Rich Fernandez
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Return on Intelligence podcast. I'm your host, Rich Fernandez. I'm the CEO of SIY global. Wear an emotional intelligence training and development company. And I am so thrilled today to welcome, fellow practitioner, an industry thought leader. and that's Laura Overton. So, Laura, welcome.
Laura Overton
Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Rich Fernandez
Likewise. just so for the audience, though, let me tell them a little bit about you briefly. and then we can get into it. so Laura is an experienced international speaker, author and facilitator in the learning and development space. Laura has been tracking the innovation journey for the last two decades, and has authored or coauthored over 70 major research reports, and is a regular contributor industry publications and has written over 300 articles.
Rich Fernandez
Her career spans international marketing, customer success, training and development, e-learning, and more. And so it's really exciting because Laura brings tremendous insights and research about the deep space. not just in terms of effective practices, but also in terms of next practices. So I am so excited that you could join us today and share some of those insights.
Rich Fernandez
And again, welcome.
Laura Overton
I'm looking forward to hearing your insights as well. Rich, I'm loving your podcast, so it's a real honor to be here.
Rich Fernandez
Okay. Thank you so much. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this being a conversation. And that's really what we aim for. So, let's dive into it. First of all, Laura, I mean, I gave that brief bio, but I'd love if you could share a little bit about your own career evolution in the learning and development space for our audience.
Laura Overton
Yes, the bio sounds like I spent my whole life writing. That has not been the case. and in fact, actually, I think I'm one of those rare people, rich, who's joined the learning profession straight from university. I was the hooked on the way that we learn things, and I was hooked on the idea that you could be in a career that could bring out the potential in other people.
Laura Overton
And so from a very early age, clearly a small child. I joined the learning profession, but, and it was actually in the mid 80s. and I saw for the first time some technology that was kept in the learning center in a cupboard under the stairs. It was a massive interactive video desk that taught you how to be a versatile leader in a versatile organization.
Laura Overton
And in fact, a lot of the things that you're talking about, how we connect, how we engage. You know, I kind of like in the mid 80s and they were using this interactive technology. I was so sold on this that I then got involved in the technology enabled learning industry from a very, very early stage. In the first 15 years of my career was working with new innovation, and new ideas and technology and trying to bring those to life in new organization science.
Laura Overton
So it was an amazingly incredible time through the birth of the internet, through the birth of the CD-Rom. You know, it's really I'm really aging myself. Yeah. So I'll move on quickly. But but the idea for me was I was involved, working with organizations who were doing things with technology for the first time. So I'm not a technologist, but I'm really passionate about why some organizations connect and engage with new tools and new way of doing things, and others don't.
Laura Overton
And in my career, first 15 years, I saw some incredible impact back into business. you know, shifts in being able to roll out new skills and you competencies, you know, really making a difference. But I was a woman in a very male oriented, career, I have to confess. And so therefore, a lot of the conversations that I had, I was drawing, every ounce of, innovative thinking in order to have new conversations.
Laura Overton
And I really drew on research. Rich. I know that your organization, you really connect with evidence informed strategies behind what you're doing. And it was something for me throughout the 90s was absolutely critical. What was the independent evidence saying about new ways of doing things and how we can connect? And I used to use that as a way of having conversations, but the right evidence was never available to me.
Laura Overton
You know, there were evidence about what are those highly successful organizations doing? It just wasn't freely available to people like me. So I thought, why not? And so I was curious, and I started a small research projects in the early 2000, which to me was a pure curiosity project, about why are some successfully using technology not even defining success and others aren't.
Laura Overton
And that grew into a 15 year study that became a global study, a community driven study from starting in Europe, really literally going around the globe, developed maturity models. And I did that for 15 years. And then five years ago, I thought I'd spent a lot of time looking at this data. And there's not necessarily a lot of movement, something something's gotta shift.
Laura Overton
And I was able to do a different type of research through the Covid period. And, yeah, I'm just so curious, Rich. I'm so curious about how we can be our very best cells in learning and development. And that is my, the, my personal motivation, for literally all of my career.
Rich Fernandez
It's fascinating. And I love the arc of your journey and then you mentioned something there that the sort of culmination of your research, in if, you know, I was hearing correctly, maturation models, the things that, sort of signal maturity in the learning and development space. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? It sounds fascinating.
Rich Fernandez
What did you find what what insights did you have there?
Laura Overton
Well, initially, we drew and my organization was called Towards Maturity. and the research, by the way, continues today 20 years on, under the, moniker of the learning performance benchmark. and it's carried on by, my tools for business. So I'm so thrilled that it's got deep, strong roots are still relevant today and still is available to people.
Laura Overton
But, my initial research was looking at traditional types of maturity models. You know, the the novice and the experience and those that are experimenting and practice and those that were embedded. and initially we asked people those questions. But actually, as the study developed, rich, what we ended up doing, I was very passionate about not testing different models, but how do we deconstruct models like, Charles Jennings and the 70 2010 model and, Casey Moore in action, action, learning, mapping.
Laura Overton
And you're all the different models out there into the behaviors, the core behaviors. and we also asked people questions about, you know, what are you trying to achieve? It was always skills, productivity, time to competence. You know, be bold, fabulous, goals that we have as an industry. And then we said an are you achieving them? And you know, not so much.
Laura Overton
But we had big, big goals. Big goals. but some were and that was in.
Rich Fernandez
because I've been a lead practitioner, as you may know. You know, I was at at the in financial services for ten years and ten years in tech at eBay, Google. I was running executive education at Google. So the stickiness and the sort of sustainability of the learning was always a question, like we had our laundry list of things that we wanted to and train and help people develop against what leaders needed.
Rich Fernandez
Their competencies, but they always, like, experienced what I call leadership drift. I'm not sure that's my term. I probably borrowed it from someplace. It might have actually been Lee Harrison, who, or Bob Lee from Hack Person, coined that term, but leadership drift, they just always like, sort of lost the thread of, like, horror lessons and ingraining.
Rich Fernandez
It was always very difficult. So I could very much relate to what you're saying from those experiences. And I know probably our audience is like scratching their heads to going, yeah, what? Why does it take recycling?
Laura Overton
And, you know, my very first study, what I noticed was the stuff that stuck with the stuff that was completely integrated into the way that their organization worked. So it was we're trying to improve customer service. It was definitely things that we are trying to, improve revenue. yeah. Yes. There was elements of yes within that trying to improve risk and, safety.
Laura Overton
But it was real hard core business issues that those high performing teams, right at the beginning of my study were looking at. So that's always been a theme for questions I asked, you know, what are you trying to achieve for the business versus for learning and development? And I find in gradually over time, those who wanted to do it, lots of people, those who were actually felt they were having some kind of achievement, probably about half of the ones who wanted to achieve it.
Laura Overton
Those that were actually putting some numbers against it drop right down. But over a period of ten years, we gather data from two 300 people who were actually delivering really strong business value improvements in productivity. You know, an average of 9% of improvement in retention of staff, 27% improvement, you know, so got we gradually got to some strong data.
Laura Overton
So that allowed us rich to be able to instead of saying, how mature do you think you are, be able to say, okay, well, what kind of behaviors correlated back to those business results? And out of that, over a period of 15 years, came different models and ideas of what what was correlating back to results. And so for me, after 15 years, I tried to break the whole thing and said, look, this is crazy.
Laura Overton
This is crazy. But actually what we saw, but in trying to break it, was that there was a very clear four stage kind of model, but as kind of a curve model that came about. And so transactional learning initially. And what's lovely is it is is repeated. You look at other people's models burst and whatever. That's a wonderful thing about data is triangulated that kind of first order taking transactional focus on efficiency, really good at efficiency, maybe using some basic learning management system, some content libraries.
Laura Overton
But you know, and but but responding to learning and the next stage was very much you know and then that first stage, let me just say there were definite benefits. there was, you know, and that's one of the challenges that we have when we, we're getting successful at saving money, doing more for less than it actually makes us very aware that sometimes we need to let go of what's made a successful in the past in order to become more aligned to business, more connect to more engaged, more thinking about the experiences that we're developing for learning, transfer, making things sticky.
Laura Overton
That's the next stage. But actually those first two parts of the curve still only focused on learning professionals as producers, maybe producers of micro things of experiences, but still produces the second part of the transformation model, really showed how and we shifted to becoming enablers of learning in our organization. That's when those business results that I was sharing with you start, start to escalate.
Laura Overton
And the high performing teams were those that were absolutely working. And you will really get this rich in collaboration in connection, working in terms of the, understanding the context, co-creating value rather than trying to prove value. really very, very exciting to see that even in last year's study, only 10% of 900 organizations who took part were really even touching that high performing area.
Laura Overton
So and over 50% of us are typically in the transactional stage. So there's exciting work for us all to do, particularly in the world of AI.
Rich Fernandez
Okay, so then if I'm hearing you correctly, the first two stages sort of like the foundational stages or that sort of transactional learning where you're kind of covering the basics, you know, let's call it an LMS and content libraries and, you know, competency based training. Then moving to the enablement of, of learning in your organization and being able to, be a facilitator in some ways or a collaborator in a kind of collective learning journey.
Rich Fernandez
Is that correct?
Laura Overton
That's right. But I think it goes more than that. I think it's actually a more strategic it's a strategic mindset that people have of actually, I, you know, and I've created something that which initially was just for me to try and understand this, you know, why is it the most of us are stuck in those earlier stages?
Laura Overton
and I created what I called the learning value spectrum. And it's not the fact that you have to move from one way to the other, but actually, potentially, when we're looking at it, when we see personally our value as being how to save money, how to get more engagement, you know, when we're entering our rewards program and we've got all this amazing data of how many people have completed the course and all of that kind of said, when we see our value is that that's what we're looking for.
Laura Overton
But when we see as a value as potentially being able to contribute back to business, then it gets messy, which doesn't it? It's that that's the place when you're working in the space of performance support, enabling community learning, and encouraging the transfer of learning and skills back into the workplace, working with managers to be able to.
Laura Overton
So that's where it gets messy. We're not in control.
Rich Fernandez
Like and that sounds like a fairly, advanced stage. I mean, is that stage two of four, is that what.
Laura Overton
I would that would be the final, that be the final stage where we're much more cognizant of how we are working in that space, and we're willing to experiment more, to roll our sleeves up more, to try things. Okay. and so we start to use data not only to prove ourselves, but to improve ourselves. And that's and that to me, is this wonderful, growth mindset that seems to be, exuded from organizations who are more, confident in working at those in those areas.
Rich Fernandez
Right. And it sounds like also that's where you can demonstrate learning impact, which I know is something that you're very much interested in and focused on. And yeah, in some ways that's a central thing. And for L&D practitioners in terms of getting company support and financing, for learning, which can be challenging. I'm sure it's a challenge many of our listeners face.
Rich Fernandez
and so when we think about impact and, and, positioning, you know, kind of learning approaches, learning initiatives, you know, how would you recommend someone go about getting by it for, you know, their new learning initiatives, programs, what have you, especially with the idea of impact in mind?
Laura Overton
Well, I think you have to be a curious person working in learning and development, and we have to understand what impact looks like for those that we're trying to engage rather than what impact looks like for us. so for us to be we've been given a job, maybe to do courses, to do curriculum, to run a learning management system, to explore all of these things.
Laura Overton
And that's our job. But actually, if we want buy in, we have to say, actually this at my job, what's the why of my job? Why am I here? Why am I what is my role in this organization? This not for profit organization is public sector organization. This finance organization. And what is it that the I really need to do to contribute value back into the organization?
Laura Overton
So if we want to get buy in for an idea, we have to buy in to business, before we can get business to buy in to us. And I think that's the trick that we miss. if any of your learning and development listeners are used to working with salespeople, are selling a new tool, what they'll notice is that the salesperson, if they're good, will actually be listening to their needs first and then mapping to their needs in order to get buy in for a new tool and solution.
Laura Overton
And that's exactly the same thing that we need to do back into the organization, because we can't sell the features of a new system without being really clear of what the unique benefits are. Back to the business. And I think that's it's a simple sales trick, but it's something that we just don't do. I think only 50% of us analyze a business problem before recommending a solution.
Laura Overton
You know, it's slightly over 50% now and then if we need it. Really want to make impact is we've also got to deliver that solution in a timely way. You know. So it's these are the things that I think are the, the heart when we strip everything back. That's why people have a problem with buying, because we've bought something that supports learning, but not we can't articulate how that goes on to support business.
Laura Overton
So we have to kind of go back to basics.
Rich Fernandez
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, it's false, distinction or binary that exists, that learning isn't also a part of the evolution of the business and isn't sort of part and parcel of what a good business practice is, you know? So a good learning practice is also a good business practice, but it's very easy to lose sight of that, I think, because they seem to sometimes be so distinct.
Rich Fernandez
I'll give you an example from our own world, right? We do a lot of emotional intelligence and neuroscience based kind of mindset, mindfulness, like all these different kinds of trainings. And people think, oh, well, that's a very nice to have, but not a need to have because what I really need is some like business tools, but what they don't realize is that two are actually one and the same.
Rich Fernandez
Right? Because if collaboration is important to you, if communications and you have conflict management is important for you, if adaptability, innovation, creativity, resilience is important to you, well, the only way you're going to get there is to go down to that foundational level and work at the level of the human foundation, our minds and our capacities and work to enhance those.
Rich Fernandez
And so to me, like, you know, those are not divisible. So when we talk about emotional intelligence training, people like, oh, that's soft skills, actually say, no, that's not soft skills. Those are core skills, right? Those aren't soft skills. Their core skills because they're core to what it means to operate effectively as a business leader, as a leader in any organization, actually, business or nonprofit, whatever sector you're in, if you work with other people.
Rich Fernandez
Because the great irony is, I used to work at Google and emotional intelligence training was hugely a Search Inside Yourself was developed at Google. The organization I read today because, I literally some of the engineers didn't realize working with other humans was in the job description. Yeah. So we had like say, you know, it is and you can train the skills for it, and it will allow you to be a better engineer.
Rich Fernandez
And it certainly did because they could work. Yeah. Style or scrums or whatever they were involved in, in a much more effective way. So they're not the visible these things.
Laura Overton
Absolutely.
Rich Fernandez
That being said, Laura, I know you've been focusing a lot on that as well, right? You've been focusing in terms of innovation. You've been focusing a lot on the inner game, I think is how you like to describe it. Can you tell us about that?
Laura Overton
Well, it's basically, you know, over that 15 years of doing the research study into what correlates back to better business impact, we shed so many insights. And, you know, since and over that 15 year period, people have written so many books about it. You know, we know a lot of stuff in L&D now. We attend conferences, we listen to podcasts.
Laura Overton
We know about learning, transfer, we know about technology, we're learning more about the brain and and yet we're not doing it, which was really interesting. So during the pandemic period, I had this amazing opportunity to work with, two colleagues, one, Shannon Tipton in Chicago and Michelle Acker's in Australia to explore the question, you know, how can we emerge stronger from a pandemic now, nobody has been in a pandemic before.
Laura Overton
No. And professionals have been a pandemic. And we did a series of podcast interviews. But as we're doing these podcasts, we are talking to people, and they were exhibiting some of the qualities that we just described about the high performance team. But the other thing that really struck me was their attitude, rich to the challenges ahead and how they were coping with their attitudes.
Laura Overton
And I kind of revisited my work with that lens of, you know, how do I thinking habits actually influence the decisions that we make and the way that we respond to dive, you know, difficult and disruptive situations. and it was just, fascinating to me when I sort of started to analyze the podcast to see actually those that seem to be riding the wave, okay, of disruption, even, you know, being put on furlough were those who had already quite adapted.
Laura Overton
And, and it made me realize that there were different thinking habits that we have. and so for me, a professional thinking habit is the kind of fixed attitude and tendency that we might have that would influence the decisions that we make about our professional world of work. So I don't I don't dig into the kind of the stuff that you the, the important stuff.
Laura Overton
But really looking at the, professional thinking habits, how do we think about value? We've talked about that. Do we see ourselves as driving value through learning or through adding value back to business? Because how we see our value will influence the decisions that we make and how we try and sell our services back and how we improve our services.
Laura Overton
But I also think about, you know, how do we see our role, you know, do you see ourselves as being needing, needing to be that knowledgeable, expert? And I'm the training expert and I know how to do training and and listen to me. Or do we see ourselves more as an empathetic explorer? it's actually my job is to really understand what you need so that I can bring my expertise and layer upon that.
Laura Overton
I see, you know, how do we see our role will influence how we interact? Yeah. How do we see our relationship with places? Do we see ourselves as being needing to be very independent, needing to prove ourselves, or that we're interdependent and looking at ways of co-creating value back into the business? So these these are the sorts of thinking habits that I think really do influence how we approach the challenges that we see in front of us.
Laura Overton
And I don't think one is right or one is wrong, but I think we need to become and I think you guys talk about this a lot more self-aware about where we're coming from, because our habits get formed when things have been celebrate it in the past, when we're asked to do things, when we're given a pat on the back because we've responded in a particular way, you know, it's these habits get ingrained, but sometimes we need to understand where to challenge the status quo internally in order to challenge the status quo of our industry, in order to say, actually, I know we've always had this leadership program, but what if I've got some data
Laura Overton
Here, 27% of improvement in productivity overall? What if we only got 3% of that by doing something different? Is it worse? Is trying you? It's that you need an attitude inside of you to be able to harness some of the data that people like myself and others around the global US are presenting back into the industry.
Rich Fernandez
Absolutely. I think, that I'm a systems thinker in general. So when I think about land and systems, you know, like there's a lot of pressure on lab practitioners to kind of like be essentially kind of like a functionary and just kind of do what you're asked and kind of business as usual. as and maybe a little bit less of a pull for, for being a disruptor.
Rich Fernandez
Or if you're being a disruptor, like, you know, prove it to me first. And that's reasonable, I think, in businesses. But I think it is striking that right balance, knowing when you're just kind of carrying out, like you said, like the standard or habitual way of practicing as opposed to taking that opportunity to disrupt. And, you know, one of the things that, I know you have been working on, since 2020 at least, is, something you call Learning Changemakers, which I think is really interesting, probably continuing along the lines of this conversation, but Learning Changemakers, can you tell us a little about what that is and what its mission is and what
Rich Fernandez
you're currently working on there?
Laura Overton
Well, when I, stopped working with the Towards Maturity study, it was, you know, sometimes, you know, I took a lot and people are like, sometimes you gotta let go before you can move on. And that was an experience to me that I had to do that I had to let go of this data and this maturity model.
Laura Overton
If I really wanted to dig in deeper into supporting the learning and development community today. and during that kind of liminal space, it was a really good opportunity for me to look in search inside myself, to find out what was I really passionate about with the industry, because I still love this industry so much. But actually, I was passionate about the small opportunities that we can find to make a difference.
Laura Overton
And I was really taken with the idea of changemakers from the Ashoka Changemakers, the social entrepreneurship movement. you know, whether training young people and disadvantaged people to say, look, if you see this needed in your community, use small child in your park, you see, literally this is the kind of core skills, human skills you are going to need in order for you to make a difference in your park, in your community.
Laura Overton
And I just thought, Rich, you know, if young kids, if women in poverty places around the world come, rise up and make a difference in their communities and as learning professionals, we can do the same. And I have all of this experience, all of this data to say, look, it's possible. So Learning Changemakers for me felt like a natural umbrella for pulling together collaborative research, insight stories.
Laura Overton
You know, the work that I do mainly is still research work, but it's much more collaborative with individual organizations. I do sounding board work, you know, because it's not that I want to become a consultant to other people, but I want them to release the potential from within themselves to be these radical, different, this was before generative AI.
Laura Overton
And even now I'm, I'm more convinced even now, how exciting an opportunity we have as learning professionals to to own our future, to shape our future, not to be shaped by our circumstances. And so it's it's an aspirational, desire of mine for the industry after 30 years being here, I still believe, and I still want the very best for people.
Rich Fernandez
I love that. Well, that's I think, the core of why we all get into this, right. You started with discussing like, human potential, and I think that's really what we are all, passionate about. And, whether it's our own journeys or, you know, facilitating that for others. So maybe it's by way of ending, is there any last sort of, encouragements or sort of words of wisdom?
Rich Fernandez
You've been in this industry for a while. You've studied it deeply. You know, if we're now listening, folks who are listening are learning and development practitioners or teachers or educators or anyone who's interested in helping foster human potential and growth, any, any last reflections to share with them?
Laura Overton
I hadn't thought about sharing in this way, but I think I well, one of the things that has really been clear to me is that we need courage to be able to shape the future, to be the kind of real, support system for those who need to be able to continually learn, continually adapt. But that takes a level of courage.
Laura Overton
And so for me, boldness is really important. and I don't talk about that brassy pop, you know, like, shoot from the hippo, like, oh, you know, I'm a maverick. I'm going to just tear everything down. Yeah, because most of us aren't like that set up that really careful. Considered, you know, but for me, it's about us being smart.
Laura Overton
Bold. And that, for me, means that we have our focus on what's important to the organization we're working in. So I said, business first. You know, you're here to serve our organization today. whatever that means. Let's get let's get close to that business first, open minded, the fact that we should be able to learn from evidence, learn from benchmarks, but don't feel you have to repeat them.
Laura Overton
You're open minded to other ideas. Bring the outside in open minded to other ideas within the organization. Very important connection, collaboration, open mindedness, alpha leading and learning. The fact that we're actually willing to do even small experiments and learn from them. Tiny things, big things. But we're willing to step out. So that kind of boldness is leading. But D is for deliberate.
Laura Overton
It's about being intentional. It's about being purposeful. It's about looking at risk, using evidence, managing risk. So bold, smart, bold I think is what we need in the industry right now.
Rich Fernandez
But thank you. I couldn't agree more. And I think that's probably for the foreseeable future, what's going to be needed given how complex and challenging and demanding, you know, the world that we all operate in is and the things that our organizations are trying to do and the disruptions that are just coming at a faster, rate and pace.
Rich Fernandez
So, thank you so much for sharing. You know, your wisdom and your insights. It's funny, we haven't met, by the way. And I know you're in England. I'm sitting here in San Francisco and, I feel like we could be having coffee, either there or here and can continue this conversation for hours. so hopefully we have more opportunities.
Rich Fernandez
but it's just such a pleasure to start the conversation with you to share, with our audience some of these insights. and thank you for your time. And thanks, everybody, for tuning in today. Thank you Laura. Appreciate you.
Laura Overton
What's been fantastic. And yes, let's say yes to that coffee.
