How to Fix a Broken Learning Culture with Andrew Barry

In this episode, we’re joined by Andrew Barry – founder of Curious Lion and host of The Learning Culture Podcast. Andrew dives into what it takes to build a thriving learning culture in your organization.

From practical, budget-friendly strategies to the role of AI in shaping the future of work, Andrew shares insights that will inspire you to rethink how your organization learns and grows.

Key takeaways

1. Why do learning cultures matter?

You have a [learning culture] whether you like it or not, and if you haven’t thought much about it, it’s probably not a very healthy one.

Every organization has a learning culture, whether consciously defined or not. Poor learning cultures have a disproportionately negative impact and are often characterized by knowledge hoarding and power-driven dynamics where "knowledge is power."

2. Cohort-based learning drives connection

Setting up and formalizing a way of conversation that, that makes learning explicit. That's really what a co-learning experience is.

Learning happens through post-training conversations that connect knowledge to real business challenges. Start small by organizing structured, budget-friendly sessions with internal experts and secure leadership buy-in to build trust and commitment.

3. Leverage AI without losing human innovation

AI cannot innovate, it cannot come up with new ideas. Humans can innovate. We can think forward and cost and we can imagine things.

In the age of AI, organizations must focus on merging human creativity and critical thinking with AI's ability to process and remix knowledge. A strong learning culture that emphasizes innovation and problem-solving will be the key to maintaining a competitive edge.

4. Horsemen of the Work Culture Apocalypse

1. Constant firefighting
   • The organization’s response tends to be reactionary, not proactive. 
2. Defensiveness
   • People avoid ownership or taking things too personally.
3. The blame game
   • Shifting responsibility to others or external factors. Without accountability, leadership growth is stunted.
4. Disconnect between working and learning
   • While working, you should be learning; while learning, you should be applying (or thinking of how to apply) it to your work.

Actionable insights

Cultivate a learning culture by integrating learning seamlessly into daily work, encourage knowledge sharing to break silos, and tackle unhealthy patterns like blame-shifting or defensiveness through regular reflection and open, proactive discussions.

Mentioned in episode

• Curious Lion
• The Learning Culture Podcast
• Andrew Barry's LinkedIn

We hope you enjoyed this episode of our L&D Explorers Podcast! Subscribe to our YouTube, Podbean, or Spotify so you don’t miss the next episode. 

Transcript:

Dan Gorgone:
Welcome to the L&D Explorers podcast from GoSkills. On today's episode we talk to Andrew Barry, founder and CEO of Curious Lion and the host of the Learning Culture podcast. He's got years of experience developing leaders, so he joins us today to discuss learning culture. We'll talk about why learning culture is so vital for the growth of your company, the warning signs of a poor culture and some strategies you can take to improve it even with a limited budget. I'm Dan Gorgone, course producer at GoSkills and I hope you enjoy this episode Hey, everyone!

Dan Gorgone: 

Welcome back to the L&D Explorers podcast. I'm Dan Gorgone, course producer at GoSkills. Joining us today is Andrew Barry, founder and CEO of Curious Lion. Now he and his award-winning team have been creating leadership development programs, helping thousands of people become better leaders. And you know, you've been doing this for years, Andrew. I know as well as hosting the Learning Culture podcast. So, that really comes in handy because our topic today is learning culture. So, thank you for joining us today.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, Dan, thank you for having me. Excited to get into it.

Dan Gorgone:
Glad to have you. So, let's start off first of all by defining what is a learning culture. It probably is self-explanatory to a bunch of people out there, but let's really define it and talk about why it's so important in organizations.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, I think the first, the reason it's so important to define it is because everyone has it. Whether you have defined it or not, you have a learning culture. And that is organizational culture is basically the way we do things around here. And so a learning culture is the way we learn as individuals and as a company. And those two things are very much related. So how are we developing, how are we acquiring new knowledge and new skills as individuals? And you know, that that starts to, that, you know, there's, there's the individual's role in that, there's the role of coaches and mentors. And so that, you know, that's quite a broad topic. And then there's the organizational aspect of how are we as an organization, you know, capturing that knowledge, spreading that knowledge, institutionalizing that knowledge and becoming an organization that learns. And so I look at it from those two perspectives and yeah, like I said, you have one whether you like it or not. And if you haven't thought much about it, it's probably not a very healthy one.

Dan Gorgone:
That's a good point to make. I like that you have it whether you like it or not and whether you realize it or not, it's an excellent way to put it. And I think that goes for any kind of culture, but especially, especially learning culture. Just thinking about it off the top of my head, you've got organizational information, all the, all the, you know, the questions that new people have about, you know, who, who are the people that I should know and who are the people that are good to talk to, people who can give advice about, like you said, how things get done. But also specifically when it comes to your department, your, your field, your job, and especially if you've got, you know, a hierarchy where you come in at a certain level and you know that you can level up or you can get promoted, there are ways of doing that and there's certain knowledge that goes beyond just understanding applications and things like that, like really knowing the, the hows and whys. So first of all, let me ask you what, what got you into focusing on learning culture?

Andrew Barry:
Yeah. Yeah. I think like many, many people listening, I've been, I've worked in cultures that are, I've worked in both types of cultures, like good versions of this and bad versions of it. And I think, I think probably the, the bad one as it tends to do, had the biggest impact in terms of how it shouldn't be done, you know, how not to do it. And that was a very toxic culture that I worked in. And I, I still see the effects of it in people that I know who work there today. And you know, it was very much characterized by hoarding of knowledge, you know, like a very political, very power-driven type culture where knowledge was power, you know, and that, that wasn't shared as much. And so there, that was probably the emphasis kind of thinking that there's a better way to do this. And then I was deeply inspired by a lot of people in the world of kind of systems thinking and thinking about this in a systems way and how the term learning organizations coined by Peter Senge and his book the Fifth Discipline. And then I got into that book and I got obsessed with it. It's quite a thick book, difficult book to read. But I, it was one of the first like thick, difficult books that I couldn't put down, you know. And so like I just knew there was something about this idea that just captured me, my imagination and, and so, yeah, I went down every rabbit hole and you know, when he mentioned somebody in the book, I went down that person's body of work and I just immersed myself in it. And so, yeah, you know, I kind of just really have been on a, on a research mission to find out more.

Dan Gorgone:
Hearing you talk about a bad culture, it certainly stirs up some memories for myself. I've been around. I've been around a few different. I've been around a few different places. You and I both have a little gray in our hair, and that's, you know, and that gives us not only wisdom, you hope, but also some experience. And hearing you talk about poor culture, one of the first things that pops into my mind is not just that hoarding culture of information, but also poor communication. And, and that. That to me, just, I think about that and I think about the, the ways that some of my past colleagues and. And managers and leaders have. Have just done a poor job at not just sharing information, but trying to not inspire more. Intimidate people.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah.

Dan Gorgone:
To do things a certain way. But I mean, but let's really get down to it. Like, what are the, the signs that you have a poor culture, a learning culture that's broken and needs.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah.

Dan Gorgone:
Fixing.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, I, I think they're four and, And I call them the four horsemen of the work culture apocalypse. Quite a mouthful. But it's. Yeah. I think when, when you hear these four, people will definitely recognize them instantly. And I've certainly experienced all four of these things. So I think the first one is the sign of constant firefighting. Right. Just everything is just putting out fires and reactionary and. Yeah. Just kind of that being on the back foot the whole time. Right. So that's number one. Number two is a defensiveness. So, you know, not, you know, which is the opposite of sort of taking ownership of things. Right. Like, it wasn't my fault, you know, taking things too personally. That kind of thing. The third, and it's related to that is blaming the blame game. Right. Like blaming others, but also blaming external things. Blaming anything, really. Like, to me, like, you know, we do leadership development, so it's a big topic in leadership. Like, if you, if you're doing, if you're blaming anything, you're not. You can't, you can't improve as a leader. Right. So you have to start to take ownership first and foremost. So that's there. And then the fourth one, which I think is probably the most important to this idea of learning culture is the disconnect between working and learning. Meaning when people say, oh, we have to go to that training, or, you know, we have to go to that, and it's like, I have to stop my work to go and learn. You know, to go to go to training. That's. That's a problem. Right? When people don't see that as the same thing. When you are working, you're learning all the time. And when you're at learning, you should be applying and thinking about that in your work context. So when there's a disconnect between those two, that. That's another bad sign.

Dan Gorgone:
Love the way that you broke it down. And those four pieces, I mean, they absolutely ring true. What are the symptoms, though? What are the symptoms that. That you see when those things are happening? Because so much of it is going to happen under the radar, and it's going to happen interpersonally. It's going to happen when, you know, people are talking to each other in the lunchroom or they're, you know, or the chatting and they're, you know, almost gossiping about things. And a lot of this stuff is going to come up and maybe it will build. Like, how do you. If you're, you know, if you're an L&D manager out there that's listening to this and, and you're thinking, I want to. Like, this is a dream to be able to have a learning culture. A. A culture where people welcome learning, where they welcome those opportunities rather than see it as, well, they're interrupting my work.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah.

Dan Gorgone:
Someone that wants to instill this positive spin to learning. How do you identify the problems before they get worse?

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, I mean, this is. Unfortunately, there's no, like, shortcut to this. It's. In my experience, it's. It's talk to people, you know, like, talk and really listen and. And follow up on. On the kind of things. Like these things we talked about, the firefighting, like, that, you know, it's like, I do this as well in my own business. Like, you can excuse that for a while. Oh, we were just. It was just a busy time. Right. Like, we just. And so some of those things show up and it's like, okay, well, we were just busy that, you know, but if it, you know, those tend to persist, and when they persist, then it's time to question them and to really figure out what's going on. And so, yeah, I think it's so important to stop and to have those moments of reflection built into what we do and to say, you know, is this the really the right way that we. Is this the best way we could have done this? You know, and to have those kind of conversations to try and unpack what. What's going on. I would also say, though, with that is you have to model the. That sort of psychological safety, because no one's going to respond to a commerce, to that kind of question if there's no safety there. Right. So like you've got to set up that environment that's, there's a trust that's there. And so this is, this is something you have to start even earlier. You know, you've got to build that trust and to say like, hey, look, I'm not trying to, you know, we all trying to get to the same outcome here. You know, what can we, what's, what's wrong? You know, like really getting to, to that, that takes a bit of trust to, to have the right conversation.

Dan Gorgone:
And all this is going to have a big impact on performance too. I mean, yeah, all you're trying to do is is know, get results and you know, however you measure them, whatever metrics you use. But person to person, they start to distrust. They start to close themselves off. They start thinking, I have now fewer options to help me get my job done. Because you may have had 10 people that you could talk to before, but if you don't trust half of them, you know, suddenly your now hamstrung and, and you're not able to clearly communicate probably with the people that you'd like to. And so, you know, with distrust comes, who knows what paranoia. There, there, there's, you know, bad morale. People start talking negatively about things and it, it could snowball. I mean, I mean there's all kinds of potential consequences. Yeah, silosing the signs.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, and silos is another one you mentioned like symptoms and consequences. Silos is a big one like that. You see that all the time in companies like that, that siloed thing of, that's a symptom of this, you know, that's all that what you said plays out to. I'm just going to do my thing and they're going to do their thing and you know, that's where you get that siloed culture.

Dan Gorgone:
All right, so that's the doom and gloom. We've covered that. Yeah, we've covered all the negative. There's plenty of negative things that can happen when a learning culture is not doing very well. Let's talk about the positive. Let's talk about how we can turn it around. Right. So whatever position you're in in L&D, there are things that you can do. Let's talk about some of the strategies that can remedy this. Even with, even with limited resources, you can still get things done. You can turn things around. So let's talk about that. What are some ideas about things that you can do?

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, so this is, this is, this is the core of what we do as a business. But, and this is, you don't have to. You can do this on no budget at all. And it's. What I'm talking about is cohort learning experiences. So setting up and, and formalizing a way of conversation that, that makes learning explicit. That's really what that. What a co-learning experience is. So, you know, most of you probably do this. Most of people listening probably do some version of this. It's, you know, you get, you get people together. There's a speaker, you know, bring in a guest speaker from outside, maybe it's someone from inside, and a topic gets discussed. So it gets people thinking about that topic and then, then conversation happens around that. And what we do is, is build some structure around that, because often that's sort of where it ends. Like, people then have this, the event, and then it's like it's, you know, the conversation happens for a week or two and it kind of peters out and then nothing happens. But to start to like, formalize that process, say, like, okay, we're going to have four of these a year, or six of these a year or whatever, these conversations. Create some kind of theme around it, do some research. What are people actually struggling with? What, what topics and speakers should you bring in for that? You know, then. So you create a bit of a calendar around it. But then crucially, you also want to create a community around it. So in other words, we're going to go through this together. We're going to go to do these four sessions this year, and we're going to cover these topics. But then after the session and in the session as well, we're going to do breakout rooms. We're going to talk about what this means for us. We're going to share examples of when we did that and it worked and when we tried that and it didn't work. And that's where all the magic happens. That's where all the learning happens, is in those conversations. And so we build these programs for our clients and we'll bring in the speakers and we'll, you know, craft the prompts and stuff. But all the learning happens in those conversations and in the, you know, we do learning circles. So it's like an extra hour dedicated to just application, right? Like how. What else can we use that for? Or, you know, when have we seen that work? And I could share so many examples of people coming out of those breakout rooms where they have, you know, like, really specific things, like this one sticks in my mind of a client who was a group of delivery executives. So they like customer success team for a software company. And they like, this guy walked out of a breakout room with this idea that someone else had done and worked, that he used to then save his client $100,000. And he told us that. That's like, I could have never have told him that. Right? Like he had to learn that from someone else in his breakout. And that's what a cohort learning experiences is. These people go through this together, they get to know each other, they build relationships with each other and they share ideas with each other. What's working, what's not working, and that's it. Like, that's really. And if you, you can start this yourself, you know, you can set that up, you can have internal speakers. You don't have to spend much at all on doing something like this.

Dan Gorgone:
I love that. It reminds me of how, you know, we at GoSkills, you know, we're a completely remote company, but we've made it an important point that we meet up, we try to meet up in person with each other like once a year, once it maybe 15 months or something. And we try to bring in, bring the whole team together and being together and being able to talk and understand each other and meet and just, you know, but also hang out and have fun and do activities. It's a wonderful way to build that camaraderie and understand each other and, and realize that just like many other virtual companies, the ability to, to not just put the, the face with the name, but also understand that person personally, it makes a huge difference. So, but, so this idea of bringing together cohorts to learn together sounds awesome. But I do have to ask though, in my experience, when you have an initiative and you're trying to improve something, getting leadership buy-in makes all the difference because it's not. And it's not just buy in, it's leading by example. So how often in these cohorts do you see executives, C-level people coming in and taking part and sharing the space with the worker bees? So if you want to put it that way, is that something that makes sense? How do you approach it?

Andrew Barry:
This is honestly one of the common mistakes that we see is not doing that. So this is something we recommend to have in every single program. And you know, most companies there's a leader that, that is, you know, championing, championing in this idea or kind of, you know, support sponsoring it, you know, for example, and that's, that's the leader you want to start to kick things off with. And what we always try to do is bring them into the first session to really talk about, like, why is this program, you know, why have we created this program? What, what do we want to achieve out of it? And just to show people, hey, we are investing in you. This is about you. This is time that we don't, you know, go back to that disconnect between learning and work. This isn't. We're not taking you out of your work. This is helping you improve in your work. And it's addressing these specific challenges that we've seen and we've heard from you. You know, having that come from a leader, it's just incredibly powerful. It really is. And then one other thing I'd say as well is having a candid kind of fireside chat piece element to it because that is also such a, you know, valuable part for participants to go through and be able to. And we try to do this towards the end usually. So they've gone through this cohort and it's a quarter long or it's nine months long or whatever. But then towards the end there's a, there's a leadership session where hopefully that leader and one or two others can come on a panel and just get. It's like a town hall, right? Just like really candid questions and they, and they answer them. But yeah, it's so key.

Dan Gorgone:
That's a great suggestion. And I think one of the things that we definitely wanted to, to ask was for those starting in L&D, for those who are watching this podcast and trying to get practical tips for them, maybe in a growing organization or if they're in a position where they're kind of trying to establish something. What are some of like the first steps that you can do to foster that positive learning culture? Right from the beginning.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, yeah, I think, I think it's lead by example. And what I mean by that is start doing this with people that would, that are like bought into it already. You know, I always use this example. I used to do online courses and I ended up running a course that was 150 people. I partnered with another company. It was like $350,000 that we made this big, big thing. But before I could do all of that, I was doing pop-up workshops with people at Twitter who wants to come and learn about this? And two or three people would show up and I'd do a 60 minute session teaching some of those ideas. And I learned so much from doing that. But also like I was starting to. That was community that I was building. You know, these two or three people, they would become regulars when I did it. And that's what I'm talking about. Like, I would, you know, before you think of that big annual program and all that sort of stuff is just host an office hours, you know, like, invite some people in and talk about something that's relevant and, you know, talk about some of the challenges like we talked about earlier. Like, if you've seen those challenges, like have that be the office hours, you know, like, hey, we want to talk about this. You know, the, the firefighting that we've been. We've been going through over the last few weeks and just like start a dialogue around that. And, and I promise you, you'll see, you know, that, that it's just the traction. That's where it starts.

Dan Gorgone:
Nice. I want to talk about, like, as we're sort of wrapping up here, there's a couple things that we always ask our guests about, and that's the future. And with learning culture kind of evolving or, or I should say, how do you see learning culture evolving into the future, especially with technology, like things like AI. Will that have an effect on it? Can it have an effect on it? Can you use some of these tools and positively use them in a way that will benefit your people and the learning culture that you're trying to build?

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, yeah. I think it's going to become only. It's only going to become more important in the sort of age of AI, right. So what AI is really good at, it's really good at obviously learning. Right. Clearly that's its main thing. But it can only learn from the past. AI cannot innovate, it cannot come up with new ideas. It can remix old ideas into fresh ways. But it's. Its source material is only the past. Right. Humans can innovate. We can think forward and cost and we can imagine things. That's one big difference. So as we move forward, I think that's going to be an interesting thing of how those two play together and how do we leverage AI to improve and accelerate that ability to imagine and then use the capabilities of AI to help with that. And anybody who's worked with AI knows that it takes a lot of like, like cognitive capacity, right? It's not. You've got to, like, know how to prompt, you've got to adjust your prompt, you've got to understand what it's. What it's coming back with, find the best parts of it. It takes work, right? It's not just put, you know, plug in, spit out. Right. So I think going forward, human intelligence and those kind of critical thinking skills, being able to structure your thinking, be able to ask good questions, these are the kind of things that I think people should be emphasizing as a skills. Right. And really, really leaning into, and then leaning into the rest of the stuff that AI is good at. And so I think with humans and AI expert systems, which is kind of the next. Or AI agents. Right. Kind of the next evolution of this, I just think you're going to see this explosion in learning and if you can get those two together, that learning culture at an organization could be a competitive advantage.

Dan Gorgone:
And one of the things you just mentioned there is like using AI tools, the ability to ask good questions, like that's one of the most basic skills that you need for any kind of learning.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah. And we're not good at that. Right. Like when we at school, we spent a whole, whatever it is, 10, 12 years of school learning how to give answers. Right. We met, we learn the answers and we repeat them back. We don't get taught how to get asked good questions, so we kind of forget how to do that and we have to practice it.

Dan Gorgone:
It's a great point. And I want to leave people with one more great point and that is first of all, to check out your podcast as well, the Learning Culture podcast, which we find it on YouTube and you find it on other platforms as well.

Andrew Barry:
YouTube's all the, all the audio only ones and, and LinkedIn. I post a lot of clips from the episode, the, the episodes.

Dan Gorgone:
Well, let's finish with this. If there's one thing, one key takeaway that you can leave with our audience about learning culture, what would it be? Because you brought up a lot of really great key takeaways already, talking about the importance of communication and the importance of trust. We talked about leaders leading by example and we also talked about how the L&D professionals out there, they don't have to start huge, they can start small with the people who are already on board.

Andrew Barry:
Yeah.

Dan Gorgone:
What's one more thing that we can tell people about?

Andrew Barry:
Yeah, and I love that idea. You make the point you make about starting small. So I, I think what people should do and think about next is assess where you are with your learning culture. There, there are so many elements to it. There's so many things you can improve. Assess where you are and then focus on one thing you can improve. And we can help with that as well. We've actually been developing a diagnostic tool to help with this. We've sort of identified like 40 things and they fall into eight buckets. So these 40 things are like components of a learning culture. Now, no one's going to be able to get all 40 perfectly, but if anybody's interested, they should get in touch with me. If you guys want to put my LinkedIn and email address in the show notes and I'm happy to share that diagnostic, people can take it, see where they measure up. And I think it just gives them a starting point to have a conversation to say, hey, let's focus in on this area that we hadn't thought that much about until now and see what we can do to improve it.

Dan Gorgone:
It's a great idea. Love it. Andrew Barry, the founder and CEO of Curious lion, also host of the Learning Culture podcast. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us today.

Andrew Barry:
Thank you, Dan. I really enjoyed this.

Dan Gorgone:
Hey everyone, thanks for watching this episode of the L&D Explorers Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please give it a like and subscribe. Because more episodes are on the way and no matter what your learning and development goals are, GoSkills can help. Click the link in the description to find out more. And thanks again for watching.