Stella Collins is the author of Neuroscience for Learning and Development and a leading expert in her field. She is the co-founder of Stellar Labs, a learning technology platform that leverages AI and neuroscience to provide learning that works. At Stellar Labs they're on a mission to make every minute of learning worth it.
In this episode, she explains her G.E.A.R. model, an evidence based approach that promotes transfer that leads to performance.
Stella emphasises the critical role of mentors and how real time data can provide insights that help guide both the learner and mentor's behaviour to enhance outcomes.
The Reimagined Workforce podcast is brought to you by Workforce Transformations Australia Pty. Ltd.
All opinions expressed are the speaker's and not the organisations they represent.
If you have a story about a workforce transformation to share and would like to be a guest on this podcast, please contact us at kathhume@workforcetransformations.com.au.
Connect with Kath Hume on LinkedIn
Stella Collins is the author of Neuroscience for Learning and Development and a leading expert in her field. She is the co-founder of Stellar Labs, a learning technology platform that leverages AI and neuroscience to provide learning that works. At Stellar Labs they're on a mission to make every minute of learning worth it.
In this episode, she explains her G.E.A.R. model, an evidence based approach that promotes transfer that leads to performance.
Stella emphasises the critical role of mentors and how real time data can provide insights that help guide both the learner and mentor's behaviour to enhance outcomes.
The Reimagined Workforce podcast is brought to you by Workforce Transformations Australia Pty. Ltd.
All opinions expressed are the speaker's and not the organisations they represent.
If you have a story about a workforce transformation to share and would like to be a guest on this podcast, please contact us at kathhume@workforcetransformations.com.au.
Connect with Kath Hume on LinkedIn
So for me my Reimagined Workforce is one where people really use the science of learning to get the most out of it and learner s benefit because they've built their careers. Managers and their colleagues benefit because suddenly they've got a more experienced and more skilled person in their team. And then the business itself benefits because they're actually being able to develop new things internally. If you've got skilled people, you can grow as a business. And L and D for, if we're doing a really good job, then we also feel better.
Voiceover:This is the Reimagined Workforce podcast from Workforce Transformations Australia, the podcast for people and culture professionals seeking to drive meaningful, impactful and financially sustainable workforce transformation through curiosity, creativity and data science. In this podcast, we hear from talented and innovative people making a positive difference for their people, their organisations and those their organisations serve. They share stories and learnings to help others on their path to transforming their workforce today and tomorrow. Now here's your host, Kath Hume.
Kath Hume:Stella Collins is a global leader in learning and neuroscience and the author of one of my most read books Neuroscience for Learning. I first became aware of Stella's work almost a decade ago, when I asked Michelle Ockers for some recommendations of people I should follow. What I quickly discovered was an amazing leader with the generosity to share with others. I don't expect you'll remember this, Stella, but in my early Twitter days I created a series along the lines of the 12 days of Christmas and I highlighted someone I admired for 12 days.
Kath Hume:Obviously, you made the cut and I posted to all of my less than 100 followers.
Kath Hume:that I thought that Stella Collins was someone worthy of following. A s a novice in social media, you kindly reached out to me this unknown Aussie to you, I'm sure and you explained the whole concept of a hashtag, which I think just really demonstrates the kind of person you are and how authentic you are about raising our profession. So I am really thrilled to have this conversation with one of my true heroes. So thanks so much for being part of the Reimagined Workforce podcast.
Stella Collins:Well, thank you for inviting me. It's an absolutely lovely introduction.
Kath Hume:It is very genuine. I have been following you for a long time and you are always very kind in commenting and things on LinkedIn now. I don't do Twitter anymore, but LinkedIn is definitely a place where we have some really great conversations that I really enjoy. So I'm wondering if you could tell us about your career to date and what you're currently doing.
Stella Collins:Okay, so it's quite a long career nowadays. I started I studied psychology at university and it was very much the science part of psychology, so kind of the neuroscience part of psychology which I absolutely love. But when I left university there weren't a lot of jobs around and there were a lot of jobs in IT. So I ended up becoming a programmer, which I really enjoyed. It was a great job, great role, the programming, coding, analysis, the whole kind of shebang.
Stella Collins:And then at some point, early in the 2000s, I kind of got this job by mistake. That was learning, that technical support and training manager. And I didn't want the training job because all the training I'd ever had was really awful. It was just sit, listen and you're supposed to learn. You get back to work and think well, now I have to learn what it is that I was allegedly being taught, so I really didn't want to go into training. I thought it was a horrible, horrible job.
Stella Collins:But I met some very inspirational people, one of whom was a colleague I worked with and she kept saying Stella, I think if you did training well, you will enjoy it and it's kind of your thing.
Stella Collins:I met a group of people who introduced me to accelerated learning and I kind of realised that there's a whole different way of helping people to do their jobs better, but to learn to do their jobs better. So I kind of then became a self employed trainer and then very quickly started my own company, which was quite successful. wrote my book and we had a lot of fun kind of playing with mainly kind of communication type training, but we did a lot in terms of train the trainer and help them. You know, our profession become better. And then four years ago now, or five years ago now, my current co-founder read my book because in his company they were doing a lot of training and he had no idea whether there was any impact and he was just like really frustrated that there was a lot of money being spent, a lot of time being spent.
Stella Collins:He had no idea that that had to come here. So he tracked me down, we started working together and then eventually we decided let's found company together. He had the real entrepreneurial growth skills and I had the kind of the learning side to piece. So we started a company Stellar Labs and we're still here four years later and we've now really rather beautifully married my two lives together because we're now a learning tech company. So we've brought not that I ever do any coding, but we have a learning tech company. So my two lives have come together, which is great.
Kath Hume:And it's probably not a complete accident that those two things, because I think when we love things and we, it's hard to drop one. So my example of that is I really love workforce planning and learning and development. I really find it hard to just stick with one, and so I do tend to blend and merge the two together as well, and I think probably your background in learning and understanding how we learn has enabled you to do that and carry on those two professions simultaneously.
Stella Collins:I learned to adapt, if nothing else.
Kath Hume:So tell me I asked all of the guests we have on the podcast what does your reimagined workforce look like?
Stella Collins:So for me at Stella Labs, our mission is that every minute spent learning is worth it, and that's really really what I want. Training learning is so important, particularly in a changing world. Everything is rapidly changing all the time, which means we have to adapt, we have to change, we have to learn. A nd if the learning we're doing is wasting our time or not having the impact that it should have, it's hugely frustrating for everybody, everybody involved. There's a lot of stakeholders involved in the learning process and yet there is. If you use the science of learning, if you get people engaged, if you have a really strong process focused on this, person is learning for a purpose. They're learning to do something in the workplace. When we focus on that and when we focus on enabling the other stakeholders to understand the value and the impact that that can have, then you can really start to have training that is highly effective, hugely engaging.
Stella Collins:Learning should be enjoyable, but not only enjoyable. It needs to have an impact. So for me, I reimagine work, for it is one where people really use the science of learning to get the most out of it and learn as benefit because they've built their careers. Managers and their colleagues benefit because suddenly they've got a more experienced and more skilled person in their team and then business itself benefits because they're actually being able to develop new things internally. If you've got skilled people, you can grow as a business and also for L&D. If we're doing a really good job, then we also feel better. So for me this is the real win. You know the usually effective learning principles and build and support people to learn in the way that our brains learn quite naturally and learn best.
Kath Hume:And I think once you've had that experience of evidence based learning that works, that gives you that drive to then engage in it again. I think the worst thing that we do to people is put them in a negative experience where there aren't any outcomes and we expect them to come back.
Kath Hume:That's obviously not going to be enticing for people. So I think not only are you creating that value at the time with the interventions that you're doing, but you're also building that love of learning so as those people can go and carry on throughout their careers and know what good learning looks like.
Stella Collins:I mean, one of the things I really quite like is to have, s ometimes called revolting learners, learners who were able to say this isn't working for me. You know, what we need to do is X, y and Z, and I was a training program recently where I was learning and I was compelled to give them some generous feedback. I wasn't criticizing everything, but I just said there's some ways you can make this just more effective. Here they are. I think if we had every learning professional did that, but also learners began to understand how they learn best, how they learn in the most effective way. They started to say, well, could we do this instead of just sitting and listening to the expert talk? That would be hugely important.
Kath Hume:I think that's why I love your book so much, because it explains what's happening in your brain and why things work. So once you've got that knowledge but I think without that, you can't really be blamed for thinking the traditional way that it's going to work, because that's how most of us were raised. Again, what I mentioned before about once you've seen what good learning looks like, I actually think sometimes with workplace learning what's interesting is you can design that and people might even learn without even realizing their learning. But calling that out to them and saying, okay, now you've learned that, how do you reinforce? So what are the things that you can do post that learning experience to make sure you can continue refreshing that and applying that in the workplace or whatever it is that you gain those skills for?
Stella Collins:So, for me, the way I think about learning is you haven't done the learning until you've applied it regularly in the workplace and you feel.
Stella Collins:Not 100% confident yet maybe, but you feel you can do it. So for me, what we often talk about in terms of learning is the first part of the learning process, which is finding some information or having an experience that makes you realize that there's something out there. You need to learn or to do differently. But then the key things that then follow is you need an opportunity. So we have G. E. A. R. this focuses on transfer and making sure that when this learning experience enabled you to do what it is, you need to be able to do. So. learning is also motivationally can sometimes feel difficult when you're practicing and you're doing the hard part of learning, which is the practicing and the applying, you need to feel motivated, but you need to be motivated right from the start, otherwise, if you haven't got that motivation, you're not going to do the learning. So it's kind of focus on transfer and think about motivation. Then the first part of the gear model is that you need some guidance, some information, some structured experience, some structured information, and that's where a lot of learning stops. Here's the information of the magic, but actually then you need to experiment with that information, you need to test it out, you need to have a go at it but get some really good feedback and do that in a really safe environment. And then the piece that is really important. And that experiment part does happen in some organizations. So you have workshops, you have digital classroom, there's all sorts of things. Even eLearning can do that VR and AR.
Stella Collins:What you really need to do is to do the job, and that's the application apply part of the learning process. It's where you really really the learning begins to really take place, because you're doing it in context, you're doing it because there's a purpose, you're doing it because everybody else is supporting you to do this thing, because you need to do it, because it's part of your job, but you still need the support of somebody to say, yes, you're doing that well. Or look, you can tweak this here or there. Let's keep improving this. So that's the application piece.
Stella Collins:And then there's the retention bit. How do you make sure that, having put all this effort into learning something, you retain the key information? And we know our brains are designed to forget what we want, so how do you remember the key information? How do you continue with that spaced practice to make sure that you don't learn the habit once and then forget the new habit? We need to keep on going. So for me, that gear model it's kind of pretty simple, but that's you know. Once you get to the end of the R, once you get to the transfer, that's when you've done the learning, not the beginning, where people talk about learning, which is really just the start of the process.
Kath Hume:And really that's where the value is going to be realised, because until we've got people applying their learning and doing that continuously, why have we spent the money, why have we invested the time?
Kath Hume:and that's I think you talked about frustration when you were introducing yourself and you know, I really feel for people who don't see the purpose of why we're putting them through that learning experience and yeah, and I think we're doing ourselves a real disservice because then we're going to try and engage them in learning in the future and we're going to wonder why they don't want to do it so, but I do think, with leaders like yourself, it's great that I've seen an enormous shift in our profession. I think we do recognise what good learning looks like and how it adds value. I went to a breakfast with Charles Jennings for COVID I think it might have been 2019 and you know he just really opened my eyes to that whole concept of performance architecture and it was just a new lens and I knew that I was developing learning for people to transfer it in the workplace. But that concept of value really run true and it's been something that's stayed with me for a very long time.
Stella Collins:Absolutely, and we talk at work about performance and productivity, both of which can end up sounding like slightly dirty words, but actually that's really really what we need. We need people to do their job well. We need them to enjoy doing their job well, which, if you've learned to do it well, you always enjoy it more anyway. But you know, we need people to be productive. We don't want them making errors or learning something to do something in a way that's maybe the most not the most efficient way, so I think all those things are really important.
Kath Hume:So one of the things I was interested to explore with you was if we don't do learning well, what do you think the impact of that will be? What are the risks that we run if we don't concentrate and make a concerted effort to do learning as best as we possibly can?
Stella Collins:So we've talked a little bit about the impact on people. But I mean, you know, one of the biggest impacts is learning is a very expensive business. You know you have to buy in technology, you have to buy in trainers, but also there's that whole cost of you have to take people or you may not take them out of the workplace, but whilst they're learning something new, they're not at the performance. So there's a cost too in terms of, you know, lost opportunity. Whilst people are learning something, they can't be doing something else. So there's a cost element. If you're not, you know, making sure that that learning has impact, there's a cost. But I think the more serious concerns are that you lose people's, you lose their engagement, you lose their desire, they become cynical and with them, oh, I'm not going to play anymore compliance training and that's not helpful.
Stella Collins:For, as you said, you know, if you want them to keep on learning we want continuous learning we've got to have experiences where people find that, well, that was actually really useful. You know, that was good, yeah, yeah, maybe sometimes it was a bit tough, but it was really useful. I can now do something different. And then I think we also lose credibility within our organisation. You know L&D are almost.
Stella Collins:It's still true that you know, if there's a recession, l&d is almost always the first thing to get caught. You know, well, we'll cancel training, but that's probably the time when you need to do more training because there's more change going on. Yeah, absolutely so. I think, as a profession, the more we can show impact, the more we can show that you know what we're doing is happening in the pattern is important. Then you know there'll be less. It won't be seen as cut training. It'll be seen as well. This is an investment in our people and in our business and we need to keep investing. You know people don't stop investing in their tech just because this is a recession. They look at how can we make this tech help us be more effective and efficient, and we should be doing the same with learning.
Kath Hume:You make me think back to when I was doing facilitation and then pretty much always be someone in the group with their arms folded, being very sternly, and you could tell in their mind they're thinking. My managers told me to be here. I don't want to be here, and one of the things that I really loved was making a little bit of a challenge to myself to say, ok, I need to demonstrate to this person that it was worth their while being here, and you know that. I think for us, learning development professionals is a real rewarding moment when we can showcase our talents and our skills. So people come on board and they, as you said, it's a good experience.
Kath Hume:That's part of it, but it's also about efficiency and effectiveness of what we're doing, and I love that you've your book and what all you share enables us to do that. I have so much more confidence now because I've got that book. I honestly could probably tell you the table of contents of it on my head. But OK, so now could you talk to us then about the solution that you've come up with to address this at scale?
Stella Collins:So for many years I've been using what is effectively the game. Obviously, we had a previous version of the book. It had the master model, but it's the same learning process and you know, and we've added new things. So the solution we now have is a blended approach and it's a platform we've built that basically uses is based on the gear model. It's based on making sure that people transfer learning to the workforce and then we use AI to kind of speed everything up, Not the learning process you can't really do that but the design process in particular, and we also use the AI to help personalize the journey.
Stella Collins:But if I kind of talk very quickly through the process, the designer basically designed a program the AI, basically the basis on the gear model. So it creates some contents and information that you need to validate because the AI creates it and the AI is not always perfect, as we know, but you need to validate it and you might want to add additional things in, you might want to improve it in multiple different ways. Use your design skills to do that. But once that program has been designed, then the learner goes in and what they get first of all is they get an experience of feeling like you know well why am I doing this. So it's really important that we understand, we ask the learner and make it clear to the learner what the purpose is.
Stella Collins:So the transfer objectives, that what will you be able to do by the end of this and the business objective to really clear to the learner so they know what they're expected to do and they know why this is going to have an impact on business. I think that really gives them starts to motivate them and then they get this information and they can work through that information and they can work through that information with me. We've got plenty of discussion boards and things, so you're not on your own, but it is kind of asynchronous. You can do that in your own time. You don't have to do it synchronously. And then we have the experiment part, which can be a scenario based activity so that AI generates scenarios, but it could or equally well could, be scenarios and a workshop. So it could be something where you now come together with other people, because that social connectivity is really important, and you can even use the scenarios that the AI generates in the workshop.
Stella Collins:There's no reason why you can't use the platform within the workshop as well. And then when people have kind of done the guide and the experiment piece, then they go back to work and they're given. The AI creates these work based actions, which are real activities related to your role that you need to implement and do. And when you set yourself a work based activity, you can set a calendar date for it. You select a mentor so somebody else in the business, preferably somebody who can see you every day doing your job and you invite that mentor to observe you, to give you feedback, to watch you. And again, that's all kind of captured within the platform. And then the final piece, and that's really important because that really brings in that kind of connection. And one of the things I like about that is we also give the mentor some feedback about how to give feedback before you call it, because sometimes when you're a manager, you didn't do the training this person's done. You don't necessarily know and that can be a little bit off-putting or you're too busy and you haven't got time to think it through. If you've given a little bit of guidance, that really helps. You have that conversation with the person and then the final piece is what we call the retain piece, and we have space repetition built into our platform.
Stella Collins:So all the key things that need to be remembered are fed back to you. There's a particular algorithm and they're fed back to you so that if you remember it then the distance between the next time you get asked that question increases. But if you forget it you kind of go back a step and then you get asked that question again. So by the end of it we can pretty much guarantee that people have learned the information that need. That's kind of pretty much stuck in their heads. But also it's been, they've been seen to do this new behaviour, this new performance, this new task in the workplace, and somebody else has seen and invalidated it. So you're able to measure that there has been an impact. You can see the impact and for me that's hugely important because when I often ask people how much impact are you having, how much transfer happens in the workplace, they say well, we don't really know. We kind of guess it's not great but we don't know. But once you can actually see it, because it's being tracked and measured, then you can know.
Kath Hume:And that's very motivational too. Obviously you know that I have had the good fortune of having a look at this platform and I don't usually talk about platforms. I try and keep it quite agnostic. On the podcast, I actually don't think I've talked about a specific platform before.
Voiceover:I might be wrong, but I don't think I have, but this one in particular.
Kath Hume:What I really enjoyed was because I do have that knowledge of the neuroscience. I can see how this has been designed with that evidence based learning in there and I haven't seen anything else like it and I would be really confident that people if it was an organisation I was working for, that people who went through that came out with valuable knowledge and skills that they were able to apply and had, as you mentioned, been seen to apply and had that confidence and it was from a learning designer's point of view it made me feel a little bit obsolete. Just, I have to say, because just the speed at which and the customisation, the ability for me to say, okay, this is exactly what I need, and just watch it create that for me and adapt it in the personalised approach for the learner, it's very empowering for the learner.
Stella Collins:And I just want to make it clear that I really think it's not going to replace a learning designer. I think what it does enables a learning designer to do the bits they're really best at, which is making making things look great, making things really using their creativity to make a solid framework. But to make that solid framework really sing.
Stella Collins:And one of the big challenges we took to lots of learning designs they have at the moment is it takes a long time to design, which means by the time they've got to the end of the design, often the world's moved on, the process has changed or something the business has changed, whereas if you can do it really quickly, you can have people trained up really fast and then if something changes, you can do it again. Change it, yeah, or just change the bit that needs changing, because we don't do the whole thing again usually. But I think it's. To me it's not a threat to learning designers. To me it's an opportunity for learning designers to do the bits of their learning design that are the really important bits, and that includes talking to stakeholders.
Kath Hume:Yeah, yeah. Can you tell me? You've talked about how the learner themselves can measure their impact. How do you do it at an organisational level?
Stella Collins:Measure impact. Yes, in the platform aggregates all the data, so as an L and D manager or CLA, whatever it is, you can look at different journeys and you can say over this journey we can see that there's been X percent progress. We can see that how many percentage of people have actually got to the end of the journey. What's really interesting is completion rates traditionally have been kind of did you do the e-learning? Yes, you completed it. Or did you do the activity or did you attend the workshop? That's kind of completion and that's not. Has that transferred into something different in the workplace? Whereas for us we generally we sometimes get it. We generally don't get a hundred percent completion rate because the completion is so much later in the journey. So we do get quite high. You know 18, 90% completion. But that completion is just a totally different stage. It might be three months after the kind of the learning event, part of it, and it's actually when people have achieved what they said they were going to do.
Kath Hume:But it's good that obviously, you can go back to those stakeholders that you mentioned and you can say this is what your workforce are now able to do for you, as opposed to this is what they did and there's no promise. And I've often found throughout my career it's really difficult to measure impact of learning because there's so many other factors. So I do think that this is a really good way of compartmentalising, I think, or separating things out. So, as you can actually say, there was a direct correlation between what we asked the learner to do and what they were able to do.
Stella Collins:One of the things I really like in our platform that you can see quite a strong correlation between, as you can see, how the work-based activities are progressing, whether they're setting them, whether they're doing them, and then, most importantly, whether their mentors are actually responding, reviewing them. And there's a real correlation between that and people's kind of performance in terms of are they processing through the programme. And we have one client where they were running an agile programme and you could really tell who were the and they're mostly in teams with managers supporting them, and you could tell who was really supporting the learners, because those people were progressing much better. They were doing more work-based actions. They were getting more space, repetition questions right, and they were participating. They were more on the discussion boards and things like that. So they were just engaging more.
Stella Collins:And then there would be another team where perhaps their mentor wasn't quite so engaged but before the programme finished the L&D team. They could see this. They could go to that manager who perhaps saw that mentor who wasn't quite doing what they were supposed to do. They'd say look, this is your job to support this. How can we support you to support better, and then immediately almost, you could see that the progress of that team started to improve, so you're able to kind of take action whilst everything's still happening, rather than wait till the end and think, oh that doesn't quite work.
Kath Hume:That didn't work.
Stella Collins:How powerful.
Kath Hume:How powerful, though, to be able to put that in front of a mentor and say this is the difference you could be having if you did this.
Stella Collins:Yeah, and you can show them look, this is your team, this is their team. And we know that other things impact on training as well. That's entirely possible. There was some other reason for that, but that particular organisation with that particular programme, that did seem to be the difference.
Kath Hume:So this has been a dream come true. I know you have another meeting to get to. I'm so glad that we were able to squeeze this into your day. I know how busy you are. I'm pretty confident that other people would love to reach out to you. How would you recommend that they do that?
Stella Collins:So I'm always on LinkedIn. That's our you, kath, I'm like you. I'm not on Twitter anymore. So, yeah, stella is on LinkedIn. Or, you know, visit us on our platform, which is website, which is wwwstelaulabsio. I'm always happy to chat.
Kath Hume:You definitely are. Thank you. We'll put those in the show notes and on our web page as well. So, as I said, thank you. It genuinely is a dream come true, and thank you for all you do for our profession. I think you've got a lot to take credit for in the professionalism that has arisen over several decades that I've been witnessing. So thank you, thank you for being such a great afterthought.
Voiceover:It's a pleasure. Thanks for listening to the Reimagined Workforce podcast. We hope you've found some valuable ideas that you can apply to transform your own workforce today and tomorrow. Additional information and links can be found in the show notes for this episode at workforcetransformationscomau. Please share this podcast with your community and leave us a rating to let us know what we can do better for you.