Disrupting Workplace Learning with Tom McDowell

What if you could transform your workplace learning strategy to achieve remarkable performance improvements? Join us on the HRchat Show as we welcome Tom McDowell, the innovative chair of The Learning Network and speaker at DisruptHR Birmingham 2.0.

Tom takes us through his inspiring journey in Learning and Development and his shift from traditional educational approaches to performance-driven initiatives. He shares his philosophy that achieving tangible performance outcomes is far more valuable than merely delivering educational content, and discusses the necessity of embracing risks and experimentation for continuous growth and innovation.

Tom also gives us a sneak peek into his talk at DisruptHR Birmingham 2.0 and his participation in other industry events. 

Explore the inspiring community fostered through his podcast and YouTube channel, which offer practical ways for L&D professionals to connect and share innovative ideas. 


We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.

Chapters

• 0:03 HR Chat Show With Tom McDowell
• 10:51 Learning Network Events and Ideas Podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom and visit hrgazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is Bill Bannam, your host today, and in this episode we're looking ahead to Disrupt HR Birmingham 2.0 by talking with one of the amazing speakers. My guest today is Tom McDowell, chair of the Learning Network and host of the Ideas Podcast and the Instructional Design Tips YouTube channel, and all-round cool dude. Tom helps businesses deliver by building performant workforces. He also runs Evolved L&D, a consultancy focused on making the L&D function a radical but essential part of one's organisation. Tom, welcome to the show today.

Speaker 3: 1:10

Thank you so much for having me. That's probably the nicest introduction I've ever had.

Speaker 2: 1:15

Okay, well, thank you very much. That's what I do for a living. Beyond my introduction there, Tom, why don't you start by taking a minute or two and telling our listeners a bit more about yourself and what you get up to? Why don't you start?

Speaker 3: 1:25

by taking a minute or two and telling our listeners a bit more about yourself and what you get up to. Sure, hello, my name's Tom. I tend to describe myself unprofessionally as works NL&D, has access to Internet and likes to share opinions. That's kind of it in a nutshell. I've been lucky enough to be involved with the Learning Network now for three years, which is just this phenomenal community. So I spend a lot of time working on bringing events to that group and sort of interacting with different members around the world, and then, when I'm actually having to, you know, work for a living, I run a consultancy of L&D where we work with, again, l&d teams all around the world, helping them move from a kind of education first to a performance first approach in what they do. And when I'm not doing any of that, I'm usually either painting toy soldiers, creating podcasts, videos, or out in the garden and that's the, the wonder. That is me in a nutshell, which is probably a somewhat poor way of describing myself, but I think it gets everything over. That's important.

Speaker 2: 2:24

I understand, tom, that, uh, this is your first disrupt talk. Um, in fact, I was doing my homework ahead of this conversation and I found a recent linkedin post in which you shared about your involvement at disrupt HR Birmingham, and in it you wrote as follows try new things, can. That said, it's sort of what we do in L&D, isn't it? Next week, I'm trying my hand at something new A five minute lightning talk at Disrupt HR Birmingham. Fear aside, I'm really looking forward to the event. Then you ask, tom, what did you last do that terrified you. So, tom, my question for you and I'm going to challenge you to answer in 60 seconds or less what Bill is. Why must we take risks and try new things in order to develop?

Speaker 3: 3:14

Put simply, even the best of us do not know what we don't know, and we discover things when we go into places we've never been before. That's true in our personal lives, in our hobbies and in our professional lives.

Speaker 2: 3:29

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast.

Speaker 2: 3:32

If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show. I thought I was being clever with that question by challenging to answer in 60 seconds. I should have said 10 seconds. Very good, tom Very good. To answer in 60 seconds, I should have said 10 seconds very good, tom, very good.

Speaker 2: 3:55

Um, okay, so you are a speaker at disrupt hr birmingham 2.0. Uh, next week, as we record, this is happening on september 5th. I'm very much looking forward to. I am one of the uh co-hosts, along with jamie keeling will be up there trying to entertain you. I need to find some new dad jokes before then. Uh, your talk is called learning isn't working, but we have the fix and um, I'd like to break down some of the topics within that talk and and the associated hope for learning outcomes, if that's okay. First one uh, the first. The first topic that you'll be addressing is the need for lnd to stop considering itself a workplace education service and instead focus on facilitating performance improvement, with learning being just one possible tool to achieve this. Tell us more about that absolutely so.

Speaker 3: 4:40

Um, this is probably my biggest point of frustration. Um, I say this with love. I work in lnd. I love lnd. We're an amazing group of people trying to do really good things, but we've got a bit stuck in the first part of that job description, that learning part. We talk a lot about how to create effective learning. We take a lot from the education space and that's really great, but fundamentally it's only part of what we should be doing. We tend to therefore jump to education or learning, e-learning more often than not, but even facilitated training, whatever it be, as the solution to every problem we are faced with and ultimately it's not working.

Speaker 3: 5:18

When you look at kind of performance and productivity in workplaces, where you look at the perceived value of L&D departments, there's a reason we're all so nervous right now about redundancies and technology replacing us, because we're struggling to demonstrate clear value.

Speaker 3: 5:33

And that's because we've attached ourselves so firmly to the concept of learning, rather than broadening a little bit and saying hey, do you know what we figured out in the 1970s? And this is the worrying bit it's about performance. That's what businesses care about and that's what we should be there to deliver. Even better, we worked out exactly how to do that. Even if you just take the work of, say, thomas Gilbert and the behavioral engineering model that he developed, that would fix so many of the impact and evidence problems we have in L&D. If we just embraced it we had it in 1973, 1974, something like that but we're just fundamentally not using it and it's because we've become really focused on learning and not sufficiently focused on how do we improve the performance of people within this organization. Broadening that view will make us more impactful and, selfishly, give us more job security.

Speaker 4: 6:33

Once in a while, an event series is born that shakes things up, it makes you think differently and it leaves you inspired. That event is Disrupt HR. The format is 14 speakers, 5 minutes each and slides rotate every 15 seconds. If you're an HR professional, a CEO, a technologist or a community leader and you've got something to say about talent, culture or technology, disrupt is the place. It's coming soon to a city near you. Learn more at disrupthrco.

Speaker 2: 7:08

Tom, I've got to say I can see why you do a podcast and have a YouTube channel. You've got a lovely voice for it. So, um, okay, uh, continuing on the next topic that you're going to be covering is the pointlessness of ai and other technologies if we use them to just do more of the same. I've got to tell you, uh, this past saturday I lost half my day. I I got up very early like a little kid on Christmas morning because I just bought some new AI tech to create videos and images and things like that, and I lost many, many hours on it, I'm loving it.

Speaker 2: 7:42

It's really helping what I do. Tell us more about this point.

Speaker 3: 7:47

Absolutely, and it should be. Prefaced with. Technology is awesome. I do exactly the same thing on a regular basis.

Speaker 3: 7:53

I've recently been working for an AI tech company and there's huge potential in this space, but only if we actually think about how we use it to solve problems. If we just go great, I've now got tools that allow me to churn out even more stuff even quicker. Well, if the stuff wasn't fixing it before, why would more of the same stuff fix it? Moving forwards, we need to really come back to basics and say what are you trying to solve, how do you, or what is the most effective and efficient way to solve it, and then start talking about is there an AI tool that can make it more efficient? Is there an AI tool that makes it more effective? Is there an AI tool that lowers the cost of doing this?

Speaker 3: 8:35

If we're just embracing new technologies because they're shiny and new, it's called shiny stuff syndrome for a reason. It's a great way to burn money, burn time and, probably most impactfully, burn goodwill with the organizations in which we work. We are often not a trusted business partner, and part of that is because, historically, we've wasted a lot of money and a lot of goodwill on technologies that never really made an impact. No other department would get away with it, and L&D now has to hold itself to that standard. As these cool new AI tools come in, always impact first.

Speaker 2: 9:11

OK, thank you very much. And then the third issue that you want to address in your five minute talk is how L&D has an opportunity to make a big difference, but must change to deliver on it. What do you mean by that, tom?

Speaker 3: 9:25

So L&D is one of these very few departments that touches everyone, from their first day in the business to their last day in the business. L&d has the power to reach everyone inside an organization and that has a huge amount of potential attached to it. Yes, in terms of business performance and therefore productivity, therefore profit. But that really tends to be thought of in the sense of well, that benefits the CEO, the C-suite, the investors. But actually a more productive and profitable business offers more opportunities to the people that work within it If it's being run well. That's a big caveat here.

Speaker 3: 10:03

And more opportunity for the people means their lives change, hopefully for the better. An opportunity for a promotion or more income might mean that someone can start a family. It might mean that someone can buy a home and gain more stability in their life. One can buy a home and gain more stability in their life. There is an incredible opportunity to improve individual lives, but also society in general, if learning and performance in the workplace can be managed properly. Right now, as we kind of touched on before, we're so obsessed with learning, we're creating a space in which people don't really consider L&D to be something that enables them to earn more money, and that's a really serious problem that we've got to fix, but if we do, we can have a massive organisational and societal impact.

Speaker 5: 10:51

This episode of the HR Chat podcast is supported by my Staff Shop, the UK's only employee-owned employee benefit provider. Shop, the UK's only employee-owned employee benefit provider. We provide a range of competitive and flexible employee benefit solutions to help you improve your employee value proposition from exclusive deals and discounts to help your people stretch their salaries to effective reward and recognition programs and a comprehensive health and well-being offering. We pride ourselves on our friendly and collaborative way of working, putting the interest of our clients at the heart of everything we do. Learn more at mystaffshopcom. Thanks, and now back to the HR Chat Show.

Speaker 2: 11:31

And who doesn't want a massive organisational and societal impact? Listeners. Okay, we are already coming towards the end of this particular chit chat. Before we wrap up, just a few more questions for you. Uh, firstly, uh, briefly, tell us about your ideas, podcast and the instructional design tips. Youtube channel as well. Um, I always like to chat to other podcasters and find out what they're getting up to and why they love doing what they do.

Speaker 3: 11:58

So tell us more yes, I mean, the ideas podcast is basically a shameless way for me to steal clever people's thoughts. Um, the whole premise is come on the show and share your big idea for lnd. Um. Really casual um, just an opportunity to say, hey, I think we would be better if we did x, y and z and we've had everything from um worked better with external contractors, like voiceover actors right the way through to thinking like a neuroscientist.

Speaker 3: 12:27

You know, there's so much going on in the L&D space. It's just an opportunity for people to share their you know their idea at the moment. And then the YouTube channel really is just an opportunity to build a bit of a community around this idea of there is tremendous value in the experience and insights people develop over time and there should be a space to share it. So that's culminated in videos that I put out, either on my own or with other people, and then an annual three-day virtual conference and this year actually an in-person conference for the first time, where literally just practitioners from the space come along and say, hey, I did this thing. Here's what it achieved. Have you got any questions? Um, and we get the most phenomenal conversations off the back of them. Um, so I'd love to say it was my. It was my way to give back to the community, and I like to think there's some of that in there. But if I'm being totally honest, it's a real good opportunity to draw people in and learn from them.

Speaker 2: 13:21

Most importantly, okay, thank you. Okay. So you mentioned you've got, uh, your first in-person event that you guys are producing coming up. Any other events coming up for?

Speaker 3: 13:29

you, tom? Yeah, I mean, uh, the learning network runs events year round, uh, for members and non-members, um, whether it's webinars, mastery days, uh. We've also got our annual Connect conference in November. So basically the tail end of my year, once we kind of hit the end of July, is just L&D events from then till the end of the year, which is a lovely space to be in. We've obviously got talent gathering up in Edinburgh in I think it's November, and then the future of learning in October.

Speaker 2: 13:58

That might be the other way around, but, yeah, lots of events between now and the end of Excellent and just finally for today, how can we connect with you and learn more about all the cool things happening over at the Learning Network? So do you want to share your email address? Do you want to tell us your LinkedIn profile details? Are you really cool, Tom, and all over the TikTok and Instagram and places Tell us more.

Speaker 3: 14:24

So best place to connect with me and actually get a response, without a shadow of a doubt, is LinkedIn. If you send me an email, there is a solid chance you will not get a response, um, but if you want to email me, it's tom evolve learning designcom. Um, and I will get back to you at some undisclosed point in the future. But the best place is definitely linkedin. And when it comes to the learning network, um, if you go to the learning hyphen networkorg, everything is there on the site. It is a tremendous community that I'm lucky enough for I think I chair it for another what? Four months, and then my term is up um. So, as much as possible, uh, check it out and get involved, because they, they do really phenomenal things excellent.

Speaker 2: 15:04

Uh, shameless plug for me. Regular listeners of the show know that I am not afraid of a shameless plug. Uh, another great lnd organization that regular listeners of the show know that I am not afraid of a shameless plug, uh, I. Another great lnd organization that regular listeners of this show will know that I'm a big supporter of is atd. Uh, we covered atd a few months ago in new orleans and did loads of interviews around that. Uh, org dev is coming up as well. Quite soon, listeners, there's an interview with a couple of speakers that'll be hitting your earbuds pretty soon, so listen out for that. But for today, tom, that just leaves me to say, sir, thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR Chat Show, and, listeners, as always, until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 15:43

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.