INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Charles Jennings

0:20 Alright, everyone it’s real it’s raw and it’s only available on the learning network, welcome to. Another edition of L&D Real Talk: Analyst Spotlight, I’m Corey Marcel, your host, bringing you world leading analysts as they get frank with us on the do’s and don’ts in learning and development.

Today, I am really truly excited to be introducing the man of the hour, our guest analyst Mr.Charles Jennings hold the applause, please hold the applause. Partner strategy and performance of the 70:20:10 Institute. Charles is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on building and implementing learning and organizational performance strategies.

He has led learning and performance improvement projects for multinational corporations, government agencies, non-profits and other organizations for more than 40 years and, of course, he’s worked with the 70:20:10 model for over two decades. Welcome Dr. Charles Jennings.

Charles Jennings

1:25 Thanks, very much for that introduction, thank you very much.

Corey Marcel

1:28 Absolutely, absolutely. So excited to have you here on the show, I met you several years ago at learning technologies in London and have been following you ever since. Real big fan, so thank you for making time for us today.

Charles Jennings

1:40 it’s a pleasure, absolute pleasure.

Corey Marcel

1:42 So we’d like to start the show off with what I like to call the real talk rapid fire round. So i’m going to ask you three questions and you just give me the first answer that kind of pops into your head. Are you signing on board at this? are you okay with that?

yeah all right all right.

Here we go. Hopefully these questions weren’t given to you beforehand, because that might ruin the purpose here. Alright, so the first one in one word or sentence what’s the best or worst thing about being an analyst.

Charles Jennings

2:12 Well, expectations.

Corey Marcel

2:20 Expectations all right we’re gonna dive back into that one in just a second I like that. Next one what’s your favorite meal of the day, if it’s not high tea, then, then what is it.

Charles Jennings

2:35 Oh, what I would call dinner at night.

Corey Marcel

2:40 fantastic and then, finally, I say the hardest one for last. It’s probably like picking one of your children, which one is your favorite. I’m going to say three numbers and I want you to tell me which one is your favorite 70. 20. 10.

Charles Jennings

2:55 Oh, 70 every time.

Corey Marcel

2:58 i’m a 70 guy as well. I knew we were clicking right off the bat. I’m a 70%

awesome alright well now let’s get into kind of the the heart of what we want to talk about today, and you know I want to start off with the 70:20:10 model. It’s been around since the 80s, like me, were both millennials.

Why is it still relevant today and and what given, you know, this model so much staying power.

Charles Jennings

2:29 That is a really good question to kick off with, Corey. I think that, you know, 70:20:10 certainly the way I’ve used that knife built on us and we built on it with my colleagues, is about a fundamental and that fundamental hasn’t changed, you know, since the 1980s.

And then fundamental is that you know learning occurs all over the place, learning occurs everywhere and learning does not just occur in classrooms or elearning modules it doesn’t just occur when it’s structured by someone else and provided to me in some way so, 70:20:10 is just a lens through which you can look at the power of learning and extend it beyond formal that’s that’s the real the real key and I think that 70:20:10 is much misunderstood I regularly get challenged or questions about the numbers and it’s weird for me to say, but it’s actually not about the numbers, as I say, it’s about it’s about looking taking a systemic look at the power of learning and how we can utilize learning within our organizations and, in fact, my colleagues and I have hardly ever referred to 70:20:10 now, of course we do, but we prefer to use the term performance based learning so it’s focused on, how can we utilize learning to improve performance and that’s you know, a big question that we all face, you know every L&D, learning and development professional, every HR professional you know, should be focused on that if they’re not. Actually, the other thing about 70:20:10 is when it’s used well, when we start to embed or look at learning as part of working and make sure that learning and working are the one. You know, that comes one of the major problems, the learning and development professionals have been struggling with for certainly or my career, which is around learning transfer. Because we’ve known for years and years that the closer that someone learns or gets help to complete a task to the point that they’re executing that task. The more effective that learning, or help or support is going to be and we’ve known that actually now for 121 years a couple of American psychologist by the name of Woodworth and Thorndike formulated their principal of identical elements back in 1901 and the principle of identical elements was the clarity, exactly as I said at the close of the context we learn something is to the context where you’re going to use it, the more effective it’s likely to be. And that’s why, when we talk about 70:20:10 We always say plan for the hundred and start with a 70 on the principle that if you can embed learning as part of working, it’s likely to be far more effective than if you take people out of work and put it through some learning progress and then back in and hope that you know the magic will happen.

Corey Marcel

6:31 That’s phenomenal, you said two things that I want to, I want to jump back into. The first is kind of transitioning the naming of 70:20:10 to performance based learning. And the second was, matching the learning style or modality, to the task that the learner is going to need to complete, I want to dig into both of those the first is what you know how did you transition from the 70:20:10 kind of naming to performance based learning what’s the significance of that.

Charles Jennings

7:07Well, really, the driver, there was a couple of drivers for that, but. One of the main drivers was the people getting tied up with this 70:20:10 because you know the tongue which originated, as you say, back in the 80s, even by making a who created the term he calls it a mean. We refer to it as a reference model, but people, no matter how much you say that, people want to know where where’s the evidence that shows that exactly 70% of learning through learning occurs through through working experience practice. and so on, and 20% because through others, and so on, and of course there is no research that shows that that would be crazy to you know it’s a nice round numbers and Bob Eichinger, when he generated the original numbers or originated, the numbers that wasn’t even those numbers weren’t nice neat 70 2010. When they when they percent of a greater leadership carried out their surveys and different groups that, of course, they got different numbers so in a way. Performance based learning is a way to get around that focus on the round numbers because that’s not what it’s about and actually it also helps us bring 70:20:10 into the day because the major challenge that we as learning and development professionals have today is to add value to our organizations and sort of partway step to that is making sure that learning delivers performance, not just individual performance but team performance and organizational performance and their performance is turned into value. My colleague is a great thinker and has written a lot about this and there’s actually just finishing up a book around value based learning. Come up with and sort of originated, a lot of really fundamental I think ideas that will fundamentally change the way that L&D works and one is what we originally called the 70:20:10 methodology in fact there’s a big book written about that, which is focused on what learning and development professionals need to do in fact five specific roles that learning and development professionals need to undertake whenever they’re. Preparing or helping to solve a business problem and in those five roles are 31 tasks and that’s what we call the 70:20:10 methodology we we used to refer to it exclusively a 70:20:10 methodology, now we refer to that as a performance based learning methodology that we run programs, and so on for building capability around that. So, so that was the first reason why we, we made that migration in terms of getting away from the numbers, but also when we think about what we’re trying to do today we’re trying to make sure, as L&D professionals, that we are adding value to our organizations and therefore the performance based and value based learning speaks much more easily to senior execs to people with you know responsibility in organizations managers and so on, because if you’re talking about 70:20:10. You can explain it to them and they’ll get it, but it doesn’t sort of ring, whereas if you talk about value based learning performance based learning, they do, they get it.

Corey Marcel

10:30 It makes sense because when you 70:20:10 it sounds like the whole idea was just uncovering, these modalities and which, in which people learn and we’ve got a you got to make sure we’re we’re speaking to them in order to drive that end result which is performance, which is business impact but people it to your point we’re getting hung up on the numbers and the ratios and what’s the mix and it was kind of distracting from, hey, the end result that we want to drive is behavior change or more performance and business impact.

So that makes.

It makes complete sense that the name changes to what it was it sounds like intended to do, the entire time which is to show learning’s impact and helps learning make an impact on business objectives.

Charles Jennings

11:03that’s absolutely right and, in fact, as long as you focus just on the 10 on the formal learning it’s difficult almost impossible to show business being impact, in fact, the research suggests that around about 4% of formal learning interventions are able to demonstrate business impact, whereas if you look across the whole hundred what we would call the hundred and start to think about about solving business problems and solving performance problems, then it’s much, much easier to demonstrate business impact.

Corey Marcel

11:51 So this, this is a huge topic right now we’ve talked about this, all the time is correlating in you know learning to the impact that’s having a business, why is it in your opinion so hard to correlate that formal learning component to impact.

Charles Jennings

12:10Well there’s a number of reasons, one is, I think the approaches that have been taken in the past have been designed around for learning so we’ve had you know Don Kirkpatrick’s model when and jack phillipsburg previous model on the top and will help feltheimer has got a really good model, now the altar model, which is a good way to show the learning value that can be delivered from formal learning. But then converting that learning value into business value is really, really tough

Corey Marcel

13:13 that’s amazing and when talking to a lot of learning leaders, this is where they’re trying to go, not a lot of organizations get there, which is obviously why your services are needed and i’m sure you’re very busy guy. You know, without going into tons of detail how are some of the ways that you’re able to correlate and, if we don’t have enough time you don’t have to get into it, but what are some of the ways we’re able to correlate that learning to business impact or there’s some key metrics that you’re looking at or for anyone out there that’s kind of struggling with this component, what would be some advice that you have there.

Charles Jennings

13:42: Yeah, the answer is and that’s part of the methodology, in fact, one of the roles of these five roles in the methodology we call the performance tracker. And the performance tracker works closely with the internal customers and they use the metrics that internal customer users and I can give you a couple of examples, one from a company called Hilti that we’ve done quite a lot of work with and with Hilti they had a major onboarding problem in their onboarding was taking too long, it wasn’t really focusing on the the training for onboarding wasn’t focusing on critical tasks and Hilti use the metric which is, which was around time to productivity and what they meant by that was how long did it take from the time they recruited a new salesperson, we work with them in their with their sales teams, how long did it take from the time they recruited there and your salesperson into the organization until the point when that salesperson started making money for the company, in other words, was no longer a cost so that’s a really nice metric it’s a really clear metric so they looked at it and they determined that.

Usually, it was more than 12 months so they’re recruiting your sales executive and they took more than 12 months in order to hit that time to productivity and so we simply use that metric and work with Hilti’s is learning and development team to redesign the whole onboarding process around 70:20:10 and they found, certainly in their Southeast Asia operation which was what were there were some significant issues they reduce that that time to productivity from over a year down to 80% of the new hires were hitting that point within three months so that’s that’s a pretty clear demonstration.

Corey Marcel

15:40 unbelievable and I can’t imagine the amount of money that that saves an organization, but also, I mean the amount of revenue that’s generated from that.

Charles Jennings

12:50 Absolutely yeah people would say well with sales it’s quite easy to do that, but we’ve done it with all sorts of different roles. We’ve done some work with another big company called freestyle campaigner, which is the world’s largest dairy cooperative and again using the 70:20:10 methodology, where they had problems in their factories in productivity of the factories and they found that they’re having outages without losing up to 15 hours a week in lost productivity to outages and identified that a significant amount of those outages are significant percentage was due to to operator error. So they approached us saying “Can you help out on the team develop some training programs to solve this operator error?” When we went and worked with the learning and development team they discovered that actually there was a whole range of things. It wasn’t a lack of knowledge and skills of operators. But there was like a process clarity, there was lack of all sorts of different, you know, issues in there. And the solution for that or the one of the solutions, was an APP they produced, which was really a guidance and support APP so that they work with technologists in the company they work with with lean and agile teams and so on, and they develop this APP and in the first week in one factory, where they have was rolled out the factory manager reported a productivity increase of 29,000 euros it’s about 50,000 US dollars from one factory in the first week and then they tracked it on when week on week and month on month so again, you can you can demonstrate the business impact really easily if you use the right business metrics and if you use the right design in terms of designing new solutions.

Corey Marcel

17:40 Hearing those two stories, the key here is. It sounds like anyway you’ve got to align yourself with metrics outside of learning in both of those cases, they were looking at a metric tied to sales productivity, they were looking at metrics tied to maybe factory production or efficiency these aren’t learning metrics, but their metrics that learning can influence, I think, maybe that’s the disconnect that we see with a lot of organizations is they don’t maybe know which benchmarks within the organization to look at before they start their program, would you agree with that.

Charles Jennings

18:17 Absolutely, and I think that speaks to a fundamental of this 70:20:10 methodology that we use, which is around co-creation. You, you know, as an L&D professional, you work with your client and you co create solutions and a key part of their co-creation is making sure that.They know what the expectation is you know, what do they want when everything’s finished when everything’s working well and how would they measure that because they’re the metrics you need to utilize and actually one of the one of the issues that I have for one of the challenges that I have at the moment is that with a lot of HR metrics that are used with HR I think that there hasn’t been cognizant of the research behind the metrics they use, for example, engagement is seen as being a very important thing and rights rightfully so you know it’s really important to have an engaged workforce. But I think a lot of a lot of HR people ended on B and D people see engagement as being a proxy for performance, in other words, if we have an engaged workforce we’re going to have a higher performing workforce. Yet the research shows that the converse is the case, if you are high performing and successful you are much more likely to be engaged. Whereas if you’re engaged it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be high performing and successful. So just even at that level, you have to think about the measures you’re using so engagement sure absolutely measure engagement in terms of how people are engaging with formal learning content and things like that, but don’t even start to think that that might be a proxy for improving performance across the organization you use, you need to use business metrics to show them.

Corey Marcel

19: 50 Phenomenal. I mean that’s, I feel like already in 24 minutes, this is gold right here, so thank you so much, already coming out of the gates firing on all cylinders here. So you know I don’t know if you, if you’ve heard about this, there was a pandemic and 2020 we’re still you know we’re coming we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yeah I don’t know if the news has gotten around yet i’m kidding, of course. How has your research or what you’re doing or what organizations are asking of you, I know there’s a lot of questions, maybe i’ll start with that one what are organizations now asking what are you hearing from organizations in this new world that we’re living in right now?

Charles Jennings

12:51 We have heard about a pandemic to make you know i’m based, in the UK, and in fact i’ve had my covid vaccination just this morning.

Corey Marcel

12:59 Amazing that is awesome.

Charles Jennings

21:03 So i’ve had the Oxford vaccination this morning, my wife had the Pfizer one a couple of days ago so absolutely pleased and delighted to have excellent. Like the US, you know, the UK has been really bad with Covid. What we’re seeing in terms of if I get your question now how is Covid impacted what we’re doing. Suddenly think Covid has obviously impact of the channels that are being used for support. Well, first of all for delivery of informal learning but also support people in the workplace there’s no doubt about that. But fundamentally I don’t think it’s changed certainly hasn’t changed the way in which L&D is approaching soul, helping their organizations. improve their performance increase agility sore throat survive and hopefully thrive through this terrible pandemic and and surely L&D is going to be called on to to help many, many of their organizations, you know get back on track once where once we’re through the worst of this. But what bothers me a little bit is that we haven’t sent back and thought about the business model that we have, what’s our value proposition? We’ve maybe thought about what we need to shovel everything that we did, face to face, we need to shovel that online and make sure it’s more accessible to people and we’re overcome this whatever the inverse to call the region so reached trade off when in the book a blonde. blonde to Pittsburgh, which I wrote back 20 years ago as more. So you know and we’ve been we’ve known for years we’ve known that the smart use of technology really provides that reach and enables us to provide rich experiences and so on outreach but what bothers me is that it’s not really changed a huge amount, and I think that we need to think about that because, again, the approach that we’ve developed in my college Yosef has developed is we use a standard business standard business canvas in terms of looking at how we help organizations improve their performance through learning and, in doing that, if you know anything about the standard business canvases you have, if you want to change your value proposition, you have to look at things such as your relationship with your customers, you have to look at the channels you’re using you have to look. At the partners you’re working with the organizations to working with you have to look at your capability, you have to look at your processes as a whole range of things that you have to do and so. If we’re going to address these changes in this current times, we really have to take a systemic step back and take a systemic view in terms of what we do and I can see that happening, a little bit in fact we’re working with clients, I was on on a call with a client in New York last night. Who was really taking this by the horns and starting to think about how they how they do change their business model, how they change the operating model, how they basically reinvent the they’re learning and km functions to you know to deliver more value, but I fear that lot and not not doing it, and we have the time now, you know we can take a step back and think about how we might approach this in a different way.

Corey Marcel

24:31 that’s super interesting and kind of leading bleeding into, that is, you know how have you seen enterprise organizations, maybe, specifically in the UK, changing their approach you know with work from home and with their their learning approach.

Charles Jennings

24:50 yeah well there’s a few we’ve learned a few lessons very quickly didn’t we. There were these huge many organizations have this huge digital transformation. Programmes many being run by the big consultancies that we’re going over three or four years and we’re really grateful to consultancies. And then, this virus came along, and you know we digitally transform we the transformation, could you know within a couple months now might have been might not be a nice neat transformation to digital. It might have had lots of gaps and holes that we had to fill in but it happened and, certainly, I think that has been in a major major had a major major impact in terms of, how we how we do this, how we provide our services, I should say, but one of the other things which has mildly amused me is that the years and years but it’s been as a chief learning officer, which I was at _________ for almost 10 years. But since then, I’ve been working outside of the corporate world. You know, particularly in leadership development management development, people said well there’s no way that you can put this online this all has to be done face to face, you know that that experience when you bring executives together that experience is really, really important. And the answer is well that experience is really powerful and you’re not going to replace that by putting it online, but my goodness me, you can put that development process online and do a hell of a lot with it, and I think that one of the things we will we’ll see coming out of the back of this of the Covid epidemic is that, we will see things such as you will never hear people saying what we can’t we can’t possibly do any leadership development online it all has to be done, we will have to go to the nice, leafy green hotel in upstate New York or you know, wherever in the world and have a nice couple of weeks away, and everyone comes back and says “this is the greatest experience i’ve ever had, this has changed me for life” and then i’ve been there, I continue, and then, when you measure the change in their performance, two years later, you find that just hasn’t occurred. So I think we’ve learned some really powerful lessons about what we can do. In a distributed way what we can do with technology and and there are a few things that we can’t do I mean, I think that. You know, one of the great ways, if you want to change attitudes and behaviors, you know, there’s probably no better way than getting people in a room and talking about it, but the technology is not allowing us to do an awful lot in terms of, without, you know, being shackled without the face to face, and that we never thought we could do before.

Corey Marcel

27:34 that’s super interesting and I think you’re definitely right about the you know the leadership retreat, although great for my instagram account. Judging like long term impact, you know I don’t know I don’t know you’re right if it is worth the entire investment of people going away for a long period of time where you’re right, technology has advanced so much you can get people in a room maybe more frequently and a more frequent cadence and have a similar maybe even a greater impact. Which, since we’re talking about kind of your experience and what you’re seeing you’ve been at this for a while and you’ve seen a lot of fit you know you’ve seen a lot of the industry i’m not gonna say you’ve been out for a long time, you know this, or you know a little bit um, has anything shocked you over the last year, have you seen anything that you said, like wow I wasn’t expecting that.

Charles Jennings

28:27 Well that’s an interesting question. To be honest, it hasn’t I do have a concern that L&D is not taking this current situation as a real wake up call. When I know, we have you know the technologies of coming in leaps and bounds understanding of how adults learn as come ahead in leaps and bounds there’s some really, really great work going on in terms of research, in terms of, even in the formal formal learning area or I should say in the formal learning area as well, there are some really, really good pedagogical models that have been developed and books written about them, and so on, over the last, couple of years and i’m just a little worried that learning and development, particularly as it sits often under the wing of HR, is a sort of closed in a little bit, and of course there’s been a lot of activity, a lot of busy work in terms of moving things online, but not as I was saying earlier on, not taking a step back and thinking. What is the value proposition that we offer to our organization, how do we add value to the bottom line, how do we add value to our organizations and and how can we increase that value, and you know that I just it bothers me a little bit that that’s not happening as much as it possibly could.

Corey Marcel

30:04 Why do you think right now is the time for organizations to be taking advantage of this, you know, for let’s say you know, an L&D team in a mid sized enterprise organization that has technology, you know they’re measuring typical learning and development metrics around some engagement completions right. Why is this their time to be taking advantage and what should they be doing if they haven’t already?

Charles Jennings

30:36 yeah it’s their time now, because if you look at economic and organizational theory whenever you have disruption and change.

Corey Marcel

30:48 which I do, I look at that theory all the time, by the way, that’s just this morning over breakfast that’s what I was looking at.

Charles Jennings

30:52Okay, but. When whenever you have time to change and we all know, this anyway. Whenever there’s great disruption, organizations, it provides an opportunity to make fundamental changes within organizational changes and then, when that disruption goes away and things settle down, it almost organizational culture and so on, sets again, and this has been well known for years, for example with mergers and acquisitions as a classic example, so that when you have a quick acquisition or merger of a couple of organizations. There’s a time usually, about a year 18 months when there’s quite a lot of disruption, quite a lot of uncertainty and in those times it’s a really great time to put new processes in place in your approaches in place to do things differently to change things that have been done or being perceived wisdom, for a long time. And then you know after a year 18 months things settle down and then it becomes much more difficult to make changes and to do, and to do things differently so you know we’re now living in a period which is. You know just the greatest opportunity of course it’s the greatest threat as well, but the greatest opportunity ever in terms of you know if you’ve got a really good idea if you’re a learning leader and you’ve got a you’ve got a plan you want to put a plan in place to say we need to rethink our value proposition, we need to think our business model, our the way that we work, we need to think about our processes our focuses and things. it’s a really good time to do it now, because I can tell you in three years’ time when everything’s going to be tight, you know we’re going to go through a few years of really tough economic times. There won’t be the opportunity or there will be less opportunity to be able to make those changes so you know it’s now a really good time to plan to do that.

Corey Marcel

32:41 I love that yeah anytime there’s a period of transition it’s also a period of opportunity very, very well said. So, alongside you know great technology in this digital area. What responsibility as we’ve talked about technology, we talked about some of the processes what role do their people play in building a learning culture? We talked about learning culture a lot, yeah what what role do the people actually play in building that culture.

Charles Jennings

33:18 Learning culture is a really interesting concept, but again it’s another term a little 70:20:10 I see learning culture is often misunderstood, in fact I like to use and my colleagues and I like to use the term, rather than creating a learning culture, we talk about creating a culture of continuous improvement because you know what is a learning what is learning, other than behavior change and improvement, you know better responses to whatever the stimulus happens to be. So when we think about learning culture there’s a few fundamentals in there in that learning culture is you know it’s a hackneyed thing to say, but it comes from the top. You know you the organization, so the culture that is is driven and displayed by their leaders, so you know when when you’re looking at any change in culture work, you need to look to your leaders. And with learning culture or with creating a culture of continuous improvement, you need to look to the leaders in the organization because. If you have managers and leaders who see this false trade off between operational excellence and helping their people develop their capabilities, well, you might just put that into a bucket you call,you know, learning or whatever, but if they they see that as a full straight off, in other words if i’m a former manager, and I say. “Well, my job is operational excellence, I have to deliver my objectives and I get targeted every year, with certain objectives and I need to deliver those and I might have a bonus on writing on those things. Therefore I don’t have time to develop my people” That is a false trade off because if you’re an effective leader or manager, you have to do both of those. And if you don’t you’re going to fail in the long term, because delivering on your objectives is important but that’s a tactic, you know that usually comes around once a year. I get a set of objectives, I need to make sure I work and hit those whereas ensuring that I’m creating a culture of continuous improvement. And that i’m giving opportunities for the people who work in my teams who will work with me to develop to learn from their experiences. To be challenged to be given time for reflection and so on, if I don’t do that i’m going to find that i’m going to first of all i’m not going to deliver year after year after year, so developing your people as a strategic objective delivering on your annual operational objectives is a tactic and there’s some really interesting research around this in fact I was involved in some research with the corporate Executive Board, as was is by the gartner now back about 15 years ago. And we, along with another 15 global companies identify groups of managers who are seem to be effective and focused and developing their people and good managers and delivering on their objectives and also groups and managers who are seen to be not effective and not focus on developing their people. And some of the things that came out of that was really interesting. The headline figure was that if you have managers who are effective and focused on developing their people, those people will outperform others by around about 25%. I always say, if you want one nice today days worth of work for everyone in your organization no cost no catch no cost to them now across the organization, make sure your managers. give time for reflective practice if opportunities for stretch work challenges, give them the support they need, let them learn from working, make sure that everyone knows who the top performers are and you learn from those people, and so on, so those sorts of things are really, really powerful. And that’s not rocket science it doesn’t cost anything it just requires a change in culture, it means that the managers are critical but, but it means that that  culture changes is absolutely important and the other thing i’d say about about learning culture, and I see it, missed very often in when you know when we look at plans for development of learning culture and that’s the element of psychological safety. Absolutely staggering we looked at a plan that was done by a very large consultancy company recently, and I think in about 50 pages psychological safety was mentioned once in a learning culture plan, whereas psychological safety is really, really fundamental. If I don’t feel safe about trying something differently, if I don’t feel safe to make mistakes and put my hand up and say “look i’ve made a mistake, can you tell me help me here how am I going to make it again” if I don’t feel safe to speak out when I need to and make suggestions or suggest improvements, if I don’t have that level of psychological safety my organization i’m never going to have a learning culture.

Corey Marcel

38:35 That makes so much sense to me because, if one of the biggest ways we learn is by doing whenever we do whenever we collaborate we’re going to make mistakes. And if i’m in a place where I can’t make mistakes, I’m not going to do, therefore I’m not going to learn and it’s this negative feedback loop.

Charles Jennings

38:54 yeah absolutely I mean, of course, we all make mistakes, and one of the just going back to the 70:20:10, often were confronted by you know when we work with, will talk to some organizations, were confronted with this challenge and the challenge is our organization is works in high risk areas, so it might be, you know we’re in financial services, we cannot make mistakes or we’re in pharmaceuticals, we can’t make mistakes. And therefore we can’t allow learning in the workplace, we have to train people for me and so on, and, of course, the answer is most learning occurs as part of work and again the research tells us that you know most of you learn, because by the work, and if you don’t acknowledge that and help build that, you’re not going to exploit all the tools in your box and in fact I know organizations, we work with organizations that are, absolutely highly regulated that might be financial farmer, you know, in some cases, energy companies running nuclear plants, in fact i’ve done 70:20:10 work with with government agencies that are involved in, you know security agencies and things where if they make mistakes know people die and lots of people die so, that I don’t really buy that argument to say that we can’t make mistakes, therefore, you know we can’t we can’t look at anything other than some formal training. And I don’t know whether you know there’s an Englishman, who has written a number of very, very good books called man his name is Matthew Syde. And he wrote an excellent book called “Black Box Thinking” and what he did in that book was he compared two industries. One is an extremely safe industry and one of the industry that actually has quite a lot of there’s quite a lot of errors occur, and he looked at what the characteristics were and why it was that one was an incredibly safe industry and one wasn’t so safe. Now the very safe industry was the aviation industry in it, you know when we get in one of those when were allowed to get in one of those metal tubes and get up in the air, we’re probably a safe as in an airplane as we are anywhere else in our lives, you know the death rate per million air miles flown is very low and then industry, one of the fundamentals of aviation is around openness sharing mistakes acknowledging when things go wrong learning from lessons, when there are errors in fact you know there’s there’s international protocols in the aviation industry that if you are working on a flight deck, and you observe an error or make an error or potentially make an error, you are obliged to report it and you are protected by law from any any sort of adverse consequences to that. So aviation is an incredibly safe industry and aviation runs on, of course, is this good, solid formal training in aviation, I mean never want to get on an airplane with a pilot who’s not being trained. But also aviation uses checklists, I mean checklist so the meat and drink to aviation and that’s performance support that’s you know support on the job helping me do the job, so I don’t make a mistake now the other industry that Syde looked at was the medical industry, and although the medical industry obviously does wonderful things and it’s doing wonderful things at the moment. You know the error rate in medicine, is quite sometimes, it’s quite high and part of the problem that Syde and other people like at all but one day from from Boston Medical School has identified, this is the fact that when you have a real hierarchy where mistakes, it’s not acceptable to talk about mistakes, you find that those mistakes are made again and again and again, and no one learns from them so. I realize it’s a quite a long story around this, but I think around creating this culture of continuous improvement or this is learning culture, that psychological safety to hold my hand hold your hand up to say “hey that’s i’ve made a mistake here let’s sit down and work out why that mistake happened and how we can make sure it doesn’t happen again” it’s absolutely critical.

Corey Marcel

43:11 that’s an absolutely brilliant story and I love that you chose two very highly regulated industries. But you’re absolutely right, you know very rarely do you hop on an airplane and are concerned, for your safety and I had no idea that a lot of it had to do with the safety, they have in reporting mistakes and being open to learning from those mistakes.

Charles Jennings

43:37 Absolutely, in fact, I have a good friend, who was a British Airways pilot for many years, he’s retired now. But I talked to him at length about this, and he said every two months, they would all go through they get the international reports from all the airlines around the mistakes, you know I forget the name the name of it but it’s a it’s a term that they use.

Corey Marcel

44:00 It was a mistake report?

Charles Jennings

44:05  It wasn’t a mistake report, but it was you know, whenever something went wrong and it’s it’s it’s reported internalized and then has published and is made available to all people in aviation around the world, so they can all learn from each other’s mistakes, I mean it’s just, it works, you know it, the proof is in the pudding, you know, because of the safety levels of aviation are incredibly high and after one day in the medical world go one day wrote this great book called the checklist manifesto, where he utilized checklist and go one day worked here in the UK, with the NHS some of the NHS trusts and in his work there’s a reduction in mortality in operating theatres, in surgery, by almost 50% and he was 47% as the highest bigger reduction in mortality that was done simply by using not learning or training, it was using performance support that everyone owned because you know, I think we’re probably all aware that some aspects of medicine quite hierarchical and so, if you’re a genius swab nurse in a surgical team, and you see the senior surgeon miss out a step in the process, or do something that might not be quite right you’d be unlikely to step up and say “hold on, should you have done this” whereas if you have a checklist that everyone owns and you’re a genius swab nurse what knows you will have that be given that authority to you know, make a correction and so simple procedures simple process changes like that can have a really, really powerful impact and now should be involved in doing the analysis to work out what the problems are and that should be in the kit bag of L&D you know it shouldn’t be just oh we’ve got this number of errors coming out of this bit of the organization, therefore, we need to design a program course, elearning module or whatever it happens to be, which is going to address that.

You shouldn’t just be looking at trying to fix a performer you should be looking at trying to fix the performance. And the performance is a result, not just the performer but also the environment, I mean, in the case of surgeries is a classic case, if you have a hierarchical structure in a surgery it obviously, you know, you don’t have to think long you don’t have to observe, but you can see the potential for it causing problems so L&D should be there, looking at you know, where that where the deficiencies are in the in what we’re trying to do in the output and in the overall performance and what aspect of that is through the performer? What aspect of that is through something to do with the systems processes environment that they’re working in? What aspect is it to do with something else, and then working always together with our clients internal clients to fix it and then, that’s the time when the professionals add real value so that’s a performance based learning, we are looking at the outs, the performance, rather than the performer and that’s really critical and I think that’s a sort of major mistake, one of the most common mistakes, I have seen within organizations as they see learning as an individual pursuit. And not..they don’t look at learning in terms of being a process or set of processes, where we have improvement at individual level, team level and organizational level so thinking about levels of agility thinking about speed to solution, thinking about you know first level resolution. These sorts of things are really, really critical. Their performance issues and L&D has a big role to play in that, but, at the moment I don’t think L&D steps into some of those areas very much at all.

Corey Marcel

47:54 yeah I was gonna say you know, this isn’t true for every conversation I have but definitely a lot of organizations are focused on onboarding. Maybe some product training and professional development. I kind of less so, the more you go to those three, I feel like very few of them are focused on problem solving. Which I feel like as a lot of what you’re talking about where there are key problems within an organization, every organization has them. And L&D can play a massive role, if not the key role in solving and having a real impact in those problems and really cementing their place within the organization as a you know key and fundamental to success sustaining success.

Charles Jennings

48:33 And that’s exactly the way that I see it in my colleague of yours talks about, most of the focus of L&D is on license to operate. In other words and it’s important that you know people do get on board and can do the basics license to operate, I fear that the whole competency models really speak to that. It doesn’t speak to high performance and it doesn’t speak to actually solving business problems. So if you’re focusing on competencies i’ve never i’m yet to meet the senior business leader has been really enthusiastic about competencies and you know i’ve met lots and lots of HR people and learning development, people who are very keen on competencies and they do serve a purpose but.

Corey Marcel

49:22 hat’s not me, maybe ruffling some feathers getting controversial now.

Charles Jennings

49:25 Well, again, you know the work that we do is not focus on competencies, it’s focus on focus on critical tasks if because everything whether it’s from a senior leader action or the responsibilities of a senior leader right through any organization, you can just you can distill down, you know the jobs that people have to do the roles they need to play into a series of a series of tasks. And in those tasks will be some critical tasks, in other words, if you don’t do these you won’t be able to deliver good performance or high performance. And so, focusing on critical tasks and then you get away you get you move you away from a lot of sort of busy work around L&D where you know people don’t need to know, if I join a company I don’t need to know everything I could possibly ever need within the first two months. I need to know you know, what’s critical for me to start to get my feet under the table and start getting or becoming productive in this job, we don’t need to don’t need to have some great huge onboarding program as long as I know, I get enough support and guidance and help to be able to execute the critical tasks that is required of me a lot of my learning will occur as part of doing so, a lot of the learning will be will happen once I started to get into the into the role so that’s a different mindset.

Corey Marcel

50:51that’s phenomenal and, our hour kind of flew by here. So much gold in here, I’d like to close with, kind of wrapping up with a segment I like to call in 10 seconds or less mostly because in 10 seconds or less, i’d like for you to describe how you see the 70:20:10 model evolving in the future, what can we expect in 10 seconds or less.

Charles Jennings

51:20 It will evolve into focus on performance based learning and value based learning and how it will become an instrument to help L&D departments deliver value to their organizations, because that’s what it is all about if you’re not delivering value we’re a cost, and what happens with cost centers and costs is when things get tough, you know, they often get chopped I know there’s more than 10 seconds, but that’s where I stand

Corey Marcel

51:50 I think it was you know if you can add really slow.I think that was, I think we got it in there. Dr Charles Jennings that was phenomenal, Thank you so much, sir. And there you have it folks a big thank you again, Dr Charles Jennings for all his insights on the 70:20:10 model and why it’s here to stay. It’s been real Charles until next time we’ll see y’all later thanks.

Charles Jennings

52:15 Thanks Corey, thanks very much.