Using GEMBA to Help Adopt VR in Enterprise, with The Learning Network's Dominic Deane

Published: March 8, 2020, 10 a.m.

For a lot of us, we think learning ends when our working life begins. But not only is that untrue; being able to learn new skills for our careers is only going to become more important. Dominic Deane drops in to talk about how GEMBA is helping with that.

Julie: Hello, my name is Julie Smithson and I am your host for the XR for Learning podcast. Today on my show is Dominic Deane from the Leadership Network. Dominic has been building immersive technology companies since his second year of university, founding Chronicles VR, a premium virtual reality studio, and taking on consultancy work with some of UK's largest cultural institutions, including the British Museum, English Heritage and the BBC. Joining the Leadership Network in 2017, Dominic has led the creation and positioning of GEMBA, the Leadership Network new virtual reality offering since joining the Leadership Network. Dominic created a new division responsible for the Virtual Reality Learning Platform for Business Transformation, creating and delivering GEMBA to Fortune 2000 customers around the world. Welcome, Dominic.

Dominic: Oh, thank you very much Julie. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for putting me on.

Julie: Thanks so much. Why don't you give me a little bit of an overview of the Leadership Network, the parent company who has produced GEMBA, and how you're making GEMBA part of the learning strategy for many of these companies that you deal with?

Dominic: Sure. So the Leadership Network's been around for the better part of a decade now. And primarily we've been delivering in-person training to top executives at Fortune 2000 companies. Ultimately, what that looks like is 3-day immersive learning on a kind of best practice site. So be it BMW, or Google, or at Toyota, for example; these executives get immersed into the culture of these organizations, where they get taught about certain topics like Lean Industry 4.0, Supply Chain Excellence Innovation, from subject matter experts who are leading in their field. So they might be from M.I.T. or Harvard. And ultimately, it's an opportunity for these top executives to get world-class training.

Julie: Is the challenge... maybe you want to talk about the challenges that you immediately walk into when you work with these clients? Because you have to start somewhere when it comes to transforming the energy and the delivery of what your product holds for them.

Dominic: Yes. In terms of these large organizations, there's a whole range of challenges that they face that we're able to kind of talk through with them on a level that many organizations potentially don't get the opportunity to. So when you're talking to these top executives in these quite private locations, you hear about the true challenges they face as an organization. So be it embracing industry 4.0, embracing digital transformations that, fundamentally, these transformations challenge the very existence of that business. And we're in a privileged position, whereby we're able to talk to these organizations about these challenges, and we're able to respond to them with feedback and guidance. And what that's looked like for us has been about going, "okay, well, look; you guys are getting some great information from us, from our leaders, through our subject matter experts. What more can we do?" And these very large organizations have said to us, "look, we get great immersive training, but how do we roll this learning out to our whole organization?" And that's kind of where the GEMBA offering has come from: a solution that uses XR technologies, primarily virtual reality, to deliver immersive learning at massive, massive scale for these large organizations.

Julie: One of the things that we talk about, the biggest part of digital transformation isn't necessa