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Using GEMBA to Help Adopt VR in Enterprise, with The Learning Network's Dominic Deane
For a lot of us, we think learning ends when our working life begins. But not only is that untrue; being able to learn new skills for our careers is only going to become more important. Dominic Deane drops in to talk about how GEMBA is helping with that.
Julie: Hello, my name is Julie
Smithson and I am your host for the XR for Learning podcast. Today on
my show is Dominic Deane from the Leadership Network. Dominic has
been building immersive technology companies since his second year of
university, founding Chronicles VR, a premium virtual reality studio,
and taking on consultancy work with some of UK's largest cultural
institutions, including the British Museum, English Heritage and the
BBC. Joining the Leadership Network in 2017, Dominic has led the
creation and positioning of GEMBA, the Leadership Network new virtual
reality offering since joining the Leadership Network. Dominic
created a new division responsible for the Virtual Reality Learning
Platform for Business Transformation, creating and delivering GEMBA
to Fortune 2000 customers around the world. Welcome, Dominic.
Dominic: Oh, thank you very much
Julie. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for putting me on.
Julie: Thanks so much. Why don't
you give me a little bit of an overview of the Leadership Network,
the parent company who has produced GEMBA, and how you're making
GEMBA part of the learning strategy for many of these companies that
you deal with?
Dominic: Sure. So the Leadership
Network's been around for the better part of a decade now. And
primarily we've been delivering in-person training to top executives
at Fortune 2000 companies. Ultimately, what that looks like is 3-day
immersive learning on a kind of best practice site. So be it BMW, or
Google, or at Toyota, for example; these executives get immersed into
the culture of these organizations, where they get taught about
certain topics like Lean Industry 4.0, Supply Chain Excellence
Innovation, from subject matter experts who are leading in their
field. So they might be from M.I.T. or Harvard. And ultimately, it's
an opportunity for these top executives to get world-class training.
Julie: Is the challenge... maybe
you want to talk about the challenges that you immediately walk into
when you work with these clients? Because you have to start somewhere
when it comes to transforming the energy and the delivery of what
your product holds for them.
Dominic: Yes. In terms of these
large organizations, there's a whole range of challenges that they
face that we're able to kind of talk through with them on a level
that many organizations potentially don't get the opportunity to. So
when you're talking to these top executives in these quite private
locations, you hear about the true challenges they face as an
organization. So be it embracing industry 4.0, embracing digital
transformations that, fundamentally, these transformations challenge
the very existence of that business. And we're in a privileged
position, whereby we're able to talk to these organizations about
these challenges, and we're able to respond to them with feedback and
guidance. And what that's looked like for us has been about going,
"okay, well, look; you guys are getting some great information
from us, from our leaders, through our subject matter experts. What
more can we do?" And these very large organizations have said to
us, "look, we get great immersive training, but how do we roll
this learning out to our whole organization?" And that's kind of
where the GEMBA offering has come from: a solution that uses XR
technologies, primarily virtual reality, to deliver immersive
learning at massive, massive scale for these large organizations.
Julie: One of the things that we
talk about, the biggest part of digital transformation isn't
necessarily the technology, but it's the change in vision and the
operating model, the organizational structure, and the talent that
they currently have in their employment. And to get to that next
level of improved customer experience and operating model that the
current business operates under, it requires immense transformation.
Maybe you can highlight on some ways that you even begin to work with
these companies to change all of these things.
Dominic: Completely. I mean,
ultimately, for these companies to continue to thrive, it's about
harnessing exactly that internal talent that you talked about. So
these organizations, they've got really great talent that needs to
keep learning and keep evolving their skill sets over time. And this
is why we've kind of adopted the sense of lifelong learning as a sort
of motto for our organization; a key value for us. And what that
looks like is giving a set of tools to organizations that allows them
to keep pushing learning out, no matter where people are in the
world. And that means empowering educators within big businesses,
because ultimately, if you've only got a team of 12 who are trying to
train tens, hundreds of thousands of people inside a company, it
becomes an impossible challenge. And that's why we've developed the
immersive learning technologies that we have with the GEMBA to meet
those challenges.
Julie: Now, does GEMBA work with
all the departments? I know you mentioned earlier, the owners and the
top C levels. But does GEMBA address all of the different departments
within an organization?
Dominic: So ultimately we --
exactly as you said -- we work with senior decision-makers and then
we flow back down through the organization to those departments that
are going to make the change happen. Often, that's collaborating very
closely with HR, but then also with individual parts of the supply
chain or within individual parts of the organization. And this is
often because we're looking for the right groups of people that can
keep the learning going, because all too often, people see learning
and continued learning as a barrier to them doing their daily jobs.
And we find that if we partner closely with companies and really
understand how they work, how they tick, we can help them introduce
processes -- not just our products, but the internal processes --
that help them embrace learning as a way of life within the
organization.
Julie: When you're dealing with
the companies, and you work with all of the different departments,
you obviously have to have a starting point.That baseline knowledge
of... not just knowledge of the industry itself, but a knowledge base
of where their training is today, and how to move forward. So are
there any pieces of what you do that find that baseline of what
you're dealing with? For example, reports within HR or strategies of
previous training from before, that you use to to move forward?
Dominic: Completely. I think
that's definitely a serious challenge. But actually, I'd almost take
it a step further back than that. I think there's also the process of
educating the learning champions, or internal educators. Because
often, people don't always know what's VR is capable of achieving.
And so we're often in a position where we know what the solution can
look like and how it can integrate within an organization. But then
it's an interesting challenge of, to some extent, winning hearts and
minds so that people see the technology as a way of enhancing what
they do. And I think that ultimately, when we've achieved that, when
people understand the potential with the technology, that's when we
can dive even deeper into how it starts to optimize their existing
learning workflows. Because I don't think it's necessarily about
coming in and wholesale saying "please use this new technology,
it's going to revolutionize everything." Instead, it's taking a
quite strategic approach, working with people to say, "look,
where is this technology best-placed? What problems do you have, and
how can we help solve them with all technologies?" And frankly,
where is it less relevant? It's not always necessary to be pushing in
new technology for technology's sake.
Julie: Yeah, there is definitely
a lot of analysis on where to implement this technology first, to
show the best return for, obviously, the investment, for the
shareholders and C-levels. But I want to go back to the discussion of
the internal champion, and making sure that you've got the leadership
internally in these organizations to be able to push not just the
strategy of what you're about to implement, but also helping them
understand. And I think there's a lot of conversation about,
obviously, the training side and business, but the education side and
the teachers and the mentors today rolling into the education system,
and that flow of learning for life, and how important it is to have
somebody who understands and is passionate about this technology
that's feeding that onto others. And maybe you can talk a little bit
about how you deal with the questions of the unknown, really, from
these mentors and trainers within the company that have to roll this
out, especially on scale.
Dominic: It's definitely a very
interesting challenge, and one that we've had to sort of evolve our
response to. I know in my own past experience -- I imagine you've
experienced the same thing -- often we're surrounded by people who
are quite happy and excited to embrace new technologies. So I think
we almost lulled into a false sense of security to begin with, that
everyone's keen and excited to jump in and put on the latest headset.
What we've found is exactly what you've said, which is it's a matter
of getting people to embrace that change and embrace the idea of
using technology as a means of achieving lifelong learning within an
organization (or, frankly, in any parts of life). And for us, what
that's looked like is actually getting internal company champions or
learning champions, those who are, excited about and see the
potential of the technology and the potential of the learning that
we've created. And ensuring that they're in power, they have the
right resources to help push the learning within the organization so
that it's not a matter of kind of outside-in; us constantly badgering
people to engage with learning, as you might get with e-learning,
kind of constant emails. Instead, it's having internal champions,
people who are wanting to push the learning because they see the
potential. And then it's a matter of organizations having their own
peers be there to help achieve that change.
Julie: And then how do you start
to even work with scale? Because I think we're at that point where we
understand the technology works, and we have these large enterprise
companies that know they need to make these changes. And one of the
show notes that I read from you was when the company realized that
they had to retrain and reskill over 100,000 employees in the next
three years, and that's a very daunting task to understand even where
you're the skill sets of your employees are today, and making them
ready for all of these digital transformations. Maybe you can shed
light a little bit on that scalability within an organization using
GEMBA and the strategies that you use.
Dominic: So you mentioned there
the 100,000 people over three years? This is exactly the sort of
challenge that large organizations around the world are facing every
day now, to stay competitive and to stay up-to-date with what people
in their space are doing. They're constantly having to
upskill/retrain workers, so that they're always implementing the
latest technology and latest solutions. When you have that sort of
scale of people to train, in-person training might be the most
effective in terms of results, but it quickly becomes clear the
impossibility of your challenge; even with sort of hundreds of
people, you won't be able to train hundreds of thousands in anything
less than a decade. And that's why I think often people turn to
e-learning, which is a perfectly adequate learning solution for kind
of your day-to-day, keeping boxes ticked, so to speak. But if you
really want to have that same level of engagement that people might
get from a seminar or from 1:1 training, having a scalable solution
that actually gets people getting hands-on with the learning,
something that can only really be done nowadays using XR
technologies, that's where we come in, in terms of providing
off-the-shelf solutions and then also providing remote collaboration.
Because I'm sure you've experienced, whenever you want to teach
anything, you want to be in the room with someone. You want be able
to talk to someone. You want to make eye contact and share an
experience together. If you look at things like Bloom's taxonomy,
that's right up there in terms of applying and creating in learning.
And that's why we've created the collaborative part of the GEMBA
platform, where people can work together from anywhere in the world.
Julie: That's awesome. I truly
wish the all the best for the Leadership Network and GEMBA. So maybe
we can close off with three lessons, or some top lessons that you
could share with our listeners, on how to get started -- and
obviously, where to find GEMBA and the Leadership Network out there
in the ecosystem.
Dominic: If we're talking about when to get started, I think it's always the the first thing to do is jump in: jump in literally to virtual reality. It's so all good and well, describing what it's like to be in a virtual space. But nothing quite replaces being there. Ensuring that there's a clear strategy and that the technology is being used for the right problem is also absolutely key. And then finally, finding us? We're at TheLeadershipNetwork.com. Do have a look at our courses as well, that's kind of where we provide our learning, it's currently exclusively to the people on our network. But it's exciting products, and we're looking forward to sharing it with more people around the world.
Julie: That's great. Thank you
so much Dominic, for joining me today. This has been another episode
of XR for Learning. Please continue that lifelong journey of learning
every day, about the XR technologies and how they apply to business
and education. Thanks for joining us.
View all episodes
By Julie Smithson
5
11 ratings
For a lot of us, we think learning ends when our working life begins. But not only is that untrue; being able to learn new skills for our careers is only going to become more important. Dominic Deane drops in to talk about how GEMBA is helping with that.
Julie: Hello, my name is Julie
Smithson and I am your host for the XR for Learning podcast. Today on
my show is Dominic Deane from the Leadership Network. Dominic has
been building immersive technology companies since his second year of
university, founding Chronicles VR, a premium virtual reality studio,
and taking on consultancy work with some of UK's largest cultural
institutions, including the British Museum, English Heritage and the
BBC. Joining the Leadership Network in 2017, Dominic has led the
creation and positioning of GEMBA, the Leadership Network new virtual
reality offering since joining the Leadership Network. Dominic
created a new division responsible for the Virtual Reality Learning
Platform for Business Transformation, creating and delivering GEMBA
to Fortune 2000 customers around the world. Welcome, Dominic.
Dominic: Oh, thank you very much
Julie. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for putting me on.
Julie: Thanks so much. Why don't
you give me a little bit of an overview of the Leadership Network,
the parent company who has produced GEMBA, and how you're making
GEMBA part of the learning strategy for many of these companies that
you deal with?
Dominic: Sure. So the Leadership
Network's been around for the better part of a decade now. And
primarily we've been delivering in-person training to top executives
at Fortune 2000 companies. Ultimately, what that looks like is 3-day
immersive learning on a kind of best practice site. So be it BMW, or
Google, or at Toyota, for example; these executives get immersed into
the culture of these organizations, where they get taught about
certain topics like Lean Industry 4.0, Supply Chain Excellence
Innovation, from subject matter experts who are leading in their
field. So they might be from M.I.T. or Harvard. And ultimately, it's
an opportunity for these top executives to get world-class training.
Julie: Is the challenge... maybe
you want to talk about the challenges that you immediately walk into
when you work with these clients? Because you have to start somewhere
when it comes to transforming the energy and the delivery of what
your product holds for them.
Dominic: Yes. In terms of these
large organizations, there's a whole range of challenges that they
face that we're able to kind of talk through with them on a level
that many organizations potentially don't get the opportunity to. So
when you're talking to these top executives in these quite private
locations, you hear about the true challenges they face as an
organization. So be it embracing industry 4.0, embracing digital
transformations that, fundamentally, these transformations challenge
the very existence of that business. And we're in a privileged
position, whereby we're able to talk to these organizations about
these challenges, and we're able to respond to them with feedback and
guidance. And what that's looked like for us has been about going,
"okay, well, look; you guys are getting some great information
from us, from our leaders, through our subject matter experts. What
more can we do?" And these very large organizations have said to
us, "look, we get great immersive training, but how do we roll
this learning out to our whole organization?" And that's kind of
where the GEMBA offering has come from: a solution that uses XR
technologies, primarily virtual reality, to deliver immersive
learning at massive, massive scale for these large organizations.
Julie: One of the things that we
talk about, the biggest part of digital transformation isn't
necessarily the technology, but it's the change in vision and the
operating model, the organizational structure, and the talent that
they currently have in their employment. And to get to that next
level of improved customer experience and operating model that the
current business operates under, it requires immense transformation.
Maybe you can highlight on some ways that you even begin to work with
these companies to change all of these things.
Dominic: Completely. I mean,
ultimately, for these companies to continue to thrive, it's about
harnessing exactly that internal talent that you talked about. So
these organizations, they've got really great talent that needs to
keep learning and keep evolving their skill sets over time. And this
is why we've kind of adopted the sense of lifelong learning as a sort
of motto for our organization; a key value for us. And what that
looks like is giving a set of tools to organizations that allows them
to keep pushing learning out, no matter where people are in the
world. And that means empowering educators within big businesses,
because ultimately, if you've only got a team of 12 who are trying to
train tens, hundreds of thousands of people inside a company, it
becomes an impossible challenge. And that's why we've developed the
immersive learning technologies that we have with the GEMBA to meet
those challenges.
Julie: Now, does GEMBA work with
all the departments? I know you mentioned earlier, the owners and the
top C levels. But does GEMBA address all of the different departments
within an organization?
Dominic: So ultimately we --
exactly as you said -- we work with senior decision-makers and then
we flow back down through the organization to those departments that
are going to make the change happen. Often, that's collaborating very
closely with HR, but then also with individual parts of the supply
chain or within individual parts of the organization. And this is
often because we're looking for the right groups of people that can
keep the learning going, because all too often, people see learning
and continued learning as a barrier to them doing their daily jobs.
And we find that if we partner closely with companies and really
understand how they work, how they tick, we can help them introduce
processes -- not just our products, but the internal processes --
that help them embrace learning as a way of life within the
organization.
Julie: When you're dealing with
the companies, and you work with all of the different departments,
you obviously have to have a starting point.That baseline knowledge
of... not just knowledge of the industry itself, but a knowledge base
of where their training is today, and how to move forward. So are
there any pieces of what you do that find that baseline of what
you're dealing with? For example, reports within HR or strategies of
previous training from before, that you use to to move forward?
Dominic: Completely. I think
that's definitely a serious challenge. But actually, I'd almost take
it a step further back than that. I think there's also the process of
educating the learning champions, or internal educators. Because
often, people don't always know what's VR is capable of achieving.
And so we're often in a position where we know what the solution can
look like and how it can integrate within an organization. But then
it's an interesting challenge of, to some extent, winning hearts and
minds so that people see the technology as a way of enhancing what
they do. And I think that ultimately, when we've achieved that, when
people understand the potential with the technology, that's when we
can dive even deeper into how it starts to optimize their existing
learning workflows. Because I don't think it's necessarily about
coming in and wholesale saying "please use this new technology,
it's going to revolutionize everything." Instead, it's taking a
quite strategic approach, working with people to say, "look,
where is this technology best-placed? What problems do you have, and
how can we help solve them with all technologies?" And frankly,
where is it less relevant? It's not always necessary to be pushing in
new technology for technology's sake.
Julie: Yeah, there is definitely
a lot of analysis on where to implement this technology first, to
show the best return for, obviously, the investment, for the
shareholders and C-levels. But I want to go back to the discussion of
the internal champion, and making sure that you've got the leadership
internally in these organizations to be able to push not just the
strategy of what you're about to implement, but also helping them
understand. And I think there's a lot of conversation about,
obviously, the training side and business, but the education side and
the teachers and the mentors today rolling into the education system,
and that flow of learning for life, and how important it is to have
somebody who understands and is passionate about this technology
that's feeding that onto others. And maybe you can talk a little bit
about how you deal with the questions of the unknown, really, from
these mentors and trainers within the company that have to roll this
out, especially on scale.
Dominic: It's definitely a very
interesting challenge, and one that we've had to sort of evolve our
response to. I know in my own past experience -- I imagine you've
experienced the same thing -- often we're surrounded by people who
are quite happy and excited to embrace new technologies. So I think
we almost lulled into a false sense of security to begin with, that
everyone's keen and excited to jump in and put on the latest headset.
What we've found is exactly what you've said, which is it's a matter
of getting people to embrace that change and embrace the idea of
using technology as a means of achieving lifelong learning within an
organization (or, frankly, in any parts of life). And for us, what
that's looked like is actually getting internal company champions or
learning champions, those who are, excited about and see the
potential of the technology and the potential of the learning that
we've created. And ensuring that they're in power, they have the
right resources to help push the learning within the organization so
that it's not a matter of kind of outside-in; us constantly badgering
people to engage with learning, as you might get with e-learning,
kind of constant emails. Instead, it's having internal champions,
people who are wanting to push the learning because they see the
potential. And then it's a matter of organizations having their own
peers be there to help achieve that change.
Julie: And then how do you start
to even work with scale? Because I think we're at that point where we
understand the technology works, and we have these large enterprise
companies that know they need to make these changes. And one of the
show notes that I read from you was when the company realized that
they had to retrain and reskill over 100,000 employees in the next
three years, and that's a very daunting task to understand even where
you're the skill sets of your employees are today, and making them
ready for all of these digital transformations. Maybe you can shed
light a little bit on that scalability within an organization using
GEMBA and the strategies that you use.
Dominic: So you mentioned there
the 100,000 people over three years? This is exactly the sort of
challenge that large organizations around the world are facing every
day now, to stay competitive and to stay up-to-date with what people
in their space are doing. They're constantly having to
upskill/retrain workers, so that they're always implementing the
latest technology and latest solutions. When you have that sort of
scale of people to train, in-person training might be the most
effective in terms of results, but it quickly becomes clear the
impossibility of your challenge; even with sort of hundreds of
people, you won't be able to train hundreds of thousands in anything
less than a decade. And that's why I think often people turn to
e-learning, which is a perfectly adequate learning solution for kind
of your day-to-day, keeping boxes ticked, so to speak. But if you
really want to have that same level of engagement that people might
get from a seminar or from 1:1 training, having a scalable solution
that actually gets people getting hands-on with the learning,
something that can only really be done nowadays using XR
technologies, that's where we come in, in terms of providing
off-the-shelf solutions and then also providing remote collaboration.
Because I'm sure you've experienced, whenever you want to teach
anything, you want to be in the room with someone. You want be able
to talk to someone. You want to make eye contact and share an
experience together. If you look at things like Bloom's taxonomy,
that's right up there in terms of applying and creating in learning.
And that's why we've created the collaborative part of the GEMBA
platform, where people can work together from anywhere in the world.
Julie: That's awesome. I truly
wish the all the best for the Leadership Network and GEMBA. So maybe
we can close off with three lessons, or some top lessons that you
could share with our listeners, on how to get started -- and
obviously, where to find GEMBA and the Leadership Network out there
in the ecosystem.
Dominic: If we're talking about when to get started, I think it's always the the first thing to do is jump in: jump in literally to virtual reality. It's so all good and well, describing what it's like to be in a virtual space. But nothing quite replaces being there. Ensuring that there's a clear strategy and that the technology is being used for the right problem is also absolutely key. And then finally, finding us? We're at TheLeadershipNetwork.com. Do have a look at our courses as well, that's kind of where we provide our learning, it's currently exclusively to the people on our network. But it's exciting products, and we're looking forward to sharing it with more people around the world.
Julie: That's great. Thank you
so much Dominic, for joining me today. This has been another episode
of XR for Learning. Please continue that lifelong journey of learning
every day, about the XR technologies and how they apply to business
and education. Thanks for joining us.