Pernille Hippe Brun: 0:04

Welcome to Work in Progress, a podcast series where I pick the brain of thought leaders within the field of people and culture. My name is Pernille Brun and in these talks we explore the latest trends shaping the future of work and the evolving landscape of modern organizations. In this episode, I'm speaking with Lars Hoffmann, who is Learning Director at DHI. Hi, lars.

Lars Hoffmann: 0:28

Hello Pernille.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 0:29

Very good to be here. We are at DHI and in a moment, you're going to explain to us what is DHI and we're also going to hear a little bit about who you are. The two of us know each other from the times when you were developing games and using games into developing leaders and employees and starting dialogues and all sorts of things, and that's why I'm very keen and interested in speaking with you today about gamification and online learning and how it can support and help leaders learn and grow, and maybe also employees. Yeah, thank you.

Lars Hoffmann: 1:09

Thank you, pernille, great to be here. Yeah, let's begin with where we are. We are in the headquarters of DHI. Dhi is a 60-year-old Danish company. We are now worldwide in 25 offices and it's the original Danish Hydraulic Institute originated in the university world and we are global experts in water, how water moves, how water behaves in all kinds of environments. So it's all about wastewater treatment, preventing, mitigating flooding, it could be making sure marine wildlife is treated well All kinds of challenges with regards to water. So we do consulting. So it's a consultancy. But we also have our own software where we can simulate and model how water behaves in all kinds of environments. So we are both an advisory and a software company. So it's actually a bit tricky with two different kind of business models, two different kinds of expertises and business worlds to be in.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 2:17

And what is your role so?

Lars Hoffmann: 2:19

my role is that I am a kind of head of development, learning and development. So all the training we do, all the courses, knowledge sharing I have a say on that. I'm not a line manager as such, but I am our global expert center of expertise with regards to best practice, everything to do with learning, yes, and that includes leadership development. It includes our career path, how we manage our job architecture. What role does learning and development play in that? But we actually also have quite a lot of training that we do in our own software, both for our own staff but also for our clients.

Lars Hoffmann: 3:03

So the design of our training for customers is also something I'm heavily involved in. So good learning, design practices I help a lot with that around the company. And then I'm also very much involved in facilitating large workshops. When, for example, our top management is gathered. I I moderate and facilitate a lot of the those uh conferences and and also user conferences for clients sometimes. So it's it's quite a broad role of everything related to to training, learning and development okay, yeah, and what is your background for entering into this specific role?

Pernille Hippe Brun: 3:44

So you are working within HR, I assume.

Lars Hoffmann: 3:46

Yeah, certainly.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 3:48

And then learning and development is usually a particular department within HR.

Lars Hoffmann: 3:53

It certainly is and I'm situated there. I'm referring to our head of HR and communication, who is also in our executive team, and then I'm working a lot together with all the HR, business partners and HR operations, et cetera, and I'm also in the HR leadership team as a kind of knowledge leader or expert role. My background is that I work now 25 years with organizational learning, change, et cetera. I think my key expertise is probably facilitation learning design. What I did when I was external, had my own company, is that I worked a lot with games.

Lars Hoffmann: 4:31

When I speak about games mostly I'm talking about analog games, you know, physical games, and not only board games or role-playing games, but also different kinds of play and stuff like that. That's been interesting to me for a long time. I started designing my own board games when I was 10 years old and then I went into role-playing games in the 80s and so on and during my time at the University of Copenhagen I got really interested in how could you use games and play for learning, which was something that was a thing especially in the military. There's a long history for that.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 5:07

So I'm interested in staying a little bit longer with your background of developing games and what was the connection you saw?

Lars Hoffmann: 5:16

I think that games in general, we have a kind of play instinct and we can enter into an imaginary world as soon as we accept certain rules. Or now we go into a game, and I thought that was just intuitively clear to me when I was studying psychology that there was something here in terms of learning and development, and not only for children but also for adults. And what I found when I start to develop my own games and use them professionally is that especially in the early phases of having to change, adapt to a change or to learn, games are really appropriate, because when you are new in a field, it's really good to play uninhibited and it's really nice to step into a fictive arena where it doesn't matter if you fail. You can do all kinds of stuff. There's still some rigor with some guidelines or rules or a boundary, but you can really unleash a lot of energy by introducing some rules.

Lars Hoffmann: 6:18

And I think all facilitators of group processes know this right and a lot of the games that were developed especially in the 60s and 70s with encounter groups and stuff like that. They have these kind of a little bit of use of games, a little bit of role play. But what I brought with me from my interest in the gaming hobby was much more kinds of rules and how to use them all kinds. There's been an explosion in board games and role-playing games in the past 30 years, right, and so I've taken the best from kind of the hobby industry and putting them into application in leadership, development or change management processes.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 6:56

And what could an example of such a game be?

Lars Hoffmann: 6:58

Yeah, well, it could be. For example, some of the tools that I've been most proud of is, for example, having to. I remember evaluating a strategy process for 5,000 employees across the country. I developed a board game for the company to evaluate their strategy, which involved all staff, and we couldn't send consultants to all departments of the company. So we developed a game that guided the staff through a kind of playful evaluation process.

Lars Hoffmann: 7:30

So taking the best knowledge we have of a good evaluation process that's very clear, you can read lots about stuff about that and then putting it into the game so that people, in a playful manner, got to talk about the strategy process. How did it work, evaluating it, finding out the pros and the best and the bad worst things, what was missing, etc. And then trying to let the game rules ensure that this was a safe process. Everybody was heard. So to have some kind of simple rules for that so that people didn't feel, oh, now we have to talk about the strategy again, right, but but that was kind of, and people engaged with it in a nice manner, I think.

Lars Hoffmann: 8:10

Over the years I've developed between 30 and 50 different kind of board games tailored to a specific process that you want people to go through. That could be some managers, it could also be staff or whatever, and the key is, of course, to use simple game elements. There are extremely complicated games out there and you can build all kinds of stuff, but to get something where you can easily get into it, you get people to feel safe, you get them to feel engaged and playful and to talk about some topic in a tailored manner, in the right manner, right Knowing that it's good to talk about the goals before you talk about the solutions and all kinds of phases and stuff.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 8:54

Are these in the game rules?

Lars Hoffmann: 8:55

Yeah, no, they're kind of built into the game, typically because you want to have as few rules to start with as possible. Then you can build rules into the game so that as you enter through different phases a new rule is introduced, because you don't want that too heavy rule load at the beginning because people even worse back in the 90s people are not gamers as they are more now. It's much more common but you want it to be simple and have a quick start, right. But then you can guide people through some phases. And what I like about physical games in this regard is that it's very transparent. Who's controlling us? Because the game is controlling you a little bit. It's steering what can be done and said in what direction, et cetera. But that has to be really transparent so people are not feeling manipulated, they feel that everybody's on a level field, et cetera. And that is something that is really an advantage with the physical game, Because in computer games, for example, it's all inside. You don't know who's making the choices, because that's built into the code, right. So that's a huge advantage.

Lars Hoffmann: 10:00

And then, as I mentioned, the early phases of some kind of change process or learning process is really ideal here, because you have that energy of play that you can build into the tool. And when people are playful they don't have their guards up as much right. So that can be really nice talking about tricky topics to get them to relax a little bit and just go into it and explore and have fun. And we also know, for example, from a lot of the research in positive psychology for example, that when people are in a good mood they are more open to seeing different perspectives, they get more diverse ideas and stuff like that, and that's really very well suited for the early phases of some kind of change and also of a decision process.

Lars Hoffmann: 10:47

I've also built these tools for actual talking about the real work, so not you know about we are trying to learn something, we are actually deciding on something, and it can also be used for that, but not only for the early phases where you want lots of idea, you want lots of exploration, different perspectives. When you're getting down to the decisions, then people need to be much more critical because now it has a cost. Right Now we want to make the right decisions, so that's not suitable for a playful mood there. You want to get more. You know, say, oh, what is this going to cost and who pros and cons, and we want to be methodical, et cetera.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 11:23

But so the background for introducing games into process facilitation and decision making also is really to help people learn something new, and also do it from a mindset of more openness and playfulness, so that they can get to some other parts of their own brain, but also others, and play themselves out in a different manner than usual. And it's also excellent for breaking patterns.

Lars Hoffmann: 11:51

In a group, you know we are very often especially if you're working with an existing management team or a department of staff, you very often get some set roles right and some people are speaking more, some less, and these games you can easily also build in as some things that make sure that those who don't speak so much get more time to speak or at least their perspectives are explored more, etc.

Lars Hoffmann: 12:13

And you can you a lot of the good game design is about building in small reward mechanisms so that that people are, for example, the very verbal or or extroverted types. They are rewarded for being more attentive to those who don't speak as much, or all kinds of stuff, and those are things that I found in so many occasions can be super helpful. But of course, I've also, over 25 years, found out some of the limitations here, and that is, I mean, a big, big limitation is to to to find out what is actually most important to talk about right now. Games are not always ideal for that. You have to find out that in advance of introducing it, putting it on the table, so to speak, because a game can never be as adaptive as a good process. Consultant, right, I, I have a lot of experience process consulting so I can go into a with a management team and I can find out during the first 10 minutes what is really going on or what do we need to talk about. A lot of they will be finding out that themselves right.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 13:14

So it's not predefined. No, exactly, it's happening in the moment. So.

Lars Hoffmann: 13:17

I can adapt and use different kind of exercises or perspectives in the situation and the game always has some kind of. It's also always built for something right and that makes it kind of good for this but, not for that.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 13:31

Yeah.

Lars Hoffmann: 13:32

So a lot of the trickiness about using these things is to use them in the right situation. Yes, and I found that it's super good if you know in advance. We want to work with this.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 13:48

So exactly the strategy process. It's about this, so we want a tool for that, et cetera.

Lars Hoffmann: 13:51

So, for example, that evaluation of strategy across a whole company. They knew over the course of some months they wanted this done. Right, Then it was fairly simple to develop it. But a lot of my work at present, for example in DHI then it's not that clear right when we gather a large group of managers or a department for some process. Then the actual exploration of what is what is going on, what is worth talking about that, that it's best to send me not a game, right, and, and that goes for a lot of the work I do. So I as an intern, I don't use these games that I illustrated, that I developed as an external.

Lars Hoffmann: 14:28

I rarely use them because they are rarely better than myself. So that is, it's good. It's very similar to technology. I think we can get back to that software technology, for example, that games. You develop them for a set purpose and then they're really good for repeating that or that right, but they have a hard time changing for the situation.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 14:54

Or the application. So a lot of people talk about using games for, for instance, learning how to listen better or to give better feedback or to live the values of a company, and things like that. Have you any experience?

Lars Hoffmann: 15:07

Yeah, and those are all good experiences and I've been working with all three examples as tools for that, and I would say again that it's Also a limiting factor is also that the person introducing the game has to be comfortable with it, right. If it's something you send out to all departments, then you can have just one expert centrally who knows it well and can introduce it, or so to speak. But there are a lot of off-the-shelf kind of tools and games, but the consultant has to know them well, right. And that's also a big limiting factor because a lot of leadership, developers and HR staff are not super comfortable with a rule set, you know, even though it's only one page. That's very simple for me, but not for all people. So those are also a limiting factor. And that's where some online games are simpler, because they introduce themselves to the participants.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 16:10

Would you say, because, also within learning and development, there's this discussion going on, or debate going on whether you should buy predefined courses, online courses or gaming that's already developed, pick from the shelf Udemy or Learning Bank or whatever or develop your own. And a lot of people would want to pick from the shelf because it's the same right Giving feedback you can, so what's your advice there for learning and development advisors?

Lars Hoffmann: 16:39

Yeah, that's a huge topic, right? I think that of course, there are some excellent tools and courses and you can pick those, but I must say when I look at what we are doing internally in DHR, we don't buy a lot of those or send people to them.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 17:01

Why not?

Lars Hoffmann: 17:01

Yeah, why is that? It's a good question, I, it's when I, when I let's take let's take feedback for it, which is something that we know fairly well, right, and um, when it comes down to it, then the the tool in question that I'm looking at, it's using another feedback model than the one we use in dhi, right, and we want to have introduced the same one so we have a common language and we can. The tool in question that I'm looking at it's using another feedback model than the one we use in DHI, right, and we want to have introduced the same one, so we have a common language and we can kind of help each other and give feedback on each other's feedback. And it's the same for a lot of other generic kind of tools or competencies, right? So that's the kind of thing that holds us back from using these things. That's a kind of a thing that holds us back from using these things.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 17:47

So, in order for it to fit with your current situation and your language, and creating that common ground Exactly.

Lars Hoffmann: 17:55

Yes, but of course I mean we might buy something or we might get a request from a department or a location and we say, try to use this one, and then they go ahead with it. Right, and we say, try to use this one, and then they go ahead with it. Right, but it becomes too wide to talk about because, for example, online training, we use external providers for this right, like LinkedIn, learning all plural site and we curate a lot of that and then we use it and that's fine.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 18:24

Why is that fine then?

Lars Hoffmann: 18:27

They have a very big market right. Still, the kind of game providers that I'm aware of, they don't have the kind of volume that LinkedIn Learning has right. So the level of quality and the reach they have is….

Pernille Hippe Brun: 18:45

And why is that?

Lars Hoffmann: 18:45

important, yeah, because then it's kind of globally tested or aligned and lifts actually decided to use some LinkedIn Learning content for specific parts of the pre-study not for the live sessions but for pre-study from LinkedIn Learning and that was nice. That it has this kind of very well proof-tested and a good high level of quality, right Of course yeah, and then you made it, so you took what you could use, not the whole package necessarily. No, we picked the parts that we wanted and integrated that with the pre-student right, the rest of it.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 19:37

Do you make it yourself or do you then show up physically to train?

Lars Hoffmann: 19:42

Yeah well, we do a lot, since we are in 25 countries and across the globe, we do a lot of online training. And we do a lot. Since we are in 25 countries and across the globe, we do a lot of online training and especially since COVID, that has become kind of customary. So the way we often do it is that we have a pre-study part which is asynchronous, so people can watch the videos and do this kind of self-paced training, and then some individual preparation, and then we have live sessions which are moderated in video conference, where we apply what we have studied and we discuss and we do exercises. Okay, and that works really well, I think, and it works well with a busy schedule, right. So we don't have to take out three days. We can put in these live training slots over the course of some weeks and then people can be together for the live training to work with it.

Lars Hoffmann: 20:31

But they have already prepared, yeah, the preparation is in their own time and we usually make it so that they can listen while they're commuting or doing the dishes or whatever right.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 20:42

Do you check if they do it?

Lars Hoffmann: 20:44

Yeah, we can check it and we do it a little bit, but actually the best way of ensuring that is that we open our live sessions with a hard Q&A. Just you know, okay, pernille, what is the definition of value-based pricing, right? So if you didn't do your pre-study, then you're kind of exposed on the spot and that works well, especially because actually that gets us back to learning all the games I have a. I mean I think that games and fun and learning are integrated things and they are really important. But over the course of the past 30 years there's been this kind of invasion of the learning sphere with that learning should be fun and it kind of took over as learning should always be fun and I really disagree with that. I mean, I think that learning should be fun at times, but actually learning a new skill is tough. That's hard work. I mean it's not that it's not allowed to be fun and there should be fun parts and we should try to make it fun. But actually learning and mastering or getting to the point where you can provide value with what you have learned, that is tough and that's hard work. I mean you will have to go through phases where you have to repeat, you have to weed out the errors, you have to find out that you're actually not very good at it, which you thought initially or it was super fun or whatever, and so that is really important to know.

Lars Hoffmann: 22:13

Also, in terms to complete this course that we did. You will have to know and I often tell people in the announcement of the course, the kind of introductory video it's going to be hard to learn this skill right. It'll demand discipline and practice and you have to get back to it and you have to do the pre-study. It's also going to be fun, but it's also going to be hard work because otherwise people will get kind of ah, it wasn't right for me or I'll do it another time, I got busy, and all kinds. So it it's good that we have these live check-ins where we commit to having done the pre-study, to to really rehearsing and holding each other to accountability for having done that in order to get through it, to learn it and master it.

Lars Hoffmann: 22:51

And it's kind of similar with change management that in order to get the reward, you have to pull through right, and it's the same thing. And I try to spice up with fun games or to get it to play with it. But I also expect discipline and we need to do that and and I think it's especially with younger generations and we also talk with our managers about that they they have a little bit more of a kind of expectation that I, that my manager or the job jobs should motivate me. Yeah, yeah it should, but it's also going to be hard work and long hours or repetitious stuff or irritating customers or whatever right, it's not all fun, no no, it's not all fun and that's um, that's, that's okay and I mean so it's expectations?

Lars Hoffmann: 23:38

yeah, it is, and a mindset and uh and also uh, the realization that when you look at messi and he has this attitude of play, you know, when you look at Messi and he has this attitude of play, you know, when you look at the real experts, they make things look easy, right and fun, but that's because they are experts, right, and they have the mindset that has brought them there, but that has been through hard work, right, and when they are hit by, you know, injuries or fatigue, then they just continue with that mindset. And that's what expertise is, or real excellence, right, and we should admire that and go for it, but we should just know that it's hard sometimes.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 24:11

It's not just coming by itself. No, it's not just coming by.

Lars Hoffmann: 24:14

It takes a lot of work right and it does at all levels for staff right.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 24:20

Do you feel that people commit more when you open up that way or that you set the expectations Exactly?

Lars Hoffmann: 24:29

That definitely helps right to some extent.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 24:32

So it's interesting with the learning concept of fun that you might associate with right.

Lars Hoffmann: 24:42

It's interesting because I was initially in my early career. I was the advocate for fun and play and let's loosen up and allow people to to play and explore, and I still think that, but in in some places it's taking a little bit over. Uh, also, with some of the discussions about happiness at work, where it's there's been some some research showing and and you can really debate it that that that if the more you increase happiness at work, the more you increase performance, and others have argued that it's actually those with high performance that have happiness at work because they are performing right, and so that's a back and forth dialogue. But I'm certainly not an advocate of always going for wherever people are having fun right, so I also am the one to say, yeah, great with the game, but let's keep it at this stage and not at all kinds of other stages.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 25:34

But it also sounds like you make it real, so it's like this is life right. It's not always fun. And in order for you to get through that and not think there's something wrong with that or that it should be any different. It leaps directly into the concept of learning, that it is a process, and it's also about the wheel of first being unconscious, incompetent, and then you become consciously incompetent. Exactly, and that's not necessarily fun.

Lars Hoffmann: 26:05

No, no, that's a downer, Exactly so. It's exactly about that process. And also I'm very much of a hotline sticker, for you know, for feedback and evaluation during those kind of learning or change processes, and that is certainly praising each other for what is working, what people are doing well or showing some kind of talent or strength doing well or showing some kind of talent or strength, but also for saying what are we missing? What would I be missing? Or continually looking at those who are working for the clients or whatever. What would they be missing? Or why are we doing this for them and where do we?

Lars Hoffmann: 26:37

still need to pull another mile or repeat or et cetera.

Lars Hoffmann: 26:41

So, and that's because I've been very disciplined in my gaming design or learning design of looking at the end result we're aiming for- and making sure that the feedback mechanisms or reward mechanisms we're building into our learning or change are strictly tailored or tied to the end client or customer, or the purpose of the change or whatever yes, purpose of the change or whatever, yes, which people can sometimes lose sight of, especially in some of the gamification.

Lars Hoffmann: 27:08

Um, uh, you know, movements there have been with kind of leader leader, these badges and leaderboards and so on. Because we know from the art of goal setting, right, you know the whole, when we are doing a bonus schemes or whatever, when we are setting very concrete goals that we are measuring people by, they are very easy to exploit and to do. Sub-optimization on, right, if people find out the number of customer calls, the number they do, that's how many bigger bonus they get they instantly see through it and they just do a lot of poor calls, right, to ramp up the bonus, right. So these goals that people set up for performance, we know as HR leadership that that's really tricky, right, because what you measure on, that's what you're going to get and that can really hit off the target and not on the target. And that's very much the same thing, building these kind of goals, what you do when you're building games. So I'm very skeptical of that right and think that we need human eyes on these things and we need also a subjective approach.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 28:12

Is this the right purpose? Yeah, exactly, is it serving the right purpose?

Lars Hoffmann: 28:15

Is it serving and making sure these feedback mechanisms that are guiding our learning or change have a? It's fine that they have some metrics, but we also need human eyes on it, right?

Pernille Hippe Brun: 28:28

And so what do you consider the most important part of your role? What is it you need to secure or be?

Lars Hoffmann: 28:34

the spokesperson for Well, yeah, I try to. I look at a lot of our processes and try to make them simple, because I mean, now I'm not an external consultant, so whatever I invent in kind of processes, I also have to face the daily operations of it. So it has to be simple enough to run stably over a longer time and serve the purpose.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 29:05

But it's so it's kind of putting yourself in the shoes of a recipient and say, oh, I have to live with it.

Lars Hoffmann: 29:11

Actually, you have to make something simple and but also serving the purpose, of course. But but so so I'm I'm touching all the kind of customer journey of of some change or learning, where I have looking at what some training we do, et cetera, and then I try to inspire our experts. We have a lot of experts, right, we have PhD levels experts, global experts on whatever water science, et cetera.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 29:41

So they are often the ones doing some kind of instruction or training, and I try to inspire them to use a more varied range of methodologies for creating good learning etc.

Lars Hoffmann: 29:51

And a lot of what I work with is also line managers and facilitating some kind of change process there and I do a kind of summits, and then I also try to use technology you know online technology as best as possible. So I began with this interest in the analog games right. But I couldn't stay free of the software revolution right, it's everywhere. So when I came to Henley Business School in around 2014, I was tasked with looking at online learning. How could we create meaningful personal leadership development in an online setting? Because there was a lot of these MOOCs back then, right, you know massive online open education and a lot of self-paced training, and it wasn't really working well on personal leadership development, right, developing your own personal style and et cetera. So I traveled around and tried a lot and developed a concept for creating these very highly facilitated personal dialogue processes in video conference, with lots of breakouts and using different apps for that, but actually using a lot of the tools that I used with leadership teams and when doing leadership team development in a facilitated online environment, and that worked quite well. And then I brought it to other places. I've been and I've taught a lot of HR consultants in online facilitation techniques and using exercises, and there you can also use small apps, you know, using Kahoot or similar, these different kind of voting apps or other things that can do. Often it's one thing they can do very well and then we use them for that, but it's very hard to find one tool, one app that can kind of do the whole process, because there is a huge fascination in the software world for automation, right, but a lot of what we do as experts in leadership development we being psychologists or whatever process consultants that is really hard to automate and I'm not sure we want to automate it. The day we can automate that, then we don't need managers, then we can just put the ai to lead the processes right, and and perhaps we want that, I'm not so sure right, but but that's a really tricky skill that involves a big understanding of the whole sphere. Both of you know the person, the people, but also the technology that the company is working with, the customers, the whole value chain and how all those things interact, right, yes, and the key thing here that the consultant, or the yeah, doing the thing, the moderation is working with, is building trust and building a confidential setting where people can be revealed themselves, show themselves, reveal themselves, share their thoughts, deepest thoughts, deepest concerns, thoughts, deepest concerns without feeling under surveillance or under being judged.

Lars Hoffmann: 33:11

One of the trickiest things in HR is that we're sometimes trying to blend appraisal with development, which is really bad, because if people feel that they're being appraised or judged in performance, then they are things they're not sharing.

Lars Hoffmann: 33:24

That they're being appraised or judged in performance, then they are things they're not sharing. Right, and with the whole revolution in technology, we're really getting close to being able to do surveillance of people all the time with AI and all kinds of stuff, and I think that people will pull back and we in HR should be careful not to become the surveillance department, right. So right now, I think that you can find individual apps that are really good at one thing and you can kind of get. You can understand what it's doing and find out whether you can trust it, and you can recommend it to your managers, for example, for use in some kind of specific process, and that I example for use in some kind of specific process, and that I think is excellent. But these kind of do-it-all systems are really tricky. We need a lot of human eyes on the content and the processes.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 34:17

Thank you. Thank you for taking us through that learning experience of your own using these tools. You mentioned that the MOOC era 10 years, 10 years ago maybe, that was a big word everywhere. Uh, what was it that wasn't working with with that?

Lars Hoffmann: 34:33

well, for with self-paced courses in general, I mean, I think it's great that we can access world experts teaching their field exact field of expertise, uh. But for self--paced training, it's just it's actually talking about things things being hard to complete. It can be really hard to get through a lot of, you know, self-paced content. You can, you can't interact enough with it, and that interaction has become a little bit better with some learning communities or, you know, being able to ask some questions and actually get a response. But as soon as you get into things that are not so clear cut as watching an expert in mathematics go through the steps of some mathematic calculation, as soon as it becomes more of a subjective, personal thing, especially leadership development, then you need moderated groups of people talking with each other. I usually say that when it's when we're doing leadership development, that the participants, you are the content, you are providing the content. The content is your reflections and how you help each other right and we facilitate that and that's actually the way of putting it the key transforming thing.

Lars Hoffmann: 35:41

Right, yes, and, and that's why the, the trust and the, the, the openness that people are sharing, that is the whole key thing. Yes, and that is hard to get automated or get machines to do right. Yeah, but of course you can. You can use some apps for for some of these things. I've, for example, I've used some apps for for peer assessment. That can be quite nice, that where the system kind of organizes that I watch a video recording of one of my peers doing a presentation and I can write some feedback and then it's easily administered right, was that one edge flow?

Pernille Hippe Brun: 36:17

yeah, that's what they've.

Lars Hoffmann: 36:18

They did, for example, and now it's it's more and more common to a lot of lms systems that you can yes you can do these kind of things, and so I like that kind of… Specific.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 36:30

It's really specific and it's easy to use for exactly the process you want. But there you also have the interaction again.

Lars Hoffmann: 36:34

So it's not only you're watching a video and you have to learn, and then a Q&A towards the end. It's more interactive actually Exactly you want.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 36:40

The interaction Is that part of your conclusion, actually, that it needs to be interactive.

Lars Hoffmann: 36:47

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's the idea of us putting knowledge into some kind of box or on a video or in some kind of system and then we share it. That is just really old-fashioned, right. I mean that's not going to fly. Of course, with the new LLMs you know the AI systems that we've seen in recent years. It's amazing the kind of knowledge that it can contain, right, and that's a whole topic of itself. But when people are learning, especially in fields of leadership and change, and then I want to facilitate a lot of interactions, I want to guide as a facilitator that it's going kind of in this direction or that we have the external perspective.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 37:30

Based on, for instance, values or strategy.

Lars Hoffmann: 37:34

Yeah, or your customer feedback or whatever kind of things we have, also based on a method, right, like it could be appreciative inquiry. I want people to go through this way or the solution-focused method or whatever, but people don't even need to know that that's what I'm using. They just mainly have to trust and see that, hey, we're talking about important stuff, right, but that could be stuff that I want to build in.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 37:56

Yes. So one thing I would like to ask you, lars, in case you are not a game developer yourself or have your background within developing games, and you still want to introduce games as part of the learning and development strategy in your organization what's your recommendation there?

Lars Hoffmann: 38:15

Well, there are lots of good providers. I must say, especially in Denmark we've had a good so you wouldn't do it yourself?

Lars Hoffmann: 38:21

No, well, I might do right, because I also have, you know, a lot of 30 years experience on more developing games. But no, I would certainly contact, do it yourself. Well, I might do right, because I also have a lot of 30 years experience, or more developing games. But no, I would certainly contact somebody who's experienced with this and do that professionally and who has both the, of course, game and learning insight, but also has management consulting experience to understand the context of the organization. And we have some excellent providers in Denmark for that. I would recommend a company like Works, headed headed by Ask Aga, and also Sirius Games, another Danish company, and there's Copenhagen Game Lab, and they are all experts in this field of either coming up with a generic tool that you can take off the shelf for a specific process, or making it tailor-made to your own needs, or developing it from scratch.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 39:06

And what if you are not in Denmark? Yeah, in.

Lars Hoffmann: 39:08

Denmark. Well, some of these tools that these providers have are also available online or they are working internationally as well. If you are going more abroad I mean actually, if you want to there is the MIT. Management Simulations is something you can just use online. They're free. There you have excellent simulations of specific business processes which you can use in training, so that is very nicely suited for specific skills training for managers. That's kind of a business school approach, right. But let me see, if you want a nice way to use gaming or play in, for example, a video conference setting, I can also recommend the app which is similar to Microsoft Teams or Zoom, called Butter Like what you eat, right, butter. It's an excellent video conference system that has built in lots of small app features for introducing Play into your video conference.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 40:18

Interesting which.

Lars Hoffmann: 40:19

I can recommend that's super cool. Yeah, so those would be kind of my top picks, right.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 40:25

Yes, and then through this whole process of learning and development and you wanting the leaders to go somewhere. What is it? For instance, you would like the leaders of DHI to develop?

Lars Hoffmann: 40:42

Well, of course we have a lot of things and we're continually talking about our whole leadership group. What is especially needed there and I mean a key thing would be to understand the strategy better, for example, to be more in alignment on key issues there, example, to be more in alignment on on key issues. There it I mean I'm less and less of my job is making sure the teaching of some generic leadership competency right and more and more just facilitating that we um talk all these different. I mean we are extremely distributed across the globe. We have extremely diverse uh fields business and we have a strategy on top and all these things just making sure the whole organization is talking to each other and aligning and calibrating and making things are moving in the right direction. And that has some huge constraints with where is our software, our business systems, how is the market moving? All that it's like a huge big organism, right, and I'm much more interested in Helping facilitate that.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 41:56

On shared understanding.

Lars Hoffmann: 41:57

Yeah, exactly, and making sure people are coordinating well and that if some parts of the business are not in sync with what others are doing, to helping those. And then, of course, some external part, some content, better understanding of supply chain management or something that's fine. We train some people at a certain stage in that right, but it's actually quite a small part of what is taking up most of my job, and I also think that in HR less and less is about this kind of we need to train X and Y on a skill in this. That is just. I mean, people are so busy and the competition is so hard or tricky that just helping the organization run as best as possible that is kind of a key focus. And the technology transformation is so fast that just keeping up with that is kind of the key thing, right.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 43:00

So how do you ensure that alignment or shared understanding, or that people are up to pace with what's going on in their field?

Lars Hoffmann: 43:08

Yeah, exactly that is. It's a lot about helping managers and our global experts being able to deliver some training quite fast when they see the need right. So helping them easily create an internal webinar or a short training course on some specific content or record themselves on video or use the proper combination of them being present, open to questions and dialogue, facilitating something or just putting something out that people can consult in their own time, like a wiki or a video or some part. That is a major part of it, but it could also be to moderate some kind of sessions between different kind of departments that need to discuss a certain topic.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 43:54

So you need to be the organization's ears and eyes there to ensure that you see the patterns going on.

Lars Hoffmann: 44:00

Yeah, and being ready to help when there are these issues.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 44:04

And how do you know?

Lars Hoffmann: 44:05

Yeah, how do I know? I think a key part is just being well known in the organization, so they also just reach out and making sure they can get help when needed. Help when needed and I'm fortunate enough also to be the host of our town halls where our CEO and also our executive leadership team speaks up, and so I'm fairly well known around the company, right.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 44:30

So they also reach out as the learning and development expert.

Lars Hoffmann: 44:32

Yeah, exactly the go-to person if there's a misalignment between Well of course, also our HR business partners do a lot of that, and when they need inspiration on some good method to facilitate a meeting or something, I might be consulted on that right.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 44:49

Yeah, okay, so, based on your experience, thank you for sharing that whole journey you've been through, because it's also been the fascination of games first the physical product and then trying to understand what's going on with online learning and the LMS, entering into the field of HR, where would you say we are now? Because now, with artificial intelligence coming in, how do you make sure that you're? Also, you've been kind of like a front runner with many things the gamification era and then the online learning, the MOOCs, and now this is coming. What is it you see in the pipeline there and what experiences have you had so?

Lars Hoffmann: 45:30

far with that. Yeah Well, since ChatGPT really hit the scene, I've been experimenting a lot with it. Chatgpt really hit the scene, I've been experimenting a lot with it and I have been initiating a super user forum here at DHI because we saw quite early that we couldn't sit centrally in a small team and predict how we could use this new tool. We need to get it out into the. As mentioned, we are so diverse, right and distributed across the globe and so many different fields of expertise, so we wanted people to experiment locally with whatever projects they had. So we initiated a super user forum of people from across the company to be kind of first movers in just knowing how to do prompting and how to upload. What kind of data and knowledge could you upload and what could you?

Lars Hoffmann: 46:19

upload and what could you find, what could you expect, et cetera. So we got a lot of people trying to use it. But then we also have a department where we're using machine learning for for certain things. So I tried to be in the middle of that field and initiate some things, and then I've also tried to apply chat GPT to to some some different kinds of training, and so far I'm not seeing the super brilliant application for leadership development or leadership training or similar as yet.

Lars Hoffmann: 46:52

What I would definitely recommend and recommend to all managers is to use an LMM like ChatGPT and be familiar with good prompting techniques and also to be really clear what it's not so good for and how to make sure you're not making a breach of data security and so on, which is quite a limiting factor, right? But many of the managers I know they use it a lot. They use it daily for all kinds of things, and at present, I think that it's absolutely brilliant for getting a draft of something when you're initiating any kind of new work. So ask it to draft something and to make variations of it or to have certain elements included. It's amazing how fast it can generate a lot, right. It's amazing how fast it can generate a lot right, and then to be really aware that whatever you're writing into your prompt is creating a lot of bias of what is coming out, and whatever it's producing will also bias you right back right. So these limitations is something you have to be really clear about.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 47:52

Do you feel the need for educating people on that?

Lars Hoffmann: 47:54

Yeah, yeah, I mean definitely you need to teach that and we've been trying to do that through our super user community, but but, uh, it's an ongoing thing and uh and uh so do you sense that the bias training has been even more, you know, important in your role as learning and development.

Lars Hoffmann: 48:14

No so far I'm not we're not doing huge kinds of bias training, but we're trying to make people aware of this right that it's so clear when you've experienced in prompting, to just creating the same prompt and varying it and seeing what comes out, and that is really interesting in order to understand what is this technology and what is it good at. What is this technology and what is it good at? And one other thing that I often recommend is that people try to interact with a chat GPT, for example, in the field that they are the most expert in. So, for example, my key, key, key expertise is using psychology for game design, in leadership development or something like that, right? So I try to challenge that GPT, to challenge me back in exactly that field, and that makes me see where's the limitations, right, because I can feel I can actually be the evaluates the quality and that you should definitely do whatever field you are in in order to find out where are the limitations and what is?

Lars Hoffmann: 49:15

the maturity of the technology and that will make you, hopefully, quite critical about what is good for, what is not so good for, and that, I think, is really, really important in this regard, and to continue doing it once in a while, because the technology is just developing so fast.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 49:30

Yes. But, so… when does the ethical part live? Is that with learning and development?

Lars Hoffmann: 49:38

Yeah, well, there are so many ethical aspects to this right. I think we should be extremely what is it called? Prudent with regards to where we introduce this technology in our organizations. And so one part is just you know what is the provider, what are they seeing and what are they? What is the provider, what are they seeing and what are they taking away from it? Also, the kind of approach that the chat GPT is taking to certain answers is really important to understand. And are you okay with that? You can use it to do a lot of surveillance. You should also be critical of that and uh, and I think that I mean, I think it's not going to say, it's not verifying the future, that I think we need some kind of consent from our staff in terms of what we are surveying, surveilling, because we can really look very closely into what, what, even what they're thinking. I think in soon, soon, right. So that is just a huge field.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 50:44

You're following it closely. That's your field.

Lars Hoffmann: 50:47

I think it's a revolution just as big as when the internet came in the 90s right, and it's just as transformative, right. And I think that it's really hard to to to predict predict.

Lars Hoffmann: 51:01

Yeah, and it's all. I have a hard time agreeing with myself on how much we should limit experimentation with it. Um, so it's, it's just it's, it's, it's like a new weapon or a new, something that is a new, a new species, I mean. Yeah, so so I I think what my recommendation boils down to is again to find an application that is very limited and very easy to understand what it's doing and use it there and then build a little bit from that.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 51:31

Yes.

Lars Hoffmann: 51:33

So I use it every day for specific queries and especially for brainstorming, and also when there's a topic I don't know much about. So instead of doing a Google search, then I ask it to do a rundown of all the different perspectives and perspectives on it, and that is really useful, right, and that's what I'm keeping it at at this level, and a lot that I know do a bit of the same.

Lars Hoffmann: 51:59

I know developers use it also for some kind of work with that coding, and that is that is fine, but there are some problems with and that's also what you are, what you're helping the organization, then yeah, yeah, exactly to that kind of approach, but right now we are waiting a lot with getting our own llms that where we can share our own you know key data that we can't share with anyone right and uh, getting that, that, having that, is a huge first mover advantage yes, of course, so you're getting there yeah, we're getting there, but not as fast as some others.

Lars Hoffmann: 52:32

Right, and that is. It's attractive what they can do. I know, for example, that no one orders the big danish company. They have had their own chat dbt, right, and that is a huge advantage, and the things they can do that are really interesting. Right, so that you want to interview them. I'd love to hear what they're coming up with, right, yeah?

Pernille Hippe Brun: 52:52

so kind of summing up and weaving it all together towards the end. Here is anything I haven't asked you that you wish I had actually asked you when it comes to learning, development and gamification, online learning, um llms but, also, but also, of course, learning banks and just in general online learning.

Lars Hoffmann: 53:13

Yeah I mean, I think there's a one thing that has been happening in this space which I haven't mentioned is that there's, for example, youtube, but also other places. There's been a huge growth in these long-format bloggings like we have right, where people two experts sit and talk for two hours, right, and I think there's a I get a lot out of that the things that I follow, that I try to keep up with. I definitely make sure to find out who are kind of world leaders in that and you can really track it down to a very narrow field where your particular interest is, and then to follow these people in those kind of formats, because here we have people who are sitting talking about really cutting edge of the field and to follow those kind of things is a huge advantage, right? So I would recommend anybody to find out, well, what are my key interests and to find out who are having talks about that in this online discussion format, right?

Lars Hoffmann: 54:14

Yes, that is this kind of blogging format. I think that is super cool. So, for example, if you're interested in AI and leadership development, there's a guy called Ethan Mollick at the Wharton Business School. He's doing a lot of really cool experimentation with using AI in this and he's just sharing everything. He's sharing his prompts, he's sharing all the setup and he's working a lot in this intersection of AI technology and leadership and innovation development. So that could be something.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 54:44

So could you repeat his name?

Lars Hoffmann: 54:46

Ethan Mollick.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 54:47

Ethan Mollick Mollick yeah, so he's super cool, yes.

Lars Hoffmann: 54:52

So that would be one thing. Then I don't know. I think we've covered a lot. No, I want to mention one thing more also. One thing I'm doing a lot actually, which has surprised me because it brought me back to things I did in the end of the 90s is that I'm doing a lot of outdoor team building.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 55:12

Interesting.

Lars Hoffmann: 55:12

Much more than I did earlier, and I think it comes about since because, after the COVID lockdowns, et cetera, we've been working so much online, because it's become so easy, right, that actually being physically together and working with your body as part of a change, or learning to work together process and building trust, et cetera, this outdoor stuff is just. People are really happy about it and I've gotten some amazing feedback from it and it's also great fun to do. Of course, you have to fly in people if they are all over the place, right, but I really enjoy it and you can. I mean, I've then developed my own methods, right, but lots of short exercises where people have to collaborate, talk about certain topics. It's just been amazing fun and letting people discover that they also have a body, right, because a lot of our cognition is in the body, right. So if we are getting too much, you know, just talking heads on a screen, we are missing out on a lot of things, right?

Pernille Hippe Brun: 56:19

You know, just talking heads on a screen, we are missing out on a lot of things, right? So that was an interesting way of ending this talk about online learning and gamification and AI and all that, but also a good advice for any learning development consultants sitting out there assisting their companies with figuring out how to best play out their role in the organization. So thank you so much, lars, for letting us borrow your brain for an hour or so.

Lars Hoffmann: 56:47

Absolutely a pleasure.

Pernille Hippe Brun: 56:50

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