Reading Beyond L&D

Since the first IDTX magazine came out in May, the conversations it prompted have great. We published articles from some excellent L&D practitioners, as you’d expect, but the pieces that produced the richest discussion came from people working in, or holding expertise in, other fields entirely.

One was from Rebecca McDowall, who works in L&D and holds a master’s in mental health science. Her article, “What dementia teaches us about learning,” included this phrase: “If skill acquisition can continue when conscious recall is unreliable, then conscious recall is a poor measure of whether learning has occurred.”

Research into conditions like Alzheimer’s is telling us something about skill development, in this case what does not drive it and what cannot reliably measure it, and that insight did not come from an L&D resource; it came from medical research.

Note: We can also draw this insight from a number of other fields, but this is a good reminder that every field in which we can draw the same insight strengthens the reliability of that insight, informing the level of credence we should give it in our own synthesised ideas, processes, and approaches.

The connections we need lie in fields beyond our own: medical research, social sciences, organisational psychology, workflow economics, and business management, where, despite the volume of nonsense spread around, looking at you NLP and the like, serious work is still being done inside organisations and testing environments to understand what does and does not improve leadership and performance. Synthesising ideas across those sources is how we operate at the cutting edge of practice and become a future-focused function, instead of a reactive solution to yesteryear’s training needs.

None of this is a new idea; what the post-magazine conversations showed me is how little of it is built into our core practice, how far reading and research from adjacent fields still sit at the margins of what most of us do when they should be central. It’s something we need to fix if we want to stay relevant and effective.

It doesn’t mean ploughing through stacks of research papers. It can be audiobooks, books by good science communicators, free online courses, and YouTube summaries, though the further we travel from a primary source the more carefully we have to weigh how much has been simplified or distorted along the way. Whatever your appetite for an academic journal, there is something to learn from these fields.

What they won’t do is hand us the implications for workplace learning; nobody finishes a paper on memory or motivation by explaining how to design a workshop around it. That part is our job. What we can all do is collect these raw inputs and start discussing them more openly with each other.

So this is a call to read broadly, to experiment, and to build new approaches out of relevant research from every field, instead of waiting for an award-winning training programme to appear and only then deciding it’s safe to copy. Contextualisation takes time and effort. Doing it with the best scientific evidence available is a competitive advantage, if we choose to use it.

You can check out the first instalment of the IDTX Magazine on the IDTX website for free.