Breaking the broken model: How to fix corporate learning and development

“Actually 90% of the change you’re trying to create comes through systemic changes to the environment rather than training.”
Charlie Kneen

Charlie Kneen is the founder of Solvd Together, a learning and development transformation consultancy that reimagines how global brands approach their people strategy. Formerly the L&D lead at BP in the UK, Charlie brings together expertise in marketing, coaching, leadership, and human-centred design.

Charlie dives deep into why traditional corporate training feels like expensive theatre that no one enjoys. He explores how most L&D departments have become order-taking functions, churning out compliance training and three-day courses that people forget immediately. He shares real examples from his work with major companies like Heathrow Airport and shipping firms. Charlie uncovers the systemic issues that prevent real learning and behaviour change, and explores everything from the psychology of how people actually learn to practical strategies for transforming L&D from within organisations.

If you’re tired of engagement surveys and hoping for the best, this episode offers tangible alternatives that focus on business performance rather than content delivery.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• The broken model of corporate learning
• Human-centred design in L&D
• How to handle difficult conversations when research reveals uncomfortable truths about leadership and systems
• Moving from order-takers to strategic partners
• Using nudges and contextual cues to drive behaviour change without formal training
• Setting up proper research methodologies with control groups to prove ROI and business impact

Key links

Solvd Together Website
Charlie Kneen LinkedIn
Solvd Together LinkedIn
How People Learn: Designing Education and Training that Works to Improve Performance
“The Empty Brain” article by Robert Epstein (former editor of Psychology Today)
Bp Website

 

About our guest

Charlie Kneen is the founder of Solvd Together, a Learning & Development and Transformation consultancy that partners with global brands to reimagine how organisations engage, retain, and upskill their people.

Drawing on a background in marketing, coaching, and leadership roles across both in-house teams and start-ups, Charlie brings a unique perspective on the psychology of work. His passion lies in applying human-centred design to learning and change, helping businesses achieve real impact and commercial value while creating better experiences for their people.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.

Transcript

Chris Hudson: 0:05
Hey, and welcome back to the Company Road Podcast, which is the podcast for intrapreneurs who are tired of some of those buzzwords and ready for some real change. And I’m your host, Chris Hudson, and today we’re gonna be diving into one of the most critical challenges facing organisations right now, in my view. So it’s how do you actually engage, retain, and upskill your people when the old playbook and the old methods just aren’t working anymore? My guest today is Charlie Kneen, who’s founder of Solvd Together. They’re a learning and development transformation consultancy that’s reimagining how global brands approach their people strategy. Charlie was also the former L D lead at BP in the UK prior to that and a few other roles that he can talk about as well at the moment. What we’re really looking for is to help companies stop throwing around engagement surveys and just hoping for the best. And I think he’s got some real tangible. Tips and tricks and some examples of things that would probably work a little bit better. And he is also got a completely different angle from my point of view. So bringing together a background in marketing, co coaching, leadership and also human centred design to this sort of messy, complex world of organisational change. Charlie you’ve done a lot of things and we’ll get into how you do some of those things, but maybe for the listeners out there who don’t know what l and d is or learning development is, then maybe you could just tell them a little bit about that first.

Charlie: 1:16
Yeah. Cool. So I think the simplified version is you do school, then you do university, and then when you get into companies, there’s meant to be a kind of version of that. Learning development in business, as you were alluding to at the beginning we think that fundamentally school and university as a system is a broken model, and that same broken model is applicable and rears its ugly head in corporate business. So the way that you might see that if you’re working in house is. You get an email from your l and d team or through a horrible system that you hate using to say you haven’t done your compliance training yet. Here’s 30 hours of e-learning. Or you get an email from your boss saying, I really think you should go on this course. And you have to take three days out of your day to go and sit and listen to someone talk at you with loads of slides for three days, which you don’t remember. And then you go back to work and people ask you what you learned and you say something like, I learned that I’m a green. So that’s like the negative end of corporate l and d. And what we do is exist to disrupt that thinking and apply human centred or product design approach to the same problems.

Chris Hudson: 2:24
And there’s a lot of, I don’t know maybe the perception over here in this market is that there’s not a lot of movement in that space but some companies are, trying to do it well. We’ve got CultureAmp and Atlassian, various people pushing ahead with some things out here. But yeah. I just wanna ask you something controversial maybe to get us started, which is, I get the feeling that most l and d departments are they’re creating a lot of expensive theatre, making the leadership feel good about investing in the people. And the employees just sit through some of that mandatory training that you were talking about and they forget it by next week. So why do you think it’s so broken?

Charlie: 2:56
I think fundamentally people don’t understand how people learn or how the human brain works. So there’s a really great article which you could find online by a guy unfortunately named Robert Epstein, but it’s not through Robert Epstein. It’s a different guy. He used to be the editor of Psychology Today and he wrote an article called The Empty Brain, and he basically says that. The way that we describe the brain is often based on the most advanced technology that we have available at the time. So his analogy is we talk about process mental processing and memory and things like that because yeah, because it’s the most advanced technology. That’s not how the human brain works. It’s nothing like a computer. And then I’m a bit of a history buff. So he also talks about the fact that in the Middle Ages, the most advanced technology was hydraulics. And so people used hydraulics as a way to think about how psychology works. So they had the four humours. It was like black bile, whatever it was. So it’s really interesting article, but I think it’s really, and it’s quite succinct and I think it describes quite clearly how we misrepresent human beings, how they learn, and and I think fundamentally the way that we’ve developed to design school and university in particular is based on this idea that a human brain is a kind of a sponge for information. A computer is a sponge for information, but actually the opposite is true. We are terrible at remembering stuff. What we’re really good at is problem solving. So a lot of what we do is think about. How do you put people in contexts, whether it be simulated or otherwise, where they can apply their human side to solving problems and learning through the process of doing, rather than sitting them down, talking at them in whatever format, whether that be online or in person, and trying get them to remember a thing that they can then apply. Yeah, a quite a long answer to your question and I could go on, but that probably gives you a summary of it.

Chris Hudson: 4:49
No, I like it. I like the history re reference as well. So yeah, it feels like the kind of awareness that anyone would have about their own learning preferences might be somewhat limited as well. You talk a bit about human sense design and that application in learning and change. But I think that most people, most companies would say that they would be totally people first, or even customer first, and. Their actual systems are probably screaming the opposite. How do you cut through some of that self-deception and what do you think seems to work?

Charlie: 5:16
So the, I think the way we think about it is there’s two things to do. There’s the systemic challenges, which is, it may sound patronising to say, but I think if I kind of think about people as not. Not the kind of engineers that are in destiny. They’re in an environment where they’re being buffeted by lots of different influences and impacts. So these things like leadership, these things like systems like technologies and so on, things like the physical environment where they are, things like the cultural norms of a business all serve to. I guess drive certain behaviour. And yep. When we start doing our work, the first thing we do is understand the problem we’re trying to solve, and then do the research to understand what the environment system looks like. Once you’ve done that, then you can start thinking about solutions that that will solve the problem. So then, but there might be remove stuff, takes barriers out the way and so you drive behaviour in the right way. Or add stuff in. Often the first is better than the for the second actually. And then you’re designing solutions that might include some kind of training intervention or a learning development, but actually 90% of the change you’re trying to create. Comes through systemic changes to the environment rather than training. So we’re like a let l and d company that spends much of its time trying to convince people not to do training, or at least in a more conventional sense, not to do training. And then, yeah you build and test the solutions that you wanna roll out in an iterative product design type way. So you get people in a room, you test the ideas. You build prototypes on tools like Figma for technology, for digital stuff. So there’s a whole range of different things to do, but that’s in a nutshell, the process that we follow.

Chris Hudson: 6:53
Yeah, very cool. Yeah, I mean it’s, yeah, obviously very similar to, the work that we do in design products and you move it interestedly through. And how are you finding the kind of the first or the few, the first few steps, of getting that. Getting that thing started like in convincing people that it’s a systemic problem they need to solve. Like where do you start with that?

Charlie: 7:11
Yeah. Because we asked the question, what problem are you trying to solve? It quite quickly unlocks the insight, whether the actual person knows why they’re asking you to do something. I think. Conventionally learning development has been seen as an order taking function. So someone in some part of the business goes, we need to have some training on, I dunno how to fix this bolt. And so they go to the training team and they say, build us some training. And the training team says, yes, that’s fine. And then they launch the training. Whereas if you ask them what problem you trying to solve and how do you know that’s a problem, they need to be able to clearly articulate and we have processes and workshops for doing this clearly articulate. What are you seeing in your organisation and what are you trying actually trying to fix? Often it comes down to, there’s probably four things. It comes down to, it comes down to engagement, retention, attrition and skills. Can a person do what you need them to do? Are they staying in the business? Could you wanna keep them? Are they leaving? And also, are you engaging them properly with whether it be comms or learning or whatever it might be. Yeah, it’s just a process of getting people to clearly articulate it and also think about how are you gonna measure it? Do you know this is a problem because you’ve got an intuition that’s a problem where you’ve spoken to some of your mates who are also leaders in the business and they also think it’s a problem? Or do you have the data? So when we’re doing the research, a lot of what we’re doing is validating the assumptions that the stakeholders have. So some, an example of that might be. We did some work with a large shipping company. And their thing was how do we get our shipping surveyors to become more consultative in their engagements with ship owners and captains of ships and stuff like that. So we looked at it multiple ways, but ultimately. The assumption being made by the business was that these people don’t have the capability to have a conversation like this. They’re too audity in their mindset to go and do this thing and they don’t have the right perception and need to be taken on the journey and look good stuff. And while whilst you can validate that so that I think part of that was true, you also see the type of pressure that they’re under. And the time, they’re somebody who has to do, I don’t know, 17 surveys in a week. Their boss is on their back the whole time because they’re like, you need to get these surveys done. Customer’s been waiting three weeks for this. They’ve got shipping port. It’s, costing loads of money and to get on there. And then you start thinking, okay, if they perceive what you are being asked to do in a new way, in the consultative way as taking more time, being more complicated, et cetera, they’re less likely to do it. Yeah. In designing solutions for that, we needed to design a, an experience to shift their mindset, which is you’re not just there to take, to basically audit the ship, make sure it doesn’t sink. You are also there as a, as the frontline, almost sales person who can give a potential client. Better advice, not technically advice, but more opportunities to solve the problems that they have. Because if you go on the ship and go, you can’t, there’s a massive hold in the ship. You can’t do anything or go anywhere. Sorry. It’s different to being saying I actually know somebody in my business who could help you with that. Or I know a supplier that is local that can have, it’s more of that that partnership type approach that we were going for. Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s. Clear problem solving focus and taking the stakeholders on the journey where you’re essentially challenging them to say, look, if you can’t prove this is a problem,’cause you’ve got data that says it is, then why are you wasting our time asking us to do a load of stuff?

Chris Hudson: 10:27
Yeah, fair enough. Good to have an honest conversation from time to time. Yeah. And those things do come up, but yeah, the root causes, when you reveal them, they can often implicate leadership and, some of the systems, some of the sacred cows that do exist within those organisations. Yeah. How are you finding, what’s your method be a personal through your company that you find is helpful when it comes to getting organisations to face up to some of those uncomfortable truths?

Charlie: 10:50
Yeah, my old boss used to say, never be afraid to be fired. So that’s one thing

Chris Hudson: 10:55
you started

Charlie: 10:55
just yeah, exactly. I mean there’s a recent example, so we do a lot of work with Heathrow Airport. Yeah, and I won’t say which team it was, but we did some research basically we came back and said, your baby is ugly. And it did cause some issues. I think I. The reason for that was partly because, little things like we didn’t play back the research in person, so we couldn’t, massage the conversation in a way that made everyone feel comfortable. We didn’t necessarily set the context that we may come back to you and say. There are big problems here. We focus on problems because we wanna improve stuff. If we are focusing on the good stuff. As much as it would be good for your egos, it’s actually not what we’re here to do. So there’s little things like that, like setting the expectations around what you are there to do and how the likelihood you’re gonna find stuff like that. And, but yeah, but I’ve been in several conversations where I’ll play back some insight from the research. The stakeholder will say, who said that? And I’ll say, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. That’s the reality. You just have to fake. You have to suck it up. You’re also not, you are not saying the bad stuff, right? You are just playing back what you’ve heard. So in that way, you’re slightly protected. And actually a lot of more bolder companies employ us because they want an outside in view rather than an inside in view, because you never really get the true. The true picture if you’re just reviewing or marking your own homework, so to speak.

Chris Hudson: 12:16
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there are there certain conversations that haven’t ended as well as that way where you’ve thought this is how we need to work, but if we can’t work that way we can’t do it. Is it

Charlie: 12:27
We have turned, we do turn down work. If we can’t do research, it’s a principle of ours, which is if you’re not willing to. To find oh one, we need to do it because if we’re gonna design a solution that works for you, we need to understand the context in the organisation. To, to the point that we can do something useful. There’s a lot, there are lots and lots of companies out there that basically have lots of off the shelf courses and will do a workshop and it’ll be good. But you’ll not really get, you’re not really getting to the root of the problem. You’re trying to take a sticky plaster over the issues ’cause as our view. So it’s good for us to do that research. It’s good for it’s good for them because they get the data that helps. Validate assumptions or reveal new things that he didn’t think of, and also give him a picture of, what there is what’s going on out there. So I think, yeah, I think the short story is that in order to. Where it’s not gone so well. Or where we’ve decided not to do work is generally speaking, whether the client has been resistant to the art concept of even doing the research initially. But, we also take on work perhaps we, we usually would say no to, but we just make sure that we do some kind of research. Anything is better than nothing. So even if it’s a day shadowing someone that’s better than nothing, gives us some idea. So yeah that’s probably the main principle that we follow on, on, on that front. I’m trying to think of an example of where it’s gone terribly wrong. The worst. A common thing that happens with the research is we play back the data and the stakeholder goes, we already knew that. So what’s the value of you? You spending 10 days on site when we already knew all this? And that’s the, that’s when the conversation goes well, this isn’t just about the process of playing back data. It’s providing you the data. So you’re making good decisions based on data rather than on assumptions and intuition. It’s engaging the population that you’re trying to target in an honest conversation about what their experience is. And you’re engaging enough people that it’s a kind of critical mass. So essentially it’s PR for your program to actually listen to people and talk to them. Yeah. And. Yeah, and more broadly, it gives you, it is much more specific and it stops you getting to a conversation later on where you’ve basically got a stakeholder looking at your solution design and going, I think it should be like this. And you’re saying, yeah, but we think it should be like this. Yeah, I’m paying you so you do what I say. Whereas if we can go, but the research is telling us that this is the way it should be, it’s a much easier conversation to have. Although I have been in a workshop where, a client was basically arguing with a member of the target audience who was in the room at the time saying that this isn’t how it is. It’s like this. So some clients are literally so focused on what they want, that they’ll just kind of push through regardless of what the data’s telling them. this isn’t just about the process of playing back data. It’s providing you the data. So you’re making good decisions based on data rather than on assumptions and intuition. It’s engaging the population that you’re trying to target in an honest conversation about what their experience is. And you’re engaging enough people that it’s a kind of critical mass. So essentially it’s PR for your program to actually listen to people and talk to them. Yeah. And. Yeah, and I think in like more broadly, it gives you, it is much more specific and it stops you getting to a conversation later on where you’ve basically got a stakeholder looking at your solution design and going I think it should be like this. And you’re saying, yeah, but we think it should be like this. Yeah, I’m paying you so you do what I say. Whereas if we can go, but the research is telling us that this is the way it should be, it’s a much easier conversation to have. So some clients are literally so focused on what they want, that they’ll just push through regardless of what the data’s telling them. But that’s really rare.

Chris Hudson: 16:12
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it sounds there are different people to convince along the journey a little bit. You might have somebody up front in the leadership that is, is like the project sponsor who would be, defending the methodology a little bit. But it sounds like you’re, you’re always gonna have to convince other people right through the process. So when are the sort of big moments of truth, one of the big epiphanies happening through your process as you see it and what’s working well?

Charlie: 16:36
Sometimes the epiphany only happens at the very end. We did a big piece of work with one of the big four professional services firms, and at the beginning of the project we introduced who we were. We showed you the process. We came up with some, we went through a few workshops of ideation and stuff like that. And at the end of that, one of the kind of key sponsors basically said, I didn’t get it. I think we should just do what we did last year. And. Then we did the thing we pushed through, we got some support elsewhere from a ex-colleague of mine. And we went through that process and by the end we launched the thing. It was a massive success and everyone was scrambling to take credit. You know everyone. Yeah. One of the main blockers of that program ended up coming to the awards ceremony with us and bringing her son with them. It was it was an interesting project in particular because of the shift in kind of mindset, but also the behaviour of people afterwards I think was quite interesting too.

Chris Hudson: 17:28
Alright. Where to next? Yeah, maybe also the start of the process. You find yourself having to, convince people that it’s a good idea and you are, you’re like. You’re maybe talking a bit about some of the signals that people are seeing, like when they, when you’re trying to get them to understand the problem space that they’re maybe seeing or maybe not seeing. So when you have some hunches about what’s going wrong with the culture of learning and how it’s all running, like what are some of those signals as you see them that usually pop up?

Charlie: 17:58
So the people that will re really want to work with us are people that want to do something differently. Yeah, we’ve talked a little bit about the way that school works and the way l and d sort of copies that model. Yeah. The complaints we often see is we feel like order takers, no one listens to us. We don’t have a seat at the table. Those are like the main complaints from learning development that we see because they basically just get. Inundated, they’re always stretched. They don’t really feel like they’re doing anything worthwhile ’cause they’re just churning out e-learning and whatnot. The other thing they have, they struggle, really struggle with is engagement. People canceling last minute or not turning up or not doing their compliance training or whatever. So generally speaking, it’s a pretty miserable existence working in learning development. If all you’re doing really is churning out content, that is fundamentally, again, coming back to my earlier point about the way that the human brain works, because the model is based on, again, broken psychology which is the kind of split between, again, this is one of those, common errors about how we think about the human brain, which is like there’s a separation between your emotional brain and your rational brain is, but it goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, that there’s a, some kind of separation that makes us different. But actually, there is no emotional brain and rational brain. You have a brain, which is interconnected and a lot, and has a book called Help How People Learn by Nick Shackleton Jones, who was my boss when I was working at BP in house. Which kind of goes into this in a lot of detail, but, and the upshot of that is everything you do is emotional. And then we play the rational on top of it. And there’s books by people like Jonah Lero. Talk about that unconscious brain and how it’s actually made the decision before you rationally realise you’ve made it. Yeah. So yeah, you can go philosophical on that, down to the point is there is no free will. Yeah. I don’t wanna go into to loads of that, but fundamentally the challenges that people face are if they’re churning out content because they’ve got this idea that learning is about putting content in front of people. There’s an assimilation of information, then magic happens. They go back to their workday, their workflow, and they remember that content or information they’ve seen and they apply that content and information that they’ve seen. That model doesn’t work because of reasons we discussed. Like other things happen when they’re at work. That means they don’t do what they’re supposed to do. They do other things. So I would say, learning development, suffer. From this erroneous view of how the brain works organisations suffer because they spend lots and in some cases they spend lots and lots of money on this stuff. But even if they’re not spending lots and lots of money on it they want people to get better at what they do. They want to train and develop their graduate population, or they want people to become really, good at applying AI in their jobs so they can be more productive. Things in organisations have to change to meet the market trends, to meet changes in our technology usage and things like this. L and d is a fundamental way of allowing people to do that. But l and d has traditionally been focused more on content and knowledge and less on application behaviour change than it should have been. So that’s the shift that I think everyone needs to go through if you’re working in this space.

Chris Hudson: 21:17
Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. So outside of l and d who is best to activate outside of l and d to make that sort of change possible within an organisation, do you think? Or who are the allies?

Charlie: 21:30
Things we, I start with, there’s people that aren’t allies. Brand and comms. Brand and comms, because it’s similar. And because, as an example, when we’re. Design deploying a thing for an L and D context, a lot of it comes down to what does it look and feel like? How are you communicating it? And because it overlaps with some of the comms and the brand stuff it can do quite prickly. So advice there is make sure you make friends with them up front and you explain how what you’re doing is different and how it needs to look and feel different, et cetera. To the usual, this is why I was talk, talking about. My lovely wife and her kind of brand alignment and my lack of brand alignment.

Chris Hudson: 22:10
Is that clash because of, the role of brand within the organisation? The EVP, the employee experience, or the kind of perceived, the perceived way in which the work should happen within the organisation is as it’s, yeah. That way. That was more of the

Charlie: 22:26
format, but it’s a little bit of both because it’s what is brand? Is brand a, is brand a tagline? Is brand the way something looks and feels? Is it what we’re talking about? Is it tone? Is it, because actually you, you could argue that brand is also kind of ways of working and attitudes and mindsets in some ways internally. I think that it depends on how energetic brand is to be able to take on that kind of discussion. But so we’ve run, again, we’ve, worked with clients where. We haven’t done the work up front to engage the brand and comms team, and then they pop up one day before we’ve got a shoot planned to say, we don’t like the person you’ve got front of camera, so we think you should cancel the shoot. We’re like we spent best part of a hundred grand on this, so we’re not gonna do that. But, why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you say this back in November? A year ago when we introduced the concept? Yeah, it can get quite prickly. The allies actually tend to be the people on the front line. The people are actually doing the job, not the people, quote unquote trying to enable them to do their job. If you spend time with and engineers on the front line that are trying to do something, and you go and listen to what they’ve got to say, and you identify their problems, and you ask them, how, who do they know who’s solving this problem? What could we do to support you, et cetera. Then they’re generally very supportive of the activity. If a little bit cynical, because I think there’s a lot of. A lot of projects that kinda start up, go through that process and then nothing really happens with it. Nothing really happens with the data. So yeah, so really the front line is the main bastion of good practice, I think, in this stuff.’cause they just wanna do their job faster and better. And if you can support them to do that, then they usually have is open to it.

Chris Hudson: 24:11
Yeah. All right. What about change readiness, like in terms of organisations’ readiness to change and. Now, what are the conditions or the right conditions for that being possible, would you feel?

Charlie: 24:22
A burning platform helps. So if there’s something yeah. Really going wrong then generally speaking, organisations are willing to change. The, there’s all these tropes at the moment, change is inevitable. Everything’s changing all the time. I don’t know the thing that got us. The thing that’s fundamentally changed, things like the fact that I can work from home most of the time and see my kids way more and not have to commute two hours each way every day was coded. That has nothing to do with, Microsoft or Zoom, being effective as a technology companies it’s not really anything to do with companies really. Making a decision on front. I think a lot of it’s without, outside of people’s control, it’s market conditions. It’s, sometimes you can get, CEOs that have a really strong vision that could drive an organisation in one way. Because if anyone’s gonna hop to it when somebody says something, it’s a CEO e. And we have lots of conversations where people ask us to do work because the CEO’s mentioned like one sentence of a comment in a. In a senior meeting, everyone goes, oh my God, we must immediately do this because Yep. That Bob’s decided it is a good idea. He is been to a conference and he thinks we need a skills platform now. So I think it’s yeah, Bob or Jill, I dunno. So I think change readiness is an interesting one. I think it’s about culture and I think it’s about I think it’s the story people tell themselves, really. I. Change. Fatigue is something that comes up quite a lot. People are really bored change. It’s that’s life. Unfortunately. Things change. Businesses change. The work, the market’s changing, the world’s changing faster than ever. It’s just what you have to suck it up. I dunno, maybe I’m maybe I’m being unempathetic, but I think change readiness is about how willing. How willing are the people at the top and also what is the culture like in terms of being willing to try new things? Yeah, and adapt quickly. And I think the companies that, ultimately the companies that do best are ones that are, that have that kind of baked into their culture and are willing to evolve all the time.

Chris Hudson: 26:29
Yeah. Yeah. Is there a thing around metrics as well? Sometimes if you’re talking in the language of product and that. Then now you can run multiple versions of something. You can obviously set very clear metrics and report on that and measure that. Is that discussion becoming very real for you as well in the way that you’re setting things up? You need to run lots of ones or can you just go with one, see how it goes, then it’s Right. You know what are the dynamics of the project and the rollout usually?

Charlie: 26:55
Yeah. So it’s a tricky one because the data that we end up playing with. Depending on the type of work we’re doing often it’s like HR data, which is generally a bit naff anyway. It’s things like pulse surveys, which is like once every six months they ask you, are you happy and do you like your boss kind of thing. So that’s data we’ve used in the past for things like Heathrow, when we did the leadership program for them to say, the main scores they were looking at were engagement and inclusion and diversity and, trust in leadership. So those are the focuses, focuses for us. And you can really see the shift over time over sort of six to 12 months. You can see a shift there. The stuff that’s easier to measure, stuff like sales. So we do a bit of sales enablement now, which we know we’ve done before, but it’s a sense of where we are in the UK and how the market is.

Chris Hudson: 27:43
Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie: 27:44
That people are coming to us more and more asking for sales. Sales training essentially. Yeah. Which is easy to measure because you can you can just see, I’ll be selling more stuff. That’s and you can track it at an individual basis ’cause they all have to report on that. So it’s, it depends on the project, depends on the type of work that we’re doing. As to what med metrics we’re looking at there’s the obvious stuff, which is essentially NPS. For the programs that you’re running, would you recommend it to a friend type stuff? But yeah, the really juicy ROI data is takes a little bit longer or it’s a longer check train to get to. But the way we generally will look at it is we measure before and after against a control group. When essentially you wanna pilot everything before you roll out fully, because you need to test how it works in the real world and with the real people that you wanna help. So if we generally will do that we’ll do a do some measurement at the beginning. We’ll do some measurement at the end. We’ll keep the groups relatively small. We’ll ask lots of follow up questions, but we’ll make sure we have a control group so we can we can compare and contrast to see whether the thing we are doing is making the difference to people. Yeah, the example you can see on our website is a legal general big insurance company here in the uk. Yeah. We did that for an inclusive leadership program and that’s the model we now use.

Chris Hudson: 28:58
Yeah. Nice. Yeah, I really like what you’re saying. I think part of it feels like, whereas, companies almost think about lots of different streams of work happening at once. And they’re all running in their own swim lanes and they’re all running in parallel. But what you are saying is not that l and d is that tack on, swim lane on the side where you’re dipping and out of it when you need to learn something. But actually it’s, you’re designing for a system of learning within the organisation within the way in which you work, when it works well. And I, I really like the sound of that, but yeah, it sounds like it would be hard for people to do. Are you finding it hard? Yeah.

Charlie: 29:30
I think that I think people are finding it hard because there’s a lot of people talking about it, or at least in, in my network I think there’s very few people can actually show that they’re doing it properly or they’re doing it, doing a good job of it. So it’s a good yarn, I would say that people tell about l and d but then they find themselves doing e-learning courses anyway. So I think the thing that’s changed a lot of what’s changed, how I approach. The kind of performance end of what we do and also the more systemic end of what we do is I now run my own business. So I understand all the shit that you have to do and all the different pillars of business in general. And obviously it’s a small company and compared to a large one, you understand the different. Angles and ends to, running business and what you have to consider in it, which I think has given me a more holistic and probably a more effective mindset in terms of how we, how we make the change to the business and what changes to things like all organisational structure can do to how people behave and how people work. So I think it’s been quite helpful to to be doing that as well as doing the work that we do. Yeah, I think it is, it’s hard, but I think there’s enough, there’s enough evidence and, a decent number of books, a general understanding of human behaviour now that perhaps I wasn’t 10 years ago. That give, that makes the argument easier to make. And also it guess massively depends on the organisation, but there are plenty of people in say, engineering that understand things like design thinking. So it’s easy enough to. Talk to them in that language and get a response that, that makes your life easier. So yeah, I think it’s the hardest bit is probably just the fact that you’re basically telling people what you’ve been doing for the last 50 years is wrong and you need to be doing something differently. Whereas there are cases for doing e-learning. If you’re doing a compliance training, you need to tick a box. But it’s understanding that you’re doing that, not because you’re actually trying to train people, get them better at what they do. You’re doing it because you need to satisfy the regulator, which is a different problem to solve. But in that case, it might as well just be one page of all the information where you tick a box at the end, you’re compliant people, you’ve delivered the information, right? So I think it’s just being honest about, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? Those kind of things.

Chris Hudson: 31:49
Yeah, for sure. The, a company’s purpose is obviously, one thing and then you’re thinking about, who’s actually behind that and who’s driving the company or the organisation. And, in, in the language of attraction and retention and. You’re talking about real people, and it’s not just compliance training, as you say, it’s like you have to motivate them on a deeper level. Companies that are very obsessed with, very regularly or, semi-regularly anyway, changing the perks and the benefits and just coming up with the new version of the fruit and the yoga or whatever it is, it is just. An illustrative thing in the wrong direction perhaps. And some of those real issues could be a lot deeper where, what they’re really missing is that, to be able to retain their best people. They’re having to, they funding to fundamentally change how their operating model works with learning at its core for that talent to remain loyal in some sort of way. Yeah. That’s it.

Charlie: 32:34
Learning is a kind of a, yeah. Learning is a, is part of the experience of work. So at, the most basic level, you can also just think about it as part of what a company does to demonstrate they’re investing in you and giving you an experience that you might not have had elsewhere. But in that case, again, you could just stick 500 quid behind the bar and, let people have a few beers or soft drinks with their friends. Again, it’s just being really clear about what you’re trying to solve, what problem you’re, you’re trying to get at, and. Being unegotistical about what the solution might be. Yeah. But as you say, you, things like, I wouldn’t underestimate the yoghurt and yoga ’cause that can be, that’s part of the experience in the EVP. And so I think some of those hygiene factors are quite handy. But again, I think it’s just the other thing I would say about more traditional and more conventional approaches to learning. And I think probably more you could apply this more broader than this as well. I think people just really try to simplify the world into a cause and effect. So if, and if you think about the world. Business as cause and effect. On a very simple level, what you get is people doing activities to change one particular thing without really thinking about the bigger picture and how complex these things are and how complex people are. So I think what we are trying to do is take a broader, more complex view of how these things can really be solved long term. Yeah. And I think that’s something that. We’ve not, human humanity is not me particularly good at in the last however many years because it’s cause of how it thinks about the brain, how it thinks about people, how it thinks about business, really how it thinks about society. So yeah, I don’t need it too philosophical.’Cause I always, there’s always a risk of that. But yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s just being more open about the complexity of what it is you’re trying to do in businesses.

Chris Hudson: 34:24
Yeah. Yeah. And we have a lot of entrepreneurs listening to the show and they, the people that are trying to drive change from within their organisations as well, have you got any advice for them in terms of how to tackle l and d transformation? If you don’t have the CEO’s ear, but you can see some of these systemic issues are there, but it feels like they’re so deeply ingrained a lot of the time that people wouldn’t know where to start and they wouldn’t take on changing the whole l and d platform just overnight because they wouldn’t do that. Yeah. Where should people start to initiate some of the positive change that you’ve been describing? Good question. So

Charlie: 34:55
there’s probably two things. One, we have a toolkit on our website. So this solve Together Without an e.com. You’ll find a toolkit where you, when you click on How we Work, so you can download some of the resources we’ve got on there. Quite helpful. But more fundamentally, I think people are used to, especially in l and d, are used to beavering away producing training behind their laptops, not really talking to anyone. So the number one thing is be proactive. If you don’t know what the business strategy is and you don’t know what all your individual departments business strategy is. How are you gonna help them achieve their business strategy? And often these companies don’t even have business strategies at a department level. They just have the main one, which is slightly ethereal, which this yeah. The exec team have come up to and off site, and they’re like, wait, here’s a strategy for the next three years. Go and do that. And everyone’s just scratching their heads like what do you actually mean? So I think it. Looking at the strategy and then engaging the senior bots to really understand what it means practically and often they haven’t really thought about it. So you can help them through that process. And then it’s looking at the kind of department level as well. So what are your, how is your strategy for your department linked to that bigger strategy? And helping them think through practically what it actually means.’cause I think these things, again, are so wishy-washy a lot of the time. So funda fundamentally understand the business that you’re trying to support. That’s the first thing. Once you’ve done that, identifying, let’s say the top three problems that the different, either the company, if you’re going that level or the, specific department has and then going and solving those problems. So being able to play back what the, say top three problems are, and also how those problems are showing up in the business, as as output. So data essentially. So you know when you’re asking what is your strategy, what’s getting in the way of your strategy. How do you know that’s getting in the way of your strategy? Those, that’s the kind of breadcrumbs to follow. And then you end up with essentially three problems per department, or what three problems per, organisation that if you could go to the CEO and say, this is one of your biggest problems and we’ve been able to solve it and we can prove it because we’ve got the data to show you. Then you start becoming order takers basically, and you start becoming a genuine competitive advantage to your organisation. And when the time comes to cut all the budgets because the market’s crap you’ve got something to to fall back on and say, look, we’re we’re not the l and d team anymore. We are the productivity and performance team or something like that. And a lot of the quote unquote thought leaders in the UK anyway at the moment are talking about maybe we need a rebrand of l and d and all this kind of stuff. Yeah.

37:35
Yeah.

Charlie: 37:35
So you know that there is an argument to also say, maybe think about repositioning. What you are talking about. If you start talking about learning and you don’t have the time to take people on the journey with you, people automatically fall into delivering some training content. Whereas if you talk about business performance and productivity, which I think is on the lips of everyone who’s struggling to figure out how to grow, and in the environment where AI is taking over everything that I think, it’s a good, it’s a good time to reposition what you’re doing into more of a performance lens.

Chris Hudson: 38:06
Nice. Nice. Yeah, I really like that. And I you, the next question I was gonna ask you is about what leaders should be asking about their l and d strategy. And it probably is along those lines, right? It’s gonna be around, business performance, productivity, is it working, basically?

Charlie: 38:20
Yeah.

Chris Hudson: 38:20
Yeah. This is overlooked. It sounds obvious, but it’s often overlooked, right?

Charlie: 38:24
Yeah. And often people go through the motions of doing learning development because. It’s intuitively the right thing to do. But again, I just think it’s time that l and d stops stops highly behind the kinda school and university. It’s a good idea to do learning type thing and actually start thinking properly about what is the. Value of what we do. Like how will we actually helping this business improve beyond people going on a nice offsite for two weeks and having a nice hotel and doing some networking. So yeah, it’s back to just getting up every morning and feel like you actually are out there to make a difference and help people and help your business get better. Rather than just thinking your job is to do some content and force some information to people’s heads.

Chris Hudson: 39:08
Yeah. It’s a hard one to rewire in people’s heads, I think, because it feels like another task on top of their day job that they have to learn something. But what they’re not realising is that by doing the work, they are learning something. The experience of learning. It’s just not, a separate thing on the side. They’re gonna try and squeeze in the last 10 minutes of their lunch break. Yeah. Smash out their compliance training. It’s gonna, yeah. It’s gotta be something they take into their work and their mindset every day.

Charlie: 39:33
They will thank you though, because they don’t wanna spend, most people are under pressure to deliver. They’re not under pressure to learn. So that’s another big challenge we see is l and d complaining that no one’s got time to do the course or whatever. And they talk about learning culture. We don’t have a learning culture because people don’t wanna sign up to my course. And the reason they don’t wanna sign up to you because they’re too busy doing actual work. In some ways learning the best learning is invisible. People don’t even notice that it’s there, but it’s driving the performance or the behaviour in the way that you want it to be driven. An example of that was so he, as you can imagine, in airports the biggest population is security. And they’re not allowed anything on them. When they’re in the security zone because it’s a highly secure environment. So they don’t have, they have phones on them. They don’t have any pictures on the wall. They, yeah, they have nothing. So you can obviously take them out of that environment, stick them in a classroom and talk at them and tell them how you should do stuff. But actually, one way we’ve figured out to, to engage that part of the organisation is spending time with them. We noticed that they were carrying. They had lanyards on them and they had badges on their lanyards from stuff they were proud of. And they also had little cheat sheets and things in their lanyards where they had their cards. So we designed some resources and some nudges to sit, on their lanyards and in their lanyards as a way of getting to those people. It’s like a channel essentially. So yeah, I think it’s, again, it just comes back to understanding the environment and how you can meet people in the right direction. But you need to really, you need to be there to understand, but that’s the kind of thing that you can and then again, behavioural science, but you can basically nudge behaviour in the right way if you use the environment, environmental cues to do that. So yeah, it’s a rich, it’s a rich broad. Opportunity, I think for people that are willing to take on a new way of thinking, a new way of working. So it’s quite exciting because you go from somebody who’s just turning out courses to somebody who’s actually thinking about the business and thinking about people’s context and environment more than I suppose just going through the motions of doing essentially a curriculum of learning like school or university.

Chris Hudson: 41:40
Yeah. Yeah. No, I like that. The behavioural nudges that, you are running it like a product, like you were saying right at the start. You all the behavioural nudges, all of the Yeah. All the cues that you’re looking for that change of behaviour in one way or another. Interested in a final question maybe, which is just around personalisation and where you see it working well. Because you can obviously observe an audience in that example there with the security guards, but have you seen it work at a larger scale as well where you’ve designed in edges that work at that level too? Yeah,

Charlie: 42:09
Personalisation, so an example of that is actually the same client, we had to do, it was a population of two and a half thousand people, and some of them had been at the company for 10 years and some of them had been at six months. And the client wanted to put them through the same experience.

Chris Hudson: 42:27
Yeah.

Charlie: 42:27
And you’re like, okay, how’s that even gonna work? Because if you’ve been at the organisation 10 years in a role versus six months, your whole frame of reference is totally different. So the way we did that was essentially just do a design, a choose your own adventure. Where we went, we did the research we understood what were there. Say top, I think ended up being seven. Conversations that people were struggling with most in their day-to-day work. And then we laid that out for them and said, which ones do you wanna do? Does that know now’s your time, now’s your chance to get better. You tell us what’s the experience you want or what’s the what’s the thing you’re struggling with most? So I think scalability and personalisation is a real challenge, particularly at organisational level because often the goal is scale. And the way we get round that really is by designing lots of things and then that allowing people to choose what works best for them. Make sure that what you’re providing them is specific enough to them that they can get some value out of it. So the very least, what we’re providing people is a useful opportunity to practice something or a useful resource to allow them to do something differently.

Chris Hudson: 43:31
Great. Charlie, thanks so much. I really enjoyed the chat with you today. And you’ve really lifted the hood and I think a lot of people over here in this part of the world will definitely benefit from, listening to what you’re saying. Because it’s always so siloed, right? It feels like a lot of these challenges are not shared challenges almost. They might be seen by some leaders, but not by others, or it feels like it. It’s definitely the place in which a lot of positive change could happen within organisations. Yeah, appreciate sharing your wisdom today. So thank you. And where can people find out about you and learn more about the work that you’re doing at Solvd Together?

Charlie: 44:00
So solve S-O-L-V-D together.com. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, obviously. And my name Charlie Kneen. I’m on LinkedIn as well, so you are welcome to follow me and connect. We are. Looking like we’re gonna be in Australia in a few months anyway after the summer. So potentially if if we’re over there at the same time, and if there’s anyone that wants to meet up for a coffee and discuss more of this in detail, I’ll probably be be on the East coast.

Chris Hudson: 44:29
Good stuff. Sounds good. Thanks so much

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