EPISODE 3: FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE

It’s no secret that the L&D landscape is always evolving. But change brings challenges, as well as opportunities. In the third episode of our podcast, Ron Zamir, CEO of AllenComm, interviews Will Thalheimer, an expert in L&D and author of “The CEO’s Guide to Training, eLearning & Work.” They discuss how leaders can plan for and adapt to change, measure performance, and overcome the pitfalls of over-training while preparing the next generation of L&D professionals to successfully enter the field. 

Will Thalheimer, PhD, MBA, Author of The CEO’s Guide to Training, eLearning & Work: Empowering Learning for a Competitive Advantage. Consultant, Speaker, Researcher at Work-Learning Research.

Ron Zamir

Hello everybody. This is Ron Zamir from AllenComm. I am reaching you today from New York City. This is our third podcast on LX Evolved where we are really trying to take a tactical look at how change can be driven into our industry. With that, we have a great guest for everybody today, Will Thalheimer.

He’s the author of CEO’s Guide to Training, e -Learning, and Work. I have all the proof that I did read the book. I even annotated some of the pages. Hopefully, he’ll like my questions and I won’t be too much of a critic, because I’m not. I am a fan. So again, we’re going to try to really attack this field from the tactical point of view.

Hopefully we have in our audience a lot of instructional designers, trainers, HR professionals, and you will get a lot out of this. So, Will, I’m going to start us off by asking you, what’s your backstory? What got you into this field? What keeps you in this field? And what you enjoy most doing and what you’re doing.

Will Thalheimer

Sure, well my backstory I have to go back a long way. I think I’ve been in the field over 35 years, something like that, around 35 years. And I got into it in the beginning, I was actually getting my MBA, and I realized well this business stuff is good, but I’m not sure that this is all I want. So I found this four course sequence on instructional design. I took that and I was hooked and got involved, started working in the field building simulations to teach leadership training and stuff.

Been doing this for a long time. At some point I decided to get a PhD in human learning. Got that at Columbia University. Then I went out, I actually worked for a while as a head of a leadership development product line. And at that point I said, hey, you know, I noticed in our field we were jumping from one fad to another and holding on sanctimoniously to some things that didn’t work that well. And I said, you know what this field needs is somebody to sort of bridge the gap between the research side and the practice side.

So I went out on my own. I formed Work-Learning Research I had big ideas for it. And started doing that work, helping organizations build more effective learning interventions based on the learning sciences. I’ve done that for a long time. Work-Learning Research, I’ve been doing it for 23 years. I did work at two other companies along the way.

And what I do is I help companies build more effective learning interventions, help a lot with learning evaluation. People may know me for my book on performance-focused learner surveys or LTEM, the learning transfer evaluation model. But the whole goal really has been to help learning professionals build more effective learning interventions.

Ron Zamir

Well, I bow down to your expertise, Will, and I’m going to take you now to the nitty gritty of what we’re trying to learn here. So let’s talk about change. I’m going to be a bit predisposed to say that my experience working with so many learning and development groups in so many big companies is that we are sometimes challenged with change. What have you seen in how L&D departments, HR leaders, deal with change? It doesn’t have to be technological change, but any change that we could think of that will evolve the way we think about what we do.

Will Thalheimer

I sort of see us doing well in some cases and not so well in other cases. So, for example, we survived COVID. We were sort of forced to take everything from the classroom and put it online. And we did okay in that. We weren’t great, but we did okay. We got through that. And now we’re exploring more and more how to teach online, how to engage online, et cetera.

AI, we’re beginning to use that, right? Not always successfully, but we’re trying it. In those instances, we are adapting to change. Now, real innovation, though, really creating better benefits, better productivity, better performance, that’s a lot harder. I think we could do a lot better with that, frankly. I think there’s really maybe three or four reasons why we’re not doing as well as we could.

One: to be really good innovators, you have to understand the fundamentals of your craft. And we’re not always up to speed on the learning sciences or the performance sciences. The best of us are. We’re building more realistic practice into our programs, using retrieval practice, spacing effect, context alignment, things like that. But a lot of us are not still using those. So that’s one thing, the learning sciences.

Another problem is measurement. We’re still not doing great measurement. If you’re going to innovate, innovators know you’ve got to try stuff out and you have to get feedback. You have to get valid feedback on how well you’re doing. Our data we get is not great. In fact, I think I say in the book that learning evaluation or learning measurement is the root of all evil in the L&D field to be a little provocative because we’re not getting good data.

Ron Zamir

Yeah, and that’s a great point because we’re going to hone down on the issue of measurement. Can you kind of talk a little bit about, because again, we’re trying to give people the tips and tricks or the insights. I don’t think it’s a trick. It’s the insights that we’ve picked up over the years. We’ve had to really be a partner as AllenComm in understanding where companies are right now, their comfort zone, and then helping them move to the edges of that zone so they can innovate.

What are some of the conveyances that you see that help companies, to help L&D teams, move themselves farther along that is not a revolution but helps them evolve?

Will Thalheimer

Well, what I’ve seen that’s most effective is really sort of educating yourselves. Self-learning, or— sometimes we the trainers, I mean the training field, get the least training. So we need to be open to more educational opportunities for ourselves, bringing people in that have that expertise. One of the things that I’ve seen work really well, I call it a learning audit workshop. So instead of just getting, instead of going to a training and learning about all the different learning science factors, get somebody who has learning science expertise to work with you and together audit your own learning program.

I did this for the first time with the Navy SEALs. And they wanted a research-based analysis of their 65- week training program for the new recruits. Now, obviously, I wasn’t going to go analyze the whole thing, right? But we created a three-day workshop where we talked about retrieval practice. Then I got all their instructional designers, all their instructors who were Navy SEALs, got them in the room and said, okay, how are you doing with retrieval practice? What are you doing well? What are you not doing so well? How are you doing with the spacing effect? How are you using that well? How are you not using that well? How are you using simulation? How are you using that well? How are you not using it well?

And we went through that for two days. We had stickies all over the gritty classrooms with the SEALs. And then I said, okay, now that you see what you got, what do you want to do with it? And they were like, well, we want to make some changes. Here’s the stuff we want to keep, because that’s really aligned with the research. Here’s some stuff we don’t want to keep.

So that is one of the best ways that I’ve seen to sort of leverage change from a practical standpoint. I compare this to me before, doing audits on my own. I would come in and I’d sit in the classroom, I’d look at an eLearning and I would give people feedback on that. And I thought that was great. But this sort of forced me to see and involve other people and then there’s a lot more buy-in.

So I really think it’s like diving in, looking at your own stuff, being open to having it be both good and bad, keeping the good stuff and improving the stuff that’s not working that well.

Ron Zamir

I think it’s been challenging. Every single learning leader I’ve had to deal with over the past 15 years has always been healthily unsatisfied. And I think that’s a good starting point, that feeling we can do better, that feeling that—and it’s not just I’m not getting enough resources, I wish I had more people—but just that idea that we’ve been doing this onboarding the same way for so long. Our leadership matrix really hasn’t changed, but the age of our leaders is changing.

What I’ve seen, which sets a lot of people up for success, and I wonder, and I’ll ask for your comment, is knowing where to stretch. Sometimes the conscious decision is not to change too much, but to change in something specific. We’ve seen so many projects start and fizzle when they’ve tried to jump to, let’s say VR and AR, because it makes a lot of sense, especially in the manufacturing setting.

But then we’ve seen clients who take that concept and move it into a smaller web-based simulation where you can use hotspots or even QR codes to kind of introduce visualization and models into real life. I wonder if you can share from your history some little things that people have done that has helped them stretch their boundaries.

Will Thalheimer

Well, first of all, I love your story and it goes back to understanding the fundamentals. Maybe we can’t do VR, but what is it about VR that works really well and can we do that at a sort of lower level of production value, cost, et cetera? So, people trying stuff out, and one thing to experiment with is scenario questions.

I used to use these, not just me, but my team when I worked for a company called the Strategic Manager Group, we would build simulations to simulate leadership situations. I started using them then, and I found them really valuable. What they do is they put people in a context. A performance context that’s realistic. You give people both relevant information and non-relevant information, so they have to sort of know what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to. Building scenario questions is not as easy as it looks. You look at a scenario question, you go, we could do that. It’s not as easy as it looks, but it’s a relatively low cost or reasonable cost solution to really ramping things up to that context-based kind of learning that we really want.

Ron Zamir

When you talk about scenario questions—and I’m going to talk about sometimes how we over train in a minute—we’ve seen some great examples from coming from our customers who spend more time upfront asking their audience, even if it’s kind of a focus group level, what they want to see differently. Not about what they want to learn, because we do gap analysis all the time, but how they want to learn.

And I think that is one of the areas that L&D can evolve tactically, is when you are more attentive to the delivery model than the content. We tend to focus a lot on content, but I think there’s a lot of variability in delivery. You talked about scenarios. You mentioned your SEAL story.

And the setting yourself up for success, I think, starts with how you apply governance to how you work with the business teams you have to train. It’s not just what you ask them, but it’s also how much you let them give real feedback and how that feedback changes your approach to that learning audience. I think we tend to have a lot of hammers and our nails look very similar.

Will Thalheimer

Yeah, and I think one of the things we’re moving toward, and we should accelerate this trend, is not just focusing on what content to teach, but also thinking about the situations that people are working in, the work context situation. Really understanding that at a deeper level in our analysis. Really important to do that.

And when we’re asking folks for input, we have to do that in a way that guides them to the deeper wisdom, the salient things that are really making a difference. Because there’s a tendency sometimes people see things at a sort of surface level. To do a really good deep analysis, you really gotta push them, you have to understand a little bit about what their situation is and then push them to really get to sort of the heart of the matter.

Ron Zamir

Yeah. And I do want to, important caveat, we know how reactive training departments are, learning and development teams are. There’s not always time for that. So that’s why I like the term governance. You know, at AllenComm, we spend a lot of time making sure if we can’t be specific in helping them evolve to a certain audience, do they have a governance model, i.e., an approach on how the intake work that allows them to create more variability or space things out right so they can try different things.

I want to move us to the issue of, and this has come up in lot of, in your book and lot of other places, that we sometimes over train. It’s not the lack of training that is the bane of our industry, but maybe it’s the over training. Can you share some of your observations on what the negative aspects of over training are, but where does that give us opportunity to change in a positive manner?

Will Thalheimer

Yeah, so in the book I have two chapters that sort of contrast each other. One says, hey, there’s a lot of research that shows that training works. We as L&D professionals are getting better year after year. But there’s also a chapter that says, hey, one of the big myths out there is that training can solve all your problems. We get often called upon as order takers, some organizational stakeholder says, hey, we need a training course. And we, in our wisdom, say, ooh, we can help.

But then it becomes tricky. How do we make sure that we are providing them what’s really needed? Because sometimes it’s not a training issue. Sometimes maybe job aids would be quicker, more useful, et cetera. So that’s a common problem.

One of the solutions to that, and I think you hinted at it, was we need to have an intake process of their request that gets us all thinking beyond training, gets us thinking about training and making that the best possible, but also thinking about what other options are there. A process to get people aware of some of the things they may not normally be thinking about is useful. In fact, I have a whole chapter in the book saying, hey, here’s a new intake process that gets your stakeholders thinking beyond training.

Ron Zamir

Yeah, I like that and I think pre-assessments are a great way to go. I look at the world of systems training. I hope some of our viewers are involved with system adoption and training where we’ve been doing the same, see it, try it, do it almost in every single aspect.

I think one of the biggest innovations I’ve seen that are influencing our LX design, we see it in all the new LXPs that are coming out, is that we are enabling self-assessments and pre -assessments. Not as a way to score a person, but to let the learner navigate their own direction in sometimes even a non linear manner.

I definitely hope that people take to heart that when we meet the learner at his point of need, we’re getting so much more engagement and motivation, which we lose very quickly when any one of us as adults has to go through something that we think we know. Even if we don’t know it well, it does create a barrier. And I think that also leads to the over training we talked about.

Can you talk a bit about partnerships? You do a great job. What are the critical partnerships? If you had to pick three partnerships you have to do as a learning department, where should you focus your energy? How would you rank the first, second, or third, or the first two in that area?

Will Thalheimer

So, we’re not alone. First of all, we have to work with each other, right? So that’s one key. How do we work together? The other one is with our senior folks, and the other one is with our sponsors, the people that are asking us for delivery options.

I think they’re all important depending on your situation. One of the things I try to do in the book is to get senior folks—I write the book as if I’m writing to a CEO. And I say, hey, CEO, this is all the things you need to think about. And the goal for that is to give them a better understanding so that they can manage us better, that they can partner with us better.

I don’t think that that’s the full solution to our empowerment. And we need to be empowered. We have
to be really successful in what we do, there’s a lot of complexity behind it. If we are too limited, then
we’re not going to be as successful as we want to be. So we need empowerment. One way we can push
senior leaders to understand and partner with us better, but we also have to take some responsibility as
well.

One of the reasons we are not able to change as well as we want is we sort of self-sabotage ourself and see ourselves as subordinates, right? And I think we need to sort of develop our own power, our own rigorous practices. If a company asks an architect to build a building, the architect does not skimp on things like making sure the building’s going to stand up in a windstorm or something like that. That’s something that architects do. They have a moral, ethical responsibility.

We have some things that we should be insistent upon. So we need to empower ourself with rigorous practices as well. The key thing I want to say here is it really does have to be a partnership.

Ron Zamir

Yeah. Well, I kind of want to move us along. I think we alluded to the measurement challenge and I think
it’s easy to say that we’re good at testing but not so good at measurement. So as we near kind of the end of the podcast, I would love to hear your—What are your main suggestions for learning organizations and measurement? And then we’re going to get to my favorite question at the end about our kids in this industry, but let’s talk really succinctly about measurement and then move to our next generation of learning professionals.

Will Thalheimer

First of all, the first thing to know about measurement is you’re probably—most people in our field are not very happy with what we’re able to do, but don’t beat yourselves up because we’re all in that boat.

When I was at TiER1, we did a global survey of L&D professionals. We asked them, are you able to do the learning measurement you want to do? Only 65% of us said no, we’re not able to do what we want to do. So don’t beat yourself up. That’s the number one thing.

But then we got to go beyond what we’re doing now. I teach a workshop called the LTEM Bootcamp. And it’s basically talking about LTEM, but some of the fundamentals of learning evaluation. We really need to understand some things at a deep level, like people learn and remember. Well, that has a lot of implications for how we measure.

So we have to get down at a deep level, understand some of these fundamentals so we can make good decisions about it. Mostly what we’re doing is poorly designed smile sheets. So a great place to start is using better learner surveys, learner surveys that are focused on learning effectiveness.

Ron Zamir

I think we’ve learned—and I really encourage our peers and even myself inside Allen—is if you can get to measurement, spend that effort understanding your audience better. I think the source of innovation, the source of creating better learning experiences, is really getting that feedback from your audience. Companies like Qualtrics and others have done a great job helping companies understand their external audience. I think L&D is situated well to be part of that value chain and helping understanding the internal audience that serves the company.

Let me go to my favorite question. And people that know me know this. I’ll say openly, I’ve been thinking, are my kids going to get into this industry knowing what we know today? So it’s a two-part question.

What would you tell yourself from the future going back, would you advise yourself to do when you entered this career? And where do you see the future of this whole field for our kids and our next generation?

Will Thalheimer

Well, I could be in denial, but I like our field. We help people do better work. We help organizations be more effective. So to me it’s sort of a noble cause. You and I have both met a lot of people along the way, right? And most of us are really good people and we want to do well, and we’re doing really good work. So the values part of it is a good thing.

I think it’s a great field to go into. I’m never going to push my daughter to go into our field or anything like that. The kids ought to decide what they want to do. But at the same time, I think it’s a worthwhile field. And I think there is worries that AI is going to take all our jobs. I don’t see that. We’ll adapt. We’ll figure out how to use it. There’ll be work for us to do.

Ron Zamir

I’m going to end with a positive note and as I thank you for your time is I do believe that we touch that curve of change because we’re a bridge between the people in our organization and the objectives of the organization. We’re a bridge between the people in our organization and the new technologies that they have to learn to use. And I think being in that central nexus between those two forces is a great place to be.

I do believe that young people who care about how people are motivated, who want to have better leaders, who want to see technology adopted better by their organization are the people that are at L&D. So, I think we have some really smart young people entering our field.

So, Will, with that, I’m going to thank you. I recommend people to read the book. I love the chapter on the myths that we have in our industry, but also the positive outlook on how to fix those issues.

With that, this is a wrap for our third chapter in LXE Evolved. And again, we love your feedback. This is a tactical approach to help you in your job. So we feel good, you feel good, and there’s some good content out there that is adapted to us as learning professionals. Will, thank you again for joining us.

Will Thalheimer

Thanks for inviting me. I’m honored to be one of your first guests. Thanks, Ron.

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