At last year’s Learning Technologies Awards, Mindtools and South Western Railway won Gold in the ‘Best use of blended learning – commercial sector’ category. 

In this week’s episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast for 2025, Ross D and Claire are joined by Becky Eason, Leadership Delivery Manager at South Western Railway, to discuss: 

• The context in which the program was developed, and the problems it was designed to solve; 

• How we used focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and a valid and reliable behavioral survey to test assumptions and prove impact; 

• The results of the program and the changes we've made to it in response to evaluation of the pilot. 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Claire gave her seal of approval to Wicked, Becky recommended the Netflix series La Palma, and Ross D wondered why he doesn’t listen to the Song Exploder podcast more often. 

For more from us, visit mindtools.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 us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Dickie 

• Claire Gibson 

• Becky Eason 

Do remote and hybrid managers need different skills to those who work in-person? If so, what are those skills and how do we develop them? 

In this first episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast for 2025, Ross Dickie and Ross Garner are joined by return guest Gary Cookson, author of Making Hybrid Working Work.

We discuss: 

• The ‘sensory loss’ that takes place when managers move to a hybrid environment 

• The digital signals that help managers understand their teams 

• Strategies for building hybrid management capability. 

Gary’s book, Making Hybrid Working Work, is available now from Kogan Page. 

During the discussion, we referenced a few other episodes of our podcast: 

• 271 — Jobcraft Country 

• 406 — Revisiting 70:20:10: Theory into practice 

• 407 — Revisiting 70:20:10: From learning to performance 

• 421 — Good managers balance care with results 

Ross Garner also discussed ‘context-dependent memory effect’. 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, we each shared a paper: 

• Ross G: Vences, M., Köhler, J., Hutter, C. R., Preick, M., Petzold, A., Rakotoarison, A., ... & Scherz, M. D. (2024). Communicator whistles: A Trek through the taxonomy of the Boophis marojezensis complex reveals seven new, morphologically cryptic treefrogs from Madagascar (Amphibia: Anura: Mantellidae). Vertebrate Zoology, 74, 643-681. 

• Gary: Veronese, N., Stubbs, B., Noale, M., Solmi, M., Vaona, A., Demurtas, J., ... & Fontana, L. (2017). Fried potato consumption is associated with elevated mortality: an 8-y longitudinal cohort study. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 106(1), 162-167. 

• Goh, E., Gallo, R., Hom, J., Strong, E., Weng, Y., Kerman, H., ... & Chen, J. H. Large Language Model Influence on Diagnostic Reasoning. JAMA Network Open, 7(10). 

For more from us, including details of our new Manager Skill Builder, visit mindtools.com.  

There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work.   

For more from Gary, see EpicHR.co.uk 

Connect with our speakers    

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Garner 

• Ross Dickie 

• Gary Cookson

Another year, another Christmas Special! We've scraped the barrel of festive ideas and selected Love Actually, the "greatest Christmas movie of all time", as the unfortunate premise of this year's audio horrorshow.

In this edition, Ross G will be asking questions that are very loosely based on the Richard Curtis classic, with answers from Ross D, Anna and Owen.

Including:

• In Love Actually, grumpy husband Alan Rickman gets into trouble when he buys a necklace for a woman who isn't his wife. If you were to buy a gold necklace for another profession, other than L&D, what would it be and why?
• Creepy romantic Andrew Lincoln spends Love Actually pining after Keira Knightley: The wife of his best friend. What aspect of L&D do you secretly love, but know that you can never be involved with?
• Spurned husband Colin Firth spends Love Actually learning Portuguese to be with the woman he loves. What L&D language do you plan on spending the Christmas season learning?
• Aging rocker Bill Nighy performs his single 'Christmas Is All Around Me' naked on TV, to celebrate it taking the Christmas Number 1 spot. What's your great ambition for 2025?

During the discussion, Ross D referenced our newsletter 'Every learning intervention you design should be award-worthy'

Ross G referenced the Mitchell & Webb sketch 'Are we the baddies?'

Anna recommended our 'critical thinking' Skill Bite course.

The papers Anna discussed were:

• Carter, J. W., & Youssef-Morgan, C. (2022). Psychological capital development effectiveness of face-to-face, online, and Micro-learning interventions. Education and Information Technologies, 27(5), 6553-6575.
• Carpenter, S. K., Pan, S. C., & Butler, A. C. (2022). The science of effective learning with spacing and retrieval practice. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(9), 496-511.

In 'What I Learned This Week', Ross D revealed a shocking truth about Darlene Love's 'All Alone On Christmas'.

Ross G recommended A Christmas Carol, as read by Hugh Grant.

For more from us, including details of our new Manager Skill Builder, visit mindtools.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 us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Owen Ferguson
• Dr Anna Barnett
• Ross Dickie

When your team are faced with a crisis, you want them to be prepared. But how do you build those capabilities when crises are rare, and you hope they never occur?

In this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Owen explore the use of simulations to build capability. We’re joined by Chris Peschanel, who ran crisis management at Bayer Pharmaceuticals for 12 years, and by Phil Willcox from St8 of Play.

We discuss:

·       why simulations are the best approach for developing real-world skills in crisis management

·       the role that emotions play in making these learning experiences memorable

·       what a simulation sounds like in practice and how to create your own.

You can find out more about simulations from St8 of Play.

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Owen shared how GiveDirectly increase donations.

Ross discussed Trung Phan’s newsletter on Duolingo’s priorities.

Phil discussed the paper: Chang, C. C., & Yang, S. T. (2024). Learners’ positive and negative emotion, various cognitive processing, and cognitive effectiveness and efficiency in situated task-centered digital game-based learning with different scaffolds. Interactive Learning Environments, 32(9), 5058-5077.

For more from us, including details of our new Manager Skill Builder, visit mindtools.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 us on LinkedIn:

·       Ross Garner

·       Owen Ferguson

·       Phil Willcox

·       Chris Peschanel

Hello listeners! No new episode this week, but we wanted to revisit this 2018 classic with Dom Price, from Atlassian.

It'll help you think about whether the habits and behaviors that have helped you navigate the world to this point, are still useful today.

Regular show notes below.

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In the early stages of our careers we learn how to do our jobs, manage office politics and earn promotion. But those habits and behaviours that initially help us advance can become a burden. We end up in meetings because it used to be important to show face, and not because they're an effective use of our time.

In this week's GoodPractice Podcast, Ross G and Owen speak to Dom Price, Futurist at software developer Atlassian, about his approach to 'unlearning' habits and behaviours.

If you'd like to share your thoughts on the show, you can find us all on LinkedIn.

The Atlassian Team Playbook is available at: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook

For a fun insight into how Atlassian team members speak to one another, see: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/inside-atlassian/teamwork-data-visualization

Owen's 'What I Unlearned This Week' covered Johann Hari's Guardian piece on depression. The original article is here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/07/is-everything-you-think-you-know-about-depression-wrong-johann-hari-lost-connections 

And, for balance, the counter argument is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/08/is-everything-johann-hari-knows-about-depression-wrong-lost-connections  

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

As Ben Betts wrote in a recent blog post, ‘the LMS is the first point of entry to learning; the front-of-house of our industry.’ While that front-of-house may look a little different now than it did twenty years ago, and despite the oft-repeated claim that the LMS is dying, it remains the default gateway to digital learning in organizations. But are things about to change?

To answer that question and others, Ben joins Ross D and Owen on this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast to discuss:

·       the many eras of the LMS, and how we got to where we are now;

·       the forces that have shaped e-learning interfaces over time;

·       how AI and other changes in the tech landscape might usher in a new era.

You can read Ben’s blog post, ‘What’s the Next Generation of E-Learning Interfaces?’, on his website.

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Owen recommended the podcast Acquired, and Ben mentioned the website ‘There’s an AI for That’.

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. 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 us on LinkedIn:

·       Ross Dickie

·       Owen Ferguson

·       Ben Betts

How can we help managers demonstrate care for their teams, while maintaining high standards of accountability and performance?

In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross G and Dr Anna Barnett are joined by Joris Merks-Benjaminsen, Managing Without Power, to discuss:

• why nice managers can still provide mediocre management
• how managers can balance care for their teams with high levels of performance
• and how to build better managers.

For more from Joris, visit managingwithoutpower.com

The paper Anna discussed, on 'nondecision-making', was: Bachrach, P., & Baratz, M. S. (1963). Decisions and nondecisions: An analytical framework. American political science review, 57(3), 632-642.

Google's research into great managers (Project Oxygen) and effective teams (Project Aristotle) is available online.

During the discussion, Joris referenced the prisoner's dilemma.

We also discussed findings from our report, 'Building Better Managers'.

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Anna recommended Those People Next Door by Kia Abdullah.

Joris discussed Sinterklaas.

Ross G discussed 'sovereign AI'.

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

You can also email [email protected] and Ross G will get back to you.

Connect with our speakers

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

• Ross Garner
• Dr Anna Barnett
• Joris Merks-Benjaminsen

Are you an over-committing over-achiever? In Toxic Productivity, author Israa Nasir argues that you can only maintain that approach to productivity for so long. 

Eventually you’ll burn out, exhausted by all those ‘time management hacks’ that organizations (like Mind Tools!) keep suggesting.  

So this week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Israa joins Ross Dickie and Ross Garner to offer an alternative approach. We discuss: 

• how toxic productivity manifests in our lives 

• how getting rewarded for our productivity tricks us into trying to achieve more 

• how the signals that managers send sets expectations for their teams. 

The book, by Israa Nasir, is Toxic Productivity. 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross D recommended checking out the NotebookLM AI-podcast version of our newsletter. 

Israa recommended the ‘Under the K’ venue in New York. 

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. 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 us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Dickie 

• Ross Garner 

• Israa Nasir 

Learning measurement is difficult, complex, and expensive. Or is it? 

In Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring, Dr Alaina Szlachta applies a Build-Borrow-Buy approach to learning measurement, and joins The Mind Tools L&D Podcast this week to share her insights with Ross Dickie and Owen. 

We discuss: 

• the importance of asking the right questions 

• how to bake measurement into your programs 

• what ‘Build’, ‘Borrow’ and ‘Buy’ look like in practice. 

Find out more about Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring. 

You can also sign up for the book launch party, or sign up for Alaina’s newsletter.  

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. 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 us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Dickie 

• Owen Ferguson 

• Dr Alaina Szlachta 

Measuring management capability is intrinsically complex. Unlike sales training, where you have sales, or customer-service training, where you have CSAT scores, management doesn’t have a built-in metric we can use to quantify learning impact. So, what’s the solution? 

This week on The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross Dickie is joined by Owen and Anna to discuss our new ‘Manager Skills Assessment’ — a scientific diagnostic that managers and their organizations can use to evaluate their capability. We discuss: 

• what the Manager Skills Assessment (MSA) is, and how it works; 

• how we designed the MSA based on scientific research; 

• what managers and L&D teams can expect to get out of the MSA. 

To learn more about the Manager Skills Assessment, visit our website. 

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Owen mentioned SpaceX’s ‘Mechazilla’. 

Ross D also referenced Donald Taylor and Egle Vinauskaite’s latest report, AI in L&D: Intention and Reality. 

For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtools.com/business. 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 us on LinkedIn: 

• Ross Dickie 

• Owen Ferguson 

• Anna Barnett 

If you work in learning and development, you probably get some direction from your senior leadership team about what to focus on and how much to spend. But, once you get into the details, you have lots of room to play.

In this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Chief Learning Officer Marc Steven Ramos joins Ross Garner and Ross Dickie to discuss:

·       the strengths and weaknesses of different genAI tools

·       whether tools like ChatGPT are living up to the hype

·       how L&D can start experimenting, and why it’s the ideal team to do so!

Marc discussed these ideas in more detail on his Substack and in his article for Harvard Business Review (with Marc Zao-Sanders).

In ‘What I Learned This Week’, Ross G recommended a warning on ‘pokies’ from The Guardian.

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

Or become a member to support our show! Visit mindtools.com and use the offer code PODCAST15 for 15% off an individual subscription. This offer is for new subscribers only and can’t be used with any other offer. 

Connect with our speakers   

If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with us on LinkedIn:

·       Ross Garner

·       Ross Dickie

·       Marc Steven Ramos