Transcript

Nigel Paine:
It’s not a product. It’s not a thing that you do from time to time. It’s a process. It’s a way of thinking about the world, about being curious, about turning anything into learning.

Sylvie Milverton:
Hi, I’m Sylvie Milverton, CEO of Lynx Educate. This is Talent is Everywhere. We’re here to talk about how to keep talent and how to develop talent in order to build a strong business. We’ll interview leaders to hear their best experiences of how they invested in people. So today we have a special episode of the podcast we’re going to be talking with two people coming out of an event that we had last week called Shape the Future Consortium, with a lot of learning leaders from around the world.

So we have Nigel Paine, who is the co-founder of the consortium, along with Chemo Kippen. And he’s had a long career in learning, organizational development. He’s an author, broadcaster, podcaster and also Martin Couzins, who works together with Nigel. He’s the founder of the From Scratch podcast around many of these HR and learning issues. And he’s the CEO and principal of Insights Media. Welcome to both.

Nigel Paine:
Thank you. Thank you Sylvie, It’s lovely to see you.

Martin Couzins:
Great to be here.

Sylvie Milverton:
Yeah. And it was great. You know, we all, you know, in these sort of same circles and we all know a lot of the same people. So it was just such a pleasure, last week at the end of January to all be together at Insead and have the chance, you know, to bring a small group of learning leaders together and talk about, you know, what’s on our mind.

And there were lots of interesting themes that came together. And as we were prepping for this, thinking about, you know, what is sort of like the arc of the conversation to pull it all together. And this theme that came back a lot was, you know, learning is the answer to everything, or is learning the answer to everything? like, how are organizations moving themselves forward? So maybe Martin, I’ll let you kind of get us started with how would you frame, you know, frame the discussion that came out of our meeting?

Martin Couzins:
I think, before we came on air, we were talking about the fact, thanks, Sylvie for asking me to step up to the mic first. And before we came on air, I talked about the fact that there was that, forums full of great people, really senior people for big organizations all around the world. And we covered a lot of content. You know, we heard from a new generation of leaders starting in the workplace. We heard about the economic challenges facing, all organizations and climate challenges.

We looked at skills, and we looked at learning and leadership. And, you know, I was thinking, if what could we talk right in 20 minutes, how do you? There’s always that, that kind of idea of how you can distill that into something that’s makes a lot of sense in a short space of time. And for me, as an observer, I just thought. What came through strongly was that learning is, is seen as, as we saw, as you said in the intro, the kind of the answer to some of these intractable problems that we have, these are really big, knotty, strategic, issues that affect the planet and organizations and communities and individuals.

And what I thought was a strong sense of that. But actually learning is the key that can help us and kind of learn our way out of these problems, you know, to innovate things differently, to be adaptable and resilient. And then I thought, so this is how I would frame it. I was thinking, well, if we know this and I think we potentially have known this for a long time, why is it not of, these kind of strategic importance that it should be in organizations?

Now, you may turn around and say, that’s not true, but I don’t know that is the case. And so that, for me, seems like a really important part of all of this debate is. The elephant in the room is that people running businesses, I don’t think are taking this seriously enough, but actually it is about learning.

It is about helping people and teams and organizations change the way they behave and how they face into these massive challenges that are on our doorstep right now. So I think that’s, that seemed to me like a really powerful outcome for me, just observing it. And I think it was reflected in some of the actions that the delegates took away. I think that was, there was one of them was about, I was just going to list it learning as the new currency as a kind of idea. Currency for change, I think so, yeah. So that, that kind of, that’s how I kind of frame it all.

Sylvie Milverton:
Right, and what about you, Nigel? How would you, and you’ve been in, sort of have organized and been in many events like this. Maybe, yeah, what did you feel was, you know, different, coming out of this discussion, you know, in this, like, beginning 2025?

Nigel Paine:
When we started pulling it together, the big issue for us was to try and get the participants eyes raised above the horizon.So many of the people that were there, just working long hours, just doing stuff to survive. And it’s all very much kind of tactical routine, pretty much stuff with little room for vision and little room to pause and think big. And this was an attempt to pause and think big. And that’s where the kind of magic solution arose.

But if leaders thought of themselves as learning leaders, then you would change the nature of organizations because their job will be to encourage learning broadly across the organization and pick up and deal with the solutions that emerge. The problem is, that if is learning the answer only if it changes things only if the behavior that is changed impacts the organization and not just the individual.

And what we found was that these massive bureaucratic cultural barriers to making learning the answer, and it’s kind of pushed aside. It’s something interesting, useful in terms of skills development, but that creative thinking about the world and thinking about your organization and its place in the world gets pushed away by the day to day.

So that, that was the essence. Is learning the answer? Well, possibly, but not necessarily. If you’ve got an organization that doesn’t allow the answers to emerge, it just becomes a kind of interesting process. So that was my take.

Sylvie Milverton:
Right. And I think, you know, what was interesting was the way you brought together, like a lot of different perspectives. Like we started out with some young students from Insead, and then we had, you know, so we’re really like they’re about to enter into the world of work.

And then we invited, you know, a professors thinking about big ideas on sustainability and climate change? And, you know, what is the? You know, how can learning, you know, what is our role of learning leaders in terms of like, you know, tackling these really big, scary topics, you know, around climate change and sustainability, you know, and then we had, the professor talking about the maison on this idea of how do you, how do organizations create this idea of a home?

And if I can, I’ll let you, Nigel, add to this, but to sum up this idea of an organization being a home where on the one hand, you have a safety and a stability, but that, you know, and also that you’re always developing, like, what do we think about when we think about being home? It’s that you’re safe to develop and it’s this constant, maybe tension between needing freedom and wanting to explore and run and wanting the comfort and the sort of, context and safety, I suppose, safety to really develop ourselves.

And that was a pretty powerful message against. Back to your idea of like, how do organizations actually make learning work? What do you think?

Nigel Paine:
Yes, the main, the concept of maison is, is very much a French concept. The idea that something is not a store or an office or a place. It’s actually somewhere where you belong and has coherent values and structures, and you go in the door metaphorically and literally, and you absorb some of that when you do your work, when you behave in particular ways.

And I think that idea that as a leader, you’re not just driving forward on profits, you’re actually creating a place that people want to come. You’re creating a kind of destination, a place where people can think, can reflect, and can solve problems. And those problems, big problems, can be, be tackled. So I thought that was very interesting, that idea that it’s really important to be comfortable and safe in order for ideas to flow.

And in some ways, in order for the behavior change of learning to have some sort of impact in the organization as a whole. And how many leaders would A, see themselves as encouraging the learning of others and B, see the place that they work in as some kind of maison with almost on everything we possibly can to make it the opposite of a maison, more like a prison, or more like a, just a neutral cold antiseptic space where you feel you’re part of for a little bit.

But you’re obviously going to move on soon. So there’s not much point in investing much into that location. So yes, that element of emotional bonding of, feeling great as well as being great. What was very much prevalent. And it came into big issues like sustainability. You know, when you talking about sustainability, it’s not just let’s look at the process that I control and try and make it a little bit more sustainable.

It’s actually looking at the impact of the whole organization in the world and the impact of the organization. It’s community. So it’s looking much, much bigger and trying to tackle big issues and make people feel that their contribution matters in that area. And when we talk to the young people, that’s one of the things, it’s not just that would be kind of interesting ,perhaps it was.

This is fundamental to the way we see the world. We want to make a big contribution. We want to have some kind of care and attention paid to us and to everyone else in the organization, and we want to feel safe in order to be creative. But their view of whether they would get that was much more ambiguous.

That’s what they want. But whether they get it delivered on, on from their limited experience, the answer is probably well on balance, probably not. So, you know, we’re on a kind of journey, and this session was just the opening of the door at the beginning of the journey. We haven’t even stepped out yet, I thought.

Sylvie Milverton:
And do you think that things, I mean, you know, every company, if you look on their careers page, or if you listen to, you know, CEOs every most not every, let’s say most companies are saying that people are at the center of what we do and we encourage development.

We encourage learning, and so a lot of these ideas, you know, maybe are old in a sense. But do we see, like, has, what has changed? Like, what do you see change? like, do you think that in terms of AI or in terms of sustainability or all these different ideas, like, do you feel like we’re at some kind of shift in the way companies are responding or meaning something different behind those words of people are at the center of what we do?

Martin Couzins:
Yeah. because I thought it was an interesting, and I’m going to say his name wrong, it slightly concerns me, Gian Pieroa and Petri Guerrieri. Right. He’s an Insead professor. Sorry for my pronunciation there. And so there was one point which I think relates to this, which is the idea of talent as a proxy for mobility in organizations.

And he was talking about the fact that the, you know, he comes from this place where people used to, want workers to stay with the organization for a long time. Now, that was kind of how things worked, basically. Not more paternalistic, potentially not all organizations. But I think that’s where people used to have longer tenure in organizations.

And he was talking about the idea of talent now. And you’re talking about psychological, functional, and geographic mobility. And I think we have to be careful what we wish for, because we’re doing this with skills, with breaking everything down to a granular like atomic levels you got individuals and individual skills and you’re going to push people around the organization based on that.

And we say this is a good thing but if we then say we’ve got intractable issues about that are linked to community and, and the planet, then actuall, if you got organizations good, it can be really hardy for organizations to have purpose and meaning if people are coming and going all the time, and if the leadership is coming and going all the time, and if the leadership doesn’t behave itself and comes and goes because of those behaviors, right.

And then you’ve got this whirlwind of talent just moving around, coming and going, going to the next place. None of that is necessarily anchoring people in something linked to community, let alone the planet. I mean, that’s my perspective on it. So I think we’ve got this tension here where, you know, things are changing. AI is definitely helping disintermediate community in businesses.

I think it’s going very personalized something that Nigel talks about. So it’s all all very atomic. And we can use AI to to come in at that level and take and automate things but what how do we then reach that? With the idea of purpose, meaning community and bigger issues like the climate. You know, I, that’s, I don’t, I think there are, so there are big shifts, but I don’t know that some of the shifts in technology are helping us answer the issues.Some of the bigger issues that I think they can do, I don’t know, what do you think, Nigel?

Nigel Paine:
I think they can do too much. And I actually think it’s not such a, an insoluble problem. If you want to solve it, you can. For example, if people had mentors or advisors or whatever they might be who stayed with them in their career, in an organization, you can move around no problem at all because you’ve got an anchor back.

And if you build a community of people who work in different parts of the organization. But, I’ve got similar issues or challenges or, or asking similar questions to you, that community is portable, and there’s nothing better than being in an organization where you belong everywhere. And it’s much better than being in a place where you don’t want to leave this small group because they’re the only ones you’ve ever met you like, and that you want to stay there because without that group around you, chaos will ensue.

So I think it’s just thinking bigger about how you manage people in a much more fluid, brittle world where you need to have to keep moving in order to stay on top and stay in touch, because there’s nothing worse than being in a nice, stable group, which gradually makes itself redundant because it’s not moving and developing. So that if you focus on how you create comfort and support and stability in people who are in stable, unstable, you know, moving around, tackling different things, moving from here and there, but they’ve got that, that, that umbilical cord that links them back to something solid, which is all around purpose and values.

And that you’ve got somebody, you know, I go back to Sylvie because Sylvie tells me and reinforces for me the importance of those connections. So whatever, wherever I go, I know that Sylvie’s just a, you know, an email or phone call or even a visit away. So I think it can be done. But it’s a radical restructuring of what an organization looks like.

Now at the moment, they’re in these hierarchical bubbles where you dare move outside the hierarchy. You can’t talk to people above because they’re, you haven’t got permission. You don’t talk to people below because who cares about them anyway? And you end up with this isolation and fragmentation and no one tries to build the lateral, the lateral connections. So that’s why I’m kind of slightly obsessed with two inches of practice at the moment, because they’re the one thing that definitely works in connecting people laterally across an organization.

So an organization knows a little bit more what it knows and feels much more like a series of connected islands, which have got very strong transport links between them. Not islands where where you repel all borders. So it’s doable. But it takes a mindset change and it takes a leadership reimagination really to deliver. But maybe naively, I just think it’s essential.

I just think this stuff is going to come because without it, organizations are just going to crash and burn because they’re just going to isolate themselves from, from reality. And we know that the world changes too fast to isolate any aspect or any part of an organization from the real world and from the real conditions in which it operates.

Sylvie Milverton:
And that makes me think also just a lot about learning. And, Martin, what you’re saying go forward is that these skill make matrices and that sort of it’s so easy to be a bit reductive, but if you think like, okay, people want to grow, organizations need to be connected. I love this idea of community of practice, like open learning up like let people choose things and think like more broadly.

Like we talked in the meeting a lot, often that came up this idea of like the the human part of AI, how to make the future of work, you know, better for people. And it was a sense of like, okay, to do my job, I need this specific skill. You know, now I’m like a, you know, new CEO of a startup.

And I’ve had to learn, you know, all types of things that I didn’t know before. But I also just need, like, just more broad skills that I’m maybe not using today. And you just think how many of us who are in the frontline or who are, you know, a junior person in HR or a junior finance person, you know, can learn a new language, you could learn project management, you could learn in negotiation skills.

Maybe you were passionate about data science, or maybe now you want to learn how to code AI. You just think like if we can think more broadly about, you know, how can learning facilitate this sort of, you know, communities and to give people, you know, more broad skills as opposed to thinking like, okay, I’m in finance, so I need to know these things.

I’m a leader, so I need to know how to have difficult conversations. And I’m, you know, in international so I have to learn Spanish. I think there’s a sense that companies can be more, I don’t know, just think more broadly or more relaxed maybe about what is learning mean to help people grow?

Nigel Paine:
Yeah, and also to make it make you think that learning is bigger. You know, it’s not a product. It’s not a thing that you do from time to time. It’s a process. It’s a way of thinking about the world, about being curious, about turning anything into learning and building learning into the flow of work. So it’s not some is separate from all the things that you do in the workplace.

So I completely get it. I agree with you entirely that it’s really important to rethink all of this in order to deliver organizations that are comfortable in the real world and will survive in the real world, because that’s what I suppose that’s the thing that really worries me, is that organizations will not survive and they’ll just crash and burn, and then it will be much worse for everybody.

If organizations just can’t make that transition that we’ve just been talking about. So it’s getting ready for the transition in a sense, getting ready for this world, which, you know, we know we’re a cusp of at the moment right at the cusp.

Martin Couzins:
I agree with you, Sylvie. I think it’s a really, interesting point because I think reality is my reality on short, lots of people’s reality is that you go if you if you’re someone that is kind of open to ideas and thinking, and you just go into work and you’re and you reflect back that you heard something that you thought was quite interesting, it’s completely unrelated to your function or, you know, your industry, but actually there’s something in it that’s just interesting,

You know, because it might inform the way you think about something. It can be so easily just pushed to one side. People just think, what are you talking about? You know, we’re here to do this thing. And I, you know, I think in my experience in organizations as being actually some of the ideas are reserved for people that are more senior.

It’s almost like that’s where the thinking happens, which I think is just unbelievably shortsighted because it is happening everywhere. To Nigel’s point, I think, well, about his your work, you know, around this is actually these ideas come from everywhere. It’s the ability to actually be able to share them and, you know, I love that the words I hear entertained to entertain an idea just to be able to have that conversation in the team or with your manager or some coach. I saw that thing over there.

It’s just that look, just imagine if we did that, could we do that? Can you have that conversation? that’s like someone kind of knocking it back saying, you know, we don’t have got time to discuss that sort of stuff. You really need that. It needs to be happening a lot, and then you need to know what to do with it. And where that goes. And that’s what I just think that is missing in a lot of organizations and all the time.

Sylvie Milverton:
Yeah. And good idea. There’s so many like, I’ve had some you know young interns and you know, younger employees and some of the best things of my startup are from the, you know, it’s just, you’re like blown away at the like creativity and intelligence of, you know, someone in their early twenties. It’s still, you know, was I that good in my early twenties? I don’t know.

Nigel Paine:
Of course you were. Of course you were, Sylvie. But you don’t have to tell them to learn. You don’t have to say, now, learning is very important. They know that because that’s what they’re doing. They’re just sucking it in, in order to be able to be more competent, and survive in this world. They get that, but it’s how you bottle that essence of that enthusiasm and and turn it into something enduring and in an organization that’s much more challenging.

But you’re absolutely right. I always find spending time with people under 30, always, you know, I try and do that every week. If I can’t, I certainly do it every month because not only are they the future of work, but they make me happy. You know that they’ve got so many ideas, they’re so enthusiastic and and they’re optimistic and they’ve got, it’s going to be a tough world for them by the time they’re 70 and they’re just about leaving the workforce, they’ll gone through an awful lot.

And the world will have gone through an awful lot. But they see it and they will take it on with enthusiasm. But for them to say, let’s debate about whether learning is important. They get that hundred percent get that, because they can see the speed of everything. The shift of the velocity of everything is so, so amazing. Now they need to learn and they recognize that.

Sylvie Milverton:
And they’re relying on their, you know, employers to, you know, fill, fill some of that, fill some of that gap. Yeah. Which is why it was just so, you know, special the two days we spent together with everyone just being together. I mean, some of my takeaways, of course, were, you know, the intellectual part of what we spoke about.

But really, the other part was just, you know, being in person and just like the human, you know, just talking and being together and sharing dinner and, you know, making, you know, new friends and being able to have these sort of spontaneous conversations. I was like, yeah, super special. And I was so glad to be a part of it.

And that you, invited me. Yeah. And so maybe to wrap up, you can tell us a little bit, Nigel, about your new book, The Great Reset, which is, I think, in line with a lot of these different things we’re speaking about.

Nigel Paine:
It is, it emerged, it emerges out of my thinking over the last ten years. And I think, if I look at my books, then they’ve got bigger, wider and wider, not necessary bigger and bigger, pretty much the same size. But what it means is that I focused in the first book very much on what you do as a learning leader in an organization. This is the process to be a learning leader.

And I end up in this book saying, hey, no, you’ve got to change the whole organization. That’s why it’s called the Great Reset, that if you really want the organization to learn, you have to rethink some pretty much fundamentals about the way the organization develops itself. So I’ve built the book around, you know, a number of values and a number of structural changes that you have to make.

And I’ve interleaved it with case studies of successful organizations and ones that are not so successful, and try to show that the success of the ones that I’ve highlighted is within everyone’s grasp. There are just some simple principles that you’ve got to get, and the book tries to make that pretty clear. And if people want a copy, then my little plug at the end to get a discount as well, then you just need to go straight to the site that is distributing the book.

So if you go to store as in bookstore, store, dot, book, baby, dot, com, slash, book, slash, the hyphen, great hyphen ,reset. So that’s the URL store, dot, book, baby, dot, com, slash, book, slash, the hyphen, great hyphen, reset. And when you check out use the code LDAP, capital letters ten. And you’ll get ten percent off the print book and 50 percent off the e-book. So that’s a pretty good deal.

Catch it while you can. If these things switch on and switch off. So I’d love people to read it. But I’d also love them to send me comments. I really like to hear what people have made of it and what they’ve taken from it, and if they’re doing anything as a result of it. Because at the end of the day, what matters to me most is that people are doing stuff, not just reading it and saying that’s interesting, theoretically, I want them to say that has helped me develop my organization, helped me rethink my purpose, rethink the way this organization operates. That’s my fundamental line.

Sylvie Milverton:
Amazing. Well, not, well, I guess there was a few things. Well, one of the things I love most is a practical case study about an HR implementation. So I am going to read your book, and then maybe we’ll even have you back, to talk about that, because that’s one of my favorite podcast topics, is like a successful and unsuccessful case study.

Nigel Paine:
Oh, I’ve got a perfect one of those. I’ve got two companies, which company A and company B, which I compare one spectacularly successful, the other disastrously unsuccessful. And it’s not because of human talent, it’s not because of aspiration. It’s to do with process and attitude of leadership and empowerment and autonomy and people’s actions. So yeah, I love to talk to you about that.

Sylvie Milverton:
Amazing. Well, I’m looking forward to read it and we will link to that URL in the show notes. Yeah. This has been, you know, a great, a great conversation. And I have to say, I was just super inspired by the meeting and as I grow my own company, I’m really taking to heart a lot of the lessons we had around the idea of maison, you know, learning at the center of what we do and, you know, just an honor to be part of this community and get to know both of you. So thanks so much for the chat.

Nigel Paine:
Thank you. So we’re gonna hope to visit your maison one day and see how great, what a great job you’ve done building a successful company.

Sylvie Milverton:
Welcome anytime.

Martin Couzins:
Thanks, Sylvie. It’s been great to be here, so thank you.

Sylvie Milverton:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Talent Is Everywhere. Make sure to subscribe if you like what you heard, and give us a follow on LinkedIn to continue the conversation on all things career mobility and talent development. Is there a topic you’d love for us to cover in a future episode, or a guest you’d recommend? Drop us an email at hello at lynxeducate dot com. And if you’re looking for support on your talent development strategy, head over to lynxeducate dot com to learn more about our career mobility solution that’s L Y N X educate dot com.