Social Learning with Nellie Wartoft

Social learning is a fundamental, age-old method of learning. But it got somewhat lost in the broader adoption of digital learning, especially self-paced e-learning, that happened in the last 20 years, and social learning suffered again during COVID. But, done right, social learning is a highly effective and efficient way to learn.

Our guest in this episode is Nellie Wartoft, founder and CEO of Tigerhall, a social learning platform that’s trying to change how professionals learn from one another in the real world. Nellie talks with Leading Learning Podcast co-host Jeff Cobb about what’s wrong with the current approach to education and how social learning can help, five key aspects of social learning, how to tackle measuring the effectiveness of social learning, and how artificial intelligence can be used to support social learning.

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Intro: [00:00:00]

Jeff Cobb: [00:01:47] Can you tell us a little bit more about what that work is, what you do at Tigerhall as CEO, and what Tigerhall is really trying to achieve?

Nellie Wartoft: [00:01:56] Absolutely. I started the company about five years ago now, and the idea came from when I was in talent acquisition. Before this, I used to lead the sales and marketing practice at Michael Page in Singapore, and I was always interacting with candidates, usually mid-level managers, who were asking me questions around “How do I get to my next role? How do I launch a new market? And how do I get this customer base?” And so on. And all these questions, I was like, “I’m just a lowly recruiter. I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I know the people who do,” and many of those were my customers. I recruited for chief commercial officers, presidents, CEOs, and senior leaders and experts, and, every time I was meeting with them, I realized that I learned a lot more from a coffee chat with them than I did in my entire university education. So that’s when I started thinking, “How can we enable more people to learn directly from these senior leaders, from experts, from people that they might not know or have access to?” And I also realized amongst my friends, when we were in that age, I was pretty much the only one who had access to these types of people because of my job, and many others didn’t. So, they didn’t have a chance to ask these questions from these different leaders and experts.

That’s when I thought, “How can we enable people to learn from each other at scale and do that in a way that is very familiar to us?” Because people always say, “Oh, I don’t have any time for learning,” but we spend three hours a day on social media.

Nellie Wartoft

Nellie Wartoft: [00:03:26] I don’t think time is the issue but rather the familiarity and how engaged people are in it. So looking at familiar behaviors that we’re all doing every day—we’re all scrolling feeds, we’re listening to podcasts, we’re chatting with each other, we’re interacting online, and so on—bringing those sorts of behaviors into that learning process was very much the second part of bringing Tigerhall to life. It was those two ideas that I combined—how do we learn from experts and leaders at scale and doing that in a way that is very familiar to our day-to-day digital behaviors. That was five years ago, and, since then, we’re headquartered in Singapore, but I’ve expanded to India, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, U.K., Switzerland, and the U.S. We’re right now global with customers around the world, and my role is very much to lead the business and a lot of client interaction. I love meeting with our customers and understanding them better and thinking of the future of the platform and what we’re going to do, so I’m based between Los Angeles and Singapore.

Frustration with Traditional Education

Jeff Cobb: [00:04:32] I want to come back to this, the whole concept of learning from others, social learning. But, before we get to that—or maybe it’s the pathway to getting to that—I understand that you have a frustration with traditional approaches to education that dates back quite a while. This is something you discovered at a relatively early age. So what is it that frustrated you early on? And I’d love to hear are you seeing any progress? Are you seeing any positive change in how we think about and approach education?

Nellie Wartoft: [00:05:07] Yes, that’s a really good question. I was very frustrated very early on, and I think my teachers were very frustrated with me for being frustrated, and I was always the one that was asking, “Why are we spending so much time memorizing the periodical table and all of those abbreviations instead of understanding how does a credit card work? Or why are we spending so much time on the osmosis process and really understanding how that’s happening, but we’re getting to learn nothing around how to lead a team or how to lead a group work or collaborate with each other?” I have nothing against chemistry or biology, and we should spend time on that as well. But I felt like it was at the expense of knowing things that we then need to deal with in our daily lives. And, up until today, if you ask people about their taxes, like the first time they were filing their taxes, they were like, “What is going on?” And they had no idea about how it worked. And things like personal finance remain a huge issue across the world—people don’t have enough personal finance education. And issues in the workplace, like how do you interact and collaborate with colleagues, and so on. I felt it was very skewed with what are we learning and memorizing, to a big extent, compared to what we actually need to know when we’re adults and we’re going out in the real world of work and tackling our day-to-day issues there. So I think that was not great.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:06:30] And then I also didn’t like how it was so much like theoretic research that was then pushed to you as a very linear approach, and that’s not historically how we’ve been learning as human beings. That’s not the best way for the brain to pick up knowledge. It’s not to cram a bunch of knowledge and then spit it out in an exam in multiple-choice questions or similar. The way that the brain learns is by experiencing, reflecting, discussing, and collaborating with others. That’s the way that the brain develops. I thought the way that we’re learning is also not the most effective. I think, looking at where it is today, there have been some elements in some schools where they’ve been trying to bring in more of that from the outside. I’m very active in Junior Achievement, for example, and, within Junior Achievement, we go out, volunteers go out to high schools many times and teach topics like personal finance, leadership, and entrepreneurship. So I think there are elements of that.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:07:30] But the fundamental way that education happens hasn’t changed. And it was funny. I spoke with a university professor—he’s a professor at university in Utah—a few months ago, and he was telling me, “Oh, but it’s great. We’ve done this whole thing where people go out to companies, and they work, and that’s part of their education.” I’m like, “Yes, so the actual education is not the education. You’re saying that they learn by going out to companies and getting real-world exposure and working and having colleagues and being part of something real.” So that means that university is actually not as effective as it should be. Those are some of the areas I think are not done great. And the fact that curriculum development is just so slow. Take generative AI, for example, the hottest topic in the last six months. When is that going to make it to school curriculums? Maybe in five years. That’s the process that it takes. So I think it’s not fast enough. It’s not the way that we learn. And it’s the wrong topics.

Shortcomings of MBAs and Other University Degrees

Jeff Cobb: [00:08:31] Yes, it’s funny. I hear some of the same criticisms from my son, who’s now in high school, that you’ve just covered, and I think I probably had many of them myself back when I was in high school and before. And he’s also involved in a group that’s similar, in some ways, to something like Junior Achievement, called the Future Business Leaders of America, and I think he is interested in the business world and, practically speaking, what does it take to get out there in the business world, be functional, be successful, actually have a career. Something he’s thinking about possibly being on his roadmap one of these days is an MBA, a master’s in business administration. I know you’ve been critical of the MBA as a degree. It would be interesting to hear some of your criticisms of that specific degree. And I’d also appreciate your perspective on degrees in general because I feel like I have a chip on my shoulder as far as that goes. I’m not sure the traditional degree process—undergraduate or graduate—is really performing the job that it needs to be performing these days. What are your perspectives on the MBA and on degrees in general?

Nellie Wartoft: [00:09:42] Degrees, university education, MBAs—I think it’s the biggest scam that we’re having in the world. I think it’s by far the biggest scam. And the biggest lie that we keep telling our children is, “Study hard, get good grades, get into a great school, and then you’ll be successful for life.” It is not true. It is definitely not true at all anymore. Degrees have fallen into this tick box that people just have to have because, otherwise, it seems like, “Oh, are you not normal? Do you not have the IQ? Or are you not smart enough?” Literally just to tick the box, but it’s nowhere near preparing people for what they need to know when they go out and work in the real world. It’s very, very far off. And that applies to both undergraduate and MBAs alike. I have no issue with university education in areas that are not changing as much. Take physics, history, or biology—I think there’s definitely a reason to go to university in those topics, and I think that could be one of the choices. But I think it’s not at all a good option if you’re going to work in business or the corporate world, which, actually, most of us end up going into a large corporation, and, for that, university is not preparing you. It’s not only that university’s not doing a good job of preparing you for what’s to come afterwards; it’s also that they take a huge price tag, they put you in debt for the rest of your life, and they take many years of your youth.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:11:13] Then people say, “Oh, but you make friends, and you can play ping-pong.” I’m like, “Are you going to spend $150,000 to play ping-pong? I can offer much cheaper beer pong places where you can meet friends than spending $150,000 on a school.” And I hear this over and over again, where people are like, “I would love to quit my job and do something different, but I can’t because I have to pay my debt, my education debt, and my loans back,” and it puts people into lack of freedom. It almost puts them into jail.

An education is supposed to give you freedom. I feel like education is doing the opposite. It’s not giving people freedom at all. It’s taking a huge amount of money off of you or your parents, if you’re lucky.

But, if you’re also not born to parents who have those means, then you’re immediately set back at the very beginning of your life because, the moment you’re born, it’s pretty much decided if you’re going to make it to university at all and, if you do, which school you’re going to go to and so on. So it further brings inequality and inequity in life and across humanity from the very beginning. That’s something I have a very hard time with.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:12:22] And then, coming to MBAs, there’s still some value in MBAs if you go to a Harvard or Stanford or similar because of the brand names that those universities hold, but it’s very, very few. And 99.99999 percent of people do not go to a Harvard or Stanford. They end up going to another university for their MBA, and then it holds very, very little value. How likely they are to be able to pay that back is very, very low. So it puts people into mass amounts of debt, the long curriculum development time that I mentioned earlier, with how long it takes to bring these things into curriculum. Take generative AI. When is that going to show up in MBA education? Probably a few years later, and then it’s already something else. And business is changing at such a rapid pace that universities just can’t keep up. And professors sitting there and doing their two-, three-year-long research. By the time that comes out, it’s already going to be something new. Also, it teaches you things that are opposite to what you need to know to be successful, and this goes for all of school. In school, you’re taught that there is one right answer, and, if you don’t have the right answer, you’re wrong.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:13:38] But, in business, there is no such thing as one right answer. You have to test and experiment all the time. And it teaches you that you can’t collaborate—that’s called cheating. If you’re looking at someone else or asking someone else a question, that’s cheating. So it’s opposite to the collaboration that we need in the workplace. A lot of these factors make people have the insecurities that lead to a lot of the politics and issues that we’re seeing in the workplace because they’re taught from the very beginning that you need to be right, you need to be on your own, and you need to be successful on your own. We don’t teach the right behaviors in school, and that goes all the way from primary education up to university and MBAs as well. So that’s why I think it’s not a good investment of time, but, most of all, this very, very heavy price tag. And, if you’re looking at MBA, being out of business for two, three years and then coming back, and what I’ve seen as a recruiter, is that most people do not end up earning what they think they’re going to earn unless they’ve gone to those very, very elite schools that very few people end up going to. It ends up not being worth it, and they’re in debt for the rest of their lives. And that I don’t think is an effective approach to education. It’s supposed to give you freedom, not to take away freedom.

Jeff Cobb: [00:14:54] Right.

I can say, as somebody who’s now been creating and running companies for more than 20 years, at times it’s crossed my mind, “Should I get an MBA?”

Jeff Cobb

But it has never, at any point, really seemed worth it to go engage in that, and it seems much more effective to get out there and be in the process of doing. And then, if there is someplace where you need some training or some education, where it becomes apparent that I don’t know enough about some aspect of accounting or something like that, then I’ll go take a workshop in that. Or I’ll take an online course and get that bit of knowledge that I need, but in the very practical context of needing it and knowing how it’s going to apply in my work. And I think that’s probably going to be more and more the way that people look at how they educate themselves, particularly, as you said, given the price tag that goes with degrees of any type at this point.

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Defining Social Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:16:25] Your focus at Tigerhall is not on degrees, not on this traditional, formal education, [but] more on learning from each other, learning from experts, social learning, basically. So, I’d like to ask: how do you define social learning? People can mean different things by that phrase depending on where they’re coming from. And then, how do you see it potentially as an antidote to the problems, the criticisms you’ve surfaced with respect to traditional approaches to education and training?

Nellie Wartoft: [00:17:00] Social learning is a completely new way of learning, but it’s actually based on very age-old methods of learning. Because, thinking of how have we learned for generations and generations, it was actually all social learning until about 200 years ago. Historically, it was all learning from stories. Stories are how we learned and how you learned how to make a fire, where to find the buffalo, and all of these things. And then that was told through stories between people—from your parents, from peers, from seniors in your community, and so on. It’s always been there but then has been replaced by this more academic, theoretic research approach that this is what is true, and then you’re fed this, and you need to then memorize it to know the right answer. We’re taking that approach back and having people learning from each other. Because what I think happened also, when learning went digital, as it did about 10-20 years ago, is that we somehow forced everyone into isolation, and the whole social piece of it got lost. Because you still had a social piece when you went to school, and, if you go to school today, there’s still a physical social piece to it. But somehow, when we moved learning and education online, the entire social piece got lost, and we took the content and then put that onto platforms and told everyone, “Hey, now you go watch these videos on your own, and have fun.”

Nellie Wartoft: [00:18:32] And people were like, “But, hello, now I’m going to sit here on my own in front of a computer and just watch videos?” There was something that went wrong when people took so-called education and put it online. So, the social aspect was completely lost.

And the way that we define social learning is human learnings from other human beings based on their human experience. So, it’s the opposite of theoretical, academic research. It’s more based on what we learn by going through life on a day-to-day basis and learning through experience and then sharing that experience, best practices, actions you can take with others.

Nellie Wartoft

The philosophy is very much why does everyone have to learn life the hard way on their own? Why does everyone have to start from scratch? And everyone who wants to be a manager needs to learn it the hard way. People who want to arrive at the C suite need to learn how to navigate that the hard way. And so on. So, everyone has to learn reality the hard way on their own, and that’s something that we think is unnecessary. We think you can learn reality faster by learning from other people in their field, not having to figure it out on your own and definitely not having to sit on your own and watch videos that you don’t want to watch on your own.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:19:49] Within social learning, there are really five aspects to it in the social learning approach. At the heart of it, you have a very engaging UI/UX, and this is in the digital world, of course. So having a good, engaging user interface. And this is where you learn a lot from how social media platforms are engaging their users and the kinds of behaviors, the easy-to-use platforms that are required to get that social interaction to happen to start with. Then you need engaging content and content that is not drones and old-school coaches that are going on and on about something, and people are just tuning out after two seconds. You need authenticity, something that is real. Many times in learning content, it’s way too scripted, it’s way too planned, and you end up with videos where people are standing with their hands together in a very unnatural way, and there’s a plant in the background, and they go, “Hi, welcome to my course.” And people are like, “That’s not how we talk to each other. That’s not authentic.” And then it needs to be real time, so the opposite to these long-time curriculum development timelines, where it takes forever and ever to develop a course.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:21:02] Social learning is very real-time. If I learn something today, then I can share it, and you can learn about it in the same day. So, it’s same-day delivery, which is exactly what you have on Amazon, food delivery, or Uber. Everything is same day; everything is fast. It’s not a case of where you hear about generative AI in 2023, and then you learn it in a curriculum in 2025. It’s much more real-time and instant. And then the fifth and last aspect is the social context because looking at what kind of social context are people part of—who are the customers of your company, who are the vendors, what kind of ecosystem are you operating in, who are your colleagues, your leaders, and people in different business units—bringing that entire social context to learning also makes it a lot more contextualized to who you are and what environment you operate in, as opposed to, “Here is the same textbook or the same video for everyone.” So it makes it a lot more relevant to what you’re working on. Those are the five areas that we call social learning, how we approach it, and what generally goes into a social learning approach.

Measuring and Tracking the Impact of Social Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:22:12]

And I think a lot of organizations, a lot of learning professionals definitely see the value in social learning. Intuitively they get it.

Jeff Cobb

And, as you were suggesting, as a result of particularly COVID and everybody having to go online, they’re starting to feel more urgency around helping to facilitate more social interaction and making social more of a centerpiece to their learning initiatives than it has been in the past. And what you just described in terms of those five elements, or five steps certainly provides a roadmap in thinking about how to implement. I think a lot are daunted by the prospect of implementing. But you can do the things that you just described, if you back up and think it through. But I know the question that’s always on people’s minds is this feels messy; it feels chaotic. I don’t know how I measure it and prove that something has actually happened here because somebody’s going to ask, “Did this work?” How do you address that measurement tracking, just knowing that it’s working and being able to communicate that to people who want to know whether it’s working?

Nellie Wartoft: [00:23:22] To implement social learning, obviously, a social learning platform helps massively because then you’re taking care of all of those pieces inside. But I usually say that if you don’t have a social learning platform, and you want to start experimenting with social learning, some easy ways to implement it is, one, using your own leaders. Looking internally, what are the leaders, the experts that you have within your company, within your network, within your organization? Who are people that you can tap for learning content creation or sharing? And then how can you make that as authentic as possible? The social piece happens after you’ve had the sharing. There needs to be content at the center of it before people can discuss, reflect, apply, and so on. So, who are the best people to create that content with? And then don’t have your PR department involved. That’s the absolute worst thing when creating learning content is to get PR involved and have them be controlling the message. Don’t do that. Instead, have it be very authentic. Have people share real experiences, real anecdotes from the reality that they operate in. And then how can you minimize what I call the Happening-Capture-Deliver ratio? So many organizations take a really, really long time to develop any kind of content or put anything out there in the world because of all of these approvals and controls that are in place, and you need to be perfect, and so on.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:24:51] I tell people, “You don’t need to be perfect. Just get it out there and see how you can minimize this Happening-Capture-Deliver ratio.” From the time something has happened, and someone has learned something from that, how quickly can you capture that learning and deliver that to other people who need it? If you have a seller that’s just closed a half-million-dollar deal, for example, how can you make sure that the moment that signature is over the line, that seller is out sharing with the rest of the sales team how they closed that deal, what’s the customer story, how do they solve the problem, and all those areas? And, if someone else is sitting perhaps on a different team on the other side of the world, how can that person, as quickly as possible, get to take part of that knowledge? So those are things you can start experimenting with and thinking through. And then, if you don’t have a social learning platform, looking at, if there are other platforms you can use. SharePoint and stuff is not great for searchability and social, but it’s things you can start experimenting with. Or just your team’s Slack environment. Those are some easy steps to get started.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:25:55] And then, for the social context, even better if you can bring in some customers. Can you bring in some other people in the community? Who are the different people that these can learn from? That’s a good way to get started. And then there are some cultural decisions that you need to make along the way, like who’s able to share? Is that saved for just the most senior people or a special set of experts? Or can everyone go crazy and share anything they like? What are your guardrails? That’s more of a cultural decision—how much noise would you like versus control? And so on. There are some things to think about there. But just starting with that and then having groups, different groups discuss this content. How are they reflecting on it, actions that they can take, and so on. So those are some things you can do outside. And then, when you have a social learning platform, that’s when you can bring all of these pieces together in a more seamless way, including the measurement. And some things that social learning platforms do is they generally integrate with your HRIS, your CRM system, and so on, so it can connect with data and do A/B testing and control groups. You can take the sales example again. If you have X amount of sellers doing that social learning, you can see how is their pipeline progressing, and how are they tracking. Are they selling more, or are they selling less, and so on?

Nellie Wartoft: [00:27:15] Because that’s the other thing with social learning, and what we’re trying to change a lot in this industry is to move away from completion rates, time spent, and those metrics that don’t mean anything to business leaders, to focus on how are people actually improving? And that could be in performance improvement, but it could also be improvement in confidence, which is, in my opinion, one of the most underestimated aspects of employee or human satisfaction and performance in general, is actually confidence. Are we seeing improvement in confidence? Are we seeing improvements in the way they perform their job, perform their tasks, or also in interrelational? Do they have improved relationships with their colleagues? Is collaboration improved? And so on. There are many different ways of measuring that, and that’s also depending on the use case. Are you using social learning for leaders, for customers, for a certain community, or for sellers? It depends a bit on who the community is. But the point is to measure it in real business results and not things like, “Oh, this person completed a course.” Okay, no one cares. So that’s the point of measurement.

The Role of Influence in Social Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:28:34] You can correct me if I’m wrong on this, but my impression is that influence plays a significant role in this, and, if you’re trying to orchestrate and facilitate social learning, you need to be paying attention to influence and, to a certain extent, helping to manage how influence happens within the social networks that you’re operating within. And we know, for example, in the marketing world, influence is huge. It determines a lot of what’s going to happen from marketing. That’s behavior change. Just like learning is typically behavior change, influence is obviously going to play a role. How do you think about the role of influence? And I know you and your company use the term Thinkfluencer. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that, what that is, and how that factors into social learning.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:29:26] Thinkfluencers are an absolute cornerstone and key part of social learning because that is where you determine who are the experts, who are the people that others can learn from, and so on. And there are some that are advocating you can learn anything from anyone, and I can see why people would say that, but I also don’t believe in that because, if someone asked me to teach them geology, they wouldn’t learn anything. So I would not recommend learning geology for me. What we do is use this Thinkfluencer mark to certify that someone has, and again, not knowledge on it but experience on it. When someone has had experience on a topic, they’ve actually done it, and they’ve done it successfully.

So Thinkfluencer is an influencer that influences the way you think, and it’s very much people who have had experience in a certain topic. They know how to do it, they’ve done it successfully, and that’s when you’re then marked a Thinkfluencer.

Nellie Wartoft

And that could be someone within the community, outside, and so on, but it’s a certain status that you have experience in what you’re talking about. I think that’s very important because I’ve seen cases where social learning has become a little bit more social media-like, and, if you think of LinkedIn, for example, there are so many people on LinkedIn that talk about things they absolutely shouldn’t be talking about, and that’s something that we want to avoid in social learning because learning is also very, very key, and, if you’re saying things based on opinion, lack of experience, or just ideas that you have, that’s not a great learning experience. So that’s why we use that Thinkfluencer verification to ensure that that background check has been made.

Artificial Intelligence and Social Learning

Jeff Cobb: [00:31:04] Now, the elephant in just about every room these days, it seems like, is artificial intelligence. It’s impacting all walks of life, certainly impacting learning and education. I’m wondering what role you see AI already playing and, certainly in the future, playing in social learning and even whether it connects to the idea of expertise, influence, who has it, and whether AI has it within any of these social learning networks.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:31:37] That’s the danger with AI—they don’t have experience in anything. It’s an amalgamation of everyone else’s experience. But I think AI is, of course, massively powerful and can impact so many different areas. I think the key areas that it influences in learning and especially in social learning are things like personalization. Personalization is the bread and butter. AI massively helps with personalization—processing vast amounts of more data and preferences, user behaviors, and so on. So that’s a big one. Also, summarization of social interactions and group learnings because social learning happens in groups with reflections, interactions, discussions, and that’s where AI can come in and do a great job in actually summarizing that and also posting questions back to the group. So, if you’re discussing something around first-time managers and then the group is discussing it in a certain way, then the AI can come back and say, “Hey, guys, have you thought about this? Or what about that? And it seems like all of you are feeling this way, but no one is really bringing up this.” Those social interactions in groups are very powerful. And then connecting learners. So, connecting Thinkfluencers with the right people and connecting people who want to learn certain areas with people that have that experience. The whole connecting learners with similar interests and building groups, that’s a big application area. Another one is content curation. The way that content is curated for a particular user and how it’s brought together—say, if it’s a topic on AI, what are the pieces that you bring together, for whom?

Nellie Wartoft: [00:33:14] And areas like sustainability. One of our customers is driving sustainability globally. If you’re in supply chain versus in retail versus in the store, in the corporate office, sustainability means quite different things depending on where in the company you are. And that’s where AI can do a great job by seeing that “Oh, you’re in this part of the company, so that means this kind of sustainability,” and so on. So content curation is huge. And then I would say, lastly, actionability and accountability—having AI supporting you on the actions that you want to take, how you want to apply your learning, what you want to take, what are the actions in the real world, and also holding you accountable. That’s still one of the biggest issues in learning—holding people accountable—because there are certain limits to how much you can go into their day and sit next to them at their desk and be like, “Hey, have you done this?” So holding them accountable to what they themselves have said that they want to action, that’s another huge area where I think AI would make a big difference. And then there are many more, but I think these are some of the top ones, especially in learning and social learning, that we’re seeing AI affecting.

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:20] Yes, that’s a great summary of all the potential end possibilities. I hope listeners were taking note there and at least bookmarked in their minds to come back to this part of the conversation because it really does summarize it well. These are things we’ve talked about in various places before, but that captures a lot in one place. I’m looking forward to seeing how fast all this actually comes to fruition in the world of learning.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:34:45] Yes.

Personal Lifelong Learning Approaches

Jeff Cobb: [00:34:46] We’ve been talking about learning all along, obviously, but, as we’re wrapping up here, I do want to turn to your own learning. We’re all about this on the Leading Learning Podcast and like to know how our guests approach their own lifelong learning. So I’d love to hear about your approaches to learning in your own life and in your own professional work and, naturally, to what extent and how social learning factors into that.

Nellie Wartoft: [00:35:17]

Yes, I use social learning for pretty much everything. That is my day-to-day learning, my professional learning. Anything that is job-related is all social learning. And the reason for that is that I don’t have much time, and social learning really fits into my life very easily.

Nellie Wartoft

I use it when I walk or run, when I exercise—that’s the best time to plug in and listen to someone—or when doing chores at home and doing the laundry and dishes and so on or while commuting and traveling. I pretty much use social learning a little bit like a healthier alternative to Instagram and TikTok and trying to spend less time there and then more time on social learning. So many times, if I find myself in the subway, instead of pulling up Instagram, I then pull up Tigerhall and consume a video or read or chat with someone because it gives me the same kind of reward, but I know that the content is better, and it helps me more in the long run. So social learning for everything day-to-day. And then I read a lot. I love reading, so I read a lot of books, but that’s usually when I have more time. That’s sometimes on the weekends, mostly on vacations, when I’m on a very long flight, and similar. So reading is something I do as well. I also love reaching out to people. That’s actually the best way that I learn, is reaching out to people, having conversations. So, again, social learning, but very one-to-one social interactions. Having that as part of it is also something I do regularly. So day-to-day social learning, when I have a little bit more time reading, and then, occasionally, reaching out to people. Those are my top three and how I do my own learning.

Wrap-up: [00:36:59] Nellie Wartoft is founder and CEO of Tigerhall, a social learning platform that’s trying to change how professionals learn from one another in the real world. Connect with Nellie on LinkedIn.

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Related Resources

• Tool Talk: Social Learning Mixer
• Defining and Designing Social Learning (blog post)
• Social Learning Trends in the Association Space (report from Tagoras)