If you've been listening to In the Loop every single week,
you'll know that we have quite high quality standards.
We spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect episode, the
best way of telling the story, and we really care about the
production. Today, that means trying
something new. This is going to be our first
ever interview, and honestly, I hope you're going to love it.
I got to speak to somebody who spent 25 years trying to fix
what can only be described as a broken system that fails
millions of people every single day.
And getting to sit down with her to dig into her story and her
beliefs was so much fun. She's an expert in the topic.
She's a fantastic speaker and an author, and it's the exact type
of conversations that I want to bring you more of.
I'm Jack Horton, and this is in the Leap.
Today I'm investigating a question that affects every
working person. Who decided this is learning and
why hasn't AI fixed it yet? Picture this it's Monday
morning. Sarah, a customer service
manager at a Fortune 500 company, just woke up to learn
that she has to complete her digital communications best
practice course by tomorrow morning. 45 minutes of clicking
through slides about not sharing inappropriate photos into a
company slide channel. Meanwhile, another company just
down the road has implemented an AI system that handles 60% of
all customer support enquiries in six months.
Sarah's job may not even exist, but hey, at least she's
compliant. This isn't hypothetical.
This is happening at companies across the world.
Whilst the largest workforce transformation in human history
unfolds around us, AI systems are already writing code,
diagnosing diseases, creating and making decisions that used
to require entire teams of people.
We're in what experts called the great upskill.
We need to rapidly train people to do things machines can't.
Creative problem solving, emotional intelligence, complex
reasoning and decision making skills.
Yet the very thing that should be helping people succeed is
currently failing most people. That's learning.
Specifically, learning at work. Companies spend hundreds of
billions of dollars on global training every single year.
That's more than the GDP of some countries.
And yet when was the last time you took a workplace training
course that you actually found helpful, that felt relevant to
your challenges, and that made you demonstrably better at what
you do? Research has shown that most
training is forgotten within 24 hours.
To understand this crisis, I spoke to someone who'd been
inside the system. Someone who's not just witnessed
all the dysfunction, but who'd lived, breathed it, and spent
her career trying to fix it, and came across the solution from a
very unlikely place, A hospital emergency room, a bottle of
vodka, and a moment of panic at 30,000 feet.
This is the story of how workplace learning got broken
and how we might be able to fix it with AI.
To finances. I spoke to Laurie Hoffman, who
sent 25 years in educational technology, working as a chief
learning officer at major cororations and advising some of
the biggest companies in the entire world on how to deliver
great learning experiences. I think there's a number of
reasons. If you look at early e-learning
and I'll focus on the digital type of content, early
e-learning was really about compliance.
So it was all thou shalt do this, thou shalt not do this.
So it was written in such an artificial way.
There wasn't any storytelling. And so people kind of had that
dread when they went into it the very first time because they
knew what it was going to be, right?
It wasn't going to be engaging, It wasn't going to be anything
of interest. And basically what they were
effectively reading was not even learning.
It was a legal document to protect the company.
A legal document not working. And when I did a little bit more
digging, I found that Once Upon a time in the 1950s, you'd learn
through apprenticeships. You'd be working alongside
masters, getting real time feedback and practising skills
in context. And now picture corporate
learning today. Lots of boring videos that are
very rarely helpful. This shift happened gradually,
then incredibly fast. In the 1990s, companies started
moving training online to save costs.
And then, as corporate scandals like Enron and Worldcom wiped
billions off the market, new laws made compliance legally
required. Suddenly the primary purpose of
corporate training shifted from developing people to protecting
companies from lawsuits. So what started as a cost saving
measure became a legal necessity.
And legal necessities, once embedded in corporate
bureaucracy, become really difficult to change.
So the company says, well Jack read this.
So therefore you know, tick mark Jack will not launder money.
That is, that is essentially what what it was doing for, for
for one example. I think the second one is, is a
lot of people that get into corporate learning actually
don't know learning. They have gone through school in
some way, shape or form and creates this this fallacy that
because they've gone through school, they automatically know
how learning works. And they have, quote UN quote, a
passion for learning. And, and you know, I have a
passion for brain surgery, but you wouldn't allow me to ever
perform that on anyone living or probably even expired.
I think one of the worst ones I ever had to do was the company
was launching an internal tool that at the time was very
similar to Slack and Yammer. But before this, before those
tools were ubiquitous and it was not an e-learning on how to use
the tools. It was basically all the things
you could and could not say basically how to be in general a
good human being. And it even had things in it
like please do not share photos that depict people without
clothes on. And I thought, well, I mean,
this surely does not need to be an e-learning.
This has to be just a simple code of conduct.
About 45 minutes. People had to go through that.
And what ended up happening is everyone was afraid to even use
the tool because the rules got so ridiculous and it was came
down to you can't tag more than three people and just just
stupid stuff. I think Laura's example
perfectly illustrates this focus on compliance over developing
people, launching internal communication tools, something
that should encourage collaboration, but then made
people watch 45 minute courses that were so restrictive that
people feared even using the system.
The resistance isn't to development, it's to
dysfunction. But I wanted to know, why are we
still stuck in this same place? Then a big part of the answer
lies and something that most people have never heard of, that
controls almost all corporate learning across the world, and
it's called SCORM. So SCORM is this funny little
piece of technology that used to be really relevant.
It's called a shared content object.
Basically is is is is what is what it is.
And it used to be that mod learning was for compliance.
So you needed to be able to prove that.
OK, Jack took this hour long course.
He passed the test at over 80%. We know what he questions he got
right and wrong. We know the date he did it on.
Yay, all good. And we send that to the
regulators. OK, so with Jack does something
wrong, we can pull that and say, well, clearly you know, it
wasn't our fault because he passed the module.
Now that's that's old school learning, but that's what we
used to have in like 2000, OK. So SCORM is this technical
standard, basically a set of rules about how e-learning
should be packaged up and delivered to people, and it was
created in the early 2000s with only one goal, compliance
trucking. But what SCORM does is SCORM
became the package that all learning had to be in, in order
for it to be interpreted and understood by a learning
management system. But what SCORM does not do is
also take into account suspended data.
What do I mean by that? Well, if you backtrack in a
module or if you do a branching exercise or if you only watch a
portion of a video or if you're learning something that isn't on
the learning management system, say you go, you see something on
Slack and what not that may not even track as part of your,
your, your learning learning Canon.
And so as a result of that, we, we got locked into this.
Click next to continue type. And there's, I feel for
instructional designers and and learning experience designers
because there's only so much you can do with that.
There really is only so much you can do and that, but that's how
we ended up with the drag and drop and that's how we ended up
with those really boring things because that's all we could do.
So there's the problem, Scorn became the dominant standard
that almost all these learning management systems.
So the software that companies used to deliver training was
historically built around. That's a multi billion dollar
industry that had a financial incentive to maintain this
system. But this raises a bigger
question. If SCOM is so limiting, why
hasn't it been replaced? And why are we still stuck with
this 25 year old standard designed for compliance training
in an era where personalization and adaptation should be
possible? In an era where developing
people has become more important than ever.
Easy, easy answer to that money, right?
So if you think about what marketing is doing, it's
generating leads, it's generating interest and
engagement with a product that's ultimately going to lead to a
sale. And there's a much, much, much
larger pool of people that you are say tempted to, to reach out
to. If say you are a company that
makes trainers, right? I mean, you're going to just
say, yes, I absolutely will pay to get a, a million, you know,
ads or whatever to, to, you know, to target ads to people.
And because that's what you do as a, as a company, right?
Learning. The reason it is a slower thing
or was because things are changing is because even if you
think of software manufacturers and you think of where the
revenue is, it's not in somebody doing a learning course, right,
because there's nothing that they're buying at the end of it.
In other words, there's not a financial incentive to innovate
in learning in the same way as marketing or sales technology.
Marketing technology advanced so rapidly because targeting and
personalization directly translated into more sales.
And, well, where's the ROI of helping someone learn better?
But the problem is, is AI and I'm using that as a as a
vernacular. OK, so you know, when I say AI,
because I'm trying not to mention specific tools, they're
not going to be able to break into that.
It's not going to be in a digestible format for them and
they're probably going to be looking for, say, the script.
And it's really hard to keep those scripts up to date because
anytime you make even a micro change, you've got to go back
and update all of them, reload all that, sort of.
Stuff. Not only are we stuck with
SCORM, a 25 year old learning idea, but modern systems can't
actually help us escape it because AI can't read that
format. It's like being trapped in this
digital time capsule. So that's the other barrier for
content to be able to be ingested and put into
essentially A rag that can't combines knowledge management
and L&D content. So it's kind of like you're
going to have L&D speaks German, but knowledge management speaks
French and the agent only speaks or coach only speaks French.
So we'd only be able to pull from one.
That's kind of the kind of the analogy there.
The irony is almost painful. We're living in an age where AI
could transform learning experiences.
But for AI to understand the information, it must be able to
understand scorn, but it can't actually ingest all of that
information and do anything with it.
So this is the real villain of the story, a technical standard
that's holding an industry hostage.
Luckily, Laurie has discovered something that could change
everything, and it came from an unexpected place.
Now Laurie's about to tell you a story that involves airport
vodka and a medical emergency. And while it might seem like a
detour, the story contains the key to understanding how we have
to be able to fix learning. So what happened was I'm afraid
of flying. I was in North Carolina and I
had to take a small plane and I mean small like 1212 seater type
tiny little plane from Raleigh, NC, Toronto and there was going
to be storms. So I was absolutely not happy.
So don't judge me. I looked around for some place I
could have a glass of wine. Well I was informed that there
is actually no bar in that wing of the airport.
So I said, well, I'll go to the duty free and I bought myself
again, please don't judge. It was desperate times.
I bought myself of course the leader bottle that they sell it
duty free. They don't sell the small ones
of vodka. And I thought, well, I'll just
make a little drink. And the the gentleman said to
me, we don't get this till you land.
We can't give it to you now. It's like, So what ended up
happening was I told the the woman at the the gate, I
explained I'm afraid of flying. And she said, OK, look, I'm
going to tell you as soon as the your plane lands, you're going
to run to the other terminal, have a drink of a glass of wine
and come back and I will get you on this plane.
And I said, OK, fine. She goes, OK, plane landed.
She looked at me. She's like, go, I run to the
other terminal, run outside, go through, get a glass of wine,
come back and I get on the plane.
It's AI survived. Obviously it was terrible,
right? But anyway, the point of the
story was when I went to get off the plane, I was so tense from
the flight that I wrenched my back and I threw my back out,
taking out my luggage and that what they had to do was put me
on a wheelchair and push me through the airport.
At this point, I'm crying. My you know, my mascara is
running. And what happened was, is the
guy from the airplane runs up to me.
He can smell alcohol in my breath and he hands me my leader
size bottle of vodka and that's how I was clutching it and being
wheeled through Toronto Pearson but.
The story doesn't just end there.
What happened next will completely change how Lori
thought about learning the. Point is, is my husband then
because I couldn't move, everything seized up.
I had to go to the hospital and that was where I saw the the
process that happens when you go into an A&E.
So you weren't seen by a nurse right away.
In fact, there was a kiosk and it asks you certain questions.
Are you experiencing heart palpitations?
Do you have chest pain? Are you running a fever?
Where have you traveled? This was even pre COVID.
It did take my blood pressure. There was a cuff that I could
use to take my blood pressure. It asks me, are you conscious?
I'm like clearly I am if I've done all these other things.
But that triage was what then went to the nurse and it decided
who got to be seen by that intake nurse first.
Then what happened is that they looked at everybody that was
sitting in the, the A&E and it determined who was going to go
first based on their urgency, based on also what specialties
doctors they had available that had time.
You weren't seen in the order you appeared.
You were seen according to the severity of of of your injuries
and what need to be treated right away and what you had
resources for. If you flip that into learning,
what's you need to look at is that if you took all of your
learning requests and put them in order, you're essentially
making somebody who might be having a heart attack wait while
somebody who maybe has a splinter.
You don't get seen first and that's not effective.
It's not using your resources effectly.
It's not helping the business. This is the fundamental insight
into how you could revolutionize workplace learning.
Right now, most corporate learning experiences operate
like a fast food restaurant. Everyone gets the same thing in
the same order. But what I was if it could
operate like an emergency room, personalized and prioritize and
optimize for real need. But we still face that problem
of the world of learning being built around SCORM compliance
and having this annual planning cycle around learning that makes
agility almost impossible. Because of the way that L&D is
set up and typically what happens in an in a learning
company and I'm talking about enterprise.
So for any listeners who are, you know, working more in a
medium sized or especially a small size, you will probably be
a lot more agile than this because you haven't had to deal
with, with this type of this type of structure.
But in an enterprise company and you know that's maybe dealing
with 50,000 employees, what they do is they set budget at the
beginning of the year and say, OK, this is what we're going to
build. And and I call it the bun fight.
What happens is all the business partners come in, you sit in a
room and everybody gives like their magic list of what they
would like to have built that year that will help them.
And you do this. And then the business signs off
and says, OK, and I will give you this amount of budget and
your performance reviews are going to be based on whether you
hit the targets for those those numbers or whether you did not.
Picture this playing out across the entire organization in
January. You're having to plan what
skills people are going to need for December, and by the time
December arrives, those skills might be completely irrelevant
because the world changed, but you've already spent money on
SCORM courses. I mean, the one that I tell in
the book was, was a, was a bank that when we just put in a
central intake. So this would be that kiosk, you
know, where everyone goes through that, that we had at
A&E. We just put in a simple like
intake form saying if you're doing anything in learning, just
fill this out and let us know what you're working on.
And we discovered 17 learning units because it was like a
global financial institution. 17 units were building agile
learning courses and the cost was astronomical. 1 was an IT
specific version because that operates a little bit
differently. And the other one was a general
version that they push out from global.
So we got rid of 15 pieces of junk and and that duplication.
Also think about it downstream for that learner, they log into
their learning management system, type in Agile and then
they'll get 17 versions. They don't know which one to
choose. It's just so.
So we're not helping them either.
This is what the emergency room model could do for workplace
learning. Instead of everyone getting the
same generic course, people get what they actually need when
they need it delivered by the right specialist in that moment.
But implementing that vision requires more than just changing
processes. It requires technology and
specifically AI. Learning is going to be most
effective and and best when it is personalized to each
individual. So I can't say this is the box
that all learning should go into.
And I think we tried to do that for a very long time.
We made learning very static and just the same for everyone goes
through and they click next to continue.
What I'm looking at is really effective learning is is one
that is hyper personalized to you what it is that it knows
you, it knows what you're working on.
It knows how your day has been. It knows how many meetings
you've had it it knows what projects you're working on.
And it brings that in contextually to to actually be
applicable in in where you are. I think the other thing that
good learning does is that it is looking at impact and if there
there is no impact, it pivots the learning in ways that will
have impact. And so it's looking at what is
actually successful. Now, this idea of
personalisation gets thrown around a lot, but what does it
actually mean? What does it actually look like
in practice? I know a lot of people don't
like the model, but Duolingo, if you look at how they use data
and how they use it to not only personalized, but make the
learning stickier and better, it's quite fascinating.
And in L&D, again, we're just giving a we're giving a static
course. I think also too, the thing with
good learning is that it is getting you opportunities to
practice and reiterate and be able to connect with, say a
virtual coach who's going to look at how you're performing
and it's evaluating and giving you bespoke feedback.
Not the, you know, you got that wrong, let's try again feedback,
but like actually hyper fixated and focused on what you are
doing and how that relates to say, a rubric that the company
would like you to perform to. All those things together are
what makes an important learning experience.
Imagine learning that understands your calendar or
your current projects and adapts to your actual work context.
Instead of this generic course on communication skills, you get
specific coaching on how to communicate with a difficult
stakeholder that you're meeting tomorrow.
This is this closed loop system that SCORM could never provide.
Learning that doesn't just track completion, but measures actual
behaviour change and adapts accordingly.
But Laurie goes even further. She envisions learning that
breaks out of the traditional course format entirely.
So the example that I, I gave in the book was, OK, you go on to a
learning system or an app and you do level 4 Spanish.
What happens is, is, oh, we know that level 4 Spanish means that
you're probably at a, a pretty good level of Spanish.
So the next time you log into say slack or any of your, you
know, work tools, it'll come up and say Hola, do you want to
change your language settings to, to Spanish to give you that,
that type of practice and hands on feeling.
And that is a whole other learning experience.
And then we start to see how well you're doing with that.
And we might say, hey, we see a lot of progress.
Do you want to be connected with this person in Colombia who's
working on a project that's very similar to the one that we know
you've been working on and start to get that conversation
happening? And so now you see how I've
taken language learning. The person is probably still
taking their courses or their whatever Babble or Duolingo,
whatever it is that they're taking their, their Spanish in
and they're probably getting tutoring.
But now we've embedded it into the way that they are actually
working and behaving in their, their day-to-day.
So that's the way we need to think about, think about
learning. It's, it's not just that course.
The course isn't going to be the same like what I would log into
a course. It's going to be totally
different than what you would have Jack, But it would also be,
there is tutoring, there's feedback loops, there's
practice. All of those things are embedded
within it. And they're also fed to me at
times that work with how I'm also performing in my
day-to-day. Maybe it has access to my
calendar. It knows from the CRM what
customers I'm speaking to. So it feeds all that in to
really make a learning experience that is pertinent to
me. So I actually perceive or
predict that you will have a learning coach.
And I hate using learning agent because I know I'm bastardizing
the term agent because agent really means something else
specifically, but that you will have a AI person, let's put it
that way, who is like your Co companion that knows everything
that you're working on. It reads your emails, it knows
how you're interacting. It sees around corners for you.
It coaches you through it knows you know things that you've gone
through things that have gone well.
It knows your everything. And it's serving up not only
knowledge, but a critical learning experiences that are
mapped to the goals of the company and, and your personal
goals that, that, that you're, you're working on.
That's really what I see that the future being so much so that
when it comes to skills, there, there will be an aspect of, oh,
we know we're missing the skill we need 16 people with this
skill. We're going to have your coach,
you know, talk to you about this skill and see if we can nurture
you along. It would be so, so precise.
And of course, it'll have all the good things like that.
That coach will embed all the good things like practice and,
you know, feedback, But it will also be doing it in, in, in a
way that is actually then tied to do we see outcomes?
Do we actually see these things happening?
If I wanted to be really honest about where I do see three years
from now, if I get a little nervous, is does the line blur?
You will have that in your personal life as well.
I do believe so you will have that, that persona.
I already have it. If you, I mean ask your whatever
AI tool you're using, like tell me my my 3 best personality
strengths and my three worst and it will tell you like it knows
things about you. I predict you also have one in
your personal life. And the question will be, I
think companies will want to tap into that personal 1.
And I think there's still going to be a divide.
Here's the thing. This isn't some distant future
vision. This technology already exists.
Companies are already beginning to implement these kinds of
systems and mindsets, helping them do it.
Definitely. I mean, I'm trying not to name
companies and, and, and brands on that, but there there's one
in particular that I, I do absolutely adore.
And they've really caught on to this piece of combining
productivity knowledge management and surfacing what
you have in, in, in L&D and really what they're measuring it
is from a productivity standpoint.
And they've seen massive, massive increases.
So to conclude, the learning trap is real, but it's not
inevitable. We're stuck with systems
designed 25 years ago for legal compliance, not growth.
Scorn. That technical standard that the
majority of people never hear about, has imprisoned corporate
learning into this world of Click next to continue.
But the real revelation came from Laurie's emergency room
story. Touching a bottle of vodka
whilst being wheeled through Toronto airport, she discovered
the solution. Triage learning should work like
a emergency room, prioritized by need, context and optimized for
actual impact. And the technology to fix this
already exists. AI can create learning coaches
that knows your work, adapts your schedule, and provides just
in time, support and mindset. Get to work with companies on
implementing this technology into their learning ecosystem.
And we're even enabling people to ingest SCORM.
Finally. This learning trap therefore is
not permanent. People do want to learn, just
not in a dysfunctional way. Or as Laurie says.
People are always learning. They're learning in other ways,
maybe ways that you just can't see.
Anyway, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
Laurie is such a fantastic speaker and if you want to
contact her, we'll put all of her contact information in the
description below. If you've got any comments or
feedback, I'd love to hear it. Just drop me a message on
whatever channel you prefer. Anyway, I'll see you next week.