Episode 44: How Novartis Promotes Learning Curiosity to Drive Business Value (Interview with Simon Brown)
In this episode of the podcast my guest is Simon Brown, Chief Learning Officer at Novartis, a company that is really setting the pace around the whole learning and skills agenda. Simon believes that curiosity is the greatest driver of value in the digital age and as well as being co-author of a fascinating new book, The Curious Advantage, Simon and his team have instigated curiosity month at Novartis, an integrated learning experience of 170 events throughout September featuring internal and external speakers. You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.
In our conversation, which took place just before the start of curiosity month, Simon and I discuss:
The increasing importance of curiosity, it's intrinsic link to learning and the 7C’s of curiosity model that Simon and his co-authors outline in their book
How curiosity is nurtured in practice at Novartis and the business value it provides
How Novartis is embedding analytics into learning and measuring skills
The impact of learning on performance, retention and mobility at Novartis
The role of L&D in 2030 and whether the Chief Learning Officer will report directly into the CEO
This episode is a must listen to anyone interested or involved in learning skills and culture development. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs, Chief Learning Officers and anyone in a People Analytics, Workforce Planning, Learning or HR Business Partner role.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Degreed. To learn more, visit https://degreed.com/.
Interview Transcript
David Green: I am delighted to welcome Simon Brown, Chief Learning Officer at Novartis and co-author of a fascinating new book, The Curious Advantage, to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Welcome to the show Simon. It is great to have you on, thank you for your time. Can you provide us with a brief introduction to your background and role at Novartis?
Simon Brown: Yes thank you, David, I am thrilled to be here so I appreciate the invite. So my role at Novartis, Chief Learning Officer, I am accountable for learning across our 108,000 associates all around the world. Novartis is a focused medicines company with a mission to improve and extended patient's lives.
Last year we supported about 800 million patients around the world, so having a significant impact. My background has been learning across various companies, Accenture, Lloyd's Banking Group, etc.
David Green: Well, great to have you on the show. You have co-authored a new book, The Curious Advantage, I have been tuning into the podcast as well there have been some fascinating discussions going on. Can you share your perspective on curiosity and why is it essential in today's and probably tomorrow’s world?
Simon Brown: So curiosity is a key part of the culture at Novartis and about two years ago, a couple of people said, you know you should write a book about what you are doing. So over the course of the last 18 months or so I took that to heart and have explored with my co-authors Paul and Garrick, going deeper into curiosity and really having a sense of wonder about the world and asking questions of what if, and then actually putting those questions into action of exploring, experimenting and learning.
The book is really an exploration of curiosity interweaved with the story of Novartis and other large organisations as well.
David Green: In the book you outline the 7C’s of curiosity model. I am not going to ask you to go into them too deeply today, that probably would be a separate podcast, but it would be good to understand them at a high level and also what the critical components of curiosity are?
Simon Brown: Yeah, absolutely. So the 7C’s was a model that we came up with through the course of our research and our thinking and it is there to guide people through being more curious really, to provide some structure around how to be better, if you like, at building the skill around curiosity.
I think we came up with five originally and as we further explored, it turned into the seven and we realised that the seven began with the letter C. We then came up with the nice analogy of sailing the seven seas of curiosity. So that was where it came from.
Just to very quickly walk through them. It starts with context, which is around understanding where you are and what it is that you want to be curious about. So putting a focus in to your curiosity, maybe with some curious questions. Then to explore that context with a community. So who are the people who can help you with understanding that, who are the experts, who are the people who can guide you and help you with that question and the detail that you need to be able to answer it. All of that produces a lot of information so you then get into curation, the third C. So how do you find out what is important, what is going to help you and what you just disregard because there is so much there and then it is around adding your own build on it, so creativity. What are the questions that you need to ask, what are the new thoughts that you can bring to the area?
Then the other part of creativity is asking those questions is fine, but you need to put it into action. So the action we call construction, that is the experimentation. It is the testing things out, it is the trying things, it is maybe failing and what do we learn from that failure. Next one is criticality. So then reflecting on what you have done, what biases did you bring, what worked, what didn't work. The research showed us that if you go through all of those steps, then actually the process of being curious builds your confidence and that is the seventh of the 7c’s. Also it could arguably be the first one, because in building your confidence that takes you back to the beginning, that means you can then be bolder in the questions that you are asking and inspires you to be more curious.
So that is the sequence, the flow, as you go through the 7C’s.
David Green: Well given my age, I did think of the orchestral manoeuvres in the dark records when I first saw the model. One I particularly found interesting was the notion of criticality, you talked a little bit about it there.
Can you tell us a bit more about that one? I think it will help shape the rest of our conversation as well.
Simon Brown: So looking at what biases, either conscious or subconscious, do we bring in? So in asking a question and then experimenting to see whether that question comes true, we may be actually looking for confirmation bias in what we do and actually therefore we look at the results and read one thing into it but actually, maybe that is not what we're telling us. There is also a piece in there around the unconscious biases that we bring around the benefits of having a diverse team, of really being objective around the results that we are seeing, and a piece around the acceptance of failure as well. Actually it is okay to say it didn't achieve the results we want, but we can still take something from that and learn from it. Also what we call a failure maybe isn't a failure, it is actually that we have just learnt a way that doesn't work or we have learnt something that we can now pivot on and do something different that we wouldn't have done if we hadn't gone through that first step.
So there is a whole piece in there around criticality that we can unpack.
David Green: Great and I think we are going to hear a bit more about that as we now look at how you have applied it in practice at Novartis. How do you nurture curiosity in practice at Novartis? What are some of the things you do?
Simon Brown: We have been on a two year journey around our culture of inspired, curious, unbossed and specifically on the curious part, we have been working to provide Novartis associates with the best opportunities to learn and develop of any company. So initially that was giving easy access to the best possible content. Unpicking that there is several parts of easy access means trying to make it easy for people to find and gain access to content, so that is around how will you make it available through systems etc. Then there is the content itself, so we added access for all associates to LinkedIn learning, to Coursera etc. They can then choose whatever it is they want to learn, whether it aligns directly as a role or even if it is at a peripheral area or something of personal interest, content is available and people can do it.
So, one is that easy access to content, but then the second part is also that support and the culture that supports people in actually being able to spend time learning. If we look at our engagement surveys that we do regularly, the two biggest barriers to people being able to take advantage of learning is “I don't have time to learn” and “my manager doesn't support me in my learning” So we were quite explicit around setting an aspiration of people spending 5% of their time or a hundred hours a year on their own learning, curiosity and development. That was not because a hundred hours is a scientific measure of what one should spend on learning, but actually it was a symbol to say the company wants people to be spending time learning. We see the value in people building their own skills and building the skills that the company needs and therefore by setting that aspiration, it creates the space that people can invest their time in taking advantage then of the great content. Just putting the content out there doesn't mean people feel that they have got the opportunity to actually use it.
David Green: So a couple of follow ups on that, I think firstly you talked about skills. How do you link the learning to skills? You also talked about the skills that Novartis needs, is there a nice link between the two?
Simon Brown: I guess different levels from having content tagged against skills etc through to having skills assessments that maybe can point you towards the right learning. Having playlists around particular themes like remote working or whatever and then having content that is being curated behind that.
We have a content curation team now where people from the business can then say, “okay, I need to build this skill in my workforce around X” and then the team can curate from across the different libraries that we have in order to be able to find the best learning that supports that skill.
Then there is a big measurement piece in there as well of seeing whether that skill has changed over time too.
David Green: Okay. We will definitely come back to the measurement. The other thing you talked about that was flagged in the engagement surveys was manager support. When some managers aren't supportive how have you turned that around?
Simon Brown: Again, it is a mixture of pieces through communication, general culture, messaging, but also then role modelling from within our leadership. We are very fortunate that our CEO is very supportive around curiosity and continuous learning and is a fantastic role model around his own learning. But we see that across many of our leadership teams as well, of role modelling, being curious and spending time learning. That then helps to create an expectation across our managers as well, that they personally should be learning and also encouraging their teams to be spending time learning as well.
I was talking to a CLO of another large organisation recently, who was talking about how the analysis they did was able to correlate the learning of the manager with the learning of the team. That the more learning the manager did that had a shadow onto the team and led to them having a team that actually invested more time themselves in learning as well.
David Green: So from a manager perspective, set the example. But actually as a manager, you are being measured on the success of your team, so if you are learning, they are likely to learn as well.
Simon Brown: Yes and we saw that the other way as well, also within our own data, we looked at correlating some of our different surveys that we do. We saw that if someone felt a manager was favourable versus unfavourable, not surprisingly that had a big measure across many different metrics, but the biggest metric it had an impact on was curiosity. There is a 22 point difference between a favourable manager and an unfavourable manager around curiosity.
David Green: That is quite significant and that kind of leads on to the next question I was going to ask. What have you found to be the business value of being curious?
Simon Brown: I guess there are many aspects of how curiosity supports our business. The nature of what we do as a scientific organisation is around scientific discovery, trying to find new ways, new molecules that will cure diseases and therefore there is a natural piece in there of curiosity supporting us through that. But also then the curiosity to motivate people to learn, to build new skills and those skills being needed to support our strategy. We have five strategic pillars. If we take one of those as an example, data and digital, part of the rationale for us going big on learning was to create the skills that were needed to support the strategy around data, digital and others. So we can actually now look at how the learning that people are doing ties to those skills.
Back to your earlier question, if we take something like data visualisation, that is a key part within data and digital is how you display the insights. We can see 18 months ago we were behind our peers on data visualisation based on multiple skills indexes and then we can see over the course of the last 18 months, how that skills level raised up across the organisation to Q3 and Q4 last year when it met the industry benchmark. It has now surpassed that industry benchmark, so we can see how learning curiosity ties to skills, skills tying to skills improvement over time, what we haven't got yet is what that actually impacts through in terms of a hard financial metric or whatever. But ultimately if you have got more people with the right skills in the area that is strategically important, that has to be a good thing for the organisation and having the latest skills rather than bringing three year old or five year old skills to the picture.
David Green: Let's talk a little bit about how you are embedding this curiosity across your workforce. We are recording this at the end of August and I know that you have got a big month coming up in September, curiosity month. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I know we had a pre-call last week and it sounds very exciting.
Simon Brown: Yes, so I think two years ago we had our first learning month. We wanted to do something around promoting the different learning offerings and getting people excited about learning. We were discussing should we do a day? Should we maybe do a week? And we decided let's do a whole month.
So we did that two years ago, it was so successful in having a series of events and activities and promoting the offerings that we did it again last year. Last year we wrapped up in a curiosity quarter where we had a whole quarter just focused around different things, curiosity wise. This year we have gone with curiosity month, obviously with Covid that creates some challenges because last year we had 250 face-to-face events around the world that took place. This year we are at the moment holding about 180 virtual events that will take place with internal speakers and external thought leaders and speakers. They will be simultaneously translated into six languages and there is lot of excitement around it. It is really trying to generate that visibility and excitement around opportunities to learn, around what is going on across the company, around the great resources that are there. Also back to the earlier question, showing that learning is something that is important for the company and that managers should be encouraging and supporting and making sure that associates have the time because we are putting on these events to be able to get into a habit around continuous learning.
David Green: I know that pre-Covid you were already doing some virtual learning anyway, I was fortunate to be involved in something back in June with Ashish Pant, who leads People Analytics in Novartis for your Oncology team. It was part of the data and digital strategic arm that you spoke about, to actually help HR or P&O partners in the Oncology team to understand what Novartis is doing in People Analytics, which is quite significant, but also learn from what's happening on the outside space as well. I must admit, I think the nautical theme was on there as well it was very impressive. But you had already been thinking about delivering learning virtually anyway, I guess because you are such a large organisation spread across the world.
So you almost had an advantage on other organisations who had to get started from scratch when the crisis happened.
Simon Brown: Yes we were very fortunate, I guess, to have started our learning transformation journey two years ago or so 18 months ago. So a number of things have been put in place that helped us and arguably some of that started five, six years ago, when we started a consolidation of our learning platforms. We used to have 14 learning management systems and by the end of last year we had consolidated that down to one main system. So some of that had been a journey we were already on and other pieces for example we had the virtual content libraries that we brought in in April last year so it meant we were very fortunate to be able to react quickly to the Covid situation and we could very quickly curate the content that was already there. We could put together playlists, we could set up mini portals that could provide people with directions like, this is where you go for working from home. This is where you go for how to use Microsoft Teams and here is a great course on resilience to help you through this. So we were able to very quickly respond and that seemed to work well for associates in helping them to have what was needed at a very difficult time.
David Green: What are some of the tools or technologies that you use at Novartis or have seen other organisations using to try and foster a culture of curiosity? I believe you have used virtual reality at Novartis to help practice and create psychological safety, for example.
Simon Brown: Yeah. So, there are different levels, from the platforms, the content and then some of the specific solutions and there is the core learning management system, there is then the content platforms that sit on those, which also spans out into things like language learning, scientific talks and things that may sit in their own wrappers as well. There is then new technologies or emerging technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality. We have had some success with those around virtual reality, the one that you referenced, we are working on psychological safety aspects but at the moment we are working on virtual reality in manufacturing in particular. In Austria, in our manufacturing sites in Kundl, they did a virtual reality training for line clearance where you have the manufacturing line and you have the medicines and the packaging and between the different products going through that line, it has to be completely cleared down. Historically that would be to shut down the line and you would then train someone on how to do it and the line couldn't be working. We have recreated that entirely in virtual reality and it meant the line could keep running and you could do the training offline outside of that in virtual reality. That had a return on investment of four or five weeks, it was incredible, the impact it can have. So yes, more and more we were looking at where can we use those types of technologies as well.
You then have things like space repetition in gamification that we use in some of our sales knowledge and adaptive learning in other areas, I guess it is different technologies for different use cases. Then at the core of that the learning management systems track all of the data and the training records.
David Green: How big is the learning team at Novartis? These are quite significant operations there, which shows that learning is important at Novartis.
Simon Brown: Yeah, we are about a thousand people around the world. But also factor into that, that includes for example, sales training, where we need people in local countries, in local language with the complexity of the product lines etc. So it may seem like a large number but, and it is a large number, but it is across very different parts of the business and core central team but also the local regional and local geographic teams as well.
David Green: And back to the virtual reality, what has been the response of those being trained in virtual reality?
Simon Brown: It is a positive response, I think there is a novelty piece initially, but you get into some fascinating things that you wouldn't have thought of. We had some health and safety considerations that we needed to do with this line clearance one where you imagine it being run in a big empty room and you have got the manufacturing line in front of you. People have to get down at one point underneath the machine in order to check that there is nothing on the floor and you then get people to lift themselves up on the machine, but of course the machine isn't there, it is virtual and you end up falling on the floor because you have tried to pull yourself up on something that doesn't exist. So things like that, that we had never thought of we then have to figure out, how do we handle that and avoid any issues? I think overall very positive and there is a novelty element I think when you first try it as well but it is very effective at what it needs to do. I think that the immersive aspect of it actually strengthened some of the training recall and retention from it.
David Green: I guess this technology is going to accelerate and develop any way, but that is quite an interesting consideration and I can understand how you might not have thought of that before hand.
So we are now six months in to the crisis, seven months for those listening from China, how have you continued to nurture curiosity at Novartis during lockdown and as people continue to work from home? Because I think you had a significant shift of people that suddenly went virtual.
Simon Brown: We had about 60,000 people switched to virtual over the course of a weekend so yes a huge, huge, huge change. In doing that, starting to work through Microsoft Teams, which many people were not familiar with at that point in time as well.
So our initial reaction was how do we immediately give people the tools that they need? Week one, that was how to use Teams and if we look at our content usage over that time then the most popular course, the week after that 60,000 switch to the remote working, was how to use Microsoft Teams.
The second week, the number one course was around working from home, managing your time and that also included how to set up monitors and keyboards and where to put your desk, how to adjust your seat and stuff to make people as effective as possible in working from home.
And then over time we saw that move to things like resilience training, managing virtual teams etc. Our role within learning was still around making sure people had access to the content, was curation of content and promoting the things that would be really useful and helpful for people at that point in time.
It was playlists, it was a portal with access to key learning, it was how to access some of our catalogues of learning remotely etc. And then over time we also made the decision to take some of our main learning catalogues and actually expand those beyond the company. We started offering Coursera for friends and family as well and paying for licenses for those. We have now had over 12,000 people who have actually taken advantage of that and are using the Coursera access. So it is extending learning to not just being curious within the company, but even taking it beyond to friends and family and that now also includes language learning and other things that we are offering as well.
David Green: Great and I like the way you set that up from that shift. The question that poses me was were some of those decisions around learning to promote specific types, was that linked to some of the surveying that you were doing of some of these newly virtual teams. So firstly, it was the practicalities like how can I work at home? How can I make sure all my systems are set up properly? Then it moves to things like resilience, was there a link with some of the surveys that you were doing with employees as well?
Simon Brown: I think the immediate piece was just based on our own personal experiences and talking to teams and what we hear, surveys came but probably a month or so afterwards.
So it was initially just based on what we were seeing, what we were hearing, what we were personally experiencing and then curating things to do that. Then also watching the trends of what people are accessing in order to be able to see the direction that things were going and that was the shift then between the practical tools of using it through to the more softer aspects of how do I cope personally and from a mindset which is more to the resilience piece. We also have a program called Energise for Life, we made then access to an app from a company called Tignum, which is all around sleep, nutrition, mindsets and movement.
There is also a mindfulness app from Michael Bunting that we made available for associates and also for friends and family as well in order to help with more of the mindset side of what people were going through, which is almost the more challenging piece for many people.
David Green: I think it is great that you expanded the access to some of the learning to friends and family of employees as well, given the blurring of work and home life now. It sounds like it has gone down very well, 12,000 people taking it up, how do you think it has gone down?
Simon Brown: Yes, it has been very well received, both in terms of the take up and also I guess the goodwill and appreciation, if you like, that it has done. We are also very fortunate to be able to support the Khan Academy as well with a donation at the start of this. We recognised that a lot of our associates had children at home, schools were closing, not all schools had a good virtual learning piece. Khan Academy is a fantastic resource and they had seen an enormous spike in their usage, they are a not for profit and they needed support with that, so we were able to also support them and then promote that to our associates as well. I know this was also very well received in terms of people who weren't sure necessarily how their children would learn with closed schools and suddenly there is access to a great resource there with Khan Academy that could help as well.
David Green: So potentially a future course of evolution of learning and development. It is not just about supporting your employees, it is about supporting their friends and families as well and that is a great thing that a large organisation like Novartis can do.
Simon Brown: Yes, I think that going back to something I mentioned earlier, we had the five strategic pillars of which data and digital is one, but one of the others is around building trust with society.
So it ties in strategically as well that we are able to, as a company that is curious, we are able to offer learning beyond the boundaries of the company as well.
David Green: We talked a little bit around how you are correlating some of the learning with some of the skills for example but how else are you using analytics in L&D at Novartis?
Simon Brown: Historically we have not been great at analytics, if I go back a couple of years when we had fragmented learning systems and we really were working with almost no data. Over the course of the last year we have seen, I would say, massive improvements. You mentioned Ashish's People Analytics team earlier and that team has been hugely helpful for us in creating a dashboard of our learning data.
Every few weeks there is new features added into that, that we can go deeper into the data and understand what is happening. So now we can look at our learning activity. We can cut it by a division. We can cut it by geography. We can cut it by band. We can look at the courses that are most accessed against any of those dimensions etc so that gives us an enormous insight into what is happening. We can look at voluntary learning versus mandatory learning and see the splits and then use that to be either targeting particular populations where we maybe don't see the curiosity that we would like to see in terms of uptake and learning, or we can make sure the message is right.
One of the recent ones we were looking at this since May to July this year for example, we saw a 20% increase in the amount of voluntary learning that is taking place. So that is great to see, it is not just the mandatory learning but actually the voluntary piece is picking up, which is people ultimately being curious.
It also allows us to start to ask questions with that analytics team there, so the one that we are working on at the moment is the linkage between attrition and learning, and specifically learning hours. The early data is starting to show that the more time people are spending learning, so the higher the learning hours, actually the lower the likelihood of attrition. So our attrition data is in people that were leaving were likely those that were doing lower learning hours. If you are doing higher learning hours, that corresponds with being more likely to be staying with the organisation. So delving into it further and starting to get the data, it means we can then ask the questions and having the analytics team there means we can then start to understand much better what is actually going on and what is driving what.
David Green: You mentioned that other correlation earlier around managers that learn tend to have teams that learn as well. Maybe there is an interesting question around that as well.
Simon Brown: Definitely. Yes very much so and I think that will be one of our next ones to be diving into.
David Green: Great. How are you measuring skills and curiosity at Novartis and how do you correlate the two together?
Simon Brown: So skills measurement through I guess various different mechanisms, but one is through some of our partners. So I will work with Coursera for example, it gives us some fantastic insights into skills metrics. They have a skills index that uses multiple data points of the level of program that someone is going through, is it fundamental or advanced etc. How often then people go through the assessments, how they are doing the assessments, do they retake them? All of these things feed into an index that then allows us to look at our relative skill, not an individual level, but at an organisation level and because they have got customers across many other pharma companies, we can then look at an industry or on a company basis. That is where some of those insights, like the data visualisation that I was referring to, allows us to see relative to others where are we and where are we moving. So we were able to look at finance skills and see that actually they were pretty static across the last 18 months. Then if we look at something like some of the digital skills, we see actually there was much more a movement in those as it was newer skills and an area that we were developing versus something that we already had an existing skill set in. So it helps us to quantify much better where we are and also then look across many skills and see these ones we are leading, these ones were actually in lower quartile, is that okay or is that something we want to focus on? Is it that actually the data is missing it because actually most of the learning is happening in another area versus is that something we need to actually focus our attention on. That is helping us to then make sure we are channeling our effort into things where actually it is a strategic skill that maybe we are not where we need to be and we can then target that and make sure we have got the right solutions, but also then the right encouragement or a curriculum for people to be able to work on them.
David Green: It seems like with a lot of HR or people organisations like at Novartis, these sort of measures are starting to break down some of the silos that we have traditionally had.
We have had learning, we have had talent and clearly there is that link between learning and understanding the skills that you need within your organisation to help deliver on the strategy and you aligning the learning towards that and linking that together. It seems like a big evolution towards learning has happened over the last few years.
Simon Brown: Yes we are seeing increasingly more and more partnership beyond the learning world into talent, into talent acquisition etc. As we start to look at what are the capabilities the organisation needs, what's the skills needs that come out of that and then do we have those skills, which is into a skills assessment or understanding of the skills that exist in the organisation. Are they where they need to be or do we need to move people around through projects or move people around through role changes. Then you get into we haven't got the skills as they need to be so do we build those skills? Do we re-skill people from something completely different and really go into that space to build those? Or do we then go outside the organisation and actually buy those in through recruitment? Or do we borrow those through externals and gig workers etc. So you then get into that whole workforce management piece essentially and it all starts to interconnect. So I think just looking at it as silo is becoming increasingly not the way to be doing it you need to look at it in that joined up way. Then the technology ultimately needs to support that as well, which is a whole extra complex layer that sits there.
David Green: And have you done any work to see how the investment in learning you are making is supporting your internal mobility across the organisation as well?
Simon Brown: So some, for example we have things like a talent marketplace where we can publish project work and people can then apply into those project work. So you can not just build your skills learning through more formal content but actually you can build your experience through then spending 20% of your time on a particular project.
So we have got a couple of those sort of portals where people can publish project work or see project work and then build their skills that way helping with that talent mobility piece.
David Green: Let's go back to the 7C’s quickly. Did you see the 7C’s as a framework for L&D more broadly or to put it another way, obviously curiosity is the centre of what you are doing at Novartis, do you think it should be the centre or the core of any L&D strategy.
Simon Brown: I am probably biased but yes. I guess why, because curiosity goes a bit beyond pure learning or at least how we have maybe defined learning. Historically it goes into learning through asking questions, through wondering is there a better way, what if we were to do this and then exploring that sense of wonder to actually test that out, to experiment, to try things. I think then from a learning perspective is if we can encourage people to be curious like that and go on that journey of discovery that unearths things that then we need to find ways to share across the organisation. We asked a question, we tried something out, we learned something from it either successfully or unsuccessfully. How do we then share that learning with another part of the organisation so that another team that was wondering the same thing, doesn't need to go through that same process?
They can actually learn from what already happened and then things can move much faster. So you move beyond almost personal learning into organisational learning. I think there is a role there for learning functions and moving into OD teams and things as well. How do you surface and share that organisational learning and maybe moving into what would have historically been called knowledge management aspects.
So curiosity generates this motivation for people to learn and these new insights that come out from it. Then there is a role for learning teams and HR teams more broadly to, how do we share that learning so it gets to the right people at the right time so the organisation can benefit from it.
And that is hard.
David Green: Yeah. I really like it and I think maybe as a profession we have underplayed the importance of asking questions and starting from that point. I like the way that curiosity is kind of positioned around that as a starting point.
That leads nicely onto the question that we are asking all our guests on the show in this particular series, it is a two frame question. You are running L&D at one of the biggest, most progressive organisations in the world, what do you see the role of L&D in 2030?
Simon Brown: So I think this probably builds very nicely on what we were just saying. It is almost blurring the boundaries between what is learning and what is work and creating the environment, whether that is cultural environment, technological environment, mindset, so that people are actually constantly learning and that the work becomes learning, because the work is around what if we could do this better? Why are we doing it like that? Why don't we do it like that? Is there a better way? Those curious questions then creating learning and then sharing that learning. So I think there is a whole piece there and you could call it learning in the flow of work. You could call it knowledge management, you could call it many pieces, but it is sort of this blurring that work is no longer a set process. Work becomes, because of the speed of digital and other things that are coming, it becomes constantly trying to figure out a way through ambiguity and figure out the best way. How do we capture that learning, share that learning so that we can all benefit from it.
I think the evolution of the sort of skilling part is going to be very interesting. So by 2030, hopefully we will have done a successful job as a broader probably HR function around integrating many of the different parts around skilling and re-skilling and so strategic workforce management and bringing all of that together.
So we do a much better job of building the skills that people need, giving them the experience through the right roles, planning their succession through the organisation and development etc. I think this whole tech piece probably that is really interesting, I had a session actually this morning with some of our team looking at virtual reality and augmented reality and the stuff that is happening in augmented reality is phenomenal.
Some of the experiments that we are looking at there with the Holo Lens 2, there is some amazing stuff that is coming. So I think in 10 years time that may be commonplace and whether it's a virtual coach that is there looking and seeing what you are doing and guiding you through it or in some of the more manufacturing or technical aspects or whether it is just in time performance support that is guiding you through looking at what you are seeing and overlaying what you need to be doing. 10 years time I am sure that will be probably commonplace. So I think as long as we are staying focused on what the business needs and also actually what our people need there is going to be a very interesting role for the learning teams to play in shaping that world.
David Green: Actually, you talked a little bit about that relationship of HR and skilling and everything else. I have seen quite a growing number of pieces out there advocating that the CLO should sit outside HR and report directly to the CEO. I was just wondering what are your thoughts around that?
Should that happen or is it just not a simple yes or no?
Simon Brown: There was an article from BCG that I saw a couple of weeks ago, which I did in fact forward to one of my bosses our Chief People and Organisation Officer, to say you need to read this. That was entitled something like, Learning should sit under the CEO, or whatever.
But I did caveat that with, for us I don't think that is necessary it is more the rest of the article. So for me, it doesn't really matter where it sits as long as you have the right support and you have the right strategic view around the value that learning can bring. So I sit in our People and Organisation, which is HR and that works very well. We have a Chief People and Organisation Officer who is very strategic and gets how the pieces fit together. So it is a very good place to be located. I think it depends really on the organisation, it depends upon the skill sets or the strengths of the individuals involved. I don't think it is necessarily necessary, in some places it may be beneficial. I think behind the question, is that learning has an increasing importance and it becomes increasingly strategic and it should be helping to support the strategy and the goals of the organisation. From a reporting line, it doesn't really matter where it sits as long as it is able to deliver on that side.
David Green: Yes, I tend to agree. I think some of the big consultancies are very keen to break up HR because I guess they get work to help organisations do some org design around that perhaps, I don't know. Actually listening to you throughout the last 40 minutes or so what we are trying to do in HR is break down some of the traditional silos in HR. So that's been hard enough for many organisations so if something as important as strategic learning sat outside, you wonder whether that would be even more difficult.
Simon Brown: Exactly, it is trying to strike the balance. So our Global Heads of Learning sit generally on our strategy teams outside of HR but they have a dotted line into me sitting within HR.
So you get the balance then between, you have got to be close to the business, but you also need to be close increasingly to the other aspects within an HR function. All of these things are starting to fit together, the technology needs to fit together. So I think completely removing it you lose one of the critical partnerships to make this stuff a success.
David Green: And as I said, I would encourage people listening to this to listen to one of the episodes of The Curious Advantage podcast, where you speak with Vas, the CEO at Novartis and Steven, the Chief People Officer, fascinating conversation.
Simon, it has gone by very quickly, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast and sharing your expertise with our listeners. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and also find out more about The Curious Advantage.
Simon Brown: So LinkedIn is probably the best place to get in touch with me. I am often sharing what we are doing on there and it is one of my main sources of learning through there. For The Curious Advantage the book is available on Amazon. If you go to curiousadvantage.com, you can find all the suporting material information on there and The Curious Advantage podcast is also on the website but it is also on Spotify and on Apple podcasts, iTunes etc. So find it on all good podcast services.
David Green: Great. I will just to say to listeners that if you like this podcast, you will enjoy The Curious Advantage so do check it out. Simon, thank you very much for being a guest on the show and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.
Simon Brown: Thanks for having me.