The Mindtools L&D Podcast

At Learning Technologies this year, Nigel Paine said AI is turning us into idiots. It was a glib line, and he admits it. But if we hand our thinking over to a chatbot and accept whatever comes back, is he wrong?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G is joined by Dr Nigel Paine, researcher, author, podcaster, broadcaster and consultant (he's a busy guy), to explore when AI makes us sharper, when it makes us duller, and what organizations should do about it.

We discuss:

• Why 'cognitive offloading' becomes a problem when we offload the thinking that matters
• Arguing with AI, and asking it to 'destroy' your conclusions rather than confirm them
• Why organizations need to rethink entry-level roles and recruit for critical thinking

Nigel draws on Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow to explain why our brains favor the easy answer.

To find out more about Nigel's work, visit nigelpaine.com or email [email protected].

In 'What I Learned this Week', Nigel recommended Kevin Fong's new book Minute Six, about what teams do when their plan meets reality.

He also shared research suggesting the aging brain isn't declining, it's adapting, trading memory for specific details for big-picture knowledge.

Ross G recommended the Charles Dickens Museum in London, and its audio walking tour of the streets Dickens knew.

Rolling out enterprise AI licenses? Don't miss out on the benefits they promise. Find out how our AI Skills Academy builds AI skills, including critical thinking, at mindtools-kineo.com, or email Ross G at [email protected].

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Nigel Paine

Most advice on burnout focuses on workload, stress and work-life balance. But what if the real cause is the act we put on at work? And if it is, what does that mean for an industry built on improving performance?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Gemma are joined by Rabih El Khodr, keynote speaker and author of The Way Out of Burnout, to explore where burnout really comes from and what L&D can realistically do about it.

We discuss:

• why 'performance' in the theatrical sense, not overwork, drives burnout
• how 'survival scripts' shape the beliefs that sit upstream of our behavior
• why resilience training for burnt-out people is like handing a drowning person a swimming manual, and what L&D can do instead

Rabih's book, The Way Out of Burnout, is available now.

Rabih explores survival scripts further in his TEDx talk, Burnout Begins with a Script.

For more on Rabih's work, visit rabihspeaks.com.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Gemma recommended an episode of The Rest Is Science, The Threshold of Human Sensation, which explores the smallest things our senses can detect. Her highlight was lugduname, an artificial sweetener hundreds of thousands of times sweeter than sugar.

Rabih shared what he learned from trying the other side of Riverside, the recording platform used by many podcasts, including this one, as he considers hosting a show of his own.

Ross G recommended a piece from Wired, Why Normal People Aren't Using AI Agents. It explains why agents are still a niche next to chatbots, and why organizations hoping to adopt agentic AI will need to be deliberate about how they support people.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Gemma Towersey
• Rabih El Khodr

AI can build a course in minutes. That should be the best news our industry has had in years. Instead, a lot of teams are skipping what really matters: working out what the problem is, and checking whether anything changed.

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Cammy Bean are joined by Tim Slade, founder of The eLearning Designer's Academy, to explore how learning design is changing and what is left for the humans doing it.

We discuss:

• Why AI shifts the work from 'building' to 'diagnosing and evaluating'
• Why order takers are exposed and performance consultants are not
• Whether portfolios can still be trusted to demonstrate capability.

Tim's new book, The Instructional Design Handbook: A Practitioner's Guide to Designing Performance-Based Learning, is available now.

Cammy's book, The Accidental Instructional Designer: Learning Design for the Digital Age, is published by ATD Press.

Tim also shares his thinking on where the industry is heading on his YouTube channel.

During the conversation, Ross G referenced Julie Dirksen's work on performance gaps. Julie joined us recently to look back over ten years of L&D in episode 500.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Cammy shared her method for crispy tofu: press it, tear it rather than cut it, dust it with cornstarch through a fine mesh sieve, then bake it on the top shelf.

Tim learned, for the second time in his life, that selling a house is no fun.

And Ross G shared the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on brands, which finds that trust now sits alongside quality and value for money in how people decide what to buy.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Cammy Bean
• Tim Slade

Articulate's latest product release puts AI at the heart of it's strategy. What does this mean for learning designers?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G flies solo to react to Articulate's Articuland announcement, unpacking what Frontline, Nova, and the platform's pivot toward operational teams means for learning design.

He discusses:

• What Articulate's new 'Frontline' and 'Nova' tools actually do, and why the launch has 'annoyed basically everyone'
• Whether the shift from 'training creator' to 'capability architect' holds up
• The seven things humans can still offer that AI can't automate, from 'embodied presence' to 'provenance'

During the episode, Ross discussed Articulate's own recap of the Articuland 2026 announcement, covering Frontline, Nova, and the new integrations in full.

He also discussed The AI Acceleration Gap, Monika Saha's thought-leadership piece arguing for a shift from training creator to capability architect.

See also Dr Philippa Hardman's LinkedIn post testing Frontline against a real fraud-reporting policy document.

And The AI Daily Brief's episode on the new jobs AI will create, the source for the seven things humans still offer.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner

What research papers did you read while lounging by the pool this summer?

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross D is joined by Claire and Dr Anna to review three studies that have caught our attention over the last few months.

Anna's pick was Vestner and colleagues' 'A dyadic training to promote technology-related learning and development among age-diverse employees: the power of co-workers' enthusiasm', published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

Claire brought Kestin and colleagues' 'AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting', the Harvard study comparing an AI tutor with in-person active learning.

Ross referenced Will Thalheimer's LinkedIn article 'The Learning Styles Challenge After 20 Years', and Clinton-Lisell and Litzinger's 'Is It Really a Neuromyth? A Meta-Analysis of the Learning Styles Matching Hypothesis'.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Dickie
• Claire Gibson
• Anna Barnett

Training one person is hard. Training 750,000 people, in more than 80 countries, spread across frontline shifts, event security and executive teams, is a different problem entirely.

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Claire Gibson are joined by Brent O'Bryan, Senior Vice President of Global Training and Talent Development at Allied Universal, to explore what L&D looks like at genuinely massive scale.

We discuss:

• Why 750,000 employees are never one audience
• How to choose between the LMS, the classroom and virtual training
• The role of AI and automation in training frontline workers at scale.

Brent and Ross G first got talking about this after Brent shared The Josh Bersin Company's research on dynamic enablement. You can read the executive summary of The Definitive Guide to Corporate Learning: From Static Training to Dynamic Enablement on the Josh Bersin site.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Claire shared the world's smallest Fringe venue, a chicken coop in the Pear Tree garden in Edinburgh. Brent recommended The Surprising Power of Reflection, an episode of Trevor Ragan's The Learner Lab podcast, on why reflecting after learning can beat a second round of practice. Ross G shared Garner interference, a cognitive science effect named after Wendell Garner, in which irrelevant information slows people down.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our spearkers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Claire Gibson
• Brent O'Bryan

We've been talking a lot about AI on the podcast recently. So this week, we're revisting a distinctly human episode from 2024 on the value of listening.

As experts, managers or leaders, we often seek to help others by talking, talking, talking. But what if we didn't talk and just listened?

In this episode, Ross D and Gemma are joined by Georgie Rudd, an executive coach, to discuss the trials and delights of listening.

We explore:

• reasons that we don't listen well
• the consequences of not listening (and of listening!)
• how we can improve listening skills.

Georgie recommended Nancy Klein as an expert on listening and techniques to improve. Time to think is a good place to start.

You can find out more about Liz Wiseman's concepts of multipliers and diminishers in her book Multipliers.

In 'What I Learned This Week', Gemma spoke about the widest fairy ring in the world. John Wright reports that it's around 800m across in A spotter's guide to countryside mysteries, but a quick internet search revealed this to be a questionable fact.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on LinkedIn:

• Gemma Towersey
• Ross Dickie
• Georgie Rudd

Georgie can also be contacted via her website: https://www.ruddcoaching.co.uk/

Every L&D team thinks everyone else has AI figured out. Almost nobody does.

Ross G recently ran structured interviews with 12 Mindtools Kineo customers, spanning tech, financial services, pharmaceuticals, energy, media and more, to find out what's really happening on the ground.

In this week's episode, Ross D and Cammy Bean join Ross G to discuss his findings.

We cover:

• Why every L&D team believes it is falling behind
• Where teams are continuing to invest at a time when budgets are constrained
• Why AI ambition keeps stalling at the governance stage

During the episode, Cammy referenced a LinkedIn post titled 'L&D Overboard' by Srishti Sehgal.

In 'What I Learned This Week', Cammy shared the history of Nix's Mate, a shrinking island in Boston Harbor where convicted pirates were hanged and left on display as a warning to passing sailors.

Ross G recommended The Rest Is History's interview with Paul McCartney.

And Ross D recommended The West Wing Weekly's 'Political Film Fest' review of All the President's Men.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Dickie
• Ross Garner
• Cammy Bean

Outside of L&D, most people and organizations see compliance training as a box that needs to be ticked, not something that can drive behavior change. Will AI make this problem better or worse?

In this week's episode, Ross D and Cammy are joined by learning designer Anisha Sridhar to explore what AI is really doing to compliance training.

We discussed:

• why the productivity argument for AI is incomplete
• contextualization, and why it beats personalization in compliance
• how to keep slop out of your learning content.

During the episode, Anisha described using the Gunning Fog index to test whether legal text is actually readable. And Cammy brought up Bret Stephens' New York Times opinion piece, I'm Begging You: Never Write With A.I., which argues that giving up the writing means giving up the thinking.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Dickie
• Cammy Bean
• Anisha Sridhar

Online learning keeps sliding back to text and images. Authoring tools and AI course generators make content cheap, but it often looks like learning without ever asking the learner to think or choose. Games work the other way, running on decisions, feedback, and the chance to try again. Following our recent conversation with Julie Dirksen, we ask where games belong in the age of AI.

In this week's episode, Ross G is joined by Richard Durham, Co-founder and Lead Game Designer at Tentacular Games and Great Grand High Lord of Everything at Wonder Tree Studios, and by Mindtools Kineo's own Claire Gibson, to dig into why games work for learning and whether they still earn their place.

We discussed:

• What makes games actually work for learning
• Why in-person, analog game-based learning never went away
• Whether modern authoring tools have flattened games into quizzes

During the conversation, Richard pointed to the beer game, MIT Sloan's classic supply-chain simulation that demonstrates the bullwhip effect through decisions and their consequences. He also referenced ABC Learning Design, the rapid workshop method from University College London for mapping out the activities that make up a course.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Claire shared The Sumerian Game, a 1964 resource-management game created by Mabel Addis, who is credited as the first video game designer. Ross shared a piece by Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, on a study of AI-generated books on Amazon and how their slow creep is starting to erode sales of human-written books.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how we can help your organization build AI skills, and how our Skills Practice scenarios help build human skills.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Claire Gibson
• Richard Durham