Human Centered Learning in the Age of AI: A Conversation with Dave Stevens

CommLab Podcast with Dave Stevens

Sherna Varayath 3:34
Hello and welcome back to the eLearning Champion podcast where we delve into strategies, trends, and triumphs shaping the world of digital learning. Are you ready to explore why human centered design matters more now than ever before?
If you've nodded yes, then you're in the right place. Today we are talking about human centered learning in the age of AI, and joining me for this episode is Dave Stevens. Dave is the CLO and founder of Advanced Learning Strategies with over two decades of L&D leadership experience at organizations like Prudential, United Health Group, and Wells Fargo. At Advanced Learning Strategies, he helps build learning ecosystems that balance automation with depth and precision with purpose, enabling L&D teams to scale performance without losing the space needed for curiosity reflection and human connection. By thoughtfully integrating AI, Dave empowers teams to move fast and stay human, supporting the kind of messy, meaningful ,and reflective learning that truly sticks. Hi Dave, we are thrilled to have you speak with us today.

David Stevens 4:48
Hi, Sherna. Thank you so much for the invite. I am very excited to talk to this important audience.

Sherna Varayath 4:55
That's great to hear. So before we dive in, dear listeners, make sure you're a true
eLearning champion by hitting that Follow button wherever you're listening to us from. Now, Dave, let's start with the basics. When you say human centered learning, what do you mean?

David Stevens 5:12
That's a great foundational question. Let me start with what it's not. Human centered learning is not about making training easier. It's not about learning styles or other kinds of debunked fads. It's not actually faster or more focused or more efficient. In fact, it's barely efficient. And it's not intuitive. At its heart, human centered learning is deeper. It's transformative. What I'd like to do is think back to a learning experience that truly changed you. Chances are it wasn't the quickest or cleanest. It was probably something that was hard earned. Maybe it came with frustration or maybe failure and there was probably a moment of reflection and possibly an epiphany in the shower, months or years later. That's human centered learning. I became fascinated with human centered learning after studying these learning pioneers who helped us understand how learning really works, people like Lev Vygotsky and Bell Hooks and others. They showed us that learning isn't just the transfer of knowledge, it's the transformation of perspective. And here's what that looks like in practice. I have an example that I share. 20 years ago, I was teaching a writing course at a Community College in Paterson, NJ. And one of my students, let's call her Melissa, she had a lot on her plate. She was juggling 2 jobs, she was raising her siblings and trying to finish her degree. And in the class, she was behind, she wasn't doing particularly well, although she was trying. And then one day, she handed in an essay about her mother's illness, and the grammar was rough. There were subject verb agreement problems. There was a lot to pick at. But in the middle of it, she wrote a line, a sentence I'll never forget. I thought strength meant hiding the bad things. Now I think it might mean letting some of the bad things show. It was an authentic sentence. It was an authentic thought in this essay that she didn't need to provide. That wasn't a test answer. That wasn't something I'd asked. I didn't ask her about strength. It just came out. Later, I remember talking to her about that essay, and I didn't ask her about the commas and the grammar. Instead I did ask her about that sentence and where it came from and how she felt about it. And I recall distinctly that she just smiled, and it was probably the first time I'd ever seen her smile. And she said that it had been difficult to write these essays, and she had to do bits. She was constantly interrupted by her family. She wrote it on the bus to her second job, and she had a realization that she had to be there emotionally for her brothers and sisters. And that they were all going through this illness that her mother had and that by sharing this, it transformed who she was a little bit and I'm not taking credit for it. The essay didn't do it, but it was a trigger. Lots of things were there in place. As a student, she had not been engaged in class before. After that, she still sat in the back, but she held court. She would talk in the class, and she was somebody who was much more engaged. And I can't explain how it happened, but I do know that what we were doing played a part in it. The result wasn't what I thought it was going to be, meaning that she was a better English student. The result was that she changed something in her life. It transformed her in a way, and I think that's a great example of what human centered learning is all about.

Sherna Varayath 9:26
Wow. Yes, absolutely. Now you've mentioned about the difference between performance training and growth learning. Could you walk us through that distinction?

David Stevens 9:37
This is a new distinction for me. And this distinction came to me as I started thinking seriously about AI. Like many in L&D, I've been fascinated by its potential, and I wanted to explore how it will impact learning, not just in corporate settings, but in higher education and beyond. And as I thought about it, I realized I could divide learning into two big categories: performance training which is tactical, is about efficiency, teaches people to do the same thing faster, better, and more consistently.

Think of call scripts in a contact center or system workflows or compliance rules and the goal is about repeatability and AI is brilliant here. We're beginning to see how good it is in performance training. And I suspect it's going to continue to grow and grow and grow and we'll discover that AI is better than we are when it's about creating performance training. Something to note is that performance training right now with large organizations, large companies with centralized L&D groups, probably 80% of our work is performance training. So I think that this is a big deal. And AI is going to do a very good job handling it.

That said, the other side of the coin of performance training is something that I call growth learning and it's different. It's what we experienced with Melissa in that class. It's not about efficiency, it's about transformation and its end result. It cultivates adaptability and resilience and deep insight. It's nonlinear. You try something and you fail. And you reflect and you discover and the timeline is not something that's predictable. Maybe you'll have an epiphany. Maybe you'll understand the solution, but maybe it takes place in three months or three years, or maybe it never happens. It's unpredictable, but it's where the unexpected happens. And the kind of change is not only just how you do your work, but how you see yourself in your role. And I think it's about leadership programs and it's about change management, and I think it's about DEI training and creating safe, psychologically safe spaces and creating opportunities for reflection in everything that we do. Both are essential, but with performance training, I think there's a big change that's right on our horizon where AI is going to take a lot of that work. I do believe strongly that the growth learning is more important to us. It's more important to the organization and it's more important to the individual. It's not something that we do a lot of because we don't measure it well. And we think that in order to sit at the strategy table, we need to show how effective we are as L&D. And we do that with performance training, but if we keep doing it, it's going to be a problem.

Sherna Varayath 13:03
Right. You've referenced Clayton Christensen's disruption theory before. How does that apply in this situation?

David Stevens 13:16
Yeah, Clayton Christensen was somebody that I had an opportunity to interact with when I was quite young. It was a moment for me to be mentored, and it really has affected the way I think about learning. He showed us that innovation almost never begins with efficiency, and it's not intuitive. Innovation begins in the margins with new ways of seeing and solving problems. Efficiency follows, but the breakthrough starts with friction, with having a challenge, by not seeing what you expected to see, or failing. An example that Christensen uses is looking at businesses that failed. Even though they were really strong businesses, even though they hired really smart people to lead it, they failed. And the classic example is Blockbuster Video in America and Netflix and how Blockbuster had bigger stores, and they kept growing and growing and growing and they were optimizing what they did really, really well. And meanwhile, Netflix came in and they weren't a threat. They were a start-up. And people were saying, well, who wants to download a video where you can actually look and see all of them? And you know what happened. We still have Netflix and Blockbuster, we don't. So that's why growth learning pushes people into the uncomfortable, into the non-linear space where new perspectives emerge. I do believe what Christensen said about business applies to L&D specifically. When Christensen says that if we if we focus on optimization like Blockbuster did, we're going to lose it all because AI is simply going to roll over us as L&D. Instead, we should be looking at where there is an opportunity for us to do something, a new job, and work. Where will there be added value for us as L&D?

We currently do growth learning, we do leadership training and change management, and DEI training and we are looking to improve, particularly leaders, but everybody in the organization. When I was working at Prudential, I was leading the enterprise instructional design group there and we were responsible for all the learning across the organization at a higher level. One thing that we learned through company-wide surveys is that people who felt most engaged were also the people who were most involved in our learning. There was a direct correlation between learning and a feeling or sense of engagement, and a sense of inclusion. What we were recognizing was that learning helps people, that first it's a safe space and it's very rare in a company where you can go in and feel a little vulnerable and you grow. Usually you're being told what to do, but here you're growing and it's an opportunity for us to transform people and when we do that through growth, learning and leadership and change management and all the soft skills, emotional intelligence, when people learn these things, what they learn isn't the same thing for each of us. We pick up other things, we've had other experiences, and that means at the end of the day, we each have a different perspective on things. We have a diversity of critical thinking when the world changes, and it always does. You can ask Blockbuster. It changed. When the world changes, we now have people in our company, some of those people will have anticipated that change. Some of those people would have been thinking about it.

If we let AI control everything, and I don't think it can control growth learning very well, but it's about optimization. It's about getting everyone to think the same way. If everyone's thinking the same way, we're not going to be able to anticipate the big changes as a company. So growth learning is critical. Christensen talked about how a diverse perspective and being open to doing something inefficient, which is human centered learning, doing things that are inefficient, don't necessarily add to the bottom line immediately. You have to have that appetite, that tolerance to do these things, or else tomorrow you won't be prepared for what's coming up.

Sherna Varayath 18:29
Right. So then what is the call to action for learning leaders right now?

David Stevens 18:40
Yeah, the call to action, I'd like to say it's simple. I'm not sure if it is, but don't confuse what's scalable with what's strategic. Whether we like it or not, AI is going to handle performance training and that's certainly true in large organizations with centralized L&Ds, but it's going to happen to all of us a little bit. The businesses that we support will see an opportunity to use AI and not have L&D as a middleman. And again, that sounds scary. It sounds horrifying to me. But the opportunity is to do what's more important and that is the growth learning where we transform individuals like Melissa, where we create an opportunity for the business to have diversity of thought throughout the organization so that we will be able to anticipate the context changes that we're all going to face in the future that we can't anticipate. No one knows exactly what it's going to look like. AI is a good example. We right now need to lean into growth learning and get better at this. We do it a little bit, but now this is going to be something that we're going to recognize as being the most important work that we can be doing because the other work, the performance work, the work that we thought was really important, that we've always been trying to optimize and do faster, AI is going to probably be doing that for us. We can't let that efficiency crowd out what really matters. Growth learning is where leadership is forged, where teams build trust, and where people feel seen, valued and included. It's so important. We've always known it, but now we're going to have the opportunity to really practice it.

Sherna Varayath 20:43
Yes. And they're so important and key for human values being seen, yes.

David Stevens 20:47
You've got it exactly right. It is about human values. We respond to that. Every one of us, whether we've been in training or learning or doing it in a corporation or doing it in school or doing it because of a hobby, something that we just want to pursue.

We've been changed by learning. And we are rarely changed when we learn how to change a customer address in Salesforce, that doesn't change us. But the other stuff, the stuff that's hard, the stuff that's challenging, that we fail at, that we reflect on, it does change us. So as L&D, we really want to make sure that we protect and prioritize this inefficient kind of learning that is critical to our future success.

Sherna Varayath 21:41
Well, absolutely. And this brings us to the end of another amazing episode of the
eLearning Champion podcast. We looked at the strategic value of human centered learning and how it's not about efficiency, but about transformation. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas with us, Dave.

David Stevens 22:01
Sherna, thank you so much. It's my pleasure. And I'm available on LinkedIn. If anybody has questions, I would love to talk about this.

Sherna Varayath 22:10
Absolutely. And dear listeners, you've seen how passionate Dave is about human centered learning. Feel free to reach out to him on LinkedIn.

Yes, thank you, dear listeners. I hope you're walking away with some fresh ideas and actionable steps to get started. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please do share this episode with a fellow eLearning enthusiast. Don't forget to follow the eLearning Champion podcast for more great episodes on important topics.

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