#3 with Domenico Dargenio, Leadership and Culture Transformation at Fortum. In this episode, we discuss how leadership, learning, and culture come together when organizations go through massive transformation. We explore why psychological safety is the foundation for learning and change, and how Fortum is bringing capability development to where the problem is – embedding learning into real work rather than isolating it in training rooms.

Other themes in this episode include:

• Send learning to the problem: Why development should happen in the context of real team challenges, not in isolation.
• Psychological safety as a precondition: How fear blocks learning and what we mislabel as "change resistance."
• Cultural ambassadors at scale: Dom shares a pactical way to make change credible and relevant at Fortum, scaled across thousands of employees.
• Convincing executives: Why learning and culture are real performance drivers, not just soft topics.
• Beyond 70-20-10: Why ultra-personalized, in-the-flow-of-work learning needs social learning to be impactful.
• Collaboration as strategy execution: How complex projects like Microsoft's CO2-free data center require cross-functional teamwork – and how to support it.
  
  

Chapters

02:04:00 Dom's current role and the "large renewal" at Fortum
03:18:00 Rapid questions: Googling and daily learning habits
04:55:00 Dom's journey into transformation leadership
08:15:00 Ultra-personalized learning & social learning
11:00:00 Fortum's approach: Sending learning to where the problem is
13:58:00 The role of inclusion and social learning in building culture
16:45:00 Psychological safety as the #1 driver for high performance
25:12:00 The most critical leadership capabilities for the future
30:21:00 Convincing the C-level: Learning and culture as business drivers
37:21:00 Scaling psychological safety across a large organization
42:15:00 The role of cultural ambassadors and transformation coaches
47:11:00 What organizations underestimate about learning during transformation
49:33:00 Final reflection: L&D leaders as the "ultimate students"

Takeaways:

Send learning to where the problem is: Bring coaching and development into real team friction points where strategy execution happens.

Psychological safety enables everything: When people can say "I don't know," they can learn. Without it, fear takes over.

Make transformation relevant: People need to see how change connects to their goals and work—managers translate this locally.

Join the L&D Leaders Community at ldleaders.net — a trusted peer space for mid-to-senior professionals to connect, learn from each other’s real experiences, and strengthen collaborative learning in their organizations.