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Today’s Thoughts ☠️

Ahoy there 👋,

I can’t believe I’m writing this weeks edition already.

Somehow it’s nearly May (where I get to drop my most fav GIF of the year, see below) and I can’t quite recall what I’ve done with all that time.

This week has been a crazy one.

I asked my UK friends if they would attend an event hosted by Moi in Newcastle late this year. The response has been OVERWHELMING. So I’m making this happen. I don’t have much to share now but a landing page to grab a free ticket is coming in late May.

I also decided that I obviously don’t have enough priorities in my life that I learnt how to build AI apps for work.

I’m a nerd at heart. Building cool things is my addiction. Plus, as I’ve been on this AI for learning journey, I’ve seen how powerful conversational AI tools are for performance. In educating you on this, it felt only right to get my hands dirty in building apps so I could give even better insights.

More on that in today’s big thought ↓

Anyway, enough self-indulgence!

Today, we’re exploring the power of emotion in learning and why we need to recapture it in these ever digital times.

Get your tea or beverage of choice ready, 🍵.

We've got lots to discuss!

→ Much love to today’s sponsor, WeSchool ❤️

In today’s chat👇

• 🤗 Don’t Ignore The Power Of Emotions For Learning

• 🤖 Why Generative AI is not taking over your workplace (yet)

TOGETHER WITH WESCHOOL

Want to drive real ROI from L&D?

My friends at WeSchool are hosting another awesome free masterclass with another equally awesome L&D pro.

Lavinia Mehedintu (Creator of the amazing OffBeat) will be sharing the next-gen L&D metrics that will boost the effectiveness of your learning programs in 2024.

Plus, you’ll get access to my exclusive “Using AI For L&D ROI” module post attending this session from the WeSchool team.

THE BIG THOUGHT
Don’t Ignore The Power Of Emotions For Learning

When was the last time you watched, listened or read something that moved you?

I asked this question on LinkedIn too, here’s what people said.

Here’s mine:

The final season of the super popular Japanese Anime, Attack on Titan (Yes, I’m a nerd).

Although you might mistake an animated series to be nothing more than comical, the tone of the tale it tells could not be farther from this. It is a dark fantasy tale of what happens when the world and it’s inhabitants cannot move past it’s collective sins.

A tale of a persecuted boy who becomes a man. A man given a powerful gift/curse that enables him to protect his people from what lies beyond their walls. Ultimately, leaving him with harrowing and horrifying decisions that alters humanity based on his experience of life.

If that sounds deep, it’s because it is.

I watched the story unfold over a decade. It’s 10x better than the majority of commercialistic crap we get from Hollywood (except Dune - I love you Dune).

I have reflected and questioned the themes from that experience at least 50 times since it ended in November last year. It stayed with me.

↳ That's what I believe the best learning experiences should do.

They challenge, inform and encourage you to widen your worldview.

Why am I talking about emotions, anime and Dune?

They all have one commonality - they make you feel, think and view the world differently.

Emotion is something I feel we’ve lost in L&D experiences.

Business leaders want long-term and meaningful change. Yet, the weapon of choice is e-learning or cookie cutter digital experiences. Real change driven by emotion takes time.

That’s not what a business wants to hear. Yet, it’s true.

Instead, we continue to operate in the cycle of “meaninglessness”. What a long word that was to type. It can all feel like a trap.

You got into this profession to enable change and growth.

But you’re held back from doing this by the very people that need this - what a conundrum.

While the present time finds each of us navigating the tsunami of AI mania.

AI can’t help us with this one. Not yet, anyway.

Emotions are a tricky business. They’re uniquely human. AI uses digits to understand the world, we use our emotions.

Emotions are your superpower

Look, I’m no brain scientist and I’m not going to play one on the Internet.

What I do know is that the things that stay with us are deeply rooted in an emotion. Consider the number of people that remember a relationship break up. Even if it was 20 years ago, some people remember this deeply, and why? Because it’s a deeply emotional event.

Emotions can be good and bad. The feelings they produce are like a snapshot of time in our minds. Kind of like a catalogue system which we access through our brain as a hard disk memory storage unit to remember how to do something or to avoid x thing.

Again, not a brain scientist. I’m just giving you my two cents from one human to another.

Let me give you an example.

The emotional journey of learning how to build an AI-powered chatbot

As a L&D pro, I have to practice what I preach.

I’ve spent the last two years learning a lot about new generative AI technologies. Of course, I’ve shared lots of this impact on the world of L&D with you. Plus, I deliver workshops for companies and teach 100’s of students in my online courses.

Building this knowledge to showcase how to use popular tools is what I look at as level 1.

To better support you and those I work with, I need to go to the next level.

That is focused on building my own AI-powered apps.

So, I decided to build a conversational AI assistant to help prospective visitors to my AI training services site learn more about how I can help them.

This involved:

• Learning new tools

• Working with beginner level code with no previous coding experience

• Deploying a live AI app to a website

I set a challenge to do this in 1 day.

I know that sounds a bit crazy, but when I want to learn something new, I focus deeply. I had a torrid of emotions over this whole process. It certainly wasn’t plain sailing.

I had…

• Imposter syndrome trying to build an AI app not being an engineer

• Excitement at building a live app to support my business

• Frustration at not understanding how to make the process work first time

• Delight (sometimes euphoria) at building and launching the final app

It’s been about a week since I did this.

I still feel that sense of accomplishment and confidence from this experience.

I learned to do something that I couldn’t do the day before. It adds value to my skills and gave me confidence to always exploring my curiosity and remain resilient in the face of blockers.

The art of an emotional culture

I was about to finish our chat here until a fresh pot of tea sparked a memory on another example with emotions in learning.

When I was Head of L&D for a tech company during the pandemic. I found many teams were struggling to operate effectively due to not only the mental toll of a pandemic lockdown, but not ever meeting many people on their team in real life.

It was a tough conundrum with everyone working from their bedrooms staring at screens everyday.

I’m a big advocate of remote work. I work 100% remote as a one person business. Yet there’s a lot to gain in human interactions, especially amongst teams to define and nurture the emotional culture they need to succeed.

For more on emotional culture, those smart folks at Harvard Business Review shared some useful research.

Anyway, out of the need to drive more emotional connections to enable team performance, I stumbled on something during a LinkedIn doom-scrolling session. It was a pack of cards called the emotional culture deck.

The creators were sharing a free PDF version of the tool during the pandemic.

So, I thought, let’s give this a try. Now I’m a pure tech L&D nerd so building and facilitating emotional human experiences wasn’t my strength, but the pandemic was a strange time.

The tool worked like this:

• Two sets of cards, one with positive emotions and the other negative

• A third set of cards that focused on feeling statements such as “To be successful I need to feel like…” and “It’s important our people don’t feel like this”

• Then participants would pick 5 cards from one of the decks to answer the question

• I did this with teams but can use for 1:1’s too

It’s pretty simple and that’s the beauty of it.

I must have ran this session 10 times during 2020. The results each time were remarkable, but why?

Simple. An environment was built for people to connect and share the emotions that drive and drain them. The best part was that 80% of people in those teams felt exactly the same way but none of them knew.

I heard constant statements of “I feel like that too”.

This little exercise enabled teams to truly discover how they can support each other in the good, bad and ugly, and how they can win together. Not bad for 3 hours of your day.

This was all driven by emotion.

Accepting we all have emotions, identifying the things we share and understanding what emotions prevent them from being at our best.

Not all learning experiences can be like these, but the best should strive to be.

They challenge, enlighten and sometimes provoke you to reach a higher level. In the current obsession to create more suff, faster and often at a poor quality with AI.

Don’t forget the power of our emotions to craft meaningful learning experiences.

Final Thoughts

• AI tools aren’t about content creation only

• Don’t forget our unique human data of emotions

• Make sure to practice what you preach

Till next time.

🗓️ Free event: Generative AI For Beginners
Thursday, May 2nd | 3pm BST 

​You've no doubt heard the word AI a hundred times in the last month. Despite this, very few people know the fundamentals of this tech.

​If that sounds like you, then join us for a tour of:

• ​Generative AI simplified

• What you need to know

• Being confident with AI and selecting the right tool for the job

👀 ​This session will not be recorded!

SMART THOUGHTS

Stuff that caught my eye this week.

🤔  How to build a simple decision making operating system on AI for L&D

Yes. Another week, another podcast.

I don’t know how these keep happening but I keep saying yes. This was one I throughly enjoyed because it was both meaningful and practical for companies

I joined Dr Jiani Wu on the Magicademy podcast to cut through the AI hype.

We discuss:

1. The concept of a decision operating system for AI

2. Key questions to explore for L&D leaders

3. How LLMs can be applied to enhance workforce performance

💡 How ChatGPT is supporting medical advances at Moderna

You may have seen this doing the rounds on social media.

As is speculated last year, we’re now seeing case studies of successful generative AI applications in big organisations. Others with Klarna and Stripe have emerged at the start of this year, but this one is catching the eyes.

We all have a vested interest in medical advancements. Seeing generative AI tools like ChatGPT playing a part in enhancing this work at Moderna is exciting.

🔥  Why Generative AI is not taking over your workplace (yet)

In my latest attempt at journalistic type video investigations, I explore why organisations aren't embracing and leveraging generative AI tools just yet.

Adoption takes time, more than you think.

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