JAYNEY HOWSON

>> Craig Gould: Jayney Howson, thank you so much for joining me this week on the podcast. Jayney you are the Chief Learning Officer at ServiceNow, and it is a very transformative time for your company and for all companies. And, we are in the middle of redefining what learning means, what the role of AI means in our careers and within our companies. And. And there’s really nobody better to talk to about this transformation than you. I love to start these conversations with one, common question, which is, Jayney what are your memories of your first job?

>> Jayney Howson: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, Craig. It’s wonderful to be here. And it’s such a. Like you said, it’s a really exciting time to be talking about this topic. I always come in with the safe harbor comment that what I say today might not be true in a week’s time because things are changing so fast. But it’s great to have the conversations. so I knew you were going to ask this question. I’ve thought about it a lot. So I’ve got kind of two distinct memories. My dad was an entrepreneur, failed vast majority of the time. I had lots of restaurants when I was growing up and different hospitality things. So I was waiting tables from a very, very young age. so my memory of doing that was that, work for me was an enabler. I could really see that money. I knew the power of money, where it came from, when it didn’t come. I saw work as the, the way of getting that and surviving. So there was a real good understanding of work and the, you know, the economics of it. But the second thing was I learned really early that my. I wasn’t great in school, which is ironic considering my job, but I had an ability to build relationships with people very early. And, I could got my favorite customers, and they come back. My sister, actually the man that she married. Her parents still remember me waiting their table when I was like, 14, because I loved go seeing them every week. So I think my memory of that is that I just loved work. I love the relationship it built. I love the money it gave me. I love the opportunity it gave us as a family. So that’s my main memory. And then I’ve got different ones for kind of real work, like when I entered the word, like the professional world. But that’s the. The first, paid experience.

>> Craig Gould: So people service then and service now, right? I mean, can you. Can you talk about the role of those relationships? And you say that, you’re enamored by the Money, but the relationships. And that’s really not unusual for most people. Right.

>> Jayney Howson: Well. And I think it was money because it gave me an opportunity to be with people. Like, when you’re 16 years old, really all you want is to be able to go and hang out with your friends around the town and buy some stuff you don’t need. And, it was all to create that relationship. For me, it was all about creating relationships with people. People. And, it’s always been about that. I’m fascinated by people. Like, I, I never. I never feel like the smartest person in the room ever. And I love that. I just love what I can glean from people that will make me better, that will make me understand the world better. That, I’m just. I’m just fascinated by humans. I think they’re just. We are incredible. so I just love the work that I was. I was a waitress for a very long time. I was actually very poor at it. Like the amount of orders I forgot. I was just chatting, and. Or spilling things, but it didn’t matter because I got so much, like, I got most of my next jobs from relationships I built there. So it was just. Just fascinated by humans.

>> Craig Gould: So I had a, really interesting conversation recently with a cio and he was telling me about his career path and how, you know, how unexpected his career path was, how he planned on being a doctor but he failed biology. And then he wound up going into business functions and it, and, you know, he saw value in tools that he was working with. And then he would go and try to figure out, how can I be part of that? And that led him to be like, you know, employee 70 in the first IT manager at Salesforce. And that, turned into something else. Right. And you. Sometimes we can’t foresee, you know, for example, 10, 15 years ago, I’m not sure, you know, if you, if you were working in sales and marketing and consulting, if you could have foreseen the trajectory that has you where you are today or. Or could you have foreseen it?

>> Jayney Howson: No, absolutely not. I mean, I think I remember when I was at school, like I said, not hugely academic. My mum always said I was kind of designed to work when I was at university. I don’t think she had any idea what I was doing. She was like, it’s a great course for her to get some work, like just work in the weekends. And so what I remember, I didn’t ever really know what I wanted to be. And I was at school, I, you know, I was at school in the 90s and you used to do those career development kind of if this then that. And it told me I should be in, in advertising which was a very. At the time I was like oh that’s interesting. I love watching adverts. I love like that. I used to just watch a lot of TV and I, and I thought maybe that is the way I want to go. And then I ended up dropping out of a course in school. My one of my A levels. I was. I thought I could do biology but it turned out it was far more complicated than that one diagram on how oxbow lakes were formed. So I had to go and do. That’s not even biology. That’s the wrong science but you know what I mean. So that’s why I didn’t do it any level. And then I had to go and work one day a week. I ended up totally serendipitous. Ended up working for Barclays big bank in the UK in their comms team. They got me into this kind of advertising space. I was very, very lucky. I was like this is where I want to be. 100 being advertising. And it did end up being where I started my career. I did some big stuff on like big agencies on in London as kind of an intern and then went into a small agency and built that space. And I thought, you know, I loved watching people fall in love with things again. It was about the people I love. I love how marketing can advertise, manipulate you to, to buy something you never thought you needed. I think there’s just something fascinating about that. But then when I went into. I ended up. My trajectory changed. I went into more of a sales kind of strategy in the agency I was in. Then went client side and then started doing digital transformations. Was introduced to Salesforce at the time because that’s who I was buying as a customer. And I was like why am I working in a 2% margin business with an E focus on EBITDA when I could be in tech and they take you to these things and it’s amazing. And I was just again I was fascinated by the marketing side of it and I went into the tech industry and I thought I was going to meet the best sellers I’ve ever seen in the world because that’s what I’d, you know, I just thought that would be what the magic would be. And it turned out actually the best sellers were working in cash and carries in Croydon in out of London. And I was like, there’s something wrong with this world. There’s something wrong that the best humans that I’ve seen can build these relationships and encourage people to do things they don’t, which is what selling is all about. Like the psychology of selling, fascinating. But actually people that we pulled out of restaurants in Corydon and put into sales roles were better at it than these very, very high paid individuals in the tech industry. And I was like, there is something wrong. You know, talent is equally distributed but opportunity really isn’t. And so very early getting into tech I was like, I want to change that. And I realized that it really was just fascinated in creating the conditions for humans to be successful and how we could unlock potential. And I was just very, very lucky that I got people who would listen to my rambles of what I wanted to change and they gave me opportunities and that got me to sales enablement and then that got me into talent and then that got me here. But I never, I definitely wouldn’t have ever dreamed even 10 years ago that I would be doing a job like this. It’s just where the paths got me.

>> Craig Gould: What do you think you understood about human behavior in sales that most people in learning and development completely miss?

>> Jayney Howson: Oh, I don’t know. That makes me sound too much like a unicorn. I think there are people out there, but I, I think what I see is I, I was never taught traditional training or enablement so I never, obviously I experienced it as somebody who’d gone through education and I did more education coming out of university. I did like my, my marketing credentials and those sorts of things. But it was, I was never taught that process. But what I understood were two things. Three things. One is I’ve got a very good understanding of a customer and seller relationship. And I think I, you know, I grew up with a salesman who was incredible from a very young age and watched those relationships up so close that it was hard to look like you can really see what the pain. So I really understood that kind of the emotion of what, what selling is number one. Secondly, I think I understand how individuals work like one of the motivations for individuals when, when you’re with them. I’ve been managing teams since I was 20 years old and had a long time being able to see that actually what you, the problem is very rarely the person, the problem is often the conditions and how do we get the most out people. So I would use the techniques I’d learned in marketing to manipulate those conditions to make it better. And then the third thing is I’ve got a very good at finding how businesses work. Like, how do you know what the levers are within an organization? How do you get what you need? What’s the commercial value of the organization at the time? when my favorite training in the world is improv training, I think it’s the most successful thing you can do across any discipline that you do. And when you learn improv, there’s a line that says hold tight and cling light. And it means you have to hold tight to the narrative and cling lightly to whatever you thought you were going to say in your head. And I think knowing how organizations work is like that. You have to hold tightly to what’s important for an organization right now and be very willing to let go of an idea that you thought was important five minutes ago yesterday. And I think my ability to, I’m very frivolous with ideas, so my ability to kind of drop things and make sure it works the organization and like I said, my ability to understand how to get the best out of humans and then how, like how to make something buy something people want. And we forget that sometimes particular industry like ours where we’re quite far away from the end user. but I think at the end of the day this is a human decision. so maybe they were the things. I’ve never answered that question before, so I don’t know if that was any good.

>> Craig Gould: Well, you know, we, we try to go into uncharted territory here. But you know, when I hear you answering that question, it just makes me think, you know, your training development, your career transformation platform isn’t a paid service. But do you, view those end users like customers? Do you feel like you’re marketing to them in order to. Yeah. To, to get engagement, to get them to, you know, can you talk a little bit about that?

>> Jayney Howson: 100%. The most precious time and precious thing any of us have is time. And if you’re going to convince anybody to give that away, you have to sell them the dream of what that is. So it’s a hundred percent, it has to be something that has value in it for them that the juice is worth the squeeze. So they’re going to get more out than they put in. That’s the same for anything in, in, in that market. So I. 100% that you’re selling something. But actually more important than. So when someone’s buying a B2B decision, they’re spending someone else’s money. Now it’s important, very important for their career and their job and the success of the business. When somebody’s deciding what training they do for what the career they’re going to make. My God, that’s the biggest decision you have to make in your life is what investment you’re going to go. So I think making sure we get a product right that is truly worth what our people, what our community are getting from us is as important as anything you can sell. Life changing.

>> Craig Gould: So tell me about a corporate commitment to education in a, ah, career transformation. Because you know it’s one thing to have a vision where whenever you hit a wall in your day to day task, I want you to have a resource that helps you get past the wall. It’s a different thing to have a vision where you are enabling your community to transform who they are and what their roles could be. It’s and I guess to have the support to say you can take whatever time you need to figure that out is. That’s a, that’s a pretty big commitment from an employer’s perspective. Because time is so precious.

>> Jayney Howson: Yeah, 100%. I think when we look at, and this is one of the big things that’s changing in learning and enablement particularly. Enablement really is a, it has an overlap with learning but it’s not completely the same thing. And we think about enablement. So much of that is just enabling somebody to win at their job today. Like how do you make sure, particularly in the world of sales, that they have the right information at the right time so that they can help the customer progress this deal, that’s essentially the thing. Now in the past we were limited to a couple of things like how often can we communicate to them, how often can we train them? and you could route them to a resource center but people never went. Now that acquisition of knowledge at the right time has now completely changed because of AI. It’s completely changed our discipline. So people have got the information that they need at the right time and the so what of that is, it means it changes what you are going to train people on. So whereas I used to still say this is my sales methodology, I’m going to train you on the sales methodology. Now we might say ask these three questions to our internal AI sales coach to progress you forward. It changes the questions that you ask and actually could dramatically decrease the amount of learning that you put in front of people because you just train them to ask questions, you train them to fish, not giving them the fish, which is what historically they would have done. So that winning in your job in theory becomes easier. Now. Now I think that’s Questionable because the amount of information that is now available consume, it’s much harder. The market’s changing so quickly, the technology, all of those things. But in theory the winning in your job is easier. But the second part of enablement and training has been how do we help people grow in their career? Like what’s next? Now historically that was a choice. Like you could have stayed in the same job, gone up a normal trajectory, started as a salesperson at 20, finished as a salesperson at 60, made a ton of money, just progressed in that career, same job pretty much the whole way through. That has completely changed in the last six to 12 months. 100% of roles, I mean the data says 90. I have no idea who those 10% are, but I’d say 100% of roles are adapting and in a much quicker time period than we’ve ever seen before. Whereas that used to kind of happen in kind of people retiring and hiring. That’s now happening in six people saying three years. I say six months to 12 month periods of evolution. So what your, the choice is interesting now because to your back to your point in terms of what choice are you making? Like as an organization you have no choice but keep people the jobs to win, the tools to win at their job. Historically you did probably have a choice to whether you were going to give them the opportunity to grow in their career. That is no longer the case for organizations because the gap, and there’s a recent data that Pearson produced that said there was a 5 trillion dollar performance gap if you don’t retrain people into those roles. So as organizations you have to provide it. You then as a training organization think how do I sell it? Because people could be just busy doing their job.

>> Craig Gould: Do you see that different types of people are more prone to succeed now than maybe 10 or 15 years ago? I mean, because you know, when I think about where we are, when I hear you discuss this, you know, in my mind it seems like, you know, the cards are there for the people that are most curious, the people that are able, the people that ask lots of questions, you know, especially you know, in this environment that those people are going to be capable of doing more given the, the resources that AI provides versus somebody who got by on their charm or got by on brute force or what have you do.

>> Jayney Howson: You know, it’s really interesting question to say are the people going to get ahead? Are they going to be different? Because I’m not sure, I’m not sure about the answer. I think I would have, we’re quick to answer and say yes definitely, but I’ll tell you, I’m absolutely the fit convince the people that will get ahead of the people who do exactly what you say. We have a model called the human advantage model which talks about how you think, behave and connect and they will be the differentiators the kind of human edge and how you think. So your ability to know that you don’t know the answers to go in very curious. Your ability for systems thinking to be able to join not docs for your. For your ability, thoughts for questioning. For your ability to think in the paradox so not know like black, black and white to understand how people think. Like just cognitive load like understanding that that’s kind of the think area. So I think people who have that kind of open mind for the world and the ability to observe is so important, then I think this kind of behavior bit is so important too. So with absolute courage and resilience and the ability to chase something with so much energy and then six months later that skill be taken away by AI like takes absolute courage to pick yourself up and keep going. So I think that character strength is so m important there. And then the last thing as I and I really hope this gets better, but I really worry it’s going the opposite way is how we connect with each other. So if we get really good at talking to AI, which we all should, and using it as a thought partner and as a emotional support, what happens to those messy conversations that build relationships with other humans? Because it’s not the perfect conversations. It’s the messy unformed ones that ah, form really good relationships. And your ability to see people and move a room and find people that disagree with you and all of those things, if you have those skills, I am convinced you will get ahead because they are skills that AI won’t be able to replicate because it can’t sense and feel the world in the same way. That plus obviously your ability to take on new technologies and use it and be open to all of that. But it’s the mindset I think in those three areas that are so critical.

>> Craig Gould: So speaking of those sorts of messy relationships, what do you find in your role in terms of justifying the kind of the, the cost benefit analysis of, of learning? Like, you know, because some organizations will say, well learning’s a cost center. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s draining our resources. I doubt that’s what you believe. And what, what are, what are the conversations like at the highest levels when you’re at some point having to, to fight for, for budget dollars.

>> Jayney Howson: And we do, we do. And that’s kind of the story of learning and development. Like if I’d have wanted to be in a world where people thought I was wanted all the time, I would have stayed in sales because there is it. But that’s not why you’re in the game. But you have to get really, really good at understanding data. And I don’t think it’s enough just to talk about how great we are and look at the, look how much somebody loved our learning. Look at the csat. We say no data, no clue. So how do you. We’re really good at making sure we understand who is coming and what which to the training, who’s engaging and who. What output we’re trying to achieve. So and in some areas that’s lots easier. So sales has always been the easier place because you can say those five people that went to that session have better pipe generational can close more deals much harder in things like leadership development for example to train. But we’re, we’re getting good, we’re getting better at associating programs back to behaviors that drive economic value. And where I think we’ve all got to get good at is the productivity line. So because of AI, we’ve got much better at talking about performance and productivity of our human capital. We need to relate that back to the training that we do. And that means really solid a B testing. It means really solid cohort design. It means doing a pre mortem prior going into any program of what you’re trying to achieve. But I think all of those things need to be true and I am very lucky to get in front of senior leadership a lot and the board a lot. But if I’m in there I have to have a data story. I can’t just be a nice to have. It has to be a, has to be economic value in what we do.

>> Craig Gould: So again back to marketing. It’s, there’s storytelling involved, right?

>> Jayney Howson: Absolutely. And storytelling at every level. So I think we’re, this is something we’ve been thinking about recently is so we’re really good at talking about the highest level. So we’ve drove this campaign. We got five and a half million pipe generation on the back of this single workshop that we did. Brilliant. What you should also be able to say is there was a guy called Nick in that meeting and Nick’s been struggling with his accounts for the last 12 months. but he spent time in this thing and he Met somebody else that’s been having similar problems together, they crafted that deal and he’s just closed the deal for 5 million in his territory. Those are the stories that you’ve got to get good at every level. And that’s marked, that’s like the, the abstract level, which is marketing kind of one on one. And so I think we can misunderstand or underestimate like you’re saying, the storytelling and the narrative in a, in a, in a role like L and D. Because you didn’t. We don’t come from that background. And yeah, really, really critical.

>> Craig Gould: Right. And so I’m hearing like, with, with your marketing hat on, folks are prone to looking at the, the quantifiable number. What, what are your, you know, how many people are on the platform, how many people are engaging. But it’s those qualitative measures that, you know what they sell. you know, numbers tell, but stories sell.

>> Jayney Howson: Yeah, exactly. And it’s a story of like, so the, the reason I chose to work for ServiceNow is because of one story about the founder and a lady that he helped called Phyllis. And there’s a story of Fred sitting down and Phyllis ends up crying because he worked out a workflow that if you pressed F5, the work that she’d been spending hours doing and not seeing her kids as much as she wanted to do could now be done in the click of a button. That’s. They’re the stories that last time and sustain and they’re the things that you need on programs. You need people saying, because I went to this thing, I’m a better leader. this was a breakthrough moment for me. And at the same time you need to say it drove 5 million in pipeline too.

>> Craig Gould: So to tell me about ServiceNow University, how is it different and how are we having to approach this next generation? Because it’s not just like a generational, you know, how the next generation consumes. It’s also a matter of just the speed that we all need to adapt. Right. Can you talk about, if you go back to the drawing board to recreate a learning model, what does that look like now?

>> Jayney Howson: So I think it’s important to remember why ServiceNow University exists. So we’ve got an ecosystem, of, we have millions and millions of people touching our platform every day. Every day. Like 40 million a month of people kind of hands on in our platform. We’ve got thousands of customers who are relying on our platform to make work, work. And in order for that platform, to be successful and embedded and absorbed into an organization, it needs to be integrated and implemented successfully. And that means we need people with skills, hands on keyboards, able to do that implementation and then able to run it every single day. And even in the world of agents and agentic, it’s important that kind of the business and the platform talk to each other. And we also then need to make sure that people building the platform and selling the platform and supporting the sales and builds are also understand what we’re trying to do. So that was true even before the evolution of what was happening with AI. And then at the same time we get hit with this, oh, by the way, 8 million people, 98 of the overall population, jobs are going to change. Things aren’t going to happen. We need to invest in this. So for us it was kind of a no brainer. We need to make sure that people understand that we need to create a solution that means what our customer can get hold of the talent whenever they need it. And the product that they’re buying is of elite quality and sold in an elite way because we’re here to serve our customers and make sure they can unlock the power of the platform. And in order to do that, we believe that we need 3 million people skilling on the platform by the end of 2027. And what that gives us is like a funnel of these people to learn. so that was kind of our overall principle. And then we said, well, the rate of innovation is happening at such speed. How do we make sure that our people keep up with that innovation that’s happening? In order to do that, we need to deliver something that is completely personalized, completely predictive, it is pertinent, it’s kind of the right level of learning. The right, it’s one minute when it needs to be, it’s three months when it needs to be. And it’s also delivered at the point of need. Because the forgetting curve means that you forget everything you’ve learned or 70% what you’ve learned in 48 hours. So those kind of were the principles of what we tried to create, wanted to create. And then we just use the power of our own platform, of the ServiceNow platform to make sure that we, that we can do that. and the biggest part of that, the biggest part of that innovation, it goes back to what you were just saying in terms of the data and the storytelling is we have a very, very good understanding of the people that we’re serving. So talent data tends to be pretty weak, usually. And much like as we talk about sensing the platform you need to sense what talent you’ve got. And so we built a model called Talent Signature, which means we understand all of our learners, and based on that data, we can deliver them predictive, personalized learning. And that’s all done through the ServiceNow university platform. So we’ve got thousands of courses on there, thousands of career pathways. Very typical in terms of a learning platform in that way. But what’s embedded in it is a learning guide which acts like a personal professor, which directs you to the right learning at the right time, which dramatically decreases the amount of time it takes to find the right learning. Means you’re not starting where everyone else starts. It helps you progress into the right career. and then in our most recent innovation, we’ve embedded that learning guide into our simulations. So what you end up with is guided simulated technical training. And that means that we’re taking our learning down. Our technical learning, which would have taken five weeks, down to a matter of hours. Days or hours, was a dramatic decrease in that. So what that gives us is a couple of things, is a concept called minimum viable duration. So how do we make sure we get the minimum viable time to get you to the best competence, which is what we’ve done with that technical training. But the side effect of it is also much greater confidence as well in the capability of the people using it because we can observe their behavior. The AI coach is our, AI sales guide, sorry, is watching them do that work and can observe their behavior. So both of those things together gives us a much faster route. But what I’m most passionate about with all of that, is I just want to create a safe space for people. I’m the mum m of, like, two girls. There is no better place to watch them grow than in a playground. And the concept of ServiceNow University is meant to do that as well. Like, how do we take you out of a space that sometimes doesn’t always feel safe, which is work or the. The job market, and give you somewhere that you can play and fail fast and learn credentials that help you grow. Just like the creds you get in a playground as your, you know, conquered the monkey bars. You can do that in ServiceNow University. So that’s what our mission is. And we’re well on our way. We’re almost at 2 million learners. We will definitely get 3 million by the end of the year. We’ve got more people certified. Greater attraction. But, how we teach people is going to continue to evolve to take advantage of AI.

>> Craig Gould: How much of that is Kind of hard coded versus how much of it is dynamic because it sounds like, you know, you’re capable of creating kind of customized learning and as you go for people who communicate what their needs are M which means that not only can the platform be much bigger than you could possibly make it in the old days, but it’s more dynamic and quick than it could ever be before.

>> Jayney Howson: Yes, much more dynamic. So the AI learning guide is actually completely dynamic in terms of it’s a conversational interface that you’re having with it. We still have hard coded courseware, but that will evolve over time. I would love to get to a point where we have very minimal. You might have hard coded content, but not as much hard coded courseware. So what that means is that you can pull in content for the right conversations and then the AI learning guide continues to push the right thing to you based on where your gaps are. and then assesses you in the moment. You don’t ever have to go into a test and quiz and read and test that sort of moment, but we’re on a journey to get there. But that’s what I see as, as the, the end point. the other thing is I want to, I want to hard code in human conversation, which sounds ridiculous, but I want to make sure that as much as possible the AI learning guide is also recommending human conversations and human connections that you should build back to my kind of the think behavior connect pillars. How do we make sure that the AI is confidently building in? Well, I think you’re going to learn a lot from Craig Jamie. So here’s a connection to him and then come back and tell me what you learned and then that get built, gets built into your talent, your talent signature in that way.

>> Craig Gould: Is it capable of recommending people across the organization because I guess it would be easy kind of within your team. But is it able to identify people across the organization that it can point you to to maintain that human interrelation?

>> Jayney Howson: Yeah, we’re filing it right now and also can do it in the community too because we’ve got a big service now community and we’ve got MVPs within there. So it’s recommending those people to talk to as well. Now this, we obviously have to make sure people are opting into that relationship. We have to make sure we’re doing things all in the right way. But yeah, it’s already making those recommendations that says it’s basically, you know, what we used to be organizational, analysis just to be able to say, who are the kind of the people who are most engaged, etc. It uses that data.

>> Craig Gould: You know, you were mentioning earlier the playground. I’ve heard you speak before about trying to move people from fight or flight into this play state. But many times our work environment is one where we are kind of in the m. Middle, in the thick of something that can feel like our hair’s on fire. Right. So how does a leader actually move their, Their, their team members into a play state when. When their team’s overwhelmed and under pressure and under the gun?

>> Jayney Howson: I could talk about. This is a topic I don’t think we talk about enough. And I could talk about all day. So we ended up talking a lot about getting people to a learning platform, getting them into that space, safe space and learning. But it can’t be the responsibility of learning to do that. It has to be an organizational responsibility. this will make sense why I’m saying this, but my husband’s a God. My husband’s a gardener and he works with big private clients. They spend thousands of pounds on plants, but he refuses to put anything in the soil until he’s confident the soil quality is good because those plants will die. And, it causes a lot of pain because he’s like, you need to invest like 30 of your dot. Your money on the soil to make this. And people want to push back, but they end up doing it because the plants will die. The same is true for organizations. We don’t spend enough time thinking about what’s the quality of the soil and make this talent thrive. So I think there’s for. I don’t think, leaders can be thinking about it always in the moment, but they always need to feel accountable for it and asking themselves the questions like, have I created the right conditions? Is this an, is this an environment where my team can thrive and have just build in reflection time or the organization builds in reflection time for individuals to ask that question. Because I never think this very, very bad. Back to my original kind of why I love this job. There’s very bad, few bad humans in the world. Like most people you work with, the vast majority are people who want to be great at what they do. And, they want to be good leaders. They just don’t have time to reflect on it. So I think, number one, they need to be thinking, looks like I’m the gardener of this, of this, patch. How do I make sure I’m building the right conditions? So I think the reflection is important. I think we need to give. It starts top down. How do we give Them the space to trust boldly. You gonna have to be ready for your team to make mistakes and have their back and make them feel like they can hold tight, cling, like to the thing I said earlier. And that means your own growth mindset, your own vulnerability, learning out loud in front of them and saying that you failed on things that. We have a model called the lead boldly model. And it starts with trusting boldly. Like, how do you boldly put yourself out there for your. The second thing I think that, leaders need to do now more than ever, and I really worry it’s degrading, is communicating clearly. There’s more people, there’s more ambiguity than there’s ever been. There’s less certainty for leaders. And also there’s more help to be able to communicate. And then we’re so we’re losing the core skill just to be able to say, I don’t know right now. This is what I know, this is what I can tell you, but this is what I need from you. And if. And if I’m not seeing that from you, then we need to talk about it again. And, having that clear ability to communicate clearly I think is really important for leaders. I think in times of fear and when we’re kind people, which most people are, we pull back from that. And that’s actually very unkind. Like Brene Brown always says, claire is kind. And I think that’s so important. And then the last thing is I think leaders need to be openly, with their full heart and mind, championing change. And that’s really hard because they’re also at risk. So how do they be upfront going, I’m all in on this journey. I believe in the mission and the purpose of this organization. I don’t know what it means for my job either, but I’ve got total faith that this means career security for me because I’m learning so much. Are you with me? I’m going to sacrifice this. So trusting, boldly, communicating clearly championing change. I think that the most important things, and feeling responsible and accountable for your own garden, that you’ll make those people flourish.

>> Craig Gould: Going back to the communication and how integral that is, I think there are plenty of headlines about how people are finding it harder and harder to communicate that the next generation is in their iPad or their phone. But is there an opportunity for a platform like this to help re establish some of those communication skills through simulations? even beyond just here are some of the things you should think about in your spare time. You know, actually practice those skills 100%.

>> Jayney Howson: So I mean I talk about this a lot. We were our event recently and we talked about the risk of degrading like human advantage. Like the. There’s cognitive decline in some of the things that I just spoke about. One of them is definitely communication. And because it’s called cognitive offloading. So we outsource something that we used to do all of the time to something else. And we have this arrogance that because we’ve been writing for the last two, three decades, we’ll never forget. We will forget. It’s just a muscle that starts to not use, not be used. So I think there isn’t a need in our, the platforms like ours to do that and we will build them in. But there’s also lots of other kind of. We call them mind gyms. Like what happened when people were taken out of the fields and into offices, everyone put on weight and then the gyms kind of boomed and we need to do the same for the mind. So how do we build those models where people can be testing? I mean I use a, like just an app on my phone that I’ve started using again. I used to use it and I’ve started using again the last couple of weeks because I just, just can’t find big words anymore. Like I’ve literally like a three syllable words. I’m just struggling to pull out. I like, I’m like what is that word? And I used to be like, I thought I used to be quite verbose in those ways and articulate and I’m just forgetting it. So I’ve started using this app which is definitely a mind gym type app, just to like stretch my vocabulary. And we all build those techniques into ServiceNow University too. But I think it’s personal accountability has to be true. you know, I keep using this analogy. I’m not sure it’s going to land but I’ll keep trying again. See. But you know there’s In the UK we call it the hokey cokey, like in out, shake it all about. You call it hokey pokey in America. No idea why it’s a different word. But anyway, I think when we’re doing learning design and it we’re designing technology, we’re designing cultures, all we focus on in practitioners is how the shake it all about thing. All we think about is how we’re going to design it for the, for everybody else else. So I hear people. My m. Friend, I have a friend, Francis Fry, who’s a Harvard professor, she does this Thing called office hours. It’s brilliant. And then I hear people ask questions or many of them learning professionals and they’re all thinking about how they design something which is brilliant. But what we also need to think about is the in and the out bit. So how do we personally think about this every single day? Like how do we build the discernment? How do we grow our the vocabulary that we’re using? How do we sometimes like not use AI to write an email or a LinkedIn post? Or like what’s our inward thing? And then the second thing is the outlook. How do we outwardly talk about it? Even if you don’t lead a team, people are watching you. So how do we outwardly talk about these skills as something we’ve got to build? So that’s my hokey pokey

>> Craig Gould: shake it all about. Right? So, well, what’s on the horizon? Because I mean again we are in the middle of something. You’re in the middle of something with ServiceNow University, which again 10 years ago we couldn’t have even foreseen the scale of it. if you were hoping to see where this platform were to go, or where career transformation across industries outside of ServiceNow, where it goes, what would you hope? What do you foresee if you’re visioneering, what does it look like?

>> Jayney Howson: So I think there’s a few things I think organizations need to be really good at. Designing what they’re trying to achieve is the number one, because learning humans will grow and adapt. We are organism growth organisms that want that. The question is, are we growing and adapting in the right thing for the people who are paying our salaries and for where the world needs to go. So I think a big part of this is so we have an AI blueprint for ServiceNow which is sense decide, act secure that talks about our platform. The same needs to be true for the talent design. So I think in the future and now we have a much better understanding of sensing the talent that we’ve got and that will mean much more assessment and that people aren’t going to love that. But I really do think that is the future we need. Like I say that a skill without a signal has no economic value and in order for us to have a skill that’s understood, we need to have assessment because that helps us sense the world. I think organizations are going to get much better at that. I think what skill based organizations had a bit of a bad reputation. I think they will evolve and we’ll get much better idea of sensing. I think the decide piece is then going to need organizations who are really thinking about what the future model of their business is, because if they get that right from that data, then when you have the ACT bit, we can start to do some real magic in that ACT area with L&D. So I think those two things need to be true. And I’m not sure learning development, people are talking about those two things enough because we need those two things to be right in order to do the intervention. And then in the world of act, which is kind of the change things, I think, far more playgrounds, as in like far more simulations, they’re so much easier to create, far more dynamic learning, far more coaching in the flow of work. I think learning is the work and work is learning. So how do you get much better at assessing what people have learned in their job and that going back into their profile so we can sense. I think that will be the future. And then in this kind of secure bit, I think we’re going to have to have much more human accountability and work through leadership to make sure that people are thriving and, using the data to go cyclical back into that world. But I think there’s a big part of the human bit in how we’re securing the future of work is a greater focus on leadership development, embedding the right cultures, creating the conditions. Everyone being a, gardener of their own patch sort of thing.

>> Craig Gould: Do you feel like you need to put guardrails around? Because it can be so many things to so many people and does there need to be at some point somebody to say, these are the more important things that we want you to learn? What are the guardrails that you have to put in there? Because otherwise people may wind up spending their time, you know, enjoying themselves at the, at the lowest hanging fruits that

>> Jayney Howson: has to be designed into the system. That’s why the sense and decide bit is so important, because without that, people are just going to do the stuff that makes them feel good. And that’s just human nature. And we’ll also do stuff that’s easiest. Like Darwinism means that we’ll have the least path of resistance and we will use AI to write everything and we will just spend time playing in the learning that gives us a badge quickest, that makes us feel good about ourselves. So you have to just get that sense and decide bit right. So that’s how you create the guardrails. And I, I would love. I spoke to, somebody who was fabulous the other day that said we’re going to move from rules and process to trust and purpose as an AS organizations. And in order for us to move to trust and purpose, which I think would be the right ways to run a business, you have to have very solid systems that go, I want Theresa to end up in this. This is what I need from her in the next six to 12 months. This is what I’m going to train her into. This is what I want Craig to do. It looks very different what I need to train him into. And I will reward them both and recognize them both for that path, not for the other things they choose to do. Because if you give them the purpose and you trust them to go on that path, then you’ll be fine. But if you’ve not designed that, then it’s a huge gap in the plan. And I say this in every conversation. No one is thinking about this as much as learning development people. So it’s your time to kind of pull the seat out from the table that’s waiting for you and take your role there, in the strategy and the business value of what you’re doing, even if it feels outside your world.

>> Craig Gould: What you mentioned there reminded me of a conversation I was having just recently about automation and how automation has evolved from rules based automation to now with the, the use of AI to outcomes based automation.

>> Jayney Howson: Yes.

>> Craig Gould: instead of telling AI these are the rules, it’s like this is the state we want to achieve. And then it becomes a more efficient path to that, that outcome.

>> Jayney Howson: Or I mean this is, we have AI control towers in ServiceNow and that governance of that is so important. So you should be in everything we do. That’s why our platform exists. They should be outcome based workflows. They should have outcome based talent workflow. But you have to know what’s happening in that system to make sure those guardrails are being kept to and make sure people aren’t going. Because at the end of the day we’re paying people salary we want to make and we’re responsible for them. We want to make sure they’re doing the right thing. So having that governance in there, so important. But setting whatever the outcome is is priority number one.

>> Craig Gould: Jayney I can’t thank you enough for your time today. This has been, a delightful conversation and so illuminating and I, really appreciate you taking time out of your day to to speak with me. If folks wanted to keep track of you servicenow, the work you’re doing, if they can’t get enough of Janiehausen, where should we point them to, follow you?

>> Jayney Howson: I really. My husband would say you can get farther than you can get too much of Janiehausen. So, be careful what you wish for. But you can follow me on LinkedIn @janiehausen. I’d, love to see you there. I try and do like I’m trying to do the in, out, shake it all about thing by doing a learning out loud every week to just show vulnerability in this space and I just would love to see more people do that. So love to see you there.

>> Craig Gould: You know, it. It sounds like ServiceNow University is kind of open to whoever feels led to learn there. Where, where, where would people go to learn from ServiceNow?

>> Jayney Howson: So we would love to see you there. Completely democratized, completely free. You, your mum, your granite. Everyone please come. we’re at ServiceNow University. Just Google ServiceNow University search or your chosen search engine. or ServiceNow. Com learning.

>> Craig Gould: Awesome. Well, Jayney thank you again. It’s been great.

>> Jayney Howson: Thank you so much. Take care, Craig.