Interview with Nelson Sivalingam, CEO of HowNow learning experience platform

Meet Nelson Sivalingam, a CEO at HowNow, author of the “Learning at Speed” book, and a host of the “L&D Disrupt” podcast. We discussed the key challenges, key tasks for L&D teams, and resources to read and listen to — more on that below.

Fundamentally, it’s about empowering people with the knowledge, skills, and mindset to be successful at what they do. And when people are successful at what they do, I believe we can solve some of the biggest problems in the world.

Companies are just collections of people who need to succeed at what they do. And that’s where L&D empowers people with the knowledge, skills, and mindset to do that.

Build your impact narrative to show L&D’s impact on your business performance. There are three types of proof that you can measure.

The first type of proof is what we call proof of knowledge. This is what most of us in L&D, probably, already do. These are test assessments and quizzes.

For example:
It’s the equivalent of if I watched a video of someone riding a bike. Can I, after these steps, ride a bike? No, of course. It just means I know the steps to riding a bike.

So, the second metric is called the proof of skills. This is whether I can apply that knowledge within a relevant context. So, this is the equivalent of me getting on a bike and riding that bike.

Now, how do you measure that through stretch assignments, where you can test out what you’ve just learned, or project simulations? Another great and easy way to implement is 360 feedback because the best people to evidence whether you’re applying what you’ve learned are the people you work with, your colleagues, and your managers. And often, there’s a misconception that if you’ve done a course, you’ve suddenly got that skill, which is not true. It’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy where you go on a leadership course and become a better leader. You need to be able to apply that knowledge. So that’s the proof of skill.

The last one is important, and the hardest one that every team struggles with is proof of performance. So, this is whether I can get on the bike, and I can ride the bike from point A to point B because point B is my desired destination. And so, you need to understand the business performance challenge you’re trying to solve.

For example:
So, I might want to increase our sales conversion rate from 20% to 30%. In this case, I measure whether the learning in the organization has helped move the sales conversion rate from 20% to 30%. Now, I use a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative data is the easy one. This is where I asked the head of sales for the baseline conversion rate. And then three months, six months later, I track what’s the conversion rate.

Now you might ask me, “Well, Nelson, if the conversion rate went up, it doesn’t mean L&D were the only people who were responsible?” They’re not, and they never will be.

No single factor influences behavior in an organization. It’s an ecosystem of variables. And so, what you then do is qualitative, where you interview the people who benefited from the learning or didn’t benefit from the learning. And you ask them, “Do you feel like your performance has improved because of this learning? Do you think this learning has influenced your behavior?” And if the combination of quantitative and qualitative data tells a story that says learning has shaped and improved business performance, that’s your return on investment.

I think the only thing that’s certain about the future is that change will be faster than today. We’re going for a period of what you call exponential change. And often, humans tend to underestimate exponential change. For example, when the Pandemic started, and they said it was spreading exponentially, many of us underestimated it. If we wouldn’t all go into lockdown, it would spread fast.

Another example is compound interest and savings accounts. People tend not to save because they underestimate how quickly compound interest will grow your savings. And so, as humans, we underestimate exponential change.

Now that is very ambitious, but that’s what we need to aim for. And to do that, we need to recognize that our only sustainable competitive advantage is our ability to learn fast and apply what we learn fast.

Because you could have a good product, a great service, and low prices, but none of those competitive advantages will sustain because the world is changing fast. So I think what L&D needs to do is a playbook that helps leaders quickly identify the business challenges.

L&D also needs to take an approach where they’re testing what is solving that problem before they scale the resources. So this is where I recommend using a lean learning approach, and it’s about minimizing waste and maximizing value.

L&D needs to be more problem-focused rather than solution-focused. Right now, what typically happens in L&D is that we have courses or content libraries, and we try to solve every problem with the existing solution rather than focusing on the problem and trying to find a solution that fits that problem. And if the solution doesn’t work, scrap it, and try something else until you solve the problem.

Where organizations want to see the impact, the business doesn’t care whether you completed a course. The business cares whether the learning you do improves performance. So as L&D in the future of work, we need to measure the impact of learning on performance. And that’s not an afterthought. We need to think about data from the beginning.

We need to know what outcome we’re trying to impact from the beginning. But often, people spend six months building a training program and then think about what they need to measure to see if this learning approach impacts them. And by that time, it’s too late. So I think we need to change our approach to how we think about L&D so we can help our company learn faster.

I often compare my background in entrepreneurship; I’ve always built tech businesses, and I find a lot of similarities between entrepreneurs and L&D teams.

As a founder or early-stage entrepreneur, you often need to figure out what will work before you run out of money:

• Is the product right for you?
• Who are your customers?
• Does it solve the problem for the customer or not?

You need to figure those things out before you run out of money or a bigger competitor takes you on. And so that’s exactly what L&D teams do. They have limited resources and need to be experimental; they need to avoid the fear of failure, embrace and learn from failure and understand what’s working and what’s not.

Often the problem that L&D face is what we call the engagement gap. The most significant barrier to L&D success is engagement because it’s the primary requirement for any learning.

It’s not the only requirement, but you can only get to behavior change or performance improvement if people engage with learning. And often, they don’t engage because it’s not a content problem. It’s sometimes a marketing problem. If the employees don’t know the problem exists, and if they don’t know there is a solution, why would they engage? That’s why L&D managers need to be good marketers. They need to know how to talk about the problem and the solution and engage people because the competition for attention is fierce.

People might say, “I could get content across the web. I could go search on Google. So why do I need L&D?” However, if you ask most people when the last time they learned something that had a big impact on their performance or career was and if that takes place inside an LMS? Most people say no. For most people, it’s a blog, podcast, webinar, article, book, or conversation with a colleague. All of those things don’t exist within a traditional LMS, right? So L&D plays a critical role in making that efficient because there’s this broad learning ecosystem, bringing it together and reducing the friction for employees to find the relevant things within that ecosystem.

And that’s where curation is a powerful skill we need to learn as an L&D team. So I think an entrepreneurial mindset with these skills means collaborating with other people within the business. So use your internal marketing and data analyst teams and learn from them.

Yeah. This is where I think the learning management systems have failed to engage employees because most of the training programs are mandatory. But when you give people the option to learn, you realize most employees don’t use their LMS out of choice because most of the learning they need doesn’t exist within the LMS.

Most LMS platforms are designed to solve the problem for the admin. They’re an admin-first platform. It’s about uploading content, tracking it, and reporting; the learner experience is an afterthought. But I think the technology needs to serve an end-to-end learning experience that serves customers, the L&D team, the business, and the employee. And when you have a platform that serves both customers, you close the engagement gap.

So let’s look at it. The advanced problem is, for example, the learning is scattered. Like I said, there is inside (blog) knowledge you have in Slack, Google Drive, or SharePoint. And the outside knowledge is often lost in those work channels. So the first challenge is how to bring together a scattered learning ecosystem.

• You can’t manually do it because the content is being created faster than we can even imagine. And so that’s one problem.
• The second problem is how you personalize at scale. If I keep pushing content out to everyone in the sales team or the company, that’s not personal because even within the sales team, we have different skills gaps.
• The third problem is how you get real-time reporting. How do you find out without doing an annual learning survey or learning needs analysis? How do you get real-time data to understand what the problems are today?

So you need a platform that solves those problems for the admin. And then, from an employee perspective, they want a faster way to find the knowledge they need. They don’t want to go to 20 different places to find what they need.

And that’s the challenge right now. If learning is scattered, it’s too difficult for me as an employee to find what I need fast enough.
The second thing is relevance. How do I find something relevant to my moment of need right now?

For example:
Imagine I’m a new manager and about to have my first one-to-one, right? What should I do? That’s a moment of need. How do I quickly find relevant learning for that? And how do I learn in the flow of work?

The problem is that most employees spend their day outside an LMS, and most often, they are forced to use the LMS rather than sending the learning to the tools where they’re working.

And this is what technology needs to allow employees to do – to embed learning within existing habits. We built HowNow because we didn’t see LMS solving the problems for both customers. We reimagined what a platform would look like that solves the problem for the admins so that they can reduce their admin effort and find more time to automate workflows, be strategic, and make smarter decisions. It’s one of the solutions to solve the problem for the employee, so they can find the right learning at the right time in a way that’s accessible for them. And that’s what we did with HowNow as a learning experience platform.

What tech does is reduce friction, improve efficiency, and increase the effectiveness of what you’re doing. And that’s why technology is such a strong enabler.

When we speak to customers, we take the first-principle approach to your L&D strategy. It’s when you break down a big problem into smaller fundamental truths, which helps you strip out any assumptions and go back to the basic building blocks of what you know is true.

So rather than building on flawed assumptions and what other people have done or say, it helps you strip it down to what you know is true and build up from there. And when you build up from your first principles, you can build up with a North Star. And North Star, in my opinion, should be improving business performance.

I’ve developed something called the Learning canvas that captures these first principles. But I recommend there are nine fundamental building blocks for your learning strategy. The first three building blocks are:

• The problem. What’s the business problem that you’re trying to solve?
• The customer. Who are you solving this problem for?
• Value proposition. What is the end benefit you get from solving this problem for this customer?

Those three blocks give you the “Why” behind your L&D strategy. The “Why” motivates your business to give you a budget, your employees to engage, and the L&D team to get out of bed and do their job.

Tracking the next three blocks are the solution. However, the solution isn’t courses or training programs. It includes the knowledge, skills, and mindset required to solve this business challenge.

You might deliver it differently: from VR, classroom training, and online course. But the solution has to be those skills, knowledge, and mindset required to solve the problem. Then the second one is, what are the partners and stakeholders who are the partners and stakeholders who can help you create that solution?

The third one is key resources. So what do you need to deliver this solution to your customer? Do you need a HowNow learning platform? Do you need courses? Do you need a classroom? Do you need templates? This is where you list your resources.

These three blocks give you the “How.” This is how you’re going to deliver your value to the customer. Then the last three boxes, building blocks, give you your what. What do I need to measure to know whether this is working?

So that starts with key metrics. They aren’t your outcome but the leading signals that tell you if people are engaging. So views, enrollment, completion, likes, comments, and shares are all leading indicators that show if people find your content and engage with it. It doesn’t mean your content is working. It just means your content is engaging. It tells you, you don’t have marketing problems.

And the second one is the outcome. The outcome is how you measure whether you delivered your value proposition.

For example:
Let’s say the value proposition is better sales performance. The outcome would be more revenue, a better sales conversion rate, or a 30% sales conversion rate, so it’s how you measure and has to be measurable.

And then the last block is cost. It analyzes how much does it cost you to deliver this value? And so people pay software cost, external expertise cost, and quite simply, their outcome minus their cost gives them a return on investment.

So there are the nine building blocks of an L&D strategy. And once you’ve filled those boxes, what you’re doing when you implement your L&D strategy is learning what you’re learning and testing each box.

You’re like, “Have I got the right partners and stakeholders? Are these the right resources? Are we tracking the right key metrics? Are we solving the right problem for the right customer?”

So the whole process of implementing your L&D strategy is testing each of these fundamental blocks that make up your L&D strategy.

We at HowNow looked at what people have been saying over the last five years and recognized similar themes. But only a few companies are practicing new updates in L&D. So there’s a gap between what we think is trending and what we think is the future of work and what is being done daily.

People know they need to be lean and agile but don’t know how to apply this practically. So, I’ll give you an example from HowNow. We follow these trends: being entrepreneurial, using marketing, and being data-informed. I think the shift from content creators to content creation is also a trend we see more and more, and the L&D teams used to almost be like a production facility where you’re just creating content.

We at HowNow looked at what people have been saying over the last five years and recognized similar themes. But only a few companies are practicing new updates in L&D. So there’s a gap between what we think is trending and what we think is the future of work and what is being done daily.

People know they need to be agile but don’t know how to apply this practically. So, I’ll give you an example from HowNow. We follow these trends: being entrepreneurial, using marketing, and being data-informed. I think the shift from content creators to content creation is also a trend we see more and more, and the L&D teams used to almost be like a production facility where you’re just creating content.

There’s more movement toward creating content that takes too long. How do we create content that’s going to solve the problem today? The other trend we’ll see if we believe the LMS product category that’s been around for two decades is dead. So if you’re a new company looking to buy traditional LMS, you need to ask yourself, what problem are you trying to solve? Because if you’re a company with what I describe as a compliance-driven learning culture, you are falling so far behind that it will be challenging to catch up if we don’t change your learning culture more quicker.

So I think another trend is a move towards a performance-driven learning culture and self-directed learning being a big part where tuition will enable that self-directed learning. And so I think from a technology front, learning experience platforms is the direction I think we’ll see as a core part of the spend for L&D. But also there’s exciting technology. For example, I recently talked to a colleague about augmented reality, and I think it’s closer to delivering some compelling use cases in the next few years. After all, it allows you to transfer your learning within the context where it’s relevant because it’s a layer that sits on top of the context where I can work. So the effort to transfer that learning and the friction is much less.

Slack, Teams, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Intercom are tools you already use; you want to access your learning and knowledge directly through those tools. And I think that shift, although conceptually we’ve spoken about it, I think the trend will be actually to see that in action.