A trend what? Trend watching is easy, it’s what you do that makes the difference and Ger Driesen explains to Jo just what is involves
Training Journal: What is a trend catcher and what does it involve?
Ger Driesen: Trend-watching is easy, you watch and then…? I introduced the term ‘trend catcher’; grabbing a trend, trying to understand it well and then translate it to what it could mean for your own profession – in my case, learning and development.
I’ve always been a kind of cross-pollinator; I like to explore different concepts that are meaningful to people in their general life, like music or the arts. Or what people find are the most useful and relevant tools and approaches in their specific professional context. If people around the world massively love the paintings of Van Gogh, it triggers me to think and explore, “What is in the work and life of Van Gogh that might contain useful lessons for L&D?” I did the research and shared ‘Van Gogh on Learning’ at conferences around the world.
“I always have to balance my enthusiasm about trends with a critical mindset about their impact on learning”
About eight years ago, blended learning platform provider aNewSpring asked me to become ‘Learning Trend Catcher’. The founders had made the deliberate choice that knowledge-sharing, creating inspiration and building a community of like-minded learning professionals should be the main building block of their marketing approach – a great vision and courageous decision in the ‘pre-influencer marketing’ era.
TJ: What do you do with some of your cross-industry inspiration?
Ger: I have been privileged to work as a ‘soft skills’ trainer for many years, which gave me the opportunity to work with professionals from all kinds of industries and sectors: software engineers, nurses, civil servants, aerospace engineers, CEOs, first-line supervisors, helpdesk agents, university professors – you name it, I worked with them.
When software engineers told me about scrum and the agile way of working, I wanted to understand these concepts and integrate meaningful parts in my L&D work. So, I ‘translated’ the Agile Manifesto (for software development) into the Agile People Development Manifesto. From whisky lovers I learnt about ‘the Angels’ share’ and applied it to ‘The Angels’ share of learning’ as a ‘romantic’ perspective to look at learning impact.
So, in my role as Learning Trend Catcher, I continued watching, catching and translating trends and sharing them with the L&D community. You can imagine that reading tonnes of newsletters and tapping into social media streams are among my daily activities. An important activity related to that is content curation. Sometimes just repeating what others have said or shared might be useful, but often that doesn’t have much additional value.
Creating a conversation out of a social media post, bringing together different perspectives and adding your own is often of more value. But there are many more and different content curation approaches that lead to added value. The essence is best described by Harold Jarche via his ‘Seek – Sense – Share’ concept. I applied content curation in my newsletter named Ger’s Learning Notes. It works like this:
- From all the things that I read, hear and see, often a topic pops up that seems to be ‘hot’. I look for the two most inspiring or informative sources (can be text, video or podcast).
- The next step is that I look for two additional sources that show a different perspective, add a different point of view, or serve as an evidence-informed foundation. I always prefer a blend of text, video and podcast, more fundamental resources and more practical resources, and sometimes from different geographical regions: diversity in perspectives and medium is an important criterion for me.
- For all four sources, I add a few highlights and explain why the source seems relevant to me. I add a short introduction on the main topic – et voila, we have a curated newsletter!
The interesting thing for me is that I always learn a lot during this process. I need to read/watch/listen to the source a few times to be able to pick up the highlights and add somethings around relevance, and that is ‘deep processing’ of the content. Also, in the process I always check more than the final four resources to judge them before selecting them. So, I process a lot more info than the subscriber does. Conclusion: content curation is a great way of learning.
TJ: What is your view on conferences and how they help L&D with trends?
Ger: A big part of my role is speaking at events, which is a great way to engage with the community. It gives the opportunity to share ideas but also to test what is most relevant and useful for the community. Another benefit of speaking at an event is that you have the opportunity to join the sessions of other speakers and catch the trends that are shared at the event.
That again gives the opportunity to create write-ups from the event and share these within the community. Creating a way into an event as a speaker is also an activity that needs time investment. Some events have a ‘call for presenters’ procedure, so you have to write and send in a speaking proposal. The structures and criteria are different for every event and it is also important to know a bit about the ‘local flavour’ of the event, community and country of the event to be successful.
“Being active and sharing good content on social media is another way into events as a speaker, and being a book author is even better”
The time between writing the proposal and the actual event can be long. For example, at the main ATD conference: the conference is always towards the end of May and speaking proposals need to be submitted the previous August. Being active and sharing good content on social media is another way into events as a speaker, and being a book author is even better.
Once you get started speaking at events, you’ll find that you often meet the same speakers – the ‘usual suspects’. This can also be helpful as speakers do also recommend their peers to event organisers. Being a speaker related to a learning tech provider makes it harder to get accepted as a speaker as event organisers assume that you will promote your company all the time and it is hard to convince them that is not your intention.
The founders of aNewSpring assured me I wouldn’t be required to sell the product – there are other colleagues to do so. We deeply believe in the slogan: ‘a fool with a tool is still a fool’. To get the best results out of any learning tech tool, you need a deep understanding of learning. So, our work is based on the core value of ‘help people learn’. My role is to support the community, my colleagues do sales and others help with implementation. It’s still hard to convince event organisers about sincere intentions to serve the community around learning. A way to overcome this is to organise your own events, like we do.
TJ: How can you change the trend with your own approach to events?
Ger: I always like to challenge and experiment with other formats than the classical ‘sage on the stage’ model and activate the participants to create deeper learning and more opportunities to explore relevance for their own context. I’ve moderated many ‘fishbowl’ sessions where my ambition is to facilitate the conversation between participants and reach actionable conclusions.
Another favourite of mine is the ‘unpanel’. During a classical panel discussion, a moderator interviews a few experts on stage and the audience listens and can ask questions. The ‘unpanel’ flips that model. After a very short presentation related to the main topic in which every panellist shares their personal perspective, the panellist concludes with an open-ended question towards the audience. The audience is split into groups and they start a conversation around the question and come up with an answer. Towards the end, the audience shares their answer with the panellist and they have a short conversation about it. This leads to deeper social learning and helps each participant to arrive at insights or actions most relevant to their specific context.
Creating new concepts for events with and for the community is also part of my role. It is a privilege to do these things as a job and work with a small team of nice colleagues on this. I’m proud of the things we have done for the community, like the ‘Learning Failures United’ event that we have done a few times, where learning professionals meet up and share their failures, including lessons learnt.
Or the online free ‘miniMOOC’ on Social Learning that we did during the Covid crisis – we created a social learning approach to learn about social learning, ‘practice what you preach’ is always top of mind for what we do. For a few years, I’ve worked closely with my younger colleague, Roy de Vries. He has taken over a big part of my role since my health deteriorated. It is a great experience to work with this new-generation blended learning pro and see him create and implement great blended learning events with internationally renowned learning experts. I strongly believe in the Frank Underwood quote: “If you’re lucky enough to do well, it’s your responsibility to send the elevator back down” and working with Roy gives me the opportunity to live this principle.
“Take the time once in a while to look at and try to understand the future a bit, after all, it is the place where you will spend the rest of your life”
TJ: Tell us about the role of research in what you do
Ger: Research is as important for our profession as it is for any other. One part of my activities related to research is very simple. When I see new relevant research initiatives on social media, I always try to support them by sharing them in my network and inviting my followers to contribute. Sometimes researchers reach out to me to do so. Another aspect is to help to share the results. That can be done in different ways: sometimes I share summaries of the results online and sometimes organise webinars with the researcher to explain their findings.
I’m also keen on initiating research. Based on my experience, this works best in partnership with clients and universities. Not so long ago, we did some research on personalised learning, finding that it resulted in a 30%+ time saving related to non-personalised learning, with the same learning outcomes and the same learner experience. It is important to work with universities to create a good research design and to let a neutral party come up with the final results. I’m now looking into new research related to AI-generated learning content, especially video content.
L&D professionals and also some learners ‘complain’ these days when video content of a learning programme is created by AI and is not ‘real enough’. I do understand that reaction, but it also leads to a second reaction: ‘so what?’ It seems to have an impact on the experience, but does it also have an impact on learning itself? Others argue that video content showing real people is also ‘fake’ in the sense that actors play their roles in a studio setting using a highly structured script. So, the question would be if AI-generated video content leads to different learning outcomes compared to video showing real people? We should stay critical and do our research.
This is a general point of attention to me as L&D trend catcher. I always have to balance my enthusiasm about trends with the critical mindset related to questioning if the specific trend – however cool it might be – has an impact on learning.
Like I said a few times before, I feel very privileged to work as an L&D trend catcher and for me, it is more a way of living compared to a job. I understand that not everybody has the same enthusiasm as I do related to trends and the future. I want to finish with sincere advice: take the time once in a while to look at and try to understand the future a bit, after all, it is the place where you will spend the rest of your life.
Ger Driesen is L&D Trend Catcher at aNewSpring
