#TLB 22🧠 2024 Megatrends And How People Leaders Should Respond
A by-weekly inside scoop on all the hottest events, juicy discussions, and oh-so-many other exciting things happening in our dynamic L&D community. 🧡
Hello Shaker,
I want to start this issue by saying a BIG thank you for giving love to the last issue. It made me happy knowing that y’ll liked it and it was worth your time.
I’ll keep iterating The Learning Brief based on my learnings as I grow and learn and most importantly based on your feedback, so if you’ve any feedback to share or would like me to explore a topic, please feel free to let me know on Slack or LinkedIn. I am all ears!
I can’t believe I started writing a newsletter at the very start of my career.
Okay, without getting more emo, let’s go!
Here’s all that you’ll experience in today’s issue:
💡Learning Bites: 2024 Megatrends And How People Leaders Should Respond
🗓️ Community Calendar: Be a part of events like How to start building a learning culture with no budget and many more.
🖌️ Community Creations: Let’s welcome Valeriia Forostianova and Jane Garza to our Core Team at L&D Shakers.
🔖 Resource Reel: A collection of resources on Facilitation, Leadership and AI.
🎤 Shaker's Stage: This week’s stage is taken by Ellie Westgarth-Flynn.
Learning Bites 💡
For this issue’s Learning Bites, let’s delve into some crucial insights that are shaping the business landscape this year. I had the opportunity to attend a webinar on "2024 Megatrends And How People Leaders Should Respond" organised by Redthread Research, and it was nothing short of illuminating. The session not only unveiled the imminent challenges but also provided a roadmap for effective responses. Let's dissect the key takeaways that will shape the strategies and learning initiatives for People Leaders in the coming months.
Here are my top three (I don’t want to miss important bites, so we’ll have five)takeaways:
Growing pressure on HR to showcase value and efficiency due to economic uncertainty.
Increased stress and pressure on individuals due to continuous geopolitical and social volatility lead to tensions within the workplace.
A gap exists between employees' desire to use AI and their confidence levels which leads to the HR with the task of driving AI adoption while ensuring safety and overseeing the augmentation and automation of work.
Hybrid work policies and unionization contribute to conflicts and power struggles. And organizations are reluctant to discuss Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&IB) practices.
Different work value propositions among generations.
What This Means for Practice:
Tailoring learning initiatives to align with critical business priorities during economic uncertainty and showcase the strategic value of L&D by emphasising its direct contribution to organisational success.
Fostering a culture that promotes open communication and support for employees facing external stressors and providing resources that help employees cope with uncertainty and maintain focus amid external disruptions. It also means to equip employees with skills to navigate difficult conversations both within and outside the workplace.
Develop AI literacy training programs that cater to employees' varying comfort levels and provide hands-on training to boost practical skills and confidence in using AI tools while also educating leaders on the broad spectrum of AI opportunities and potential risks.
Provide training that enhances leadership skills in navigating challenges related to remote and in-office dynamics and a platform for open dialogue on workplace policies, addressing concerns before they escalate. Encourage leaders to examine the DEIB actions and plans, fostering a commitment to equitable practices.
Implement mentorship programs that facilitate knowledge transfer among different levels. Train managers to understand the unique work mindset of each generation and encourage alternative approaches to traditional management styles, promoting flexibility and adaptation.
That’s all Shakers! What are your thoughts? Are you observing any of these patterns in your organisations? If you are a consultant, did any one of these trends pop up in your conversations? I would love to listen to your views. Drop them in the comments section below! 😍
Coming Up Next
Community Calendar 🗓️
Our next events lineup is here! Join us for super practical, fun and interesting sessions and meet other L&D buddies. Register for events using the link below!
Register for the events below! 👇
Community Creations 🖌️
👩🏽🎨 Exciting times ahead as we welcome Valeriia Forostianova to lead the charge as our ThoughtLab Event Catalyst!
This year, she's turning her focus to learning design and facilitation, taking charge of curating and co-hosting our expert webinar series – ThoughtLabs!
A huge round of applause for the incredible Stephan van de Ven, who's been the maestro of ThoughtLab for past years.
Valeriia, we're beyond thrilled to have you steer the ship, and we can't wait to witness the incredible learning sessions you'll bring to our community this year, good luck!
🇺🇸 We have a new addition to our Local L&D Shakers Hub in the US – Welcome to Los Angeles!
Leading the charge is the incredible Jane Garza, she envisions a hub where L&D professionals in LA can connect, share insights, and learn from each other as peers
If you're in or around LA, join the conversation in #2-local-hub-los-angeles channel, and gear up for the inaugural gathering next month!
Let's shower Jane with love, luck, and heartfelt appreciation for stepping into the role of community lead for LA!
Cool Stuff You Don’t Wanna Miss Out
Resource Reel 🔖
This week’s hottest resources are:
Top 20 Facilitation Methods by Marie Dubost that spreads across five themes: Facilitation for Innovation & Impact, Games and Play, Strategy and Action, Participation and Collective Intelligence and Futures.
Leading in the Flow of Work from HBR which talks about activating your inner core—your best self—by tapping into five energies: purpose, wisdom, growth, love, and self-realization.
Difficult Conversations, a self-coaching workbook by Coachable which is designed to dig deeper and have honest reflection. If you are planning to have a difficult performance conversation, use this workbook to help you prep and better regulate your emotions during the conversation.
The AI For L&D Lab: Zero-cost tools to become AI confident by Ross Stevenson where you’ll find practical case studies, research and reports for L&D teams.
Community Corner:
Shaker's Stage 🎤
Let’s welcome Ellie Westgarth-Flynn, Freelance Learning Consultant and Facilitator to take the Stage.
What was a pivotal moment in your career?
-The most pivotal moment in my career was the moment I decided to make a change in my career. The change of becoming a Learning Consultant and Facilitator itself came later, but if I think about when the pivot occurred, it was then. I've passed some major milestones since - for example, landing a contract with Grey Consulting as a Learning Consultant, running learner experience research for Ableton (the company I'd always wanted to work for!) delivering workshops overseas for the first time, getting to travel with my job. All of these were extraordinary experiences, but the pivotal moment they came from was that moment where the resolve set in, and I said to myself "I'm going to make a change. I'm going to build a new career for myself." I was sitting in a cafe in December of 2018. I'd been making music, playing music and teaching music in some capacity for about 9 years at that point, and I'd done everything I could to make it a feasible, sustainable existence, but over the decade I'd run out of things I could learn from doing it, and it just wasn't interesting. I can remember the day so clearly. I was wearing a yellow top, sitting by an open window, looking out at the apartment block I was about to leave, moving to I didn't know where yet. A younger me might have catastrophised, but the me then sat with herself and said "I'm going to make a change." It was on that day that I found CareerShifters, searching for career change support. I didn't take their Launch Pad course straight away - in fact I didn't do that until 2020, when I'd saved towards it, and when gracefully the pandemic carved out space for me to participate in one of their cohorts. CareerShifters in itself was a pivotal experience and gave me the grounding in my authentic and very real interest in learning and development I needed to springboard into meaningful work. It was whilst running a workshop for my cohort, turning one of their individual exercises into a group activity, that one of the other participants said. "Ellie, you know you can do this for a job, don't you?" The rest is history. Can you believe I didn't know anyone ran workshops at work? That anyone in the real world needed learning services? From that point on, I went from strength to strength, started building my own learning and DE&I programs, running workshops wherever I could. I found training, took part in peer learning cohorts, and connected to a freelancer network through which I still work every day. I joined L&D shakers at that time too, and remember it was like looking in a mirror. Consulting is the latest evolution, although, long term organisational development and culture change has always been an interest. The "becoming" a learning consultant is just the result of that pivotal moment. Had I set off knowing this was a destination, I probably wouldn't have made it here. It feels now like I'm on the holiday/trip I've been planning for a really long time. The decision to travel, and the strategic roadmap I put in place to make it a possibility, came a long long time before any exploration of the possible destinations. Once that decision was taken, I was already on the road.
What’s a source of inspiration for you right now?
-A source of inspiration for me right now is conversations and networks. I've always found these to be more fruitful in any sense of the word, but if you think seriously about it, our network is the container for all of our collective knowledge. Therefore, strengthening it's connections is of paramount importance if we want it to exist or evolve. Particularly in the face of AI, it's important to draw on knowledge from all directions. This morning I've had a great conversation with an OD wizard with twenty years knowledge under their belt - I've come away with five A4 pages of notes on organisations and topics to look into. Last week I chatted to a consultancy uniting design strategies with learning and culture change. Conversations are great for inspiration, for sourcing knowledge, and for gathering feedback and insight on who I am as a person, and where I can add value and collaborate with others doing interesting work.
Share a tool, method, or framework you find useful
-Can I cheat and suggest two? One that looks introspectively and one I use in service of others. A tool for me: What - So What - Now What I workshop myself, every day, and integrate workshop tools into my own ways of working to improve my own internal working culture (I am my own business.) One tool I use to drive my own progress is the What - So What - Now What reflection. At the end of every day I write a list of what I've done and what it meant or what I gained from taking that action. At the end of each week I run back through it and fill in the Now What. Ta-da: Actionable to do list for the upcoming week.
A tool for work: When designing learning or workshops I carry out pretty extensive learner (user) research, and also work at a strategic level, to make sure what I'm bringing about fits into the change roadmap a company is on or wants to be on. The Kata Questions are a pretty useful skeleton for any research interview, for leaders or for learners, (leaders are also learners, uh oh, hall of mirrors...) and also have a cool history.
I don't use the formal wording as rigorously as Toyota did when this question structure was devised, it would create obstacles between me and the learners I am talking to. Instead I say things like "Where are you now? Where do you want to get to? What's getting in your way?..." But it is a question set I fall back on again and again with every new learning program I design and deliver.
What does being an L&D Shaker look and feel like for you?
-Exciting, vibrant, full of possibility. I'm so grateful for all the guidance and opportunity L&D Shakers has given me so far!
〜See you soon
Till then, keep spicing up your learning! 🧠🧂
Sejaal