The Mindtools L&D Podcast

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

If you're rolling out AI licenses, how do you get people to use them? For AI learning designer Emily Valencia, there are two key requirements: that people can experiment safely, and that they can share results with others.

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross D and Matt meet with Emily to discuss:

• What organizations get wrong about AI rollouts
• What effective AI adoption looks like
• Whether we should really see AI as a coworker (or whether this framing is one of the obstacles we've created for ourselves)

During the discussion, Matt referenced recent news that an OpenAI experiment went rogue.

Find out more about Emily at emilyvalenciaai.com

In 'What I Learned this Week', Matt discussed the always-round-the-corner nature of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Emily discussed Anthropic's partnership with Detroit Public Schools.

Ross D discussed the documentary Rafa.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how our AI Skills Academy supports practical, hands-on AI upskilling for the enterprise: four weeks, role-specific use cases, governance built in from week one.

Like the show? You'll LOVE our newsletter! Sign up to The L&D Dispatch now.

Connect with our speakers

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

• Ross Dickie
• Matt Mella
• Emily Valencia

There are at least four factors that influence the success of AI adoption in your organization: training your people, clarity of compliance guidance, how people are rewarded, and the influence of managers. In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, we're exploring the last of these.

In his book, Leading with AI - How to build high performance teams with AI as your sparring partner, Joris Merks-Benjaminsen presents an action-focused framework for helping managers adopt AI. In our discussion, we focus on:

• whether AI can replace managers
• how to help managers get started with AI
• why embracing AI is a mindset shift, beyond just 'writing good prompts'

During the discussion, we referenced Google's Project Oxygen. This was led by Laszlo Bock, who wrote Work Rules! about his experiences.

The woman who "married" her ChatGPT companion was covered by Forbes.

To pick up a copy of Joris' book, visit managingwithoutpower.com.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Ross G discussed AI's preference for negative parallellisms.

For more from Mindtools Kineo, visit our new website mindtools-kineo.com. There, you'll find out how our AI Skills Academy supports practical, hands-on AI upskilling for the enterprise: four weeks, role-specific use cases, governance built in from week one.

Connect with our speakers

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

• Ross Garner
• Ross Dickie
• Joris Merks-Benjaminsen

In this week's episode, Cammy and Gemma are joined by skills expert Koreen Pagano to unpack the rise of skills-based organizations.

We discussed:

• What becoming 'skills-based' in an organization might look like
• The benefits and challenges of shifting towards a skill-based approach
• The impact of AI on this shift, skills development and managers.

You can pre-order Koreen's forthcoming book, Rewiring Your Organization for AI, and buy her published books Building the Skills-Based Organization and Immersive Learning: Designing for Authentic Practice.

In 'What I Learned this Week', Cammy shared a non-fiction book recommendation for Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies.

Koreen described the lives of a family of eagles which she's been following on the Big Bear Bald Eagle cam.

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:

• Gemma Towersey
• Cammy Bean
• Koreen Pagano

In the final part of our 500th anniversary 'Eras Tour' retrospective, we conclude by saying farewell to our human co-workers and embracing the technology that will ultimately destroy us all: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Ross G and Dr Anna B are joined by our most frequent guest of all time, Donald H Taylor, to discuss:

• how AI took over Don's annual 'Global Sentiment Survey'
• the mindset shift that L&D professionals need to embrace to adapt to change
• whether, 10 years after we first asked this question, L&D is truly dead?

During the discussion, Ross referenced the ultimate hidden banger in our back catalogue: 357 — L&D governance (the ultimate juggling act).

He also referenced an August 2025 report which found that 95% of AI pilot programs deliver no value.

In 'What I Learned This Week', Ross discussed the incredible longevity of sharks.

Don referenced a conversation with his AI reports co-author Egle Vinauskaite. You can find their reports on Don's website. See also: donaldhtaylor.co.uk

Like the show? You'll love our newsletter! Subscribe to The L&D Dispatch now.

And if you're currently building AI skills in your organization, we can help! Check out our AI Skills Academy to find out more. Or drop us a note on LinkedIn, we'd love to hear from you.

Connect with our speakers

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

• Ross Garner
• Dr Anna Barnett
• Don Taylor

If the pandemic years saw the office become a 'blank space', the hybrid era gradually witnessed that space fill up again through return-to-office mandates.

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Rob Baker joins us to continue our 'Eras Tour'. We discuss:

• how the pandemic created an opportunity for 'job crafting', and what's changed since we've come out of lockdown
• whether job crafting has lost relevance since the pandemic, or just gotten harder to realize
• what new research tells us about the impact of job crafting on performance and wellbeing.

You can find out more about the work Rob does at tailoredthinking.co.uk.

See also:

• Tailored Thinking's series of articles on Work and Job Design (including AI crafting): Building Better Work by Design
• Rob's book, Personalization at Work: Personalization at Work

In 'What I Learned This Week', Rob discussed the art of subtraction, including the Lego experiment explored in this video.

Ross G referenced an article in People Management on the challenge we may experience fulfilling AI roles in the future.

Like the show? You'll love our newsletter! Subscribe to The L&D Dispatch now.

And if you want to work with us, please do visit mindtools-kineo.com or find us on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you.

Connect with our speakers

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

• Ross Dickie
• Ross Garner
• Rob Baker

Ross G stays out too late. Got nothing in his brain. At least, that's what people say.

In this week's episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, we're joined by Heeral Gudka and Andy Lancaster to continue our 'Eras Tour', with a look back at the pandemic years. We discuss:

• the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on L&D, and how much of the 'new normal' we've held on to
• what connectedness and belonging look and feel like in the post-pandemic era
• how attitudes and organisational priorities around DEI have shifted since 2020.

In 'What I Learned This Week', Ross discussed an HBR article on the pros and cons of continuous assessment.

Like the show? You'll love our newsletter! Subscribe to The L&D Dispatch now.

And if you want to work with us, please do visit mindtools-kineo.com or find us on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you.

Connect with our speakers

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

• Ross Garner
• Heeral Gudka
• Andy Lancaster

Ten years, 500 shows, countless guests. To celebrate our anniversary, we're releasing a special four-part series looking back at the evolution of L&D.

In part one, Ross G and Ross D are joined by friend-of-the-show Julie Dirksen to revisit our early years.

We discuss:

• whether L&D has yet become 'evidence-based'
• dumb ideas we fall for, get over, and fall for again
• evidence-based orthodoxies which we once believed, but now aren't so sure about.

During the discussion, we referenced the Mehrabian fallacy, problems with the forgetting curve, and how psychologst Anders Ericsson improved his memory by forming connections with running times.

In 'What I Learned This Week', Ross D referenced A History of the United States in 100 Objects, a podcast collaboration between the BBC and 99% Invisible. He wants you to know that his description of the 'screws' episode is inaccurate.

Ross G discussed the carrier pigeon-based social media app Roost.

Next week, we'll be revisiting our second Era: The pandemic years.

You can find details of Julie's books, Design for How People Learn and Talk to the Elephant, at our website usablelearning.com

Like the show? You'll love our newsletter! Subscribe to The L&D Dispatch now.

And if you want to work with us, please do visit mindtools-kineo.com or find us on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you.

Connect with our speakers

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

• Ross Dickie
• Ross Garner
• Julie Dirksen