313 — How can we learn at speed to drive performance?

How is it possible to learn faster than external world changes? What do we need to do to purposefully protect ourselves against irrelevance?  

Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Gemma and Ross G are joined by author of Learning at Speed, Nelson Sivalingam, to discuss how organisations, L&D teams and individuals can upskill and reskill efficiently. 

We discussed:  

• What learning at speed means 
• The barriers to learning at speed 
• How we can overcome those challenges 

 Nelson’s book, Learning at Speed, is available from the Kogan Page website or any other good bookseller. 

To plug into Nelson’s podcast, L&D Disrupt, find it wherever you get your podcasts, or visit the HowNow podcast webpage. 

At the start of the podcast, Gemma referenced The Economist article, ‘The tech winners and losers of the pandemic’.  

Nelson mentioned Andy Lancaster’s Driving performance through learning. This is available from Kogan Page or any other good bookseller. 

Michelle Parry-Slater’s The Learning and Development Handbook also cropped up in the conversation. It’s also available from Kogan Page and any other good bookseller. 

Nelson recommended reading Sapiens: A brief history of humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Get a copy on Amazon. 

Nelson talked through the ICE framework, a scoring method created by Sean Ellis. Find out more here: productplan.com/glossary/ice-scoring-model/ 

Additionally, Nelson advocated using the principles of ‘Jobs to Be Done’. To read about the practices involved, take a look at Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice. You can find it on Amazon. 

Ross referenced the Agile Manifesto. You can read it and the 12 principles on agilemanifesto.org. 

In WILTW, Ross talked about the percentage of American subjects in social psychology studies as discussed on the Freakonomics podcast episode, ‘The U.S. is just different – so let’s stop pretending we’re not.’  

Gemma mentioned ‘Kopfkino’, a word that appears in Susie Dent’s new book and appeared as Word of the day on her Twitter feed. 

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.     

Connect with our speakers   

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter: 

• Nelson Sivalingam - @thatnelsondude 
• Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT  
• Gemma Towersey – @gemmatowersey