184: From Darkroom to AI: Reflective Practice Across an L&D Career - Greg Wilton

Speaker A: Welcome to Learning Uncut, where we talk about real learning solutions with the people who made them work. Here is your host, Michelle Parry Slater.

Speaker B: Welcome to the 184th episode of Learning Uncut. In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to elders past and present, and we extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples present today. Listen, Listening in. I'm on the comber Merryland. My name is Michelle Parry Slater and as you know, Michelle Ockers is off on her travels. So just my voice today alongside our guest. Now, as longtime listeners, we'll already know 184 episodes. So you are longtime listeners. This podcast brings you great case studies of practice in L and D. Now today we're joined by our guest Greg Wilton, who's based out of St. Louis in the US of A. And Greg is a long time L and D practitioner, like M many of our listeners. And so this case study we're discussing today is actually Greg, his own career, his practice as an L and D professional. And I'm sure that many of you are going to resonate with how being in the profession for some time, we move from one thing to the next, sometimes not even celebrating one achievement before we move on to the next achievement. Now, anyone who's read my book, the Learning and Development Handbook, will know I am a huge believer in reflective practice practice. There's so much of my belief in it. I have a whole chapter dedicated to it in the book. So we are going today to do some reflective practice with Greg and his career. So I hope that we can learn a lot from looking over what he has done. I believe genuinely that, you know, if it's in the immediate moment of how well did that call go right through to checking and focusing in on ourselves about a program that we might have delivered that larger body of work. It all needs a reflective practice. So it is so important that actually at Middlesex University you can study a doctorate in exactly this. Professional practitioners who have a substantial amount of output into the public domain can spend their PhD time reviewing that body of work. Many players in our field have actually done this. Nigel Payne, for example. Julian Stoddard is, uh, on the program at the moment and so is our lovely friend of the show, Laura Overton. So today, Greg, you are the subject of our case study, your career. And I'm curious to know how that will inspire others to focus in on their own growth, to think about their critical thinking and to build their own reflective practice. Now enough of me. I want to introduce you. Greg, who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself and start at the beginning. How come you decided to come into our fair profession of learning and development?

Speaker C: Well Michelle, well first of all thank you for having me on. It's an honor to be on Learning Uncut. It's very exciting to be here and uh, hopefully I'll be able to provide a little bit of insight, maybe a little bit of wisdom along the way. So you asked me how did I come m to being a learning and development professional. I did not major in learning and development in university. I was a history major. Uh, but, and I thought I was going to be a history teacher. Um, I wrote uh, a book and I wrote a one act play. So I learned how to speak publicly. I learned how to think critically about systems, to build a narrative, all those types of things that go into being a history major, history professional. But uh, my career took kind of an unexpected turn coming out of university. I ended up getting a job as a darkroom technician for a photographer. And so um, this was right around the same time that film resolution and digital resolution were kind of coming up to be about even so you can, everyone can kind of uh, tell how old I am now by saying that. Uh, but during that time I learned a lot about creative operations. I learned about how to both be a creative professional while also doing it efficiently and effectively. I also learned a lot about uh, uh, image, uh creation software on the digital space and HTML. And then eventually I landed as a web publisher. Uh, coming out of that uh, experience um, I ended up managing uh, the web presence for national nonprofit here in the states. Um, uh, I learned so much about search engine optimization and the use of words for findability, communicating its scale, ah, component based content architecture. So not just working in documents but also working in, in bits of chunks, user experience. These are all skills that were central to that role. But I hope that you're hearing that I'm also picking out components of those roles. Before I came to L and D that prepared me for a career in learning and development because uh, eventually I was recruited to a sales training organization at a national uh, private health insurer here in the states to become a web develop in the sales training organization. And that's how I came to learning and development. And so in this about three years uh, that I spent with this organization, this is where I learned instructional design. This is where I learned um, how to do facilitation video editing for personalized Learning and reflective practice, um, in the late um, 2000s there. Um, and so then my career continued to bloom uh, in learning and development, especially as we started going from more like classroom based work during that time to education at scale where I've led learning campaigns for over 50,000 users now too.

Speaker B: Wow, that's amazing. And what you're describing is so many people's careers that it's just sort of almost non sequiturous route to where we are today. Um, but the beauty of what you've described in your reflection is that this digital piece was stacking up for you along the way. And uh, we won't have time to have a curious conversation about what happened to history. I married to a history teacher. I'm sure he'd want that conversation another time, Craig. But your journey to get you to L and D reminds me with you talking about film and digital, we're at that point now with inflection with AI and I'm sure we are going to talk more about that a little bit later on. But um, this is the same sort of thing. We're not, we're not arriving at AI having not got experience of turning points in industries. And certainly if anyone was working at Kodak then, you know, this film digital piece is a real challenge and that's where we're kind of at now. But I know from our uh, discussions before your work in learning and development, um, you know, took you to a place where you realized that perhaps there was another way to approach L and D. You had this digital background, you had this web publishing background, you really knew about communication but something wasn't quite sitting right for you. Um, so I'd love you to talk us through what happened Next, particularly in 2013.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So uh, Michelle, after the three years with the health insurer, I got the opportunity to become an E learning, uh, developer for a global agricultural company. So this is where I got to a point where I was training on a global scale, up to 24 different languages. Um, and that's a really exciting prospect. Um, but the learning operations really influences how we create learning experiences. So when I was there, um, I was an elearning developer and I was based in our global headquarters here in St. Louis. Uh, but I was making training for a global audience, up to 24 different languages. I rarely ever met the humans that took the courses that I developed. But I had spent most of my education, uh, uh, development time with the health insurer, meeting every single person I trained. And so human, uh, empathy was a real part of how I understood the impact of what I was doing. And so um, occasionally I would hear maybe some negative feedback. It's oftentimes a lot easier to hear the negative feedback than the positive. Right. And uh, a lot of times that negative feedback was like the learning experience was boring or that they just clicked through it without learning anything, things like that. Now I was a part of a team. So sometimes it, it might have been my course, sometimes it might have been a course that somebody else had built. But you know, just by me saying it was my course versus somebody else's courses can help. You already hear that there is not much of a standardization for the process of learning operations. So in this area here, how we got our money, how we were funded as an organization was a build back model. So the business process owner or the, the person who was commissioning that training would approach the organization and one of our, one of the developers would get assigned to that project and you manage that project from M intake through delivery. And so because of that autonomy as a practitioner we had a um, wide variety of styles and um, adhesion to instructional quality and uh, adult learning principles and things like that. And so um, I felt like I never wanted to make a click through or narrated PowerPoint. And so um, my original thought was I was going to lean on the skills that I developed earlier in my career. Things about like narrative creativity. And so the second assignment I ever had at the company was uh, for a series of elearning modules on the risk based process safety approach, uh, published by the center of Chemical process safety in 2007.

Speaker B: That sounds cool. Yep.

Speaker C: The RBEP assets made up of 20 elements and organized into four major, major foundational blocks. Have you checked out already?

Speaker B: Yeah, maybe.

Speaker C: It sounded and looked terribly bureaucratic and I thought I am not going to make a click through PowerPoint about this. I am going to make this sort of narrative around like a detective character and the detective is going to go around and see what's what the problem is with this process safety stuff. And uh, I came into my intake meeting so jazzed about this idea. Like I was going to rock it out and it was going to be so much fun. And the uh, the process owner, you know, listened to my pitch and he said like I love the enthusiasm, I love the creativity, but I can't do it. And I was like holding back my heartbreak a little bit and then I kind of just asked for like I completely understand and respect that. Can you tell me a little bit about why that is? And he said because if people get this wrong, people die. And that changed my entire outlook around this, uh, series of educations that ended up translating into something that I had never really considered before, but the learner's value proposition. Why should they invest their attention in an assigned course? And so, um, I, this really opened up the way that I thought about intakes for the rest of my career. Um, and so, uh, you know, like, when you think about who is the customer of your learning. If you're familiar with Peter Drucker and some of his business management, um, authorings, you know, he has this great example of who is the customer of a doll. Is it the child who plays with it or the parent who buys it? And you think about that for a little bit, right? Because the answer is really both. But you know, the, the eye of the beholder is really an important. It is how you create value or where you create value. Right. So I needed to adjust my intake methodology to uh, to, to sort of this dal method, you know, kind uh, of concept. Who is my customer? Is it the learner or is it the business process owner paying the bill? And the answer is both. But the business process owner is rarely ever set to represent the learner. And that's why I've really changed a lot the way that I approached, um, how to um, produce, um, an e learning experience.

Speaker B: It's wonderful to listen to you talk. You're a great storyteller, Greg. Um, really appreciate, uh, the way that you're sharing this with us. But I wonder how many of us in our careers have had this kind of pivotal moment, this realization. And one of the reasons that I wanted to share your story with the learning uncut listeners is because we don't need a pivotal moment. We can learn this from others and the more we share as a community, the better that will be. But talk to us more. Then you were really putting the human at the heart of intake. So by intake you're talking about that initial briefing conversation, that initial kind of what is it that we're trying to build here folks? What learning are we doing? Is that right?

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker C: so many processes, whether they're creative or, uh, systemic processes, um, getting the proper needs analysis and the proper intake methodology makes so much more of the design, development, et cetera, uh, work, important work. Well now in that model that I had at that agricultural, uh, company, um, you know, the build back methodology kind of assumed that the business owner was paying for the design, development and implementation of the addie process. They were really thinking they were paying for the D D and I of Addie, they weren't really interested in paying for the analysis, nor were they especially interested in paying for the evaluation.

Speaker B: I think that's a story that resonates with a lot of people, to be honest. The evaluation is hard to come by.

Speaker C: Exactly. So how do you become, um, a better practitioner of learning and serve the full spectrum of your, your learner's needs in that constraint? Because in that constraint you are kind of in a data poor environment. And so then the questioning strategy that I developed in my intake tried to bridge some of the gap. Now I'm sure that many, uh, of your listeners are going to think like this seems kind of like, you know, not very data driven. And in a world where my, my uh, uh, uh, commissioners weren't going to pay for data, I needed to come up with something else. So I, I developed a, a human centered intake methodology where I crafted very specific questions to move me from the uh, business process owner being my customer to the business process owner being my partner.

Speaker B: Tell me more.

Speaker C: So these uh, questions that are really start with the human. So oftentimes intake starts with tell me about your project. What do you want to train on? What is the behavior you want to change? Right. I just started with a Tell me about your learners.

Speaker B: Could they answer that question?

Speaker C: It was a wide variety of answers. Right. You know, some had really terrific empathy for their learners. Some were truly business process owners and the humans were part of the process and any matter of gaping between. And so, uh, the successful intake M. Um, I was really looking for four things for learning architecture. I wanted a learner value proposition. I wanted a performance outcome. I wanted my learning objectives and I wanted my metrics. Those are the four things that I was looking for. And I only had about an hour to get them. My intake meetings were typically about an hour. Now that's kind of like a lightweight, you know, getting into the realm of like a high performance learning journey. Um, but you know, again, in those kinds of, uh, constrained areas, you know, um, we look for the best answers we can get. So, you know, my first question was always, tell me about your learners. My second question was always, will they be happy to take this training? And about 70% of the time the answer was no. And then I would let that kind of just go for a second and then I would lean in across the table and I would say, then why are we doing it? And that question was really important for capturing the learner value proposition. Uh, and for anyone that said no, they're not going to be happy to take that training, they probably haven't thought they deeply enough about their learning value proposition. And so that then really changed was the foundation of the change from being uh, the uh, business process owner from being a customer to being a partner. Now we're starting to define the behavioral challenge that we get to partner on together to try to solve. So after that I would typically ask the question if we walked away from this meeting now and decided to take no further action, what would happen? And this uh, this question is really meant to get current state behavior. I'm mining and questioning for, for metrics. How would I observe or count that? Mhm. I am looking for what is the cost of delay if we did nothing? What's the real risk here? Sometimes it's also an off ramp to an uh, alternative modality other than elearning. You know if, if the cost of doing nothing is one where it's actually better if we actually just use signage or like a QR code that goes to short videos or, or something along those lines. This is one of those kinds of uh, ways for me to have a, a data point upon which to make a, a modality recommendation. Next question. I would also give the reflexive that's like complete this sentence for me. This training will be successful if love

Speaker B: it could they answer it?

Speaker C: And typically they could answer that one, they knew why they were coming to me. But by asking about the current state first, like what happens if we do nothing? Now I've got the endpoints of the performance gap and so we can start working on learning objectives within the boundaries of those two items. Another one that I'd like to ask is describe for me the moment on the job where this training matters. So in Brickerhoff's high performance learning journey there is actually a column for moments that matters. Um, but this is my follow up question on that is how will the learner know that this is the moment and what would you observe when they do it? This is about getting the real context of the performance and the behavior. And I'm not using any like learning practitioner language here. I'm using their language, uh, to be able to start mapping into the components of proper instructional design. I'll oftentimes ask if there's anything that a learner needs to stop doing to be successful. You know, because if we just continue to pile on more and more behavioral expectations without taking anything back, then we're just overloading the system with rules and expectations. And then my favorite one, my favorite question at the end is let's imagine this training is so successful that the board of directors invites you to speak to them about how this is the most spectacular training the company has ever seen. But the catch is you only have five minutes and one slide. What's on your slide? And when I paint that story of remarkable success and I ask them to what's on their slide, inevitably it's always the business metric, the correlative business metric that they are looking to influence through behavior change. And that's the foundation for a correlative ROI calculation.

Speaker B: Instantly you can tell what difference does it make.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: It's a masterclass in performance consulting at the end of the day. And I'm loving it, and I'm loving that you've shared it with us. So for anyone listening, I'm sure they're going to rewind and write all your questions down. Um, but I am curious. We can't um, shy away from the evaluation piece. This is a conversation today about reflection. So what difference did it make when you shifted away from sort of the wild west of autonomous elearning design to um, your human centered intake methodology? What difference was, um, the result?

Speaker C: Sure. So certainly we started to see ah, qualitative feedback, uh, coming back that was certainly much more positive because we were thinking about who is the learner, where is the moment they're applying that learning. We now started getting into more situational, um, uh, application within the elearning module itself. So then it becomes more relevant, it becomes more useful, it becomes that the transfer of knowledge, the transfer of training, the friction is reduced.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: You know, so feedback was really nice there. We also uh, saw that um, we got uh, to about a 95% accuracy rate for our estimates. So we were in a build back method. Right. So we were making an estimate for how much is this going to cost. And um, we got so accurate with it because we were so good about the instructional design up front that the expectations for rework started to really diminish. So the quality of our training work started to increase substantially without the expanding the hours and the manpower in order to make that better learning experience. Um, so Michelle, I really appreciate the question about the evaluation and unfortunately in the environment that I was in, we didn't see a lot of measurements beyond consumption completion types of metrics. Now I could tell you about some other things that we did outside of that later on in my career where uh, we used say like level one surveys, uh, the methodology of that to get into predictive level 3 intent to apply, uh, measurements. So we started getting into like dipping our toe into predictive indexes, um, later on in my career. But um, that direction impact on that was one of operational efficiency and qualitative and people started uh, enjoying getting a learning uh, assignment again.

Speaker B: It is ah, fair to say it was a long time ago, wasn't it? And so I want to start thinking about those lessons learned, demonstrating impact, um, along later areas of your career. So what is it that you can share with listeners today? The reflections of your work. Um, as we've gone on through time, um, is there any sort of advice that you might have for L and D professionals, particularly about using this sort of evidence based learning methodology?

Speaker C: Yeah, um, I have continued to learn and appreciate how important it is to build partnerships and relationships with adjacent disciplines. When you are conducting uh, learning in a business environment, you are really conducting learning in an ecosystem. Now you can do it effectively or not effectively, but when you're working in an ecosystem you almost never have full control over it. And so as I got better at my career of identifying key stakeholders, building relationships with those stakeholders, finding common measurement, common guardrails, common methodologies, um, I started to uh, develop a lot of systems thinking. And then as I got better also at human centered design, as I became a design thinking practitioner, for example, uh, later on in my career I could apply the concepts uh, of design thinking and human centered design work to systems thinking and how our people learn in systems. Sometimes in systems we control, sometimes systems that we don't have authority over. And so this has guided a lot of my, my, my own personal development to get better at the practice of learning and development as well as prepare for the inevitable evolution and disruption that comes to learning and development as technology advances.

Speaker B: I'm smiling to myself because as Michelle Lockers is on a beach somewhere listening to this because no doubt she will be, she will be kind of laughing because the words that you're using are the words that I use in my practice too. And uh, I swear dear listeners, we did not have this detail of a conversation prior to our recording, but I genuinely think that when we as L and D practitioners borrow from the adjacent community of our organization development practitioners of our human centered design, of our systems thinking practitioners, we will all benefit. Um, I love that you've talked about an ecosystem. I often say that when we drop the ego and we move away from ego system into ecosystem, we realize how we're all interconnected and we can't do anything in L and D without realizing it's going to blow up something somewhere else in the organization or just have no effect, which is what you were kind of describing in the early days. Um, so you are now sort of um at your career today and you're doing human centered work throughout your career, getting us there from 2013 that you describe your wonderful story of thinking up this human centered intake methodology to 2026. Along the way have you been your own critical friend? Have you um, practiced reflective um thinking along the way? Talk to us about now, Bring us up to date. Greg, where are we at?

Speaker C: Over the last 10 years I've had the opportunity to work at one of the major wealth management firms here in the United States. And I've. In this um, in this opportunity I've really grown um as a uh, from a practitioner to a leader then to a agent of modernization and change in the, in these different roles here. So um, in this role I got to um, work on things like revamping the financial advisor onboarding and development ah program. You know this is, this was a program that was bringing through thousands of financial advisor candidates every year. It was a pipeline of the industry talent and uh, being able to modernize that system, um, being able to not just learn design thinking myself, but be an early champion for the people that I led on my team to also explore some of these uh, adjacent disciplines. Some of these folks have gone on to have incredible careers outside of learning and development in some of these adjacent uh areas here when talking operational excellence, um, strategy and uh, human centered design, digital product management, um, and so when we lead learning as a system we also create these opportunities for um, talent pipelines to expand into the organization, taking that learning uh mindset with them and helping to build a learning organization. Uh, you typically can't build a learning organization from an ivory tower in your L and D practice, right? Um, and so um, I also got the opportunity to modernize our learning technology stack. Um and uh, it moved from a singular learning management system to more of a suite of learning tools that worked in concert together. And then I also got the opportunity to uh, work on the firm's first ever generative AI use case. Um in 2023 our use case was selected um, out of a pool of candidates. And um, as I worked on that uh, as I learned the foundations of uh, responsible AI, as I learned the mechanics of how you train a model, I really came to appreciate how much organizational knowledge management and what I call wisdom management is going to be important for learning and development moving forward. Earlier this month Anthropic released a report of uh, some early indications of uh, displacement risk for different job categories as AI Matures and adoption, uh, moves throughout uh, industries. Um, if you haven't looked at it, I think it's extremely instructive. It might be a little scary for some people if I'm being totally honest. But as I think about what does that mean for L and D M many of us think about what does that mean for my job. I think it's also important for us to think about what does that mean for our practice of learning and development. So in uh, jobs where you're going to expect a significant amount of displacement risk, the work being done is going to be done in typically in concert with humans and AI agents working together. So in a world where that is true knowledge management and wisdom management become extremely important for those AI agents doing some of that work. And so I um, believe Michelle that as the agentic future comes through, we in learning and development should really come together with knowledge management to help manage the ground truth of our organizations. That is both the technical knowledge that you would typically find in say like a uh, manual or a policy, certainly all of that is still really important. But I think where we can make a wonderful partnership is in what I call wisdom management. Because knowledge is not just what's documented. It also um, happens in the artifacts of our daily work. It happens in the tacit knowledge that's stuck in our experts heads. And if we can build knowledge models that can produce reliable results with AI and combine that with the human learning and development work that we're already so good at, that's a field that I believe will eventually end up sounding like human enablement. And um, if we continue to think ahead about a world where it's not just people doing the work, it's also agents doing the work. I think this is an important reflection point for us as we think about what's next for us as uh, a

Speaker B: discipline, I think that's definitely where we're at, isn't it? What is next for us? And you're right to raise um, the report from Anthropic. We'll make sure that there's a link in the show notes for others to read it. People may feel scared of that, but the way you approach your whole career and there's been turning points throughout it remind us that change is constant. We're always moving forward. We've had this moment before film and digital, you know, E learning or not elearning. There's been lots of these moments. I think this moment feels bigger than some of those other ones. Uh, perhaps, but it might be because we're Living through it. But I'm curious, how do we work alongside these agents? What does that sort of more augmented career relationship look like? Have you taken the human? Have you stopped the human at the center of your learning now? I mean you've never stopped thinking about thinking. That's very clear. So much so that you're developing a narrative of where the profession needs to be going. But where's the human in this, Greg?

Speaker C: Well, Michelle, I think that there's already a lot of ink spilled on where's the human in all of this, right? And um, when I was thinking about what's my contribution to this discussion, I thought it's more important for us to start thinking about the mechanics that we use in our work and updating them for this moment. So, um, one of the things I've worked on recently, I just released my personal um, uh, position about how we should revise Bloom's Taxonomy's verbs for this day and age. So, um, I'm sure everybody listening is probably familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy. It was designed originally in 1956. And um, it has six tiers of learning objective verbs, uh, for lower level and higher level cognitive processes. Uh, as we build learning experiences around these learning objectives. And as I'm looking at those, those verbs are built for a much more analog time than we are in now. And so as our work changes to be, uh, either AI augmented by, we're doing the same work, we're just doing it faster and better with AI or are we doing it in concert with uh, AI agents where there's probably less humans, but they are much more super augmented by this AI. And there's also another kind of vision for full transformation of a business where it's mostly agents, but we'll leave that one for another day. I posted an article, um, with uh, a suggestion of a completely new set of verts for Bloom's Taxonomy. So these would include verts like prototype and govern and things along those lines where uh, the verbs of judgment, of oversight, of critical thinking, um, applied in that same kind of hierarchical model could give us a, um, practical way to think at the point of each one of those learning items. Are we teaching people for today's age of AI and teaching them the skills of what we need them to do with AI, or are we holding on to historical models that have been taught to us since university that never conceived of an artificial intelligence augmented world? So Michelle, as people think about or uh, what's uh, upcoming for them, as people think about what is AI going to do? I really encourage us all to think about in the near term, what we can do is update our practices for the modern age. And if we do that, we'll be able to keep pace with change a lot better than if we try to just use, um, the same tooling that we always have.

Speaker B: It's a good lens to look at the world through updates rather than this sense that we're losing something. And there is definitely a kind of an air of fear and concern. AI is taking my job. AI is morphing the jobs. I think the jobs will shift, um, but I genuinely believe that there'll always be jobs for humans. Um, I often go back to thinking about when farriers were around when the car was invented. Oh, we'll be right, no problem. Let's get our head in the sand. Everyone's always going to have horses, like horses are privileged today. So the jobs shift. But those wise farriers started to become blacksmiths, making gates to put the cars behind because they're expensive items. So, yeah, we need to think about what our gates might be, um, that we will start to morph into. So I think it's a really good opportunity to help people to reflect. We'll put your link to your LinkedIn post in the show notes and I really encourage people to just jump on board. What do we think about these new verbs? What do we think about where the human sits? Um, and Greg's new thinking? Um, one of the things I do love to do is to take learners on what I call a meta learning experience. I describe it as being in the thing is the thing it teaches us reflective practice. Um, and so I think it's appropriate in today's podcast that we stop, uh, and sort of zoom out. Let's look above ourselves and sort of. If we were looking down on this conversation, you've been talking about your career, Greg, you've been talking about your thinking, your brilliant ideas, how you've grown and adapted over a number of years. So if we're looking down on your career, what are we seeing in that more holistic, bigger picture? You know, you're a systems thinker, you know how this goes. So what, what themes have we got that you've latched onto? What's consistent throughout change? Because I think it's important when people are worried about change. Some things don't change, some things are rooted, you know, right back in you writing a one act play, uh, you know, in being a history major. Some things are rooted back there. So what's consistent? But then of course, many Things do change. So what would you have done differently? Perhaps? What would you, um, sort uh, of recommend to others? What have you learned just from this reflective conversation today?

Speaker C: Oh, I love being in the thing. I'd say that as I thought about this, I've really reflected about how much I've, uh, matured as a LED practitioner that serves a business. When I learned about the fundamentals of learning and development, a lot of it was theoretical. And the more responsibility that I accepted in my roles, the more I understood that I was a business leader who practiced L and D. And so, um, that's a theme of consistent growth that I'll never achieve. I'll always be growing in this area. And so if, uh, others are kind of reflecting about that, I would say that if you are in a corporate environment, think of yourself instead of saying like, I'm a learning and development professional. Think of yourself as, I'm a business professional that uses L and D tools to, to, to, to get results. This helped me to really change my thinking about, from being a, someone who produces products like learning products to being something closer to something. I heard, um, uh, from McKinsey not that long ago. Underwriting outcomes like, imagine how valuable you are if you can help, uh, to underwrite and co travel toward a key business outcome, whether it be in business transformation or any number of different kinds of outcomes. That feels purpose driven to me. If I were to kind of, if I was to do it all over again, I probably would have put, even. I put a lot of effort in those, uh, relationships and partnerships with adjacent disciplines. And I probably would have doubled my effort to create and nurture those relationships if I had to do it all over again. There is no point where you're like, enough is enough there. Um, I, I've never regretted making that connection with anyone, you know, uh, whether it be with my partners in compliance, uh, where I really got to think about someone who thought about risk all the time. And I became a much better practitioner of learning and development because of it. And then lastly, I learned about the scientific method when I was a pretty young person. And I have been thinking a lot about the scientific method and its use for pilots. Because our environment right now is one where we will have to move through remarkable ambiguity for a long period of time. And things will always be iterative. And so as we try to keep pace with the business, keep pace with the evolution in our discipline, um, our ability to craft a pilot, to test and learn becomes all the more important for us now. And I got the privilege to Be able to learn how to do that along the way in my career. But imagine, uh, that if you don't know and you go back to the basics of the scientific method and you construct a experiment to at least get some guidance there, it makes, I don't know, a lot more comfortable.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: And if you craft it correctly, you always have an off ramp to declare success in failure. Meaning that you may put the pilot together. The pilot doesn't produce the results that you want. If you, uh, have constructed your experiment correctly, then there's a success in. In. In the knowing.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: That it failed.

Speaker B: Yeah. Great learning. First attempt in learning.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: What the acronym stands for? Fate. First attempt in learning. So I agree with you entirely. Pilot really does help.

Speaker C: There's all sorts of people that say we need to make it safe to fail. Um, I would suggest that instead that comes from the way that we construct our experiments. Right, right. Um, and it's a responsibility of us to create the conditions where failure is an option that's forecasted. And if you fail something, it's still success because you've learned that this stuff didn't work. It's not an accident. It was one of the possibilities that you forecasted in the first place. And now we know. Um, and um, boy, I tell you, whether that is a constructivist learning experience itself or if it is us experimenting with, should we invest in that learning technology? Um, I've been thinking a lot about the fundamentals of the scientific method and how that can give me courage and ambiguity.

Speaker B: Wonderful, wonderful. Well, we do need to bring this wonderful conversation to a close. I wonder, Greg, is there anything that you'd not said yet that you wish you have said to your fellow L and D professionals? They might be considering their own career journey. They might be starting out in our profession. They may have been around for a while and are wondering what's next in this new augmented age of AI. So, any thoughts?

Speaker C: Um, first of all, you all matter and we matter as an organization. We are the enablers of growth of people. And that's a really important thing that fuels people's purpose. And I mean, that's. If that doesn't get you out of bed in the morning, then you're probably in the wrong profession. But at the same time, we're entering a time of substantial disruption to our profession. And so I really double down on some of what I said earlier about adjacent skills, adjacent, um, uh, disciplines. When things get disruptive, they are disrupted. Um, think of it almost like a game of Boggle. Right. Things pop up into the air and then they resettle. And if you are really familiar with all the blocks in the Boggle, uh, bubble, uh, then you'll probably find a graceful spot for how you create value. Because if we all agree that learning and development matters, if we can always adjust to where we sit in an organization.

Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you so, so much. So if you're considering your career, if you're, um, wondering about what's next for you in this age of AI, then we can all do this. We can all reflect and we can all think about our own future. You've mentioned a few times Adjacent Communities. I want to give out a shout out to, um, the book Adjacent Learning by David Hayden and Steve George. In that book, they take our profession and they really look about where we can learn elsewhere and throughout it. So that might be a good resource. I'll pop that one in the show notes. But I just want to say thank you, Greg Wilton, for allowing us to put your career in the sponsor spotlight as our case study today. You've shared your vision, your values, your passion, your thinking, and we definitely appreciate it. So encourage listeners to connect with Greg on LinkedIn. Uh, get involved in that Bloom's Taxonomy conversation. Stretch your thinking as we navigate this changing world of AI. I would also like to encourage people to leave a review of the episode. If you leave a review on your favorite podcast player, it does help others to find the podcast. We're well over 100 countries that we're in, but we could always be in more. And as you know, we've got 184 episodes that's of Learning Uncut alone. Not even the specialist series such as Elevate. So we have got a lot of opportunity for people to reflect on their career through listening to the podcast and we would love for more people to hear it. And we want to walk our talk. So if you have any feedback for the podcast, we are open to hearing it. Until next time on Learning Uncut. Thank you Greg and um, good luck to everyone thinking about your own careers.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. Head over to LearningUncut GlobalPodcast to access resources discussed in this episode. If you have a story to share on the podcast, contact Michelle Parry Slater on LinkedIn.