The L&D Leader: from book to podcast – the unanswered questions

Writing a book forces you to commit.

Michelle Ockers and I spent eighteen months doing exactly that – exploring what it means to navigate the changing world of work as an L&D leader, drawing on over twenty years of research, thousands of benchmark conversations, and our own hard-won experience. The L&D Leader: Principles and Practice for Delivering Business Value is where we landed. It’s a book that offers evidence-informed principles for creating genuine business value through learning. We outlined core principles we saw in the data that we believe in and that we tested against the reality of organisations in all their messy complexity. We shared how aspiring and seasoned learning leaders could use these principles to navigate to a new future for workplace learning, one that is uniquely impactful for each organisation.

But publishing didn’t stop the questions we were asking of ourselves and of our profession. It multiplied them!

From book to podcast

The conversations that followed publication, conversations in our private WhatsApp chats, workshops, and webinars, kept surfacing things we hadn’t fully resolved. What does it actually look like to apply these principles in organisations that aren’t ready for them? How do we navigate when the politics won’t move? Is the profession genuinely changing, or are we telling ourselves a story we need to believe?

Those questions didn’t belong in a book. They belonged in a conversation.

That’s how the Learning Changemakers Podcast started. A series of questions that turned into a series of conversations recorded live with practitioners in the room on Zoom. No script. No polished answers. Just Michelle and I working through the challenges that we still wanted to explore – with a community tuning into our thinking, pushing back, sharing their own stories, and occasionally saying the thing neither of us had quite managed to articulate.

One of the things I value most about that format is what it does to ideas we thought we’d settled.

In one of our earlier conversations, Michelle described working with a maintenance planning team – a story that I hadn’t heard before. At the time she had some strong L&D models and frameworks that had served her well, but something hadn’t felt quite right, so she chose to work iteratively with the team instead. When she shared her story with me in this episode, we could look back and see exactly why her instinct had worked and which principles she had used. The pattern was there all along. We just needed to name it. This was an aha moment for me in that episode – the importance of creating space to explore how the principles that had personally served us in the past builds our confidence in applying them in the future.

That kind of discovery – mid-conversation, unexpected, real – is what the podcast is built for.

Season 1 of the Learning Changemakers Podcast takes our new questions raised from The L&D Leader and creates space to unpack them. It’s not so much about presenting ideas as testing them. Can the principles help us hold up under pressure? Where do they create new problems? What are we still working out? (You can catch up with the first episodes now on all major platforms).

So many unanswered questions!

We’re picking up the recordings again, and I want to tell you about the format – because it’s not quite like anything else we’ve experienced as podcast hosts or guests, but it works for us.

Michelle and I spend around thirty minutes in conversation (that’s the bit that is recorded for the podcast). The question is set, but the thinking isn’t scripted. We follow where it goes. Those that join us live watch that unfold in real time and use the chat throughout, bringing their questions, examples, disagreements, the occasional moment where someone says something that stops us mid-sentence.

After the recording stops, we open up the conversation. Your voice, your experience, the things you’re navigating in your own organisation. Some of that reflection finds its way into published episodes, always with your permission sought first.

It works because all of us in the room are thinking about the question, not just talking and not just listening. Sessions are live on Zoom, audio only, around an hour in total. The chat is active throughout.

Our next four conversations

We are about to explore the final four questions in season 1. For us, they are questions that sit right at the edges of what we see the profession trying to work out. If we don’t ask them of ourselves, no one else will.

Episode 7: Is AI our next silver bullet?

We say we don’t trust silver bullets. But we wonder if we’re treating AI like one – not in the sense of expecting it to solve everything, but something closer to the opposite. A bullet through the heart of the very things we’re trying to build. What happens when we reach for AI before we’ve asked what’s actually needed? We’re open on where this lands. We’re less sure the profession is asking the question first.

If you want to join us live we’ll be exploring more on 2 June, 9–10am BST, 6pm AEST
Register here

Episode 8: Are we backing the wrong horse with ‘skills’?

We still question whether adopting an industry-defined narrative is the same thing as creating unique business impact. Has ‘skills’ become our next defined initiative – something we embrace because the industry has named it, rather than because we’ve asked what our specific organisations actually need? And to what extent can we avoid that trap by applying first principles to something this business-critical? We don’t have a clean answer. That’s why we’re asking.

If you want to join us live on 10 June, 9–10am BST, 6pm AEST
Register here

Episode 9: Is a seat at the table really necessary?

I’ve been in that room in the past – a junior, curious person without authority but hungry for change to happen. In fact, in my early career, I’ve been there many times. I realise now that it wasn’t the seat that released me. But we wonder, today, is our dependency on that seat holding us back? We want to ask whether seeking the seat sometimes means conforming to the table’s existing agenda rather than bringing what the business actually needs. The question isn’t just about access. It’s about what we’re willing to offer (and risk) when we get there.

This one is on 24 June, 9–10am BST, 6pm AEST
Register here

Episode 10: How do we make an impact when we are not in control?

This is the question underneath all the others. Not how do we navigate the politics, or survive the difficult sponsor, or make the case, but who are we when none of that is going our way? We want to explore how we see ourselves, our sense of identity, our agency. Is this the thing that determines our influence, more than position or permission ever could? Some questions are uncomfortable to sit with. They are also, we think, where the real work begins.

Join us on 1 July, 9–10am BST, 6pm AEST
Register here

Register for whichever ones call to you. Or all of them.

Destination Impact – the next stage of our journey

We said in the introduction of our book that we feel this writing was the start of the next stage of our own personal journey, one we invited our readers to join us on. Our journey’s destination is always and has always been business impact. But the world of work is in continual movement and conversation together around the tough questions – questions that we can’t always resolve – allows us to continue to tune in, to respond, to improve – to navigate!

Our book, The L&D Leader, captured what we knew. The Learning Changemakers podcast is where we work out what we don’t.

These are the things that are on our mind, but I’d love to know which questions do YOU think our L&D industry most needs to sit with right now? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.