How do we set ourselves up to learn?

An interview with Jo Royce, Consultant-coach and ex-Unilever/Google Capability leader

All this month, we’ve been focusing on why Old Dogs need to learn New Tricks, and how to go about building our own Stay Ahead Plans to drive our own learning journey.

When we started exploring this topic, one of the first names that came to find for inspiration was Jo Royce, LookUP Expert, regular reader, and former capabilities leader at Unilever and Google.

Our recent interview with Jo was an opportunity to look at learning from lots of different angles – including why it matters so much to find your own path, and why it is so hard for organisations to meet the learning challenges of mid-career.

Jo has covered some really interesting ground in her career, and made some big shifts, from agency leader, to L&D/capabilities leader, to Board Advisor.

But throughout, she has been on a quest of people-centricity.

How do you transform organisations, industries, and the world, by putting people, and their desire to learn and grow, at the heart of everything?

In this interview we look at three different chapters of her journey.

Chapter 1: ‘Explaining the Internet’

When we first met Jo, we were both, in different ways, explaining the Internet to a previous generation of marketers. It was an experience with ups, and downs. Many of our own generation are coming back to this theme, as AI brings a similar learning challenge to an established generation. In this interview, we discuss:

-       Our responsibility to keep an open mind and learn

-       The importance of respect and empathy in sharing new ideas

-       Why we all need to play and learn in the world of AI (see below)

Chapter 2: Enterprise-level learning

We then discussed some of her experience of leading learning at the enterprise level. It’s clear that even in some of the best-equipped businesses, organisations are struggling to:

-       Create the right spaces and freedom to learn

-       Embed truly creative experiences in the learning agenda

-       Empower autonomy in the way people learn in the organisation

All subjects very close to our hearts as our LookUP workshop proposition scales within some of our very enlightened client partners. It’s also very close to some of the themes of decentralisation that we discussed last month around community-building in the workplace.

Chapter 3: Our personal learning journeys

We then focused more deeply on Jo’s own learning journey – in particular as she pivots her own practice towards the new challenge of championing the triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profit. We discussed:

-       How to work out the best way for you to learn

-       How to identify your own strengths and gaps

-       How to filter the infinite sea of learning content

In the process, Jo reintroduced us to the concept of Johari’s window, which sits behind some of our thinking about how to define your own learning agenda.

This fantastic interview has really shaped our thinking around how to help Old Dogs learn New Tricks. You can watch the whole thing for free here (and if you like it, why not share it too.)

If you’d like a framework to build your own Stay Ahead Plan, you can do that here…and look out for our new LookUP List next week!