Serendipity and Learning

 The larger question is about gamifying learning. And at one point, everyone was gamifying everything . That was a prescient 9 years ago, but even today that ideas lives on.  Gamifying as a decorative piece is passe. Please do not do it. It demeans both your audience and your learning intent (and content). Do not strap on gamification to your learning just for the sake of it.  If your learning intent - the reason you want people to get into the learning - is strong - there is no need to gamify it.  If your leadership believes it and supports it - there is no need to gamify it.  If you want to gamify to complete some artificial target set by your boss and your think your audience is not gullible enough to see through it - still do not do it.  So when should you gamify?  When you have a multi-dimensional score. When the badges have application in real life (like stackoverflow) or salesforce trailhead.  Or the badges have benefit in real life (no, no...

Whenever you read articles on the future of L&D, there is a sense of deja vu. You know you have read it somewhere else. That's because we have been talking about the same things year on year.  But at the root of L&D what is it? L&D is only and only about behaviour change. As you move up the corporate ladder, this is the only thing you will be working on is to work on yourself.  There might be skill components in L&D where you learn frameworks on strategy or new theories on management, but that will boil down to practice. And practice in most contexts will require you to change behaviour (else why be trained in the first place), be vulnerable and be a role model. Now, regardless of your position on the ladder, you have to do this.  You learn new skills  The process of learning is fraught with vulnerability Then you learn to apply those skills Then those skills become second nature Somewhere along the way, you also train others So, you learn to coach. W...

 The previous post did not have any reference to Artificial Intelligence or Metaverse or AR or Gaming. Why? Because much of behaviour change is about focused skill building. And you can get the bells and whistles via Gaming or metaverse or AR. But you need an assessor, who is giving you real time feedback when you practice those skills with "Conscious competence". As far I know it there is no AI assessor that can do it - but this is a space an AI skills coach can be useful - who understands the candidate and works with the candidate to give very specific feedback.  Until then, it is back to basics. Practice, apply, learn, unlearn, relearn, apply till you get it somewhat right. 

These are the 4 broad shifts I have seen in the L&D landscape over the last few years (this is a slightly elaborated post from the year end update ). These are not shifts - these are more my learnings and you can classify these as my approach to L&D more than anything else.  The death of inspirational training. A few years ago, this was the norm. Inspiration driven training with quotes, examples, visuals was supposed to move the audience into taking action. I have written about it here . Bordering on motivational talk, it exhorted the audience to "change". Net result - zero. Smiley sheets full marks.  There are still occasions where you might want to use it sparingly, but well not so much. The death of day long trainings. Earlier trainings ran for 4 days like a test match and then came down to 1 day (8 hours). Post pandemic, I have found it useful to keep trainings to 2 hours max. What that also means is cut down on the inspiration talk and all that dive into the topi...

Some time back I was approached by someone who wanted to do a bit of training - since she was free, had recently retired and had time on her hands. Another one told me, I am a trainer - I always had the gift of the gab. Another time, it was recommended for the juniormost employee to work on leadership training. And a set of students wanted to train people on creativity.  All fairly common problems faced by organizations and people and sometimes they meet - to disastrous effect.  Many years ago when I was somewhat new to leadershp training (I did have the experience of few training sessions under my belt), the organization I was part of had paired an HR person and a non-HR person to train First Time Managers. This is an experience I am immensely grateful to because I was able to see both views - the employees, the HR and the system. And it sharpened my instincts as a facilitator. And one thing, I have done over the years is never lost touch with this perspective - but thats for...

 I recently read a report on the future of l&d and I must I am disappointed. To sum up, here were the broad points.  Digital learning will grow:  My take: Yes, but getting access to good content is more and more difficult. Companies want to sell you a billion licences. Employees want learning only at the point where they need it and dont want to waste time searching through dozens on videos, learning and unlearning digital frameworks. So, digital learning will grow - but where is the quality?  In future I hope, Digital learning is relevant, shorter (minus the preambles), crisp and very very context specific. I personally think companies are better off investing in making their own content especially if the content has to be repeated - standard frameworks, relevant to the values and so on.  L&D will be key to talent retention: My take: Not in India. Not in tech. I cant think where else. L&D was never and is never the key to talent retention, except in...