Agile L&D: fast and adaptive training at the speed of business

Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to Talent Talks, the L&D podcast about the future of work and the talent driving it forward. Today, learning leaders are expected to do more, do it better, and do it faster than ever before to strengthen teams, scale training, and to show results. Because when learning works, businesses move forward.

Together, we’ll explore what that really means for L&D in growing organizations, what to rethink, what to refine, and what to double down on. I’m your host, Gina Lionatos, and this is Talent Talks.

Talent Talks is brought to you by TalentLMS, the easy-to-use training platform that helps growing businesses launch faster and see results sooner. [00:01:00] Learn more at talentlms.com

On today’s episode:

Natal Dank: If you start seeing your employee experience or your L&D solution as the product, then what problem is it solving? How is it making an impact? Why should people consume it or use it? And how’s it gonna help them get the job done?

Host: We’re talking about taking a more agile approach to the way we do L&D.

Joining us to discuss is Natal Dank, co-founder of PXO Culture, and someone who’s literally written a book on the topic. Together, we’ll dive into how businesses can shift to a more responsive, dynamic, and ultimately effective way of training their teams. Stay with us.

Well, Natal, welcome to Talent Talks. We’re [00:02:00] very excited to have you with us.

Natal Dank: Great to be here. Thank you very much.

Host: So Natal, you have literally written the book on Agile L&D and Agile HR for that matter, and it’s something that you’ve clearly spent a lot of time thinking about. It kind of seems like we’re at a point where it’s more important than ever, which is why I’m very excited to be having this conversation today.

The workplace, as you know, is becoming more complex, and the skills that we need are changing all the time. In a recent study that we ran, we found that almost half of the people surveyed think that their skills have become outdated in the past five years. And on top of this, we’ve seen The World Economic Forum predicts that 44% of all core skills will be disrupted by next year.

We’re not speaking too far off in the horizon. So to open, I’d really like to get a sense of what you make of all this. Are we reaching a point where traditional L&D can’t keep up with the rate of change?

Natal Dank: So it’s a great [00:03:00] question. I call the era that we’re now in fundamental uncertainty, and we’ve shifted into this environment where we used to see change and uncertainty as something that you just had to get through.

So you go, “Oh, okay, we’ll just get through this change, or through this kind of little bit of hard times, and then we’ll be okay.” And I think in organizations we still talk like that. We still talk about, “Let’s get through this big change program. Let’s do this big leadership development, and then once we’re at the other side, we’ll sort of build resilience back up, or we’ll be stable for a while.”

And what we’re seeing is that, yeah, economic turmoil, po- geopolitical tension, the acceleration of AI and other tech just means things are moving so quickly, that it’s not that you don’t have all the data at hand, and you can’t make the sort of decision now. What it is, is that if you plan and make some strategies, something’s gonna change quite soon, but you can’t fully predict what it is.

And that means [00:04:00] whatever you do, you have to have that inbuilt mechanism of change in there. And that really shifts, I think, the way that we have to work, the way that we have to collaborate, the way that we build solutions like learning. So I don’t think it’s that we’re not relevant or we’re out of date, it’s the way that we engage and create experiences and build learning has to change.

Host: I’ve heard you say before that you can’t spend three to six months building a large learning solution without knowing that it’s exactly what the business needs. The thing is though, now within those six months, needs can and often do change. So I’d like to talk a little about the danger of those longer development cycles, which were, you know, quite the norm for a long period of time.

Do you have any examples, perhaps, where a learning solution or program became outdated before it was even able to be launched?

Natal Dank: Yeah, I think [00:05:00] there’s a lot like that. I think, like, I was just at a conference in Copenhagen last week, and an audience member even commented on all the presentations, which were all about digitalization, culture transformation, and developing leaders for this environment of change.

And what was interesting is that the turnaround for programs, whether it be a learning program, a leadership program, or a culture change, people were talking a few weeks, sometimes even within… Like, they were doing these leadership programs that would, they’d bring them all together in a day, and they would create sort of action plans, and then they’d go off and start implementing them straight away, kinda thing.

And within a few months, they had changed the whole strategy and their whole kind of ways of working. And this person commented that even probably a year or definitely a few years ago, you would talk about things taking six months, a year, and now that just does not happen. [00:06:00] So I would say that what’s different is, so definitely I had leadership programs in the past where I think it would even take us sometimes three to six months just to get the budget, and you’d get all the money upfront, and you would then go to tender.

So then you’d interview various business schools on who was gonna run the program with you. Then you would do some needs analysis, so they’d come in and they’d, you know, interview some leaders, and then we’d design the program. So after that, there’d be another three months, so we’re talking six months to a year for the program to then be running.

And I always comment that that kind of process, the first program, you’d often call a pilot. But by then we had signed the vendor form; we had the CEO in the room for the pilot. Like, what does that mean? And so, of course, we couldn’t fail, and if anything happened in that first workshop, all we could do was tweak from now, this point onwards.

We couldn’t fundamentally change anything, and it was all [00:07:00] scheduled in everyone’s diaries, you know. And I remember at the time, this would be about, I reckon 15 years ago, when I used to design leadership programs in in-house roles, and, you know, I thought it was cutting edge because I had, you know, these several days where they went in and did experimental learning.

I would… They all then went and ran designed a project together and delivered that. You know, they had coaching; they had psychometrics. So I thought it was great, but it was all waterfall, I suppose. We just built it all upfront and then cascaded it through the kind of ranks of the organization. So yeah, I would say any program that’s designed like that just doesn’t work anymore.

Host: Yeah. I mean, we’ve talked about the need generally to move faster, but, you know, many organizations are still operating with, learning processes and legacy systems that were designed for a different pace of change. In your experience, what might be the biggest [00:08:00] barriers that are preventing organizations from delivering learning at the speed that business needs it to be delivered today?

Natal Dank: Yeah, look, I think that it’s about where we’re still pushing learning out onto people, and we sort of create learning in a way that not only do we push it out onto people and they need to consume it through our learning management systems or getting scheduled in the diary, but we also then… learning is seen as this thing that happens away from work, so you kind of, you take two days out and you go to a program, or, you know, you take time away from your desk and you go and do your eLearning.

So it’s seen as this kind of, it’s still seen as a kind of an occasion, a kind of separate thing to your job. And we know from all the studies and all the theories out there that you learn best when doing the work itself, when solving real [00:09:00] problems. So I think even though we’ve talked about trying to connect learning with the flow of work and the moment that you learn, which is asking that question or solving the problem or, you know, getting better at something, I think I feel that we’re not, still not very good at that.

And the speed of getting, of, I don’t know, creating those moments that matter, I think that’s where we’re behind.

Host: So just on that a little bit, a little bit more, because, I mean, obviously at TalentLMS, we’re an LMS vendor, and we are certainly very intent on bringing AI into our product in a way that is going to add value for the L&D professional, for the trainer.

And I would love to kind of talk a little bit more about how AI can help L&Ds put out great work in not necessarily faster, but from the perspective of needing to pivot to a need or being a little bit more agile in terms of, you know what? Things are [00:10:00] shifting all the time in business right now, and as such, we need a spur-of-the-moment product training, or we’ve actually had to recall a part of our product or shift what our customer support team needs to focus on.

I’d love to get a little bit more your thoughts on how we can approach that in a more agile way.

Natal Dank: Yeah. So I think where the speed comes into it is getting closer, knowing that you’re delivering value as soon as you can, and you do that by testing and validating and using data. So that’s where your learning management system, and particularly AI, can start to help you.

And this is where I think, you know, this is what agile L&D is all about. How do you … Essentially, each sort of learning solution, shall we say, it’s not necessarily a program, it’s not necessarily a course, or… but solution that you’re gonna create. There’s a hypothesis that sits behind it. So what is the problem you’re trying to solve?

So is it that someone needs to … You [00:11:00] know, some of the basic ones, is it that someone needs to know how to negotiate better and sell a product? Okay, so how do we help them do that? And how can you get to that kind of, solving that problem as fast as possible? I think where platforms like yours helps people is they can set up very safe, short experiments testing different ways to do that.

They also can get close to the point of need because they’re able to analyze, okay, when does someone have this problem? When would they go about, you know, solving this? In what situations do they need the learning? What kind of information do they need to know? Or what do they need to practice to get better at it?

And where I’m seeing AI as being really effective is not only can it help you set up those sort of short, experiments, and to test what works, what doesn’t, but it can be tracking how people engage, are engaging with any kind of [00:12:00] content or solution that you create. They can be working out where people have problems.

They can be working out where people need more information. It can also be, sort of acting like a coach. “Hey, I saw that you, that went well. How do you feel about doing this now?” So I think AI helps us get faster of kind of getting to the point of need more and understanding how to get the right solutions to the people at the right time.

Host: Yeah, I think AI is definitely creating a world where those L&D experiments are a lot more possible and a lot more low-stakes as well because three to six months haven’t gone into making it a reality, but it’s been able to be shipped, tested, analyzed, and iterated on. So I think that this is an absolutely beautiful part of where L&D is able to go.

Natal Dank: Totally, and you can just track the data like you never could before. You can even have a bit of AB testing, or you can try [00:13:00] two different solutions you know, two teams that do the same kind of work and see what happens, see which one has the best result. One half of the business does this, one half of the business does that, and then look at the performance of the sales or the revenue or the, you know, the turnaround.

So I feel like being able to run your L&D a bit more like a digital consumer, product, you know, is much more evidence-based and data-driven. That, that’s super exciting. And where we add craft is that we are experts in the learning frameworks, the way you go about it, what, you know, the way… what’s going to work for people and how to put things together.

That’s where we add the value, and then… but we now have these platforms that can give us lots of data to understand where and how to put the solution.

Host: AB testing L&D. This is the future, and this is super exciting actually. Let’s say you’re speaking to an L&D manager who’s, you know, [00:14:00] really looking at applying agile ways of learning, but the stakeholders within the business are a little nervous.

You know, they want the certainty, the sign-offs. They want, you know, fully finished solutions before anything goes live versus, for example, the testing and experimenting that we were just talking about. What would your advice be for having that conversation and helping people become more comfortable with experimentation?

Natal Dank: Well, I tend to not talk about Agile or any kind of methods. I talk about the problem to solve, and I talk about the need to have some evidence that we’re solving the right problem and that we’re spending the right amount of money. So, and we’re gonna, you know, invest the right time and energy from their people.

You know, stakeholders generally sort of come to you not just with the learning need, but often the solution at the same time. So they say, “Oh, you know, my people aren’t working effectively, they need time [00:15:00] management,” or, “My managers need management development because the teams aren’t delivering like they should.”

Now, we all know that actually, often the problem to solve is not the one that the stakeholder is presenting, and also it’s not the solution. But you then have to kind of get underneath that. “Okay, well, what’s going on? What’s the evidence that these teams aren’t delivering? Let’s kind of go and work out what’s going on for these teams.”

And we might find that it’s actually that they don’t understand the strategy, maybe that’s the kind of the team makeup. It’s not necessarily the management skills as such. So we want to try and help them kind of spend time in the problem itself. So I often spend time looking at the business challenge with stakeholders, and what I want to know is what’s the value if we solve this?

And once you start talking about value and impact, it becomes a different conversation because that’s what you know you’re going after. So if they say, “Oh well, [00:16:00] we’re not shipping our products fast enough,” or, “Our projects aren’t getting delivered on time,” or, “I’m not seeing people in the office, so I don’t think they’re productive,” okay, so this starts to…

Like, it… Each one of those goes in different directions. So once we understand the value that you’re going after; You can start to talk about different ways of doing that. Okay, so our hypothesis is that if we create learning around this topic, we’re going to be able to deliver projects on time. Okay, can we go and run a short experiment to find out what’s going to work effectively in this area?

And so you bring them into that kind of problem-solving routine. So I’m gonna run a short experiment to see if we can actually get evidence that this is gonna solve the problem. Can I do that? Are you part of that? Are you excited about that? Do you wanna be part of that? Do you wanna watch the data? Do you wanna see the result?

Then once we’ve got that result, we know we can make bigger commitments. I think that this kind of experimentation approach of creating [00:17:00] products and particularly finding out what’s gonna work with consumers, that’s pretty standard in business now. So I think if you talk about how do we get the data to know that we’re gonna make the right investment, can I go and test this hypothesis, get some information, and come back to you, and then we can design the full program?

Generally, I find that stakeholders quite like that.

Host: And I think that’s such a great point that you raise, that if the business is already working in this way in other parts of the business, why on earth not apply that to L&D? So I think that’s such an awesome point. We often assume that, you know, learning is something delivered by L&D.

Well, of course it is. But some of the most effective learning can happen through managers, mentors, and peers. What role do you think peer-to-peer learning can play in an agile learning culture, and have you seen any great examples that you can share?

Natal Dank: Yes. [00:18:00] So I think that we underestimate the connection part of learning, and the, I suppose, the informal learning is the term.

And an example that I can think of is a team that I worked with a little while ago. They got asked to create a leadership executive program for their C-suite. So we’re talking top leaders of a very large organization. And they thought, “Well, we don’t have the money to buy everyone to Harvard, but at the same time, we need to make sure that this is going to be seen as credible. But also we’re…our business is changing, and we’re moving, you know, as a big financial institution. We’re becoming more digital. We’re supposed to actually work more digitally with our customers, so we maybe should learn this way as well.”

So what they did is they actually, just to land the core concepts, they sketched out different ways of doing this program, literally on paper to begin with, and they took [00:19:00] that to a series of senior leaders.

And very quickly, they found out what senior leaders didn’t want, and I think this is the key. So this is a really cheap, cheerful way of testing something early on. So we’re not we haven’t got anywhere near design. We’re just trying to get some design principles. And what they found is that I think they landed on something called the four Cs.

So there was context, content, connection, and coaching. And what they found is that the content was key. They needed to think they were learning from the very, very best, the very, you know, the experts. But it didn’t matter if it was online, and it didn’t matter if they sometimes logged into a, you know, a learning management system.

They didn’t need to sit in a classroom. They then needed skin in the game. So whatever they did, they needed to think that there was gonna be an impact on the strategy and the business itself. So they linked it to a real project, and they had the head of strategy be the person that leads that part of the program and also [00:20:00] oversees the projects that came out.

They then, however, realized that people wanted to feel very connected, and actually there was a need to bring these leaders together in these groups where they could actually learn from each other, challenge each other, and essentially kind of coach each other. So yes, they liked the idea of having a coach, but the concept of connection and this peer learning was actually really, really important.

And so that was something they created outside of the actual program itself, you know, what we would see in as the more formal learning. And that was bringing people together to talk about the different topics, to talk about the projects, to talk about strategy, to have sort of little get-togethers, bring in guest speakers, etc., etc.

I’ve slightly gone off on tangent with that one, but it’s an example of that I think we maybe forget this aspect of our design when we go in and start thinking about the content too early, or the kind of [00:21:00] we think we need to kind of create a learning in a certain way. And actually sometimes just putting people together to talk about something is learning in itself.

Host: And I really think peer-to-peer is Agile’s best friend. This is like an immediate access to your peers who already have knowledge and experience to share, and I think that it’s just such a beautiful complement to any learning program, especially something that is kind of moving at a faster pace.

And perhaps there’s not, you know, traditional content that’s up to date, and while it’s being brought up to speed and updated and reviewed, that peer-to-peer piece can really complement all of those efforts. So you make a strong case for speed to skill as a competitive advantage. I know it’s something you’ve spoken to about in the past and something that we are well behind here as well at TalentLMS.

Speed to skill is both a competitive advantage and a huge challenge for businesses at the moment, in view [00:22:00] of pace of change. But speed alone here obviously isn’t the goal. Business impact is really the goal. What do you think organizations risk getting wrong when they focus too heavily on accelerating learning, and how can they ensure faster skill development that actually translates into better performance and better results?

Natal Dank: So I suppose for me it’s that you focus on the performance. Learning in a workplace environment is about improving business performance. And the reason I use the concept of product-led, and which comes a lot from Agile, is that if you see your L&D solution or the employee experience itself, and L&D is part of that, as the product, then you’re better able to talk about value because products deliver value by solving problems.

So a phone, we buy the phone because we wanna stay connected, we wanna kind of, you [00:23:00] know, lose hours on social media, we want to read our emails, we wanna kind of call our friends. There’s a series of jobs to be done or problems to be solved as to why we go and buy this product. We… You know, if you can make a great product, you delight us, we stay loyal, we wanna use it again, we recommend it to others.

If you start seeing your employee experience or your L&D solution as the product, then what problem is it solving? How is it making an impact? Why should people consume it or use it? And how’s it gonna help them get the job done? Once you think in those lines, it actually becomes much easier because your, you know, onboarding isn’t a process or a series of learning initiatives, it’s that, okay, on day one, I need to feel connected.

I need to be able to understand how I fit in the strategy. I need to know who my team members are. I need to be able to log on from day one. I need to understand certain things about the strategy and the organization. I need to feel [00:24:00] like I can contribute my skills to this new organization. I need to understand my manager, et cetera.

So there’s a series of problems to solve, and if you go about solving them, you can measure that that has actually happened. So you move away from learning being about the content that people need to consume or the process that someone has to go through, and you’d move to, ah, what’s the job to be done or the problem to solve?

How do I go about that, and how do I track the evidence that I’m solving it? If you think that way, then I think it’s your question, we just flip it. You know, we start with what is the business performance that we need to go, we need to demonstrate or achieve, and then how will we get there? And of course, if we can set up small safe experiments testing that we’re actually moving towards that result before we design the whole solution, or we build it up incrementally based on the evidence, then that’s even more powerful.

Because the main thing about working that way is you’re [00:25:00] They talk a lot of… at Agile about minimizing waste, and people don’t quite, “Well, why? Is that just because you’re working really fast?” And it’s not. It’s that because you’re constantly trying to look at the data and the value, does this work versus this one, you get rid of the things that don’t work.

And actually, if you test something quite early and it doesn’t, then that’s fine. You just stop there, and you pivot, and you move in a different direction. Also, once you- if you’re starting to constantly prioritize work based on value, at the start, you think of all these things that you should do, and actually half of them aren’t going to be successful.

Or, you know, once you do a bit of work, or you get a bit closer to the problem to solve, you realize that’s a waste of our time, so you don’t do it. Where if you work in the old sort of more waterfall way, you would plan it all out, and you would go through all of that until the end. So the idea is you get to your solution faster because you get rid of the things you don’t need to do faster.

That’s actually [00:26:00] how you get speed. It’s not so much that you just work faster. It’s actually you don’t do the things that are wasteful, and you do the things that are valuable.

Host: I love the thinking of your learning solution, your learning program being treated as a product, because I think it also kind of lends itself to the idea of putting perhaps, like, as we speak about experiments, right?

Putting out the first solution, like, as a Beta version, getting some feedback, getting some inputs, testing it out, and then, you know, reiterating on it the next release, the next release, and kind of building on it. And I think that this is really the beauty and the important part about L&D working in a more agile, fast-paced, whatever you’d like to call it, way, rather than over-investing at the beginning and then ending up in a spot where you’ve invested all this time at the beginning and then in fact you’re so invested in the [00:27:00] process that the results at the end may not be where you wanted them to land as a business, and having to go all the way back to square one, versus putting out the Beta, testing it, refining it, refining it, refining it, and I think that this is really a beautiful thing for L&D professionals to be able to do.

Natal Dank: Yeah, like, if you’re measuring the impact of your leadership development program at the end, it’s way too late. You’ve missed the opportunity, and that’s why we end up measuring activity. We end up measuring how many people attended, what was their feedback, what one thing did they do differently. Maybe we go and capture a bit of narrative about what did they do since they’ve been to the program.

But all of that is just activity. It’s just things that have happened, and that could be evidence towards, but we need to be showing, well, what’s the difference on revenue, sales, productivity, efficiency. What’s the actual impact that we’re going after?

Host: What would be the data points that you think are [00:28:00] fair to look at in the short term?

So I know that you just mentioned a couple, like in terms of the interaction with the learning itself. But when we look at, you know, business-level outcomes, do you think it’s misleading, or what’s your take on trying to get a sense of those bigger, longer-term impact outcomes when we’re looking at shorter bursts of testing and learning?

Natal Dank: Yeah. So I talk about lead and lag indicators. So your lag indicators are ones that usually need a little bit longer to see. So they’re your maybe retention over a period of time, maybe more sales for a certain product, productivity lifts over a period of time. However, you can track your lead indicators prior to that.

So if you’ve got something where, say if we’ve got, okay, we want to upskill a team to be able to sell a product more. [00:29:00] Okay. So we can start with how did they engage with it? Did they watch the videos? Did they download it? Are they having the right conversation? So at this stage it’s all activities that we’re tracking.

It’s user behavior. But these are the user behaviors that we think are the right ones to indicate that we’re gonna lead towards this lag metric, which is sell more products. You then wanting to track the first few engagements that this team has after any kind of learning intervention. Okay, what happened?

Did they have more conversations with clients? How many clients did they meet? What was the kind of conversion rate, etc.? Did we see any immediate change? Again, this is user behavior, but it’s telling you you’re moving in the right direction. If they went and they didn’t sell anything after the first initial one, I would wanna step in and go, “Okay, we’re not seeing the right lead indicators here.

What, you know, do we need to do something differently?” And then I would talk to the business, how long does it [00:30:00] take to see an increase of selling these products? Is it over a couple of weeks? Is it over two to three months? I would ask the business to give you guidance as to what’s a realistic time period, and then you would sort of go back from there.

Okay, what are all the user behaviors that we need to see to indicate that people are doing the right things towards getting to this endpoint? I think what has happened in the past with L&D teams, and also I dare say the wider HR kind of function, is we’ve often thought that, oh, but there are all these other factors that can impact the learning and the results.

But finance doesn’t go and, you know, not measure things because other factors could be getting it. Or marketing, this is exactly what marketing do. They do a campaign, and then they track what happened as a result. There could be other factors. It could be summer, it could be, you know, all these other things could happen to lead people [00:31:00] to buy the product more or engage with the product differently.

But marketing is gonna track exactly what happens following that campaign, and we need to kinda step into that mindset of actually what we’re doing makes an impact, and so let’s go and track it. Yes, and then if there are some different results, or isn’t it interesting that in July and August this happened, but when we then ran it in November, December, this happened?

Okay, so it looks like the weather affects the result. Okay, fine. But see ourselves as another part of the business where we believe that our solution will have this result, and don’t worry about so much about the other factors. I’d get very passionate about this, but you hear a lot of L&D teams saying, “Oh, but how do you measure learning?”

You know? You measure it by looking at what people do differently. And yeah, so we need to get over the idea that learning is impacted by so many different things, and therefore we can’t measure it. No, we definitely can. We can measure what happens in the business as a result. [00:32:00] Sorry, I’m over my preaching now.

Host: You, you, you’ve summed it up so beautifully, actually, and it’s such a great way to wrap up the conversation. I think there’s so much more we could unpack, but I’m so pleased with what we’ve kind of uncovered here today. You know, I think when it comes to the need for businesses to work more responsively, adapt to what’s happening right now, and kind of test and learn and pivot, these are kind of all of the areas that businesses are kind of struggling with in many ways.

And if learning and development can be the function that helps personify that and bring that to life within the business, I think that this is… would be a huge win. And so I think what we’ve spoken about has just been so meaningful today. Thank you, thank you so much for your time today.

Natal Dank: Thank you for having me.

When you invest in training, you need to know it will pay off. According to G2, [00:33:00] TalentLMS customers launch training twice as fast as the industry average. They also report seeing ROI in less than a year, while many LMS platforms take closer to 16 months. That means you’re not just getting started faster, you’re proving value sooner.

Looking to launch training without the complexity? Visit talentlms.com. Thanks for tuning in. In the next episode, we’re looking at what it takes to scale L&D successfully. You can find Talent Talks on all podcast platforms. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode.