Episode 25: Why we don’t learn at work:
The psychology behind great training

Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to Talent Talks, the L&D podcast about the future of work and the talent driving it forward. The world of work is changing fast from AI reshaping strategies. To new definitions of success and the push for people-first mindsets, learning leaders are being asked to do more, do it better, and do it faster than ever before.

Together, let’s learn, relearn, and sometimes even unlearn what L&D can look like in today’s world. I’m your host, Gina Lionatos, and this is Talent Talks.

Talent Talks is brought to you by TalentLMS, the easy-to-use training platform that delivers real business results from day one. Learn more at [00:01:00] talentlms.com.

On today’s episode, 

Julie Dirksen: I sometimes talk about the fact that you don’t really need dancing cats and unicorns to make your material engaging. There just has to be a reason to use it, like it has to be relevant. It has to feel purposeful. 

Host: Why do so many people walk away from training without changing the way they work?

The traditional tick-the-box methods are failing us, and let’s face it, they have been for a while. So in this episode, we’re asking how do we move beyond content delivery to actually create courses where employees can turn their knowledge into action. Here to discuss all this is Julie Dirksen, instructional designer, author, and expert in learning psychology. She’s an advocate for creating training that doesn’t just teach knowledge, but actually equips employees with the skills to use it. Stay with us.[00:02:00] 

Hello, Julie. Thanks for being here. 

Julie Dirksen: Thank you so much for having me. 

Host: I’m really excited that today we’re going to get to explore how we can make learning programs more impactful by driving real behavioral change. And I would love to start off, uh, by talking a little bit about your book, Talk to the Elephant.

What struck me was how an often overly theoretical subject like learner behavior was made so clearly applicable, particularly to workplaces where learning needs to be simple, effective, and tied to real shifts in behavior. For anyone who’s new to the idea, can you start by explaining the concept of the rider and the elephant and what that means when it comes to creating learning that actually works?

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, the rider and the elephant is a metaphor that comes from a book by Jonathan Haidt called The Happiness Hypothesis. And he talks about how there are sort of two systems that engage when [00:03:00] we’re making decisions. So there’s this kind of logical, rational rider who is sort of our Mr. Spock brain who projects out into the future and considers consequences and makes quote-unquote rational decisions.

And then we’ve got a lot of our brain that’s really concerned with things like the physical world and visceral things and emotional things, and how do you sense and perceive and vision and hearing and movement, and that part of your brain is the part of your brain that feels things. And so it has a lot of like automatic things like habits or things you do without really thinking about it, and it has a lot of emotional reactions and things like that. And so that both of these entities tend to be part of decision-making. And one of the big decisions that we all have to make all day long is where am I gonna allocate my attention?

What’s gonna be worth paying attention to? The truth is both kind of parts of the brain get involved in that decision-making. [00:04:00] One of the things we look at when we’re looking at the creation of learning materials, especially workplace learning materials, is we tend to talk to the rider. We tend to make the rational argument, we tend to state the facts, we tend to give the SOP guidelines, any of those kinds of things.

And you know, if they show up in nice bullet points on a slide or in an e-learning course. Well, that’s great, but kind of is what it’s saying to the elephant is this is boring and you wanna get away from it as soon as you can. And so when we create that dilemma when we’re talking just to the rider and not kind of engaging the elephant at all, that’s where we have this sort of chronic issue, which I think we do, of getting people to pay attention to learning materials that have been created for them and their jobs.

Host: So my understanding is that it’s about designing learning that is for knowledge, appealing to the rider, but not ignoring the elephant. Making sure that we are setting up learning that is going to actually impact behavior through the emotional connection. [00:05:00] Have I kind of caught it, and could you maybe walk me through what that might look like when applied to a traditional workplace learning experience?

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. You know, one of the things that, that I see a lot, like one of my favorite kind of strategies for that sort of talking to the elephant is the technical term for it, if you want the academic term, is salience of consequences. And what that means is we’re bad at worrying over much about sort of future things.

It’s much easier to be concerned with the here and now. So what are, what’s gonna make me happy now? Or what’s interesting now, or what seems, you know, comfortable now, or any of those kinds of things. And as soon as we’re sort of projecting out into the future, it gets a little weaker. A personal example is, I know that if I don’t wear sunscreen most days, there’s gonna be some bad consequences down the road.

But the truth is, if I don’t put on any sunscreen, nothing bad happens today, for the most part. And so those tend to be situations where we struggle with this. And so when we do this in workplace learning, we’re like, oh, we can say that this topic is really important for team [00:06:00] cohesion, or it’s really important for hitting organizational goals, or it’s really important for safety or for compliance, or any of those kinds of things.

And those may be big, important reasons. But the truth is they’re just not very compelling with people’s elephants. And so one of the questions we wanna think about when we’re creating learning materials is how do I make this feel real to somebody? So, for example, in a compliance environment, it might be seeing what happens when this all blows up, and the bad things that could happen within the organization.

For safety stuff, it might be really making it feel real to people what the issues are. There was a great example. This wasn’t an e-learning example, this was a live classroom example, but somebody was telling me a story about people would clear safety or hazards on the assembly line without turning off the machine because it would take 10 minutes to cycle it around and turn the machine back on, and so it was easier to just go and grab the thing and pull it out.

Well, the problem with that is you could get your arm caught. And so they [00:07:00] wanted to make the consequences feel really real to the people so that they were playing the odds of it’ll probably be okay, but if it’s not, it’s really bad. And so what they did is they had them put a plastic bag over their dominant hand, whether they’re right-handed or left-handed, and seal it up.

And then they had them do common household tasks so they could see what the experience of trying to like button a shirt or make breakfast would be if you only had one arm. And it was like, that’s an example of: This is a really bad consequence. Nobody wants to lose a limb, but people were feeling like, well, it’s not that likely.

It probably won’t happen. But if we wanna make the consequences really feel salient and real to people, then what kinds of experiences can we give people where it’s like, okay, this doesn’t feel abstract or conceptual anymore. This is real, and this would be very, very bad. 

Host: Yeah, absolutely. Making it feel real, I think. Especially in the instance of that, you know, more mandatory obligatory training that can often get done in a more mechanical [00:08:00] way, I think this can be hugely impactful. What kind of difference have you seen this dual approach make, whether it was for learner engagement or a real measurable outcome?

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, you know, this is where a lot of the simulation stuff is really nice, so you can actually see the consequence of a particular decision, what the outcomes are, and that we can have kind of a bigger impact ultimately on behavior. Well, I’ll tell you about my favorite research study, just ‘cause I love it so much.

It was done out of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory, and they were looking at people’s behavior around using excess disposable paper. And so they had half of the group go and read about trees being cut down that would be impacted by their environmental choices. And they had half of the group go into a virtual reality environment and cut down virtual trees with a virtual chainsaw.

And they came out and they said, will you use less paper? And both groups were like, yeah, yeah, we’ll use less paper. But that’s the, that’s your rider that projects out into the future and considers [00:09:00] your future behaviors. And what they would do is they would accidentally quote unquote spill a glass of water while people were still in the room, and then count how many pieces of paper towel they used to mop up the spill.

And the people who had been in the visceral condition, where they were really experiencing the trees being cut down to support their paper habi,t used almost 20% less paper than the people who had been in just the kind of cognitive, let’s consider the consequences. And we know with compliance things that this comes up all the time.

One of the issues is how do I make, you know, these financial regulations feel real to people. We could put you in the position of being the auditor, for example, in a training program. And so now you are the one looking for the errors or looking for the issues, or you know, things like that. And so now I’m making it feel real, like there’s an actual thing that you’re supposed to be doing with this as opposed to just learning about it conceptually.

And so what that does is that you can see the consequences. If you miss something, you can find out what would [00:10:00] happen. And then also it makes it feel real because there’s an immediate application for the thing that I’m learning. 

Host: Yeah, that’s right. And I think, uh, you’ve raised a, I guess a point that I was just had in my mind as well, which is it’s all well and good to create the content, to teach it, to make it feel real.

But of course, even great learning can fall flat. If it’s not then applied soon after. Right. So we are seeing multiple studies come out that show a large chunk of learning never gets used. It’s often referred to as scrap learning. 

Julie Dirksen: Oh, interesting. I like that term. 

Host: And Gartner puts it at around 45%. Some estimates are even as high as 85%.

Why do you think this is, is this a problem with the content itself or is it more about how or if people are applying what they’ve learned? 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, I mean the really fundamental, when we look at motivation research, when we look at, you know, adult learning theory, when we look at any of these things, we know that relevance is gonna be the biggest predictor of whether or not people are [00:11:00] engaged and whether it’s useful and whether it gets applied.

If this is really relevant to me, I’m here for it. We don’t need to motivate people to use YouTube videos to fix their faucet or to figure out how to fill out a tax form or something like that because these people come to the table with a problem that they’re trying to solve. I sometimes talk about the fact that you don’t really need, like you know, dancing cats and unicorns to make your material engaging. There just has to be a reason to use it. Like it has to be relevant, it has to feel purposeful. And in the absence of people bringing their own purpose to the table, we have to figure out how do we construct it in a way that it can make sense to you that you’re, you actually are like, oh, I still see the point of paying attention to this.

And the nice thing is we’re willing to like take on these challenges that are pretty heavily fictionalized and compliance has its own specific issues because sometimes the goal isn’t for somebody to learn something. The goal is for this to be part of the legal defense. If you get sued, you can prove that [00:12:00] everybody, everybody’s training got marked off in the LMS and that, you know, you’re at a hundred percent for the compliance on that kind of stuff.

But usually there’s some purpose behind compliance, even compliance training, where there’s something that you’re supposed to be doing with this, or it’s somehow important, or it exists for some reason. And so, how do you make that feel real and salient to people? And how do you make it feel like purposeful, like there’s a thing that you need to do?

Because in the absence of that, of course people are gonna just pound the next button as quickly as possible. And the material, you know, it’s not gonna stick with people, it’s not gonna resonate. You know, any of those kinds of things. 

Host: So what I’m really getting there is with training on those more mandatory, I don’t like using the word obligatory, but it is one of the, the key words here.

We need to find ways to make it feel real. We need to make the risk feel real and potentially immediate, and we need to find ways with whether it’s, you know, within the training itself to find ways to help them apply their [00:13:00] learnings quite soon after the fact. So let’s talk a little bit more about the elephant.

So one thing you have mentioned about the emotional side of the brain is that it doesn’t respond well to abstract ideas or intangible impact. Right? And that really got me thinking about the kinds of skills that we are now being asked more and more to develop in the workplace. So things like adaptability, growth mindset, critical thinking. The more human, harder to define skills. Now, I know you’re a proponent for scenario-based learning in the case of teaching soft skills. Tell us a little bit more about how and why this works. 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. Those kinds of things are interesting because there’s a couple of variables that really govern, I think, whether or not they ultimately make a difference.

One is, do I see the relevance of it? Telling people, here’s a bullet list of ways that you create better functioning teams, as long as it’s the abstract, [00:14:00] it’s like, okay, well that sounds good. You know? You ensure that trust. Everybody feels like. You know, trust and rapport or you, you know, you ensure that everybody feels heard in certain circumstances.

You know, what does that actually look like when you know it’s a real behavior? So what is ensuring everybody feels heard? That could be checking in with the quieter people at a meeting and saying, is there anything, you know, do you have feelings about this? Is there anything you wanna add? What’s your take on this?

Once we take it from being an abstract – you know, this is important. We want everybody to feel heard – to a concrete behavior where it’s like, okay, you’re gonna check in with different people. When they were doing a lot of looking at effective manager behaviors, that they did a lot of this in the People and Analytics group at Google where they would actually try to record and identify places where these things were happening.

I know that I do this sometimes in workshops where I start kind of paying more [00:15:00] attention and being more responsive to the people who are kind of giving me the most back. You know, like the ones who are giving me the strongest reaction or speaking up. And that ultimately, though, that being a good facilitator means that I should also be like engaging some of the people who are a little less active in the room and being deliberate about that.

But when we get into these things where we sort of, you know, soft skills or people skills or whatever, a lot of this stuff gets hard to see, or you need to get a lot of exposure to it to really see what happens. Or you need to figure out how do I get some feedback on things that I’m doing in a way that’s meaningful?

‘cause there’s no single right answer, right.

Host: Okay, so let me come up with a real-life example, a workplace example. So I need to deliver a course on how to give constructive feedback. I could obviously put together a one-directional course with all of the key information about why and how. And what the outcomes, the positive outcomes would be of all that. How can I improve it?

How can [00:16:00] I add to it so that I know that the way it’s being delivered and the content within it is actually going to get to that behavior shift that we are looking for? 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, so there are a few different things there, though, that are interesting. One of the questions is, why is feedback not happening right now?

There’s a number of reasons why it could be. It could be that the person genuinely doesn’t know good formats for giving feedback or what good feedback looks like, and then an educational experience is a really good solution that like, I’m gonna show you lots of examples and we’ll talk about what the characteristics of good feedback are and all of that kind of thing.

But more likely, or at least as likely, is that the reasons why people might not give feedback isn’t that they don’t know how to give good feedback. Could be. But it could also be that they’re just not comfortable doing it. Right? So it could be that giving positive feedback feels like awkward and fake when they’re doing it to get started with, or giving negative feedback is obviously very fraught, right?

We don’t wanna give feedback in a way that’s gonna get blowback or create [00:17:00] conflict, especially for a conflict avoidant person. You know, all of these kinds of issues. And then there’s just the habit of remembering to do it. I have had managers in my early career where if you actually pin them down, they’d be like, oh yeah, you’re doing great.

Here’s, you know, these are the nice things, and they could be specific and they could tell you stuff, but it just honestly wouldn’t occur to stop and do it because you know, we’re all busy, everything’s going on. And so when we look at those kinds of things, we look at the question of how do we build the muscle basically of feedback?

Because the question I use to identify if something’s a skill is – do people need to practice to be proficient? Do people need practice to be good at it, basically? And if the answer is yes, people need to practice to be good at it, well then we should be designing practice into our learning experiences, and we wanna ask the question of how we’re getting, uh, practice. 

Uh, I was just talking to, I saw an example at a, an event just last week where McKinsey, which is one of the big consulting companies, has been doing this program [00:18:00] where they’re having just people practice receiving feedback, and they do something every single week over several weeks. Because that’s a fraught thing, right?

Like, how do I hear this in a way that isn’t defensive and that I can turn it into a productive behavior? So the flip side of, you know, the giving feedback, and they’re really thinking about it in terms of what’s the rubric that says this is a poor response, a good response, a great response. And they’ve got it scored and they’re collecting data on it and doing all of these kinds of things.

And so when we’re saying that, the question is like, how many times should somebody practice giving feedback before A, they get good at it? Right, like you can do it competently. B, it starts to feel comfortable for them, especially that negative feedback piece and C, that it starts to become an automatic thing.

You know, we’ve identified what the triggers are when we wanna stop and give feedback, and we start to have the automatic reaction of, oh, I should give feedback now, or the nearly automatic reaction. Additionally, one of [00:19:00] the things that I think is a little bit of a weakness of a lot of these programs is that they tend to be like, you should just do this from now on for giving feedback.

And the truth is, that’s pretty daunting. I’m gonna change the way that I do everything as a manager going forward. And so what I think is often a better strategy is let’s find two, one, or two or three examples. Let’s make them easy examples. Something where you should give some feedback, but something where it’s maybe not gonna be like, turn into a major disruptive thing, and let’s practice a couple, and then let’s talk about how it went.

What could you adjust going forward? And then let’s practice some more. 

Host: Absolutely, and I quite like something that you raised there, which is the idea of potentially breaking the training on a specific topic or skill, perhaps into a two part series, teaching the why, breaking down some of maybe the baby steps, if you will, to ease into that behavior.

Check in again. And then take it to the next level. I think this can also really [00:20:00] help to guide the behavior in a really much more feasible and approachable way. So you mentioned, er, social learning, and I do wanna talk a little bit about, I suppose some of the specific workplace behaviors that relate to learning in a wider context, and one of them is knowledge hoarding, which kind of goes against the idea of social learning, right? And peer-to-peer learning and knowledge hoarding is often seen as a major blocker to learning at work. And of course, we know the benefits to a more open and collaborative culture, right?

Things like faster onboarding, reduced risk, increased efficiency. So, for leaders who want to drive change in organizations where knowledge sharing hasn’t traditionally been the norm. What’s your advice? How can they start fostering that culture of openness and collaboration and peer-to-peer learning? 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, and some of it is the question of what’s the blocking thing?

Blocking it right now? ‘cause sometimes it’s opportunity. I worked on a, oh, a manager [00:21:00] training for sales managers for a pharmaceutical company in the late nineties. And we rolled it out in I think seven or eight countries. And what we found was that like people liked the scenarios, and that was fine, and they thought they were, you know, they were, they were fine.

But what people really liked is these sales managers would travel around and shadow reps, and so they would only get together with their peers like once a quarter, maybe. They’d have a two or three-day sales meeting, like quarterly. And so they were just so happy to be, have a place to communicate with each other and see what everybody else is doing.

And so that was really solved, you know, a lot just by creating, you know, the place and the opportunity for it. You know, sometimes people are starved for that connection a little bit, and then they’re happy to have any place to do it. But then there’s other scenarios where you really need to seed the community and make sure that you’ve got some good early energy that kind of grows it.

Because anything social or community-based is really more of a garden and less of a machine. Just turn it on, and it runs. You have to tend it [00:22:00] and bring it along. But social learning is great when it works because it’s a very responsive to context. You know, if I have to go and update my e-learning materials, because some new guideline came out, the time that it takes to do it and run it through legal and to deal with all of that kind of stuff is a lot slower than, oh, hey, we’ve seen that example a couple times, let us tell you what we did. 

Is that much more immediate. Sort of responsive and people can ask a specific question and you know, arguably AI is going to sit in this space a little bit, but there seems to still be something really powerful about connecting with your peers and that social modeling piece and, you know, some of those kinds of things.

‘cause that’s really powerful too, is just, am I doing it like other people are doing it, or am I doing something differently? Or, you know, am I in range of, of you know, how this is being handled, or is there something I should really change about my practice? 

Host: And Julie, you’ve spent a lot of time exploring how people learn and how people change.

[00:23:00] In your experience, what are some of the biggest blockers, the most common blockers to real behavioral change in the workplace? And once we identify those most common ones, do we have any kind of remedies, ways that we can remove those barriers in a meaningful way? 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, and I mean, one of the biggest ones is just to sort of ask the question, is it cheaper and easier to try to change the people?

Or is it cheaper and easier to try to change something about the environment or the system, you know, in terms of the systems around these people? And what are the incentives? Incentives are a huge one. I was talking to a it was a multinational insurance company, and they were talking about the complexity of entering an application for a multinational policy because it’s got all the legal issues of all the countries that it’s gonna be operating in.

And they said, you know, the people who are doing data entry, they just don’t care that much about accuracy. Can we put something in the training about how important accuracy is? And they said, sure, we can do that. Can you tell me, like, how are they paid? And they said, oh, the number of [00:24:00] applications they do per hour.

And it’s like, all right, you see the problem here, guys? You know? And do they get any feedback on their accuracy? Do they like get an accuracy report, or does that show up anywhere? And they’re like, nah, I don’t think 

they really do. And I’m like, okay. 

Host: So goals themselves can be one of the biggest blockers to behaviors, right?

Julie Dirksen: Yeah I mean, you know, you can say accuracy is important, but if the incentive in the compensation system and the feedback system, and in fact the technology itself doesn’t support the idea that that accuracy is important, we can only do so much from, you know, using the training lever. The other things have to come along.

In the book, I talk about the Com-B, um, which is part of the Behavior Change Wheel, which is out of University College London Center for Behavior Change. And it just sort of fundamentally asks, do they have the capability of doing this? Which could be a knowledge problem, which could be a skills development problem?

Maybe I need to give you information, or maybe I need to support practice. But then we look at opportunity, [00:25:00] which is that physical opportunity. Does the system support it, does the environment support it? Um, we look at social opportunity. What’s the culture? What are the guidelines in the organization?

What’s an okay thing, you know, in terms of what your peers perceive, some of these behaviors? And then we look at motivation, you know, so what’s the, what are your goals? What do you see as part of your values or identity? What are you incentivized for? What do you get feedback on? You know? All of these start to become questions that are gonna have as much or a bigger influence on whether the behavior actually happens.

And the training material can definitely help with capability, and I think it can also help with opportunity. And if we kind of come at it with a performance mindset, we can also look at things like environment. What information do I need to put where in the environment to best support this behavior? 

Host: No, I think that’s a great point.

And I think it goes back to the growing trend of, you know, learning and development becoming decentralized and [00:26:00] parcel of almost every function within an organization. And I think that really speaks to that. 

Now, a big part of instructional design is obviously understanding how people learn, but just as important, I suppose, is understanding how they work, work habits, routines, preferred tools, even emotional states. Why does that perspective matter, especially in a hybrid world? We’ve got diverse and increasingly global workforces. Walk us through that concept, a little bit of the importance of understanding how people work when it comes to impacting behavioral change. 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, one of the things, there’s a, one of the things that’s becoming more of an issue with a lot of the virtual classroom or moving everything to digital and things like that, is it, it’s got a lot of really nice benefits. Like people can do it anytime and they can pick it up and put it down and they don’t have to leave their office and all of those [00:27:00] things can also be the, you know, those can all be the pros, but they can also be the cons, right? People don’t have to stay engaged in this, and they can put it down at any time. And then they have switching costs when they try to pick it back up and have to remember what they were doing.

People don’t leave their work environment, so their email’s still pinging and their phone’s still there and they’re, all of the work stuff that they’re supposed to do is still sitting on the desktop of their computer, piles paper around them and things like that. So like the benefits of it are also working against it in some ways.

And we used to take people out to a classroom, and they created a little bit of a, an intention bubble around them where they kind of had to focus on the thing that they were learning. So one of the other pieces though, when we look at the kind of how they work and what their work environments are and things like that, is that it’s very easy to build a lot of learning material without ever going and seeing what environment are these people in when they’re working. And especially working from home is kind of encouraged that because we all sort of assume we know what that environment looks like. But, you know, my [00:28:00] favorite form of user research, which uh, you know, I’m a big fan of, is to go just follow somebody around for the day.

Now obviously, if they’re working from home, that’s a little bit of a challenge. I’m not gonna go, you know, hang out in there and they’re, you know, in their den with them necessarily, but we could do just being like, you know, a Zoom character at the, in the court of their screen and they occasionally let me know what’s going on.

We often, as instructional designers get handed a pile of information and a lot of it’s a little bit abstract and a lot of it is a little bit conceptual and, you know, we sort of organize it as best we can and it helps if it’s beginner level material because we can bring our own beginner mindset to it.

But if you don’t really have a sense of what their world looks like and how everything functions. The likelihood that you’re gonna be able to build effective learning experiences really goes down quite a lot. And we know that if we make the learning more context relevant, that promotes the more contextual cues when you’re learning it, the more those contextual cues will help you recall [00:29:00] it again. 

This is basic, you know, memory and coding, and retrieval. The more that these contextual cues are present, the more likely it is that people will be able to remember the material over time. 

Host: And so is there kind of a, an ideal scenario if someone’s gonna sit down, take some training, let’s say it’s a 30-minute module. What’s the ideal scenario?

Where should they be? Uh, what should their surroundings be? What time of the day should it be, Julie? 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. 

No, these are all good questions. Protecting people’s time for learning is a really hard problem right now. And there’s an organizational issue with that, and companies that I think had very healthy balance sheets and knew how to do this a little bit better.

So I, you know, it’s probably a decade ago, but I was on a world tour of Google offices for a while doing instructional design courses, and Google had their whole, you know, it was either 10 or 20% time where you could kind of learn and everything. And they have a very robust culture around, it’s called G2G or Googlers Teach Googlers.

[00:30:00] And so anybody who wants to teach something can get support from this internal organization to create these learning experiences. And when people showed up, they were really present. They were really, you know, because they knew that they kind of had that buffer time to do it and things like that. So, really trying to figure out how do you create that protected time?

How do you create a little bit of that filter bubble? And I don’t know that I have great answers to it. I have tried, I’m gonna book that out as a learning day and get caught up on my to-be-read. The truth is, personally for me, the only thing that works is like I commit to something. It might be a blog post, or it might be an article, or it might be a talk or something, and then I kind of have to get caught up on some of these things, and then it works much easier because I’ve got a compelling reason and a deadline.

But how do we create those spaces? It’s tough. It has to do with norms within the organization. It has to do with the idea that you can genuinely like, protect that time. Um, it has to do with the fact that there’s some feeling of [00:31:00] genuine urgency or importance around the material. Like, this will actually be useful, or I can actually do something with it.

Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s a hard problem. 

Host: It is. And I think the, as much as asynchronous learning and the ability to do so can be a blessing and can really fit around people’s programs and allow flexibility. It also does put, you know, the onus back on the individual to make sure that they do carve out that time.

And there was a Deloitte research actually that revealed on average, employees can devote 1% of their work week to professional development. So in a standard 40-hour work week, that’s less than five minutes per day. And 94% of workers say that they see the benefit of making time for learning, of course, but less than half actually make time to do so.

So it is this ongoing challenge of, okay, it’s on me, it’s asynchronous. I can do it when it works for me. But guess what? Now I need to find the time that works for [00:32:00] me and carve that out and, and really commit to it. Right? 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah, absolutely. 

Host: Now, it wouldn’t be an L&D discussion if we didn’t mention the other elephant in the room, AI. Now, of course, AI is already showing immense value, right? In helping us create course content, process learning data, develop learning paths. You’ve also mentioned some other benefits as well. How do you see AI really transforming the role of the instructional designer? Where do you think AI is going to play the single biggest role for an instructional designer or a learning and development professional?

Julie Dirksen: Um, the AI as performance support is a really interesting problem to me because the most successful instances of AI usage right now are people who already know how to do their jobs, doing it faster, uh, or, you know, being more productive. But the AI that, you know, the form of the large language models, which are essentially predictive engines, [00:33:00] you know, which are sort of guessing at what the, uh, you know, assembly of words are that are gonna make the most sense here. The challenge with those is the hallucination piece, which I don’t. I think it’s getting better, but I don’t know that it’ll go away. And then even just if it’s distilling out the best versions of something that I can find in a large language model, is that still good enough or is that, is that the right answer?

Being able to judge the outputs of the AI means that the human doing it needs to know what good looks like. I have a cheese analogy, which is a little weird, but I’ll, I’ll trot it out anyway. If you look at all the cheese that’s in, and I don’t know if this is true, uh, where you are, but in the US if you go and you wanna buy cheese, there’s cheese in like two or three different places in the grocery store.

And so in one part of the grocery store is like the fancy cheese, right? Like the really nice, it’s artisanal. It’s people who like know all their goats by name, and they all cost a quarter of my mortgage payment or something like that. This is really nice cheese. [00:34:00] And that’s over usually in like the deli area or something like that.

And then you have more of just the regular refrigerated area, and you can get a big bag of shredded mozzarella that I can use for lasagna or whatever. And the AI seems to be doing a decent job of producing that. The big bag of shredded mozzarella. I, I know the cheese analogy is weird, but I, it’s, I need to, 

Host: It’s speaking to me. 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. And sometimes that’s all you need, right? I don’t need this to be brilliant. I don’t need this to be new or novel or even all that clever. I just need it to be solid and competent and reasonable. And that cheese, the, the content version of that cheese, which is the big bag of, it’s not terrible, it’s not like fake cheese or something.

It’s, but it’s, you know, it’s not fancy. It’s, it’s not exciting. And then it’s unreasonable to ask an AI to go over and produce the really beautiful artisanal cheese [00:35:00] because AI, by definition, is aggregating a huge amount of data and kind of coming up with the little bit of the mean across of it. And you can, you can nudge it into the higher echelons by prompting.

You can say, no, no, I really want small batch cheeses for my, you know, my fancy content. But it’s not gonna come up with things that are, you know, somebody might be able to use it to come up with something that’s genuinely novel, but they’re still bringing their own creative kind of process to the table, and I’m still a little skeptical on that space.

Host: Absolutely.

Julie Dirksen: So you know, will it produce a nice big bag of shredded mozzarella? Yeah, probably. It’s probably fine.

Host: I’m gonna go home and make some pizza tonight. Thanks, Julie.

Julie Dirksen: There you go. 

Host: Julie, thank you so much for the insights you’ve shared today. Thank you for being on Talent Talks. It’s been a real pleasure.

You’ve given us such a wealth of insights, and I’m sure our audience is going to love listening to it. Thank you. Thank you for being part of this today. 

Julie Dirksen: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Host: Thanks for tuning in. [00:36:00] In the next episode, we’ll be looking at the future of onboarding. You can find Talent Talks on all podcast platforms. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode.

This episode of Talent Talks was brought to you by TalentLMS, the easy-to-use training platform that delivers real business results from day one. Learn more at talentlms.com.

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