Guest: Michelle Ockers, Founder and Principal L&D Consultant, Learning Uncut
Published: November 20th, 2025
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‍Episode summary

A pragmatic, evidence-based guide to navigating the future of L&D without getting lost in content libraries.

Michelle Ockers is a practitioner first and a thought leader second. A former Air Force officer turned L&D strategist, she is the founder of Learning Uncut and the co-author of The L&D Leader. Michelle has a unique talent for cutting through the noise of industry buzzwords to find what actually works.

This conversation is grounding and incredibly practical. You’ll learn why "throwing courses at people" is a failing strategy when the time horizon for skills is shrinking, and how to adopt the mindset of a Polynesian voyager to navigate uncertainty with confidence.

Key topics

• 📉 Why training is broken: Why content-heavy solutions can no longer keep pace with the shortening skills horizon.
• 🛶 The Wayfinding Metaphor: How the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s use of nature to navigate open oceans offers the perfect blueprint for modern L&D
• 🔄 Reframing Learning: Why you should stop asking "How do you learn?" and start asking "How do you get better at stuff?"
• 🚀 Case Studies in Agility: How McKinsey and EPAM Systems build learning agility through feedback surges and transparency.
• 🦁 Be "Smart Bold": Moving beyond "proving" your value to "improving" your work by taking agency.

Top quotes

“We still tend to throw too many courses, too much content at development needs... if we're relying on content... we just can't keep pace.”

“When you're evaluating learning and impact, why do you do it? To improve, not to prove. It's all about evaluating to adapt your course.”

“We're not talking about being brassy-bold... but smart-bold. There's work to be done to continue to have value and to reshape our roles in what is a changing world.”

“A leader is someone who can shape a different future than the one that's immediately in front of them.”

“If I want to know how someone learns, I don't ask them, ‘How do you learn?’ Because people automatically think about courses. I ask them, ‘How do you get better at stuff?’”

Resources

• Download the One New Zealand Case Study
• Read Laura and Michelle's book The L&D Leader
• Book a Platform Demo

Full episode

Michelle Ockers: Training is pretty broken. Every development need that comes up, we're still very content heavy. We still tend to throw too many courses, too much content at development needs. There are times when it's the right solution, but there are many times when we're trying to develop skills which are changing very quickly, where if we're relying on content and throwing a stack of courses at people, we just can't keep pace. 

Michelle Ockers: Helping people to adapt to a rapidly accelerating future. And the idea of the horizon is getting closer. We don't have the runway we used to have to help people to shift skills for the future because things are moving so quickly. So in that context, the key to helping our people, teams and organizations adapt more readily for the future is building learning agility and adaptability. I'm conscious as an industry, we've been spending a lot of time talking about skilling, reskilling, upskilling, and there's a lot of content libraries that claim to help you with that. But ultimately, helping with learning agility and leaning into that space, more of that. So L&D do not have to be involved in every intervention. That learning continues to happen without us.

Mike Courian: Welcome to Shapeshifters, the podcast on the hunt for passionate individuals who are discovering and rediscovering the best ways to transform people and organizations for good. I'm your host, Mike Courian, and it's great to be with you.

In this episode, I'm talking to Michelle Ockers. Michelle is a seasoned professional of the industry and has spent her career helping organizations build high impact learning strategies. She's the founder of Learning Uncut, the host of its popular podcast, and is bringing ‘author’ to her list of achievements with her new book, The L&D Leader, co-written with Laura Overton. See the show notes for more details.

She's collaborative, pragmatic, and

Mike Courian: practitioner first, focused on giving people things they can put into action. In this conversation, Michelle breaks down why training is broken, and why throwing content at people is no longer the answer to our rapidly changing skills gap. You'll hear how ancient Polynesian voyaging techniques serve as the perfect metaphor for how L&D leaders can navigate the present uncertainty. She'll reveal why we need to move beyond proving our value to improving our work with examples from McKinsey on building genuine learning agility. And you'll learn about being smart-bold, how taking agency is key to shaping the future of your role.

Michelle brings such a clear, evidence-based voice to the table. She has a wonderful way of cutting through the noise, and I'm confident you'll walk away from this with new principles you can put to use.

Let's jump in.

Mike Courian: Michelle, welcome to the podcast.

Michelle Ockers: Hello, Mike. I'm delighted to be here speaking to you today.

Mike Courian: Yeah, it's so nice to have you. Now, where I want to start is I want to get a sense of who is Michelle? What are like the top three words or little things that come to mind when you think about wanting to tell somebody about you?

Michelle Ockers: Collaborative and community minded would be the first one. Practical, pragmatic would be the second one. I regard myself as a practitioner first and foremost. Sometimes people refer to me as a thought leader. I'm like, please don't. I'm like a practice leader. My goal is always in anything I put out into the world to give people something they can do with whatever I'm bringing to them. So that would be the second one. Um, and I don't know, I just feel like I'm a pretty grounded person. I have some fundamental beliefs about myself and the way I show up in the world and the way the world's going to treat me. And one of those is that I'll always land on my feet. So, I think I'm a pretty calm person and I just like to work my way through things. I have a good sense of self and a good sense of

Michelle Ockers: just moving my way through whatever comes up. And I feel like I adjust and flex pretty well to work and life unfolding.

Mike Courian: Well, I can testify to that being true because unlike many of my guests, we've actually spent time in person before and I would say that you ooze that. So I would say that's very true, Michelle. I love that you called that out. Were you a practitioner and pragmatic from the get-go or was that something that really got amplified during your time in the Air Force?

Michelle Ockers: So I joined the Australian Air Force straight out of school. I was 18. I've always been really well organized, quite structured, and there were some important things I had to unlearn when I left the Air Force 16 years later, I've got to say, because that level of structure, um, is not always useful. The other thing that I think goes into that is my mother's German. So she is very organized. I think I just picked up a lot of traits from her.

So I think I've had to learn to be more at ease with less structure. People who work with me would probably say still I'm very structured, but that level of flexing and flowing, and that's something we're going to talk about when we talk about the work that Laura Overton and I have done on our book, where we use a navigation metaphor, and the the pace at which things move these days and the complexities we have to address or face and work our way through in our work requires a level of flexibility that I honestly think 30-year-old me would have drowned under.

Mike Courian: I love that. You've a lot of dynamic elements to your work, but walk us through what a regular sort of week might look like.

Michelle Ockers: Okay. So nearly all my work is done remotely, virtually, with the teams that I work with. I live in a beautiful part of the world and a village of 2,000 people on the south coast of New South Wales. I moved down here three years ago from one of our cities here in Australia.

Michelle Ockers: So, what does a typical day look like? I work on a couple of different types of key projects. One is learning strategy. So I'll work with one or two organizations at most at a time, coaching and guiding through creating their own organizational learning strategy, and I have a whole process and resources for that. And associated with that, often we work on their operating model, you know, their tech road stack, their structure, their skill set, and so on. And the other thing I do a fair bit of is workshops and mentoring, often with learning and development teams, sometimes with facilitators, sometimes with managers.

One thing I do every year, which I just love, it makes my heart sing. It's for the Australian Sports Commission. They have a Women Leadership in Sport program, and as part of that, I run a couple of optional career development planning workshops each year for them. I have also been doing work with the Australian Institute of Training and Development, a couple of different roles, and I do some pro bono work on an ongoing basis with them around the capability framework. Try to take a break for lunch, get out for a walk, maybe do a little bit in my garden. You know, my garden's a really important part of my personal balance. Around four o'clock, if the weather's good, my partner and I will jump in the car and head down to the beach with our fishing rods and see if we can catch some salmon for dinner.

Mike Courian: I love that. I'm so glad I asked. I would have never put fishing on the list. That makes me really happy. Tying on from a day that looks like you've just described, when you're working, I'm curious where are Michelle's superpowers? Or like, what parts of the process do you know that you excel at?

Michelle Ockers: Coaching and mentoring, definitely, it is kind of one of those. And it's not just mentoring in practical skills. One of the things I find when I'm mentoring, it's often people who are in sort of...

Michelle Ockers: aspiring L&D leader roles or new L&D leader roles or maybe you've been in a role for a couple of years and they're wanting to work more strategically. So some of it is about the skills and the ways of thinking about strategy and coaching them through that. But there's also this huge piece that's about self-confidence.

Mike Courian: Mm.

Michelle Ockers: that I didn't realize when I started this work that that was going to be so important as part of my mentoring. And it's a big theme in the book in terms of agency and taking agency in your work in L&D to shape your role, to have different kinds of conversations, to navigate your own way through complexity in your organization. So that's I think one of my superpowers.

I think another one is helping to figure out how to apply something. And by that, and I think again, probably the book is going to be a good example or some of the work I've done over time with Laura Overton, um, and another lady called Shannon Tipton that we've done quite a lot of work with out of the US. You know, Laura has this incredible 20 years worth of research around L&D practice and high-performing L&D teams and how to maximize innovation and the use of technology in L&D. And one of the things I think I've really brought to the table has been how to, how to apply that into practice. And when I look over some of the other collaborations I've had over the past five or six years, for instance Nigel Payne on learning culture, you know, I was able to help him work with what he had written in his books and some of the work he'd done previously and look at how do we apply that or how do we help people to apply that through a series of workshops. So that's kind of one of the superpowers I bring to my collaborations is really that practical application of good ideas and insights.

Mike Courian: I saw that word pragmatic and practical coming back through, and so that that really makes sense. We've heard multiple references to this book, so I want to take us there now. Daily Journal. So it sounds like Michelle's got writing in the blood already, but is this your first book?

Michelle Ockers: Oh, it's not. It's my second. But the first one, no one will know about, no one will ever read. When I was in the Air Force, I had received a posting, you get posted every two or three years somewhere different, and I'd received a posting to go to the Australian Defence Force Academy and be a divisional officer. A divisional officer basically has to take responsibility for a group of cadets who are straight out of school, who are going through their three years of university and military training. And I looked at this and I thought, oh man, what have I done? I don't deserve that job. It was nothing I wanted to do. So I thought, how can I find a way out of this? And there was a fellowship scheme in the Air Force at the time, and you could apply for a fellowship to research something that was related to air power.

So I put in an application for one of these fellowships, and I got a fellowship. I still had to go to Canberra, but I didn't go to the Defense Force Academy, so I dodged that one. And one of the things you had to do as part of the fellowship was to write a book. So I wrote the definitive book on preparedness and reparable item management.

And it's written under a different surname, so I'm not going to tell anyone what that is, but although I journal every day, writing for yourself versus writing to communicate and explore ideas with others are very different. And I've got to say, I would never have stepped up to the plate to write a book on my own. So when Laura asked me, she already had the publishing deal with Kogan Page when she sold towards maturity through which she ran the learning performance benchmark.

Michelle Ockers: she was approached about writing a book based on the research and insights from the benchmark. And she said yes, but she sat on it for multiple years. And part of the challenge for her was she's someone who always likes to be looking forwards. So she never wanted to write a book that only looked backwards. She wanted to take her time to think about, well, what does this mean for the future and how can I, Laura, continue to show up and help people in a meaningful way in the industry into the future. We had worked together on different projects, particularly through COVID. But she also knows I'm a good finisher. So she said to me, would you like to co-write the book with me? So that gave me enough confidence to go, yes, let's figure it out, let's figure out how to write a book.

So in terms of me figuring out how I want to write, I started doing more reading to pick up industry books and read them differently and go, what's appealing to me? And what I realized is you're trying to communicate as clearly as you can with the people who are reading the book. Yes. So it's not about using big words or long sentences or lots of jargon, it's about how can I keep this really clear and plain? How can I take ideas that could be complex or new to people and explain them in as simple and approachable a way as possible. And Laura and I also had to develop a common tone so that the book is coherent because we write with a single voice. So we ended up agreeing on a tone that was really about being personable, approachable, clear and plain. So, the way I ended up writing is probably a lot closer to the way I speak when I coach than I had anticipated.

Mike Courian: I've seen other situations where co-authors call out when they're each writing a chapter, and I actually love that you guys tried to find a unified voice because I think, I think there's a refinement.

Mike Courian: that happens through that process that will only amplify the work. Now, the book is called The L&D Leader.

Michelle Ockers: The L&D Leader. It wasn't our preference, but the publisher was insistent that that's what the book needed to be called. And that's partly for searchability, right? Because it's not just for L&D leaders.

Mike Courian: Yes, I'm picking up on that.

Michelle Ockers: Yeah, so we switched the language a little bit in terms of the way we communicate with the reader. And we talk about aspiring leaders and seasoned leaders. And we make it really clear up front that this is for everyone in L&D. And we kind of take a broad view around. We don't directly say what leadership is, but in my head, when I think about who is a leader, I often go back to something that a lady from New Zealand actually said to me on one of the Learning Uncut podcasts. Helen Said-Cole, we were talking about leadership and she said, a leader is someone who can shape a different future outcome from the one that's immediately in front of them. And that fits so nicely with one of the themes around the book. In fact, the last chapter is about shaping the future of L&D, where we bring together this idea of agency and taking agency as individuals, but then also in order to shape the future of L&D, it's about doing it as a community. So collaboration is another key point that we land on. And spoiler alert, we don't know what the future of L&D looks like. None of us do. So it's more about how we navigate our way to shape the future and land on business value. So the subtitle of the book is Principles and Practice for Delivering Business Value. There's this beautiful story, a real world story that uh Laura came across, which we use as a metaphor throughout the book. And it's a group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society who were formed 50 years ago when a group

Michelle Ockers: people in Hawaii got together because they were on a quest to rediscover ancient navigation techniques and show how it was entirely possible for the Hawaiian people to navigate their way to Tahiti over 2,000 miles away without any navigation instruments whatsoever.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Michelle Ockers: And they did that, you know, reading the currents, reading the winds, using what they called a star compass. So that is the kind of their mental map of the stars in the sky. Looking at what was happening with the wildlife, which way the swells were coming. All of these signals and signs around them to navigate towards something that's over the horizon. And it just became this fantastic metaphor. Laura's, Laura's superpowers, she has many, but one of them is making meaning from metaphors. And it formed the basis for, you know, talking about us, we each find ourselves in our own territory, in our own context. And for each of us, we have to figure out how to navigate our way forward and by what, you know, each of us as L&D practitioners, in my context, in my own territory, how do I navigate my way to deliver business value?

Mike Courian: I love the metaphor because I would say it's a core metaphor that I'm trying to weave into the framework of this podcast is, who are the people that are wayfinding? And that idea came to me watching Moana with my kids. That was my very surface level introduction to this rich, incredible process of learning and of observation. And it just, it, they're metaphors, but they're, it's actually the principles that they used are really principles for navigating a dynamic environment. And I can't think of anything more dynamic than sailing on the ocean across huge stretches of water. It speaks so well to the current situation. If there was a storm on the ocean, I feel like AI is the perfect metaphor for how disruptive it's.

Mike Courian: It certainly created this upheaval of uncertainty. Is there anything you want to add there before I ask you another question?

Michelle Ockers: Yeah, just a little bit. The other thing about the work and impact of the Polynesian Voyaging Society is, although they didn't set out to do it, what they've done has actually shaped a cultural renaissance for Hawaiians.

Mike Courian: Yeah, interesting.

Michelle Ockers: Because they've just connected these ancient techniques, they brought them back to life. They've helped create a sense of cultural pride.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Michelle Ockers: So one of the calls to action that we weave into the book is, you know, sometimes L&D feels a little bit lost and we go through these existential crises almost, and AI is a great example, like is there a future for L&D? You know, what is our future? And it's all about connecting with who we are at kind of a bigger level and the idea of looking to the past to shape the future. So we've looked to the past in terms of the 20 years of benchmarking research and what that shows us about how to navigate our way into the future both as individual L&D practitioners, as teams and as an industry as a whole. So the cultural renaissance theme is a really important part of the metaphor and the pattern here as well. We've tried to be so respectful of what the Polynesian Voyaging Society has done in the way we talk about it, the way we take inspiration from it, encourage others to do so as well, and then to weave that metaphor and some of the key incidents in the history of the society into key parts of the book as well. And one of the people who's reviewed it for us said it just creates a little bit of magic.

Mike Courian: Yeah.

Michelle Ockers: I think it really seems to have hit the mark for people who've been reviewing the book for us.

Mike Courian: I think it's going to be a real asset. A great metaphor I think can carry almost anything. I'm really stoked on it. Now, I'm really curious to hear two things and you can pick them off in either order. One is, what's broken? Like why?

Mike Courian: Do L & D leaders need to shift their focus? And then maybe what's not broken?

Michelle Ockers: Okay. What's broken? Training is pretty broken. As in every development need that comes up, we're still very content heavy. We still tend to throw a lot of content at development needs. So too many courses, too much content is the first thing that's still a little bit broken. And it just can't keep pace.

There are times when it's the right solution, absolutely, but there are many times particularly when we're trying to develop skills which are changing very quickly where if we're relying on content and throwing a stack of content and courses at people, we just can't keep pace. And there's a chapter in the book where we talk about the horizon getting closer.

That was one of the chapters I led the writing on, but we very much were thinking partners. You know, we just had book club meetings. We'd meet on Zoom and we would hit records and then we would talk through things. And this was the chapter that I grappled with the most in terms of, well what's the angle here? Because it's not just about helping people to adapt to a rapidly accelerating future. And the idea of the horizon is getting closer, right? We don't have the runway we used to have to help people to shift skills for the future because things are moving so quickly. So in that context, yes, it's about building skills, but the key to helping our people, teams and organizations adapt more readily for the future is building learning agility and adaptability.

So that was the underpinning message because I'm also conscious as an industry, we've been spending a lot of time talking about skilling, reskilling, upskilling.

Michelle Ockers: is a lot of content libraries that claim to help you with that. But ultimately, building a learning culture, helping with learning agility, and leaning into that space and figuring out how we do more of that so we L&D do not have to be involved in every intervention. That learning continues to happen without us, which it does anyway, right? Our role is two-fold. It's to help people to be equipped for today, and that's the bread and butter stuff like compliance, onboarding, just today's role readiness, but also to be ready for whatever is coming into the future. And some of my clients even say to me, we no longer talk about tomorrow or the future. We just talk about being adaptable because it's all happening so quickly, you know, we can't split time into these two horizons anymore.

So I think this idea of learning culture, learning agility, which of course, if you look at the World Economic Forum report, they publish a jobs in the future report every second year, and they always include a list of top 10 skills on the rise. And the last couple of times they've published it, it's been a pretty evenly balanced mix of tech skills, a range of tech skills, and then things like resilience, learning agility, curiosity. So I think one of the things that we need to embrace more is this idea of supporting our workforces to develop those kinds of skills so they can be more agile and adaptable. So I started with what's broken. Yet content and overdoing it on training is broken.

Another thing that I think is broken that we've tried to address in the book is just this idea of we're not here just to help people. How do I phrase this? It's delivering value, which is something we've been grappling with as a sector for so long, right?

Mike Courian: Yeah.

Michelle Ockers: How do we move beyond being order takers to actually aligning on business objectives, collaborating with

Michelle Ockers: effectively with others in the organization to move towards creation of business value. It's kind of a thread that runs through the principles that we unpack in the book, which have been informed by the research base from the benchmark, really. Um, and you know, it's things like when you're evaluating learning and impact, why do you do it? Evaluate to improve, not to prove. So it's all about evaluating to adapt your course, not to just show, hey, we've created value. So part of its mindset is around how we approach key parts of our work. So I think the way we think about evaluation is often very broken, and then the way we do evaluation and approach it is broken as a result of that. So that's another key shift I think it would be valuable for L&D to make.

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You've touched on some of the most important things that I think people are asking and wondering about. A reoccurring theme on this podcast from the conversations I've had so far is actually this question of how do we help people become more curious?

Michelle Ockers: A couple of things I would say. First is the way we frame what learning is when we talk to people. So if I want to know how someone learns, I don't ask them, how do you learn? Because people automatically think about courses, right? So normally what I ask people is, how do you get better at stuff? How do you improve in your work? That's normally what I ask, because that will open up people's minds straight away to a wider range of things. So I talked earlier about the career and professional development planning sessions I run for the Australian Sports Commission. I do an activity in that session where I ask people to think about one thing they've gotten better at in the last 12 months. One thing they can do better now than they could 12 months ago. They don't have to tell me what it is, just get something in your head. Then what I ask them to share is, what did you do to get better? Like, how did you make that improvement?

Every now and then someone will say I did a course, but mostly it's about practice. I got it wrong a lot and I tried, I asked questions, I watched other people, I read some stuff, I watched some videos, you know, I just figured it out. Or I got a mentor, that sort of thing. And then I talk to people about, well, this is real learning, you know, getting better at stuff is learning, and you're all doing it and you're all doing it in a wide range of ways. And then I go on to talk about, we get better through experience, through giving things a try, through practicing things, through setting intentions and trying things in our work, through reflecting. We get better through people, through mentors, through our colleagues when we work together, you know, through joining communities or groups, through conversation and collaboration. And then we get better through, I call it investigation, through resources and courses. So it's kind of like 70 20 10, but just in plain language that people understand, right? We get better through people, through our work, through resources, through courses.

So that's the first thing is around the framing and to help people to see that there is opportunity to improve and get better all around them and they're all doing it quite naturally, but with more intention, they can amplify that. Then the second thing is about examples of where organizations are doing this well. There's a couple of examples in part

Michelle Ockers: three of the books. In this chapter I talked about, you know, helping our workforce to be ready for whatever is coming their way. Um, and I think there's some clues in those two examples which I'll introduce very briefly. One is McKinsey, and they did something called a feedback skills surge.

So the key thing that made this a surge is that it wasn't just the L&D team working on feedback skills and supporting the development of feedback skills in the organization on their own. It was the chief people officer who very smartly identified that there was a number of people across people and culture who had a role to play in creating an environment where feedback was being more actively sought and used across their workforce. And they had not only the skills, but the kind of environment that was available to do that. So it was about collaboration, particularly across people and culture, but also with their leaders that they were in partnerships, so partners. So it was in collaboration with business as well.

And it was very intensely focused, you know, you think of surges in the ocean, I'm going to use a navigation metaphor here. You know, there's a lot of force in surges, the waters are rising, they're moving you in a certain direction. There's a lot of power in a surge. So it's this whole idea of what is, if you want to apply this around developing learning culture or learning agility, what is a key skill in the organization that if you really focused on building it in collaboration and thinking systemically with others would really help people to be more continuous learners.

And this is one of the things about feedback. It's like a core learning skill. And particularly it was around seeking feedback and receiving feedback was what they ended up focusing on. So that's the first thing is figure out, you know, what are the skills within learning agility and how might you really hone in on those and support the workforce.

Michelle Ockers: in a really coherent and practical way to use those skills to keep improving in their work once you've reframed what learning actually is.

Mike Courian: Yeah, it's so interesting thinking of that example because even as the people on culture team actively seek feedback, they're demonstrating curiosity, but also I think it's tapping into the part like where the rubber hits the road, which is positive feedback easy, but sometimes there's a hesitancy to really hear the critical stuff. Sometimes it will be negative, sometimes it will be painful, but I feel like that's actually the muscle that will really create the agility and the adaptability is getting comfortable with both.

Michelle Ockers: It seems so simple like feedback is a skill really. Is that really something about helping people to be prepared for the future? Absolutely, because it's a key part of learning agility, right? I won't unpack the next one too much, but it's your classic. You know, we've spent a lot of time talking about skills-based organizations, which is about more than just building skills. I mean, it's a pretty fundamental shift if you're going to truly embrace being a skills-based organization, because you start organizing work and people around skills rather than around jobs. And there is one organization that's been doing this for 30 years. And they're another consulting company. EPAM is their name. People probably wouldn't have heard of them. EPAM systems, and they've got about 50,000 staff globally, but 30 years ago, before they even had HR, a couple of their engineers sort of thought, how are we going to match people to client work? And they decided to do it through skills. So skills have been used as a fundamental part of the way work gets organized in that organization for decades now, and they've really fine tuned that. But the key part of that case study, or that real world example that I really want to tease out is when we talk about preparing people for the future and leaning into skills, we tend to get a bit mechanistic, and what's the architecture, and what's the taxonomy, and and so on.

Michelle Ockers: really the thing that makes it work there is the way that they've tapped into individual motivation. So this is the other piece of the puzzle, I think that's really important. In the book, we've got two sets of principles. One are professional practice principles and the others are a set of mindset principles for those working in L&D. So the professional practice principles are chunked into three lots, tuning in, responding, and improving. And in the tuning in, the first part is about shared alignment. So that is alignment with business goals, really. But then the second piece is understanding individuals and the importance of understanding what motivates your workforce and offering people choice and appealing to their motivation. And EPAM for them, what that looks like is being highly transparent around skills and the skills that are needed for different roles so that people have complete visibility of that, and they can make personal choices around what do I want to develop based on where do I want to go? So high levels of transparency, and they build skills and skill development and continuous feedback into the way projects work. And it just kind of taps into the motivation that individuals have. That's a key thing that we talk about in the book and give examples of is how to understand the individuals in your organization and give them choice and autonomy. So I think that's the other part of building a learning culture and getting people curious.

Mike Courian: So is the idea that if we're highly transparent, then those that naturally are motivated towards these skills are going to then be able to express that autonomy, put themselves forward and you're going to have better fit and then things are happening synergistically because you're not fighting somebody to fit into something.

Michelle Ockers: Yeah. Yeah, when people know what the options are, and when they know how to develop and get access to the opportunities, you know, you unleash people. There's a good podcast story with Schneider

Michelle Ockers: electric around their talent marketplace. And one of the key things that's important about their success with a talent marketplace isn't the tech. It's not, hey, we introduce this great piece of tech, but it's about them sitting back and thinking about their whole philosophy around talent. And again, they moved to a very open philosophy where all opportunities for job roles or secondments or mentoring are accessible to everyone in their global organization, and anyone is free to apply. They don't need to put in a whole stack of paperwork. Yes, we recommend you talk to the manager and managers, you talk to your people, but you actually don't need manager approval. You don't need to put in a form to HR to apply for something, you know, you don't need to be in the know, you just need to be on the platform and searching in the talent marketplace and every opportunity is open to you. So I think that makes a difference as well.

Mike Courian: Great. I love that. Now, I'd love to hear more about your motivation. So, why, why did you write it and why now?

Michelle Ockers: Partly because Laura asked me, and it was just a great opportunity to collaborate with Laura. For me also, you know, I've got this incredible library. I've been running the learning uncut podcast since 2018 now. So that's seven years. And it's a case study based, real world case study based podcast. And I wanted to do more with the great examples in the podcast of bringing good practice to life. So it gave me the opportunity to do that. But I think also for me, this piece around it being another vehicle at a critical point in time for learning and development because the latest disruption is AI, and not so long ago, the disruption was the pandemic. And there's more on the way. There will always be some sort of disruption, right? My observation earlier about part of my work with coaching and mentoring is not just about skills and

Michelle Ockers: but about confidence and bringing back a sense of agency and helping people in L&D to see you can shape the future. And that it all starts with your day-to-day choices about the way you're working and you know, using these navigation principles that we've derived from the evidence around what sets high-performing learning and development teams apart, applying them in your own context. So a lot of it is about amplifying the work I do one-on-one with individuals or with teams, L&D teams and making it more accessible to others. It's very evidence informing the approach we've taken in the book and combining, you know, the research base with real world examples and how do you apply this. I've used that learning performance benchmark in my work with L&D teams since I discovered it in 2014. And it's not always easy to take what is a pretty vast body of evidence and figure out what it means to me. So we've really tried to give lots of different examples of how these principles apply. There's ideas for experiments people can run whether they're seasoned or newer in their L&D careers. The motivation for me was it making this body of research more accessible and easier for more people in L&D to apply.

Mike Courian: I think that confidence idea is really important and it's just ringing in my ears a little bit because I'm hearing some really big calls from people outside the industry because of large language models, pronouncing the death of certain divisions and sometimes the target's L&D. And I think what's so interesting is everything we've covered speaks to the huge opportunity for L&D to align with business value. In a lot of ways, maybe the best part of the business is to do that alignment and to be proactive and to lead into the business value. But it's interesting, you

Mike Courian: in this moment and Laura being able to speak to the community and inject a level of confidence while there's naysayers saying the opposite. Do you think that's true?

Michelle Ockers: One of the distinctions we make, and I know I'm going to attribute Laura, she's the pattern maker of the two of us. She's a researcher. So that's important. Someone reflected back to her through her work on the PhD that you know, the hyphen in their researcher that she's continuously searching and re-evaluating and looking at how things from the past are relevant to the future and so on and continually searching for what works.

One of the patterns that she first spotted when we were doing a special podcast series during COVID called Emerging Stronger. And one of the questions we grapple with is everything about these principles has been public domain for many years through the benchmark and the reports that were published. Why is it that some L&D leaders and some teams are able to pick them up and run with them and figure out how to apply them and others aren't?

She came up with this acronym based on the conversations we had with a number of L&D leaders who we felt were the kind of the people who were creating impact. And it's bold, B O L D, business-oriented, open-minded, leading and learning, and deliberate. But the distinction she talks about is we're not talking about being brassy bold.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Michelle Ockers: Um, you know, we're not talking about coming from a place of ego and overconfidence, but smart bold, smart bold. There's work to be done to continue to have value and to reshape our roles in what is a changing world. The people who are saying, you know, L&D doesn't have a future. That's only if we don't reshape our roles.

Mike Courian: Yes.

Michelle Ockers: And reshape using these principles to move forward into the future and to perhaps work in different ways.

Mike Courian: I love the idea of L&D getting to grab back the reputation and we are the leaders of agility. We are the leaders of adaptability. And so

Mike Courian: We are now the most valuable part of the organization as we move through these seasons of change. Let's take that back from transformation or whoever thinks they have it.

Michelle Ockers: We have the potential to be. Yeah, and transformation, you know, we should be right in the heart and center of transformation. We should be a key partner in any transformation initiative in organizations. And I know a number of very, I would call them the smart, bold L&D leaders who have established themselves in that key strategic position, working hand-in-hand with transformation projects or part of transformation projects. Definitely where we belong. But the more we hold on to courses and content, the less relevant we are to the future.

Mike Courian: Well, Michelle, is there anything else you want to leave us with before I sign us off on the book? Is there anything around what you've learned through the process or what it's left you curious to explore more?

Michelle Ockers: In terms of, you know, the learning along the way, the whole process of writing this book was one massive exploration and learning experience. And one of the things Laura and I are really keen to highlight, and we've pointed it out in the preliminaries for the book, and we returned to it right at the end is this is an exploration for us as individual L&D practitioners. We think it's a community-based exploration and we think there is so much more that we can learn. I'm really curious about the mindset piece. I'm also really curious, you talked about learning culture and building learning culture, about how people embrace that and this whole idea of supporting people to be adaptable and agile, you know, and how do we find expressions for that and ways of really making that work on an ongoing basis. So we're really hoping to lean into the community and to keep exploring some of the questions we pose in the book together.

Mike Courian: It's fantastic. I'm so excited to see how it's received and see it head out into the world, find its own way.

Michelle Ockers: Yes. Curious to see what people do with it.

Michelle Ockers: ways of embracing and applying some of these principles people can come up with as we just keep moving into the future.

Mike Courian: Michelle, you are a joy. You're very eloquent. Thank you. I've loved getting to hear about the book and I think what's so exciting for me is both you and Laura getting to pull together a huge corpus of work.

Michelle Ockers: Mm.

Mike Courian: And I just know there's a sense of significance in getting to share a lot of your hard work. And so I'm really pleased that you both are getting this outlet for that. And I'm also pleased that all that writing ability is getting to be put to good use.

Michelle Ockers: I feel like now I've written a book, I feel like I can write now. Maybe I have to test it out. Maybe I have to write another book to fine tune the skills. I don't know. If I'm up for that again. It was quite the effort.

Mike Courian: Well, we're very grateful for you taking the time to speak to all of us, myself and everybody listening. So thank you, Michelle.

Michelle Ockers: Thanks for the invitation, Mike. It's a pleasure to speak with you.

Mike Courian: And that wraps up this episode of Shapeshifters. Thanks so much 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@makeshapes.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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Until next time, I'm Mike Courian and this is Shapeshifters.