Q&A with Mark Henderson

Reading time: approx 10 minutes

As part of the Learnovate Centre’s Meet the Patrons series, we speak to Mark Henderson, CEO of Kubicle, a corporate training and upskilling company focused on the areas of artificial intelligence, data analytics, and technology.

Founded in 2014, the company is based in Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in Dublin city centre. While it services clients in all industries, Kubicle is highly concentrated in management consulting, financial services, banking, and manufacturing. It employs 28 people worldwide. 

Mark earned his undergraduate degree in Architectural Design from University of Toronto in his native Canada in 2003. A brief career in the oil and gas industry in Australia led to him to make a somewhat unlikely move into direct sales Down Under. Beginning as a door-to-door salesman, he would rise to become a partner in the Cobra Group, a field marketing and fundraising service with offices in Australia, New Zealand, and Portugal. 

In 2008, he joined the One4all Group as the Irish Retail Business Development manager, a role which he held for two years before departing to become General Manager for Living Social Ireland, an online marketplace connecting subscribers with local merchants in cities across the world. Following that, Head of Sales and Marketing roles at Time Data Security, an Access Control technology firm, and Scrapinghub, a data extraction company, led to brief sabbatical which ended with his arrival at Kubicle as CEO in 2020.

Mark recently completed an MBA from Dublin City University. A father of twin girls, he is an endurance athlete and a passionate believer in the cross-pollination of ideas between business and sport. 

What are the biggest lessons you learned in your career?

I often talk to my team about the importance of maintaining consistency in our work. The key to that consistency, in my view, is predictability. It’s great to work with people who are predictable in their approach to work, their attitude and how they treat others. It’s really important that we recognise the small behavioural traits that are required to do good work. I would include resiliency in that as well. Everyone has had knocks in their career and has had to learn to rally back. Lately though, I feel like that resiliency is being lost as the way people work has changed. It’s something we should really try to win back and protect. 

What was the best advice you ever received?

Do the easiest and most basic things well. When I was working in direct sales in Australia, a poster on the wall of the company office outlined what it called ‘the eight steps to success’ and they were all focused on the basic ingredients of dependability: being on time, being prepared, bringing your best attitude, working your hours. I absorbed those lessons and they’ve stood to me over the years.

How would you define your work style and how has this changed over your career?

Early in my career, every little thing mattered. A former manager once described my style of work as a thousand small pinpricks because I wanted to know the particulars about everything. I questioned everything. I’ve moved on from that – much to everyone’s relief, including my own – and I’m much more focused now on people enablement. I want to remove barriers for my team and be subservient in my leadership. In my business, I’ve managed to recruit an extremely capable group of senior leaders tasked with delivering on our strategic vision. The best way to help them is by enabling them to work autonomously. However, to do that, all the barriers and impediments to hard work must be removed. People do their best work when the runway is clear for them. 

What have you learned about managing teams and individuals?

As I said, I work hard at getting out of people’s way but I also encourage them to ask themselves, ‘Can I do better?’ I’ve been involved in early-stage businesses at every stage of my career. That has a lot of advantages but one negative is that the lack of an alternative example leads to complacency in your approach. If there’s no better example available, you can think what you’re doing is great and your results are great. Your perception of yourself isn’t being challenged because you’re constrained by your own experience. I ask people to challenge themselves. When you’re honest about your reasoning, people really respond to that.

How has AI impacted your organisation/industry?

Kubicle is a company that trains other companies in AI technology and data analytics, so it’s great for us that every company around the world is trying to figure out how to compete in this landscape. It’s also been great in terms of new product development. There’s so much we can do to leverage AI to augment and improve learning experiences. We’re also exploring AI-led assessments in which creative exercises can be graded using a scoring framework, a process driven ostensibly through generative AI technology. In terms of its impact on our day-to-day operations, we do lots of script writing but we like to question our approach using generative AI.  

On the macro scale, the learning community as a whole is trying to figure out how AI is going to change the way training is consumed and delivered, whether other learning initiatives will see divestment, and how much further investment will go into AI capability. There’s a lot of opportunity and that’s very exciting but it’s also creating uncertainty around budget spend and commitments to spending on technology because the technical landscape is continuously changing. 

What are the opportunities and/or risks from AI to your business or sector and/or the learning technology industry?

Kubicle focuses heavily on professional services. Like many other sectors, the model underpinning the professional services sector is being challenged by AI, which in turn is leading to questions about the capabilities we are really trying to enable. There’s a lot more unpredictability in the market than there was in the past. The half-life of some skills, for example, is now three months, so the skills needed by an organisation now could be very different to what’s needed in six months. A big challenge for Kubicle is to figure out how we can help businesses identify the skills they will need before they need them. 

Why is R&D important in your industry?  

In the average CPD course, a credit is equal to about an hour of the learner’s time. That idea that the quality of learning is related to time, that you get a good learning outcome because the learner has invested an hour, is such a misnomer. In the corporate training world, the average learner is time poor. That correlation between time and outcome needs to be broken and we believe there’s a significant R&D opportunity on that point alone. 

We also think there’s an opportunity to help businesses evidence the impact of learning spend. We’re finding that L&D communities are becoming increasingly interested in how learning is being applied and that is translated into business benefit. We think there’s opportunity in our R&D future to build capabilities that are better able to support and enable L&D community members to put a real quantitative and qualitative value on learning spend. 

What are the biggest skills challenges to your business or sector?

From our perspective, the biggest skills challenges centre on problem-solving, project management, creative thinking and innovation. Staying up to date with the latest tools and trends is one thing, but knowing how to look for opportunities, consider problems from multiple angles, and solve through creative means is something else entirely. These are pertinent skills. Call it life-long learning, curiosity – whatever it is, it’s about how to be individually motivated to stay up to date with skills and capabilities that can help you better compete. 

How can third level address the skills gaps/challenges you are facing? 

My first job after my university degree in architectural design was with an oil and gas company in Western Australia. It was my job to draw the positions of underground petrol tanks at petrol stations but what I ended up doing was putting petrol tanks in farmer’s fields miles from where they were supposed to be. The problem was that I didn’t learn those technical skills in school but suddenly l had to apply them in the workplace. That experience makes me extra motivated to ensure that Kubicle’s work with universities to train students in AI, data and technology skills leaves them ready to compete in tomorrow’s workplace. 

I found it interesting that when I did my MBA in DCU, there was a large emphasis on bringing in industry experts. Everything was framed in context of the real world, with simulations and project work. For one project, we had to run an airline. Whatever decision you made, you would have to wait a week for the simulation to run and for results to pop out. Doing things that way allowed you to raise the right questions and investigate them, apply decision-making and be creative. Maybe if all third-level institutions took a similar practical approach, it would be helpful in terms of preparing students for the world of work. 

What books or podcasts would you recommend?

I enjoyed the Richard Branson autobiography, Losing My Virginity, and Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Journey by Alfred Lansing, the story of Ernest Shackleton and the failed polar expedition.  

I started doing triathlons a few years ago and have since completed a number of half-Iron Man races, a full Iron Man, and other endurance events. There’s a strong connection between sport and business, so I dip into books that are ostensibly about business but in which there are great sporting lessons and vice versa. 

In terms of podcasts, I listen to Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, and the High-Performance Podcast with Damian Hughes and Jake Humphrey. They all have a common theme, but there’s a relationship between sport and performance and there are interesting learnings there. I feel lucky to have found a connection between two passions. It means you’re always training your brain – to problem solve, to be resilient, to endure.   

Are you using any AI tools in your business at the moment? If so, which ones would you recommend?

We’re using Gen AI to think through ideas for scriptwriting, to do document reviews on scripts, and other analytical work. We also get ChatGPT to summarise documents and synthesise information for us. All that helps you navigate questions and helps to fill in blanks. Obviously, you still have to go back and validate all the information, but it is a great start to the process. We use many others but a particular favourite of mine at the moment is Gong. It records phone calls, provides a transcription as well as notes on the conversation that deliver real insights.  

Why is membership of Learnovate important to your company? What does Learnovate do well?

Kubicle has only been a member of Learnovate since the beginning of the year but already we can see the potential that the relationship has in terms of delivering impact for the company. Our team went to the Learnovation summit at the Aviva Stadium this month and they had amazing things to say about the speakers and the level of insight. Learnovate offers access to cutting-edge research and innovation support, as well as a whole L&D community, but it also gives you the opportunity to engage face-to-face with people at something like Learnovation 2024 and come away thinking, ‘Gosh, isn’t it important to get inspired and educated through real human interactions?’ 

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