Learning Innovation and Future-Readiness: What's Changing and What Won't with Jonathan Halls

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to AT&E's Talent Development Leader Podcast, featuring monthly conversations with the greatest influencers in the talent development field. We cover the latest trends, hot topics, and future-focused ideas that current and aspiring TD leaders need to know. Learn more by visiting www.td.org and searching for talent development leader podcast. Today, I'm joined by Jonathan Halls, an award-winning author whose books include Confessions of a Corporate Trainer, An Insider Tells All, Rapid Media for Trainers, and Rapid Video Development for Trainers, among others. Based in Washington, D.C., Jonathan focuses on coaching and workshops for trainers and consulting and strategic support for learning managers and directors. He also runs workshops in digital media for learning and is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University. He has worked with thousands of people in some of the leading organizations from around the world. With close to 30 years' experience in media and training in 25 countries, Jonathan was formerly a learning executive at the BDC. Deeply committed to evidence-informed approaches to corporate learning. He balances deep skepticism of today's easy fads with an excitement for how the world of talent development and training can help others become awesome at what they do and support organizations in their quest to improve talent. He's been active in ATD for two decades, most recently as a member of the advisory committee for ATD's capability model and a facilitator for the ATD University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education's talent development executive certificate. Hi, Jonathan. Thank you for joining me today. Hi, and who are you talking about just then? It's impressive, right? I can't. I think you know more about the books that I've done. But then of course, ATD's published a lot of those books. So part of that library of knowledge, but great to be with you, Anne. Well, today we're talking about learning innovation and future readiness, what's changing and what won't. And to set a little context for our conversation, I just want to share some current data around C-suite expectations for the future. So this was a recent ATD study that we conducted and we asked C-suite non-learning executives. So CEOs and COOs not CLOs or CHROs. A variety of questions involving their learning functions. One of them was how prepared are you for the future of work? 48% so less than half said their organizations are prepared. And then we asked about their future learning priorities. And they rated developing AI literacy as number one, rescilling and upskilling as number two, and leadership development as number three. And Jonathan, I loved when we were talking about in the intro here, you know, and introducing you and your bio, what is so true about you is your commitment to evidence-informed approaches to corporate learning. And I like that the skepticism of today's easy fads. So I'm curious, given that data, that research about your thoughts and reactions about future learning priorities. Yeah, I think it's interesting. It depends on how you see the glass, I think, with it's half empty, half full, when you think that 48% feel that they're prepared. And the sense I get is many organizations have no idea. They're kind of trying to figure this out. It's almost like they're building the aeroplane while they're flying to use that kind of somewhat hackled analogy. And as they do that, I think a lot of people are kind of closing their eyes and just hoping for the best. I have this lovely scene from planes, trains, and automobiles, not wanting to sound too old here, but there's a fabulous TV show from, well, back in the '80s, and John Candy's driving the car. And I think it's just outside Chicago. And as he's driving the car, he kind of falls asleep and then wakes up on the wrong side of the road, and he's driving down with two semi-trailer trucks on both sides of him. And he just closes his eyes, hoping he'll get through without those two trucks crunching the car. And I think a lot of organizations do that. I think there are some issues that kind of exacerbate it. But when we're talking 48% I've prepared. Now I don't know about the 52% whether that's divided into somewhat prepared, half prepared, just not kind of figuring it out. But when we think about that, I think our kind of workplace ecosystem in different organizations are having thrown at them so many different things like the AI, like the new technology. We've got political shifts in terms of the way different countries work with each other, which affects supply chains. It affects the way different divisions within different countries work with each other. It also affects culture. We also have the need to become more and more efficient. And then there's this business about hybrid working, which has been banging around for a long time. And it's gone quite in the last few years, but there's still these uncertainties we need to get people back into the office. One of my clients is going through that whole process at the moment saying, "We're going to bring people back." And I often wonder, "Do you really think you should bring them back because they've got them in the office or because it's going to make a difference to your organization?" So it's a confused mess that we're in. With technology, we're moving into this post-industrial kind of world. Some people call it IR4. I don't like that. That's two kind of two-glipsy, glamoury, shiny object type of a term. But we're going to this post-industrial world where at the heart of our practice is going to be uncertainty and ambiguity, which is calling for organizations to be far more agile. I think that's what's scary most of us because to be agile and work with uncertainty, we need to develop new mindsets. And so we have this notion of, "Oh, the post-modern world. We've got to be innovative. We've got to be creative." But when we start thinking about those, we're doing it within a mindset of the industrial world. It's kind of like solving the post-industrial world's problems with the industrial world's mindset. Now, I know this all sounds kind of academic and kind of high-falutant and really probably most people should be thinking about having this conversation over a glass of wine and a wine bar because it's kind of very ecoteric. But here's the deal. Organizations have to change or they won't survive. And they don't know how to do that. And so that 52% they need to figure out what that is all about. And I think it comes down to being able to determine what's going to change and what's not going to change. And within all these big myths of, we don't know what the future is. We've actually got to say, something is not going to change. We can kind of explore what that is. But I think my immediate response, my very long-winded immediate response to your question is we need to be thinking about the future on the future's terms, not on our comfort terms from the industrial model right now. AI is changing so many things and we need to be able to embrace the future with uncertainty. And his word gets really exciting in my mind. And that is successful organizations need two things to go ahead. Good strategy and people. And most of the literature that I hear being quoted by people is strategy. And they'll tell me what Zuckerberg's done. I'll go back and talk about what jobs did it, Apple. We need to talk about people too. And strategy will not come alive unless our people in the organizations are agile. The best placed professionals to ensure that happens or to help that happen are the talent development people, whether they're the leaders or whether the people doing the grunt work and actually helping people on an individual basis day to day. So that's kind of my immediate reaction. I threw a lot at you, I suppose, sorry. - No, it's great. It is an exciting time for the learning function for talent development leaders. I also think it's a scary time, right? That I mean, with the banny world, right? Brittle anxious, non-linear incomprehensible comes a lot of uncertainty and I think just the word future itself is so vague, right? You know, like this vast land that you're just not sure what's out there. So I like your approach of we have to start over essentially. Get away from the systems, the processes, the approaches we used to use to figure things out and know that there's a whole new era. But yet be anchored in, as you're saying, there are some things that we can be certain about. There are some basics that fundamentals we can return to, which I think does give people a little bit of comfort that they need in this time. - A lot of the work I've done over the last 20 years, 25 years has been about the future. The BBC, it was doing workshops with executives and producers about the future of broadcasting. When I left it was working with newspapers, helping them transition from paper and ink into the digital world with their skills and talent development there. And so always been future-focused. And in the newspaper world, often I'd meet journalists who would say, "I'm a print journalist. I'm scared to death for this future. I can write well." And in fact, they'd be award-winning writers. They say, "I can write well, but I don't know how I can do this video thing. I don't know how I can do this audio podcast. There's too much changing." And what I found really helped was when I would ask, "Well, what do you think will not change?" We would workshop that a little bit. And almost always it came back to the fact that human beings need a story. We make sense of the world through our story. So we say that person over there, she's a very successful person, because she did this, this, this, and this and this. That's her story. Or that organization is successful. Their story is, so we make stories. And so there will always be a need for a story. So whether or not a journalist is doing it in print or video or both, their course skill that will never change will be storytelling. And that is a huge science of its own. And we can hold on to that. And the parallel in talent development, what will never change is that human beings learn in the same way. And when it's wonderful world, where we no longer get hooked into junk science, like learning styles and things like that. but what we know is that when And people learn, and there's certain things. People have been learning exactly the same way from the year. Of course, we have different ways to describe it. I like the cognitive science perspective to describe how learning happens. But I look at learning needing three things. And with my clients, particularly when I do workshops on learning science, I say, if you want to help people learn, you first need to help them understand. And understanding is about building mental models. And we can make sense of that through Schemer theory. Schemer theory is basically, we draw schematic diagrams in our brain of a process, a knowledge and abstract idea, whatever. So learning is first about understanding and then remembering which we do through practice. And there are many different ways of practicing, you know, space learning, interleaving, all that fun stuff. But to be good at what we do, the academic literature in the field of developing expertise talks about the need for expert feedback. And not that kind of wishy-washy feedback where we say, "Oh, that was lovely. Oh, nice job." Where we encourage people. But real feedback saying, "Actually, if you do this differently, that will change the needle." And then you guys and practices, they come back and we get them feedback. So we know that's how people learn. And that will never change. Now, yes, the Elon Musk kind of chippin' the brain and all that kind of stuff, who knows what will happen there. But we do know that the human function of learning will not change. And so the talent development executive can actually have a lot of confidence when they walk into that C-suite because they can say, "You know what, if we need people to learn these skills to branch into this new market, or if we need to develop the abilities of people to use this new software or equipment, we know how to make that happen." And we know through science it works. What we don't know is the new software. We don't know the new market. So I think it gives us confidence to really be bolder saying, "Put us at the heart of change because you've got this strategy on how to cope with AI or whatever else it is in this new market." We've got the roots to help you do that by helping people learn and grow their skills. So in many ways, being clear on what isn't changing will be really, really helpful. And there are a couple of other things that won't change. The fact that people don't like change. The resistance to change. People don't want to change. It's like, "What, you go through a restaurant and someone wants you to move to another table?" "No, I'm very comfortable where I am right now." You want to move to the other side of the building, but I had a window here. We don't like change. So with the tools that we've got, we've got a lot of good, solid skills that we need to really lean into. I think when you look at some of the resilience literature, we build resilience by being clear on our purpose. So there's a sense of authenticity in who we are as a leader. We build resilience by being clear on what we can do and how that relates to our purpose. And then we're also clear on what we can't do. And I think having that clarity becomes really important because there's this notion that you come into a leadership role and you've got to know everything. And frankly, the people who come into the leadership role knowing everything are the ones who are going to screw up. The ones who come in saying, "I don't know anything." Well, maybe that's too far on the extreme, but you're not mean leaning into that. I just don't know. What's next? Let's see. What I do know is going to give me the skills to help figure out what I don't know. Well, I think that the confidence, I mean, just hearing this myself and I'm not a learning executive, it's reassuring because there's a lot of complexity right now, but there is some simplicity in what you're saying here when you talk about the basics of learning. It doesn't mean it's easy, right? So simple isn't easy, but being able to cut through all the noise because the noise is ever changing, change is changing, noise is changing. Things are always going to be different, but being able to, again, anchor on these fundamental principles, understanding, remembering, feedback, the things we know to be true and the way that learning executives can move the needle by ensuring that's the focus of what they do and not all the fads and the noise. I think it's super reassuring. So it's good stuff. You mentioned the leadership and how it's not about knowing everything, right? But it's about asking good questions, being like, let's figure this out. When you and I talked about this conversation previously, you had mentioned a leader in your life, in your career at the radio station, who modeled that and the impact it had. Can you share that story? Yeah, I'd love to. Guy Bruce was probably, and you can tell that's an Australia because Monty Python says that anybody called Bruce is an Australia, but he was an inspirational leader and had a record of turning radio stations around. He could take a number of six, number eight, rating radio station in 18 months up to number one. And so he came and was hired as a GM or the general manager at the radio station I was working at, whereas the assistant manager and really, really inspiring. And my expectation was that he would come in and put a formula down on the table and say, this is what we need to do. We need to do this. We need to do that. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And if you look at radio broadcasting, there are lots of formulas that you can use to really boost it, particularly if you're a local station, just putting people's names on the radio, doing competitions where you mentioned street names and the local, all those sorts of things are known to drive. And I thought he'd come in and he'd say, right, this is what we're going to do. Boom, boom, boom. And he didn't. And I was in the car with him. We're going to lunch. And I said, Bruce, you've been here now for four weeks. What's the strategy? What are you going to do? Better. And he said, I don't know yet. And I'm sort of floored. And I was in my early 20s. And I know what he's doing. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, it's interesting because when I left the station about three years after that, the revenue has tripled. He did all the stuff. But he didn't know how he was doing it. Now he knew and was confident in himself how he did it. Many people know the Washington Post and the guy who runs the Washington Post is Sir William Lewis. And I worked with him when he was just Will Lewis back at the Daily Telegraph in London. And he was leading the change process at the Daily Telegraph as they went from paper and ink into this new converged newsroom. And my job was to kind of create the talent development skills strategy to get all the journalists in the newsroom trained up. And what was interesting about Will is I'd often come to him and say, look, I'm getting this question from a couple of your journalists in such and such a department. How do you want me to answer? I mean, what's your policy on this or that? And this was at a time when newspapers were really making that big shift, was innovative. And the work at the Telegraph was considered groundbreaking because of its converged news room methodology. And he said, I don't know. I said, so what do I tell him? Tell him I don't know yet. I thought that was really interesting. And often people would say to him, we're doing all these changes. How do you know that it's going to be successful? And he would often say, we don't. But we know if we don't, we won't be successful. And I haven't spoken to Will for probably 18 years. So I haven't spoken to him. He's now a big and famous and very, very influential. But in his role there as a chief editor, I thought those questions and approaches were actually really, really, really helpful. And I look around at different ways of leadership, the leaders who are confident about what doesn't change, but also open to change and taking a little bit of a leap are really, really powerful. Around about 2009, I wrote a book on creativity and innovation that I never published, but I've turned it into a chapter for Elaine Beacon, ATD's new leadership book coming out next year. And it was based on the creativity workshops I used to run in London. It was a pretty crap book to be honest. It's all kind of like me being a young kid trying to figure it all out. But the bottom line was when it comes to creativity and innovation, one of the things that they were saying was you must take a risk if you want to be creative. And what would happen is I would see CEOs and executives say, we're going to be like, we're going to be an innovative organization. You've got to start taking risks. So somebody would take a risk. They'd make a mistake if someone said, whoops, that just cost $10,000. They'd fire them. And what would happen is they'd take this new mindset of let's be risky, but use the old mindset of the industrial era, say what you fail to have fire at you. And what we really need, and I think what we'll exhibited, what, produce exhibited, and in fact what great leaders over the years have exhibited is the fact that you need to embrace uncertainty. You need to embrace that it's okay to make mistakes and they are calculated mistakes. We don't be reckless. It's not reckless risk taking. It's calculated risk taking. And if we are truly going to embrace a future, we have to go in there and say we don't know. In my mind, there's no checklist for the future. And actually the industrial world is all about checklists. Can't do it. The incident we want to think about, you do it developing a checklist for future, forget it. What we really need to be doing is not looking for answers, not looking for predictions. We need to be thinking very carefully about the questions that we're going to ask. And how do those questions relate to the value that our organisations are going to bring to our society, to the shareholders, to the voters, to the communities that need them? The future for leadership is very much about those questions. So when I think about that for a talent development person, and I get back to my experience leading production training at the BBC, it's not about me coming and saying, okay, he's what I'm going to do. It's about saying, what do you need from us? And then saying, how can we fix it? And then not fix it with a fad like, I've got this new software or I've got this new ACME model for regenerative learning. It's not about coming into that. It's about being really focused and intentional about our questions. And then listening to what the needs are. And listening to the struggles people have, we keep hearing. People manage it as being squeezed from both sides. It's under a lot of pressure. What are they telling us that they really need? How can we help? And having that view on the organisation as much as the individual. And I wrote about this in Confessions of a Corporate Trainer. We have two clients, the individual and the organisation. The organisation pays the bill. They fund the training department for as long as they can see it's helping them build business. But they're other clients, the individual. We can't help the organisation unless we're also finally attuned to what the individual's needs are. And again, that comes back to griddle fashion skills. We know how people learn. We know how to help. them learn. So maybe it's about saying, if it's not about whether I do a training class, it's about what do they need to do to learn? They need to understand, remember, and then apply with feedback. Well, maybe I've just got to ask the question, how can I help that happen for them other than my standard? I've got a training program for that. That might be that now we're helping the managers be the trainers or the performance coach. And we're becoming more strategic. But when I'm actually changing our focus on helping them do the work of learning, we're just changing the way we're getting them to do the work of learning. And maybe we're one step back and we're empowering other people to do some of the stuff that we're doing before. And I think the changes, there are so many changes coming about that there is no way the traditional training department can meet the development needs of the modern organisation. That's another thing to admit, because a lot of us don't want to do that. We want to say we can be all things to all people and do everything. We can't. And while we try and do that, we're only going to make full of ourselves. We're going to be disappointing people. But when we can say, well, you know what, Ms CEO, you've given me $15 million through on this training department. You want all this stuff done. I actually can't do it. So let's go through and work out what you can do without. And then maybe cull that even more by figuring out how we can help other people do it. I mean, it's just different ways of thinking. And I think going back again by being confident about what doesn't change and making sure we lean into doing that well, we have the leverage and the credibility to have the conversations about what we're not going to do. And then maybe how we help people or other people kind of do that. The problem is there's no formulas. There's no quick and easy way of doing it. There's no checklist. This is complex. And we've got to start with the patterns. And then with those patterns, figure out how we help other people maybe do some of that work. I keep going off in these different directions because there's so many strands. It's fascinating though. And it requires such a mindset shift. We've been trained from a young age that checklists, you know, this plus this equals this, but problems rather than solutions, you know, it's definitely this a new way of thinking. But there's a lot there, Jonathan. And you make me think too when you talk about what we do know how our brains learn. That's not going to change is it? No, there's no science coming out though. Actually, we're learning in different ways from how we thought. I think what might change is the way whether we explain it. And you know, when we look at the research, most of the research is based on typical learners, not a typical learners. So that's an area of research as we think about a neurodivergent workforce. People talk about neurodiversity. And I keep saying, where's the science? Because the science is still very, very, very young. And we need that to be able to serve people who've got a typical needs, but we're pretty confident about typical needs. We could also say with science, and I guess I'm a post-positivist in this regard, science only tells us what we know so far. And there might be more data that comes along. And there might be better ways to find more rich data. But right now, what we do have is pretty solid. And you know, it's so interesting when you look at the cognitive science and you go back and you look at pedagogy over thousands of years, the old-fashioned people were doing pretty much what cognitive science says. That is practice, practice, practice. I mean, at the end of the day, it's practice, practice, practice. And we get hoodwing to this idea of learning styles will be better for some, no, no, we're all visual learners. We're all kinocetic learners. We're all auditory learners. So, you know, that might make it sound sexy, but really learning is still hard work. And learning is always about what we bring in the resources we bring in that we use to make sense of new information. I think what will change is maybe how we describe learning, not I don't think we're going to learn. If you look at neuroscience, people get so excited, oh, neurosciences, neurosci, come on, give me a break. It's not telling as much that it's new. So, okay, someone tells me there's a study that shows people need safe learning spaces, you know, that space needs to be safe to learning. Come on, give me a break. Carl Rogers was talking about that in the 1950s. That's not new. All we're doing is explaining it from a different perspective. That's valuable. But it's explaining it from a different perspective. And very often, when you go and read these studies, which most people don't, and I learned this from a US artist in New York, most of the studies end with, based on this, we could be led to believe that this is likely. It's not black and white solid. These are findings that have very tentative knowledge itself is tentative. I kind of just roll my eyes a tiny bit when we hear about other neuroscience of learning. I'm a big fan of the science of learning, but we need to remember that it's not actually telling us many things that are radically new. It's just giving us a different perspective. And that can certainly help us fine tune what we're doing. But there's nothing you want to the Sun in many ways. There's some things that will just never change. So, I don't think learning is going to change. I think you're right. And as a change of earth's person myself, I'm counting on it. You're counting on it. It's funny. That whole idea of being a futurist. I was thinking about becoming a futurist, but I moved to America. And the thing that really got the excited was you can predict anything. And by the time you're proven wrong, everyone's forgotten what you're predicted anyway. It's kind of like telling the weather. The difference between the weather, they know that you're wrong. Let's put on your future as tap from it. We've talked about what's not changing. We think it's not changing most likely. But what will or what can we talk about the need for agility and baguity, resilience, some of the things we need to develop for this future world. Do you have any predictions that when we think about for the learning function, for talent development leaders, and the next, I don't know if you can even say year or two, maybe months, what might be changing that we could prepare for? I think first thing is it's not homogenous. So big organizations like the Accentures and McKinsey's and all those people who've got the time money and resources to invest in high-end learning solutions are going to look very, very different from the credit unions with eight branches at Arkansas. So I think we first of all need to understand that shift. And we need to understand that those organizations are going to be in very different places. And I think that we spend more time in our profession talking about the big stuff that's changing and not enough about what's actually changing for some of those smaller organizations who are doing incredible work in their community. So the change is going to look very different depending on where people are, what they're doing, and the size of the organization. So that's the first piece I just want to say. We're a fork roads. I think that in some of these organizations where we're going to have any big impact and we can show that talent development will actually help an organization flourish and be productive and create a climate where people want to come to work. I think in those organizations what's going to happen is that talent development leaders will be at the centre of their organizational strategy, but it's not going to be everywhere because I don't think yet we have the skill set in leadership to make that happen. I say that very carefully and obviously ATD is doing that with the talent development executive program with UPEN and that's great. But a lot of people end up in the talent leadership role with no background in learning. I meet these folks. They're great folks. They've got a background in manufacturing. They've got a background in project management. They've got a background all this stuff. But if you ask them to describe how learning happens, they get a blank look on their face. That is not acceptable. I'm sorry, we have to do what we can to prepare these people because they are going to be under fire and not going to be able to survive the organization's demands if they can't do that. So we've got two worlds, tale of two cities. But those who've got those skills, they understand things like data analytics. They understand change. They understand that we need to be able to have conversations in the language of the C-suite where we talk about impact, not about process. What learners leave a learning experience with, not what we put into the learning experience. Those kinds of conversations are transformed. What's going in some organizations, I think talent development is going to be really really key. And executives are going to look to their talent folks to say, we've got this great strategy, how do we make it work? Peter Drucker, he said, culture, each strategy for breakfast. In some organizations, we're going to be in really cool positions to actually shape the destiny of the organization. And by being in that position, we're also going to be partnering with the people that can make that happen. I can have the world's greatest architect design, the most incredible building, right? I mean, you're in Pennsylvania. I think a falling watch, you know, Frank Lloyd Wright. If he had crappy builders, his artistry would never come alive. It's master craftsman. And so our job is to keep reminding organizations that if you help your people, they will make your strategy real. And I think in those organizations, our roles will probably expand out to influence other parts of the organization like recruitment, like morale, like engagement. And so in that really exciting new organization, what's going to happen is the talent development folks are going to have a much less defined role because it's going to be pulling all these strands that I pulled together today that we find hard to describe because we're grounded in what works. We understand learning. We understand how organizations function as systems. We understand the need to align what we do to organizational goals because those things are working people are going to look past the fact that we've got all these kind of abstract ideas because we're going to be able to deliver results. That's going to be where we have the substantial change. Now, that's one organization. That can also happen in that credit union in Arkansas, but it will look a little bit different because it might be much more localised. Now, the organizations that don't get that, they'll put people in there and say, "Oh, this talent department is failing." So we're going to put somebody in with an experience of project management, managing different silos within the organization. They can come in and make them fix that up. They're going to struggle because until you understand those fundamentals, it's going to be managing by checklists. And you can't checklists your way into the future. You have to walk into the future ready to respond with what it throws at you by being prepared for answers. So I think we have a future in our industry where we can change the world quite literally. So ATD, making a better world and all that kind of stuff, that's actually very real. But we need the skills to do that. In many cases, people don't have the skills. They don't have the background. And so maybe organizations like ATD need to be stepping in, not telling you how to do your job, and but stepping into provide that thought for them because they're going to be in trouble. So we need to be able to deal with the learning, what we do in the classroom with the organizational goals, and we need to be showing how we do that. These are the things that are most important, but we also need to be connecting that to that ground level. I know preparing the profession, especially leaders, has been a charge for years. Since I've been at ATD, you mentioned the program ATD has with University of Pennsylvania's graduate school of education, UPEN, GSE. We developed a certificate program, and I think it's a good example of the yes and that you're talking about. Yes, you need to have this breadth of skills at the C-suite level as you move into that function, and you need the depth of learning, understanding expertise. In that course, we talk about being a C-suite leader in talent development business strategy, change, you talked about analytics. And then also the future readiness component, which you teach Jonathan, so such a treat that folks get to learn from you. And I do know the role of a talent development leader has expanded in recent years. So much that's required of folks these days. As you talk about that, there's another thing that comes to my mind. And it all wraps into that innovation and creativity, which by the way, I have a lot of fun teaching. That's a lot of fun working with folks. But one of the things I think, as we kind of think about the future, whatever level the leader is, if they're a director, a CLO, a senior VP or whatever, it's important to think about resilience and self-care because there is so much changing that's hard to keep up, and it can be overwhelming. And I think also it can be overwhelming to kind of make those identifications, what's changing, what's not changing. And be brave enough to kind of step back and say, I'm not sure I can do this. Or I think we need to give this a shot. Let's start small rather than trying to waterfall it over the entire organization. And so I would also be encouraging people to build networks when I was learning executive at the BBC. It was hard work. You go back in the politics of a big organization. It can be overwhelming. I'd come over to ATD from London every year. And I'd come back kind of renew because I'm talking to other professionals. If there's any kind of advice I would throw to people is build those networks of support. Find a coach who can talk your language, ask your questions, and just remind you every once in a while that you are saying, despite all the craziness going on around you. And also keep reading stuff. That's the most important piece too. There are so many ideas that are coming up in literature. HED publishes a lot of them. There are other organizations as well. But being abreast of what different people are talking about, I think can be incredibly empowering and just hang out with people who are thinking about the future and not people who are saying or approaching learning in an old project management way. Nothing wrong with project management. But that's not how we release the capability of an organization. Project management is about managing it. Our job is to release and let people see the potential so that with their skills that they continue to grow organically, they can actually be all the future of the company. And when we get to that point, which is all about pulling strings from different directions, that's when the fireworks happen. That's when it really becomes spectacular. As we start to wrap up today, Jonathan, one question for you, maybe advice to tunnel development leaders listening, who think about, and I can imagine just kind of putting myself in their shoes that this idea of staying anchored to the basics, the fundamentals, what we know doesn't change is reassuring, building their confidence already. Yet, at the same time, all of how their role has expanded, the pressures from the sea suite and what's being asked of them and then the shining objects, fads, whatever we want to call them, AI, kind of just swirling about and distracting. How can folks kind of stay anchored to that, not get distracted by the fads, yet ensure they're responding appropriately to evolutions in the field and staying future ready? From your experience, if you could just still maybe a next step or a first step or a piece of advice. That's a tough question. Thanks for finishing with a tough question. I was just on a Zoom call about an hour ago with a guy from Penn State who's in China. And we're talking about this. And we're talking about the values in doctoral programs. That's kind of a big conversation. And he kept coming back to sharing and connections. And I think that if we're going to be ready for the future and help manage and lead other people, I think we need to be very intentional and conscious about the relationships that we form within our organisations with other stakeholders. And we need to understand where they're coming from. We make sense of the world through our stories, which are schemas, mental models in our brains. And when we come in and we do change, they're going to interpret that through whatever tool or schema they have. It might be, oh, change again. It might be, I'm fearful, I can't do this. It might be, I'm sick of this, I'm going to cause a problem. We don't know what their response is. But usually their response, which may come back to hurt us, is not reflective of who we are, it's reflective of where they are at. And our job is to actually through relationship building, through trust building, ethically help them see something that's different. Sometimes that will be saying to them, this is not a traditional training solution. Actually, you'll get more value if you don't spend money on training, but you help your colleagues do pin networks or something like that. But I think that as we go through it, build relationships, build trust, because other people are going to come back to what you're leading through different lenses. And we need to honor their lenses as well as have an opportunity to help them change that. And we can only do that through relationships and trust. So build relationships, understand people come from their perspective, and also don't kick yourself too much, because I think sometimes we can be too judgmental on ourselves. Super helpful. Thank you so much. For folks listening, again, Jonathan teaches a block of the talent development executive certificate, a program that ATD and UPENGSC have partnered to create. And if you're interested in learning more about that program, you can reach out to me and Parker, a parker at TD.org, and get more time with Jonathan, which would be pretty cool. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, Jonathan. How might listeners get in touch with you if they want to ask some additional questions or keep the conversation going? It's probably the easiest. I'm on LinkedIn, my email addresses, [email protected], but always enjoy the conversations. I'm great to hang out with you today, Anne. We've talked about lots of stuff and just having a call to talk about this earlier on was a lot of fun. And I think the really cool work that you and the ATD team are doing for talent leaders, because it's a lonely job leading a talent development function. People think, oh, great. You're the learning executive. It's lonely and you get a lot of blowback. And there's a lot of headwind you've got to fly again. So I think the work that you guys do is really, really valuable. So hopefully you don't ever lose sight of that as well. So thank you. Thank you so much. And I know that your words today have been inspiring to folks listening to those leaders. And I appreciate your time today, Jonathan. Thanks, Anne. Appreciate it. Take care. Thank you for listening to this podcast by the Association for Talent Development. If you found this show insightful or useful, please be sure to like, subscribe and share it with a colleague.