For me, HRD (as was) is the best organised event in the L&D calendar. Great handouts, an exhibition floor that's easily navigable and manageable in size, and good conversation to be had all over. Two criticisms: the first being a lack of keynote. I think a keynote speech is a nice way to kick off any event. It brings all delegates together and provides a universal talking point before everyone goes off to their individual sessions. But this is the CIPD way and we're used to it by now.
The second is that the sessions are very case study-heavy, which traditionally has made it quite difficult to provide soundbites for people who aren't attending and follow the event on social channels. Not so this year. Both Veronica Hope-Hailey and Geoff McDonald's talks in session 1, 'Creating a New Generation of Trustworthy Leaders' were passionate and easy to distil into bite size nuggets of L&D gold. Long may it continue through the rest of the event.
Session two? 'Collaborative Learning through MOOCs and Social Development'. Hosted by the indomitable and irrepressible Perry Timms and featuring talks from Mira Vogel and Matt Jenner of UCL, this session was all about the MOOC, although the talk was lighter on the social dev side of things. It's understandable - MOOCs are still a new phenomenon with plenty of (perceived) faults, so most talks around the subject at events like this are still instructional and introductory in nature.
Martin Couzins, formerly of the TZ parish, made a good point that little was made of the opportunity to enroll entire teams in MOOCs rather than just the individual. The focus was quite Ivy League-centric and the lack of a collaborative angle seemed a missed opportunity. Nevertheless there was some value there, and here's a good blog post from the host with the most.
Two afternoon sessions - the first one about coaching culture and the second about agile leadership. Stuart Holdsworth from Cineworld cinemas provided us with a talk of moderate insight that was peppered with references to motivational books from the likes of Daniel Pink and Stephen Covey plus the films of, um, Whoopi Goldberg. Fair play to Cineworld though, for sitting down and thinking, we need to do a self-audit. What do employees think of us? What do the public think of us? It turns out, they thought of cinemas as relatively similar to each other, so Cineworld decided to work hard on putting the customer first and create a unique experience, that the average punter couldn't get at home. And if coaching was the key to unlocking that cultural change that's a good thing.
Marion Kneale from BDO talked of Earnest Shackleton as her inspiration for agile leadership and my what a story. Even though he 'failed' on his mission to cross Antarctica, he saved the lives of 28 men in extremely adverse conditions (camping on moving ice floes, no maps, no sleep): what if all our business leaders showed such resilience against adversity, even if not on a similar scale?
