The Elephant in the Org
The "Elephant in the Org" podcast is a daring dive into the unspoken challenges and opportunities in organizational development, particularly in the realm of employee experience. Hosted by the team at The Fearless PX, we tackle the "elephants" in the room—those taboo or ignored topics—that are critical for creating psychologically safe and highly effective workplaces.
The Elephant in the Org
Do L&D Folks Really Know Anything At All? With Ruth Crick & Jim Bentley
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Welcome to "The Elephant in the Org," where today's episode, "Do L&D Folks Really Know Anything at All?" promises to turn the tables on traditional learning and development (L&D) perspectives. Our hosts Marion, Danny, and Cacha are thrilled to host Ruth Crick and Jim Bentley, the dynamic duo behind Wild Learning. They're here to dissect and debate the effectiveness of current L&D practices, introducing groundbreaking alternatives that could redefine organizational learning and development.
Ruth Crick, the innovative mind behind Wild Learning, has pioneered the Learning Power Profile, a tool that's changing the game for learners and organizations alike. Jim Bentley, CEO of Wild Learning, brings to the table his vast experience in driving transformational change and fostering resilience within various sectors. Together, they explore the eight dimensions of learning power, offering fresh insights into how these principles can catalyze profound, lasting learning experiences.
This episode is a goldmine for anyone involved in or curious about the future of L&D. It's not just about questioning the existing paradigms but about embracing new methodologies that address the complexities of learning in today's fast-paced world. So, whether you're looking to overhaul your organization's L&D approach or just keen on the latest in educational innovation, you're in for a treat.
Tune in for an episode that challenges, enlightens, and inspires. Join us in rethinking the role of L&D in achieving organizational excellence and personal growth. Subscribe, listen, and embark on this transformative journey with us on "The Elephant in the Org."
Ruth Crick on LinkedIn
Jim Bentley on LinkedIn
You can find complete show notes here.
📩 Got a hot take or a workplace horror story? Email us at elephant@thefearlesspx.com
🚀 Your Hosts on LinkedIn
- 🐘 Marion Anderson — https://www.linkedin.com/in/marionandersonpx
- 🐘 Danny Gluch — https://www.linkedin.com/in/dgluch
- 🐘 Cacha Dora — https://www.linkedin.com/in/cachadora
💬 Like what you hear?
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🎙️ About the Show
The Elephant in the Org drops new episodes every two weeks starting April 2024 — fearless conversations about leadership, psychological safety, and the future of work.
🎵 Music & Production Credits
🎶 Opening and closing theme music by The Toros
🎙️ Produced by The Fearless PX
✂️ Edited by Marion Anderson
⚠️ Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests, and do not necessarily reflect any affiliated organizations' official policy or position.
Topics: employee surveys, listening culture, trust, people analytics, psychological safety, employee voice, ...
EP24: Do L&D folks really know anything at all?
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Danny Gluch: today we have guests.
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Danny Gluch: Ruth Crick and Jim Bentley, from the wild learning both in the the Uk. Because our elephant in the org is about learning, and what is the actual, like mechanisms that help people individuals and organizations learn and grow in their life.
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Danny Gluch: And they've done some really amazing work on that welcome to the podcast. And Ruth, why don't you introduce yourself?
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Ruth Deakin Crick: Hi, thanks, Danny. I'm Ruth and I'm the founder of wild learning, Limited and Wild Learning Community interest company. And I'm also professor of learning analytics at University of Technology, Sydney. So I've been working with these ideas as an academic for 25 years. And now I'm
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Ruth Deakin Crick: out there in the real world.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: doing it properly.
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Danny Gluch: 25 years you've been doing this.
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Danny Gluch: That's incredible. I didn't know it went back that long. That's so. You're just you're just, you know, off the cuff, you know. No real background in learning. And and, Jim, what about you? What's your background.
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Jim iPad: Yeah, thanks, Danny. Yes. So I'm Jim Bentley. I've had about 30 years mainly in infrastructure and engineering. A lot of that's been in water
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Jim iPad: like water utilities and a bit of time in the New South Wales government as a sort of head of policy for water across the State of New South Wales. I've also been a academic in infrastructure. I ran the center for infrastructure research at Walton University. And I've been CEO of a couple of water utilities and operations director for a large one in the Uk. Fairly recently. So I've kind of
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Jim iPad: not spent much time, really, any time as a learning professional
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Jim iPad: but I've been a client to wild learning, and I've been someone who's been trying to apply these things in the real world and say, very excited in recent times to have joined Ruth and the team in the CEO role, trying to help Ruth and others spread this message about the power of learning cause. That's
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Marion: that's so relevant to me. That's exactly me. I'm doing a Phd. Right now, and I'm quite academic, but
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Marion: also worked in in, you know, in a commercial business, for like
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Marion: way too long, and and what you tend to find are certainly what I find is when you can bring both of those elements together, the what, the how in the why, it has so much more power. So I think that that's a really great profile for a CEO for learning business, because
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Jim iPad: it definitely brings what's needed. So that's great. Thanks, Mary, that's what we're trying to do. And
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Jim iPad: in the work that I've done with Ruth. You know it's been between us trying to bridge the world between the academic world and the the world of reality, and how we bring those together and maximize the benefits.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: You can't really do research into learning unless you're working with people who are learning. So therefore you have to be in the workplace working with people who are learning in order to do the research. And it's obvious, really, but it's very challenging.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: Which is why we've pulled it all together in
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Ruth Deakin Crick: this governance mechanism, which is wild.
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Danny Gluch: Yeah. And and I'd love to to dig in and and let the listeners in on the secret of of wild learning, this learning, power, profile.
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Danny Gluch: what? What research like, what? What prompted, wanting to do that research? What sort of did you discover in that research? And and what are you doing with that now, Ruth?
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Ruth Deakin Crick: Well, it began, as I said, in the year 2,000, and the challenge was then looking at education, not the workplace. To start with
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Ruth Deakin Crick: that in learning. Everybody thinks that learning is about absorbing information, transmitting information and then regurgiting information for the test and ticking the box. And that generation of
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Ruth Deakin Crick: people that we were working with are the most tested generation in entire history. So we know about how to pass the test. But we didn't know about how to
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Ruth Deakin Crick: support learning how to learn. So the challenge was, the research challenge was, could we identify the personal qualities that enable people to learn, IE. To lean into risk, uncertainty.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: challenge and
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Ruth Deakin Crick: navigate their way through complex problems and come up with solutions that matter in the real world. So that's how we define learning. If you know everything. Obviously, you can't learn.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So that was the motivation and very quickly we found that the the results that we came up with had an application with adults and in the workplace. And we've now worked with over a hundred 1,000 people who've
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Ruth Deakin Crick: done their learning power profiles over that period of time.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: But the core. What we found out. Quite early on we. We put into this sort of research bucket all of the things we then knew about learning, not just what happens inside people, but learning cultures, learning relationships.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and put it through factor analysis, modeling and came up with 8 dimensions of learning power. So we describe what we assess and feedback to individuals as learning power.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And there are 8 dimensions of learning power, and I'll just
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Ruth Deakin Crick: list them, for you also have a link in the show notes with something. I'm sure that'll we're a professional podcast
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Ruth Deakin Crick: so what we call mindful agency, which is the capacity to step back and reflect on yourself, on your context, on the purpose of your learning journey.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So that's about reflective self-awareness and a sense of purpose and a sense of agency only enough.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And we have sense making, which is about putting together information and data and making meaning out of it, making sense out of it in order to do something differently. Creativity, which in our model is all about using
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Ruth Deakin Crick: your imagination and your intuition, and bringing that there, on problems as well as playfulness and risk taking
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Ruth Deakin Crick: which goes together with imagination and intuition. But curiosity, which is wanting to the feeling of curiosity, wants to get beneath the surface and asking questions and digging deeper.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And we have hope and optimism. And that really is a growth very close to a growth mindset. So those are the active learning power dimensions. Those are the ones that we use in knowledge, building.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and innovation. And then we have 2 relationship dimensions which are belonging a sense of belonging which is psychological safety. It's okay for me to be me. And it's okay for me to be here, and I have a contribution to make.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And then we have collaboration, which is.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And this is about learning learning with and from other people. So that's collaboration. And then the the final
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and not the last, but not least, learning how dimension is what we call openness to learning.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And that's about an emotional readiness to move into the unknown. Okay? And we have that on our feedback. That's the sort of a slider. Because actually, you want to be in the middle of openness to learning. You want to be open enough
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Ruth Deakin Crick: to be wrong, but confident enough to persist. Okay, so you don't want to be where you keep doing the same old, same old, same old, and get the same. Nor do you want to be
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Ruth Deakin Crick: fragile, independent clock out and go home
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Ruth Deakin Crick: psychologically, or even physically so in being in the middle of openness to learning is is really quite important, and that underlines the other learning part dimensions. So there's sort of 3
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Ruth Deakin Crick: key parts to the whole spider diagram which
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and love a good spider grab photograph. Yeah.
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yeah, I just when I first was introduced to this, I was just like
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Danny Gluch: holy smokes like this is this is what I deal with as a learning professional every day, and and you finally just like gave it words. Still learning like you. We see people who are just like
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Danny Gluch: within 5 min. They're just checked out. They're just not. They're not ready for it. It's either too much or it's they're just. No, I just want to keep doing things my way right and every bit right. All 8 that you just mentioned are so important. And
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Danny Gluch: yeah, II wanna hear what Kasha wants to to say, because she, Kasha, was my boss. When we worked in learning and development together.
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Cacha Dora: II think it's just honestly the thing that, like.
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Cacha Dora: I think, for learning professionals, just even having the hook of explaining where wild learning came from 20 years ago is so relevant because anyone in the learning and development field right now the thing that we all struggle with is knowing that our audience just wants the answers right. They want the answers to the test.
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Cacha Dora: They, the learning process like the the aspect. And that's because all of us came out of this testing generation. Right? Like how many tests like? And I'm speaking as an American and our education system loves, tests.
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Cacha Dora: separate podcast conversation for sure, but you know the the aspect of like. Well, my audience is looking for that instant gratification, that instant answer, not necessarily of a learning journey. This evolution of growth and the workplace, as a result, has really segmented
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Cacha Dora: what we're learning right? It's hard skill, soft skill.
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Cacha Dora: and it. And it goes into these buckets, and there's not an actual holistic aspect where you're learning both. And I love that your pillars really kind of speak to that. I mean, obviously, Danny Mirren and I are big proponents of psychological safety. So hearing that woven through all of us, we're smiling and like giving you nods. But II really like.
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Cacha Dora: I think it's a really great concept, because our audiences are obviously diverse. But it's a struggle when you have that instant gratification need to just give me the answer.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: 25 years ago it was quite risky to say that thinking and feeling go together, all of these learning, power. Dimensions involve cognitive thinking, but they also involve emotions, and they also involve consciousness awareness.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So they're holistic capabilities. So curiosity is a state. It's an emotional state of interest and arousal. It's also something that drives questioning, which is
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Ruth Deakin Crick: the skill that you use to develop your curiosity. And we just always want to segment things and put them in their silos. But you you can't, as you can't with people, you can't give somebody a full frontal lobotomy, and just look at their emotions, you know they come with stories and thoughts and beliefs and
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Danny Gluch: well, and and you even have a community to the dimensions around fitting to do community because people aren't just in in silos, you know, in organizations or or anywhere. They're always connected to other people.
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Danny Gluch: It speaks so real and cross-culturally. And and I think that's something that's so beautiful about this to where
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Danny Gluch: II think we need to really approach this organizational learning and growth in a very different way. Because, as Causa Kaja said, like people are wanting these tick boxes, that's not really gonna do what you want. It's gonna get you to pass the test. But that's not gonna help you in the long run, right? We need to look beyond our nose a little bit.
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Danny Gluch: and this is why I'm so excited to have Jim on. Because Jim, before he was he was with you, working with you as as the CEO was a client.
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Danny Gluch: and and you work together and really develop this out. And I'd I'd love to hear, Jim, how is it that you got connected in the first place, and and where you found the curiosity and the interest in this way of doing things. And then how did that succeed so well that you ended up working with them.
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Jim iPad: Yes, thanks, Danny. So, going back a few years, I think it was 2,016 I became chief executive of a water utility in Australia called Hunter Water.
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Jim iPad: and in the first week or so, being there, I got a group of
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Jim iPad: sort of slice of the organization together, and I said, Tell me what it's like around here. And the first thing they said was, the first word they talked about was fear.
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Jim iPad: and as a fear of what? And it was fear of failure, fear of we were government owned so fear of upsetting the Minister, fear of appearing on the newspapers fear of being told that you would interfere in someone else's work, and you should just stick within your own box. And and as we sort of explore this together, it was clear
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Jim iPad: our culture was really one of compliance. Everything was about compliant, and and water and utilities and things like that can be a bit like that, because the public health implications of getting things wrong or enormous right? So it's really important that we have high compliance in terms of the standards we achieve.
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Jim iPad: but that got translated into high compliance in terms of what our people do when they come to work every day they comply with rules, and that if something goes wrong, we write another rule, and we ended up with so many rules and so many procedures that were like sticking blasters put on top of each other, and every time something went wrong we put another banda, and so in in it so happened that
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Jim iPad: I was at a meeting at University of Technology, Sydney.
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Jim iPad: and Ruth was in the room. And Ruth, someone that I had
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Jim iPad: worked at worked with a little bit in my previous incarnation, where I was running a research center at Auckland University, and I've been over to London, and and I recognize Ruth. And and we started exploring what she was doing in learning.
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Jim iPad: And I said, I think my organization has forgotten how to learn, because it's become so compliance focused
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Jim iPad: and we needed to change ourselves. And we needed to become innovative. We needed to provide better services for our customers. But we were stuck in this thing about rules, and it was all about. Some one tells me what the procedure is, and I follow it rather than me, exploring where I need to go.
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So Ruth came over and we ran some workshops with the team, and ultimately
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Jim iPad: we sort of realise that
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Jim iPad: we've got a really good chance of changing the way our organization thinks and behaves and performs if we can help them to learn. And so we applied the learning power principles at an individual level, a team level
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Jim iPad: and a corporate level. And then we went beyond that and recognized that actually.
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Jim iPad: our community that we served is about 600,000 people. We needed them to change the way they use water
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Jim iPad: because we didn't have enough time to build the new dam or the new desalination plant or whatever it is. And we needed to work together and make sure that we, we created the time that we needed by changing our water use behavior.
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Jim iPad: So as an extension of this process, we sort of thought, well. if we need our customers to change our community change, we need to change the way we relate to them, and stop telling them what to do.
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Jim iPad: Every Australian water utility, because they have very severe droughts, went through a phase of telling their customers don't use water these times of day, and if you do use water at the wrong time of day, this is the sanction we're gonna hold against you. And you know, I can remember saying to the company, I don't think it plays very well to hope and optimism and belonging
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Jim iPad: and curiosity to keep telling people what they must do, and then tell them what we'll do to them if they don't do it. We even had there were items or posters telling people how to tell us if your neighbors using water at the wrong time of day. So it was all kind of creating this. These are the rules you must complain with. And so we set about trying to create a better sense of belonging between us and our customers, their community.
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Jim iPad: and also a curiosity in them
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Jim iPad: around. How they could change their behavior. Why was it important to change their behavior? If it was important, what could they do about it. So we were trying to provoke them to ask us questions and ask each other questions rather than tell them what to do.
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Jim iPad: and I'm delighted to say the results were fantastic.
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Jim iPad: And but it was really taking these principles about learning and say, well, what we need is not just to show that we've passed tests. But we actually need to change. And we need our communities to change.
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Jim iPad: So this was about using learning power to drive change.
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Marion: It makes so much sense. And it it goes back to that thing of of
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Marion: one of the fundamental things in organizations as well to people like adults.
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Marion: you know, when you when you when you and conform control of that stuff.
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Marion: sure, we just don't wanna play. We're like screw that, you know. But when you to people like adults and give them agency and and see, you know, here's the problem, how you know, how can we navigate this together? Well, we see that now. It wasn't always
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Danny Gluch: no, and I mean, like, like, Ruth said, like 25 years ago, it was controversial to say, you know, we're not just thinking things we are thinking, feeling like that is, that's a very like
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Danny Gluch: the last 15 years last even 5 years. Kind of notion that you know, a lot of research just have been way ahead of that and leading the way. Obviously, thank you, Ruth. And it's I just. I'm so astounded at how I just continue to see
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Danny Gluch: learning and development professionals who are trying to do this really amazing work and really engaging. And.
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Danny Gluch: you know, capturing people's attention and really communicating efficiently. But so often I see, the root of what they're doing is
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Danny Gluch: being asked to do. Well, we just need to get this new process communicated. Well, so people can do it
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Cacha Dora: well. And what I love that that Jim really
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Cacha Dora: ex like kind of explained, was the want of people to participate the want of people to work together that collaboration right? And
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Cacha Dora: I think we're always gonna be better when we're not just by ourselves, because you. Only you're only stuck in this one little space that you have right in in your mind. And so having the team and the community create community.
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Cacha Dora: I think, is huge, especially like I used to work at a Sas company that catered to the utility industry. So. But as you were talking about that, I was like, Oh, man, my past life loved this. But I think it's really important in the learning process to to involve others right to get those divergent thoughts.
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Jim iPad: Ca, can I just extend 1 point as well? You're talking about psychological safety.
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Jim iPad: I was privileged to work in Australia for 6 years and apologies. If I have an Australian twang to my voice, so I can promise you I'm British, but nobody believes me these days but 11 years in New Zealand 6 years in Australia is gonna do something to you. But in in Australia.
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Jim iPad: the the conversation, the the really important conversation was about, how do we make sure there is cultural safety for indigenous people, for for the aboriginal population who are working with us in our organisations in Australia.
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Jim iPad: Which is a a sort of a greater extension. Shall we like, shall we say of the sort of psychological safety thing, this, this concept of cultural safety, where
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Jim iPad: I can remember a colleague saying to me
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Jim iPad: that when, when aboriginal people were coming to work every day when they left work.
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Jim iPad: they left work a little more to diminished as a result of the cultural insensitivity that they experienced in the workplace.
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Jim iPad: So we set about trying to use these principles of how do we create
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Jim iPad: belonging and collaboration with people who not just
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Jim iPad: have have different personality, profiles and things like that? But people who come from very different cultures to ours. And how do we make sure that they feel culturally safe?
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Jim iPad: And I think you know, for our aboriginal population that worked with me in the world utility that I oversaw, and also in the Government department, that I had responsibility for a big chunk of
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Jim iPad: our, a lot of our approaches. How do we create a space in which these colleagues are comfortable to change because we've created a culturally safe space for them to change it?
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Marion: Hmm, II I'd love to add a bit of a follow-on question to that, because
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Marion: you've got that cultural slice through your your you know your learners. What about generational? Because, you know, since you know, 25 years? You know, we've we've
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Marion: at our we've identified our Boomers or Janexes or examiels, you know, or or wise. If you bought into that research Jersey, you know all of that, and a particularly in the arena of learning very different preferences, very different styles.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: How, when you apply those kind of Ca, generational layers, what have you seen with? You know this learning model, and and how that's played out across generations. Well, it was quite interesting, really, because we started with children from 7 to 18, but very quickly realized that teachers couldn't give what they hadn't got, and so we would put the teachers through the same experience so they could
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Ruth Deakin Crick: experience the coaching conversation. And so we we began to develop an adult dataset. and we've eventually published all sorts of you can go and look up the research if you're interested. But we found several
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Ruth Deakin Crick: factors that actually are quite shocking. So in our school age, population, this is England. It's not Australia or America, but the age group with the highest levels of learning power were children in primary school, and the
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Ruth Deakin Crick: age of age group, with the lowest levels of learning power were those between 16 and 18 going into their exams. So throughout the progress of school learning power drops.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: But then, in our adult population. So we we've also published quite large studies on adult population. The cohort with the lowest levels of learning power, were young people in full time, higher education between the ages of 18 and 24,
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and the population with the highest levels of learning power. Funnily enough. was
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Ruth Deakin Crick: people in midlife who were professionals who'd stepped out, or partially out of the profession to go back into into learning. I'm starting my master's program. That makes me feel so much better. It does tell us something about the systems that we've created. You know, we're working within education and the workplace which actually
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Ruth Deakin Crick: shoot themselves in the foot, you know, score an own goal, because the very qualities that we know that the
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Ruth Deakin Crick: that we need in the workplace creativity and thinking outside the box and innovation are actually depressed by our management metrics. And the thing that one of the reasons I'm doing, what I'm doing is that I think that's a huge design fault that we need to address as culture and societies, and we haven't addressed it because
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Ruth Deakin Crick: we're still perpetuating the same models. And I think because earlier, you talked about having a language with which to talk about these things, and in my experience, when somebody says
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Ruth Deakin Crick: really gets it and their practitioners, that's a sign of good social science. They recognize people in this model.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And that's really powerful. And in a way, yeah, of course, there's loads of data behind it. But the most powerful thing it does is gives people a language with which to talk about qualities which are otherwise invisible, and it also gives a metric. So one of the things we did with Jim early on was to take a baseline
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Ruth Deakin Crick: sample of the population of people working in the water company, and we could tell from analyzing the raw data which we got from the back end of the survey platform. That unless there were changes, the that the population weren't going to be learning the way forward. In other words, the majority of people were passive and waiting to be told what to do, which, of course, is the case in a culture that Jim has described, and that was what needed changing.
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Jim iPad: So
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Ruth Deakin Crick: yeah, no, I do feel very strongly about that, because we know we've known these things for years, and most practitioners, coaches, learning professionals know this.
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Marion: Yeah.
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Marion: that's just fascinating that all of that's just blew my mind particularly this, I'm laughing just like I'm thinking about myself doing my first degree. My, you know, my my bachelors, and you know that stage. I was like, I have a part time job. I'm going to the clubs on party and like education is like the last thing that I'm interested in. But I'll do it because you're main to.
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Marion: And then by the time I went back to do my master's program mid thirties.
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Marion: I've had found my niche. I'd found where I wanted to be. I was passionate about it, and it was paying for it. And you you come up back at it with a completely different mentality, because it's something that you really bought into rather than feeling like, should it just take a box? So that is absolutely fascinating to me? II guess I have a follow-on question to to all of that.
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Marion: And, Jim, this may might set with you, cause it's pretty commercial question. One of the biggest things I'm a chief people officer. So one of the biggest things that when I, you know, build into a budget and propose, I want to bring in these these modalities. I want to bring in this tech. I want to bring in whatever
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Marion: I'm always looking to
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Marion: be able to highlight what the Roi is right, and that's one of the hardest things in our part of the business, because. you know, if we could always measure Roi on any people based intervention, we would do we my job?
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Marion: It'd be so easy, right? Be like it'd be simple.
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Marion: Has there been any case studies where you've been able to directly correlate the the the kind of input of this modality to the the output of the organization
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Marion: on any sort of metric, really. But roi particularly.
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Jim iPad: Oh, II think, in the in the case of the water utility that we're talking about before
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Jim iPad: and and there's a paper that Ruth and I had published a small number of years ago that talks about the case at this water company, and there are some hard, measurable things that change as a result of what we were doing like
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Jim iPad: when I when I arrived at the company this compliance focus that we had
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Jim iPad: meant that we
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Jim iPad: we weren't really trying to push the boundaries about how well we could perform in a number of areas as long as we were kind of performing to a point where we weren't getting criticized by others. That was okay. But we were running out of time. We're running out of roadway for, you know, to be able to bring about sort of change we're gonna need.
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Jim iPad: And so water leakage is the thing that's really important, particularly in relatively arid places like the Eastern seaboard of Australia would be similarly so in California, and so on.
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Jim iPad: We. We had lost our expectation that we could reduce water leakage by any significant degree, but by engaging with our staff, using these kind of learning power principles
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Jim iPad: and really exciting them about the potential for change we brought around. I mean, I was even surprised, and I was setting some fairly audacious goals about what they could achieve. We significantly out perform them. So those are hard, measurable, economic, and environmental benefits that were delivered
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Jim iPad: by the company through changing the way we think about what we can do through through these learning power principles. So there was a hard, measurable thing. And a and another thing was, I talked before about trying to work with our customers in our community to use water in a different way.
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Jim iPad: And it would quite a significant reduction in the volume of water per customer that was being used which provided us with time to do the planning and the assessment that we needed for future water sources and so on. So there are 2 very hard, measurable
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Jim iPad: things with economic and environmental and customer service related benefits that II can't off the top of my head, tell you what that's worth in terms of return on investment, but massively outweighing the cost of investing in the people in this way. And and the vibes seems so different, right? Just that it's no longer process and and fear of, you know, being wrong or
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Danny Gluch: criticized or publicly outed. Yeah, it's wow. We're doing really cool stuff.
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Danny Gluch: We're we're doing creative things, innovative things.
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Jim iPad: II feel trusted. I feel inspired like that's I'm getting jacked up just thinking about it, Danny. That was that was evidenced by our engagement stuff engagement survey results. So I one things I used to do at the Oakland University back in the day was I used to run leadership programs and work with psychology firms that were using various types of
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Jim iPad: engagement, survey and personality, profiles and all those tools. I had never seen, the kind of shifts that we saw in a relatively short period of time
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Jim iPad: to how people felt about their experience at work, and the expectation that our people had that we were gonna be able to bring about change, and these 2 sides of things were measured through the engagement tool that we used.
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Jim iPad: So yes, we've got hard measures around the engagement changes brought about and the expectation of our workforce that we could do more amazing things. And we've got hard, measurable things about the actual performance of the company. So I think sometimes when we talk about the the change in engagement, what I'm really passionate about that and the changing wellbeing, it can be still quite hard to put a return on investment, hard dollars or pounds on that.
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Jim iPad: But in in the case of what we were talking about at at the Water Company. We've got it in the engagement schools, and we've got it in hard, measurable things, like reduced water loss and improvement in
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Jim iPad: how customers use their water. So you know, we got the hard measures, and we've got those other measures that cynics could say, well, that's all very well. You've made to happy. But we're still not performing. We measured both sides. Both had amazing results. Oh, yeah, I was just gonna ask your your thoughts on that, Ruth. Well, I was. Gonna say, the thing is,
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Ruth Deakin Crick: most people really want to do a good job at work. Yeah. And if they don't want to do a good job at work. They're probably in the wrong job.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And one of the exciting things working in hunts of water was the the early, the conversations that you have quite early on in the learning journey process, when you're looking at your learning, power, profile. And one of the questions is, you know, is this you. What's the story? What matters to you?
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And why are you here? And those conversations don't normally happen in the workplace, but they do like the fire of engagement. And of course they need leadership to support that but once
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Ruth Deakin Crick: once that fire is ignited, so I think learning is lighting the fire, not filling the bucket.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and you need to spend time lighting the fire at the beginning of a learning journey. And actually they did really care about water in their region. They did really care about environment, and that fueled the learning journey and the courage that it took from an awful lot of people actually to do something differently, and to step up and say
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Ruth Deakin Crick: at the end of a learning journey, which is what we ask them to do. Here's my unique contribution to business strategy. Here's what I suggest. We do differently in my zone, my area of responsibility.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: And alongside that. And here's my story of significant change. So there was a personal story and a pitch about how they uniquely contributed to the to the vision that Jim had set, and that was a really powerful
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Danny Gluch: yeah, bringing, you know, the a lot of studies. I'm sure you know this, but a lot of studies have been done and highlighted by like Adam Grant, Simon Sinek, about taking someone's actual work and and connecting why they're there to the actual impact they make and bringing that the work they do and the impact they make closer together.
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Danny Gluch: is is off, awesome and and so beneficial. But I think that
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Danny Gluch: this learning power profile offers more tangible things to sort of bring it in and tangible things to focus on, to where you know you're actually growing, and that your growth
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Danny Gluch: is impacting the overall business. And II wanted to to bring it back to some of those. What? What are like one or 2 top ones? I'm trying to think of like self leadership, curiosity. What are some of those top ones? Ruth, that when you hear Jim tell that story, that when you work together that you really identified as like, this was a big change and a big focus and a big area of need.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: It. It was quite interesting. Quite early on that. I everybody seemed to latch onto curiosity, which which was just a phenomenological thing that happened, and we went with it. So curiosity is people most people understand curiosity, and they were being given permission to be curious. I mean, they were required to be curious and ask questions and say, should we do it this way? Is there a better way? Why do we have to get this thing signed 10 times before I can do anything?
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Ruth Deakin Crick: You know, reasonable and so curious. So the language itself began quite early on to have have legs which moved things. But I think the
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Ruth Deakin Crick: the overall outcome. That that.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: I think, is probably most
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Ruth Deakin Crick: powerful to summarize. It is self leadership. People became and developed self leadership. The capacity to make a unique contribution to the business.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and they developed the capacity to learn together because nobody knows it all. And they had to collaborate. And the other thing that
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Ruth Deakin Crick: was a sort of an overall outcome was the capacity to know how to go about solving complex problems systems, thinking. So if you're not following the rule book.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and you've got a playbook that you've got to choose from.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: You've got to think about the big picture you've got to think about the end to end customer journey. You've got to think about things from multiple perspectives and and develop what some people call systems thinking skills.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So that which is the way through to new innovation. So
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Ruth Deakin Crick: I would summarize the notable outcomes as self leadership.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: learning, relationship and complex problem solving skills which basically underpin. I think all of the future skills that we need.
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Danny Gluch: Do you think that's sort of like a cascading thing like you have to have the self leadership first before you're gonna move into the relational learning and the the complex problem solving.
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Danny Gluch: or do they? They all go together?
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Ruth Deakin Crick: No, I think there is sequence of engagement. I mean, we've worked in prisons with young offenders and you need to spend a long time at the beginning of a learning journey until the lights come on until you find the
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Ruth Deakin Crick: connection between that individual, their story and the purpose of the learning journey. So, and I would
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Ruth Deakin Crick: describe, I think mindful agency we know from our modeling is the most powerful of the learning power dimensions. So the ability to
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Ruth Deakin Crick: reflect on myself. you know, to think about myself as an observer of myself.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: to think about my relationships, and why I'm here
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Ruth Deakin Crick: is is at the heart of self leadership. So I guess that is a starting point. And then, once you have a relationship with yourself. you can relate to other people more effectively because
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and then in the work that we've seen applied so many different ways over the years. It's very easy for people to think, oh, this is another psychometric. It'll just tell us A, B and C about somebody.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: But actually, the real power of the process is in how it can guide and support innovation
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and the generation of new knowledge through thinking differently about everyday problems. And so there is definitely a sequence to how people engage with the process.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: But if you just said, well, I don't have much mindful agency, and that's that.
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Danny Gluch: Yeah it it. It seems less. It seems less of a descriptor. Right? This is not. I went and took my buzz sprout, or whatever quiz. And now I know which hogwarts house I'm in
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Danny Gluch: right? It's it's very much a snapshot of where you currently are
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Danny Gluch: but it's it's a snapshot with a prodding of you should probably grow here. II love that cause a lot of that. We we've talked a lot as a unit about psychometrics. And
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Marion: yeah, we kind of have a bit of a love hate relationship with them because they're some of them are pretty good, like I do like Bill Ben, for example, I find that really powerful, but
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Marion: you know it. Some of them are just. They're very focused on being
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Marion: static. You are this, and this is what you will always be until the day you die. You will be this because these are your preferences.
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Marion: and II really because I think that so much influences us externally, internally, and we do change. And so what I love. When Danny told us about wild learning and and explained it to me. I was like, I love this. The world needs this because
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Marion: we have to identify that people are fluid. We're constantly shifting. We're not bloody growing right? So I I'm a huge proponent of that, and I think that that's one of the biggest things to show from the rooftops, you know, is
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Ruth Deakin Crick: we're constantly moving and growing. And it's so. And that was that was the big challenge at the beginning. How can you assess something and create an assessment technology that actually turns self diagnosis into strategies for change that you can create. That's why we have a spider diagram with no numbers on it, because everyone thinks it's a test, and they everybody looks at what they're good at and what they're bad at. It's not about that you have to relearn
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Danny Gluch: when when you walked through like. So II did this, and and Ruth was kind enough to do a personal coaching on me. One of the things that just like lit me up with with excitement was when she said, It's not about the intensity. It's not about how big the spider graph or how small it is. It was about the shape
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Danny Gluch: it was about. What are the areas in relation to the other areas that are lagging behind or leading. And where is it that you can really focus? Take practical
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Danny Gluch: daily, you know, practices or thoughts, or, you know, work on to to actually grow in the areas you need to. And that's what. And and I really encourage everyone to go take the is it just the the wild learning assessment. Wh, what do you call what do you guys call it? Right? Now, what's the brand?
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Ruth Deakin Crick: The brand is wild learning. The the tool itself is a learning power, profile, the Posh name for it is the quick learning for resilient agency profile.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: But we set, we, we put the learning power, profile in the context of a learning journey. So there, there is a process. There is a journey. It's time bound. And it's con context driven. And you're quite right. If you're about to go into an operation, you're likely to be fragile and dependent. You you are dependent by definition. If you know a bear comes into your garden, you're likely to be rigid and persistent. You're not gonna hang around and debate it. So of course, it's we know from our data. It's context.
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Danny Gluch: dependent culture of fear.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: Top down, commander control will produce low levels of learning power. And we know that learning professionals that support autonomy, ie. Self leadership
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Ruth Deakin Crick: will statistic are far more likely to have cohorts of people that they lead who have high levels of learning power.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So there's an awful lot we know from from the science behind this about context, maybe get go there. Just made me. I got a giggle there because I got into a very heated discussion with the CEO one time about the use of this this training is mandatory, and I'm like.
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Marion: Well, you've just screwed it right there, because the second you put mandatory in the same sentences training everyone switched off. No one cares
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Cacha Dora: shown up because they have to, not because they're open to it. And I think I think that's the key point. Right? Marian is like in so much of the underpinning of what Bruce and and Jim are talking about is this sense of openness right like? And and yes, you've got safety. But like that, that self leadership right like you're being invited to it. But the person also has to be open.
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Cacha Dora: not just to the learning process, but the participation of it like there. Ha! They have to be
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Cacha Dora: willing to do all of the things that then happen when you learn which is being vulnerable, being present, not looking at your email and like actually being involved in this experience. I think that that sense of openness and fostering that I think for a lot of organizations is probably a lot harder than they realize, and when they say, like, we'll just go learn this. Just go. Just go do this right?
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Cacha Dora: Yeah. But like, you have to be open to the whole process of scuffing your knee
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and asking questions and not looking like the smartest person in the room. Yeah, a lot of people have baggage around learning as well, because very often so.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: A lot of people think that rubbish at maths. I was one of those people, actually, until I suddenly saw the beauty of the stats behind this work. And suddenly I could do the stats because I had a good reason to, and because it was. It was beautiful. It's like a painting to me. But so unless you have a reason to do something.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: You're not going to learn it, anyway.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: but but bringing the baggage is often a blocker, the baggage that we bring around learning training. There's one area of this that I we haven't really talked about very much that
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Jim iPad: I'm really passionate about as an organizational leader. So we've talked a lot about how, as an individual with mindful agency and all of those fine things. I and I can be more curious and all that stuff.
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Jim iPad: But as an organization. And this is what we did in a couple of places, I work where we use this way of thinking.
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Jim iPad: we, we said, not just as individuals. How can individuals grow their learning power, but as an organization? If we believe, harnessing the learning power of the people in our teams and in our company will change our performance.
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Jim iPad: And we looked at the sort of collective profile. So we say, either of the whole organization or parts of it? Or what have you?
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Jim iPad: We had conversations about? How can we develop the curiosity of our people. How can we create an environment in which people feel they belong more? How can we grow the hope and optimism of our organization? And and I think one of the most powerful things we harvest in in the audio utility that I was looking after was people started to believe they had hope and optimism around the fact that we could achieve amazing outcomes.
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Jim iPad: So I think there's some of these dimensions of learning power
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Jim iPad: have were really powerful for individuals to work on in terms of how do I grow? My ability to learn? But they were equally powerful for us as a at a corporate level to say, how?
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Jim iPad: How are we gonna change this organization? Which of these I'm nice, all those learning powered dimensions as levers that we could pull if you like. So if if hope and optimism is the thing that I fundament see, I need people to believe in the strategy that we're putting in place because I'd inherited this organization that was doing okay.
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Jim iPad: But that was no good for me that we were okay. We need to be really good. We need to go. We work, we work poor. We were okay. People were this compliance, mentality stop people moaning about us. So it was okay. No one kind of noticed that. So I wanted us to get noticed.
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Marion: And we I wanted to get noticed by becoming really good. And I need people to have the
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Jim iPad: the the faith or the hope, or the optimism, or the belief, or whatever you want to call it, that we can go there. But I also needed them to be curious about why it was important that we should go there.
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Jim iPad: But so so I think, using those dimensions at an individual level is really powerful. But if we can get organizational leaders to understand their power at a kind of corporate level.
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Jim iPad: We can say, what are we doing in this organization that develops the hope and optimism that we need all the collaboration or the belonging with our community, or whatever it might be. II love that you. You turned it there cause. I was just about to ask the question, because both the the story you told and and Ruth said something that really like brought some curiosity up
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Danny Gluch: for me was when she said, you know a certain leadership style will lead to a specific measurable deficiency in a certain learning power dimension.
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Danny Gluch: And I was wondering if you know organizations doing these learning power profiles for for all of their workforce is, can that be a bit of a diagnostic of Oh, wow! Like people don't have a real sense of belonging right. People aren't feeling curious, and and all of you know all those things. And and then let that inform the leadership to okay, how structurally, how organizationally.
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Jim iPad: can we maybe start addressing does, does does it? Can it work like that, Danny? If I, if I can just say, from the practical sort of user experience
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Jim iPad: that was as important to us in the audio utility as the individual taking charge of their own learning, as it were, that that we could cause if we got an engagement survey that would tell us how engaging or otherwise that people were. That wasn't the same thing as having this sort of measure, shall we say across the organization of their learning power, the organizations learning. But that kind of explains to us, perhaps, why engagement and performance would where we needed them to be.
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Jim iPad: So. It was incredibly powerful from that point.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and that's part of the challenge of the learning analytics behind it. So we've we've we've built a web app. And this is the seventh and the last in my career. I promise where the the data, the same data point, provides feedback to the individual which is anonymized oops. Sorry, which is private to the individual. Nobody else gets to see that same data points we can extrapolate and aggregate at group level.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So leaders can get a look at what the group learning, power, profile is without seeing who the individuals are within that group profile, and then we can export the data at the back end and do more sophisticated analysis with it, which is what we did with
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Ruth Deakin Crick: with hunter water, with which was really very, very powerful
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Ruth Deakin Crick: and and and sometimes sometimes the results are often counterintuitive. We once worked with
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Ruth Deakin Crick: a group of science students in a top independent school in the Uk. And they were super successful. So what was the intervention with that cohort? It was actually to teach them to fail.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So the intervention was to give them challenges that nobody knew the answer to needed to learn how to fail. But most people at the top of organizations they're very often, with maybe, with some exceptions, have really failed, you know through
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Ruth Deakin Crick: through their careers by definition. And so learning to fail because everybody does fail and will fail, is actually a life skill that is hugely important. And and and it's all part of not knowing. So that all comes into the
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Ruth Deakin Crick: the learning power culture. It's okay not to know. It's okay to fail.
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Marion: And it's okay to create an innovation that fails. You know, we just learn from it and carry on.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So
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Marion: hmm, I love that.
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Danny Gluch: Yeah, that's that's amazing. I, and caution Mary, and any any final thoughts or questions for for Ruth or Jim, as as we start to wrap up.
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Marion: No, but I just, I think, so like some of geeky academic. But you know, is there any links to resources apart from the website? Obviously for any research that anyone who's interested might want to read Co. Which we're developing all the time. And there are quite a few resources on there. There's also contact points. And we have we developing an online community of practice which in which we're putting
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Ruth Deakin Crick: various types of resources.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: so that's probably the best pointer
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Marion: you can. Also Google it, or ask Chat Gpt, and see what comes up.
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Marion: Yeah, Google scholars always pretty good as well for these things. Yeah, there's there's so many there are so many academic publications which
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Ruth Deakin Crick: will bore you unless you really need to read them. And then, yeah, so I don't know. We're kind of geeky academic sharing here. So we kind of like articles all the time right now. So it's just in my wheelhouse. But it's been great to hear from your perspective and Jim from your application as well, because I think when we are as learning professionals, it's hard sometimes for us to articulate some of the implementations we've done. When
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Cacha Dora: W. We know we're we're the the curious with innovators. And it's sometimes very hard to take that practical storytelling to it. And I love getting. I've loved that we've gotten to hear both today
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Danny Gluch: learning how learning actually works. It's it's so different than what I was taught. And II have a family of educators right generationally.
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Danny Gluch: and it wasn't until I got into education that I was like, I don't think this works how I thought it worked. And and you know, II keep learning every year. And and when I came across this I was like, Oh, this is this is incredible. And I'm like this isn't the end, either. I'm sure it's gonna progress and grow and and get better over time.
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Danny Gluch: but thank you guys so much for joining us. This is really incredible. Any last sort of like call to actions for any listeners who are are curious and like, Wow, I want, I want to, you know, for myself or for my little pod that I manage at a group. I really wanna
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Danny Gluch: to make this happen for them and and create this culture of learning where people are really empowered. Any any tips for those individuals or team leaders?
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Ruth Deakin Crick: W, we're just about to launch a coaching for learning program which you can find out through the website. Because actually, the key is learning professionals and enabling learning professionals to understand the how to coach along the length of a learning journey, using the learning powder mentions. And so that's kicking off in April, we'll have some rolling programs. And also we're doing some tasters
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Ruth Deakin Crick: which are sort of shorter. Do your learning power profile and join a join a group? Coaching triad feedback.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: So it find out about it first, I think, because there's an awful lot in our culture that pulls you back to the old way of doing things. Think it's really well worth
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Ruth Deakin Crick: getting into it for yourself. You you kind of give what you have in a gut, as they say in glass.
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Ruth Deakin Crick: You have to do it for yourself would be my you know. Get in touch with wild learning, and you know we'll show you how to do that.
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Jim iPad: and can I? Can, I add, can I add, for learning professionals and chief people, offices and people like that?
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Jim iPad: It to influence
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Jim iPad: the organizational boss who's got to write the check, or whatever it may be, around.
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Jim iPad: You were talking before about the Roi, or whatever it may be. When I talk about this, II,
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Jim iPad: although it's based on learning power, it's learning as an ability to bring about change, changing performance and changing behavior, the resilience of people and organizations and so on. We cannot be resilient if we don't, how to change. But all of these things to me, fundamentally, I need us. If we can. Harness learning power will bring about change. But I talk about performance, change and growth and resilience
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Jim iPad: for which we need to understand learning power. So I think if learning professionals can help join the dots with their Ceos and divisional Mds. Or whatever they might be called about.
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Jim iPad: this is how to unlock performance change, because we're harnessing the learning power of individuals rather than otherwise. It sounds like a means to an end, your end in itself, shall we say? Sorry? Just about becoming better learners. We'll go and learn learn French or whatever, as opposed to bringing about change.
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Danny Gluch: that that contextual part. It's not just about learning anything right. It did II couldn't go learn French may maybe not me. I'm not good at languages, but right, it's contextual learning. And I and I think that's something that's really learning is to is so that our organization improves. Yeah. So we've changed how we're doing things for the good.
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Danny Gluch: That's amazing. I know our listeners are going to absolutely love this
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Danny Gluch: again. Go to www. Dot wildle learn.co there'll be links in the show notes. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Ruth, for joining us and for creating this awesome thing that we got to learn about and share. Thank you all for listening. Be sure to leave a 5 star review like, subscribe all those things you can contact us at Elephant, at the fearless Pxcom. We'll see you next time.
