IDTX Podcast

In this episode, I chat with Linnéa Sjögren and Melanie Martinelli about their sessions at IDTX Online 2026, both live on 19 February.

Linnéa is speaking to anyone in L&D who’s tired of waiting for “a seat at the table”, and wants to operate as a strategic learning partner, focused on business outcomes, not just training requests.

Melanie is tackling one of the biggest gaps in workplace learning: transfer. Her session uses a practical card game to surface common transfer barriers, create shared language with stakeholders, and plan for application before a programme even rolls out.

Whether you’re joining live or catching the recordings afterwards, it’s worth listening to what they have to say. IDTX Online is free to attend, so if you haven’t already, head over to the IDTX website and book your ticket. If you’d 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)
  1. Stop waiting for permission. Become a strategic learning partner (Linnéa Sjögren)
    Day 2, 19 February, 12:00pm UK time

  2. Let’s play cards and make transfer a hot topic, exploring the 12 levers of learning transfer (Melanie Martinelli)
    Day 2, 19 February, 5:30pm UK time

What we talk about
  • Why “waiting for a seat at the table” has kept L&D stuck for years, and what it looks like to move anyway
  • Shifting from “deliver the training we were asked for” to “solve for the business outcome”, including saying no to training when it isn’t the answer
  • Designing for reality as it is, messy, complex, and full of constraints, rather than oversimplifying problems into neat course shaped boxes
  • Why transfer should never be an afterthought, and how to surface barriers before you launch a programme
  • Using a card game to make transfer discussions safer, more concrete, and easier to run with stakeholders who would otherwise push back

One thing to try after listening
  • Linnéa: stop oversimplifying. Assume the problem is complicated, and let your approach reflect that.
  • Melanie: take a first step into transfer by learning what the 12 levers of transfer effectiveness are, then use them as a lens to spot blind spots and prioritise what to improve.

Tickets and what’s next

IDTX Online (18 and 19 February) is free to attend, and sessions will be available as recordings afterwards. Book your ticket on the IDTX website.

If you’d like to join us in person on 29 May for the Evidence Informed Practice Conference in Birmingham, tickets are available but strictly limited. Learn more on the website.

  • (00:00) - Intro
  • (00:35) - Episode overview and IDTX Online reminder
  • (01:20) - Linnéa interview begins
  • (11:07) - Melanie interview begins
  • (19:09) - Closing and event reminders

Creators and Guests

Host
Tom McDowall
IDTX Founder and Conference Chair
Guest
Linnéa Sjögren
Educational developer creating learning
Guest
Melanie Martinelli
CEO & Owner of Institute for Transfer Effectiveness

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 0:35
Welcome to this episode of the idtx podcast. In this episode, I interview Lanier and Melanie, two of our fantastic speakers at the upcoming idtx Online Conference. The event is set for the 18th and 19th of February, so just one day after this episode goes live, Lanier and Melanie join 18 other fantastic speakers from all around the world sharing their knowledge and experience and insights completely free of charge with you. We hope to see you there live, but if you can't make it, almost all the sessions will be available as recordings on the instructional design tips website. As always, you can learn more about idtx online and all our other events@idtx.co.uk

Unknown Speaker 1:20
without further ado, let's get into the interview with Linnea.

Unknown Speaker 1:27
Hi. My name is linear. I run a company called linear learning based in Stockholm, Sweden, and we usually frame ourselves as being strategic learning partners, which means that, yes, we work with learning, but with a strategic mindset and framing. So instead of thinking about like what training is needed, we sort of look at what is needed for the required business outcomes, the needs, etc.

Unknown Speaker 1:58
And that means I spend a lot of my time in this sort of intersection and tension right between what could we do using learning related tools and what our business is asking us for?

Unknown Speaker 2:15
And you know, if I'm going to slide into the session, that's sort of where I'm coming from, right the

Unknown Speaker 2:21
yes, they're asking for this, but they don't need that.

Unknown Speaker 2:25
And you know, as a strategic learning project, I know that because I know lots of things related to learning and learning science, etc, like we all do,

Unknown Speaker 2:35
but nobody's going to ask me to do that. In practice, I'm going to have to put that forward myself somehow. And so that's sort of how we frame the business, linear learning. And then

Unknown Speaker 2:45
so inside of that, I also I do some YouTube and some blogging and share things. I'm also very active in different learning communities, like the gldc, which is an international community, and some communities here in Sweden as well. Fantastic. And you kind of mentioned your session, then you're one of our speakers for idtx Online 2026,

Unknown Speaker 3:07
your session on day two, the 19th of February, at 12pm GMT or noon, is Stop waiting for permission. Become a strategic learning partner. Now you've already kind of touched that a little bit, but I'd love to know of everything you could speak about. Why was this the thing that you felt you wanted to do, and what can we expect from the session? Okay, so one of the reasons I wanted to speak about it is because I feel like we're not speaking about it, and it's such a core thing, but we're so focused on like, how do we do this thing? How do we use AI? How do we and we miss that, we need to sort of take the step back, get that bigger picture, meta perspective, if you will, and sort of work from there. But also it's related to what I'm seeing and what I'm meeting everywhere, which is this feeling of want, like we've all heard this, right? We sort of say it almost like a joke now, like, I we're asking for a seat at the table or wanting to be invited in, right? So there is this frustration from learning departments, wanting influence, wanting to be part of the conversation, wanting to be asked, but it's not happening. And I don't know how many years you've been hearing this, I've lost count. But like, we have been in this position, in this frustration for a really long time of wanting that seat at the table but not being invited, and at the same time now, there is this growing fear of lnd basically becoming redundant because of AI, because we can't prove that we are creating business value,

Unknown Speaker 4:39
because we can't find The data to back up that what we're doing is helping, and because money is tight, right? And in the sense that learning is not giving an automatic business outcome, it is a luxury. And if we, if we're a luxury, we are easy to get rid of when money is tight. So I think.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
All of those things happening at the same time, made me want to talk more about this, because I feel like,

Unknown Speaker 5:05
in general, like the fact that we're constantly waiting for someone else to tell us who we are is

Unknown Speaker 5:12
holding us back, and we don't have to be in that position or mindset

Unknown Speaker 5:17
absolutely and I guess something that often comes up in these conversations I'm having, though about this kind of metaphorical seat at the table.

Unknown Speaker 5:27
Is that sense of, what are we for? Are we for skills? Are we for learning for its own sake? Are we performance enablement? Are we an extension of HR? Are we here to drive equity and inclusion across the organization above all else. Or, you know,

Unknown Speaker 5:45
the the conversation often becomes very muddy, shall we say, and difficult to kind of find our way through. Now, I'd love to hear kind of how you got to the point where you are, because clearly you have a very defined view of what you're about and what you're trying to do in organizations. So, so how did you get to that point? Well, I think I tried to look at it from a business perspective, right, instead of looking from it from a learning perspective, like, because learning has its own value in life, in society, but in a company, learning's value is directly related to business outcome, short term, long term, medium term, right? And we often are focused in the short term. And we're often sort of not necessarily focused on what creates business value, but what is being asked of us. And because nobody else understands learning, they're not asking us the right questions. They're not asking us for the right things. And so for me, there's been a frustration for a long time, like even before I started my company, when I was employed, just the frustration of, like, why are we doing these things? Why we're being asked to do this when we know it's not going to help or solve the problem, or create change, etc, right? And so when I started my own company, it was a chance to sort of choose

Unknown Speaker 7:09
where I come in and how. So, like a lot of times, I tell people I have an L D company, and they think what I do is create learning for people. Just like people contact me and they say, Hey, build us a course. And I say, okay, and that's what I do, but actually where I try to get in is at the sort of high we have a problem stage,

Unknown Speaker 7:29
and just even helping them understand if learning is an option or not, if it's a possible solution, helping them understand what other Transfer Tools will be needed alongside training or learning initiatives to make it possible to create actual, well, transfer business value behavior, etc, and sometimes, or actually a lot of times, telling them not to do training,

Unknown Speaker 7:54
but also helping them in other ways, right? Because we're really good, it's, we think it's, it's hard to say no, but if you say no to this, but yes, I will help you like that's where we are. So we, you know, we might help you create a kick ass manual instead, or support things that you can put on your intranet. Or we might, you know,

Unknown Speaker 8:16
make a few instructional videos that your IT support can send out when needed, when someone calls and has a problem. So it's still, you know, problem solving. It's still focused on learning. We still make content, but we sort of refuse the frame of it having to be delivered as training, as courses.

Unknown Speaker 8:39
Fantastic. I mean, this touches on so much of, I think, what the industry is struggling with right now. So I think this is a really timely session, and one people are not going to want to miss.

Unknown Speaker 8:51
Now, I always finish these interviews up with the same question. I usually change the words because I'm incapable of just repeating myself, but it's always the same idea behind the question anyway,

Unknown Speaker 9:03
and that is, if people sat at home listening to this right now, could go away thinking or doing one thing after hearing you today, what would it be?

Unknown Speaker 9:16
Yeah, I think it's just to accept that the problem is complicated and reality is complicated, and therefore the solution will not be straightforward. So whatever it is you think of doing,

Unknown Speaker 9:30
please don't over simplify it. Allow it to be complicated and messy and have several steps and things to it, because otherwise, when you oversimplify, you risk not addressing actual needs and actual problems. So just sort of embrace that life is one big gray area and and work from that. Idtx is all about, bringing together amazing practitioners from around the globe to share.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
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 and 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 11:02
today to make sure you've got your ticket.

Unknown Speaker 11:07
Next up, we'll hear from Melanie about her session. Let's play cards and make transfer a hot topic, exploring the 12 levers of learning transfer. Her session will be live at 5:30pm

Unknown Speaker 11:21
UK time on the 19th of February. With that said, let's get into the interview.

Unknown Speaker 11:28
So I'm Melanie Martinelli, and I am the owner and the CEO of the Institute for transfer effectiveness. And I guess, like the name says of the business, what I do is I work with l&d professionals across the globe that really want to make sure that their learning sticks and gets applied back at work. So that's what I'm passionate about, and that's what I do, at least professionally.

Unknown Speaker 11:53
Fantastic. And you'll be joining us on the second day of idtx online at 5:30pm

Unknown Speaker 12:01
UK time, and then whatever time that is, you can all convert that for yourselves, listening in, because I don't have those numbers in front of me, but your session, let's play cards and make transfer a hot topic. Can you tell us a little bit about what this session is about and what we can expect to walk away from it with absolutely I'm actually really excited. And I know you just planned the agenda, but I was so happy to see that I'm kind of one of the last slots, because I think transfer, though, it should never be an afterthought, that we should actually think about transfer, you know, already before rolling out a program, and that's what my session is going to be mainly about. It's also a great opportunity to engage people with some reflection on what they've learned at the conference and do some transfer planning. But the main focus of the session is, as the title says, let's play card. So I have this card game around transfer where we're going to Yeah, together, kind of see what are common transfer barriers and which ones are mostly applicable for participants kind of programs that they're working on. So it's a very, you know, powerful card game to engage stakeholders with to kind of get a better sense proactively where possible application barriers might exist. And so that's going to be the key focus of the session. Fantastic. And I've got a bit of a question about the actual setup itself, not just about the not just about the session, but about cards, because this always fascinating. I'm a big fan of card games in general, but I'm really interested what made you think that cards were the way to do this, that this was something that would be helpful to people? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, we had a very kind of more elaborate audit and diagnostic tool up, but that's very formal. And so what we realized a lot of our clients, what they really struggled with was, first of all, to get buy in, into transfer. There were very often these pushbacks, Hey, come on. You are responsible for training. Just do the training, and it was kind of hard to create this awareness in other stakeholders that training alone cannot be the solution. And so developing a card game where people have something in their hands and get to move it around just kind of seemed like a cool idea. And when we tested it, we got just really good responses stakeholders, all of a sudden grabbing the cards and saying, Okay, well, what is this trans volition all about? Because one of the cards talks about trans revolution, which is one of the 12 levers of transfer effectiveness. And they get curious, because they can take it into their hands. So it was kind of a low hanging fruit. It was low effort

Unknown Speaker 14:42
making it safe a little bit more playful to because I audit is very formal and, you know, kind of straight away, finding out what might I be doing wrong. No one wants to find that out. Let's be honest. Whereas the card game was more about let's talk about this. Let's talk about these facts.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Factors that impact transfer and in a more enjoyable, safe way, kind of realize what we might be doing well and what not.

Unknown Speaker 15:11
I mean, it's always really interesting that

Unknown Speaker 15:16
these topics themselves aren't kind of new or groundbreaking. And yet, actually, when we consider them fundamental, but how well are we doing them is often questionable. So I think tools like this that kind of shine a light on that, as you say, without the kind of inherent judgment of the term audit, the results of an audit are never everything's great. You're doing a wonderful job. Let's be honest. You know, the tax man does them, which is never a good team to be on. But I guess probably the what I'm most excited about from from the session, is the fact that it's so practically focused, and I think especially with this topic, so often it is, you know, here's an essay on, or here's a textbook about and now you must contextualize. So I guess, just to wrap us up, when you when you do this with people, what are some of the kind of real breakthroughs you see people having? Yeah, and, you know, you just said something really important. That's actually another reason that motivated us. If I just quickly go back to your previous question. You know, as you said, there's so many essays available around transfer, and I mean, transfer has been researched for hundreds of years, but you know, the paradox is that the transfer industry kind of has a transfer issue itself, like we've known for a long time, what is required to drive transfer, but most practitioners are not making use of that knowledge because it's too theoretical to kind of it's just not translated into practical language. And I think that was also the idea behind the cards game, to translate a lot of hard science and research into something we can all more comfortably talk about. And so the that's exactly the aha moment a lot of people have. So when we play this card game, a lot of the practitioners, you know, l, D, professionals, or also trainers, designers, kind of go like, Oh wow, there's some stuff I'm already doing really well. I'm thinking about that. You know, for example, they see some of the Levers connected to training design, such as content relevance or active practice. They go, Oh yeah, I do that. But then they also kind of go, oh wow, I now know exactly where maybe I'm having a blind spot. And it kind of helps them prioritize. It really helps them kind of prioritize where they want to put their focus on. So I think people leave the experience of the card game feeling empowered, feeling to have a joint vocabulary to talk about transfer and kind of an idea what to focus on

Unknown Speaker 17:48
absolutely again, sounds fantastic. I can't wait for the session. So that's let's play cards and make transfer a hot topic at 5:30pm

Unknown Speaker 17:58
UK time on the 19th of February. It's the second to last session of this year's idtx Online Conference. And just to see how our conversation today, Melanie, if people could walk away thinking or planning to do just one thing after listening to this today, what would you like it

Unknown Speaker 18:18
to be? Ah, so many things, but let's think like baby steps. No, that's another transfer mantra, one little step at a time. And I think, you know, you and I actually use the word transfer. Transfer levers. The cards came out quite a bit, and some people might still be wondering, what are these levers actually all about? What is she talking about? So my recommendation would be, maybe go on Google, or any AI search engine you're using, put in the 12 levers of transfer effectiveness and actually find out more what they might be about.

Unknown Speaker 18:48
Melanie and Lanier's sessions will be live on the 19th of February, which is day two of the idtx online conference 2026 sponsored by l&d Free Spirits and supported by the CPD 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 19:09
There, you'll also find information about our other events 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. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai