Andrew Barry

After working in corporate training for just over a decade, I started Curious Lion in the belief that we could do a better job creating custom digital training. Too often I had seen online training consist of hastily thrown together eLearning versions of slide decks. I knew there was a better way.

The Four Horsemen of the Work Culture Apocalypse

We have a common enemy we’re all fighting. They are the four horsemen of the work culture apocalypse. The four most destructive team dysfunctions are: Constant Fire-Fighting Defensiveness The Blame Game Disconnect Between Learning and Working Let’s unpack each of these a little more. Constant Fire-Fighting The time available for people to think and reflect is scarce. …

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Year In Review: 2022

Me watching my mom hold hands while walking with my son, next to a picture of her holding hands while walking with baby me.

This year I finally stopped being busy when my mom died out of the blue. One year ago, I wrote, “the theme for 2021 was Focus and Alignment. I achieved that at the expense of my own creativity and to some extent free will. I was lost in being busy.” If 2021 was about losing …

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How to Turn Failure into a Learning Opportunity: The Story of Danny MacAskill

Danny MacAskill climbing a rock face with his bike over his shoulder

“One more,” said little Danny to his Dad, Peter, his knees bloodied and a bump rising on his forehead. This kid was determined. He wanted to ace the dangerous move on his new bike before supper time. Danny’s parents bought him a rusty old second-hand Raleigh bike for his fifth birthday, and he spent hours …

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The Death of “Training” and the Rise of Cohort-Based Learning

An expressive oil painting of a computer with a screen full of faces on a Zoom call

I’ve worked with 22 Fortune 500 companies in my career. As partners to these companies, we have one clear goal: to help their people reach their full potential. I’ve seen passionate clients who pour their souls into transforming people. They strategize like CEOs and design learning experiences like the Old Masters. I’ve also seen tired, …

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Learning By Teaching

“No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.” – Peter Drucker In my late 20’s I was a consultant at KPMG. Early in my career, I focused internally on delivering training to our offices in South Africa. For three weeks every month, I was on the road …

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The Unexpected Power of Why: Curiosity At Work

Sideways leaning owl being curious at work

“I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious.” – Albert Einstein “I am inspired by curiosity. That is what drives me.” – Elon Musk From the theory of relativity to self-driving cars, most of history’s breakthrough discoveries have something in common: they are the result of curiosity. This impulse …

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Transforming Your Learning Culture (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

List with bullet points for a tutorial

This post builds on my cornerstone piece on How Great Companies Become Ultimate Learning Machines. Go read that first to learn how I discovered our approach for reverse-engineering a healthy learning culture. In this post, we’re going to walk through that approach. If you follow the steps below, you will be able to start the learning …

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The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement (Book Summary)

Building Blocks of Sales Enablement

Mike Kunkle’s new book (his first), The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement, brings a systems-thinking approach to sales enablement. Regular readers will know my love of systems thinking in organizational learning. The work of Peter Senge hugely inspires me (check out my summary of his seminal book, The Fifth Discipline). He calls systems thinking “the …

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