Photo: Nesster

If you’re British and old enough you’ll remember the TV adverts from the 70s. Three people are out and about. Two of them are in some discomfort, but it’s not clear why. The third is all smiles. Then the two catch each other’s eye behind the back of the third and the advert delivers its killer blow as one of them mouths the letters “B.O.”.

Body Odour was the silent social killer. Nobody would tell you that you had it, but it was your ticket to pariah status. The only solution: buy some deodorant and rejoin the human race odour-free.

Move forward 40 years and we have a similar problem – Social Media BO, and yes, you may suffer from it.

You won’t know you suffer from SoMeBO because – in the words of the advert – even your best friends won’t tell you. But the numbers will. Probably the most telling symptom of SoMeBO: you regularly gain followers, but just as regularly seem to lose them.

What’s going on?

Probably they are unfollowing because they’re not getting what they thought they would when they followed you – and that will be because of your tweeting habits. Here are some typical tweeting habits that will give you SoMeBO:

1. Tweeting too much in clumps, not spaced out
2. Whining and complaining – so desperately unattractive
3. Sighing at the world’s inadequacies – probably worse than 2)
4. Providing too many vacuous uplifting quotes
5. Always asking questions, but never volunteering answers
6. Tweeting mostly a series of 1-to-1 conversations, excluding all your other followers

I’ve done some of these from time to time, and have seen the consequences or, luckily, I’ve had friends honest enough to point out my failings to me. I’m sure I continue to fail in my tweets, but perhaps slightly less often than in the past.

In truth, we all suffer from SoMeBO some of the time, because we’re bound to upset others sometime. But do you want to consistently, unknowingly, alienate those who have chosen to read your tweets? [Deep 70s TV voice] Ask yourself the question today:

Do you suffer from SoMeBO?

Today I attended Universities UK’s conference (#openandonline) on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in London, which included excellent high-level talks from Martin Bean and Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts as well as some very good practical talks.

One question that came up several times during the day was this: “Are MOOCs HE’s Napster Moment?” A ‘Napster moment’ is when a new, online and often free technology enters a marketplace and disrupts it, as file-sharing service Napster did to music at the turn of the century. It revolutionised the way we think about, buy and share music and paved the way for – among others – iTunes. 

Are MOOCs really HE’s Napster moment?

I don’t think so.

It makes much more sense to describe them as HE’s Amazon moment. Here’s how the Amazon platform has changed the book market, and the effect it has had on publishers (for which read universities):

1) One platform is dominant globally. Users know they can find almost whatever product they like there. They seldom visit publishers to buy direct. Will most university courses be bought this way in 10 years’ time? I think it likely.

2) There is an explosion in product breadth. In 2003, 300k books were registered for an ISBN. In 2012 there were over 15m. These books are now in many types of format, and of course there is a wide range of quality. For HE think of this as an explosion in types of offering, from a free MOOC, through a short certified course to 3-year residential degree (see November’s blog for more)

3) Margins are driven down. In publishing this has been caused by a combination of factors, not least Amazon’s sharp negotiating. Many publishers and books shops have gone bust as a result. Others, with different models, have entered the market. The analogy for HE is pretty clear, but I believe universities can avoid bankruptcy by working together and choosing their platforms carefully.

4) Others set the rules. From being the dominant force in the book world, publishers have in a few years found themselves forced to deal with a dominant platform which commands the market, distribution and pricing on a global scale.

5) Things take time to settle. They have not yet settled in the book world. There is disruption still to come. We can only be sure that things have changed forever.

Not all MOOC platforms are bad, but the similarity of universities now (dominant for centuries, with an efficient model of production) to publishers 10 to 15 years ago, is difficult to ignore. The reason the VC funders of Silicon Valley poured $22m into Coursera last year, and £20m into Udacity is precisely because they see this. They are looking for the next big bet, the next platform to dominate a lucrative market on a global scale.

And, as I have observed elsewhere, these numbers are tiny in comparison with the amount of funding sloshing around in the education technology world at the moment. We can only expect the pace of change to quicken and the stakes to increase.

Learning folks -which blogs should you follow to develop yourself in L&D? Was recently asked and would value your opinion

I kept this to 122 characters to enable retweeting to spread the word as widely as possible and was immediately rewarded with an RT from Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth). This started the ball rolling.

By the end of the day there were 14 suggested blogs. By the end of day two, it had more than doubled to these 29 (in alphabetical order):

Ben Betts
Bianca Woods
Cammy Bean
Cathy Moore
Charles Jennings
Clark Quinn
Clive Shepherd
Connie Malamed
Craig Taylor
David Kelly
Donald Clark
Donald H Taylor
Harold Jarche
Jane Bozarth
Jane Hart
Jason Silberman
Jay Cross
Josh Bersin
Julie Dirksen
Julie Drybrough
Mark Aberdour
Mark Berthelemy
Mark Oehlert
Nick Shackleton-Jones
Nigel Paine
Ryan Tracey
Steve Flowers
Steve Wheeler
Tom Kuhlmann

I can think of many names missing from this list, but as of today – 30th April 2013, I’m going to draw a line under it. However, if you feel that a great blogger is missing from this list, please feel free to add their name and blog URL in the comments section below.

Why am I stopping adding to this list? For the following reasons, which occurred  to me as the comments and suggestions came in:

First, another, very comprehensive list of 86 Workplace Learning Professionals who blog and/or tweet already exists, compiled by the redoubtable Jane Hart. I always tell other people not to re-invent the wheel on the internet, and am rather embarrassed to have done so myself.

Second, although this list is fine, if I allow it to grow by suggestion, it will soon get spammed by self-promoters. It’s certainly good enough now as a starter for someone beginning in L&D. (And once they’ve looked at these, they go to the super set of Jane’s list – see above.)

Third, and importantly, Stephanie Dedhar and others pointed out that ones’s area of interest changes as one’s role in L&D changes and one’s experience grows. While this is a good enough list for someone starting out, it certainly has biases. There a fair deal about strategy and design, for example, and not so much about performance improvement. My hope is that this short list will act as a jumping off point to other blogs.

My thanks to all those who contributed; my apologies to those whose blogs are not on this list (but who almost certainly are on Jane’s list) and my best wishes to all those in L&D who use this as a leaping off point to stretch themselves and keep learning about learning.

I’m not sure, though, that we think about change in L&D in the right way.

We tend to consider it one-dimensionally, as a straight line – your rate of change is somewhere on a continuum ranging from fast to slow. While this is true, I think it masks the real question: how fast is your L&D team changing in relation to the rate of change of your organisation? This is the question that determines how much impact your work has on your organisation. It may even determine your chances of future professional survival. Here’s what a two-dimensional view of change looks like:

There are two axes. The vertical one shows the rate of change of your L&D department, the horizontal one reflects how fast your organisation is changing. I’ve been talking a fair amount this year about change in L&D and whatever country I’ve been in, in whatever sector, this idea of the importance of relative change has struck a chord with the audience. People seem to recognise instantly where they belong.

The top right quadrant is Risky Leadership. If both the department and the organisation are changing fast, this is a great opportunity. We can invest in new procedures and systems, build our skills and experiment with different ways of working with the business, and the business – because it is also changing fast and open to new ideas – will respond. It’s in this quadrant that we find really progressive L&D teams that are making an impact.

While they are undoubtedly leaders, this quadrant is also risky, because that’s the nature of change. The implementation of new technology may not go as planned, a new approach may not find favour with mid-level managers, an unexpected change in the business may mean we have to re-work our learning content immediately. In this quadrant the L&D team has to be open to change and risk, but also willing to tackle any resulting issues fast, and stay in constant touch with the business.

Of course no part of this diagram is free of risk. Diametrically opposed to Risky Leadership is Comfortable Extinction. Here things are pretty much as they’ve always been. The training department produces the same courses, with minor modifications, year after year, and the business accepts them. The department regularly conducts Training Needs Analyses which are no more than asking learners or managers which course they’d like to attend. Level 1 evaluations are conducted after every course, but there is no further analysis of impact, and there is no demand for it from the business. Training is conducted according to what David Wilson calls the ‘conspiracy of convenience’. Everything is quite comfortable until an external change requires the business to change rapidly, it fails to, and the entire organisation, blindsided, goes bust.

The top right corner is home to Instagram, the 12-person company bought for $1bn by Facebook in June 2012. The bottom left is where you’d find Kodak, the inventor of affordable, personal photography, which filed for bankruptcy in January 2012 because it hadn’t changed fast enough.

Sometimes, though, the L&D department is ahead of the organisation it finds itself in. This is where you find those people who rail against their employers’ backwardness, what I call the Unacknowledged Prophets. These departments are often capable of great things, but while their organisations are usually frustrating, they almost always contain a niche where L&D can flourish. Most organisations have at least one manager or executive who gets it, who has a performance need that can be met by learning. Rather than berating the organisation as a whole, find and work with that manager and build a case study of success and a band of positive learners who will spread the word about your work.

If that niche isn’t there, or is too hard to find, there is an alternative: quit and find and employer that does appreciate you.

Most L&D departments that I’ve talked to, however, rightly fear being in the bottom right quadrant, the Training Ghetto. Here, we are unable to service the needs of a rapidly changing organisation. The result: it’s the business, not L&D, that adopts today’s innovative approaches to learning and information sharing. I’ve seen plenty of examples of the sales, operations or marketing departments doing things with wikis, online communities and mobile devices that are fundamentally about learning, but without the L&D department being involved. Why? Sometimes L&D didn’t make their case well enough, but usually it’s just because they were overlooked. In this quadrant L&D is seen as being about training delivery, in the classroom or online, and nothing else. The Training Ghetto is where good information goes to die. It’s the training department that’s in the basement or the Portakabin across the car park. It’s the cost centre that gets cut when times are hard, and which is reluctantly retained for compliance and induction training. It isn’t seen as contributing to the business and the good people there are usually promoted out. Nobody wants to stay in the ghetto.

The question is this: how do we get all L&D departments above that horizontal line and into the top right corner? There are answers, and they are pretty much what I spend my days thinking about. Expect more from me on this subject over the rest of this year, because I don’t believe there’s a more important subject on the L&D agenda.

For now, though, I’d invite you to consider this question: where does your L&D team belong?

What does ‘LMS’ mean?

Yes, I know that the three letters literally stand for ‘Learning Management System’, but actually we all know that’s nonsense. You can’t create a system to manage learning. Learning happens inside people’s heads, and it’s a process that can be supported and stimulated, but not managed. As Mark Britz said in a Twitter exchange just after I posted part 1 of this double-entry blog:

RT @DonaldHTaylor: Does the LMS have a future? wp.me/p2n5B-kj / ppl are what learning is all abt. The risk is leaving to a system

He’s absolutely right – you can’t leave learning to a system, or rather you shouldn’t. Despite a projected 2013 global market value of $1.9bn, Learning Management Systems have only a middling reputation at best among L&D professionals. This is partly because when initially launched in the late 1990s they were not Learning Management Systems, but Training Administration Systems, and too often the training materials delivered over them were dull, ‘click next’ materials that were all about compliance, completion rates and not about learning.

That reputation has stuck. And although LMSs have grown in functionality, and materials in potential (although not always in the realisation of that potential), they have repeatedly been over-sold and under-implemented. In fact, as Andy Wooler, Academy Technology Manager at Hitachi Data Systems Academy, put it when we spoke:

“LMS too often stands for Litigation Mitigation Service.”

Andy, a long time user of a variety of LMSs, is no knocker of the systems. In fact, his work in the financial sector has lead him to believe that the ability to track whether people have undergone training to meet the requirements of Sarbanes Oxley and other regulations – the most basic function of an LMS – is itself essential. “Try running an insurance company without those reports and see how far you get,” he says.

But, says Andy, there are others things we naturally want to do beyond compliance. They usually involve making things (learning content, conversations, networks) available to people, along with a way of engaging with these things, and a database of some sort to support this activity. “A web server, an application and a database – you can call that bundle what you want,” says Andy, “but I’d call that a Learning Management System.”

It’s difficult not to agree. You’re in an enterprise, and you want to support widespread learning. You’re going to need systems to help you – co-ordinated, possibly integrated systems that help the social networking and micro blogging make sense of the videos and User Generated Content, as well as the high-quality training materials that you have produced yourself or outsourced, accessible to managers and including prompts and suggestions for stretch assignments as well as ways of managing coaching and mentoring.

As Andy says, you can give those systems any name you want. You can create them yourself or buy them off the shelf, but together they make up a modern LMS, the sort of system which many of today’s more advanced LMS vendors actually sell. Not a Training Management System, but something that actually supports learning when used properly.

In which case, if this is not a Training Management System, what should the letters LMS stand for?

I asked Andy this. What did he think the letters LMS stood for in this richer, more complex set of tools? He thought for a moment and replied “We provide the systems, and add some context. People use this to make sense of the issues they face and then do their work better.” He paused, then he came up with his definition.

“How about ‘Learning to Make Sense’?”

I think he’s right. We need technologies to support learning at work today. We can buy them packaged in a single, centralized system, or we can assemble them ourselves and integrate them as much or as little as we wish. They can be our learning management system, our personal learning environment, our knowledge network or whatever. Whatever we call these tools and systems, the key thing is what they do. Properly implemented, they help us make sense of the issues we face, and work a better as a result.

In a way, this is a non-question. As a commercial proposition, the LMS has never been more successful. Bersin by Deloitte predicts a 10% growth in LMS spending in 2013, with the global market reaching $1.9 billion this year. And Wall Street thinks it’s a hot market, too, with heated M&A activity over the past 12 months for often eye-watering sums: Oracle-Taleo ($1.9bn), SAP-SuccessFactors ($3.4bn), IBM-Kenexa ($1.3bn).

That’s right. Three acquisitions of single LMS providers totalling roughly three-and-a-half times the market’s total forecast global value. Clearly the money men reckon the future of the LMS is not merely secure, it’s golden bright.

In another, perhaps more fundamental way, however, the question is still unanswered.

The question is this: can the LMS survive in a world where workplace learning is about more than taking prescribed courses, a world where much learning comes via our interactions with others?

I have reflected on this since being a guest recently at the Saba Software annual user conference, People 2013. This event is also known as the Saba Global Summit but that headline name – People 2013 – is the key to this question of the future of the LMS. People are indeed what learning is all about. It’s only in the past few years that technology has been able to begin to catch up with this truth, thanks to the power of social networking over the internet.

Saba – one of the first players in the enterprise-wide LMS space, with 31m users, and still an independent, listed company – understands that systems can do a lot more than just push out compliance training. People 2013 was its opportunity to unveil a radical re-iteration of its platform: Saba PeopleCloud.

Clive Shepherd has already blogged about Saba PeopleCloud, examining whether it can meet the needs of modern enterprise learning that he laid out in The New Learning Architect. Does it support learning across his four contexts of the formal, non-formal, on-demand and experiential?

Clive’s assessment is positive, and from what I’ve seen of the LMS, I would agree that the move is absolutely right. With Saba PeopleCloud, Saba has produced a SaaS platform that can support the learning experience rather dictating it. It has – among other things – a genuine social focus and mobile delivery capability.

But I use that phrase “can support the learning experience rather dictating it” deliberately. The devil in any system is in its implementation. By this I don’t mean I think the technology suspect. I think Saba PeopleCloud can probably meet its claims in practice. The real question is how it will be put to use.

Like any LMS, Saba PeopleCloud can be used solely to deliver courses. There is nothing wrong with this, but if it is the only thing we do in L&D, then we are not doing ourselves or our organisations justice And – importantly – if we choose to use our learning systems in this way, it is not the fault of the systems. It is a choice we have made. And frankly, if we make this choice, then neither the LMS nor L&D has much of a future.

I explore this point further in a future post, when I consider what the three letters LMS mean to the L&D profession.

[Disclosure: Saba paid my expenses for attending the conference, but no fee. The company did not view this blog before posting, and did not ask to. Saba is a sponsor of the Learning and Skills Group, which I chair.]

Right now, for L&D, it’s crucial.

Things are shifting. Whether it’s hotter technology, weaker budgets or the changing expectations of both learners and managers, nothing is as it used to be. Caught up in the middle of this change, it’s difficult to sort the important from the trivial and to know what action to take.

That’s why I’m so glad that Elliott Masie is coming to London on 16th April to run his only ‘Learning Directions’ briefing outside the US this year.

Elliott has been a leading thinker in this industry for over three decades, and I’ve shared many conversations with him which have given me cause for thought. The London event in the series (the other 5 are in the US) is a chance to spend a day in conversation with him, getting away from the daily grind for a moment to consider where we’re heading.

It will be a discursive and wide-ranging day, with an emphasis on separating reality from hype. From details such as how we can get the most from User Generated Content, to the big picture view of some of the world’s learning leaders, the idea is to sort out what’s really important. For me, well-structured thinking time like this is essential when we’re setting our strategies for the future.

One thing I like about Learning Directions is that it’s not just a one-day event. Elliott will be providing a follow-up webinar, and further resources based on the feedback he collects during the six one-day sessions.

The Learning and Performance Institute (which I chair) will be hosting Elliott in London. Further information and details of how to register for the event are on the LPI site. Please note – places are limited, and LPI members are eligible for discounts.

I hope to see you in London on April 16th!

Answer: I don’t know. And I’m not sure anyone else does, either. In fact, I don’t believe any industry data on this exists. That may be reasonable – after all, the definition of ‘learning content’ is slippery thing – but it still rankles.

An animated conversation about this with several providers and users of learning content a few weeks ago at Sally Ann Moore’s iLearn Forum in Paris was fascinating but inconclusive. Every possible opinion was expressed, and no conclusion reached.

Of course the conversation took a long time wandering around the different types of ‘content’ that we might be talking about. Did we mean classroom courses? Online courses? MOOCs? Free stuff from the internet? Generic stuff? User-generated content?

To try and make some sense of the different types of content I sketched out this pyramid of different types of content, the lowest part of the pyramid being where there is the greatest volume:

The learning content pyramid

By ‘content’, I’m referring to materials people learn from. This includes reference materials and courses. It could be on any medium – Google plus, a video on your phone or a book. To be clear: I am not suggesting that content creation/sourcing and maintenance is the only role of L&D.

From the bottom of the pyramid the five layers are:

Freely available – The internet provides an almost unlimited set of resources to draw on for learning. The trick is to choose the right ones. In an LSG webinar recently Virgin Media’s Mike Leavy showed (among other things) how they incorporate free content from on their corporate Cornerstone OnDemand LMS (see at 41:30 in the video). And this goes beyond a few links to YouTube. It includes iTunes U, free courses from MOOC suppliers Coursera and Udemy, talks from TED and lessons from the Khan Academy as well as free online courses from the Open University’s Learning Space.

With online courses now available for free from the world’s leading universities, why would you not include MOOCs in your available content? As the range of these offerings widen (see my previous blog on MOOCs), the challenge for L&D here is to move from solely creating content to sourcing it – in particular in filtering to make the most useful stuff visible (see my previous blog on filtering as one of L&D’s 4 key content skills).

Generic – There is a strong, global market for online learning materials, so strong that before writing anything, L&D must always ask who else might have already produced it. When he first arrived at Lloyd’s as CLO, one of the first things Peter Butler did was to stop his L&D team producing courses on topics such as Microsoft Excel and Word. The company already had a subscription to an online course provider, meaning that these courses were available for use at no additional marginal cost. Maybe these weren’t exactly the content and quality the L&D team would have liked, but they were certainly good enough. The L&D team’s time was better spent doing higher value work.

And ‘generic’ needn’t mean ‘poor quality’. Video Arts has produced high-quality generic management training materials for more than 20 years. And neither need ‘generic’ mean ‘non-sector specific’ either. When Ray O’Connor produced an anti money-laundering course at his legal firm, he realised that it would be useful outside the organisation, and made it more widely available. It’s always worth checking with your L&D colleagues in your industry before you start writing anything.

And as well as the celebrated providers of online content such as Skillsoft there’s always the original generic content – books. The rise of the e-book removes the headache of providing and circulating physical books, leading to a rise in online books clubs that like that run by Shell Senior Innovation Adviser for Global HR Technologies Hans de Zwart  where both the meetings and the books can be virtual.

User generated content (UGC) – UGC is all that great stuff which people naturally create in work that others can learn from – whether it’s explicitly designed for learning or not. A typical example would be Black & Decker’s use of short videos shared between members of its field sales team (see the CERTPOINT case study)

As well as very targeted material like this (most UGC videos are under 5 minutes long), UGC also includes chat sessions (like those from LSG webinars or Twitter #lrnchat meetings). I’d suggest that UGC is not entirely free, as we often like to believe. There may be no upfront cost, as there is with generic content, but it certainly takes time (and sometimes money) to set up and maintain the systems for sharing UGC, and we should never kid ourselves that opportunity cost is not a real cost.

Created internally – with so much else available for free or at low cost, the centrally generated materials we create must be context rich. This is where L&D adds value (again – see Interpretation – a crucial part of the L&D role)

BP’s internal ‘Moments of Truth’ programme, for example, uses video and story-telling to raise diversity and inclusion issues far more effectively than didactic approaches. (Click for the slides, or for the context of the 2012 Brightwave event “Beyond the Course” where I first saw this.)

‘Moments of Truth’ has very high production values, because that is appropriate for this subject: inclusion is a core issue for BP, and will remain part of employees’ learning for years to come.

Not all internally-generated content need be as beautifully prepared or even as emotionally engaging as ‘Moments of Truth’. The key differentiator is that it should be context rich, steeped in the reality of that particular organisation. When power tool manufacturer TTI wanted to improve efficiency in handling returned goods, it produced a clear online course with the 10 most common mistakes in handling returned goods. Sounds simple. It was. It also generated $33-$35m in savings over a 2 year period. (Click for the case study.)

Internally-generated materials don’t have to be fancy, just context rich and effective.

Commissioned – There will always be a place for high-quality commissioned content. The subject may require specialist knowledge beyond anyone in the organisation. It may also be a high-profile piece of work that demands great production values.

I sense, though, that commissioned content is an increasingly specialized field. As the cost of production has fallen, with great content creation and editing tools available at low-to-no cost, many of the barriers to creating good content have fallen. Global competition has also made this a tough market to be in. The bespoke content providers that remain have to offer a service where value rests on a combination of production and learning expertise as well as subject matter understanding.

As Clive Shepherd pointed out in 2008, Nick Shackleton-Jones originally proposed a three-layer model of content development at an eLearning Network event in the UK. The pyramid above has five layers, but it remains only a model. The map is not the territory.

If you choose to think of content in terms of a layered pyramid, I would love to hear your comments and insight. How many layers does your pyramid have? Where are you focusing your efforts now? And do you see your focus changing in the future? Perhaps if we engage in a broad conversation around this, we may be able to answer my original question: are we  producing more or less of our own learning materials internally?

I’ve been thinking and talking about this a lot recently, because the pace of change in our profession is pretty fast and because the old certainty – that L&D was about creating and delivering courses – no longer holds. 

The days when L&D was the main (and sometimes sole) provider of information to employees has gone. The internet saw to that. Once knowledge was power. Now information is free and almost frictionless. So if all we’re doing is providing generic information to people, we don’t deserve to be in a job.

Making sure people can find and learn from the right things, however, remains an important part of L&D’s role. The process use has just stepped up a level of sophistication.

That process follows four steps. Directly or indirectly we need to:

Note – this may seem to be a description of the curation process. It is, but it is also the process we follow when creating learning content. We find the information we need to express, filter to focus on the essentials and then express it in the right format – interpret it – before making it available.

Currently in the profession we’re talking a lot about the first and last of these – about smart search and the ways we can share cleverly, making sure people can find and learn what they need.

But where the L&D department really adds value to my mind is in the third step, interpreting. This is where L&D should be using its combination of knowledge of the business, with its expertise in learning to ensure whatever the topic, it is framed in a way that makes sense to the precise context of the organisation. A generic health and safety course is ten times more valuable when expressed in terms of how that affects people at work in your organisation. A book on business leadership has more impact when discussed in respect of your own work. A YouTube video on sales makes a greater difference to performance when linked to other, work-related materials.

Conversations and social networking within the organisation may not require much interpretation to those involved (here L&D’s role is more to facilitate the conversation) – but there may still be an interpretive role to play later. Making sure that the gist of a good conversation is available later to those who didn’t participate is,  I believe, something L&D should absolutely be doing, and it certainly involves interpretation.

I’ll be talking about this – and other things – in a webinar on 19^th March, with Randy Emelo of Triple Creek (and I’m indebted to them for the graphic above, which they produced from my words). Randy will explore how Triple Creek can help L&D with these four steps. Like me Randy’s background includes classroom and technology work and he’s also been thinking about this topic for a number of years. It should be a good session.

Learning from Others: How Technology is Changing the Role of L&D runs on 19^th March at 15:00 UK time (10 ET). I hope to see you there!

Last night I found out.

The answer didn’t come in a glib, well-turned phrase, polished by a professional motivational speaker. It slipped out in conversation over dinner.

It helped, of course, that the dinner was the Learning and Performance Institute’s Learning Awards at the Dorchester Hotel. It also helped that the speaker was Liz Johnson, who a few minutes later stood up and delivered one of the most moving speeches I have ever heard (and as a conference chairman and awards dinner habitué, I’ve heard plenty of speeches).

Liz Johnson is a British Paralympian with cerebral palsy. A swimming world champion, she took gold at the Beijing Paralympics and bronze in London 2012, where she also read the athlete’s oath in the opening ceremony. These successes are the result of having trained relentlessly throughout her school and university days, and of focusing on success while at the same time keeping her options open by – for example – graduating with a good degree, leaving her able to move into business in the future.

How, I asked her, could she top what she had already achieved? Was she training for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro? I’m sure that after the success of London 2012, British athletes are rather tired of hearing this question posed by armchair athletes like myself, but Liz answered with an easy openness.

She accepted that after three Paralympic Games, getting to a fourth might be difficult. Competition would be tough. But swimming and competing were in her blood and she would try her best. This much I expected. After all, you don’t become a champion by giving up. This is the competitor whose mother had told her from birth that she could achieve anything despite her disability (and whose death from cancer inspired Liz to gold at the Beijing games).

But Liz said something else. She accepted that she might not make it. That was the way things worked. And so yes, as always in her life, she would make sure that she was always open to other opportunities if they came along. She had her degree and could always go into accounting. But with selection for the squad years away, there could only be one thing in her mind when she was in the pool: “You have to train like you’re going to Rio”.

And that’s it: train like you’re going to Rio. If an inspirational champion like Liz Johnson can put her all into training while at the same time accepting that her best not be quite good enough, who am I to differ? It’s a strangely liberating concept. What is the worst that can happen? Aim for the stars and you might not make it even to the moon. You might end up flat on your face. That’s out of your control. What is in your control is how much effort you put into your practice, be it as an athlete, a leader or as anyone who cares about their work.

Based on last night’s success in simultaneously charming and moving a crowd of 350 in an extemporised 15-minute speech on behalf of children’s charity Dreamflight (her flight with them in 1997 changed her life, she says), I’d guess that Liz will have many different options open to her – including a career in the media – if she doesn’t make it to the next Games.

Whatever else happens, her own story of achievement inspired everyone in that room both to believe that helping others is worthwhile, and to believe in overcoming impossible odds. Liz Johnson’s success is the result of an attitude that blends fierce ambition with realism, an attitude that can be summed up in six short words which even the most sceptical of us can believe in:

Train like you’re going to Rio.