As part of our ongoing Getting To Know series of blog posts, we’re talking to central members of the LEO Learning family so you can get to know them better. Today we’re talking to Andrew Joly, LEO Learning’s Director of Strategic Design.
Describe your role at LEO Learning
As Director of Strategic Design at LEO Learning, I have a number of different roles, all exciting, and ever-changing. Firstly, I lead the consulting faculty, which is a group of around 15 exceptional Learning Consultants. They all have very different experience, skills and capabilities, but everyone is passionate about what they do and it is a great privilege to work with them. In this capacity, my role involves driving our thinking as a company while engaging and challenging our team, sharing ideas, and drawing it all together and playing it back into the organisation, our work and our clients. I work particularly closely with LEO Learning’s Director of Learning, Imogen Casebourne, and our other principal consultants.
I also focus on innovation and creativity in the organisation, driving and challenging us to think beyond what we do normally, make us more innovative and achieve the real goals that our clients need and love, in all ways, from a business solutions level, to learner experience and even visual presentation.
The theme throughout my career has been the development of highly engaging experiences with an end goal. Heading backwards, it touches learning design, brand development, multimedia and game design at the BBC – if you go even further back it’s media, TV and film production. My passion these days is exploring ways we can use a range of joined up and different channels and technologies to create ever more powerfully integrated experiences for learners. We sometimes call these learning journeys – or at a higher level, if you like, learning architectures or learning ecosystems.
Which part of working at LEO Learning do you love most?
Every day is different and every day has a new challenge. I love working with people with different attitudes, skills and outlooks.
What is your proudest accomplishment?
Recently helping a client team in the US to visualise their ideas and then go on to create a game that completely changed the way they deliver learning through their organisation. When they walked into the workshop that we were running, they had no concept of what this could be and we helped them conceptualise, develop and imagine a groundbreaking project. It was very exciting.
In a non-work context, it would be the day I played live at the Royal Academy of Arts. I used to play the mandolin in a band, and we were asked to play at the opening night of the ‘Sensation’ exhibition. It was the most surreal evening I’ve ever done – we were playing in front of the Damien Hirst shark in a tank installation. The best part was when one of the guests walked past us as we were having a break and said “I love the music but I don’t get the art.”
What is the biggest challenge you’ve overcome?
I honestly think it’s buying and constructing seven pieces of IKEA furniture for my son’s bedroom, all in one day, without any pieces left over.
What are the three things you can’t work without?
1) Great creative people
2) A sense of perspective. Unless you keep what you’re doing in context and perspective, you can’t work in our world
3) A big pack of coloured felt tip pens and a block of A4 paper
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was small I wanted to be a Boeing 747 pilot and fly jumbo jets around the world. When I was older, thinking about university, for a while I thought I wanted to be an architect. What I do now is oddly about as close to being an architect as you can get. They both involve technology, creativity, innovation, teamwork, goals, experience, commercials and engineering.
We’d love to get to know you too. Contact us today to find out how LEO Learning can help you address the challenges in your organisation.
Read Andrew’s thoughts on dispelling the myths around games in learning