Nick Shackleton is the CEO at Shackleton Consulting and Former CLO at Deloitte UK. He is awarded for people development, strategy, innovation, and learning content including the Learning & Performance Institute’s Award for Services to the Learning Industry, 2017.

This week's Digital Adoption Show features Shagun Vaish, Principal Customer Success Director at Whatfix, and Nick Shackleton discussing An L&D Innovator's Journey who believes in the power of learning.

09:32 What are some suggestions for creating a learner-friendly environment? Can you share any examples of how this concept has worked for you?

“People are just doing a weird educational ritual that doesn't achieve what they would like to achieve.” - Nick Shackleton

• Nick mentioned that challenges drive our learning, and sometimes those challenges come in the form of a story. But more frequently, they come from our work. Anyone familiar with the Centre for Creative Leadership’s work knows that their challenges are really what drive our learning
• On the other hand, In order to support people’s learning, we can do two things. We can challenge them and look at the challenges they already have in their jobs and create the resources that support them
• Likewise, Practical advice is to focus on either creating useful stuff that helps people or challenging experiences that change people. And all of the tools you need to do that systematically, in a data-driven way, are freely available

17:30  We know the future of the world and L&D is digital. So, why are social networks and human-centred design so important for the future?

“Some organisations increasingly realise that they cannot control their reputation and their external brand independently, they are dependent on their employees to be ambassadors of their organisation.” - Nick Shackleton

• Nick stated that human-centred design is essential across lots of fields. So the reason design thinking is critical is if as a business you want to sell your product, it's not a bad idea to talk to your customers
• And you should take time to understand the needs of your learners if you want your learning services or products to be effective. This will help you not only improve your learning culture but also make your learning services or products more effective and efficient
• In fact, when most people join the business, their initial impression of learning is negative, they're just being forced to comply, and complete this. Imagine if you could turn that around, and actually help people to do their jobs more seamlessly. That would influence a lot of things, it would reduce the number of people leaving, improve employee satisfaction, and increase productivity. So it would improve the overall experience

20:31 Why is it so difficult for a leader to modify his or her leadership style? What effect does this have on organizational change?

“Leaders have a huge influence on the culture of an organisation and if you've had to work for a bad leader, it makes every day miserable.” - Nick Shackleton

• Nick also mentioned that we tend to promote people who are good at their jobs. And quite often, that means that they're bad at leadership
• For instance, in some engineering organisations where if somebody is performing very well as an engineer. So they are going to promote him as a leader. And then his natural inclination is to tell everybody else how to do things like him, and that sort of quite infantilizing people and often it means that they lack people skills
• People often sort of pick up a lot of their leadership styles from their parents. And so their idea of what it means to be in authority, and how you should behave is quite deeply ingrained and embedded. So we have to take the time to actually step into experiences, which develop them in different ways and show them a different way of working with people that aren't merely telling people what to do, and turning people off when they don't do it

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