adams—it turns out it came from Dolly Parton, a quote that we love—but we put it in there because that kind of sense of us as individual having agency is a real, you know, and and agency having intent, having purpose, having direction in our world of work. It's so...

Laura Overton: If I was brand new into learning and development, you know, the fact that I can have that agency and these principles allows us to do this. But if we're just aware of what we see around us and what we choose to learn in our field of work and the way we respond and how we choose to define our success in the concept of improving, that from the very start is an attitude. That's why we talk about principles.

Mike Courian: But as you become more... We talk about aspiring leaders and seasoned leaders. I guess as you get...

Laura Overton: ...more authority, one of the challenges that we have is the fact that, uh, they have to rely on what got them there in the past. Uh, you know, that standing on solid ground, getting great results, but when their world of work is changing as well, you know, how do they do that? And this is where they, how do they bring together multiple models in order to drive forward. We had a great example of Jody, who is head of learning and development at a charity called Barnardo's here in the UK. It's a children's charity.

Mike Courian: And she took on this new leadership role, she had a team of people into a new organization. And it was a perfect example. It's like, okay, all of us as a team, let's roll our sleeves up right now for a moment in time, let's spend time looking at what's going on. Let's understand what's going on in strategy. And she spotted that strategy was changing in the organization, and so she started having conversations with the business leaders to say, okay, well where is it that my team can be able to help you?

Laura Overton: And yes, using all kinds of tools, techniques, really excellent kinds of models from learning and development, she would be able to say, okay, this is how we are going to respond moving forward. And her strategy for responding wasn't about how many courses we can create for this new thing going on in the business, but how we work together as a team with the business to create the right moment at that point in time. It could have been a PDF, it could have been...

Laura Overton: ...at that level of interaction. Well, it could have been a 12-month program of interactions and interventions where people are learning by doing. And her eyes are like, how do I continue to ensure that this strategy is agile and flexible? And that was one of the things that came through in our study, was that, you know, the high-performing teams were so many more times more likely to be saying that my strategy is not rigid, it's flexible, it will move with the business.

And then you start to say, okay, well, that's agility in action. Tuning in, responding, improving at a strategic level. And that's just a small example of how she did that.

Mike Courian: What I was hearing you say is really a leader also has to draw from their experience of what's going to be the right mode of learning delivery for this particular thing, and that's where the flexibility obviously comes in. But I just heard that it was fresh this time and I thought that was really interesting going, okay, there is a really critical point of how we translate. There's this thing going on in the business, and this is going to be the correct way to deliver that to learners. And there now is quite a wide toolkit of methodologies available for delivering learning. And I'm just processing it all out loud with you as I respond.

Laura Overton: Part of a challenge that we face as an industry, you know, over the years, the number of technologies we've had in and out through has increased massively. And also, as you say, the models that are available to us, the frameworks, the acronyms, the 70-20-10s, the 5 DI designs, all of these... We've got so many. And you know, go back to the science of how we learn. This is cognitive overload for us as an industry. I am not surprised at all that most learning professionals still stick with the models that they know.

Laura Overton: The evaluation programs and instructional design models that were established and developed brilliantly for a 20-year ago period.

Mike Courian: And those models are adapting and changing a little bit like learning management systems kind of oh, bolt on a bit of AI here and there just to keep relevant.

Laura Overton: But actually our world of work has changed but our choices are so high, you know, it's cognitive overload. And so that's another reason why I was so passionate about trying to understand what are the principles we bring to our industry.

So we make the right choices of which model to use, and work out how we bring them together. And so we're starting from a different position rather than starting from, you know, and I am a massive fan of 70-20-10 models here. Um, you know, I spoke with Charles Jennings, we deconstructed that model into the study, we'd been exploring behaviors, that model and yes, they all correlate back to better business results.

So I'm not dismissing something, but I've seen some people say oh, we do 70-20-10 and that's how we do it. And then they're not able to see that actually these are a smaller program of initiatives for example for new starters who need to be scaffolded through an experience um and you know, to build their expertise in a way that is more structured.

Yeah, and models, if we stick with them, even the good ones can hold us back. So that's why as well as overwhelming as to say which one do I choose, we said let's start with a principle and then we can build up.

Mike Courian: I'm curious to ask you about collaborative learning and sort of the power of collective wisdom. Where does that sit? Is it a tool? I think it's a lot more than just a tool. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that and how you're seeing organizations using that at the moment.

Mike Courian: ...and I wonder if it's a way to push through some of the cognitive overload.

Laura Overton: Tell me more about your definition for this, because I love—I loved on your website where you said, "everyone has something to learn and something to teach" at its heart. Oh yes, I want to get my head around what that means to you. So tell me a little bit more about that for you, first of all.

Mike Courian: Yeah. Well, I'll start back with where I had a hunch and then I'll come more directly to your question. Because my hunch was when we have all these options before us, it can get really complicated really fast. And I was thinking one thing that is always simple is that when you get people together and when you get people talking, learning happens pretty fast and pretty easily.

It's just who we are as humans. And we've been noticing that more and more, the more organizations we work with. It's just like, wow, if you can get people talking, great things happen. And if you have some scaffolding around that, those group interactions where there's a focus and there's an agenda and you can help keep people on time, which are some of the ways our platform tries to help and support group learning in general.

We're just amazed at how big the impact can be. And I think it's partially us getting to leverage a lot of organizations being so steeped in individual learning that it can feel like a real breath of fresh air getting to be together again. Even if largely it might feel like you're working through something almost pseudo-compliance, let's say, but just doing it with somebody else is like, "Oh, I can share it. Oh, it's so nice. What do you think? I'm a bit stumped here." You know, just being able to do that at any given moment in an hour session is so helpful.

Where it actually started in the three of us, Cody, Dan, and I, who started—

Mike Courian: ...started Make Shapes Together, where that idea came out of was actually out of Māori culture. So, the indigenous people in New Zealand have this beautiful concept around learning and the word is *ako*. And *ako* is, it's beautiful in the sense that it's predicated on the idea that learning is reciprocal. And that in any given moment, the teacher needs to be open to receiving from the student. At the same time, the posture we're very used to is that the student should be open to receiving from the teacher, but as soon as you flip it, you all of a sudden create an open conversation. And I think what's fascinating is when a student perceives the teacher to be interested in what they have to say, they're all of a sudden more interested in hearing what the teacher has to say. And so it magnifies the learning opportunities because there's this funny thing that we have to be open to receive things and to learn things.

And so, riddled through the foundations of the New Zealand education curriculum is this idea that learning needs to be reciprocal. And so we came across that and wanted to imbue that because we saw that that's not a school thing, that's a human thing. And so that's, that's part of where that language came from and why it's really important to us. And we've... There is a lot of science to reinforce it, but that wasn't actually where we started. We started far more on an intuitive level.

Laura Overton: I recognized so many elements of what you just said when you talk about the kind of relationship between people in the room. One of the challenges that Michelle and I had initially when we were writing was the fact that we felt that we were exploring new territories when we started...

Mike Courian: Let's talk about principles with Hōkūleʻa. A Polynesian—so somebody—one of my best friends says, "What, you're trying—writing a book about being modern, and you're going back not just centuries, but you're going back right before James Cook discovered or, you know, looked at—looked at the islands. You're mad." And it was like, well, actually, we feel we're in a position where we're trying to learn at the moment.

Laura Overton: So, our relationship together, where we were, like, really grappling with the data and what we were seeing in the industry, that's just two people connecting. You know, we were smarter together than we were on our own. We've seen in the data that the high-performing learning teams are bringing the voice of the individual into their thinking and into their strategy before they even get into the classroom. Great facilitation techniques involved two-way conversation.

The reason I think my strategy was unique at the time was because we spoke with Charles Jennings, we spoke with Kathy Moore, we spoke with Nick Shackleton-Jones, we spoke with all these people creating models to say, "Can we deconstruct those together? You know, what is it that we're—we're looking at?"

When we had it sponsored, it was sponsored by, as I said before, about 30 organizations, some of which were all in competition with each other. But the thing that—that created the direction and the positive movement of tapping into collaborative learning or collective wisdom was the purpose. When I used to get my ambassadors in the room, it was like, we're playing nicely because there's one thing we all care about. We care about how learning can deliver better business impact. Not a learning impact, not deeper learning or getting more people through the learning, or more literal learning and micro-learning, but we care about what's happening in organizations about performance, about talent, about career progression, about business results.

Laura Overton: ...bility about organizational and operational success. So we were drawn together with that one purpose. And that purpose allowed us to bring our collective wisdom together. Um, it was based, it supported the research. The questions weren't "Oh, this is from this LMS" or "this is from this content provider". They were all questions that we all cared about the answer because they all impacted us. That's the essence, you know, whether it's a program that your individuals are going through. What is the purpose and do we both care? Student, teacher, supplier, buyer. Do we care about the same thing?

And it's that purpose that actually allows collective wisdom not just to be a free-for-all and a bonfire or an arm wrestle about whose idea is better, but actually we all care about this. Um, and talking in the book about a bold mindset as individuals as well. And although we're talking to learning and development leaders, I think it is relevant to anyone who cares about people growing.

And we talk about a bold mindset, not brassy bold. You know, "let me, I shoot from the hip, I've got a new tool or I've got a new model or, you know, I've got this great idea, look at me, look at me". But a smart bold. Smart bold means that you could be an introvert. Smart bold means that you could be a less senior person, a junior member of the team. Smart bold means that you're business first, you understand why you're here. You're not here to get learning credits, you're here to drive business value.

Mike Courian: Oh, open-minded. Absolutely linked into that collective wisdom.

Laura Overton: But it's being open-minded about your own experience, who you are in that space, what other people have to say. Um, you know, it's that curiosity of the things that make that collective wisdom so important. It's that open-minded attitude. L...

Laura Overton: L is leading and learning. And you're trying things, you're exploring things, whether it's through vocally sharing in one of your events, or whether you're trying an experiment as a learning and development professional. You're willing to put something out there to see how it lands and how you can respond. That's what the L is leading and learning.

And D is deliberate, intentional, risk-aware, not risk-averse. You know, that kind of intentional evidence-informed, you know, you're not stupid when you step out. All those types of things.

So a bold mindset is as important as these practices of tuning in, responding, and improving. And I think that bold mindset, whether it's in your, one of your interventions, or whether it's in our world of work, is what makes the difference between collective wisdom and social learning and movement forward and progress, to collective ignorance.

Which some people are frightened of. If you give everyone a voice in the room and everyone's battling it out, that is not collective wisdom, because we're not moving towards something that we all care about.

Mike Courian: I'm just inspired and I'm going to go and think about that more of how we can help groups? Because the sessions are pre-designed. We're trying to coin a new phrase, instead of learning design, we're starting to call what you do in Make-Shapes experience design. Because you really are pre-designing a social group experience where the facilitator most of the time is not going to be present, they're going to be pre-recorded. And how do you design that experience really intentionally? And often there is enough just in the scaffolding of the session that the purpose is clear, but I think when you just give people that little bit of time to engage with it and take it on themselves, I think there's something really interesting.

Laura Overton: And that's when tuning in really helps from a learning professional. You know, what is important?

Laura Overton: ...out. What do other people care about? How do we work together to help you achieve that? I mean COVID was um a horrific time for so many people, but it was a time that showed how learning professionals often in organizations, they rolled up their sleeves, along with everyone else as how do we as an organization get us, our customers, and our people through this common challenge that we've all got.

And it was an incredible way that some learning professionals, I mean they said, "You're not relevant to us." Oh, we didn't want that. You know, we don't ever want to be at a point where a learning professional isn't relevant to the real challenges of business. So we have to look at ourselves and redefine ourselves and who we are and what we're here to do.

And for me it's always been not just about performance and experience design and all the rest of it. It's how we as professionals bring our professional expertise to ensure that others are equipped and ready to do their job today and also for a new job tomorrow that they don't even know what it's going to be. And you know, and we've got to make sure we're equipped and ready to do that as well. That's what kind of still drives me on. I'm passionate about this. I'm curious about this and I want to keep on digging into how we can do it better.

Mike Courian: You actually remind me of one of the things I loved that came out of my conversation with Michelle was her real rally cry to L&D leaders of its on you to proactively show the business why L&D is vital.

You know, because by default you will, like you were describing before, you can become just sort of a cost line and a cost center and it can become a real slippery slope where you're kind of, it all becomes very mechanistic and all of a sudden you've lost the magic and the magic is all these things that you were talking about before of reading...

Mike Courian: ...on the horizon and being able to show people what they can't see yet either and go, "We're going to go in this direction." So I loved Michelle calling that out and I felt like it set a really high- high bar and you've just reminded me of it. So I've just brought up returning business value and I'm curious, where do you land with the conundrum of- of business value? How do leaders think about delivering business value within this framework of sort of operating in quite- I don't necessarily mean formal agile, but you've got to be adaptive. And so how does that work with business value?

Laura Overton: We are not in an industrialized, mechanized work environment now. Any work organization now is complex, i.e., that there is uncertainty because we are working- you know, AI hasn't taken all of our jobs. There are people in the world of work and people respond differently to each other all the time. There isn't a culture, there's a constant moving of culture in an organization.

You know, and this- and I- I love learning from the field of complexity theory because actually how do we move in that space? And that's where, how do we amplify good behavior and how do we suppress behavior that isn't working? And that's why having a clear goal, a clear goal doesn't fix it. A clear goal gives us direction so that we can spot and see what is going on and is moving around us in order to move forward.

What are the conversations that are going on in our community that we've set up to support our learners, for example? Those community conversations can give us a real sense of what's actually happening and what the struggles that they've got. Where are the extra little...

Laura Overton: interventions that I might need to do, so we had to celebrate something that's really working well in one particular individual's life, um, and that can be accelerated and amplified across others. Whereas something going on in that ongoing community which needs to be brought back with an intervention or some extra support. So it's not that at working in an agile and responsive way actually detracts and sends us all over the place, but because we've got our clear direction and business results moving forward, we know what we're trying to achieve here for the business for these individuals in this initiative, if we can't identify that, it could go all over the place and we're like, in hindsight, I judge on a lot of awards, Mike, and it's incredible the number of awards entries that I read where it's very clear that they've done evaluation way after, just in order to try and get used to them. Whereas actually the awards that tend to win are the ones that have been adjusting, and they say actually this wasn't working and we moved and shifted and we used the data to be able to allow us to amplify what works and to kind of reduce what wasn't working and to be able to constantly with our goal in mind of this business outcome, working together with the business, that's how we achieved those results.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Laura Overton: So it's a both-and, business first allows us to have direction to the agility and allows that purpose to be able to achieve more with less, which most learning and development professionals want to be able to do right now.

Mike Courian: Yes, completely. Well Laura, thank you, I’ve so enjoyed our conversation, so thank you so much. 

Mike Courian: And that wraps up this episode of Shapeshifters. Thanks for being with us. We really want this to become a two-way conversation, so we would love for you to send in any questions or comments that this episode has prompted. You can do that by emailing shapeshifters@makeshape.com, or if you're listening on Spotify, you can drop it into the comment section. We'll be incorporating these questions and comments into future episodes.

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I'm grateful for all of you. This is a real joy for me to get to do this, so thank you for your support. Until next time, I'm Mike Courian, and this is Shapeshifters.