Want culture change? Build a learning philosophy first.

Dwayne Britton (00:00):
L&D teams are cultural amplifiers. We are more than just content creation teams. It’s on us to really own that upgrade. We really need to nail hitting those three dimensions of the human brand and strategic realms so that others can see us that way.

Hannah Beaver (00:17):
You are listening to How to Make a Leader, a leadership development podcast from Big Think+, where we take the best ideas from the biggest minds in learning and development and distill them into actionable insights. I’m your host, Hannah Beaver. Our guest this month is Dwayne Britton. With over 15 years of experience shaping culture and capability at brands like Apple, On, Zalando, Lululemon and Adidas, Dwayne is a firm believer in the truth that learning amplifies culture. In a moment, we’ll be talking about all things learning culture and learning philosophy, including a breakdown of the two, why they’re so important and the best way to think about both as you tackle learning at your organization. Dwayne will share a case study example of how he rolled out a learning framework at On Running, and you’ll hear some little nuggets of musical theater along the way. Dwayne, welcome to How to Make a Leader.

Dwayne Britton (01:25):
Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.

Hannah Beaver (01:27):
We met a couple months ago now at Offbeat Fest, and Dwayne had a fantastic presentation in front of the conference, so we kind of got chatting about that and we’ll be digging a little bit into that theme today. But I am very excited for Dwayne to share his learnings with us today on the podcast.

Dwayne Britton (01:46):
Yeah, no, it was great conversation we had and I’m happy to continue it.

Hannah Beaver (01:50):
Great. Well, Dwayne, I would say that a common thread that we have with guests on this podcast is kind of their varying path into L&D. Many people ended up in one industry and kind of wound their way into the world of learning and development, and you are no exception to this commonplace theme that I’ve noticed. So can you talk to us a little bit about where you started in your career and how did you get here to where you are now?

Dwayne Britton (02:19):
It actually started even as a young child, I was think a sensitive emotional young lad and I really found my community in theater and I found a space where people would hold space for others and it was really all about connecting on an emotional level. I think that’s what actually helped me later in my career with really connecting with audiences and getting a sense of an audience’s needs because it’s really more about, it’s not so much about standing on stage in a spotlight, it’s really about meeting your audience and what their needs are in that moment and connecting with them that way. So I went to school on a musical theater scholarship. I knew even back then I didn’t want to be an actor, so got another degree in Organizational Communication with an emphasis in Organizational Diversity back when DEI was just getting its legs and I spent the next part of 12 years as a performer and ended my career about 12 years later taking all of my experience and putting it into a CD that I recorded that got signed with an independent Broadway jazz cabaret label. So I began actually then teaching the software and hardware that I used to make music and to market that music as a retail trainer for Apple. And that’s how I started, not in HR, but becoming a retail trainer for Apple teaching folks on how I created and what I did and went on to lead that training program.

Hannah Beaver (03:28):
That is such an interesting background and I love the way that you wove us through the story there. And I think what’s interesting is we’ve had a conversation about this in person around how the importance of connecting with the audience, inspiring, engaging learning experiences. I certainly see the parallels between theater and the connection there and then also L&D. So I think it’s just fascinating how that skillset has translated so beautifully into L&D and your career in L&D. Well, on that same theme of connection, that brings us to why we’re here today and that is to talk about learning philosophies and learning cultures. So why don’t we start with the basics. Could you define for us what is a learning philosophy and how does that differ from a learning culture?

Dwayne Britton (04:21):
Yes. So you know what I might do, if it’s okay, I might flip it. I think in order to understand the philosophy, we might need to want to look at culture first. And I think even to understand learning culture, we might want to understand organizational culture.

Hannah Beaver (04:33):
Let’s take it all the way back to the beginning. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Dwayne Britton (04:36):
Organizational culture as I know it and define it, is the way things are done around here. Quite simple and straightforward. I’ve also heard it defined as the way decisions are made when no one is looking, and also this responsibility that it’s not just pass down, but that we all have a part to play in it. And the reason why companies are so explicit in defining their cultures, their values, their vision, their goals, their habits and rituals is because if they don’t, typically what happens in organizations is as we know, the strongest and loudest voices kind of come in and fill that vacuum. And the same is true for learning culture. If a company doesn’t necessarily explicitly express what they believe good learning to look like, you can have a whole hodgepodge of different types of learning experiences and not even in a maligned way or people trying to sabotage the system or whatever, but people have different backgrounds, have different strengths, and they’ll naturally gravitate towards putting those forward.

(05:29):
So a learning culture can be skewed by people’s individual contributions unless there are some clearly stated guardrails, let’s just call them. And that’s what a learning philosophy is. It is a north star that an organization can detail that aligns their learning and development community, gives them something to hold themselves accountable to and can really tie in their programming into an umbrella point of view foremost, so that everything that they make and everyone that’s paying into that learning culture from interns to new managers to vendors can really have a sense of what we’re trying to achieve here as a brand. And in terms of learning, it’s the same thing. We might have marketing philosophies on how we want to connect with our audiences. We might have product philosophies on how our products and services should look and feel. Having a learning philosophy helps the organization know what we are a stand for, how people grow and develop at our organization.

Hannah Beaver (06:25):
Fantastic. I appreciate that breakdown. And I know the last time we spoke we were talking about philosophies and cultures and you were mentioning it’s kind of a chicken and egg, which comes first, you have to talk about one to talk about another. So why do you think that distinction and knowing the difference between the two is so important? How does that show up in an L&D program?

Dwayne Britton (06:47):
Yeah, when teams have a learning philosophy and when they’ve articulated and even shared it out with the organization, what it does is it positions a learning and development team as a strategic partner to the business, more just a way of creating content or attaching themselves to a strategic brand initiative or target. So typically there are three realms that we’re working out within the learning and development. And in my view, there’s this strategic realm where we’re going after business KPIs and trying to impact behaviors and help achieve a certain goal. There’s the brand component that the learning philosophy serves, which is more sort of the cultural elements, which is more what the brand is hoping to achieve and be a stand for internal and external customers. And then there’s the human realm, which is how we can create and design learning experiences and meet folks where they are in it so they have individual relevancy with the learning inside and outside the organization.

(07:35):
And so when you clearly articulate how you’re working to design and target these, you elevate your L&D team to actual strategic partners as opposed to sometimes the content creation teams that were sometimes viewed and sometimes we view ourselves as. And so I recommend to CEOs to CPOs, to learning teams to really take that upgrade because when you look at those different realms that we impact how we’re literally given permission to evangelize the way things are done around here, you can really see that we are poised to really have a lot more impact within an organization than just creating content.

Hannah Beaver (08:10):
And then further down the line, what does building a learning philosophy impact? Why is it important?

Dwayne Britton (08:18):
It can impact those three realms, the strategic branded human realms, but also it really holds the L&D team also accountable to this North star. It also can create a sense of efficiency in what you’re building. So rather than going through so many iterations, if you have a clear north star that you’re aiming towards from the beginning, you can really align the learning towards it and it can really make a off the shelf training feel a little bit more customized and translated for an organization on my website. And in a recent podcast, I gave an example of translating Radical Candor into an organization. So rather than just taking Radical Candor, which is a great framework for giving feedback for those who may not know it, and just taking it as it is, really looking at it through the lens and seeing how we can apply this to our systems and have it correlate to strategic goals that we’re impacting how we might tweak the verbiage or the framework a little bit to ensure that it’s meeting our brand and our culture.

(09:11):
And then helping folks immediately find the learning in it from the very calendar prompt of asking someone, what’s a piece of feedback that you’ve delayed giving and why? Or what’s a great piece of recognition that you’ve been meaning to share with someone and how might it improve their performance, their day, their quarter, whatever it might be? And getting folks thinking through how this can really impact them on that human level. And then additionally, what I believe a learning philosophy has the ability to do is create impact. So when you have your entire team, everyone that’s creating learning experiences, whether it’s an intern who’s giving an office tour or a new manager that’s onboarding someone into their team.

Hannah Beaver (09:52):
Starting at the beginning, how would a listener listening today identify their organization’s learning beliefs? If they’re not clearly laid out, what’s the first step that you would take to identify those?

Dwayne Britton (10:03):
One question I would encourage you all to answer and consider in tandem with your stakeholders and your partners is answering this one question foremost, what do we believe about how people grow and develop here? And by answering that one question, you’re going to find different avenues to go down, but that really is the essence of what a learning philosophy is. You might consider different ways that your values tie into learning. You might consider the different ways leadership shows up in learning about how your brand positioning, your brand design shows up about how what you uniquely believe about people and the stand you want to be for people in DEI topics, in regional concerns in operational, on the ground matters, whether if you have retail teams, for example, or people in factories or if you have people interacting everything via chat. And then finally what the actual modalities look like, what types of learning experiences are you creating?

(10:56):
These are all things that could be answered or uncovered and bubbled up through answering that first question. I think foremost. And then from there, as you detail this out, what I would also encourage you to do is consider the next step is really within those guardrails, what freedom do people have to move within those guardrails? Because adults typically learn by making sense of the information themselves. And listen, we’re all adults. It’s less about kind of dictating what folks need to do, but giving them some guardrails and letting them know how they can implement and tweak it. And then the final layer I would encourage you to consider is detailing in how the team can pay into it. So what if they find more efficient ways to pay into this? How can they contribute feedback? How can they pay into that document? In which places can they contribute their unique expertise and point of view? So then you have this great foundation, how it can be adapted to fit certain needs, and then how the team also contributes. And then by sharing that out and making it public, you can also ask your team to hold you accountable to that. And that is a really robust first step in generating a sense and really detailing out your cultural learning cultural ambition.

Hannah Beaver (12:01):
Fantastic. I appreciate that you laying it out so clearly with this multi-step framework. I think that’s very digestible format to learn time for a little bit of a case study. Can you talk to me about your time at ON and the work you did there with the SPARK methodology?

Dwayne Britton (12:20):
Yeah, there’s a lot in there. And listen, I think what SPARK is is just a vivid example of what I just walked through. So on my role as the first dedicated head of global learning and development was we needed a way to protect our culture as we scaled. We didn’t need another framework, we didn’t need another training on X, Y, or Z. What we wanted to do was create our point of view. So we created SPARK, which is an acronym, S-P-A-R-K. And the S stood for Spirits on calls, their values, their spirits. So we felt that they were really responsible for the success of On. So we wanted our learning experiences to be grounded in those spirits, to tie our experiences back to the bigger picture whenever possible. And when it made sense, at this particular point, we’re really working to unify the brand internally on leveraging the brand design and point of view.

(13:07):
So whenever possible, we wanted our learning experiences to be positioned from fonts and colors to the tone of voice and this sort of thing. We hired a media designer to ensure that our learning experiences were really on brand, but one in particular was I think particularly important to the human spirit of learning it on. And that was the Explorer Spirit, which was this entrepreneurial way of thinking, of iterating, of trying, calculated risk taking and so forth. And we really wanted to protect this. So in our learning experiences, we wanted them to be agency enabling, and that’s the A, we didn’t want to just throw content at folks one way. We wanted them to be in choice about how they learned when they signed up for learning. And we wanted to leverage learning discovery over a list of steps whenever possible. DEI is also very important on.

(13:55):
And so we really wanted, in addition to cultural considerations, we wanted to consider things like contribution, preference, scheduling needs, session length and this sort of thing within our offering and design for that. And then finally, great learning takes place. I think when folks practice. So at on we said that learning is kinetic, it’s an active participatory sport. So we wanted people practicing whenever possible new behaviors, trying on new thoughts and so forth. So that is SPARK and that it’s giving teams parameters within which to work. And then for those team members that we did have to be really explicit with customer service, maybe retail team members, we still want them to feel comfortable asking things like, okay, this is great, but what if I find a better way to do this? What if I find out more efficient way? How can I pay into this? How is my feedback considered? Where can I contribute my expertise and my point of view? So that there was this accountability to us as L&D too, that we weren’t just pushing things on to folks, but we were really treating folks as the experts that we hired and allowing them to pay into and to contribute to that culture.

Hannah Beaver (14:56):
And what would you say was your biggest learning and perhaps your biggest piece of advice for someone listening that might want to roll out a similar initiative at their organization?

Dwayne Britton (15:06):
In general, I would say it’s not, I think very common for folks to always view L&D teams as this much of a strategic partner, you might actually be demonstrating this for the first time. And what I would encourage you to do, and the only way I think I was able to get this through a little bit even at on, was that we tied it to a strategic win. So speak the language of the business, and we were able to tie that philosophy to a big strategic retail win. We had our retail trainers use SPARK philosophy as a lens to roll out on customer service training, and they didn’t even have to do very much. They gave their training a chiropractic adjustment to the SPARK philosophy. So they rooted good service in our Spirits. They worked with our media designer to make sure it looked perfectly positioned.

(15:49):
They created a space for the facilitators and the team to make it their own. They worked with our DEI team to make sure that we were using inclusive language and practices on our retail floor so that our guests felt great and they made it come alive with real case studies, practice and follow up nudges and so forth. So they really adapted it to that learning philosophy. But what that did, and this is the important thing, is that it made that cultural component come alive at the retail level, which candidly sometimes are the people that probably feel for this remove, even if they’re not feel for this removed from the culture that we might have at the headquarters of the main office. And so that’s I think what we do in learning and development. We make that culture come alive, but sometimes we have to show people the win to get them to see like, aha, this is what you mean.

(16:37):
It’s interesting as I share that as it’s coming out of my mouth, it actually reminds me of when I was recording, I was at the end of my career and I just wanted to record some beautiful songs. And as I was explaining this to folks, they’re like, well, what is that? Is that pops it like cabaret? Is it, what is that? I’m like, no, it’s my take on these songs. And it wasn’t until people heard the music when they were like, oh, I totally get this now. I see what this is. You kind of have to show people sometimes what it is for them to completely understand what you’re going for.

Hannah Beaver (17:05):
And then aside from your work on, do you have any other examples of your approach to storytelling and branding within the L&D function?

Dwayne Britton (17:15):
During my time as an artist, of course, when you’re an artist, you’re the manager, the product, I had to develop skills to sort of market that. And so when I first had the chance to actually build my first learning and development team, I was working within a small startup and I knew that I wanted to bring on someone that could help elevate the visual, the audio visual look and tone and feel of our learning experiences. So we hired this part-timer and the L&D team really became known for this look tone and feel of our sessions. And it actually part of the reason we were asked to be involved in so many other areas of the and eventually get folded into the greater business because folks saw the way that we were working and we were working to create learning experiences. When I came over to On, probably the coolest thing that we did in terms of practical tool is we created a website called the Own Your Development Map.

(18:06):
So many organizations say folks own their development, but what does it mean on, we really tried to put that into words. So I drafted 10 tenets about different steps that folks could take from getting clear on their values and their why up to entertaining lattice framework development. And we created an interactive clickable relief map with different brand imagery and brand videos that would tie people to different external sources that were inspirational, that clearly articulated what that tenant meant and internal resources to explore it further. So for example, one of the tenants might be discover uncharted paths, the Lattice framework, and internally it might link to our job board for internal job placement, this sort of thing. And at the top it would just have three or four questions for reflection to get the team member thinking about where they are within that particular tenant. And it’s a very choose your adventure style thing. And we rolled that out just before I left.

Hannah Beaver (19:02):
That’s such a fantastic example of how to really embed learning into your organization. I loved how you mentioned too, even the different mediums of tear off or having visual maps because we all learn differently. And so trying to meet the learner in any possible touch point just to bring them in, I think that’s just such a fantastic example. Thank you for sharing. So Dwayne, we’ve covered a lot today, but if listeners could take away one piece of advice from today’s conversation, what would that one learning be?

Dwayne Britton (19:36):
If you walk away with nothing else that I would share is that L&D teams are cultural amplifiers. We are more than just content creation teams. It’s on us to really own that upgrade. We really need to nail hitting those three dimensions of the human brand and strategic realms so that others can see us that way. So I would suggest partnering, getting clear in that learning philosophy, partnering with a strategic win, and then being able to speak to how you hit those three realms, human brand and strategic. It’s a dance.

Hannah Beaver (20:06):
What’s on your bookshelf in terms of books or resources that you would recommend to people within the industry?

Dwayne Britton (20:14):
Yeah, there are three books that I often recommend, especially for those that are really just getting started with L&D. The first is The Accidental Instructional Designer by Cammy Bean. It’s just got really great basic instructional design technique and really great foundational content. The next is The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, which is a really delicious book of 40 different types of modules that you can piece together to create really engaging learning experiences. And the third one I recommend is called Map It by Kathy Moore. And it’s a way to really partner with your subject matter experts and really help them solve the problems that they are trying to, without necessarily creating full-blown training. Really meeting the training needs to solve the problem. And I think it’s a really great way to help your subject matter experts really get clear on what it is they’re trying to impact and what would be the best remedy to solve their woes.

Hannah Beaver (21:03):
Dwayne, what is the best piece of leadership advice that you have ever received?

Dwayne Britton (21:08):
Master and revisit the basics. And for me, that is really mastering the skills around empathy, creating psychological safety and being of service to your team. Leaders need to be able to create strategic visions and they need to have business acumen for sure, but then they also need to meet the individuals and the teams and the people that make up the organizations to really get enrolled in those visions. And so that I think is the core skillset that I think every leader should really double down on and even revisit later in their career and bring all of that great experience back and really recheck in and relearn, or even in some cases unlearn the basics.

Hannah Beaver (21:41):
As always, thank you so much for listening. For more from Dwayne, check out the show notes where we’ve linked his website and his LinkedIn. For more from How to Make a Leader, please subscribe so you never miss an episode. We’ll be back next month and every month with more insights from another L&D leader. We’ll catch you next time as we learn how to make a leader.

Every great learning culture starts with one thing: a clear philosophy of how people grow. 

Dwayne Britton has spent his career shaping culture and capability at Apple, Lululemon, Adidas, Zalando, and On. Across each, he’s learned that lasting impact comes when learning is guided by philosophy, not just programming.

In this episode, Dwayne shares how L&D teams can redefine their role from content creators to cultural amplifiers, by building a learning philosophy that connects business strategy, brand identity, and human growth.

You’ll learn:

• The difference between a learning culture and a learning philosophy
• How a learning philosophy positions L&D as a strategic partner
• The SPARK framework Dwayne used at On to connect learning to culture
• How to align brand, business, and learning goals 
• How to identify your organization’s learning beliefs

Things to listen for:
(00:00) Introducing Dwayne Britton
(02:19) Dwayne’s path from musical theater to L&D
(04:36) What defines a learning culture vs. philosophy
(06:47) Three realms every L&D program should serve
(10:03) The question that defines your learning philosophy
(12:20) The SPARK method for scaling learning
(15:06) How to get leadership buy-in for new L&D initiatives
(19:36) Advice for L&D teams to increase cultural impact

About Dwayne Britton:
Dwayne Britton brings 15+ years at the intersection of learning, culture and brand. He’s shaped programs at Apple, Adidas, Zalando and Lululemon, and led Global Learning & Development at On. Through his Berlin-based consultancy, DAY|WON, Dwayne provides fractional L&D leadership for startups, scale-ups and internal teams, with a focus on brand-led onboarding, culture building and collaboration. He partners with leaders to design clear, practical programs and workshops that align teams, clarify decisions and build momentum. Dwayne also serves as an L&D Strategic Advisor to Manageable, a UK startup helping managers build the confidence and habits to lead well.

To learn more about Dwayne, check out his LinkedIn, his website, and his musical background.