Governance Bites #141: cracking the nut of visual learning for directors, with John Mason

In this episode, John Mason joins Mark Banicevich to unpack the fast-changing world of visual learning — and what it means for today’s directors. With attention spans shrinking and Gen Z and Gen Alpha now dominating many workforces, John explains why short, authentic, phone-shot videos are transforming how organisations share knowledge. They discuss why corporate-style training is dying, how peer-to-peer clips can solve problems overnight, and why boards should rethink how they communicate and learn. From AI-ready content libraries to practical tips for building thousands of bite-sized videos, this conversation shows how modern learning can lift performance at every level of the organisation.
John Mason is the Founder & Learning Activist for Sideways. He is a specialist in systemic organisational development, leveraging technology to enhance organisational effectiveness. He advocates for a fundamental shift in corporate systems, moving away from outdated, top-down approaches. The core philosophy is that knowledge needs to be liberated, not managed, a vital concept for modern governance.
John’s work, which includes founding Vidleos (2013-2022) and Sideways (since 2022), focuses on making workplace learning spontaneous and continuous. By championing a Knowledge Sharing Platform, Sideways acts like an organisation’s brain, democratising access to all the "smarts" in one place. This approach plugs knowledge gaps, improves productivity, and simultaneously enhances organisational consistency. This commitment to peer-to-peer visual learning fosters businesses to become true learning organisations. 
#VisualLearning, #DigitalLearning, #MicroLearning, #ShortFormVideo, #LearningInnovation, #DirectorEducation, #BoardDevelopment, #GovernanceBites, #FutureOfLearning, #GenZLearning, #WorkplaceLearning, #LMS, #LearningCulture, #KnowledgeSharing, #PeerToPeerLearning, #AIInLearning, #ContentStrategy, #VideoFirst, #CorporateLearning, #LeadershipDevelopment

Transcript

0:00

Yeah, hi, I'm John Mason. My current role is CEO and founder of a company called Sideways, [sideways.ai] and it's a learning platform centred around visual learning, or video-based learning, I guess, which we've been doing for the last 10 to 15 years. We kind of pioneered how learning, we could take from, you know, these stuffy learning systems or platforms, or Learning Management Systems [LMS] as they're called, and really look at how younger audiences wanted to connect with content. Content now, when we started, was like two to three minutes long, video-wise, but now we're getting down to videos that last for, you know, 15, 30, 60 seconds, sort of thing. So it's been a very fast-paced 15 years, learning as we go and helping many, many brands to better understand how to connect to their learning audiences. But it's gone in the flash of the eye, and then there are always new technologies that are catching up. So it's something that we really work hard on, making sure that we're supporting the learner. It's all about how do we help them to learn better. So it's been a lot of fun doing it and we've learned a lot along the way. So what we're going to talk about is Cracking the Nut of Visual Learning for Directors. Yeah. Hi, welcome to Governance Bites. My name's Mark Banicevich, and as you just heard, today I had the pleasure of spending time with John Mason. John, thank you very much for your time. You're welcome. As you said in the intro, you've got a business, Sideways, which is very much around creating learning content at all levels of the organisation, and your experience over the last number of years is that videos, and really attention spans, are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. Exactly. So the 15 to 25 minute videos that I do for Governance Bites may not be targeted at the right level, but I'm having fun. And hopefully you are enjoying it, too.

My first question for you is: 1:59

why do you believe visual learning is critical for today's boards? Okay, I think it's critical for everyone because what we're seeing is, you know, in the industries we predominantly work in, which are retail and hospitality, over 50% of that audience now is Gen Z [Generation Z]. And closely coming behind them are Gen A [Generation alpha], right. So they've only learned through this medium and, for a lot of them, they left school. It might not have worked out for them, and they're getting roles and starting their careers. So they're used to learning things on channels like YouTube, and they're watching Netflix and they're consuming content. Yet businesses have been very slow to react to that. And, if they have, they've done some videos that they might have done in their induction or they might do it on their onboarding. But they're still quite boring, long videos, right. And to your point, your format, you need 25 minutes to get it out there. But if you don't need 25 minutes, then don't do 25 minutes, right. And if you are going to do a piece on who you are and what you do, make it shorter, sharper, and do more of them. Because what we see is that people check out within five to ten seconds if they're not interested in what you're talking about. So we need to connect with them, we need to better understand where they're at. Where they're at in their journey, and then how do we meet them where they're at so that we can have a chance of providing the information and the tools that they need that suit them. Right. What makes visual learning effective compared to learning by listening or written formats? Why is visual so useful? Well, there's anecdotal evidence that it's nine times more likely to be remembered. I guess when you see things happening at the same time, you see the person and you can immediately connect with that person, especially if that person looks like you, sounds like you. And that's the type of thing that we try to do, which is, depending on what the learning content is, always have someone presenting it that is someone that's been there, done that, or someone that does it regularly, because that connects with the audience so much better, right. Right. What trends do you see in visual learning? You've already talked about how video is getting shorter. What other things do you see? If I look back to some of the early learning content in my career, people spent a lot of money on these videos, right. Yeah. Animations, or they'd have complex cutting, and they'd have images pop up. What's happening now? I think that started off with corporate-based videos, right. They were a thing and they were probably necessary at the time. But if you're still doing that, depending on who your audience is, you're probably wasting a lot of time and effort and money, because they cost a lot of money. Yeah. Nowadays, with video on mobile phones, we can shoot a video, like TikTok style, vertically, really quickly, giving answers to questions or problem solving, or doing those types of things in 15, 30, 60 second intervals with text overlays and music and those things that directly connect to the end user or the audience or the learner. We see that changing rapidly and that the people that are winning the war of attention are having to better understand all of those techniques. Right. You talked a little bit about just using your phone and things. It used to be very expensive to create this content and it's not now. How can this stuff be created cost-effectively, and what are the trade-offs that are involved in doing such low cost? Well, nine times out of ten, the content's used for internal purposes. So if it's not external, or there's a risk that you might be seeing this content outside in the real world, then if you've locked it down in whatever platforms you're using, then there's very little risk involved, right. Because you can do it, you can change it, you can create something and then say that wasn't good enough, let's do it again. You can reach out to your people. We believe in the power of peer-to-peer learning, which is where we identify problems, we find solutions, we find the people that are good at the things that we need to illustrate, and we film them doing it in their natural environments, where being natural and authentic really counts. Because if you don't share that authenticity with learners, then they think it's a corporate video and they switch off. Right. If they think it's a video based on people, like I said, things they can recognise, people they can recognise, habits they can form themselves, then they get really interested in that. So if you think about YouTube, we look for how to do something on YouTube, we find the video, and you don't know those people. You then have to form some level of trust with that person to figure out if this is the right person or not who can help you with this problem. In your business, we all have amazing people who are brilliant at what they do. We have the problem solvers sitting right there. But what doesn't happen is we don't write the list of the things that everyone needs to know. We don't drain the people that are about to leave of all their intelligence and knowledge. We just tend to let it happen. If you want to be purposeful about how do you share knowledge and how do you solve problems, you have to have hundreds, if not thousands, of these bite-sized videos. Videos, right. Traditionally, in all sorts of corporate-style videos, you have branding through the video, maybe a watermark, those sorts of things. Are you putting those in these short 10 to 15 second videos? No. Again, that's wasteful. It's time consuming and all those sorts of things. People want you to cut to the chase. You think about it yourself. If you start watching a video on any medium across any of the things that you do at home, you switch off within seconds, right. You know in 30 seconds max whether you're going to keep watching. You know if you're going to watch a film for longer in a minute, or a new Netflix series, or whatever it is. If they don't capture you in that first 30 seconds, your mind's already drifting off. You're picking up your phone, you're checking out, you're just going to let it go, right. So the governance, I would say around that, is don't assume that you know everything and that you can get it right and it's going to be great and it'll be this long and all the rest of it. Connect with the audience to understand what their needs are first. And this sort of learning can be done at all levels of the organisation, as you say. So it can be from people flipping burgers right up to the directors on the board sharing tips with each other in short, tight clips. Yeah. Do you think that it's more effective to create a logical structure of learning content, or when you're doing 10 or 15 second videos and you're going to have thousands of them. Are you trying to find it in some sort of logical structure, or is it just a massive searchable database? How do people find the relevant content? Yeah, great question. And I think now, with the advent of AI [Artificial Intelligence] and what the tools are that we're starting to bring into the offices or bring onto the floor, or to let people use their own devices to find the things they need, AI or search capabilities need content. What companies don't have is the content, right. So they're content poor. So if you're promising this experience and it's going outside of your business to find the answers, then you're in deep trouble, right. So we want to lock it down to the business and what the business knows and what your people know. So you need that content and you don't need to prescribe it. You certainly need to start somewhere if you don't have a lot of it. And what we're trying to introduce with companies, and the companies and our customers that do things really well, is start by a list of the things that you wish your people knew better.

Then add that: 9:52

what are the things that, where are the problems? Then you can write lists of the things that you need. You can then circle people that do those things really well, and you can bring them into a room and talk about how we're going to problem solve together. And that people, if you include them, what we've seen is people want to help, and young people especially are helpers, right. We, not so much. I'm older than you, but when I started out and I asked lots of questions, I didn't get any help because people wanted to hold on to that knowledge because they didn't want you to leapfrog them and all those sorts of things. But some of the brilliant things about these younger generations is that they want to share and they want to help. If they've been there for a year, they'll share all of their learnings with you. So find the people that have been there, done that, and share that as quickly as you can. Are you having, do you tend to find that businesses curate their content? or do they just leave their people to it and say, "Hey, go create videos, chuck them out?" I think you have to start with why you're doing it and what your expectations are and what's acceptable So if you build a team of people, what our customers do is they'll send an e-mail out to the people they expect would want to be involved, just based on who they are, what they do, the types of people they are, how bubbly they are, those types of things. And they'll say, "Hey, does anyone want to help us with thinking about doing this?""We want to problem solve, we want to create videos on things that happen"every day that you get tapped on the shoulder for, that slows you down,"that decreases productivity, how can we make lists of those things"and then make them really available for people." And if you ask, say, 10, 20 people of the people you know, at least 80% of those people would want to get involved in that. It's something different, it's new, it's exciting. They put it all together, it's in your platform, whatever you use, and then it's, you know, fully searchable. So, you know, if you're doing those and then you let those people from those learnings take over and create the next wave of content, you can solve a hundred problems in a month. And that's super, super powerful and that's what our best customers do. Right, right. With all of this content that's going to be available, how do directors identify what their gaps are and the content that's available to fill those gaps? From a director's level, I don't think too many of them get involved. They probably will get involved with the things that annoy them the most or the things that they see. So if you look at it from a hospitality point of view or retail. Quite often the managing director will go behind the scenes, they'll go to their restaurants or to their retail floors, they'll walk the floors, they'll see how everyone's going, they'll see what's happening, they'll check the merchandise, they'll check out what's going on. And there'll be these little things that bug them, right. 90% they're happy, 10% there's these lists of things they wish we could improve. And so if you're able to do that with them, I would simply walk behind them and write the list of the things that's annoying them and solve those problems. And you can literally solve them the following day. Right. Yes. What's the most common tool that's used to engage with this content? Is it mobile? Is it tablet? Is it desktop? It's mobile. Depending on the type of business, like, you know, with your business in an office and, you know, behind desks, then, you know, it's probably more desktop, but there's no reason why people who need to move around for their work can't find the thing they're looking for. They're out on a job, they're looking for what to do, and you know there's something that they need to figure out, they can search for it, and you know that's what I mean about that type of content so looking at each role in the business and saying, "What does that person need to do their job properly?""What if they went out on the road and they couldn't find the things that they're looking for?" That's what you should be doing. Right. Are there any trends about when it's consumed? Is it consumed like when the need arises, or is it consumed. do people do 10 minutes a day and just go, "Hey what can I find?" Well, yes, yes both. So, yes, definitely on demand for those that what I just mentioned. You know, "I need this now, I can't do what I'm doing, help me." And then the other part of it is that what we're trying to do is give people skills that will help them to do their jobs better. So we're looking at, so for example with hospitality, we're doing, we're solving a hundred problems in January, with my business up in the UK [United Kingdom] where we're working with our customers, we've made the lists, we're doing 50 videos a day with each customer on the things that they need, and then we're going to share those with the industry, as well. Or the ones that can be shared. And predominantly what they've asked for is the softer skill training for younger people in the workforce that haven't, that don't know what it's like to be hospitality-focused, or even show what, you know, "be hospitable". So they don't look you in the eye, they take you your drink and don't look at you, they put it on the table and they go. And all of those things that are lost, we need to bring back again. And we just need to show the examples of shiny, happy people doing these things in a way that connects with them to go, "Oh, okay, I see you get a better reaction if I do this,"or if I ask you if you want another drink, it's not hard," and those types of things. So yeah, what we want to see is people tapping into their knowledge, a bit like a masterclass, if you like, in terms of"I like that, I want to find out some more." So that's been tagged and I can follow that kind of deep dive into it more. It would also be interesting to see how this technology and this approach could be used for the directors themselves and how they operate in boardrooms. There'd be some interesting content. Yeah, I don't think, it's definitely not just for the younger audiences or the people that need work on the go. I mean, if you share things that you want, or you expect how they should be done, or you show examples of things, you can record your screen, you can talk to the audience to say,"Hey, listen, I'm tired of this, can we try and do it this way?" Or whatever it is. People don't know if they don't know, and if they can't find out what's going to make you happy or How is it going to be, what happens if we do it this way? Then, you know, it's basically your fault. Yeah. So you have the power to do these things and you can't just hide behind, "I don't know how to do it," anymore. It's very simple. Get someone to help you and share your thoughts. And also what we see the best business owners and leaders do is share regular five minute bursts of what's happening. Yeah. And you do that and things change overnight. Absolutely. Yeah. Keeping the team informed. Yeah. What do you think - you mentioned artificial intelligence before and video generation in artificial intelligence is moving in leaps and bounds. Yeah, it is. We've also got advances in data visualization. How do you think those sorts of trends or those sorts of technologies will improve? Well, unfortunately, I think corporate will take that as, "Well, this is easy to do now," but no one wants to watch that right now. It's not, you could argue that it's good enough but I would argue that human beats AI all day long and I think the point of difference is being human. So human to human. So our mantra is you know our videos are by humans for humans or by people for people. Right. And you connect better to that. If you see some AI that's been generated, the tone doesn't sound quite right, it's a funny accent, it's, yes it's people, but you can sniff that out pretty easily right now. It will get better. And maybe it'll be able to just use us, and do it without it. It does with HeyGen and Synthesia, and tools like that. All of those types of things, but I think you can still smell that a mile away, right. We are putting our hat on human-led everything and using the AI to surface what you need. Right, right. So AI becomes the search engine rather than involved in the video generation because you want the authenticity. You might be able to get a few clips out of it if you need them, or that type of thing, but do not treat it as your new video tool. Right. At your own peril. That's my opinion. A final question for you. What is the best governance advice that you've received? You've been involved in training with Faraday and so forth. What's the best advice you've received about being a director? About how learning applies to that do you mean? Yeah you can put a learning lens on that question if you like. I think that from what I'm seeing it's just how, especially here in New Zealand, it's like technology just gets, it's moving so fast, but I don't think it moves that quickly in the boardroom, or in with directors, or they don't have a full appreciation of it. And I think you can learn more from your kids and you can from, you know, in an office. So it would be about embracing it and especially if you want to connect to your younger teens. I just walked into your building, and just seen a lovely array of young people that look like they're a bit nervous, they're going for job interviews and those types of things. If you want to talk to them, you're going to have to use tech. They're not going to be able to talk face-to-face with you. So I see the biggest barrier for anyone in leading organisations, leading teams, is not connecting to them how they want to be connected with. Two things I'm going to take out of that. One is around the generational shifts, and learning how to communicate with different generations, which is a significant one. The second one is that directors do have to have, they don't have to be experts in technology, but it's really important for them to keep up with what's happening in the technology space, so that they can make effective decisions for their businesses. Yeah, 100%. And look, what I see is this, which is kind of frustrating, is just this default to Microsoft or default to how we've always done it, or, "I don't know enough about that,""It's not my bag," "I'm too old," or whatever. Depending on the size of your organisation, depending on how, you know, how much effort you want to put into this, if you don't embrace it or at least have some sort of knowledge of it, you just get worse, right. You're not going to get better. You don't fully understand where it's going, what it's doing. You can't connect to it. But even as something as important as a message to the business once a week, that can lift morale, it can lift everything, it can lift sales, it can, you know, and you see evidence of that with amazing leaders throughout, you know, retail and tech and all those sorts of things that just inspire their people to do one more thing that week. And it only takes a couple of minutes to record this video. 90 seconds. Absolute no-brainer."Hey, this weekend, why don't we just try to make one more sale, sell a dessert,"sell a dress, or sell the belt for the dress, or sell the," and that just stuck in your brain. And if everyone did that, and there's evidence to say that, you know, over 50% of people carry on and do that. Sales just spike. And if we're in the sales-led environment or businesses, which predominantly most businesses are, you just want them to do that, or have one better conversation, or ring one customer, or reach out to a prospect, or whatever it is. That has to come from the top. Absolutely. That information comes from the top, the learning comes from the bottom. John, that's been a really fun conversation. Thank you. You're welcome. Appreciate your time. We'll look forward to catching up with you soon. Yep. And to seeing you next episode. Thank you for watching this episode of Governance Bites. We have more episodes on YouTube and your favourite podcast channel, where I interview directors and experts on various topics relating to boards of directors and governance. We'd love to see you back, and please like, subscribe and share the videos and podcasts.