Most learning and development spend gets justified by completion rates and course counts, not by whether anyone actually changed how they lead. Nick Gonios, VP of Learning Transformation at TalentLMS, has spent 30 years building and scaling technology companies, and he thinks L&D has been solving the wrong problem for decades. He joins Kent to unpack what he calls the capability paradox, and why building capability, not dependency, has to be the goal.

Guest: Nick Gonios is VP of Learning Transformation and company ambassador for TalentLMS (part of Epignosis), with more than 30 years building and scaling technology companies, including roles at Microsoft and Fujitsu, several startups, and a stint as public-facing CEO of a software company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.

In this episode:

• [00:49] — Kent opens on why "building capability, not dependency" is today's topic
• [02:13] — Nick's path from Sydney to Athens: 30 years in tech, Microsoft, startups, and taking a software company public
• [05:16] — Nick's "lowercase L, uppercase T" theory of learning transformation
• [11:04] — Why HR "plant tours" miss the real problems, and what minimal viable learning looks like instead
• [19:04] — The Lou Gerstner and IBM story behind "people respect what's inspected of them"
• [20:28] — The capability paradox: how L&D metrics quietly optimized for the wrong things
• [27:49] — Why one-to-one coaching has always been too expensive, and what AI changes about that math
• [42:35] — Nick's advice for leaders in week one of a new role

Resources mentioned:

• Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change by Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
• TalentLMS, TalentHR, and TalentCards

Links for today's show:

• Nick Gonios on LinkedIn
• TalentLMS
• Kent Kniebel on LinkedIn
• The Promoted Leader Toolkit

Music for this podcast comes from a live recording of the song Needle & Thread and is provided with permission by Pert' Near Sandstone. Check them out on pertnearsandstone.com and on all major streaming platforms.

Enjoyed the episode? Leave a rating and review wherever you listen, it helps more leaders find the show.

Another acronym.

For what, what it's worth, if we took Learning Transformation and turned into an acronym, and that acronym is LT or 1.

Typically L&D and HR looks at learning Transformation with a capital L and a lowercase T. And you get this completely, Ken, right from where you've come from.

And what I'm a big believer in is actually it should be very much lowercase L uppercase T, right?

And so L and D leaders need to start just generally leaders in the space really, you know, future work all need to be looking at the.

The much more important area around transformation that's required, around organizational design and operational excellence and.

And roadmap execution, which in that comes learning and development along that journey versus the other way around.

Hi there and welcome to the Step up podcast.

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One last thing.

As a leadership development consultant and executive coach, focus area of mine is supporting newly promoted leaders.

One in three promotions fail because we never teach newly minted VPs how to stop being a director or a newly promoted director how to stop being a manager.

That's you.

Or if you support a leader who has been recently promoted, I encourage you to visit my website at Kent Coach Toolkit and download a free copy of the Promoted Leader Toolkit filled with practical advice and tools to help new leaders stick the landing and truly step up to their new leadership level.

All right, I've dillied and dallied long enough.

On with the show.

Welcome, everybody.

Today we're going to be talking about building capability and not dependency.

And with me for this conversation today is leadership Nick Ganios, vp, Vice President of Learning Transformation, and company ambassador for talent, lms.

Nick, we nailed it.

I nailed it.

Thank you for being here.

You nailed it.

It's all good.

It's my Australian accent that probably gets in the way sometimes, but it is what it is, so I doubt it.

For the audience here who isn't familiar with you, would love for you to start this off by introducing yourself, telling us whatever about your life and career journey you want to get into, Spend.

A whole day doing that.

Well, let's give.

Let's give a few minutes worth.

And which actually brings me back full circle and I actually reside in Athens, Greece now where our company is HQ'd and I've been living here for the last three or four years.

But before we get to where I am right now, I spent the last over 30 years in the technology sector seeing three or four different transitions and transformative sort of paradigm shifts I would say from offline to digital to you know, systems of records and as we're shifting to systems of intelligence as we're calling them now and have lived and breathed a.com era, the recent mobile and social and we're at right now with sort of SaaS and how that's transitioning as well.

So I've had a, my, my career is sort of just a large organization, multinational public companies to early stage startup companies from scratch and also the third piece of that puzzle is buying all the software companies and making them software as a service companies and that transformative shift was where the value and arbitrage that we created for the, the company that we had and we ran that as a public listed software company on the Australian Stock Exchange.

So I was a public facing CEO for a period of time and yeah in amongst all of that I, I've got two amazing sons, 21 and 23 which I'm super proud of and they're both on their entrepreneurial journeys and proud dad and amongst all of that I made the big transition to help us take the next step with our company which is bignosis and known as Talent lms, one of the leading top five providers globally.

It's a whole labyrinth in that space as we know but we're proud to be one of the leading players in SMB early mid market small business and early mid market space and we practically focus heavily around helping organizations transition and scale their learning and development needs on an SMB budget as I say so really getting away from that mid market enterprise space where there's too much baggage and too much too many people in the way I would say and friction and we're trying to eliminate that with the way that we deliver our capabilities to market.

So yeah I'm sure We'll get into probably a little bit around LMS and LMSs and AI and all that as we talk about the topic today, which I, I'm going to fight the urge to go there immediately.

But what brought you into sort of the talent LMS learning HR space, Right.

Cause I.

What I hear is more of a entrepreneurial and tech background, but I know I've.

You've been.

I think you've been steeped in this a while.

I've seen you.

You have been on a lot of podcasts or in a lot of videos of you talking about learning and leadership.

So give me a little bit of the.

How do these two things come together?

So I come at it from a little bit of a different perspective in the sense that let me.

Let me shape it.

Why I'm a. I'm a. I'm a doer in that sense.

And I've come at it from an operational transformational perspective.

And I've actually come up with a. I've actually come up with a particular sort of thesis around this, which is I'm a big believer in learning transformation.

And what I've basically created is this notion of if we took another acronym, let's create another acronym for what, what it's worth.

If we took Learning Transformation and turned into an acronym and that acronym is LT or 1.

Typically L&D and HR looks at learning transformation with a capital L and a lowercase T. And you get this completely, Ken, right from where you come from.

And what I big believer in is actually should be very much lowercase L uppercase T. Right?

And so L and D leaders need to start just generally leaders in the space really, you know, future of work all need to be looking at the much more important area around transformation that's required around organizational design and operational excellence and roadmap execution, which in that comes learning and development along that journey versus the other way around.

So how do I come from that?

How do I come to that position is the fact that I've had to rebuild software companies, both starting them from scratch and also rebuilding old software companies and transforming them into SaaS companies being on the public market.

And that has brought us, you know, with those certain things that we did and executed, which we focused on capabilities and mentorship and many other different areas that were very sort of adjacent to learning and development, but wasn't at the core.

So really the heart and soul of how I look at things is very much from an operational execution point of view, hashtag, get shit done perspective.

And.

And really just get on with things that needs to be done.

So I'm very much a roll up sleeve type of, you know, roll up your sleeves attitude kind of guy.

And then more importantly I think with over 30 years in the sector cutting, traversing the whole area from large, small, public, private and seeing the transformational shift that's going on, it's brought me a lot of, I would say, you know, respectfully wisdom and learning a lot of battle scars as I say along the way.

And that sort of is the, is the sort of unique point of view that I bring to the table.

The second part to sort of your question is sort of why, why sort of why I'm at where I'm at right now.

I actually joined the board as a board Advisor of Talent LMS at Bignosis about 15 years ago and since then sort of been a board member and advisor for about eight or nine of those years operating out of Australia and doing things internationally.

And as part of some life changes I decided to move to Athens, Greece three, four years ago.

And with that came an opportunity to really take on a new opportunity to really get more operational with our company.

We're about 310 staff.

We've got a lot of aspirations on growing as an organization.

We operate in 22, 150 countries around the world.

We've got, we've got 22 million learners on the Talent LMS platform and most, and most of them are growing small mid sized companies.

Half of them are in the US and we're proud of what we're doing but not too many people know who we are and what we do because we, we haven't done a good enough job in, in telling the world about the goodness that we've been sharing.

So half of my role is really around we, we, we basically strategic role of be the company ambassador as I call myself and going out and, and sharing our love and wisdom and, and know how and, and values and principles in, in what we believe when it comes to what we do.

So that, that's sort of me, that's sort of why why.

Yeah and it's interesting to hear, right because not every, and you're in an HR adjacency, right because probably 80, 90% of the time who you are both selling to but then ultimately consulting with and you know, partnering with to roll out your LMS in their system is hr right Is usually learning and development or heads of hr.

And I have found an odd and I don't know what it is about L and D but there's something about Learning and development that brings in more than I think other areas that I've seen brings in more mid career professionals from other functions into it.

Right.

And sometimes it's because they're coming from some other kind of more operational training role than sort of making this jump into hr.

But with your entrepreneurial background, what it really has me thinking about is something I've been thinking about a lot of lately, which is my 10 years in HR kind of regularly heard this.

HR needs to understand the business.

HR needs to get closer to the business.

And I would say 90% of the time I think how that ends up showing up is HR going on ride alongs.

Right.

HR going on plant tours.

Right.

Which, which I think, not to say that's not important.

I think we need to you know, understanding what the day in the life of the employee base is has its benefits to certain things.

But I, I'm having now started my own company and show so you know, company company with a small C perhaps but gaining the understanding of how, how my business operates and how that has built my sort of, I'll just call it empathy for how businesses operate.

And so it just has had me thinking about, I think more HR people need to spend some time minimally with their finance partners unpacking the P and L if not working in a smaller company or starting a company of their own.

Because I think the entrepreneurial background that you bring that I'm now building, so to speak, I think brings a unique perspective then to, let's go with learning and development, for example.

Yeah, yeah.

So I mean I think one of the, one of the interesting things is that you talk about HR sort of going on these tours that I call them, let's call them tours.

Right.

And, and it's a bit of show and tell.

And you know, you go on your factory tour, you go on your front line, sort of go and see some retail stores or you go and visit some offices and whatever it might be, but you go back to the office and you sort of get back into the routine again and sort of it just disappears in terms of that.

So that was great.

That was great.

You know, produce a great trip report from it.

And it is what it is.

The challenge with that is that you're not going into articulate and unpack problem, real, real problems.

Right.

If we go one step deeper.

So it's really going in and understanding the real business problems that are happening in the field or whatever part of the organization that are been trying to be tackled in some sense and going in it from that perspective and you know, with the startup sort of scale up mentality that we have and I've experienced firsthand, and let's be clear, I've, you know, nearly gone bankrupt twice building startups and so forth, I've got a lot of battle scars along the way.

These are what, what you get to miss is actually the opportunity to actually execute minimal viable product development.

And there's a current new sort of trend around minimal viable learning as an example, which I'm actually going to write a post about soon.

Interesting.

But if you think about, if you think about the approach of lean startup execution, it's all about going deep into the problem or design thinking execution, really going into the problem, understanding the journey map and then understanding how we're going to try and drive behavior change towards achieving that potential outcome, right.

That sits across an infinite amount of problems, right.

So they're all out there and then the next phase of that is really then being able to try and build that strong feedback loop with the stakeholders to then execute that.

Right?

And then from that trying to get an iterate as fast as possible to ultimately achieve the outcome in a small scale to then be able, as a small proof point to then be able to scale it across the organization.

What you've, what you've just heard me say is gone.

Hasn't actually I've never used the term learning development in any way, shape or form or HR in any of that.

So, so this is, this is one of the challenges that I think the sector needs to take some of the blinkers off, if that makes sense, unpack itself and start to think about problem solving first and, and then sort of going in and tackling and I'll give you one example, I'll give you a couple of examples, ones that we've seen at the moment because of the role of company ambassadorship.

I'm doing a lot of speak keynotes and talks around the world right now.

And I was in North Carolina recently for the training Industry conference.

We had about 800 people in North Carolina, which is a great event and we sponsored and did a lot of different things.

But park, that aside, I was in a conference in London in April, which is a big Learn 10 conference in April, and we had one of the speakers talking about skills gaps and changes and how they're adapting and trying to drive, drive and drive that change.

And one of the custom, one of the organizations, what was the leading Middle Eastern delivery food sort of provider equivalent to your Uber eats and your Deliveroos and the like, I Can't remember the name of them.

I should remember the name.

It was a really, really important story because what she was still able to articulate as the chief sort of learning officer was that they, they lent, they lent into with their values and cultural approaches and beliefs in terms of building skills versus trying to map everything that every single person actually does and work back from there.

So ultimately they were able to build out 10 high level skills that are associated to the company's values and core capabilities to then be able to then execute really fast.

So in that, in that situation, they were able to quickly be able to unpack problems.

They actually took out their learning, their learning siloed L and D teams and training teams and they unlocked them and put them into the business units as executional partners.

Where they listened to is one mouth and I'm doing a lot of talking at the moment, but yeah, and then, and then from that they basically started to unpack briefs that they could actually start to collaborate with the organization.

And from that they saw a lot of retention, improvement and uplift and all these other sort of ancillary or sort of byproducts that actually come through with the organization.

So one thing that we're doing right now is at ibignosis, we, I see ourselves as a young adolescent organization.

We're about 20, we're 20 years young, as I would say.

And we're at that young adolescent phase right now.

We've grown really fast.

We've got a lot of organizational challenges we're trying to unlock and sort of start to put more structure in place.

And with that came the phenomenon around, and I'm going to use the word AI and that with that starting to help us sort of, we're basically forced to rethink what our business is and where we're going to start delivering more value.

So we as an organization ourselves are going through a certain transitional, transformational pathway in terms of trying to understand what learning means for us.

And with that came a very important skill that we've basically made available horizontally to every single person, which is the notion and the ability and capability of storytelling.

Right?

So we've invested heavily in every single person to actually go through an experienced masterclass program to actually understand and be able to articulate storytelling in a great level of detail.

Everybody from frontline receptionists, director of first impressions, as we say, through to the cto, through to myself and many others, to be able to be able to articulate in stories, not in numbers and spreadsheets and, and KPI's what we're trying to achieve and that's, that's, that's been working wonders for us.

So there are, there are opportunities that we can sort of unpack things from a horizontal point of view and a particular use case challenge, you know, business problem execution.

So.

But I'm a big believer in tying those sort of two or three things together and building those horizontal capabilities and then use case problem solving executional capabilities.

So yeah, yeah, I might take it even a step further and you know, for the HR listeners, maybe be a little crass when I say, because I like how you're putting in as focus on solving problems I've been doing a little bit.

With all due respect, not to say that they're not right.

Let's.

No, no, no.

But here's.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna simplify it in a way that they're not even.

They're probably not gonna want to hear, which is I've been doing some work with a PE firm and there's no place where it's more direct wear like your, your job should be making it either easier, less friction or what have you to bring in top line dollars or you know, remove cost in order to maximize bottom line dollars.

Right.

And so is, is what we're doing here in service of that in some way, shape or form.

Now my.

It's easy and I think it's the smaller the organization, the easier it is to see that and see your leverage toward that.

But.

And a lot of my HR experience has been in giant Fortune 500 companies where you're just further and further removed.

And that's not to say a lot of people get in the HR because they're people people.

Right.

Or they want to serve people.

And I think there is all.

I think you can do both.

That's such a big question.

That's such a big point.

What does it mean to people?

Right.

You know, are you helping them unlock their future potential in who they are as a person or in the particular role that they operate in?

Are you going to be a conformist in nature in terms of this is your JD and you do nothing else and you're going down a particular linear pathway upscale?

Right.

Or are you going to become.

Are we going to create, Are we going to enable people to be the best versions of themselves every day and be the best craftspeople they need to be every day?

Right.

So I'm a big believer of the latter.

I'm a big believer of trying to unblock organizational silos and friction along that pathway.

And I see it everywhere.

So yeah, speaking of which, because this has been fun but I want to not just forward topic that I've heard you speaking a little bit about which is why the best leaders build capability and not dependency.

So I would love to and maybe I'll put, put it on you to help segue us into that.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'll give you a story back in the day.

About 20 years ago I was sitting on an island, a Greek island actually just in here, just off the, off Mykonos.

And that was beautiful summer day.

And I was reading a book, I love reading autobiographies and business autobiographies to be exact.

And I was reading Lou Gershner's why Elephants Can't Dance at the time which is an amazing book for anybody still, it's still valuable I would say if not more now with what's going on.

And Lou Gershner had the, had the riff, had the massive Herculean, you know, Herculean Homer esque task to try and get IBM to survive within an 18 month period or go bankrupt.

Right.

And, and what he did was in a global multi matrix environment which I'm sure you would understand and appreciate sort of where you've come from and who you've sort of worked with.

And so for in multi matrix environments you get lost in the noise of KPIs and objectives.

And what he realized was wow.

Within 12 months he worked out after doing many many trips around the world of any subsidiaries and all the usual multi matrix environments was that people respect what's inspected of them.

Very simple.

People respect what's inspected of them.

Doesn't mean that they're doing the right thing.

They're just basically doing what they need to do to get paid and get bonused.

Right?

That's just the reality.

It's hard truth.

What gets measured gets managed kind of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What gets managed exactly.

So fundamentals around that and he re transformed the organization based around from a KPIs and objectives perspective all the stuff, the 101 stuff that we know.

And so with that I think leads into part of the challenges that exist in learning and development with you know, powered by, let's, let's say powered by and, and coming from a company that builds edtech technologies, right.

We have been part of the process of actually creating these KPIs or behaviors that organizations adopt based on the way the systems operate.

Right.

And so the reality is, and the sad truth is the larger organization, the larger you need to spend to justify budget to exist, which is the frank truth.

Right.

You can still get away with doing what we do a fraction of the cost.

Right.

But you know, you never got, you never got fired for buying IBM.

I'm talking about a lot about IBM today.

But anyway, and, and so the challenge that comes with that is, you know, people respect what's inspected of them.

The systems of records that we've been able, we've been deployed in marketplace that are driven by certain type of metrics and have been sold in marketplace like course completion rates, visibility on who's done what, how many courses are available on the platforms.

All of those things have actually shaped and created blind spots to what really needs to be done in organizations, which is to enable capabilities for individuals and teams and organizations to execute better, to achieve business outcomes faster and deliver more impact.

Right.

So it's simply, that's the capability paradox that exists right now and has existed for a while, but we haven't, we've recognized that it's one of those, it's one of those subconscious untold truths that we know.

And it's not just in learning and edtech, it's across all systems of records, right.

Which we call SaaS.

Right.

Software as a service platforms in that sense.

So if you think about the way that we've sort of focused on metrics, they've been pretty much based on the way that the systems operate.

And the systems have been operating for many decades the same way because it's actually how we ran filing cabinets over 50 years ago.

Right.

So when you look at it from that perspective and you then say, hey, let's take a first principles point of view here and sort of take all that stuff out of the way and see what's important.

You need to start now rebuilding from business outcomes back into capability gaps to learning intelligence data and the foundations of that, which is sort of the doing.

Right.

And so with that, it really comes to thinking about how do we, how do we start looking at what do we actually need to execute and achieve better versus thinking about the technologies that we have.

The reality is we have so many technologies that we can access right now.

You know, from a comms point of view, many organizations use Slack and Microsoft Teams and all these other technologies.

You know, we use Slack internally, we use, we use GONG for sales intelligence in terms of tracking and watching conversations that all of our different team members are providing and gathering insights.

We have LMS technologies, we have learning experience platforms, we have content libraries being accessed as well.

And so many of them are available so that all is part of the challenge that exists, which is a, is all the friction that we need to basically unblock and try and change over time.

So really, for us, the capability paradox is pretty much evident.

We don't talk about it enough because it's the way that we respect what's inspected of us.

But this is the untold truth that we need to unlock and.

And get back into.

Get back into.

I have a mantra.

There's two mantras that I'll.

That I'll share with you.

And I should create a third one because I like doing things in threes.

The first mantra is to minimize friction and maximize flow.

Is.

It is the essence of how we live, work, learn and play.

And the second is with this notion of what notion of what's happening with AI is to be human, is to be offline again, I like that.

And what does that mean?

It means that we need to.

The second part of the second mantra is very much around bringing humanity back at its core and enabling what we're doing right now and having a conversation and connecting as humans is at the core of everything.

Right.

So that then presents itself another area which is very much around how do we start building mentorships and guild programs a lot stronger than we have in the past.

We know we need to do them, but we don't do enough of them.

They're pretty much hazard.

And there needs to be some formality that's required around that to actually start to build learning signals.

And I won't go into this at a tech speaker.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So much to go into there.

But I'm gonna, I'm gonna dig into because I think what you're describing, interestingly, when I think of an lms, I think of primarily housing elearning or even elearning either whether that's one specific course or a course curriculum or what have you.

And to your point, this ability to measure volume and attendance, right?

Like, you know, volume for an individual and attendance for any individual course.

Yes.

And I would say what you're kind of getting at is in.

In my words would be how do we get people into action, right?

From insight, insights into action, which frankly, standup facilitation struggles with just as much as any.

Any elearning does, with the one small exception of oftentimes you have to wait to be invited to attend some sort of in person or even blended course or program where a lot of companies, in order to democratize learning, have kind of opened up the entire catalog to everybody.

Right?

So you have people who Are kind of not everybody.

Right.

There's a, some kind of bell curve here.

I'm sure some folks who just consume as many completion certificates as they can.

But I would say even stand up, facilitate standup facilitation, even in person or blended facilitation needs to think more about what are we teaching and why and how do we get to action.

Right.

And we kind of keep coming back to the sort of the entrepreneurial concept of like.

And again I'm gonna, I'm just keeping it stupid simple which is maximizing top line, maximizing bottom line.

Right.

We gotta get people to behave different.

Right.

And so I would say even in my own.

When I design a leadership development program, my going in position with my clients is we need to take our time and build practice and application into this.

Right.

And I would say that, I probably would say has been my biggest.

Yeah, start with that.

Right?

Yeah.

And I would say that's been probably my biggest critique of.

And I think things are changing, but somewhat.

But I would say the critique of the last maybe 15 years or so push to an elearning system has been I think to the detriment of practice.

Right.

I think.

But that's not to say that the vast majority of in person learning has nailed it either though.

Right.

But I would say we, we've removed.

Problem is economics and scale, Kent.

Right?

The problem, economics and scale.

Right.

It's.

It's that simple.

The economics of doing one to one is way too expensive.

Right.

Pre.

Pre AI.

Right.

Yep.

Yeah.

The, the other aspect of it is.

So there's the, the, the cost of, of economic, the economics of producing and delivering content is expensive, right?

It has been expensive.

It's been very laborious and has been difficult to execute irrespective of format or channel.

Right?

Yeah.

Irrespective.

Elearning physical whatever it is at macro level, it's just bloody expensive.

Right.

And then the other flip side is that once you get to do it, you're always looking through the rearview mirror and you're not needing it when you need it in context to what you're doing when you have an issue to deal with.

Right.

You.

Kent.

Nick, I've got something to deal with.

We've all got different things we're doing in the course of our day, month, week, whatever it might be.

And the challenge is because it's everything so programmatic and expensive to execute.

Right.

From a content perspective, it gets in the way and it's the hard again, the capability paradox, having a plethora of content Available and capabilities in terms of technical capabilities doesn't solve the actual problem.

Right.

So where are we leading towards right now is very much this notion of, you know, personalization at scale.

You know, we've been, we've been buying into one for one, one for one communication and value for, for decades.

And we've.

The problem has been the systems of records that have been designed for scale for one to many.

And what we are now moving towards is very much a human centered approach to being able to do what Nick or Kent needs right now versus later or close to, you know, real time.

And so how that will prevalent, how that would prevail and come to life in the future we believe is the opportunity of actually building content on the fly as you require it designed for Kent in what you do in your organization.

That's the future of where it's all going to solve a particular problem that could be done dynamically and automatically.

We've got the capabilities already for doing that right now in the way that we're rolling out what we're doing.

But this other part to that is to be able to have tap into Nick 24:7 as, as my, as my mentor either digitally or physically by, by connecting.

Right.

In some sense.

So it's that, it's that magic of human, the human connection together with the capabilities that Generative AI brings to the table.

That is where we're going.

And it's a beautiful, beautiful paradigm that we're entering and, and it sort of leads into point of discussion which, which really goes into are we, we need to stop looking at what is going, coming at the moment, being half glass empty in terms of mindset and really start to look at half class, full mindset and start to look at tapping into our human potential.

Every single person that we've had join our organizations, there are reason why we've hired people, there's a reason why people are staying around and there's ever so more reasons for not getting rid of people.

Right.

And laying off people.

Right.

It's just we're going through this crazy period right now which is, you know, the Gartner hype cycle is a really good example of the organizational challenges that we're dealing with and a big believer of that.

My first role was actually at Gartner setting up Asia Pacific for Gartner Group in Sydney many, many decades ago.

So I'll leave it at that.

But yeah, that's really, you know, really, I think that's where we're going.

We're going through this sort of we're in this inflection point in time which is going to take a few years.

Yeah.

So tell me if I'm kind of misreading some of what you're saying here.

But with.

And I'm not sure we, we've talked about what we set out to talk about today, but it's been fun either way.

But it's interesting because I'm thinking back to some of the grad school programs that I went through where we were thinking at that time how huge knowledge management was going to become.

Right.

And how, how important it needed to be.

Right.

But we know there was all this talk about a we need to be able to gather knowledge, transfer knowledge, but also serve it up just in time.

Right.

That, that and I think this is part of the problem with three day in person course that we fly people in for is we, we're teaching them things that they might not even have a cause to use for a year, you know, or six months or two months.

Right.

And expecting someone to remember a model and how we talked about or even practiced doing something in a training room when it's needed.

And so I think since you talk about AI, that's making me think about the dynamic way as you learn to become a better user of AI and how you leverage it as a thought partner.

It seems like that might be the unlock finally for this sort of just in time learning the just in time ability to serve up content and knowledge.

Because I would say probably the biggest stumbling block historically for knowledge management not taking over the world like they said it was going to as a, as like a function and specialty.

And we've lost all business leaders at this point.

Only HR people know maybe what I'm talking about now.

But I think the biggest stumbling block has always been finding the information that you need when you need it.

Right.

And so large language models, maybe even generative AI being able to.

Me being able to pretty much just have a conversation with my computer about what I'm thinking about and looking for and can it pull together what I need and it being able to look at all the sources and pull together a custom learning plan that might even take into account what it knows I already know.

Right.

And I don't know if that's maybe.

No, no, you're using, you're using your thought process is right.

And to use sort of what the mark where we're, where the, in where the sector's going, where we're going with this is.

So I talk about, I talk about in the presentation I do know is very much around what we're entering is sort of SAS 2.0.

I'm calling it Software as a Service 2.0.

And where we're at right now is sort of pretty much in the systems of record space, which we basically manage in databases.

Ultimately all software products are databases with some functionality on top where humans have to input some stuff, the software does some logical stuff and then spits out some reports or some data again.

Right.

That's software at the end of the day.

Right.

It's pretty much what was done pre software days where we're sort of.

Then there's this sort of all these new generative AI sort of capabilities that are known as what we call systems of intelligence.

Right.

I mean systems of intelligence.

Big word to use systems of.

To use intelligence.

But that's all other discussion are there to sort of.

Are there for us to friction in some frictionless way be able to have a conversation with something that seems to be like human like.

Right.

And the challenge with that.

So that's the second pillar and then the third pillar is that how do we connect all these things together in some type of a connective nervous system of some sort.

Right.

And so enabling the challenge that we have.

They're all, they're all separate and siloed right now.

Right.

So when you go off and sort of use Claude or whatever these other tools might, might be, you know, Gemini, whatever else might be using, and you're using a HR or EdTech sort of product as well, they're all not connected in any way shape before and they're out of context and, and the challenge that comes with that is that context and memory around what our organization does, which is in systems of records at the moment and in people's heads, is what needs to be, let's say, built out over time.

We're going through this ourselves as a company right now.

We're building up company memory right now across the board to basically enable us to value our time more, to do more things in what we want to try and do over time.

So yeah, and to do it in the environments and the interfaces that I operate in on a daily basis versus have to go into what we call checkbox culture and login screens and so forth.

Right.

So that's sort of.

I think that's where the fundamental change and transition will go.

And unlocking that with the new economies of scale, being able to do things one on one, truly now, but without doing.

Adding the context layer is going to be the problem.

So from a business leader's perspective, the value.

One of the key takeaways here is you need to.

You just can't say, I'm going to have all these systems I have and then there's going to drop in some AI and hey, it's going to be so cool.

No, it's not going to be like.

Because you're going to be garbage in, garbage out, as they say, if there's no context.

So you need to build a context associated with.

And that's all your background information and how you operate as an organization, your values, beliefs and everything else.

Roles that go into that and how we're transitioning.

So I mean, what we, what we don't.

What we haven't even spoken about time for this.

But you know, the notion of work being split between humans and digital workers now for the first time.

Right.

Yeah.

So what does it mean to have a job description?

What does it mean to do learning development in partnership with a digital worker?

All these things.

I'm excited.

I'm excited again about the space, to be honest, because of what's going on.

Text and as I've come to, I'm building this vernacular on a daily basis.

At times I feel like.

But you know, the, the persistent memory.

Right.

I think is this other thing of like your, your system knowing what you talked to it about yesterday, today.

Right.

Versus and I want to come back to it.

And then just for time, we'll, I'll, I'll segue us into the end because this has been a very fun, nerdy.

I don't know if this is what you do.

I don't know if your podcasts run this way, but this is what I do.

So.

No, this is great.

The one thing that.

Where was I going to go with this is you were saying you were talking about, about I don't remember the language you use, but about getting the human experience and people kind of what the experience.

And I'm going to take a leap.

I can't remember the words you use, but I do.

And I'm.

If I had to attempt to read a crystal ball here, I think the, the experience economy is going to become more important.

Right.

We now in my state of Minnesota, we pioneered shopping malls because it's frigid here six months out of the year.

So I think we are credited with the very first shopping mall, indoor shopping center.

And they've Been right.

But I'm actually starting to see them come back.

Right.

And I think people are wanting more and more to get out of their house, to get out from in front of their computer.

And so the one thing that I've always wanted to see in the learning space.

Let me bring it back to learning space.

The one thing I wanted to see happen more and more often is for organizations to whether it's through having a consultant or hiring internal, but someone who's a learning expert and how do you pull together?

And I think the term they were trying to use five years ago or so was learning circles or now we say group coaching or team coaching.

But I think that's going to be an important layer, right?

I think it's going to be an important layer because it's one thing for me as a leader.

I've got a tough feedback that I need to give someone.

And yeah sure, I can sign into my, or I can chat with my AI that and let's just even say we figured out how to plug it into all the systems that it needs to be plugged into in the company and it can also I can talk through how I want to give feedback to this person.

But there's an element of agreeableness that these AIs have where the ability to perhaps process out loud with other humans and hear how someone else's experience went, get doing something similar.

Right.

I think that level of shared knowledge, being able to learn from others mistakes is what I think's been missing in frankly both live learning and elearning for a long time right now.

I think if I was able to wave a magic wand and say how should L and D transform over time?

It would be how do you have more either coaches or real learning experts that simply just pull people together, a cohort of leaders or whatever, to have more of that sort of group coaching or something like that.

I guess.

The frank truth is that we can't quantify everything in learning.

Right?

Let's be frank about it.

You just can't quantify learning.

It's a human thing that you build out and you connect with and you do with all the time.

So there needs to be a strong aspect around when doing things and justifying things and pathways going forward in building learning.

For capability development to achieve business outcomes or organizational outcomes, there needs to be this notion of be also to bring the qualitative aspects, the qualitative aspects to what it is to execute on learning development.

Capability development, what does that mean?

Being able to actually articulate stories of Greatness that have happened along the journey.

Right.

Goes back to what I said 20, 30 minutes ago, which is very much the power of storytelling for L and D and hr, to be frank, is critical.

It's at the core of everything now.

You need to be able to be able to articulate and present stories of, you know, that a CFO can actually say, you know what, we spent half a million dollars or million dollars on this stuff, but.

And it was a large experiment, but we're going to do it again because half a dozen people, we've been able to articulate that half a dozen people or 10 people have actually achieved this particular outcome in this particular way.

If we recognize that 10 of these hundred have been able to tell us these stories, Maybe there's another 90 that we haven't captured that.

So that has been quite valuable along the journey.

And in that way, it really needs to be brought to life.

In terms of the value of the quantitative, qualitative offline experiences, I would say that's why the big one, as I said, my second mantra is, you know, to be human is to be offline Again.

Right, there we go.

Now that's what you.

Now, Yeah, I thought that's what you.

So right.

So we can't, you know, again, it's a bit contrarian to the whole.

We can't measure what we can't.

We can't manage what we can't measure.

But we need to start thinking very, very much more pixel like, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yes.

And for the sake of time, so really quick, one of the things that I spend most of my time writing about just from my own experience is we spend from a leadership development perspective.

The industry's huge.

We spend a lot of money on leadership development, either individual coaching or marquee programs that we send 30 people to.

And the one place that we just tend not to spend a ton of money on is the day that someone lands them themselves that next promotion.

How do we help a new VP learn how to stop being a director and be a VP and operate at that new level?

We're relying on managers having their boss, having the time to help them make that evolution.

So for the sake of time, I'm just gonna.

I'm gonna isolate it to folks who were just recently promoted.

What's one piece of advice you have for someone who's in week one month, one of their new level, you know,.

Take on as much as they can in terms of the existing, existing organizational stuff around capabilities that they need to build that learn out.

Right.

The second part to that is recognize where they have gaps in the skills that are required to execute on the particular role.

Right.

And they're both probably quantitative and qualitative in that sense.

Right.

Recognizing those, if the organization has done appropriate skills mapping to a certain degree, we would know what those are.

Right.

In some way and map them against who I am as a person and what I do, my personality set and so forth.

And then the second, the third part would be actually to find a mentor that I can actually connect with and share where I'm at openly, you know, recognizing who I am and where my, you know, I wasn't going to want to say strength and weaknesses, but how I improve myself and sort of drive some organizational and personal development growth through learning from others.

Right.

So.

And that the triangulation of those three things for me are basically as simple as it can get in my view.

So be able to get yourself on a particular type of roadmap and pathway to improving your skill sets and know how.

And then just partnering up with an individual within the organization or externally to do that.

We're building a.

We're going off building an ambassador program next year with, you know, hot off the press, but really trying to see what we can actually do on those particular areas.

We're building a guild network within the organization around horizontal and sort of vertical capabilities.

And with that as well, we're building little sort of task forces where people are going to take certain leads in particular areas.

AI transformation being how it's reinventing our own company is a great example of that.

So we've got.

Not everybody can do everything at any point in time.

But this is probably the simplest, two or three key takeaways for me in a particular new role is recognizing that people don't have the know how.

I mean the, the other contrarian.

I wouldn't say contrarian, but to go against the grain on this a bit is not every person should be going.

Executing on a linear going up pathway.

Right, Right.

Going from a specialist to a, you know, generalist management role to a leadership role is traditionally what's actually happened.

We now have the ability to actually empower anybody.

We could.

I'm a big believer we should be building, we should be building a superhero network across all our organizations.

Right.

That's what I talk about, building a superhero network.

Right.

Nice.

And so for.

I'm going to, I'm going to.

Just for the sake of time, I'm going to wrap us up here and say so for those who are interested in having a bit more Nick Gonios in their life or talent lms.

Tell us where, where should they find you who should be reaching out?

Yes.

So we we're ON we're at talent lms.com and we've got you know, we also said as well we've also got talent HR IO I should say we're extending out into across HR LND as well.

And we've also got talent cards as well which is for our our mobile first deskless workforce capability that drives reinforced learning.

So we've got a very strong suite of capabilities.

And so for me, I'm very prevalent on Insta on on LinkedIn.

So I think it's LinkedIn.com forward slats in forward slash Nick Gonios and you'll find find me there.

Love to connect with anybody and continue the conversations and yeah, looking forward to more.

Awesome.

Thanks, Nick.

Really appreciate you being here today.

This was surprisingly fun.

Twists and turns in this conversation.

I really enjoyed it.

Sounds good.

All right, take it easy.

That brings us to the end of our episode.

Thank you for listening.

I'd encourage you to head on over to my website, Kent Coach and start a client conversation with me there.

Or check out my promoted leader toolkit at Kent Co Toolkit.

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Till next time, take it easy.