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In this episode, I chat with Dr Heidi Kirby and Helen Routledge about their sessions at IDTX Online 2026.
Heidi shares FUSE, her framework for useful learning evaluation, built to scale from small assets to big programmes, and designed to slot into whatever design process you already use.
Helen explores the conditions for real world capability, grounded in psychology and behavioural science, and how to design learning that helps people practise, own decisions, and apply skills when it matters.
IDTX Online is free to attend, and sessions will be available as recordings afterwards. If you have not already, head over to the IDTX website to book your ticket. If you would like to join us in person in May for the Evidence Informed Practice Conference, tickets are available but strictly limited.
Sessions featured (IDTX Online 2026)
Heidi shares FUSE, her framework for useful learning evaluation, built to scale from small assets to big programmes, and designed to slot into whatever design process you already use.
Helen explores the conditions for real world capability, grounded in psychology and behavioural science, and how to design learning that helps people practise, own decisions, and apply skills when it matters.
IDTX Online is free to attend, and sessions will be available as recordings afterwards. If you have not already, head over to the IDTX website to book your ticket. If you would like to join us in person in May for the Evidence Informed Practice Conference, tickets are available but strictly limited.
Sessions featured (IDTX Online 2026)
- FUSE: A framework for useful learning evaluation (Dr Heidi Kirby)
Day 1, 18 February, 6:00pm UK time (closing keynote) - What makes skills stick: The conditions for real world capability (Helen Routledge)
Day 2, 19 February, 11:00am UK time
What we talk about
- Why many evaluation frameworks struggle to reflect today’s workplace reality, including scale, modern working patterns, and the pressure to demonstrate organisational impact
- What Heidi wanted to fix with FUSE, including avoiding implied hierarchy, and making evaluation workable for both small and large learning work
- The common blockers to demonstrating impact, including the myth that L&D has to be the sole cause of results, and the temptation to look for one measurement approach that fits everything
- The conditions that help skills transfer into real work, and why practice, ownership, and safe failure matter
- How lessons from psychology and the games world can translate into practical design choices, even if you are not building simulations or VR
One thing to try after listening
- For your next project, plan how you will measure beyond completions and “did they like it”, and aim to triangulate evidence rather than hunting for a single perfect metric
- Look for one way to create a safer practice moment, where people make choices and learn from the consequences, instead of only being told what to do
Tickets, recordings, and what’s next
IDTX Online (18 and 19 February) is free to attend, and sessions will also be available as recordings afterwards. Book your ticket on the IDTX website.
If you would like to join us in person on 29 May in Birmingham for the Evidence Informed Practice Conference, tickets are £100 and limited to 100 attendees, so now is the time to book. You can also find details on the Virtual Summit on the IDTX site.
Sponsors and supporters
This week’s IDTX Online event is sponsored by L&D Free Spirits and supported by The CPD Group and Learning News.
Creators and Guests
Guest
What is IDTX Podcast?
Hosted by Tom McDowall, The IDTX Podcast explores what’s really happening in the L&D world right now. From evidence-informed practice and instructional design decisions to the realities of using learning technology inside complex organisations, this is a space for honest conversations rather than polished sales narratives.
You'll hear from all the IDTX speakers ahead of their conference appearances throughout the year, allowing you to learn from their years of collective expertise and get a taste of what it's like to attend an IDTX event.
Unknown Speaker 0:07
Learning and Development is a noisy space. There is no shortage of big claims, shiny tools or confident answers, but if you actually do this work, you know that improving practice is usually slower, Messier and far more interesting than any headline would suggest. This is what this podcast is all about. I'm Tom McDowall, and this is the idtx podcast.
Unknown Speaker 0:34
Welcome to this episode of the idtx podcast. In this episode, I chat with Heidi and Helen, two of our phenomenal speakers at this year's idtx Online Conference, Heidi and Helen will be joining 18 other speakers for 19 sessions over two days, all focused on giving you practical advice on improving your practice in the worlds of L and D, Performance enablement and HR. Idtx Online is our annual virtual event in February this year, scheduled for the 18th and 19th of the month, just one day after this episode goes live. If you'd like to learn more about this or any of our other events in 2026 head over to the idtx website@idtx.co.uk
Unknown Speaker 1:20
Now without further ado, let's get into our first interview with Heidi.
Unknown Speaker 1:28
I'm Dr Heidi Kirby and I, I do a lot of things. I wear a lot of hats as the founder of useful stuff, which is part L and D consultancy, but also part
Unknown Speaker 1:42
mission to help people get better at L and D, right? So there's multiple ways that I do that. I run a community for L and D professionals called the useful L and D community. It has, it is free for everyone, but it also has an all access tier where people can pay a small amount of money per month to get access to like live events, and that just kind of self funds the community. I also do coaching and mentoring with L and D teams. I also help edtech product founders with how to create good products for L and D professionals. So I help them with things like features and roadmaps and what's important to us as L and D professionals, but also like how to market to our unique audience as well.
Unknown Speaker 2:37
And I do kind of straight up L and D consultancy as well. So helping teams with either upskilling or with roadmaps or with figuring out how to build programs, I've helped people who were the first L and D person at their organization to kind of build it out and build the rest of it. So
Unknown Speaker 2:57
I started as an instructional designer. I got my PhD in instructional design, and I just kind of worked my way up the ladder until I was laid off from the tech company I worked for, and I just kind of started my own thing after that. So, yeah, okay, and your session fuse a framework for useful learning evaluation is our closing keynote, which is 6pm UK time on the first day of the event, which is 18th of February. Can you tell us a little bit about what the session's about, and for those attending, what they can expect to walk away with Yeah. So I'm super nervous, actually, because this is the first time I am presenting the fuse, which is a framework I've created for learning, evaluation to the public. I've socialized it a little bit with some friends and within the community, but this is really the first time I'm sharing a framework that I've worked on for almost three years now. I saw a need and a gap in the industry, right? We have some learning evaluation frameworks. We have some some old and some new.
Unknown Speaker 4:09
But when I was asked by some of my coaching clients for which framework they would I would suggest, I realized that, like all of them, had differing problems and that I wouldn't suggest any of them. And I think the biggest three things for me
Unknown Speaker 4:28
are that the
Unknown Speaker 4:30
frameworks that are out there were largely created pre pandemic and pre AI, and not really updated to reflect how very different and global our workforce is, I think a lot of them are visually designed as a hierarchy, or there's a hierarchy implied. And so I wanted to kind of get away from that. And I think the other thing is that a lot of the models out there don't scale well, right? A lot of them cover only audience measures, and they can't really be applied equally to like.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
Like, a six month leadership program or a job aid, right? And so I wanted something that was really scalable. So I looked at a lot of models that were already out there for inspiration, and to kind of, I did a needs analysis of the models, if you will, right? And so the aim was to, like, fill those gaps. And then I also was inspired by different models from the performance world, so like Roger Kaufman's organizational model and things like that that I kind of like looked at and used as an inspiration. And so what I'll be sharing is a framework that allows you to measure any project big or small in learning, and it's designed to be fused, as the name implies, to your current instructional design process, right? So whatever your design process currently is, the framework I'll be talking about can be applied no matter what, as long as you have some sort of analysis, as long as you have some sort of, like design and development, and as long as you have, like, some sort of delivery and method of, kind of making adjustments, it can be applied. So it's a lot to cover in 45 minutes. It's going to be pretty intense, but I am going to do my best to at least give everybody a high level. Hey, okay, here's at least some ways I can think about measuring my next project, or here's some things that I can do that are a little bit outside of my norm.
Unknown Speaker 6:31
Fantastic. And I think at the minute, there's so much pressure, I would almost say on L D teams to demonstrate organizational impact.
Unknown Speaker 6:41
Yeah, and just really quickly, as a bit of a follow up, I'm wondering, what are the blockers that you see in organizations that you work with and look at around demonstrating impact? Because I think it's not always one thing, right? Yeah, I think there's a couple big ones. I think the first one is that people have this misconception that you have to be the sole contributor to impact, right? Like, they think correlation doesn't equal causation, but, like, in workplaces, it's different, right? Like, if you are one of three departments that contributed to a goal, like, that's good. That's something you should brag about. And that's how I always tell people, like, collect, like, triangulate your data, collect multiple data points, so that it shows that you have influenced this. You don't have to be the only influence if you have like, those multiple data points. I think the other thing is, people want a one size fits all. That's why we have completions and smile sheets, because there we can do that to every single project, right? And I think you really have to expand and say, No, we're going to have to measure things differently every time, because the outcome that we're shooting for is going to be different every time. You know,
Unknown Speaker 7:55
I think that makes perfect sense, and I always close these conversations off with the same question for everyone listening to this right now, what is the one thing you would like them either to be thinking about or planning to do tomorrow?
Unknown Speaker 8:12
Think about how you can go beyond just your audience and completions and surveys, and did they like it for your next learning project, idtx is all about bringing together amazing practitioners from around the globe to share what they know. For the last five years, we've been hosting virtual conferences, and year six will be amazing with two virtual conferences, but we are also bringing idtx into the real world. On May 29 we'll be hosting the evidence informed practice conference in the heart of Birmingham. This one day event will bring together scientists, researchers, l&d practitioners, HR professionals and people from across the performance enablement landscape, all focused on figuring out how we can harness the scientific understanding of how people work to improve our ability to facilitate performance in the workplace with a roster of fantastic speakers and ample opportunity to network. It's an event you do not want to miss out on. Tickets are just 100 pounds, but strictly limited to 100 attendees. Head over to idtx.co.uk,
Unknown Speaker 9:33
today to make sure you've got your ticket.
Unknown Speaker 9:37
Next up, we'll hear from Helen about her session. What makes skills stick the conditions for real world capability. It'll be live on the 19th of February at 11am UK time. So without further ado, let's get into our interview with Helen.
Unknown Speaker 9:55
I'm Helen Routledge. I'm the CEO of totem learning and at.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Totem, we help organizations create what we call safe practice spaces using digital technology like simulations and games and virtual reality, so enable people to practice really critical skills in you know, practice those moments that matter before they do in the real world,
Unknown Speaker 10:20
fantastic, really important stuff. So often, the element that's missing from a lot of training interventions, and it's quite difficult to do. In fairness, it's not missing because people don't care. I often think your session with us, then what makes skills stick the conditions for real world capability. It's set for 11am UK time on day two of idtx online. So that's the 19th of February. If you're listening to this and you've missed it, you can, of course, catch the recording, and there'll be links to that in this episode description. But Helen, could you talk to us a little bit about, you know, what is this session, and if I attend it, what should I be walking away with?
Unknown Speaker 10:57
So even though most of our work sits in the digital realm, we recognize that a lot of organizations don't have budgets and capabilities to create virtual reality or simulations, but a lot of the work that we do
Unknown Speaker 11:12
is grounded in psychology. So that's my background, is Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, and the session is all about kind of unpicking the conditions for learning, you know, based on on human psychology and and trying to separate that out a little bit from digital and jargon
Unknown Speaker 11:33
and translate it into a way that everyone can apply it to whatever learning intervention they're working on today.
Unknown Speaker 11:40
So and hopefully what they take away from it at the end is is
Unknown Speaker 11:47
just thinking a little bit differently about how to create learning so thinking about how we operate as humans, and a little bit more about our psychology,
Unknown Speaker 11:59
and, yeah, just a little bit of a broader view about how to design learning amazing. I'm particularly pleased to hear that kind of evidence informed practice piece in there. You know, it's something I feel very passionately about. We've got another event in May focused on exactly this. And I'd really like to ask kind of, how have you gone about merging that knowledge of psychology and behavioral science into your practice, because the conversation I often have with people is that people struggle to jump from that here is a theoretical understanding to here is what you can do in the workplace. So when you're doing your work, how do you go about, kind of navigating that gap?
Unknown Speaker 12:40
Yeah, well, the, I mean, the games industry is full of examples of how psychology has been brought into solutions that we you know, lots of people love to play, and games, at the end of the day are scenarios that put us into that driving seat. So a lot of our work resolves revolves around identifying where those I suppose, risk points are in a process or in your day to day job, and creating those scenarios around those points, and then putting the learner in the driver's seat and giving them the opportunity to make choices and fail safely. But what happens is they become the owner of their choices, so it's not someone telling them how to act as they start to own the ACT themselves. And that deepens the learning and yeah, that accountability and ownership is really important.
Unknown Speaker 13:39
Amazing stuff. Well, it sounds like it's going to be a really fantastic session, a real opportunity, again, to to think about how we can change what we do. So often at the minute, the conversation is, how can we do more of what we've always done, which is an approach,
Unknown Speaker 13:56
but I think some time to think about how we can actually improve would be very worthwhile. Now, I always like to finish these conversations with the same question, and that is for everyone listening to this right now, if they're going away thinking or planning to do just one thing, what would you like that to be? I would like more people to adopt
Unknown Speaker 14:18
a more scientific mindset to how we work and to be open to experimentation. I mean, I do a lot of experimentation in my life, anyway, with the way that I run the business and the way that we design,
Unknown Speaker 14:31
and I think we need to embrace innovation and risk a little bit more, because that's where we're going to see the change. Heidi and Helen sessions will be live at idtx online this week, sponsored by l&d Free Spirits and supported by the CPT group and learning news. You can book your tickets and find out all about these and all the other sessions@idtx.co.uk
Unknown Speaker 14:57
There, you'll also find information about our other events shared.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Scheduled for this year, the evidence informed practice conference and the virtual Summit. Thanks for listening to this episode of the idtx podcast, and I'll see you in the next one.
Unknown Speaker 15:13
You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai