How to turn Learning into Performance

What really drives performance at work?

It’s a question many leaders and learning professionals wrestle with — and one that my guest, Paul Matthews, has spent decades exploring.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Paul challenges some of the most common assumptions about training and learning. Drawing on insights from his three books — on informal learning, capability building, and learning transfer — he explains why so many well-intentioned programmes fail to create real behaviour change, and what organisations must do differently.

We cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Why people learn best through activities, not content
• How capability depends on both the individual and the environment
• What your SatNav can teach you about turning learning into performance
• The link between diagnostics, performance consulting, and business outcomes
• How culture can “eat training for breakfast”, and often does
• Designing learning like an engineer: with purpose, precision, and clear success criteria
• Why AI is fast becoming “the world’s tutor” — and what that means for L&D and leaders
• Practical examples of organisations turning learning into sustained performance

Whether you’re a leader, an L&D professional, or simply someone curious about how people grow, this episode offers powerful insights into what actually helps people change behaviour — and what gets in the way.

🎧 Let’s have a listen

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Driving Lesson Analogy
• 1:44 Meet Paul Matthews
• 3:34 Engineering Mindset Meets L&D
• 5:29 Book One: Informal Learning
• 8:18 Book Two: Capability And Performance
• 12:18 Sat Nav Framework For Behaviour Change
• 16:12 Diagnosing Performance Beyond Training
• 20:58 Culture Eats Training For Breakfast
• 24:06 Purpose Of Workplace Learning
• 28:06 Formal To Informal: A Continuum
• 32:12 Removing Barriers Beats Pushing Harder
• 35:59 What Leaders Need To Know
• 39:16 Measuring What Matters From The Start
• 44:12 Defining Capability Beyond Skills
• 48:28 Success Stories: NHS And Councils
• 52:05 The People Alchemy Workflow Platform
• 55:04 Data Literacy And Evidence

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to Leading People with me, Jerry Murray. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the best in themselves and others. Every other week, I sit down with leading authors, researchers, and practitioners for deep dive conversations about the strategies, insights, and tools that drive personal and organizational success. And in between, I bring you one simple thing: short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use. Whether you're here for useful tools or thought-provoking ideas, leading people is your guide to better leadership. Recently I've been teaching my daughter how to drive. She's getting the hang of the basics, driving a circuit, changing gears, keeping the flow. But the real challenge has been reversing and parking. It's counterintuitive at first, turning the wheel in the opposite direction, coordinating clutch and steering, and keeping calm while doing something unfamiliar. You may also have had this experience of learning to drive. So we've been breaking it down into simple maneuvers, just like learning a tricky passage in music. You isolate the movement or bar, repeat it deliberately, get feedback, make small adjustments, and try again. Then you put it back into the full piece. In this case, back into the flow of driving. And as I was guiding her through this, it struck me how similar this is to what my guest today, Paul Matthews, talks about. That real learning isn't about content, it's about practice. It's about activities, feedback, removing barriers, and building capabilities so performance becomes natural, habitual, and even intuitive. Paul has spent decades helping organizations turn learning into performance. And in our conversation he shares powerful insights into what really helps people grow and what gets in the way. So, without further ado, let's dive right in. Paul Matthews, welcome to Leading People. Hi, it's good to be here.

SPEAKER_01: 2:22

And which part of the world are you coming in from today, Paul? Um, I'm living in the UK, but people say you've got a weird accent, and that comes from New Zealand originally, but I've lost a lot of that.

SPEAKER_02: 2:32

So Alright, good. So over the years you've published, I think it's three books, and they're all still highly relevant to how we develop competence and capability and performance in organizations. But first, to kick things off so my listeners can get to know you better, how did you come to focus your work on learning and development and what people, places, or events stand out in your journey, or were there any epiphany moments along the way that influenced your decisions?

SPEAKER_01: 3:03

Um in hindsight, you can always say that was an event, but there was no grand plan to get into it. My background's actually engineering, and I got into LD purely by accident. Um quite liked it. And and also brought, if you like, an engineering mindset to it. So that gave me a different perspective to people who'd been kicking around the LD community for a long, long time. Um, I I like to think that gives me some advantages. I've operated on the business side, not just LD. So I've you know run a profit and loss account in large organizations and things like that. So and the engineering mindset is yeah, let's get something going that actually works and is not broken. Um quite honestly, if I was an engineer and designing stuff with the failure rate that LD exhibits and most of what it does, um I'd be killing my customers. So uh I think that wouldn't be very clever.

SPEAKER_02: 3:59

Okay. Yeah, because I was going to ask you what is the engineering mindset that you bring to LD? And I guess failure rate as a starting point, right? Well, it's certainly a starting point.

SPEAKER_01: 4:09

If you've got something on a production line, you want as little scrap as possible. Um, and a lot of learning, quite frankly, is scrap learning. It doesn't have any impact, it gets thrown away, it doesn't get used. Um and also you want to design stuff that's gonna fulfill what the customer wants to do with it. Um, so it's about designing um for success of that piece of kit or of that process or of whatever. So it actually produces what the customer's looking for. And I think too often there's a disconnect in learning and development between what is designed and what originally is envisioned.

SPEAKER_02: 4:48

Okay, so I'm I'm sure that all my listeners who work in LD or who are affected by LD are probably getting curious now about how you're going to explain this. I'd like to start with the three books um that you wrote and why you wrote them. And they all sort of, I think, maybe it wasn't the intention at the time, but they do sort of link together quite nicely. So the first one was called.

SPEAKER_01: 5:15

Uh the first one I wrote was about informal learning. Um actually you just mentioned the listeners might be getting curious. Um if they're an L and D they're probably getting a bit angry saying, Oh no, I'm I'm good, I'm I'm doing good stuff, you know. So and many are, by the way. I'm not casting aspersions on every LD practitioner out there. Um but I still come across too much stuff that really isn't that well um you know conceived.

SPEAKER_02: 5:38

And perhaps to comment on that, that might not be the that that might not be totally at the feet of the LD person. It could be organizational constraints and other stakeholders who condition that. And in that respect, please stay listening because I think Paul has some interesting things to tell you about. But let's start with the first book.

SPEAKER_01: 5:58

Um well, informal learning, and I mean I'll be perfectly honest, we had a product at the time that um was based around uh learning informally outside of the formal training and that happens in a workflow. And I was convinced to write it for marketing purposes because oh, it's always good to write a book, you know. And actually, I struggled with that book, quite frankly. It turned out very well. I got some very good um, you know, um plaudits for it. Um, but it it was hard work, a, because it was my first book, and B, because I my heart, I guess, wasn't totally in it. Um, the other two books a very different story in terms of my desire to get something out there because I had something to say that I felt was really needed. The second one was cold? Uh the um the second one um was about capability. It was um capability at work. It was focused on um what's the conversation you need to have with a manager and an organization when they come and ask for training on a topic. You know, someone says, I want a one-day negotiation skills training for my team. How do you handle that conversation? Um, you you could just act as an order taker and take the order and create something or buy something in or deliver it. Or you could say, well, you know, what are you trying to achieve here? What's your outcome? Where are you trying to get to? What will look different once we get this successfully implemented and so on? So it's really that whole process of it's it's often called performance consultancy or performance detective, or there's all sorts of different phrases and words out there. Um performance diagnostics. Um, so what's going on now? What do we want instead? What's the gap? How do we bridge that gap? How do we get people across that gap?

SPEAKER_02: 7:54

Okay, so you you linked it to performance, which is an outcome of whatever standard of performance is expected. It's an outcome that therefore works back to what capabilities or competence we need, and therefore what interventions need to be designed to get to that.

SPEAKER_01: 8:12

Yeah. I think it's it I one analogy I sometimes use is a sat nav. For a training course, you've got to know where you are now, like a sat nav does. You've got to know where you want to get to. In other words, your destination. And for a training course, this is really a behavioral destination. What are they doing now and what do we want them to do instead? So what's our behavioral, what's our doing destination? And then how can you set up a set of turn-by-turn or step-by-step instructions so they do something different to what they're doing now and move closer to and write to what you want them to do instead of what they're doing now? So, how can you take them on that journey between point A and point B behaviorally, I suppose? And then how can you have some kind of system involved where you nudge them back on track if they drift off that step-by-step set of instructions to get from A to B? And those are the four critical success factors for a SATNAV, and they're the identical ones for a training program if you think about it. Um, so in a very simplistic way, you could look at any training program you've got and say, are those four critical success factors in place? Do we know where they're starting from? Do we know we want to get them to behaviorally? Do we have a fit-for-purpose set of step-by-step instructions? And do we have some way of noticing when they're not on track and nudging them back onto track during that journey?

SPEAKER_02: 9:37

What are some of the challenges that managers uh face in terms of articulating that?

SPEAKER_01: 9:44

I think the biggest problem managers have is they've often been trained by the organization and by the culture to offer training to people who aren't doing what they should be doing. In other words, they say, well, those people or that team or that department isn't functioning in the way we want them to function, so let's train them. And they fail to look at all the other possible reasons for those people not doing things the way that we desire them to do them. Um and so I think it's that performance diagnostics capability that's missing from most managers. It's certainly very seldom have I ever seen anything like that on a management training course. And yet it's a fundamental part of management, is saying things aren't going the way I would like them to go. How do I diagnose the problem of performance, for want of a better word? If they're not doing what I want them to do, that becomes a performance issue because clearly I won't meet my KPIs. How do I diagnose that poor performance to find out what's going on? What do we want instead? What are the barriers to what's happening? How do we overcome those barriers? How do we work with these people to get them from a mindset and a skills perspective to the point where they can operate? And then how do we get them motivated to actually operate in a new way, uh, consistently, so that it just becomes the way we do things around here? Um, so very often they're fighting with the existing culture. Um, you know, to paraphrase that, you know, culture will eat strategy for breakfast. Well, actually, your culture will eat your training for breakfast as well. Your culture can untrain people faster than you can train them if you're not careful.

SPEAKER_02: 11:29

On leading people, the goal is to bring you cutting-edge thought leadership from many of the leading thinkers and practitioners in leadership today. Each guest shares their insights, wisdom, and practical advice so we can all get better at bringing out the best in ourselves and others. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share a link with friends, family, and colleagues. And stay informed by joining our Leading People LinkedIn community of HR leaders and talent professionals. And the irony of that probably is, particularly in manufacturing, is that those same managers can probably go on an assembly line or a production line and diagnose, or even into customer service, uh and diagnose how machines or software or other things are performing. Yeah, what what did managers so so it always fascinates me. So you get somebody who's very competent, capable of doing that in terms of understanding throughput in a production facility, at the same time, and and what the standard, performance standard, etc., is at the same time struggle to do the same thing with the team that they manage. What do they need to learn?

SPEAKER_01: 12:45

I think they just need to learn a very simple diagnostics process. Um I I went through that in my second book, The One on Capability. There's some um, I've got a little diagram I can send people at the end of the, you know, which is a little model of what I call the performance system. It isn't something I totally developed myself. I've I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here, like we all do in terms of you know our thinking, but I've developed it on a bit from what I've ever seen, where there are two fundamental components to the to the fact that someone can be capable at the point of work of doing their job. And in order for that to happen, in other words, for them to step up and actually be capable in the moment of doing what they're asked to do, they themselves must be um, you know, competent with their skills, attitude, and things like that. Um, but also the environment that surrounds them has to be competent, for want of a better word, so that it's friendly to those attempts to do that job in the way that we want it done. Um, and and very often it's the environment that stops someone performing and or or doing things the way we want them to do them. It's it's it's it's not so often that they don't know how to do it. Now, sometimes they don't know how to do it, in which case they've got to learn something. That that's fair. But far more often, and the research I've done and my own personal experience is 70 to 80 percent of the time when someone is not doing a job the way you want them to do it, it's systemic, it's cultural, it's process, it's it's lack of motivation. There's all sorts of reasons that come into play that um you know are nothing to do with that person's ability to do the job if the environment was good for them.

SPEAKER_02: 14:31

Yeah. And I suppose one of the things that sometimes people miss as well is that uh confidence can play play, sorry, confidence can play a big role in whether somebody, even if they may have some core ability, they're not confident or they feel that they're going to get feedback that's going to diminish their confidence. Sometimes that gets in the way, right?

SPEAKER_01: 14:52

It can do, yes, absolutely. Um, yeah, you've uh that's one of the factors, but uh that's a cultural thing. If there's a blame culture going on, that's what saps and kills the confidence that people have because they're not prepared to give it a go. But also, if they are prepared to give it a go, management has a responsibility to put some training wheels on that, like the little guide wheels on a bicycle when you're learning to ride a bicycle. How does the manager um insure themselves against problems? How what contingency planning do they have in place so that someone can try that new thing, but have a safety blanket wrapped around them in such a way that it can't do damage to them or the organization? Um, right. So there's also that need. So there's that sort of consequences issue has to be thought through. Um, that comes back a bit to the situational leadership stuff that Blanchard talked about decades ago, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 15:48

So yeah, it's still very relevant today. It's it it's it's not that complicated a model, and yet it kind of has has got into that sort of genre of it was a trendy thing at one time, therefore it's no longer trendy, and yet some of the stuff that was created way back uh around contingency theory and that actually still holds very well today because situations change, and the model was based on adaptability uh to changing situations and being able to recognize when your people could adapt, when they couldn't adapt, what support they needed, etc. So uh and then the third book. So let's just get to that because I guess that was a natural evolution then as you started to help organizations put in the capabilities. Um, does any of the the learning training that's being done actually get transferred into the workplace? So tell us a bit about the third book because you say on your website that you were kind of hadn't really planned to write third book, but you felt there was a need to write it.

SPEAKER_01: 16:52

Um I hadn't, and I started writing articles about learning transfer and then an e-book and then a slightly bigger e-book, and it just kept growing, and I finally sort of acquiesced to the inevitable. Um, writing a book is is quite a job. Uh uh, well, for me anyway, maybe for some it's not. The uh I mean, where the the second book got to is about if you're gonna put people in a training room, make sure it's the right people at the right time and the right circumstances for the right reasons and with the right content and with the right design and and so on. So um, but of course, once they're in the training room, um, or any or or e-learning or or some other intervention, it doesn't really have to be training, how do you make sure then they operationalize what it is that you've given them in terms of new knowledge, new information, and and so on. So it's about how do they convert that knowledge into understanding and then from there into doing so that it actually has an impact in the real world. And we're talking organizational learning here, not learning Greek history for the sake of it, you know. So um, so in terms of I mean, one definition I saw I have seen on learning is that it it's it's an experience that results in um ongoing behavior change. In other words, it becomes visible because people are doing things differently in a sustainable way. Um and of course, then that begs the question well, if I learn something, change my behavior, and then the behavior does keep in that new mode onwards, but I completely forget what it was I learned that prompted me to change my behavior in the first place. Is that still learning? You know, so there's a lot of I don't get too hung up on definitions of learning and so on. There's so many around, and most of them are quite self-serving for the academic paper that are embedded within. But um, so it's much more important to me to be thinking about what are the outcomes that we're looking for? What do we want them to be doing instead of what they're doing now? Or what do we want them to be capable of doing instead of what they're capable of doing now? Because there are some things where you want them to develop that, well, that competency probably is a better word, uh, even if they don't use it on a regular basis or maybe even use it at all. I mean, like first aid training. You kind of hope it never happens that you have to give someone CPR, but when it does, you need to know that people can step up to that. Um so that isn't a behavior that you can see in day-to-day operation necessarily. So there's there's quite a bit of variation in how you might defend, you know, define an endpoint to different training for different reasons, whether it's compliance, regulatory, whether it's a pure behavior change like handling customers um you know in a retail environment, for example, or so on.

SPEAKER_02: 19:44

So I'm gonna ask you a very high chunk, big question now, which might just be a way to synthesize everything you've just said. But in your view, what is the purpose of learning in the workplace?

SPEAKER_01: 20:00

That assumes it has a single purpose in a sense. So that's a it's a big question. It it to me that you caught me on the hop a little bit here. It it sort of comes back to what is learning anyway for any individual? Because learning is a very individualized process. It's people that learn, not organizations that learn. Although we talk about a learning organization, but ultimately it's about the people in the organization picking up and disseminating knowledge across the organization. So as an entity, it kind of learns because the people are all learning within it. So what is the so what's the purpose of learning? Ultimately, it's about survival. If we were not able to learn as a species, we'd have been consigned to the evolutionary dustbin some time back. So learning is a survival thing and we do it automatically. We cannot not learn. Now, when you talk about learning in an organizational context, typically there's some kind of outcome that people want. In other words, learning happens informally anyway. There's this huge informal learning engine running in the basement of every organization. And if the engine ever stopped, the organization would be completely screwed. They wouldn't survive more than a few weeks, quite frankly, because we are always learning all the time, informally as we do our job. Something new happens, we learn a little bit about that or what to do with it just in the moment as we go, asking colleague or whatever. So there's a huge amount of learning that happens completely out of our conscious awareness. It's just going on. If you were to go to that basement with that big informal learning engine, it would be covered in cobwebs in most organizations and sputtering along. Thankfully, you can't turn it off, but it actually is often running not that efficiently. So it is useful being able to go down there and clean it up and give it better fuel and work with it. And you can do that. You can improve how informal learning works in your organization. You can harness its power more directly and more appropriately. So that's all possible. But normally, when people talk about the purpose of learning, they talk about the purpose of formal learning because they don't even think about the informal stuff because it's out of awareness most of the time. And the purpose of formal learning is going to be usually some kind of regulatory tick box or uh some kind of improvement in the way that people are doing their job that will impact the bottom line or the patient care or you know whatever it is that we're seeking to achieve.

SPEAKER_02: 22:41

Yeah. And that actually was my more or less my next question. I'll ask it anyway for the opportunity to just make some more distinctions. Because I was going to ask you, but how do you distinguish between informal and formal learning? And what do organizations typically get wrong about where they allocate resources to learning and development?

SPEAKER_01: 23:01

I think I took the chickens way out when I did my book on informal learning and basically said informal learning is any learning that's not formal. Because I can't think of any other way to define it. And I've actually come across a lot of people that start arguing saying, well, that's informal learning and this is formal over here, and no, no, no, that one's informal. And I really couldn't be bothered. It's like arguing how many angels dance on the head of a pin. It's completely irrelevant. What we want is those people to learn a bit when they need to learn it, and then to use that effectively in some way that assists the organization move and develop and grow. So really, I don't care whether it's formal or informal. In fact, I think it's a continuum from one end to the other. And there was actually a research paper I read where they set that continuum up and said sometimes we will do things where our primary purpose of doing that thing is to learn something. Attend a conference, go to a training course, go to a colleague to ask some really specific questions about a process or whatever. Other times we will learn things by happenstance as we're doing our job. So those are the two ends of that continuum. So in other words, is it a uh a learning conscious task or is it a task conscious task in a sense? Um I can't remember the details. It's in my first book. But uh, yeah, so it's a continuum. So trying to say that's formal and that's informal, I think is uh is a red herring. We just need to say these people need to shift their behavior from where they are, or we need to tick that compliance box, whichever it happens to be, um, and we need to get them from where they are to over here. How do we get them on that journey? How do we create a workflow of things for them to do to get from point A to point B? Those step-by-step instructions you get, like in the SATNAV. And that's what's critical. And then if they take that journey and the journey is fit for purpose, they will get to the endpoint, guaranteed, provided you can keep them on the journey. Um, so that's pretty cool, a guaranteed endpoint. And really, I don't care along the way whether a lot of that learning happens informally or formally. I I think it's irrelevant personally.

SPEAKER_02: 25:16

Yeah, I think that's a very useful answer. I sort of provoked it slightly. I hope everybody out there who listened to that got some insight. Because effectively, um, it probably also uh plays into this idea of learning or training transfer in the sense that whilst you might have a formal component to the training or the learning, a lot of what happens in terms of transfer may be happening in the more informal context of actually taking it back and playing with it and getting interactions and feedbacks, right?

SPEAKER_01: 25:47

I pretty much learning transfer would not work if we weren't doing informal learning all the time. You know, learning transfer is predicated on informal learning happening, um, but in a very ad hoc sort of happenstance way, which is what informal learning is all about. Um, so when someone learns a new negotiating model, for example, until they take it into either a really good role play with AI or with a colleague, or they take it into a negotiating room and use it, they're not going to discover really, well, does this work for me and my personality style? Could I use this model effectively? Um, my colleague might be able to, but I've got a different sort of personality in the way I gain rapport and relate to people. That style won't work for me, so what will? Now that's all happening informally through and through reflection too. So again, that's another factor is without reflection, um, learning kind of wouldn't happen. There needs to be that rumination about things and uh um, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 26:50

And would it would it be kind of fair to say that that's where the organizational context factors come into play with regard to whether somebody can actually take something they learn in in maybe a more formal environment and transfer it into their day-to-day work? Because you often, I mean, a lot of uh writers on this topic will talk about, you know, there's the motivation aspect of the individual, there's the quality of the materials in the training, and then there's a whole bunch of organizational factors, cultural factors, and often you can have the first two quite well done, and people go back and start you know attempting to implement stuff, and like the classic one is the boss says, Well, that was the training, you're now back at work, get on with your job. I know I'm being a little bit facetious here, but um, is that not are those not the the type of elements that pre prevent the learning transfer becoming informal learning in the workplace?

SPEAKER_01: 27:49

They they can do all of those things you mentioned, and yeah, the the you know, some of the research I've read and so on, I've read a fair bit around it as you might imagine. Um yeah, it talks about those three areas you've just talked about, the mindset of the individual, the the design and and so on of the program itself, and then the environment or culture within which it's gotta happen. Um, and certainly as I said earlier, that culture can eat your training for breakfast. It you know, it can snaffle it up. And you said you're being facetious about a manager saying, Thank God you're back now, get on with your intray. Actually, that happens rather more than we would like to admit. Um and so one of the things that you can use to get around that, if I go straight back to a practical thing, is during a training course, ask people what's going to stop you doing what we've agreed is the good thing to do. Um, so you actually enlisting their help and finding out what the barriers are that they will experience when they go back to their desk or their work line. What barriers will they experience that will stop them implementing what you're discussing on the training course? And then you've got to say, okay, collectively, how can we deal with those barriers? You know, who do we have to go to at a senior level if it's a process issue, for example, to get that process changed? Who do we have to go to if we need something else on the IT stack? And, you know, so you've got to find a way of dealing with all those barriers. The the an analogy I sometimes use, if your car is on your driveway and it needs to move forward three feet, you'll often just give it a shove and move it along the concrete because you can do that with a car provided the handbrake's off. But if there was a brick under a wheel, would you try and push the car over the brick or would you remove the brick? Now you could push it over the brick provided you enlisted the help of several neighbors, but chances are you'd go and take the brick away so it's easy to push. So removing barriers is a far more effective way to getting motion forwards with what you're doing in training than actually pushing hard at what they've been taught to do.

SPEAKER_02: 29:54

Okay, and that sort of leads nicely into another question I have here, which is let's talk about the role of leaders. Like many of my listeners are leaders themselves, and some may not be sitting in LD but rely on it. What do leaders still need to learn about learning and development at work? You're listening to leading people with me, Jerry Murray. My guest today is Paul Matthews, a leading expert and author of three books on how people really learn and perform at work. Coming up, what leaders often get wrong about learning and the surprising role they play in turning learning into real performance.

SPEAKER_01: 30:42

Um, a couple of things. One is the fact that you're a leader means you need to be leading because leaders have an immense impact on LD, even if they've got nothing to do with the L and D function. And what I mean by that is if the leader is there sort of saying, Yeah, well, you know, nothing much, and I don't really, you know, I where are we going? Don't know, hasn't got a vision of future, no direction. If none of that sort of leadership stuff is in place, people will go, well, that means I don't need to change or do anything different because where we are seems to be okay. Whereas if the leader's saying, go over there, over yonder that horizon, that's where we want to go. That's brilliant. Um, that's where we're going. Come with me, you know, all of the, you know, um over-the-top pearl handle revolvers, the whole lot, whatever you want to, however you want to put it, that leader is encouraging motion and movement towards a brighter future. And if they do that well, then people will say, I want to be part of that future. I want to join the train. I want to jump on board. What do I need to do to get on board with where you're going or what you're doing? How can I help that process? Because that to me is meaningful. I want to be part of it. And automatically they'll start learning stuff without even thinking, I've got to go and learn X, Y, Z. They'll just say, Oh, I need this tool to contribute here. So the leadership is vitally important, not because it's espousing learning, although it's no bad thing if it does, but leadership's important because it is leadership and it's doing leadership type things. So that's one critical thing about leading. Um, the other thing, actually, what I do is recommend a book by a chap called Will Thalheimer in the States. Um and uh hang on, if I got the title somewhere. Oh, the yeah, the The CEO's Guide to Training and Learning at Work. And that is Will's a brilliant guy, very research-backed, and he's got lots of little short chapters that are directed, more or less as little letters, if you like, to a CEO saying, this is what's real. You've been told this about LD before, you know, actually it's a load of rubbish, this is what's really going on. So I would suggest any leader who's not in LD specifically, and in fact, any LD leader should get a hold of that book and read it through because it will give them some insights into where LD can help, where it can't, what the myths are, and what the mysteries are with it. So it's a it's a very strong lead for leaders. And of course, if the CEO is going to read that, then the L and D guy better read it as well, so he knows what's going to be expected of him. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 33:25

So having personally worked closely with many CEOs and leadership teams, including CFOs, um, a question that comes up is many LD people struggle with meaningful evaluation and measurement of the learning programs and the learning transfer. What advice could you offer them? Start early.

SPEAKER_01: 33:48

And what I mean by that is in the early days when you're doing your performance diagnostics, when when someone says, I need this, what did we say before? One-day negotiation skills training, I think I said, Um, you've got to get really clear with that stakeholder who's asking for that. Or what do you want to see instead of what you've got now? And then you define those future behaviors and you define how you will know those behaviors are occurring or not occurring. And that gives you your set of measures. Now, you might well tie them together with some KPIs they've got and so on, you know, mash that up. But primarily you want that list of output behaviors from your program and how you're going to notice when they're there. Because then you've got something to measure. And then you get that set of behaviors signed off by that stakeholder saying, if we can help you get your team exhibiting these behaviors in a regular and sustainable way, are you a happy bunny? Will you get what you want? And they need to basically sign off on that. And then your job in LD is to get those people across the threshold to be exhibiting those behaviors regularly. It's not about to deliver content, it's about getting them, you're delivering behaviors in a sense. Now, the only way you're going to deliver behaviors is if you deliver activities to these people. In other words, over a period of time, what activities do they need to do in order to get from the behavior they're doing now to doing things differently and doing different things in the future? Um, so as soon as you say that, then you're talking about a workflow. You're talking about a sequence of activities that takes them from where they are to where you want them to be. And so really, your learning is that sequence of activities. And along the way, you would be measuring has that activity they've done made a difference to how they're operating? So you'll have some in-stream measures as you go. Uh, is our program working on the fly in real time? And then, of course, you might say, well, actually, three months, six months later, how do we look at um those behaviors we were seeking to achieve and have we got them? In other words, were the measures that we decided way back in the early days, you know, how are we measuring them now?

SPEAKER_02: 36:05

Yeah, and I'd just like to build on that a little bit from more that boardroom perspective. Um, if if it just take your new negotiation skills training as an example, uh, although as somebody who trains it, I think one day would be okay for a little bit of an introduction, but coming back regularly would would help. Um, for me, uh, and you probably embrace this, which is um I'd be looking at how many more deals we're closing as the as the true ACID test of is this making any difference to the organization? Because that's what the CFO, the C CEO, and maybe the sales guy in the the chief sales officer, they're going, are we are we actually closing any more deals? And if we can track that back to the fact that our people have got better at framing their negotiations and they're actually better at formulating those final steps, then I I think you you've got a winner. And and my only experience of this is that I don't know whether it's because of the education that uh some of people go through when they train to be LD people, is that being able to link to the strategy of the business is not easy for some people because they're they're given a job in a part of the organization with a specific role to play. And often if they're not linking into those bigger picture items, I I think they miss something that they could add which would help them justify more what the the value they can create in an organization.

SPEAKER_01: 37:33

I think, well, what they've got to learn to be is a process consultant, really. And so when the stakeholder says they want that negotiation skills training, they've got to say, well, what's this designed to achieve? Where's it trying to get to? And one of the measures they might agree on is somebody sitting down and actually signing a bit of paper that closes the deal. That's a behavior. Um, now also it isn't just behaviors you can observe. I mean, it might be, for example, the way you construct and write a report. You don't observe someone writing that report, but you do observe the output from that activity. So then you're talking about first or second order um evidence tracks of the behavior that you're seeking to do. So you don't always necessarily observe the behavior directly, but you will need to be able to observe at least, if not that, then a first or second order sort of output from that behavior, like a signed deal, uh like a report structured in a certain way and so on.

SPEAKER_02: 38:32

Yeah, it actually reminds me in your it was it your second book, you you actually identified five components of capability, which kind of allude to that. Do you do you remember what they are? Because I have them written down here. You talk about knowledge, sknowledge, skills, mindset, physiology, and environment. And I guess if somebody is closing more deals, you will you may not see the mindset that helped them do that. That's something they brought into the conversations. So I guess uh being able to define capability in a in a broader sense than just skills, for example. Uh, would you like to comment on how you formulated that?

SPEAKER_01: 39:10

Well, I think that's step capability is an interesting word. It's used in many different ways in LD and elsewhere. So there was a post just on LinkedIn, actually just a couple of days ago, by Andy Lancaster about you know the way we use words for those sorts of things. Um but there's capability, there's competence, there's talents, there's abilities, there's all sorts of different words. And they do get used in a confusingly different set of ways. So before you do have a conversation about capability or competence or anything like that, be clear about what the people in the conversation mean by those terms. Um To me, someone who's capable means they can do the job asked of them in the moment. So, for example, if a mechanic's fixing a car but doesn't have the spare part, that renders him immediately. Incapable of fixing that car. Now he's competent to do so, but he cannot in the moment fix it because he doesn't have the spare part or a special tool or whatever. So we are often rendered incapable in the moment of doing a job because of something outside of us. A colleague didn't turn up, something's filed in the wrong place, we can't find a file. There's all sorts of reasons why that becomes a barrier to us performing in the moment and rendering us incapable. That doesn't stop us being competent in the moment. It's just that we can't we can't activate that competency because something in our environment or around us is actually stopping us doing that. So we also then have to be very clear about what are we trying to get? We're trying to get people to the point where they can be capable. So therefore, we have to be looking at what surrounds them in the moment as well as focusing on what that individual brings. And the five things the individual brings are their knowledge, their skills, their mindset and understanding of how to utilize those knowledge and skills, their and their physiology. And what I mean by that is if you're carrying bricks up to the second floor of a building site all day, you're gonna have to be physically fairly strong. If you are doing some intricate jewelry work, you need to have quite good manual dexterity. Um, if you're handling massive actuarial spreadsheets, you're gonna have to have to have some serious IQ behind that. So there are things where we are different as human beings naturally that will allow us to do a job or not in some cases.

SPEAKER_02: 41:32

And yet yet your point, your your analogy to the car mechanic, it's strange. I just dropped my car into the garage this morning for for a service. Um, but your analogy to the car mechanic uh is and not having the spare parts is is almost the equivalent of somebody coming back from a training, knowing how to do something and not being given the opportunity or the resources to support them doing it. Yeah. And and this this is soul destroying for people when they find they can't actually do what they've been they spent two or three days on a training learning to do, get back in the office. Yeah. So maybe I could ask you. Yeah, sorry.

SPEAKER_01: 42:08

Oh, it's just uh there's a slide I often use when I'm doing conference sessions and so on with a donkey cart where the donkey has been raised off its feet by the cart being overloaded the wrong way. So there's a classic case of a worker very, very competent, but incapable in the moment of doing the job he was employed to do, which is pull the cart, and all because of a rubbish manager who's managed to overload the cart wrong. So, you know, how many times do we see people unable to do their job because the management they're being subjected to is poor? So it's a very nice little pain memoir.

SPEAKER_02: 42:41

I've seen versions of that with the donkeys behind the cart, so as well, it sort of um doesn't help. A question I have for you, and I'm sure a lot of the listeners out there, my listeners, might be curious about is what are some success stories uh that you could maybe relate without necessarily disclosing names if you don't feel that's appropriate, but who are successfully implementing uh learning transfer, you know, and really getting it together that you've you've been working with or noticed over the years?

SPEAKER_01: 43:09

Um I think we do quite a bit of work in the NHS here in England and and um with our software platform where they are doing things like um learning and getting supervised instruction on things like venepuncture, you know, drawing blood on the ward in a hospital. Um and it's it's it is gratifying to see when they go through that process where there's some learning, it kicks in, they get the supervision. In other words, all the steps are in place to take them from where they are to a place where they can then be observationally assessed as being competent to do that going forward into the future. Um, and then they have to go and renew it in three years' time or you know, whatever. So, yeah, yes, there are lots of examples where that idea of a workflow of activities over time, where they do bits and pieces, that will lead them from um where they are to what. I mean, I remember um uh um a public uh council doing some work on feedback skills as well in a similar way, where they set up a workflow of activities over a period of I think it was five weeks on our platform. And they compared that quite literally with someone who did a half day training online uh with much the same sort of material. And anecdotally, they said the results were far superior when they were, you know, when they were drip feeding things um into the system. So um it it was, you know, the the the once-only training had its limits in terms of what it, you know, how sustainable it was and how much it got operationalized afterwards, whereas converting that into a workflow of activities over time for that particular topic at least was far more successful in terms of getting people doing things differently.

SPEAKER_02: 44:57

So that was the NHS and a local authority. Would there be a private sector example that you can think of?

SPEAKER_01: 45:04

Um Yeah, we we work with a number of training companies who use our platform to do stuff. And again, it's about that workflow of activities for learning transfer. One of them does a lot of work in uh coaching and mentoring training, uh, for example. They've been using our platform for over a decade now, I think. Um, and they see it as fundamentally central to their delegates going out there and actually doing work well afterwards because the the programs have spread over time.

SPEAKER_02: 45:35

Um, so yeah. Um and what's the purpose of your platform? Maybe you want to just speak about the platform uh because people might be wondering what you're referring to. What's the platform? And what's it called?

SPEAKER_01: 45:46

Um well the platform is People Alchemy, it's the name of the company. So, and really I I kind of talk about it as a learning workflow tool. Um, so it's not a line an LMS, it's not about delivering a boatload of content, although you can deliver content through it. It's more about if we want these people to get from what they're doing now to what we want them to do instead, what is the journey they're gonna have to take? What are all the steps they're gonna have to do? Um, how can we deliver them all the activities they need to go and do between point A and point B to successfully make that transition across the gap? So it's about scaffolding that journey and really in a nutshell, it's about you know, don't just deliver content. That really doesn't do much in the way of changing behavior. In most cases, there's more, there's more required. Um, and you talked a bit about that earlier uh in your introduction. Um, so I I sort of talk about well, deliver activities. Now, those activities might be attend a training course or go and consume this bit of e-learning, but there's lots of other things they need to do, like reflect, like experiment, like practice, like discuss with colleagues, come back, go and research a little bit more, you know, and so on and so forth. So you can add all of these activities into your timeline to get them across uh across that journey. That's really what the platform is, it scaffolds all of that. And then it brings in obviously reporting, and we've got a Kirkpatrick level three evaluator built in and all sorts of other stuff like that. So it's uh pretty cool.

SPEAKER_02: 47:16

So Ken it segues into a question I have here, which is how important is data literacy, both personal and organizational, when it comes to LD?

SPEAKER_01: 47:27

Um I think that varies on the culture of the organization. Some organizations are much more data-driven. Uh, I did a bunch of work, consultancy work with Google years ago, and you know, they're very data-driven there. Others not so much. Um, some of them are data driven because they have to be for regulatory reasons, like the NHS, for example. Um, so there's lots of things they've got to have in place for compliance. So I think someone on the team needs to be fairly data literate, but I'm not saying they have to be a statistical analysis expert or anything like that. And particularly with AI these days, it's it's interesting. You can drop spreadsheets in there and surface information and trends much more easily now than perhaps you used to be able to. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 48:11

And that's the next question. What impact is AI having or going to have on learning and development and learning transfer?

SPEAKER_01: 48:18

Um, huge impact. I read an interesting stat yesterday, I think it was, that 10.2% of Chat GPT questions are learning related. Um that is huge, given there's something that that covers like seven million people and and two billion questions a week. Um so AI is already the world's tutor, the biggest tutor in the world. Um so that's gonna have implications going forward. The biggest um uh volume of those requests are coming from mid and lower income type countries. Uh so they are finding a place to go and learn in a way they probably couldn't before easily. So that's gonna change and kind of democratize a lot of that stuff, particularly remote jobs, are gonna, you know, a few years' time, they're gonna be skilled up in a way that they have never been before in those countries. So um I think it's also affecting learning. Uh, there's a recent output by FOSWAY in terms of, you know, what AI is really being implemented already and what is just still smoke and mirrors and on the roadmap at some point in the future. Um and the one that is there that's implemented most solidly, I think it was about 62%, is the um the personalization, in other words, picking different topics for someone based on who they are and using AI to kind of build uh curriculums almost for someone of bits of e-learning and so on. Um, or focus learning on areas that they are clearly not being able to do well because of some kind of pretest or something. But there's a lot of other stuff is still quite frankly smoke and mirrors, um, and it's coming, um, but it's it's slower than what a lot of the vendors would have you believe, in my opinion. The the other thing that I find disturbing is a lot of people using it for content creation. Not that that's a bad thing, but they're relying on it too much, and consequently they're all drifting towards that common average middle ground where nothing actually stands out very much. Um and uh it it then they become just just almost proofreading what AI has done, um, and AI is driving it rather than the other way around. So I think it's more important we start looking at a lot of stuff that's helping us really design our design principles, our our working with the performance diagnostic. There's lots of things we can do outside of just content creation where AI can help us immensely. What we don't want to do is just do what we've been doing, especially if it hasn't been working so well, and in many cases it hasn't, and then using AI to make it faster. Uh, because all we get is fast rubbish, you know, it's the old garbage in, garbage out, and you digitize stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 51:15

And the future for trainers and coaches and people who traditionally have delivered um content and skills, you know, let's say model skills or uh shown skills, what's your current sort of perception on that?

SPEAKER_01: 51:34

I think they need to in time become much more uh better at facilitating tutorials and things like that. And it's the flipped classroom. Now with AI, the flipped classroom is a real that that's what's happening because you can go and get all the knowledge direct from AI or most of it. Um if that's whether that's a trained AI in that knowledge set by your company or whether it's just the open internet. Clearly you've got to be aware of what it's doing and the hallucinations and so on. Um, but it certainly has democratized that knowledge in a way that's never been there before. So I think where the tutors can add value is being a tutor. Um, you know, it's the old, let's um it used to be here's all this content, now go away and do an assignment and deliver it back when you finish the assignment. Actually, the better route now seems to be here's all the knowledge online, go get it, go fetch, figure it out. Now here's the assignment. Let's come together and collaborate around this assignment so we can learn from each other as we solve this assignment together. And then you would have a tutor working and as a tutor within that collaborative environment. That to me is the real value that people can add to this process.

SPEAKER_02: 52:49

Yeah. You remind me a little bit of the work of Anders Ericsson, you know, in this sort of the you know, the stuff Gladwell made into 10,000 hours and that. But one of the things that he talked about was deliberate practice, but also he qualified it as well by saying if you get expert guidance, it's going to, you know, it's going to help you fine-tune like a tennis coach that can really pinpoint. And it's it's unlikely that we'll get it's well, it's likely that human beings will still need to be involved in that kind of tutoring.

SPEAKER_01: 53:21

Yes, I I I agree with that. AI will get a long way there, but I think it's quite a bit of time before AI gets to the point where it could replace a human. And it may well do at some point, but um I'm not sure when that'll happen. It's moving remarkably fast, but also it's surprising how much smoke and mirrors is out there. But we can look at what's there now, and it's still pretty damned amazing, uh, in my view.

SPEAKER_02: 53:48

Okay, coming to the end, uh, what would be a few key insights or a big idea you'd like to my listeners to take away from this conversation?

SPEAKER_01: 53:58

Um, I think back to my thing about deliver activities to people, not try and just deliver content. Um, and my question always is to people in LD: do you want to deliver some content or do you want to make a real impact? Now, they're always going to say a real impact. So therefore, you're gonna have to do something more than just deliver content. And and it's that more bit that's where my expertise is and and the stuff in the books and so on is what else do you have to do as a wrapper around the content to make it have an impact?

SPEAKER_02: 54:31

Okay. And finally, how can people get in touch with you? And do you have anything special to offer them? And I'll put links in the show notes uh to facilitate this.

SPEAKER_01: 54:42

So Yeah, well, I you can get me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to answer questions there. You'll find me on LinkedIn easily enough. Uh, the websites at peoplealalchemy.com. Um, I also have a personal website that sort of has my books and things on it at PaulHenMatthews.com. Um, but yeah, I've got a few e-books and I I mentioned before this little you know capability diagram thing I've got. So if anybody uh gets in touch, I'm happy to send them a couple of digital files that they can uh have fun with, and I hope they find them useful.

SPEAKER_02: 55:13

So, as always, thanks, Paul, for sharing your insights, tips, and wisdom with me and my listeners here today. That's been great here. Good. Thank you. Coming up on leading people.

SPEAKER_00: 55:27

You know, if I were to summarize the research on work motivation from the last 50 years, I'd summarize it in one line. It is almost impossible for anything to matter to a human being who doesn't first believe that they matter.

SPEAKER_02: 55:40

That's Zach McCurio, author of The Power of Mattering. If Paul Matthews helps us see how learning turns into performance, Zack shows us the human foundation underneath it all. That people perform at their best when they feel seen, heard, valued, and needed. Join me next time as Zach and I explore how leaders can create workplaces where people truly matter. And remember, before our next full episode, there's another one simple thing episode waiting for you. A quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast. Until next time.